Read Chapter 7: Evolution

“Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.” -Terrence Mckenna

Isaac Newton sat alone in his candle-lit study. Winter churned outside the cloudy windows of Woolsthorpe Manor. A biting wind howled with cold grief. The Great Plague swept through London, dragging a hundred thousand souls to early graves and pressing the young scholar to retreat to the countryside.¹²⁷ In uneasy seclusion, far from the chaos of the city but not beyond the reach of cursed infection and its trailing sorrow, Newton busied his mind with thoughts of sterile mathematics recently reviewed at Cambridge, but his focus was relentlessly pulled toward the machinations of a brutal world.

While he pondered, a barren apple tree outside Newton’s troubled sanctuary swayed against an unseen gust. The dormant husk incubated ideas destined to change the course of mankind. When the apple finally fell, and a brash intellect gazed at a heavy moon still suspended in the sky, universal forces came into focus.¹²⁸ Newton perceived great but elusive powers influencing reality in predictable patterns, wondrous causes demanding enlightened elucidation, so pen touched paper and calculations began.

When Principia was published, the whole universe was squashed between its covers.¹²⁹ Sure, Newton had only glimpsed the smallest slice of cosmic marvels, but his calculus was solid. Every action was governed by quantifiable force. Every reaction seamlessly obeyed measurable inputs. Aristotle’s uncited Unmoved Mover still reigned supreme, but new math pushed Him far away from humanity. In the dawning age of precision, physical phenomena were predictable without appeal to metaphysical power. It was the first time in a long time that Jesus, Helios, or Ra didn’t paint the sunrise. Deistic beauty was inherent but allowed to rest apart from a blossoming scientific system.

"The universe is but a vast assemblage of laws under which every being, every creature, every particle of matter acts, moves, and exists. These laws are immutable, and nothing can deviate from them.” -Baron d’Holbach

While Newton remained faithful to his religion, believing that he had only described an aspect of God’s genius, his followers ran with determinism to its logical end. Voltaire saw a clockwork universe ticking in harmony with only natural laws intrinsic to its structure, so denied claims of deistic intervention.¹³⁰ If God existed at all, He was a distant force of ages past, an irrelevant entity unconcerned with the struggles of the present. Baron d'Holbach agreed, finding no room in airtight mathematics for metaphysical intrusion. The gears of the cosmic clock were fit too closely and its springs wound too tightly for anything extraordinary to penetrate the system.¹³¹ Thomas Paine was so overwhelmed by the flawless complexity of calculated reality that he chastised his Christian compatriots for daring to claim any understanding of the ineffable power that set the world in motion.¹³² Kant split existence into knowable and unknowable realms to reconcile the floods of science and philosophy overflowing the era’s expanding zeitgeist.¹³³ When our familiar guide, Laplace, was asked by Napoleon why he didn’t include God in his explanation of the cosmos, he flatly replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”¹³⁴

"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." -Schopenhauer

First falling apples, then all objects in motion, finally human bodies were added to the technical brew. They were an unsettling addition to the rhythmic system but not beyond description by indifferent laws of nature. Flesh and bones, too, obeyed inertia and gravity, only objecting when compelled by other integral influences. Hunger and safety pulled puppet strings just as certainly as matter was compelled by magnetism.¹³⁵ Morality, it appeared, was another naïve delusion of yesteryear, an antiquated outlook alongside obsolete deistic oversight. Who could say what behavior was right or wrong when every gear in the universal clock turned solely according to preordained trajectory? Only arbitrary and irrelevant rules could possibly be broken when energy and matter bound by natural law spun impeccably across the universe toward their inevitable destiny.¹³⁶

“Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” -Isaac Asimov

This was the world into which twenty-year-old Charles Darwin, a recent graduate of Newton’s alma mater, sailed as an aspiring naturalist. Enlightenment sciences, the training filling his mind and leading his investigations, had come to describe existence in starkly mechanical terms, reducing human affairs to equations of self-interest and survival. Morals we left to social researchers interested in the profits of civil harmony, along with lesser minds who clung to religion despite the obvious conclusions of modernity. It was only natural for Darwin to see solely callous cause and effect driving minor adaptations in finches and tortoises across islands in the Pacific. Environmental pressures, he noted without consideration of alternative explanations, were as reliable as gravity and pressed relentlessly upon every biological contrivance.¹³⁷ Cold weather selected offspring with thicker coats and plumes. Fearsome predators nibbled slower prey, driving herds toward greater speed and agility. Abundant hard nuts chose strong beaks to break them. Bugs demanded sharper instruments for their demise.¹³⁸

“No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth.” -Will Provine

Sure, Darwin had only glimpsed the smallest slice of cosmic marvels, but his evolved reasoning was valid. Life’s progress could be wound backward as easily as Newton’s cosmic clock, revealing trees of evolution that traced all adaptations to their ultimately humble beginning. His perception of biological strife and adaptation was so clear that he didn’t bother to cite Empedocles from 450 BCE, his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, or a handful of others who previously described similar systems.¹³⁹ “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,” he wrote with perfectly balanced condescension and arrogance, “having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one."¹⁴⁰

"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual." -Nietzsche

While Darwin was delighted to be a grandly evolved, overgrown amoeba imbued with “several powers,” his lofty contemporaries bathed in freedom from judgment that flowed from his biological bookend to Newton’s math. If there was any doubt after Enlightenment physics that humans were only minor cogs enslaved in a galactic merry-go-round, Darwin had put it to rest. Humanity wasn’t just a worthless discharge of heat and ill-fated complexity; humans were but germs with fast legs and big brains unwittingly bestowed by their unforgiving environment!¹⁴¹ Self-loathing and wanton cruelty were finally free from the haunting specter of righteous Jesus to plot the culling of lesser beings and enslavement of what remained.

Trouble for determinism and evolution percolated away from mainstream research, but the nihilistic train leading academia had left the station. Lowly individuals were demonstrably insignificant in the grand scheme. Übermensch ruled. Predators over prey was the set order of human affairs. Misery and joy were mathematically pointless, therefore modern Vespasians were morally free to do whatever they liked. Missing links in the fossil record were happily ignored as great discoveries in waiting, not as problems for evolution’s appeal. When a brilliant scientist named Thomas Young conducted the first double-slit experiment in 1801, revealing the wave nature of light when it was thought to be a particle, enlightened eyes in ivory towers glanced but yawned.¹⁴² Little things might escape the grasp of Newton’s unwavering calculations, but institutional understanding of reality remained in command. The intriguing discovery motivated tangential research into various transfers of wide-spectrum energies, but outliers were kept apart from macro physics, and Young’s experiment was not repeated for a hundred years. When the quantum torch was finally picked up by Max Planck, a crucial gear in the clockwork universe burned, and a new physics apart from deterministic laws rose on its ashes.¹⁴³ The scientific elites looming over meek humanity’s progress monitored quantum potential but weren’t keen to openly explore its ethical implications.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” -Carl Sagan

Edwin Hubble inadvertently banged the final nail into religion’s coffin in 1929, when he verified that the universe wasn’t a static array of heavenly masses but an expanding realm of runaway galaxies. Space itself exploded, in some places racing beyond the speed of light!¹⁴⁴ Sure, Hubble had only glimpsed the smallest slice of cosmic marvels, but the conclusion was obvious for anyone evolved enough to understand. If everything moved apart, then, at some point in the past, everything was together, a phenomenon already introduced by Einstein and refined by his contemporaries. Without crediting Anaximander from 610 BCE, latter physicists had predicted a cosmic egg or primeval atom at the beginning of universal time.¹⁴⁵ Hubble found its undeniable bones in celestial soil, and the singularity that would come to be known as the Big Bang was born.

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." -Richard Dawkins

Though its edges were frayed by ongoing discovery, the prodigious case presented to the public was open and shut. A falling apple, colorful finch, and big telescope were the new Alpha and Omega of existence. Ancient religion was over for serious souls. Later scribes would lazily cash in with catchy titles about the demise of God and end of faith, but as the twenty-first century dawned, every edgy renunciation of metaphysical belief was old news.¹⁴⁶ There were no God gaps between Newtonian cause and effect. No loving Creator mangled life with occasionally helpful mistakes over billions of years to form flawed humanity. Conscious omnipotence couldn’t reside inside a fiery ball of infinite quantum chaos accidentally raging toward universal reality. Only the dim and needy were still duped by vestigial houses of worship and laughably looked for an invisible man in the sky.

