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It cannot be seriously disputed that evolution is taking place, to some extent at least. It is the only way of explaining how pests become resistant to chemicals sprayed on land – those which fail to evolve in such a way that they become resistant to the chemicals die out, leaving just those that are resistant. Similarly, antibiotics target certain bacteria and force them to evolve; the over-use of antibiotics is creating some very dangerous and resistant strains, such as MRSA, C-dificile, “mad cow disease” (BSE/CJD) and bird flu. Evolution also took place for the turtles in the Galapagos Islands studied by Charles Darwin, because those that failed to adapt to a changing environment died out too.
The laws of evolution, with the genes of an offspring being the combination of genes from both parents plus mutations, cannot seriously be disputed either – they are visible in people.
However, the idea that humans could have evolved, purely by chance, via a large number of evolutionary leaps from single-celled organisms in seas and oceans, is far more contentious. I used to hold the point of view that there are many “missing links”, and that complex things like the eye could not have evolved naturally, because intermediate steps between creatures with no eyes and those with fully functional ones don't exist. However, I have seen articles in the New Scientist magazine that claim missing links (including creatures with simpler eyes and those part way between classes of creatures (such as reptiles, amphibians and mammals) have indeed existed even if they do not exist today.
What I strongly disagree with is the idea that fundamental evolutionary change takes place purely by chance. This is partly because I am unconvinced that the myriad of species on the Earth today consists purely of those that have an evolutionary advantage over their ancestors. The main reasons for my disagreement are a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that the world is planned plus the failure of evolutionary theory, and atheist theories generally including the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism (see my Rosa Lichtenstein page), to explain free will. My understanding that the world is planned, but influenced by free will, is explained in my song The World Is Planned. I know I have free will and some sort of soul (existence outside matter).
What is often overlooked by those who criticise Intelligent Design, which is now being taught in some schools in the USA, is that it does not necessarily entail the existence of God. I take the point of view that there is some sort of combined consciousness linking all souls on the Earth together. I argue that the Earth is a kind of super-organism which directs the free will of individual minds; that super-organism could be considered to be God, or there could be some sort of overarching god overseeing everything. I think my idea of a super-organism is similar to the Gaia theory of Richard Lovelock (but I have only read his book The Revenge of Gaia and will need to read more of his literature before I can fully establish the differences between our understandings of the world).
Religious people tend to believe that everybody has some sort of soul and the capacity for free will. Atheists, on the other hand, tend to believe that nobody has either and that everything that happens is a result of material conditions – what somebody says or does (outputs) depends entirely on inputs from that person’s senses over time. This would be describing a world of robots!
As a scientist, albeit one who is sceptical about some commonly accepted scientific theories, I want a scientific explanation of the soul and free will I know I have and of life in general.
I believe that life is something outside matter, even if there isn’t a god outside matter too. Another scientist once said to me that life is energy, which makes a lot of sense (although such a reconciliation of religion and science can be considered cheating!) This leaves the question as to whether life is a kind of energy (as a chaplain said to me) or everything with energy is in some sense alive. The distinction here is largely one of semantics – how life is defined, either as a collection of souls (which I believe are linked together into a super-organism like Gaia as I mentioned above) or as the same thing as energy – although the latter implies that there is nothing special about the souls of individuals.
Marxism incorporates the atheist theories of “dialectical materialism” (which purports to explain how nature and society works) and “historical materialism” (explaining history). Some Marxists, including Rosa Lichtenstein who criticises dialectics but not materialism, appear to believe that there is an “alien class” (and Rosa uses a hyphen between those two words to strongly imply a class of aliens) of beings that do exhibit free will, while denying it for society in general. From the point of view of an “alien” like myself, I would be a human being in a world of robots.
Notes made on the 3rd of July 2007 (soon to be revised):
Many of the views below are out-of-date (but worth reading nevetheless) and I have some other extremely points to make. For now, I will give you a flavour of those new views by directing you to my Isaac Asimov page on which I suggest that a living telepathic world (called Gaia in the Foundation series but how Earth operates too) expanded to the whole galaxy in the final books in that series and called Galaxia (which I now think my band should definitely be called rather than Red Day for that reason) is the same thing as God!
