In the ongoing debate between faith and evolution, there are those who firmly believe that evolution is solely responsible for the development of human beings. They might cling to the idea that all animal life on earth can be traced back to the simplest one cell life forms. They might further believe that somehow, life developed from a magical chemical mix that became capable of self-replication and increasingly more complex life forms.
They would believe that through millions of years of gradual modifications, these animal life forms evolved into the human species we know today.
Perhaps they are partially correct.
Perhaps evolution isn’t so much the magical random process as it is a tool used by a Creator who has an infinite amount of time to devote to the task of creation.
What is missing from our understanding of the evolutionary process is the surge of intellect that separates the simplest life forms from the advanced life forms, and key to that difference is the ability to communicate.
Certainly, other animal life forms communicate to a degree. Beavers slap their tails on the water to warn of danger. Birds may squawk and dogs bark for similar messages. But, human beings have, obviously, immensely more complex communication abilities.
Chief among those abilities is the ability to convey abstract ideas. Even more remarkable is the ability to comprehend abstract ideas from the earliest days of childhood.
As parents, we make an effort to educate our children in spoken language. This is a bed. This is a cat or a dog. This is breakfast. In the process, we use abstract terms that, somehow, our children begin to understand even though there is no image connected to that term. In many cases, we make no conscious effort to explain or define those terms, but, somehow our children begin to grasp the meaning.
We might ask our child – “What do you want?” In that sentence, only the word “you” has a clearly identifiable image that the child can grasp. Every other word is abstract, yet somehow the child begins to comprehend the meaning of those words, and the combination of those words, without having those words explained. Even as adults, we would have difficulty explaining those words, yet we use and understand them every day. Many abstract words have different meanings depending on the context of their use, yet somehow we develop the ability to make that distinction.
If we look for evidence of an all-powerful, all-knowing creator, we might want to consider the likelihood of the intellectual capacity of humans being the result of a random collection of evolutionary events over millions of years.
It’s still a long way from the primordial soup that pure evolutionists consider to be the initial source of life on earth.
Perhaps our existence as a self-aware, reasoning, comprehending being is the strongest evidence yet of God’s existence and the case for intelligent design rather than random chance of an indifferent universe.