The end, almost.

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." -Einstein

When Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Marie Curie, Louis de Broglie, Max Planck, and all their brilliant contemporaries dash to a meeting to discuss a single physics problem, you know some history-shattering madness is about to go down. And down it went, in 1927, when the Solvay conference applied its gargantuan collective brainpower to a deceptively innocent question: what is an electron?¹⁴⁷

The vaunted crew predictably kept erudite proceedings stodgy by not asking the real question burning inside big brains above tight lips: what kind of insane asylum, eleven-dimensional, Marvel multiverse, machine matrix, cat and dogs living together, opium trip, kaleidoscope world had Planck uncovered? Focusing on a misbehaving electron helped calm troubling deliberations, but Einstein was still upset after the grand proceedings tilted toward Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which nudged observers toward the center of a fluctuating universe. In a later letter to Born, the irritated agnostic griped, “God does not play dice with the universe.”¹⁴⁸

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -Einstein

What the group hotly debated and finally rationalized was far worse for determinism’s devotees. God didn’t just play dice with the universe; He made the whole spectacular contraption out of dice and let His children play. The unexpected view began with J.J. Thompson in 1897, when he discovered that electrons were flowing particles dislodged from their constituent atoms.¹⁴⁹ The revelation at first appeared benign, but nineteenth-century physics was built on pillars of electromagnetism moving in waves (found in the first double-slit experiment from 1801) and sturdy atoms traveling along calculable trajectories. Matter, the hard stuff composing tactile reality, obeyed Newton’s laws of motion. Energy affected the hard stuff with less predictable but still dependable waves of influence. But Thompson, then others, found flowing hard stuff, and a wheel on physics’ wagon fell off. Louis de Broglie soon postulated that electrons must behave more like wavy light than little apples.¹⁵⁰ His math checked out, and was confirmed when Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer fired electrons instead of photons through a crystal that mimicked the haunting double slits. Lo and behold, wave behavior appeared.¹⁵¹ Neils Bohr reviewed the experiment and its successors, then did some math of his own, finally postulating that the act of conscious measurement must affect the state of all reality.¹⁵² Physical existence wasn’t what anyone thought it was, prompting every available genius to gather at the Solvay conference. When they left, the world outside the Hotel Metropole in Brussels must have appeared more mysterious and inviting than when they arrived. Could it be true that the damp cobblestones of Place de Brouckère underfoot, cloudy skies above, crisp autumn air on their breath, and everything therein beckoned their gaze to solidify harmonic existence?

Schrödinger thought not, like Einstein. He created a perfectly gruesome thought experiment to prove his stance. If everything was a wave before it was prodded by inquisitive consciousness,¹⁵³ then a cat could be both dead and alive at the same time. If Mittens was stuck in a box with a vial of poison opened by an unstable atom, one that might randomly decay according to radioactive probability, then the whole pet would be forced into the quantum realm alongside its unseen executioner. Since no human eye could glean what happened in the box if it remained sealed, the poor cat was cursed by an existence of both life and death until someone looked.¹⁵⁴ The plausible scenario was too absurd to be believed, prompting Schrödinger to (maybe) gloat, “Checkmate, losers.”

"It is not down in any map; true places never are." -Herman Melville

It was a fair point, prompting more research. Single electrons hit an advanced double-slit in 1961, confirming less sophisticated attempts and certifying that a lone particle would interfere with only itself if unwitnessed.¹⁵⁵ The rabbit hole went deeper still, as scientists probed the strange result. If they monitored which of the two slits the particles passed through, all wave phenomena disappeared. If they didn’t observe this moment of selection, waves washed over whatever backdrop they erected behind the slits, verifying Bohr’s Copenhagen hypothesis. It was apparent that electrons were hard particles when measured by curious hands but waves of potential when souls looked away. Newton’s clockwork universe was supposed to be flawlessly indifferent to its meaningless witnesses, but lengthy experimentation over decades caught it routinely dancing for its audience. In 1983, clever scientists thought to trick the maddening system by not observing which slit a particle shot through until after the action.¹⁵⁶ The universe chuckled, then snapped the particle out of its waveform and into a single position in the past when the mischievous researchers looked in the future. You read that right! Reality reliably interacted with witnesses across time. The eerie effect was tested and retested, always delivering the same result: the universe seemed to know if someone would look at it, not just when they looked. Yoon-Ho Kim, probably tiptoeing to the edge of insanity in 1999, erased the data that would be looked at in the future to confirm whether a particle was wearing its wave or solid attire before it was admired.¹⁵⁷ If you guessed that the clever wave/particle still won the elaborate game, you’re getting the gist of how mind-blowing quantum mechanics truly is.

"Nature is clever, but not always obvious." -Richard Feynman

“Fine!” screamed the lab coats. “Particles know when we’re looking and even if we’re going to look, but certainly not whole molecules!” The micro world might hold paradoxes almost beyond description, but not the macro environment in which people drove to work, stubbed their toes, and cooked dinner. It just couldn’t be! So, between fits of hairpulling, scientists shot big molecules composed of sixty atoms through the infuriating slits. Balls of hard stuff when they looked; limitless waves of possibility when they didn’t.¹⁵⁸ Bigger, heftier, and more comical stuff was up next, and always exhibited the same insane result.¹⁵⁹

We know what Fauci did to beagles,¹⁶⁰ so don’t doubt for one second that mad scientists would shoot Schrodinger kittens through quantum slits if they could figure out how. Their cold hearts would bathe in furry gore, if they checked the bloody result.

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." -Richard Feynman

What? You didn’t hear that science confirmed, again and again and again, that you were the center of your own universe? No one told you that the entire spectacular cosmos evaporated into a fleeting wave of infinitely possible realities when you didn’t play with it?¹⁶¹ That’s ironic because you pay for much of the research, and that’s one reason you weren’t told.¹⁶²

Today, a strange détente has shrouded academic debate concerning the unsteady nature of reality. It is prophesized in ivory towers that a unified theory shall rise, prove itself worthy, and connect micro and macro physics, but the chosen one has yet to be christened. We are left with two broken models for one magnificent universe.¹⁶³ Newton’s laws help launch modern spaceships into orbit. Quantum absurdities underpin circuits in your phone. The quantum realm obviously composes our larger world, but emergent interactions remain elusive and mysterious. Whacky concepts abound behind the shiny gates of academia but, like Richard Feynman said in 1965, nobody understands quantum mechanics.

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” -Shakespeare

We can take away from this story that if Newton’s laws needed a mind-bending update that is still in progress, they were incomplete. Having never strayed from his faith, he would probably appreciate the insight. And it was always obvious that human actors possessed more free will than a deterministic system provided, which exposed the absurdity of such a contrivance. Life creates beautiful complexity in the shadows of inescapable degradation and races for the stars against all constraint.¹⁶⁴ We are anti-entropy, anti-gravity, and laugh in the face of fateful odds. Determinism’s inexorable march toward the end of time is the placid stream in which we joyfully stomp. By vaulting a spirited observer back into reality’s purpose, quantum mechanics highlighted the egregious error.¹⁶⁵

“Destroy a man’s belief in immortality and... everything would be permitted, even cannibalism.” -Dostoevsky

In spite of constant prodding to belittle humanity, surreal science since Newton has begrudgingly confirmed that the universe is a fabulously vast arena patiently awaiting your conscious curiosity. When not spirit cooking, child trafficking, or otherwise devil worshiping, the inbred beneficiaries of social Darwinism who reign over the technocratic institutions controlling lesser mankind would like to remind you, though, that you are still only an overgrown bacterium. Don’t get any big ideas about your celestial value or resist paying voluntary taxes collected at the end of a gun.¹⁶⁶

It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? If one authoritative fence on our humiliating tax farm was an illusion, what about the others? Let’s see how Darwin’s theory has evolved after centuries of incremental updates.

