I Don't Know All the Answers... (and I never will)

(I'll probably jump all over the place with this topic...)

I was listening to an encore presentation of "To the Point" on NPR today. A Harvard Bio prof. and a woman of some sort of significance were discussing the holes in Darwin's theory of evolution. Both were on the side of "science". Neither wanted to mash together "natural explanation" and "unnatural explanation". The guests agreed, "[natural and unnatural explanation] are two separate realms that cannot co-exist." I don't necessarily agree, but I'll get to that later.

A man called in and, with a strong southern accent, inquired about the origin of the first cell; the cell from which all life emerged. And before that cell, there was matter; and from what did that matter emerge? Actually, now that I think about it, one of the speakers either wrote, or quoted work from, a book/essay... the title loosely recollected as "From the Wing of the Dragonfly to the Human Eye." But I digress. Anyway, the caller simply stated, "Unless there's a beginning, I just don't understand." The Harvard prof. smugly responded with the question, "Of course we don't understand. Neither of us have studied molecular biology. Have we?" In other words, the prof. didn't have any sort of answer for that question. At least, he didn't have an answer he wanted to share publicly.

Both guests agreed that science, in and of itself, is not a perfect science. The woman joked that if we put our faith in science as something that's absolute and factual, we should be leery of riding an elevator, "because there's a lot we don't understand about gravitational principles." They loosely defined science - no, natural science - as a means of explaining and cataloguing observed datum and testable occurrences.

Okay, so as I'm writing this I am frustrated by my lack of direction on this topic. It's bigger than me... and I can't do it justice. I'll go back to my thought from paragraph 1. Primarily, I think that both natural and unnatural explanations require much faith. And let's just call this debate what it is, Big Bang vs. Creation. Evolution within a species is observable and virtually unquestioned in and out of dogmatic boundaries (tho inter-species evolution, for which there has never been proof, is undoubtedly questioned), and that's is why I'm commenting on the Beginning: Big Bang vs. Creation.

My point is that it takes just as much faith to believe in a Creator as it does to believe that something came from nothing (because that contradicts everything we've ever learned from and about the study of natural science). A friend once asked, "Why does there have to be a beginning?" I'm stumped... sort of.

To believe in a Creator is to believe that the Creator is eternal* - it's supernatural. But to believe that matter is eternal is also supernatural, because it violates natural science.

Back to the Harvard prof. It is my opinion that the Harvard prof. could not, in a way consistent with the laws of natural science, declare the origin of matter as being anything other than supernatural. He thusly avoided the question posed by our red-necked caller as a means to side-step the matter of supernatural faith. The question was henceforth dropped. What a shame.

*Is the human brain capable of comprehending eternity? My brain can't do it.