Fossils show that life on Earth has a past, and that there is something mysterious about that past. Even if Earth had hosted life for billions of years, it would not necessarily follow that there would be mineralised traces of such life. All rocks might have been formed when the planet was formed, and life might have subsisted just on the surface, leaving no trace of its history.

But that is not how things are. The fossil record provides us, wonderfully, with an opportunity to investigate life’s history, almost back to its very beginnings. It is a mystery which we can try to solve, in the hope of answering some of man’s profoundest questions.

Some say that the fossils reveal an evolutionary story, where there is no essential difference between life and non-life and all plants and animals go back genealogically to inorganic chemicals. However, as shown from time to time on this website, the data do not support such a view. On the other hand, they also do not support a story where fossils are the remains of creatures buried in a global flood. In both cases the wide gap between the data and the stories purporting to make sense of them is filled by an irresistible will to believe. Atheism offers its explanation, theistic fundamentalism its alternative. The ideologies generate ideas about what ‘must’ have happened, and where a choice must be made between what must have happened and what did, they plump for the former, concealing the discrepancies under theoretical sticking-plaster. To the extent that the theories are scientific, they are falsified theories, kept alive not by any explanatory power but by the belief systems that underlie them.

This site offers another approach, a ‘third way’ that recognises that there is truth on both sides: evidence both for large-scale evolution in the fossil record over thousands of years and for an originating creation that was subsequently undone. The ideologies fall short of the truth when they deny, or ignore, the most compelling evidence on the other side. It is time to move beyond the polemics which assume that evolution and creation must be mutually exclusive.

The two positions can be reconciled when we see that organisms evolved as they recolonised a planet engulfed by a solar-system-wide catalysm immediately before the beginning of the rock sequence. Because of that cataclysm the Earth cannot be studied in its originally created form. What can be studied are the lands and oceans which formed thereafter by natural processes and, to that extent, have an evolutionary history. The organisms that recolonised the lands and oceans also have an evolutionary history. They were created with an immense potential for variation over time, and they progressively realised that potential as they multiplied and radiated across an unstable world.

To find out more about this view, turn to The Hadean cataclysm.