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Otherwise known as miracles." -H.L. Mencken

Sixty years after evolution devoured all competing theories describing the origin of life, the stubborn countryfolk of Tennessee voted to outlaw its instruction in public school. They had heard enough from unquestionable science in the decades since Darwin and were ready to take a stand on the outdated yet reliable Bible. Newfangled discovery be damned, people were not big-brained monkeys; they were eternal souls created by God in His image. Believers were no longer amused by finches and fossils that insulted their existence, undermined their religion, and eroded society’s fragile morals. Both well-intended and nefarious academics had hoped to rid the world of dogmatic superstition with a constant drumbeat of research and reason, but they had instead driven Christ’s quarrelsome factions together into a fundamentalist constituency with enough political power to fight undeniable facts.¹⁶⁷

John Scopes broke the law. He wasn’t a rabid atheist, just a mild-mannered substitute teacher who in good conscience couldn’t ignore science when leading a classroom. Clarence Darrow, a legal firebrand who thrived on challenging tradition, took Scopes’ case with the backing of the ACLU. William Jennings Bryan, a famous advocate of fundamentalist Christianity, led the prosecution. Contentious arguments flew, engrossing the nation in the Monkey Trial.¹⁶⁸ Everyone wanted to know if their side could withstand the harsh light of courtroom scrutiny and sensed that the future of society might be decided by a gavel.

“I wish I could believe in the Bible, like you people—I just can’t. And I wish I could get hope out of it like you do. I’ve got no hope.” -Clarence Darrow

Scopes lost the battle, but the war had just begun.¹⁶⁹ A lasting line was drawn in the sand between racing academic pursuits and truths held sacred for millennia, which was (and is) a sad scenario for every soul hoping to understand their small slice of grand reality with humble insight. Darrow and Bryan felt it, too, while they quarreled over geology and revelation. Devout Bryan was forced to admit under oath that the Biblical account of creation couldn’t be taken literally in light of growing archeologic evidence. Forthright Darrow ducked and weaved when confronted with glaring gaps in the fossil record concerning humanity’s recent evolution and long-ago species differentiation. And both men appeared to genuinely appreciate the value of the other’s camp. Darrow never attacked the sanctity of belief when he had the chance, and Bryan was quick to praise scientific discovery. Our scale of probability swayed in their hearts while they weighed facts and dutifully fought for a side, but neither yet had the words to express doubt in conviction.

We’ll fix that before we’re done.

Science sprinted to strengthen its theories after the irreverent Monkey Trial, and only momentarily tripped over the perplexing Solvay conference. Hubble snatched and ran with the torch of enlightenment when he brought the whole universe into an incomplete but all-encompassing evolutionary view. Determinism ironically turned unpredictable, but biological foundations of the natural world fit into place when the stars aligned into a long-expanding cosmos with an explosive accident at its core.

"The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." -Thomas Huxley

Another great mystery was definitively resolved in 1953, when Watson and Crick finished a hundred-year quest to identify hereditary information in living cells.¹⁷⁰ DNA spelled the end of debate over the origin of life. The ubiquitous building blocks of all biology formed brilliantly complex codes in advanced organic echelons and terse scripts inside basic critters. The conclusion was obvious for the highest primates: the molecular cryptograph of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs was evolution manifest. Naturally selected improvements to the aspiring data structure were both beginning and end of biological purpose, life’s true bible etched into every cell on Earth.

The mutation mechanism, too, was laid bare by the glorious double helix. Perhaps whiter fur of occasional offspring was selected over eons of snowy landscapes, stripping color from polar bears over time, but it was always a curious development that litters of carnivorous mammals like the ancient miacids could incrementally give rise to cats and dogs and bears.¹⁷¹ Voluminous time was the nonspecific answer, but DNA sharpened the branches of the evolutionary tree. Each and every time a cell replicated its intricate code, an error might arise. Most were unhelpful for survival and removed by cruel selection, but with millions of years, improvements would compound into species as varied as jellyfish and eagles. As the ubiquitous molecular cipher slowly morphed into endless possibility, so went the wild chase of all biology.

The end, almost.

“Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.” -Vera Rubin

The undeniably probabilistic mechanism of random mutation unexpectedly restrained boundless genetics by plunging the new field of study into the old realm of strict statistics, which added mathematical limits to evolution’s projections.¹⁷² Changes occurred at the molecular level of life and only at the molecular level. For a beak to be sharper, a leg more muscular, or a hoof more rugged, the binary AT or GC structure of DNA required a random edit to produce different proteins or instructions for cellular behavior. Complex beneficial changes, like various apparatuses for flight, were loosely possible according to evolutionary theory within the confines of rigid molecular coding, but intricate alterations invited atrocious odds which required colossal heaps of expansive time to unfold – insane amounts of time, like what might be needed to roll fifty snake eyes or skip across a lake. Perhaps feeling a haunting quantum tingle shiver up their spines, geneticists scoured nature for more sources of mutation to alter their initial conclusions. In addition to copy errors, they found environmental disruptors like radiation and chemical culprits, which could speed the process through constricting eons of available geologic time. They also found many organelles in cellular biology whose sole purpose was code correction and repair, an awkward development for believers in the religion of random teeth and accidental victims.¹⁷³ Always quick to sleight-of-hand for funding and adoration from the lesser public, the lab coats were mum about busy enzymes that constantly fixed any alteration in coding. If DNA reliably repaired itself before it could express occasionally beautiful variation, the time bill for wild biological diversity increased far beyond what the Earth could pay in years. Mathematical timebombs in the overarching theory aside, genetic revelation appeared too perfect to be wrong, so textbooks focused on coding mistakes that somehow slipped through genetic guardrails. The basics of evolutionary biology, sans statistical challenges, seemed sound and pointed in only one direction: stringently gradual advancements according to trial and error across life’s digital blunders. Extravagant modifications were all but forbidden by slippery chances swimming in a pool of limited time.

Science looked for its reflection in the fossil record to confirm genetics’ promise of universal, incremental advancements through small changes in molecular coding. We all want to know where we came from, and human evolution is recent and accessible by geological standards. It was a compelling and easy dig. The depth varies according to local conditions, but researchers must excavate only around thirty feet of sediment to reach hundreds of thousands of years into the past, to the time of Homo sapiens’ arrival on the world.¹⁷⁴

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” -Einstein

Shovels dug around the globe. Bones sprang from wells and raced to labs, joining previous excavations awaiting modern investigation. Human history roughly fell into place, but noticeable gaps marked periods where there should have been gradual transition. Millions of years ago, apes evolved to both walk upright and use natural tools with expanding cerebral power. Rare skeletons like Lucy’s marked the change.¹⁷⁵ Around a million years ago, stone axes are found alongside murder victims who were smart enough to wield weapons but not run away. Some carcasses were also eaten by their assailants. Prehistory isn’t for the faint of heart. Then, three hundred thousand years ago, what we might call cavemen emerged in an evolutionary blink.¹⁷⁶ Better tools, rudimentary language, art, shelters, culture, and the burying of dead friends, alluding to religion, all appear at once. It’s a magnificently wide biological jump, and not without concerning precedent, plus we must note alongside the statistical miracle that we’re all still pretending that DNA doesn’t routinely fix itself when it accidentally advances. Moving on, distinctly modern humans are born around 40,000 years ago, ostensibly from their cave-dwelling kin. Cro-Magnon is a truly magnificent upgrade by any standard. She still hangs out in caves but has all the intellectual firepower to build pyramids and skyscrapers when technology is finally refined according to her insightful will. Compared to her lineage, she has a larger forehead and rounder skull for a hefty brain, inquisitive rectangular eyes under a slender brow ridge, gracefully chiseled facial features with smaller nasal passages tucked under a narrow nose, a tall frame expanding into agile limbs, and a well-defined chin under a modern smile.¹⁷⁷ She’s an elegant vision among outdated cousins. It’s a small wonder for which we can be thankful that the shocking aberration wasn’t snuffed on sight.

"The trouble with miracles is, they don’t happen often enough to be reliable." -Mark Twain

Bones don’t lie, even if carbon dating is a fickle art. The skeletons of Homo Sapiens and their predecessors spoke of a glaring problem concerning genetics’ maiden voyage into predictions of humanity’s past. Random copy errors, radiation, and environmental toxins couldn’t explain the rapid updates from beast to caveman to man.¹⁷⁸ A slightly larger brain with intricately supportive tissue and neurological framework was a statistical wonder in itself, but how could so many skeletal and form changes possibly coincide with the marvelous mutation? How could modern man suddenly sport different teeth according to his desire to dine with utensils? And where did that stylish chin come from?¹⁷⁹ Why was an armored brow no longer useful and suddenly deleted in the same genetic patch?

