Where life came from is one of man’s most fundamental questions, for at bottom we are asking about our own origin. We are born into the world as if from nowhere, in a birth we cannot remember. So in his perplexity man has dug into the rocks of the Earth to see if they will disclose the answer. Did the world slowly create itself, or was it created by a higher power?

Does nature have a creative power of its own, capable of producing things that are more complex than anything we ourselves could engineer, for all our intelligence and technological prowess? Can life be reduced to the properties of lifeless atoms, despite our sense of being distinct from the world, conscious and alive?

In recent times it has become difficult to ask these questions in an open-ended way. Institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences pronounce such questions illegitimate, protesting when anyone seeks to introduce them into the scientific domain and lobbying hard to have them excluded from places of education. Only one view of reality is permitted: the one that believes in self-creation – a scientific justification of natural magic.

Many find it difficult to believe that it was a divine power who said, “In six days I created the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” When we contemplate the remote glory of the stars, the majesty of the continents and oceans, the secret lives of the animals that share our planet, all appear to deny a natural explanation of their existence. But it is also apparent that they 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 paradox can be resolved if we recognise the following:

• The rock and fossil evidence shows that the original world was subsequently destroyed. Thus its ultimate origin became hidden. Although what has been preserved and can be investigated points back to a creation, we cannot go all the way back to the beginning.
• ‘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.
• Certain ancient oral traditions about the beginning could be an important part of the total evidence. Unless we assume at the outset that the world is billions of years old, these might go back a long way and represent an authentic collective memory of how things originated. Science seeks to build up a historical explanation that is independent of this memory, but since it addresses the same questions (‘How did the world come into being? Where did man come from? Where did animals come from?), each might throw light on the other.

Although there is much evolution in the fossil record, there is no evidence that all organisms have evolved from a common ancestor (a point discussed here). The key point is that there was a global cataclysm at the beginning of the rock record. This is a fact, not an assertion; the ‘new approach’ seeks only to offer a different interpretation of facts that are already known. The whole phenomenon of fossils is a consequence of that cataclysm – an event attested both in the annihilation of the Earth’s oldest crust (at the end of what is called the Hadean period) and in the vast impact craters that deface the Moon. People have assumed that the order in which fossils appeared was an evolutionary sequence only because at the same time as species were colonising sea and land they were diversifying into new species, and the planet itself was in constant flux. Bacteria appeared first because they were and are the most prolific of all 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 – diverse millipedes, insects, mites and spiders, reptiles, and in due course dinosaurs and mammals. In this unforced but revolutionary view, the mystery of so many obviously unrelated organisms appearing in such rapid succession begins at last to make sense.

Belief in evolution can undermine the spontaneous wonder that nature evokes: the sense that what we see is the handiwork of a being greater than ourselves. But ‘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’. However, organisms are manifestly too ingenious to be so explained, as are real examples of evolutionary change. Consider what is involved, for instance, in:

• anemone-like animals evolving into jellyfish
• lizards evolving into snakes
• land-dwelling quadrupeds evolving into whales and dolphins, or
• feathered birds evolving into penguins.

Examples discussed on this website include ichthyosaurs (am extinct group of marine reptiles) and turtles (still living). We will add others in due course.

No less wonderful are the life histories which instead of a radical change in body form exhibit an immense range 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

Evolution of this kind in no way implies the denial of a preceding creation. 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, within one life span, we know that the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of an egg into a chicken is pre-programmed.

The site has several sections. After various introductory pages, 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. Before the cataclysm looks at what the original world was like, and The old world destroyed argues that evidence generally taken to go back to the solar system’s birth is actually evidence of its destruction, of the cataclysm known (rather misleadingly) as ‘Noah’s Flood’. A series of diagrams and timecharts provide visual aids. The Key concepts page 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. Mysteries of the cnidarians explores the story of corals and jellyfish. Finally, Genesis and other traditions considers what information can be drawn from accounts that predate the invention of writing, on the basis that they represent a lost memory of how the Earth came into existence.

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.