Wow! That explains why the Big Bang and Genesis are complete tosh!
By the way, I think the band Genesis as well as the first book of the Bible is complete tosh. Phil Collins was (and presumably still is) a very bad person (despite the fact that No Jacket Required sounds good, he went back on his promise to donate all further royalties to charity after recording a song about homelessness in which he called living on the streets paradise!).
Most drummers are bad, and tend to be the uhgliest members of the band (all other members of the Bangles were very good looking but the drummer was ugly) because they tend to whack the drums very hard. And if they take it out on drumkits, they are also likely to take it out on their kids or their wives, and children brought up to think that violence is good (even when they deserve it when often they don’t such as the one occasion when my father inflicted physical domestic violence on me) tend to be violent to their own children and are more likely to want to go to Iraq, either to kill Iraqi civilians and soliders or work in torture centres like Abu Ghraib (which still exists despite US promises to close it down).
I used to think that the Devil didn’t exist even if God does, but I have just written a science fiction song (heavily influenced by Doctor Who) called 99 Blue Balloons in which the greatest mind control expert in the world Derren Brown is reincarnated as (or regenerates to become, in common with other so-called Time Lords) a Sea Devil. I intend to write many further songs as sequels to that one, perhaps even putting them all on one album, and there will certainly be religious views in at least some of them.
Part of my musical poem Assassinations, mainly about the death of a very beautiful woman who also had a beautiful mind, Nathalie Monier, who I was massively in love with, takes inspiration from the REM song Losing My Religion but I sing that I was “in the spotlight gaining some religion”.
Incidentally, just as John Nash spent time in psychiatric institutions in the USA, which inflicted torture via electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) as shown in the Beautiful Mind film, my main ally in the world, Priya Reddy, otherwise known as warcry, of War Cry Cinema, has compared the institution she is now in in the USA with Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Visit my warcry page on this website or the Warcry Allies website for information about her, and try your best to help me get her out of there.
I am a Doctor (who some would compare to Jesus since if he came back to the world he would end all humanity’s problems and that is precisely what I am trying to do) and Derren Brown is the Master. Oh, so you preferred to watch Songs of Praise to Doctor Who? Think again!!! My hatred of the House of Lords has generally put me off hymns, but Doctor Who is/was a Time Lord. But then again, so too is the Master, and he has more in common with those appointed by Tory or New Labour politicians than the Doctor has.
The following is the original contents of this page. I have a lot of other important pages to create/update, so I will postpone editing of that text, written a year or two ago, to a future date...
My views on how the world works lie somewhere between those of science and those of religion. So many people around the world adhere to a religion of one sort or another so there must be some truth in religious beliefs. See my page on scientific theories for some of my views on how the world works, incorporating some religious as well as scientific and Marxist ideas.
In my view, being an agnostic, but open to the idea of an afterlife, is preferable to unquestioningly accepting atheism or any religion. I have always thought that an ethical God would prefer somebody who questioned the ideas of established religions (bearing in mind the fact that they have been often been used by people with dubious motives) as long as they were good people. The ending of the idea by Christian leaders that God would be cruel enough to inflict eternal damnation in hell to anybody is to be welcomed; they agree with my view and that of atheists that evil people would have no further existence once they died.
Freedom of religions is vitally important, under capitalism and in a socialist society. John Lennon’s song Imagine is supposedly a socialist song, but imagining no religion and imagining no heaven seem deliberately designed to alienate a massive section of society.
Uniting working class people of differing religions is a vitally important part of the struggle for a socialist world. There is one important fact that is not widely known to non-Muslims, because teaching it in schools (for example) would help the working class to achieve such unity – Jesus is regarded in Islam as the second most important prophet (behind Mohammed). Bearing in mind that Jesus was a Jew, unity between Christians, Jews and Muslims would be much easier to achieve if such arguments were widely put. In my opinion, 9/11 (and indeed 7/7: the terrorist attacks in London on the 7th of July 2005) and consequent attacks on Iraq and human rights/civil liberties (including proposals for the introduction of ID cards) were partly motivated by the method of divide-and-rule used between working class people of different religions fermented by conspiratorial forces on the side of big business (which in my opinion includes terrorist organisations).