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss." -Nietzsche

It's worth checking the astronomical numbers, once again, because Laplace’s math reigns over random transactions, not Darwin’s scribbled ape fantasies. The odds of copy errors and outside influences accidentally forming a single, average-sized protein that can be processed by a cell into a helpful, 3D shape and benefit an organism are difficult to pin down but not to estimate. Genetic building blocks are known quantities with limited variations and combinations. The math is manageable if wily. Best guesses for the random appearance of a single advantageous protein among the tens of thousands necessary for complex mammals range from 10-40 to upwards of 10-100.¹⁸⁰ Laplace’s snake eyes live! In this case, though, rolling genetic dice doesn’t require five seconds between intervals. Large populations of creatures replicate and mutate all at once, all over the globe. Perhaps 50,000 Neanderthal hominins were alive when Cro-Magnon showed up with her sexy eyebrows.¹⁸¹ In a population of that size, subjected to the pressures of mutation and natural selection, roughly 1.25 million DNA base-pair mutations might arise per generation according to current estimations.¹⁸² Roughly a thousand base pairs produce a single protein, so that’s how many edits nature needs to “get right” in order to achieve the tiniest advance. It's not a roll of a hundred six-sided dice; it’s a flip of a thousand coins, because DNA’s throughput is essentially binary.¹⁸³ The odds of the tricky coin flip are far less than the delicate dice roll but are exercised far more frequently across a vast population, putting our new estimate of years between unexpected but successful sightings at 1044.¹⁸⁴ That’s all the time our universe has existed, once again, plus another decillion universes. For. One. Stupid. Protein. Colored in metaphor, the odds of evolution plucking a single useful protein from its available blocks with its eyes closed are roughly the same as choosing a particular grain of sand on a beach that’s a foot thick, mile wide, and stretches past the known boundary of the observable universe… in both directions!

If a protein is a thousand bits of chemical code, then the entire human genome is a little less than a one gigabyte drive.¹⁸⁵ Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon arguably share over 99.5% of their genetics, so the requisite update is easy to calculate if we set aside complexities like epigenetics that distort otherwise clear numbers. Give or take, the genetic change between the old model and new might be as little as two megabytes of altered data on the one gigabyte cellular chip. Some base pairs would code for proteins; some might dictate chemical behaviors; some might be labeled as junk by folks who haven’t figured them out yet, but the end result still adds up to the same answer: eight million segments of DNA would need to be successfully overwritten, virtually at once according to the fossil record.¹⁸⁶ A coincidental thousand base pairs forming one tidy protein was an unlikely event similar to selecting a particular grain of sand on a universe-spanning beach; A two-megabyte update’s chances swell from approximately 10-50 to 10-352,000, elongating the beach into geometrically multiplying seascapes across countless universes far beyond human comprehension.¹⁸⁷ Our language cannot adequately describe the smallness of a probability so near zero, so we use a near miss and say impossible.

"I’ve got a system for roulette. It’s called losing." -Groucho Marx

Science sees the problem with their theory, though they are loathe to speak its name, so they have imagined and tacitly confirmed mitigating circumstances like the accumulation of smaller, immediately unapparent changes over time, interbreeding that might have transferred parts of updates still cooking in Neanderthal’s oven, powerful control genes that might alter greater composition with fewer changes, and the aforementioned (outlandishly mysterious) epigenetic contributions to advancement without specific code alterations.^{188 189 190} But these rebuttals only scratch multiverse-crossing, mind-boggling eons of expected intervals between expected occurrences. Therefore, the jumps found in the fossil record were, and are, far too far for the theory of evolution to incorporate. The conclusion leaps off every page of honest calculations, even while science continues to obfuscate the fact that DNA lives among layers of redundant biological machines that routinely fix the code when updates struggle to arrive! What are the odds of a random, two-megabyte update when the hard drive erases advanced new bits as they emerge? How many decillion universes of time would it take to sneak maddingly miraculous information past watchful guards? The number hardly matters when Earth offers only five billion years.

“Your ancestors were hairy, but you have to buy a coat." -Unknown

If it can’t happen, it probably didn’t. The more perceptive lab coats of yesteryear knew the truth at first glance. Darwin, like Newton, made insightful observations about nature but his limited understanding of the majestic universe was woefully incomplete. Genetic research had arrived to cement evolution but had turned on its masters like new physics turned on the old. The numbers were irrefutable. As forthright agents of holy science, the godless nerds donned tweed jackets and called a press conference. “Our present theory of evolution doesn’t match the fossil record,” they admitted to the world before flashing cameras. “Yet science marches on. We’ll get back to you when we figure it all out.”

Just kidding! No scientist has ever admitted that their last few decades of prognostication was disastrously false, and they hope you don’t catch on to the most basic principle of their esteemed art: it’s always under revision. Its paradoxical superpower is always being wrong! To wit, some shifty lab coats chose to lie about apes and cavemen and their spontaneously Gigachad offspring. Cash, worship, and global control were far more seductive than truth, so “scientists” glued a baboon jaw onto a human head and passed it off as the infamous missing link.¹⁹¹ Problem solved! Piltdown Man stood tall in the British Natural History Museum and infected textbooks for decades while humanity was belittled by their slithering elites.

“Men are not animals erect, but immortal Gods.” -Francis Bacon

With one embarrassing anomaly swept under the rug, science dug deeper into the past to find more primal evolutionary processes. As evolution’s branches narrowed into the past, common ancestors would surely link patchwork biology into an undeniable story. Abbreviated timescales (like less than a decillion universes) would eventually be explained by advanced genetics, and missing links along narrow offshoots would be forgiven when the great circle of life was completed from beginning to end. Furious shovels dug to the dinosaurs of 150 million years ago, past prehistoric fish and crustaceans of 300 million years ago, all the way to the roots of what seemed like the genesis of all life’s diversity: The Cambrian layer of 500 million years ago. There they found a hauntingly thin specter of breakneck evolution that made Cro-Magnon’s quantum leap feel tame and logical by comparison, an explosion of wild life forms lying together in a layered graveyard too chronologically connected to be possible.¹⁹²

We’ve mathematically explored the troubling timespans required for just one useful protein to accidentally spawn inside a living thing, along with the vast infinitude expected between two-megabyte makeovers. Having done the calculations, we may now sit back and enjoy the statistical comedy of the Cambrian Explosion. The joke goes like this: A gelatinous leaf-like thing that is neither plant nor animal, a big leaf that sucks the ocean floor, a centimeter long flat worm, a primordial sand dollar, a tiny tube that looks like coral if you squint, and a bunch of bacteria slither into a seaside saloon.¹⁹³ Only eleven million years later, out walks (literally) a veritable parade of magnificently complex life forms.¹⁹⁴ Trilobites are instantly blessed by evolution with heads, brains, never-before-seen compound eyes, plentiful creepy legs with intricate joints, functional feeling antennae, and an armored exoskeleton!¹⁹⁵ “What predatory pressure selected genetics for armor when there were no predators?” you ask. Shut up! Science is trying to tell one of its funniest jokes. Trilobites are part horseshoe crab, part spider, and all nightmare, which spawned from no discernable predecessor. Pikaia is a snake fish with many of the same impossible upgrades, but houses gills, a spine with a parallel central nervous system, and a dorsal fin instead external shielding. Annelida sports a showroom-new segmented body like modern centipedes. Mollusca drifts along with a squishy body and intricate hard shell. Early clams are born at the same time but are unrelated to their mollusk drinking buddies. Cute starfish instantly pop into existence under the shadows of annoying jellyfish, which “evolve” replete with functional stingers and venom, right out of the gate!¹⁹⁶

That’s it. That’s the joke. It would be funny if academia didn’t draw diagrams of this farce and put it in classrooms and textbooks as if it corroborated their favorite science.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” -Einstein

Nobody tried to glue a trilobite head onto a flatworm to cover up the Cambrian’s catastrophic repudiation of Darwinian evolution. The lab coats just walked away quietly and hoped no one noticed. When pressed, they cloud the issue with theories about unseen complexities of life before the Cambrian Explosion or with talk of phantom influences bestowed by eons of old, but the math will never add up.¹⁹⁷ An impossible event, thus miracle awaiting religious devotion, is firmly lodged in science’s prehistoric sediment.

Nervous shovels dug deeper through prehistoric madness to find an origin story that might make sense of the wonderous plot in the layers above. The first cell, researchers theorized, would hold the ultimate key to decipher all later life, the prime element of spirited matter, science’s glorious micro-god in the primordial muck. So clamorous were the lab coats to meet their god that they named it before discovery: LUCA, the lowest universal common ancestor.¹⁹⁸ Far, far under the Cambrian disaster lived only tiny, multicellular blobs and algae across billions of years of sediment. Some didn’t evolve in any way across billions of years of opportunity.¹⁹⁹ Life’s long, eerie simplicity unhelpfully showcased the impossibly marvelous explosion above but hinted that ultimate revelation grew near. One simple cell would rule them all.

