Natural Creation

For Alan Eames

Introduction

 

I have started this book for two main reasons. Whilst travelling in South India and being asked what religion I hold and hesitating before answering, “None”. I really wanted to say evolution but this somehow seemed inadequate, not a complete answer. Evolution only covers how life changes once it has got going, it’s not as complete an answer as belief in God where all creation is accounted for; it’s not an overall philosophy. He was looking for a word like, Christian or Hindi and I couldn’t think of a word to adequately describe my beliefs so he was left thinking that I had none or had not thought about it.

The second reason is that I don’t think that science is being taught with adequate enthusiasm to get enough kids interested in it. Most of the best scientists with this enthusiasm are involved in far more interesting and financially rewarding occupations than teaching kids. Even if they are teaching, they are teaching at a higher or more interesting level. Consequently, more and more students are going on to studying, “History and Politics” or “Philosophy, Politics and Economics”. Not that there is anything wrong with these subjects, it’s just the quantity of good students studying them compared with the sciences. I am sure that our world would benefit far more by having a few more scientists and engineers even though it costs a little more to teach them. I'm not saying that there are no teachers that teach with enthusiasm, just not enough. The sciences that are taught are disjointed and separated from each other. It’s just not joined up. We spend as much time teaching the history of science rather than the science itself. My aim with this book is to include a short introduction to the basic sciences necessary to describe where we and everything else comes from in the hope that it stimulates a few to go onto discovering and enjoying a little more about these fascinating subjects. How can anything be more interesting or important than how we and everything else got here and how it all works together?

Collectively as a human race we have started to unravel the secrets of nature and to discover how things work. Sometimes, it feels as if we already know almost everything and there is not much left to discover. We have started to travel into space and look to the ends of the universe. Illnesses that would have maimed or killed us naturally we are starting to understand and overcome, new electronic gadgets that amaze us appear more frequently each year. It seems that our biggest invention and new best friend, the computer will help us solve any problems thrown at us. But the truth is that we have barely scratched the surface of all there is to discover. We have only just begun, in the last few millennia or even centuries, or even decades, for the first time, to understand how things work and where we and all this other stuff around us came from and how it all interacts with itself. How could all this complexity have come from such simple beginnings? What is life?

We appear to be so much more successful than any animal around us or those that came before us. With each generation we seem to be so much more advanced than the previous one, which makes us think that we are more intelligent than the last. But its not so much how clever we are compared to the other animals or previous generations, but for the simple fact that we work together as a species so much better than any that came before us. Our acquired knowledge is not being lost or forgotten so much as in the past. Each time we put already known things together to make something new, we advance a little. But more importantly that new thing is available to put together with other known things to make something else new in a never ending progression. We are doing exactly what naturally happens, on its own, to all matter and life. The reason being is that we are part of that natural process. We are that same stuff. Let’s hope that we are wise enough to continue to work together and not let our achievements go to our heads.

So this is my attempt at creating an alternative to religion; a belief system so that when I am next asked what I believe in, I can say, “Natural Creation!” It’s a bit like the Bible except, I hope, a little closer to “The Truth”.