We are born into the world as if from nowhere, in a birth we cannot remember, and when as adults we ask how the world itself arose, we find that its origin, too, is far from clear. This is the fundamental mystery of existence.

Does the Earth have a natural origin? Does nature have a creative power of its own, capable of producing things incomparably more complex than human intelligence and technology can engineer? Can human life be reduced to the properties of lifeless atoms, contrary to our sense of being distinct from the world?

In recent decades it has become difficult to ask these questions in an open-ended way. Scientific institutions permit only one view of reality is permitted: the one that believes in self-creation.

Nonetheless ‘life’ is something different from molecules. It has to do with consciousness. Although bacteria and plants use the same DNA language as other organisms, they are not life in the sense that animals are. Our own experience as conscious beings tells us that there is more to reality than can be accounted for by molecules, however complex their organisation.

Since life is inherently and irreducibly wonderful, all we seem to have done in rejecting theistic explanations is to transfer the power of miracle from God to Nature, using scientific language to dress up a belief in natural magic. This does not mean that creation in 6 days furnishes a straightforward answer. The glory of the stars, the majesty of the continents and oceans, the secret lives of the animals that share our planet may all appear to deny a natural explanation of their existence, but they also do not speak directly of creation. Nothing is as it was. Everything that we examine lies at the end of a long history. Creation cannot be read from the universe’s immediate appearance.

The reason why we cannot go all the way back to the beginning is because a cataclysm near the beginning destroyed the primeval continent. This is an event we have become aware of only in the last 40 years, as a result of discovering that Earth’s oldest crust is completely missing and that the vast craters defacing the Moon are impact craters from that time. The whole phenomenon of plants and animals being commonly preserved as fossils is a consequence of that cataclysm. Fossils are a record of organisms recolonising a world that had been rendered formless and barren.

Evolution

This is also the key to understanding the many examples of evolution in the fossil record. After the bombardment the planet was in constant flux. Species had to colonise sea and land afresh, diversifying as they did so into new species. Bacteria appeared first because they were the most prolific of colonisers and were essential to the re-establishment of food chains. Other organisms gained a foothold as environments stabilised: first mosses and lichens, then fast-growing marsh plants, then trees and, at about the same time, a huge diversity of land animals – millipedes, insects, mites and spiders, reptiles, and in due course dinosaurs and mammals. Viewed thus, the mystery of so many obviously unrelated organisms appearing in rapid succession begins to make sense.

‘Evolution’ has two meanings – one, the well established fact that most species originate from other species, the other, the presumption that all species are related and originated aeons ago from lifeless chemicals. More influenced by Darwin than we would like to think, we tend to confound the two. When we see species originating from other species, we think we are seeing evidence for the theory that life evolved from a ‘prebiotic soup’. In reality there is no such evidence, and documented examples of evolutionary change are cannot be explained in Darwinian terms. Consider what is involved, for instance, in:

• lizards evolving into snakes
• feathered birds evolving into penguins
• land-dwelling quadrupeds evolving into whales and dolphins.

Examples discussed on this website include cnidarians (anemones, corals and jellyfish), ichthyosaurs (an extinct group of marine reptiles), turtles and manatees.

No less wonderful are the life histories which do not exhibit a radical change in body form but instead an immense explosion of variation, as when

• a single species of fern gave rise to more than 11,000 fern species
• a single species of ray-finned fish gave rise to 42 orders and 431 families of ray-finned fish, comprising over 26,000 species
• a single species of beetle gave rise to 4 suborders and 168 families of beetles, comprising hundreds of thousands of species

The more spectacular the transformation or imaginative the variation, the more it becomes clear that such phenomena cannot have been accidental but were programmed from the outset – just as the single-generation metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of an egg into a chicken is evidently pre-programmed. Evolution of this kind in no way implies the denial of an original creation. Survivors from the cataclysm had to have been programmed with an enormous potential to evolve/diversify because there were so few of them. It has been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It is equally clear that evolution makes sense only in the light of creation.

How this website is organised

Earth history took place over a succession of ages, and inevitably the names of these ages will be unfamiliar to many readers. Be patient, therefore, while you become more used to the names! The organising principle of the site is primarily chronological.

• A record of Earth’s colonisation walks the visitor through the early part of the fossil record, illustrating how the step-by-step appearance of plants and animals reflects a process of ecological recovery (Archaean to Devonian).
• The antediluvian world steps still further back in time to look at what the original world was like, before the cataclysm that some refer to as ‘Noah’s Flood’ (before the Archaean).
• The old world destroyed argues that evidence generally taken to go back to the solar system’s birth is actually evidence of its destruction.
• Transitional fossils discusses, in chronological order, the ‘top ten’ examples of evolution, from fishes to man (Devonian to Quaternary).

In addition:

• A series of diagrams and timecharts provides visual aids.
• Key concepts summarises the new thinking, followed by pages that treat a few of the concepts in more detail.
• In-depth discussions engage the general reader at a more technical level, with topics such as the origin of the solar system and the newly discovered ‘transitional’ fossil Tiktaalik.
• Finally, Genesis and other traditions considers the testimony of oral traditions that predate the invention of writing, on the basis that they represent a lost memory of how the Earth came into existence. They too tell us that the original world was destroyed.

This is a quality site, which invites you to be open to new ways of seeing. The less you skim, the more you will get out of it. New material continues to be added.