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” -Mark Twain

Instead, they found two.²⁰⁰ The universe winked, once again, at dogged science when it neared a foundation of creation. Reality always giggles when its deepest nerves are tickled, but science won’t join the joy until its apostles realize that holistic truth evades microscopes and telescopes by definition.

The first cell they found was a solid rung on any Darwinian ladder. Eukaryotes, first seen 2 billion years ago, came equipped with all the familiar cellular tech: DNA in a protected nucleus, gooey cytoplasm to house chemical reactions and activity, ribosomes processing genetic information into proteins, mitochondria juicing the neighborhood with chemical energy, flexible membranes and cytoskeletons holding the operation together and contorting to swallow resources, receptor proteins sensing the environment, handy ATP synthase pumps in the membrane inviting protons to keep the lights on, and microtubules whipping external cilia to propel the spirited craft throughout the high seas.²⁰¹

But beneath eukaryotes awaited no eukaryotes light, no predecessor sans a fancy gadget, no slightly less evolved single-celled grandparents. No evolution was to be found. Instead, eukaryotes had weird neighbors that were themselves 2 billion years old!²⁰²

“The study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world.” -E. B. Wilson

Prokaryotes were a disappointing quandary reminiscent of the skip and hop between apes and humans. They were 100 times smaller than their upscale eukaryotic friends, had no nucleus and clumsily free-floating DNA, possessed no high-tech organelles like mitochondria, were encased in simple lipid membranes, and used a gaudy spinning tail for propulsion.²⁰³ Darwinian evolution demanded a gradient genetic predecessor to fabulous eukaryotes, but misshapen little simpletons were all that existed in the darkest depths of time.²⁰⁴ To add insult to their injurious discovery, prokaryotes too lacked a discernable lineage.²⁰⁵ The ancient rocks spoke of no prokaryotes with slightly less DNA and tinier tail. The bio-trail went cold.

There was nowhere else to dig. Meticulous science had already scoured a past so distant that Earth’s biosphere was essentially uninhabitable after being struck by a large celestial body that eventually formed the moon. Life rationally needed a stable backdrop to spawn, and the shovels had reached the final layer of impenetrable chaos.²⁰⁶

“Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” -Socrates

Undeterred, science filled in missing puzzle pieces with their educated imaginations. There must have been transitionary cells between eukaryotes and prokaryotes; they just hadn’t been preserved. And there must have been equally invisible precursors to prokaryotes. In fact, the very beginning of life must have had almost no form at all: just RNA bumping into nutrients to replicate companions.²⁰⁷ It was all so simple and clear when dreamed instead of unearthed and studied! With abundant hydrogen cyanide and formaldehyde across primordial Earth, the building blocks were all there. Perhaps a lipid bubble inadvertently formed around a chemical catalyst, and boom! Life was off to the races.

The inevitable conclusion of Darwinian evolution was always an uninspired chemical reaction that spawned a spirited race across eons. Source was inevitable. DNA is complex only because it repeats simplicity. Unwound as predictably as clockwork physics and an expanding cosmos, the birth of life was inescapably apparent: a short code that facilitated replication.²⁰⁸

They could prove it! Why had they bothered with the shovel at all? If they gathered RNA building blocks in their labs, subjected the pieces to fortunate but not unimaginable circumstances, and gave the concoction a jiggle and stir to simulate enough time to cover troubling statistical probability, it would live! All the old holes in the theory would be plastered over by a modern miracle, and the lab coats would finally establish their hearts’ deepest desire: the power of creation! Throughout centuries of willfully heightening horrific warfare, science had established wonderous control over death.²⁰⁹ Calling forth life itself from their tubes and beakers would raise them the remaining step to unchallenged omnipotence.

“The scientific process moves like an unstoppable tide, sweeping aside old certainties and replacing them with new mysteries.” -Brian Greene

To no one’s surprise but the lab coats, it didn’t work. Again and again, all they made in their tubes was sloppy tar and a few glaringly unalive amino acids.²¹⁰ Science has been molesting poor sugar, phosphate, and nitrogen for generations, now, in every conceivable way, cheating with every advancement at hand, but inanimate molecules have never cooperated and sparked with life. The repeated failure begs a question of evolution’s first step and last stand: how did it happen in the first place? Abiogenesis was always implicit in every evolutionary claim, but few focused on the most absurd pillar holding up the theory.²¹¹ Why did something utterly inanimate suddenly become so spunky only a few hundred million years after Earth calmed? How did life leap from unalive pieces, and why doesn’t it happen all the time if it takes so little to organize simple biology. Sugar, phosphate, and nitrogen are everywhere, but they never get any wild ideas about replication or planetary domination. What is alive, now, fights for survival; what is dead always slumbers. Yet evolution’s ultimate foundation was always etched with disturbing fine print stating that your coffee might suddenly fornicate with the slutty molecules in cream in a wild ploy to make more delicious coffee… and take over the world! But no one laughed in supposedly academic or deceitfully journalistic faces when they spewed their insanity across polite society. Costumes, lies, and corrupt institutions glittering with stolen coins were sadly enough to quell laughter that might have saved humanity from the nightmares released by a materialistic world view.

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed." -Marcus Aurelius

Science wasn’t done, yet. Lab coats are respectably persistent if misguided. Evolutionary biologists swallowed their pride and called in real scientists: chemists. “Share your mystical knowledge!” cried lesser minds only capable of grandiose theorizing and playing with bones in sandboxes. “Make sugar and phosphate and nitrogen do something! We beg of you.”

“Alright, we’ll look at your problem,” sighed the nerds from down the hall. Five minutes later, they reached a truly scientific conclusion. “Yeah, this RNA crap breaks down too quickly in any natural environment to ever have time to, like, do anything. Sorry,” they offered, then returned to labs where real experiments were conducted and hard results were recorded. Callous murmurs echoed in the hallway as they walked, “Did they really think that was going to work?”²¹²

Evolution’s acolytes wept in their smelly tar. It wasn’t fair, but it was true. Left alone, RNA swiftly degrades, especially in environments with water, heat, or UV light.²¹³ Sound like anywhere familiar? It never has time to accidently hump other molecules to coincidentally make more of itself, an obvious fact that highlights a long list of similarly unanswerable questions. RNA codes for proteins, but it doesn’t make proteins. That task is always left to ribosomes, which are made of proteins. See the chicken and the egg? Ribosomes can’t exist without ribosomes to make proteins for ribosomes.²¹⁴ Even if one miraculously spawned, how does an otherwise inanimate group of ribosomal proteins read information encoded in RNA in order to assemble necessary proteins?²¹⁵ Reading is too tall of an order for microscopic clumps of ignorant molecules. The first chemical book they were said to enjoy was another conundrum. Information represents reality in a code or language. How could simple molecular clumps learn necessary syntax without a similar core to store the script, and how could another nearby molecular chain, RNA, represent the code that the first chain accidentally learned without a brain? Keep in mind, the people who come up with this garbage think religion is silly. And, finally, where did all these magical pieces get the energy to carry out functionally impossible operations on unfathomable information? Magic or no, thermodynamics still holds sway over evolution’s spells and concoctions.²¹⁶ The answer pounds the final nail into evolution’s idiotic coffin: ATP synthase pumps.

