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: that all plants and animals go back genealogically to inorganic chemicals. However, the data do not support such a view. As can be seen from even a casual look at the record and copiously documented from the academic literature, there is nothing to connect bacteria with multi-celled animals, plants with animals, invertebrates with vertebrates and so on. The beginnings of most major groups of organism are sudden.

Others say that fossils are the remains of creatures buried in a global flood. This too is false, as can be readily seen from the photographs – tracks made by living dinosaurs in sediments kilometres above what would have been the pre-flood surface, burnt logs of similar age and stratigraphic height in cross-bedded estuarine sediments.

Atheism offers its explanation, theistic fundamentalism its alternative. The ideologies generate ideas about what ‘must’ have happened, and where contradicting evidence forces a choice between what must have happened and what did, they plump for the former. 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. Science, by contrast, when most true to its principles, is always looking to test explanations, both against further data and against alternative explanations; it is always prepared to ruthlessly throw out what does not pass muster.

This open-mindedness should apply even to explanations at the highest level, such as the theory of evolution, or the Big Bang, or Noah’s Flood. That, in practice, it does not is well known – at least among those who disagree with the explanation in question. Science is an activity practised by human beings, and human beings are not merely emotional animals but spiritual ones, with particularly strong feelings when it comes to religious questions. When science seeks to understand how the heavens, the earth and everything in them came into existence, it is exploring pre-eminently religious questions.

This site offers a different approach, and one that leads to different explanations. The more non-partisan approach allows one freedom to give credit where credit is due, to recognise that there is some truth on both sides: evidence for large-scale evolution in the fossil record over thousands of years and for an originating creation that was subsequently undone. The opposing ideologies fall short of the truth chiefly 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.