Where life came from is one of the most fundamental questions anyone can ask, not least because at bottom we are asking about our own origin. We are born into the world as if from nowhere, in a birth we cannot remember. Can we explain our coming into being? – or our parents’? Such questions lead to the origin of all living organisms. And, if we go further still into the heart of the matter, we are faced with the mystery of the Earth’s origin, also beyond the recall of memory.

The possibilities seem to boil down to just two: either the natural world created itself, or a higher power created it. Consider the first possibility: is self-creation consistent with the way the world looks? Given that it does not owe its existence to a higher power, does it have an equivalent power, capable of producing things that are more complex than anything we ourselves could engineer, for all our intelligence and technological prowess? Can life be reduced to the properties of lifeless atoms, so that our sense of being distinct from the world, conscious and alive, must be illusory?

In the Western world it is difficult to ask these questions in an open-ended way. Institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences have pronounced such questions illegitimate, protesting if anyone seeks to introduce them into the scientific domain and lobbying hard to have them excluded from places of education. Only one view of reality is permitted: the one that believes in natural magic.

It may be difficult to believe that it was a divine power who said, “In six days I created the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” When we contemplate the remote beauty of the stars, the majesty of the continents and oceans, the secret lives of the animals that share our planet, all seem to deny a natural explanation of their existence, but it is also apparent that they do not speak directly of creation. Nothing is as it was. Everything that we examine lies at the end of a long history. Creation cannot be read from the universe’s immediate appearance.

If this is a paradox, can we resolve it?

• In this website it is suggested that the world, although created, was subsequently destroyed and thereby metamorphosed, so that its ultimate origin was hidden. This is inferred from both rocks and fossils. We cannot go all the way back to the beginning, but what has been preserved and can be investigated points back to a creation.
• ‘Life’ is something different from molecules. Life has to do with consciousness. Although bacteria and plants use the same DNA language as other organisms, they are not life in the sense that animals are. Our own experience as conscious beings tells us that there is more to reality than can be accounted for by molecules, however complex their organisation.
• Certain ancient oral traditions about the beginning could be an important part of the total evidence. Unless we assume at the outset that the world is billions of years old, these might go back a long way and represent an authentic collective memory of how things originated. Science seeks to build up a historical explanation that is independent of this memory, but since it addresses the same questions (‘How did the world come into being? Where did man come from? Where did animals come from?), might not each throw light on the other?

This website majors on the fossil record, which shows that species have neither remained the same since creation nor descended from a common ancestor. What, then, is the story? The key is to recognise the evidence that there was a global cataclysm at the beginning of the rock record – as recently highlighted in Nature journal – and to understand the whole phenomenon of fossils as a consequence of that. We have dramatic evidence of the cataclysm both in the annihilation of the Earth’s oldest crust (at the end of what is called the Hadean period) and in the vast impact craters that deface the Moon. The order in which fossils appear has been mistaken for an evolutionary sequence only because at the same time as species were colonising sea and land they were diversifying into new species, and the planet itself was in constant flux. Bacteria appeared first because they were and are the most prolific of all colonisers and were essential to the re-establishment of food chains. The ‘Cambrian explosion’ that followed is an evolutionary mystery that also begins to make sense from this perspective.

Belief in evolution tends to undermine the spontaneous wonder that nature evokes: the sense that what we see is the handiwork of a being greater than ourselves. But ‘evolution’ has two meanings – one, the well established fact that most species originate from other species, the other, the presumption that all species are related and originated aeons ago from lifeless chemicals. More influenced by Darwin than we would like to think, we tend to confound the two. When we see species originating from other species, we think we are seeing evidence for the theory that life evolved from a ‘prebiotic soup’. However, organisms are manifestly too ingenious to be so explained, as are real examples of evolutionary change. Consider what is involved, for instance, in:

• anemone-like animals evolving into jellyfish
• lizards evolving into snakes
• land-dwelling quadrupeds evolving into whales and dolphins, or
• feathered birds evolving into penguins.

No less wonderful are the life histories which instead of a radical change in body form exhibit an immense range of variation, as when

• a single species of fern gave rise to more than 11,000 fern species
• a single species of ray-finned fish gave rise to 42 orders and 431 families of ray-finned fish, comprising over 26,000 species
• a single species of beetle gave rise to 4 suborders and 168 families of beetles, comprising hundreds of thousands of species

Evolution of this kind in no way implies the denial of a preceding creation. The more spectacular the transformation or variation, the more it becomes apparent that such phenomena cannot have been accidental but were programmed from the outset – just as, within one life span, we know that the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of an egg into a chicken is pre-programmed.

The site has several sections. After various introductory pages, a record of Earth’s colonisation walks the visitor through the early part of the fossil record, illustrating how the step-by-step appearance of plants and animals reflects a process of ecological recovery. Before the cataclysm looks at what the original world was like, and at the events in the solar system leading up to the cataclysm. A number of diagrams and timecharts summarise the evidence any theory of the history of life must explain. Key concepts summarise the new thinking, followed by pages that treat a few of the concepts in more detail. In-depth discussions engage the general reader at a more technical level, with topics such as the origin of the solar system and the newly discovered ‘transitional’ fossil Tiktaalik. Mysteries of the cnidarians explores the story of corals and jellyfish. And finally, Genesis and other traditions considers what information can be drawn from accounts that predate the invention of writing, on the basis that they might represent a lost memory of how the Earth came into existence.

This is a quality site, which invites you to be open to new ways of seeing. The less you skim, the more you will get out of it. New material continues to be added.