They’ve nurtured all being, from Cro-Magnon to first cell. They were in prokaryotes, 4 billion years ago, and are in us, now. They are the first and the last, biology’s true alpha and omega. DNA is a wonderous collection of data, but only a scroll lost in the dark without a flame to reveal prose. Synthase pumps are the generators that illuminate the vast library of life, and they get the last laugh at Darwinian evolution.²¹⁷

“Science advances one funeral at a time.” -Max Planck

An ATP synthase pump is a wondrously complex molecular machine.²¹⁸ Its base integrates into every cellular membrane, and houses a rotor ring built of several subunits, along with a stator built of even more. The basic configuration can be found in every modern electric motor and generator, which is an eerie find in the first cell of prehistory. Each intricate pump base creates delicate, moving mechanical pathways for protons to flow across biological barriers. Above the sophisticated components lodged in the membrane rises a shaft reminiscent of a gear in a transmission, which connects to a long cam that spins inside a multifaceted outer structure awaiting aloft. The soaring pieces form an efficient engine, which uses the torque rumbling beneath to rhythmically contort a large, hexagonal series of catalytic subunits overshadowing the elaborate architecture. This outer network of shifting pieces grabs and fuses ADP and phosphate to create ATP, the energy of all life. To hold the upper complex in place, another tower of sophisticated molecular scaffolding is connected to the outermost machinery and anchored to the membrane below, allowing the core to spin at a dazzling 7,800 rpms while the lofty perimeter remains stable.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

There are a hundred examples of irreducible complexity lurking in evolutionary mythology, but ATP pumps take the gold medal for most preposterous. Take away any piece of this marvelous machinery, and the whole system comes crashing down, not unlike modern engines and electronics. Evolution, though, would have us believe that evolution incoherently assembled countless dysfunctional pumps, for some reason, while it slowly taught blobs of proteins, that couldn’t exist without themselves, to read a progressively complex language that was accidentally written in chains of inanimate molecules, which fell apart if not protected by a coincidental membrane and managed by the aforementioned miraculous blobs and astonishing ATP machines. Could all of these maddeningly elaborate components have formed at once and sparked to life against odds that surely stretch across incomprehensible infinities? In a quantum reality brimming with possibility, sure, but don’t think for a moment that the religion of evolution doesn’t embody breathtaking miracles that make walking across a lake seem mundane by comparison.²¹⁹

After many doomed attempts to call forth life from inanimate pieces, evolution’s acolytes at last understood that the foundation of their church was scientifically absurd. They never said the words aloud for fear of angering their financiers, who enjoyed reminding livestock on their tax farms that they were nothing but worthless, oversized germs, but retreated into new theories to save face and prop up the lucrative charade. Abiogenesis was absurd from every angle. Another source was required, and it couldn’t be where scientific shovels had already dug empty holes. Thus, panspermia was born.²²⁰ Outer space was the answer! Fully functional cells with all their irreducibly complex, interdependent pieces must have fallen from heaven itself, then taken over the planet with their alien technology bound in extraterrestrial codes. Testable science was for the small-minded; science fiction explained everything!

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. Science fiction inspires it." -Carl Sagan

The mysterious cosmos swirling above, and perhaps raining life over our spirited planet, leads us to the final scientific fountain of nihilism. Determinism was long ago overturned, allowing free will to shine through clockwork enslavement. Evolution stumbled along its rungs and tripped over its impossibly humble beginning, letting wild creation flourish outside the contrived boundaries of selection and survival. Yet in the firmament above, a singularity at the beginning of existence still dictates that the origin and fate of the universe and its witnesses are merely accidental. According to this verse in science’s bible, Humanity represents nothing more than irrelevant discharges of complexity racing toward cold, meaningless entropy. All souls and worlds between distant poles of cosmic birth and fate count only as trivial quirks while prime order hounds a chaotic grave at the end of time.²²¹ The Big Bang hath spoken.

The end, almost.

“That’s physics. It’s inevitable.” -Les Grossman

Hubble’s cosmic geometry that spawned the Big Bang at first appeared undeniable. If every great galaxy raced apart, then they were all once together by way of simple extrapolation. What could be more obvious? Though it was a simple model under awe-inspiring heavens, certainly no room existed in straight-forward celestial trajectories for any religious nonsense. Yet, astronomers have only witnessed the motion of the cosmos beyond our galaxy for .0000007% of universal time, a small sample from which to draw absolute conclusions.²²² At first glance, it might appear that astronomy is ignorant of 99.9999% of galactic activity, so perhaps incapable of accurately describing universal genesis, but higher primates with the biggest telescopes know a little secret that rectifies their blindness: the speed of light is a ticking clock reliably dashing across infinity. Lightspeed has received occasional updates, but it is always the same, sayeth bespectacled high priests of great cosmological accidents.²²³ Therefore, looking outward is also looking perfectly backward into the past. In a way, then, the lab coats have seen nearly all. Across vast time and space, they have dutifully catalogued nearly .01% of the 5% of the contents of the universe that they can see.^{224 225} The pesky 95% of the universe that remains completely mysterious and invisible has been ignominiously dubbed “dark,” but researchers didn’t etch that word onto their scrolls to make us giggle.²²⁶ Witnessing .0000007% of astronomical activity and naming .01% of the visible 5% of the universe are very serious accomplishments and more than enough to conclude our worthlessness, fellow plebs.

“We have no warrant to extrapolate all the way to infinity.” -Martin Rees

Though lacking the vast majority of celestial data, science still wields extensive discovery and elegant, celestial mathematics. It may come as a surprise, then, that astronomers still have a tough time pinpointing the exact moment of creation inside their own universal schematics. The measurement is harder than it looks, and not because of the elephant in the firmament: astronomers don’t understand most of what they’re looking at. No, the difficulty stems from troubles arising when little gods try to measure a whole universe from atop a spinning ball, orbiting a bigger ball, hurtling through a swirling galaxy.²²⁷ It’s not easy! Hubble first made the calculation using the red shift of light created when galaxies drift away from each other, all still riding the Bang’s expansion. He found that the universe, according to this method, was 2 billion years old.²²⁸ He also noticed that galaxies farther away were receding faster than nearby neighbors, and coined his famous equation to account for the uniform phenomenon: Hubble’s Law, a calculation encapsulating distance and speed in relation to Hubble’s constant.²²⁹

See that? It’s constant, so we’re done here, almost.

Not twenty years after the new law was chiseled on scientific tablets, astronomer Walter Baade noticed that the celestial markers Hubble used in his calculation varied in ways he didn’t imagine, so the constant was revised to another constant, pushing the date of the Big Bang back to a locked down 5-10 billion years ago.²³⁰ Case closed, almost.

By the ‘60s, Hubble’s very constant value had been revised, again, kicking the scientific genesis date to somewhere between 10 to 20 billion years in the past, but this adjustment was made with controversy.²³¹ Cleverly bickering scientists attract more attention and grants, but a real problem brewed in celestial motion. Another way of checking distance is called parallax. It’s an unambiguous measurement. You check the position of a cosmic object when Earth is on one side of the Sun, then check it again six months later, when it’s 180 degrees on the other side. The three points create a friendly triangle whose angles indicate distance. The trouble lies between red-shift and parallax measurements of galactic recession rates: they never match.²³² That’s why the Bang’s birthday is a range instead of a date. No one can be entirely sure what Hubble’s shifty constant actually is.

The more they learned, the less they knew. Science sheds this axiom to retain its perch above society, but ancient wisdom eventually trips every grandiose venture. In the ‘90s, advanced measurements found a mysterious surprise lurking inside the expanding universe. Rushing to pinpoint the slippery recession speed, scientists discovered that galaxies weren’t freely drifting across space or slowing as gravity gradually restricted the Bang’s momentum, but speeding up!²³³ The old diagram of galactic debris hurtling away from a celestial TNT accident no longer fit enigmatic observations. If expansion continued into the present, then there wasn’t a once-fiery but now-empty void in the middle; fire and force were still everywhere, lingering in the form of the Cosmic Background Radiation and somehow pressing the sky apart. The great Bang was omnipresent, and its awesome power continued to swell after 10 or 20 billion years. Who could say for how long! The exact number was more mystical than ever.

Science got to work, if making up stories can be considered legitimate labor. The lab coats would say “theorizing” because it sounds less like fiction writing, and fancy words grease the skids between alumni and endowment. The distinction without a difference is perhaps settled by their lack of laboratory. No one can scientifically test billions of years ago and galaxies far, far away. Astronomers deploy powerful computers to peek through telescopes, but are required to produce nothing tangible. It’s a good gig, if you can get it. Either way, erudite pencils scribbled fascinating plot points that described outlandish observations, then sketched impressive equations to logically connect the new scribbles to previously sanctioned scripts. They soon had an answer. Dark energy was the culprit!²³⁴ What was dark energy? They weren’t sure, but they knew it couldn’t be seen because it never had been.

