Sunday, June 29, 2014

Fred Reed on the Origin of Life and the Implausibility of Evolution

Fred Reed, of "Fred on Everything," is a thinker and writer, someone who dares to think independently of prevailing fashions and theories, and challenge them.  A lot of his columns are just fun, like ones on "Bar Girls."  Others inspire deeper thought.  His ruminations on the origin of life and the plausibility of evolution are among his best.

Fred is not chained to any religious doctrine on the great questions of "Where did we come from?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?"  However, he has decided that the theory of evolution is intuitively implausible, that the highly complex life forms on this planet could not be some kind of weird accident, and that something is going on that we can't explain.  "I don't know what," says Fred.  (Mark Twain didn't know either, and opined that the universe was some kind of experiment.)

Fred says that there are two kinds of minds in the debate:
This agglomeration of everything under one theoretical roof appeals powerfully to minds that need an overarching explanation of everything. The great intellectual divide perhaps is not between those who believe one thing and those who believe another, but between those who need to believe something—I am tempted to say believe almost anything—and those who are comfortable with uncertainty and even the unknowable.
Fred includes the ardent evolutionist, along with the ardently religious, among the former (i.e. those that need an explanation of everything.)

After years of studying and believing in the theory of evolution, I began to see holes in it, and eventually had to reject it as implausible.  So what did create this multitude of life forms?  Like Fred, I believe that something is going on, but I don't know what.

What I do know, or at least am pretty sure about, is that human beings don't have the gray matter to figure it out.  Some things are beyond human understanding, and will remain that way.

Here are some of Fred's columns on the matter, that will make you think:

438 - Darwin

484 - Darwin, Sort Of

580 - Darwin's Fly  (Best one, IMHO)

582 - No More Evolution

No comments: