About us

This website is about the origin of the Earth and the organisms that live on it. It’s not an attempt to detail every event or process that led to the present world.

There are good websites and bad ones, some well-informed, some misleading, and distinguishing between them is not always easy, so a few words about values and motivation.

In relation to origins, the present contenders in the market place are Darwinism and creationism. Both are entrenched, extreme, polemical positions, and many people prefer not to be identified with them. Strong opinions are held because what is being fought over is an explanation of life.

Consult biology textbooks and you’ll find that life is defined in various ways, generally majoring on its properties, such as growth, reproduction and energy utilisation. But surely life is best understood from the experience of being oneself a living being. We know it intimately even if we do not understand it, because we are beings that think, feel and perceive. Life is in essence spirit, not matter. Its origin must therefore be spirit. Every time a new baby comes into the world, it owes its life to the giver of life.

That perception has implications for how one understands evolution. If, with every individual, life is a gift and comes from above, what passes from parent to child is only half the story. There is no natural selection of souls, and it is a mistake to suppose that life can account for itself, beginning from chemicals in the sea and gradually attaining the amazing diversity we see today. Organisms have changed over time, that is clear, and species have proliferated. But it is quite another thing to suppose that their ancestry can be reduced to the properties of self-organising atoms. Even bacteria are miracles of engineering.

Darwinism represents life as something understandable solely in terms of matter. It ignores the author of life and within educational institutions tolerates no contrary view. Regrettably, creationism is little more than a dogmatic reaction against Darwinism: it perpetuates the false association between evolutionary change and common ancestry, and promotes an association, equally false, between creation and the doctrine that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. It consequently misrepresents the fossil and geological record to a degree that orthodox science – most of which is not ideologically driven – does not. A section on this site discussing the primary evidence for time in the rock record suggests that the Earth is considerably older, though nowhere near the 4.6 billion years claimed.

The research that went into developing the new approach benefited from the financial support of Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, and the zoo continues to pay for the website’s running costs. Located just south of Bristol, UK, it has won awards for green tourism and its education offering to schools, and is recognised as a world-leader in the keeping of elephants.

All material on the website was written by Steven Robinson, who has a MA in English (Cantab), a BSc in geology (RHUL) and a PhD in geochemistry (UCL). A summary of his intellectual journey may be found here.

According to the New Testament, history consists of many undefined ‘ages’ and we are living at the end of the last one (I Cor 10:11). All the previous ages were geological; the last age was when Earth had become sufficiently stable for civilisation to take root, which happened first in southern Mesopotamia. The last book of the Bible describes how the culmination of earthly civilisation, ‘Babylon the Great,’ will come to its violent end. A true understanding of Revelation depends quite heavily on the reader’s having a true understanding of Earth history, for the one who is coming is he who created all things (Rev 4:11). The message to this generation (Rev 14:7) is, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made the heaven and the earth, and sea and springs of water.” The book explaining this, When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon, was published by Wipf & Stock in 2022.