“Wow, wow, wow… wow.” -Ryan George

Though unwitnessed and untestable, dark energy soon ruled the universe, quickly accounting for more than 70% of all energy in creation!²³⁵ It takes a hefty shove to bully a whole galaxy, and the phantom force pushed universally. The new energy was super cool and loosely fit observations, but boring old physics, the kind with repeatable tests conducted in controlled environments, tossed a wet towel on the party by demanding a rational source for a power so great. Astronomers nervously checked their telescopes and under their computers. Where could dark energy reside inside their overfunded habitats? It had to be everywhere but nowhere, at the same time. “Of course!” they cackled when the obvious answer solidified among infinite possibilities. Shifty quantum mechanics was the perpetrator, this time saving a marvelous proclamation instead of snickering at it. The vacuum of space was known to contain nothing capable of pushing around galaxies, but quantum possibility was said to pervade even the widest expanses of potential. Though ostensibly empty, randomly fluctuating energy still bubbled across the void, creating blistering quantum wind from nothing.²³⁶

Equations composed to validate the “discovery” uncoincidentally did their job. Gravity obeys an inverse square law, which states that its influence drops precipitously as distance increases.²³⁷ Thus, when objects gathered closely in galaxies, gravity ruled and little quantum bubbles were suppressed. But in the lonely expanses of deep space, dark energy, a force conveniently too weak to be seen locally, exploded.²³⁸ One epic force pressed the universe apart while the other gathered it into cozy neighborhoods.

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.” -G.K. Chesterton

“Huh, that’s lucky,” remarked a lowly grad student, idly toggling between blurry telescopic imagery and the dizzying mathematics of universal quantum fields curved by Einstein’s spacetime.

“What is?” grumbled a grizzled professor within earshot, ready to pounce on his underling’s naïve hiccup resembling joy.

“Oh, nothing,” retreated the uneasy student. “It’s just that if either gravity or dark energy were stronger, for whatever reason, nothing would exist, right?” he proffered with an uneasy chuckle. “The universe would collapse or all matter might explode. The balance is kinda ironic,” he concluded with a nervous smile and shrug, hoping he might still someday dine on the same tax dollars as his miserable mentor.²³⁹

“I hope I don’t need to tell you that life is very insignificant as far as the universe is concerned.” -Sean Carroll

The fictitious student was judiciously removed from the imaginary building, obviously, for the crime of noticing the unnoticeable in academia. Any whisper of fine tuning is a great blaspheme that deeply offends the high priests of science, not because it is silly in the arena of serious research but because it is omnipresent. Take the balance of forces that inspired our doomed friend to grin when he saw the universe wink. The gravitational force (G) is generally reliable if not well understood. To date, no one actually knows why bodies are attracted to each other. Some chant sounds like “curved space-time” to invoke the phenomenon, which makes sense in a relative way. Some reject Einstein’s mystique and instead place particles called gravitons in the Standard Model of physics, though no one has ever seen a graviton. Still, we have a familiar force of gravity in our lives and can measure its strength, up to a point. On the other side of the scale rests Hubble’s equally elusive cosmological constant (Λ). No one has seen inversely folded space-time or anything like a dark expandon particle, but galaxies appear to move apart.²⁴⁰ The phenomenon’s force can be estimated, to a degree. Smiles creep across the faces of open-minded observers when the two mysterious influences are compared. If Λ were larger or smaller by even 1 part in 10120, it would have long ago overpowered or succumbed to G, and the universe would have been ripped apart or collapsed before anything meaningful could have formed.²⁴¹ Laplace’s snake eyes are once again easy by comparison, so science must begrudgingly log yet another miracle in their bibles, and we’re just warming up!

“There is a set of basic numbers that one must specify when setting up a universe, such as the mass of the electron and the speed of light.” -James Kakalios

If you want to see unimaginable miracles, let your beloved religious text rest for a moment and witness the breathtaking spectacles enshrined in the psalms of science. Water walking might be farfetched, but at least feet and water are familiar phenomena. Invisibility, men, and skies happen, if infrequently altogether. People heal all the time, and prayer can’t hurt, etc. But science? Oh, sit back and enjoy this litany of infinity-bending marvels from the insufferable priests of astronomy and theoretical physics.

Deep breath, here we go!

The speed of light we noticed when clocking the age of the universe is tuned to a specific velocity that’s necessary for every atom in the universe to hold together, all biological chemistry to occur, and for suns to efficiently burn nuclear fuel. Remember E=mc2? That c landed on a value that’s one in a million of what it could have been. The other 999,999 versions would end reality as we know it.²⁴²

Likewise, the strength of the electromagnetic force also maintains atomic structure and facilitates stars, which facilitates planets, so your house. Its value landed on another lucky 1 in a million.²⁴³

Planck’s constant, which governs atomic spacing and molecular stability is yet another convenient number tuned to a digit with a one-in-a-million chance of subatomic success, allowing for complex chemistry to facilitate life.²⁴⁴

The electron to proton mass ratio is another fortunate coincidence. Our shifty electron from the Solvay conference has a mass about two-thousand times less than a proton. Alter that number by a deviation as small as (can you guess it?) 1 part in 1,000,000, and atoms would have trouble bonding into the forms that compose life.²⁴⁵

The raw number of both electrons and protons fortuitously birthed from the Bang is another moonshot miracle with no underlying reason beyond obvious orchestration. The two building blocks are perfectly balanced across the cosmos, giving rise to a universe with a neutral charge instead of heavy on the positive or negative sides of chance. This winning lottery ticket paid off with a chance of 1 in 1037, once again making water-walking feel mundane.²⁴⁶

Matter and anti-matter, according to fundamental laws of physics, should have been produced in equal amounts in the Bang. If that were the case, the fateful pair of particles ought to have self-annihilated right from the start, leaving no reality to behold. But wouldn’t you know it? Another miracle rushed into the universal cake batter. For every billion anti-matter particles, a billion and one particles of matter rose into a tasty reality. Every atom in our bodies is one of the lucky escapees.²⁴⁷

The strong nuclear force is nothing short of a universe-making cheat code. The nuclei of atoms contain protons, which are repelled from one another by the electromagnetic force of their positive charges. Thus, all subatomic reality naturally resists forming into cakes or anything delicious, leaving potential universes with no dessert whatsoever. But when trouble strikes, in flies a mysteriously robust force to save the day! The strong nuclear force pulls just hard enough to overcome natural repulsion but not so hard as to spoil soufflés, a strength finely tuned on the order of 1 in 200. It also very conveniently stops pulling on particles any farther away than 39 trillionths of an inch. How lucky is that? Incalculably, even for this book. But wait, there’s more! The tiny particle carrying the fortuitous force is known as “virtual” by science because no one has ever seen it, which is a fancy way of saying magic.²⁴⁸

The matter to dark matter ratio is another serendipitous balance in the Bang. With a 17% shift either way, the universe would implode under crushing gravity or detonate under runaway dark energy. 1 in 6 is staggering odds for Russian roulette, but low for our odyssey, so might seem gratuitous. But keep in mind that no one has ever seen a dark anything, so we must add another sprinkle of science fiction onto this page of science’s bible, a tougher pill to swallow than mere odds when origin stories beg belief.²⁴⁹

When the universe sprang into existence, it could have been a chaotic mess. Instead, it launched with extraordinarily low entropy, meaning a state of magnificently high order. How improbable is such a Bang? 1 in 1010^123. That’s a number so big, you couldn’t write it down even if every atom in the universe were a digit. Then came along seemingly clever quantum mechanics during the inflationary period to add necessary wrinkles to the universe’s otherwise perfect order that would later congeal into galaxies. The miraculously low-entropy start and saving grace of lucky fluctuations set the stage for stars, planets, us, and subsequent philosophical musings.²⁵⁰

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” -Richard Feynman

The preceding examples are the greatest hits of fine tuning, but the list goes on and grows with discovery. The long train of awesome miracles said to compose material reality points to a universe that is almost undoubtedly designed. Materialism’s purveyors rebut by pointing to a catastrophic deficiency with competing creationism, even if God is mathematically compelling: its inability to make testable predictions. Much of the above narrative is hilariously untestable, but let’s play along to inspire curiosity over conflict. Creationism says that the next great scientific revelation will yield as much mystery as evidence, not because the physical universe accidentally harbors endless complexity but because inquisitive minds inquired. Secular investigators poke provided probability clouds awaiting their interest, yet remain surprised when enigma reliably answers intrigue. We religious folks will happily wait for the big brains to catch up.

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." -Matthew

The brighter bulbs on science’s Festivus tree, those who have gathered the staggering odds of all their outlandish tales, know that their religion is preposterous to the point of comedy without a wise Creator. Thousands of years spent diligently deciphering reality have crystalized the conclusion now more than when Jesus reportedly tiptoed across a lake. A safe bet is that God’s nature is not random but intelligent, something any Roman could have explained to any modern theoretical physicist or wild-eyed astronomer. Yet science doggedly resists seeing the light because their religion was never about discovery; it was founded on control. Helpful control over nature is only the appetizer before deeply satiating control over humanity. Once that spiritual door has opened, it doesn’t like to be closed. Demons, whether real or a proper metaphor for observed behavior, squeal and hiss when a higher power materializes to shower life with benevolent miracles, so instead of surrender to intelligent design, a new lie is concocted to cover the failures of theories to adequately explain the world. “Sure, this universe appears intelligently designed to nurture life,” grumble the dark priests of nihilism, “but it only seems that way because you didn’t see all the other universes!”²⁵¹

The fictitious multiverse does more than ruin movies. Its desperate stench is now ruining the frontiers of science. Crazy theories are fine if they can be tested and falsified, and there’s no harm in guessing if it’s honestly advertised. The recently esteemed multiverse can never be witnessed, though, so belongs on the science fiction shelf next to panspermia, yet is intentionally leaked into mainstream thought as the true origin of reality. The frantic lie is meant to obscure eternal God in our minds, a predictable ploy from the religion of science. Its cultists want everyone to believe that we are enslaved to material physics, though matter only arrives to serve our souls. We are meant to think that we are only chemistry run amuck, though abiogenesis is chemically impossible. We are told that we are but the latest version of organism, though accidental enhancements are statistically laughable. And we must accept that we are only a celestial accident, though every element of the universe has been brilliantly conceived to see life flourish.

“We may have to rewrite all the textbooks about the beginning of the universe.” -Michio Kaku

Luckily, or perhaps predictably, for humanity, the Bang theory ended with a whimper, not long ago. Malevolent science races to restrain the information from the unaware public, but the charade is over. The astronomical mistake recklessly foisted upon mankind for a hundred years was at last definitively explored. The Big Bang is debunked.²⁵² You didn’t hear? That’s ironic because you paid for the discovery, and that’s one reason you weren’t told.

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” -Wernher von Braun

Like when fake science was forced to turn to real chemistry and beg for help understanding abiogenesis, only to see their religious idol shot to pieces by legit experimentation, science-fiction astronomers asked real machine architects to build the most powerful telescope in the history of the human race. The high priests of big accidents wanted to witness their equations and predictions come to life in the past, exactly 13.4… no, 13.8 billion years ago. Once the JWST was completed by dazzlingly smart, truly impressive scientists called engineers, the armchair cosmonauts howled, “Point your mysterious contraption hence into the night and you shall see the face of god appear in the shadows! Gaze upon genesis itself and revel in the awesome power of the almighty Big Bang!”

“Um, okay,” replied a lowly doctoral candidate sitting quietly at a computer in the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Fingers struck keys. Computers churned. JWST looked deeply into the distant past, reaching nearly 13.8 billion years ago. Algorithms crunched data into organized images.

“What do you see, child?” cried the chieftain of the genius idiots. “Do you see the cradle of the cosmos, when the first stars were born of nascent hydrogen? Can you see a void across the dark ages, before galactic fire pierced ancient night?” (You can imagine clothed self-touching, if it heightens the drama.) “What of the inflationary realm?” he screeched. “Is its mysterious blaze at last laid bare before your innocent eyes?”

“Well…”

“Nay!” the high priest demurred, his voice cracking. Such close proximity to the scientifically divine momentarily overwhelmed his intrepid curiosity. At last, kneeling under the weight of a presence so great and awe-inspiring, with tears welling behind thick glasses, he finally allowed his deepest desire to escape his heart. “Do you see it?” whispered softly beneath humming computers and glowing screens. “Have you witnessed the singularity itself? Does the Big Bang grace your unworthy pixels?”

“I was trying to say that I see…”

“Yes, child! Speak its name!”

“Looks like a bunch of ordinary galaxies. They’re really far away, for sure. Right where you wanted me to look, around 13.8 billion years, but I see, strangely, what I always see in space, give or take. There’s none of that stuff you were looking for. Sorry. In fact, some of these galaxies look maybe billions of years old. That’s funny, huh?”

Wiping tears and straightening an unnecessary lab coat snatched from the closet of real scientists, the theoretical astronomer rose slowly. Checking the data for himself, he finally uttered, “It can’t be.”

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’” -Isaac Asimov

But it was. At the end of a saga that began with Aristotle, blossomed in Rome, rose through a renaissance, spun around a clockwork universe, evolved notions of life’s origin, and ultimately captured the heavens with unquestionable equations, science looked directly into the face of their creator and found absolutely nothing of the kind foretold on their religious scrolls. No stars without galaxies. No dark speed bump. No raging inflation or inexplicable halt. No Big Bang. Instead, the heavens revealed ancient galaxies born before calculated time, and unveiled another new mystery for oblivious but devoted inquiry. Right on cue, the universe winked when someone tried to look behind its curtain.

If you’re a devotee of religious materialism, don’t fret. Your priests will never admit error. They’ll twist JWST data like a baboon jaw on a human head before acknowledging that they were wrong, so you’ll always have an avenue open for belief that you are a worthless accident. To wit, some astronomers are already “recalibrating” red-shift data to keep their calendars intact and blaming the nerds who formulated galactic formation models for getting their math wrong. The Big Bang yet lives, if only in lore and myth dubbed hypothesis.

If you’ve been keeping score along this odyssey of human arrogance, the amount of faith required to accept the religion of science is bewildering. Guesses, shrugs, and miracles comprise far more of the holy scrolls than what’s openly recited in state-sponsored schools, allowing wide space for belief, if curious souls are more inclined to the methodical collection of limited data than ancient revelation. Clockwork determinism evaporated with new iterations of physics, but evolution remains a viable tale. Fossils exist. They evidence what can be reasonably called evolution, along with wonders that cannot. Abiogenesis is a crock, but so is a talking snake. Inexplicable wonders, it appears, invade every story of source. The Big Bang became far-fetched before JWST, as soon as its honest priests admitted that they didn’t understand dark presences constituting 95% of the night sky, but 5% isn’t nothing. How much faith must be mustered to accept any astronomical tale after that admission? 95% is a fair place to start, a near complete commitment, something like scientific fundamentalism. Galactic evidence which suggests that the Bang never happened must lower certainty and raise the threshold for commitment, but does a shift in probability materially alter the original choice of nihilism? The widest scientific leap of faith for this religion is its aggregate, glaringly erroneous, fiction-laden estimation of source. Erudite priests begrudgingly acknowledge God, but only as an inexplicably lucky accident, comically robbing Him or It of statistically unavoidable intellect while discovering more by the hour. After the pompous sleight, shifty science tacks countless fantasy universes composed solely of imagination onto their spite to balance the flub. If you still want to believe that you are an overgrown germ riding a ball of solar waste spinning through a meaningless cosmic anomaly, then these are the logical hurdles your heart must hop. Only then may you bask in the glory of a meaningless accident, irrelevant existence, and inevitable doom.

"When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger." -Zen Proverb

It is said that an ounce of knowledge requires a pound of humility. At this point on the journey toward understanding, the notion invites many curious minds get off the bus. In one hand, they find Christian gibberish manufactured by flawed scribes. In the other, they find scientific gibberish manufactured by flawed scribes. Looking around the religious scene, they notice that Buddhism masterfully says little with countless words; Zeus is missing on Olympus; Judaism fell when its Messiah rose; Hinduism offers only repetitive drudgery; Islam is Mormonism waving a bloody sword; the far-east endlessly meditates for undiscoverable balance; and far-flung tribes venerate tales only applicable to lands no one wants to visit. After all answers are exhausted, though, everyone remains haunted by a sense that there is more to the human experience than the here and now. We know that we exist in a crazy universe, and caused neither phenomenon. We were put in here, one way or the other. God is out there, somewhere, in whatever form, sometimes dragging us through a meatgrinder, sometimes showering us with more blessings than we deserve. Spiritual but not religious coins the conundrum. Take no odious side and hope for the best. Wave at the bus full of lunatics as it rages on.

It's a reasonable but dangerous gamble, because it might carry eternal consequences. If this adventure has a thesis beyond the end of doubt, it is that with infinite existence looming, lazily putting all your religious chips on misunderstood numbers is a terrible strategy. There’s too much in the pot to skip counting cards.

"To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." -William Blake