Stuck Between 2 Points of View on How We Got Here

By DANA PARSONS

Aug. 30, 1992 12 AM PT

I have a short list of demands to be met before I die. One of them is that we reach universal agreement on how the world began and where mankind came from. No loose ends, no dangling theoretical threads, no room for doubt.

I’d like to have the utter confidence in my position that either Francisco Ayala or A.E. Wilder-Smith has. Ayala is a renowned UC Irvine biologist and Wilder-Smith is a visiting English scientist who’s scheduled to speak next month at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa.

Yes, I’d like to have their conviction. Unfortunately, Ayala is convinced that man evolved from lower forms, and Wilder-Smith is convinced that man is the unique product of a Creator. In other words, a bit of a gap between their positions.

I’ve talked with Ayala before, so Friday I paid a call on Wilder-Smith, a white-haired, bearded 76-year-old who has written, among other books, “The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution.”

People have a craving to understand this stuff, don’t they, I asked him.

“We’re built to want to know,” Wilder-Smith said. “You see, a child starts to ask questions, and it’ll simply produce thousands of questions which an animal will never come to. You can teach an animal sign language . . . but it’s confined to ‘I want a banana,’ or ‘I want honey,’ but it will never ask, ‘What am I here for?’ It’s built into us to want to know.”

Wilder-Smith explained, based on DNA research, why he thinks a force above and beyond natural law must have been present when life was created, but I’m not sure I understand it and I know I can’t explain it in this column.

I think his argument is that the DNA coding that produces life is just that--coding with no meaning--until the code is assigned a meaning. That meaning can’t be provided by the natural sciences, Wilder-Smith says.

The concepts are too abstract for me, but are no more confusing than the scientific explanations for the origins of life. I know that the scientific community overwhelmingly accepts evolution, even while admitting that there are some gaps in the theory that they haven’t figured out.

If evolutionary theory is true, he said, “there should be billions of missing links (as species evolved), and there aren’t any. The original tar (from which life sprang)--there’s never been a trace found by any geologist. There must have been a huge amount of this tar, oil, out of which life slowly arose, like Darwin said, in some little quiet pool over millions of years the first cell put itself together. Well, there’s no evidence of that at all. That’s just simply religion.”

Speaking of religion, I noted that many people have been condescending toward creationists.

“I think creationists, I’m very sorry to say, deserved it,” he said. “The literature they put out has been very uncritical very often. They haven’t separated out the important things and thrown away the unimportant things. That’s the trouble. The creationist does take things to a very great extent on faith. Well, that’s not enough for the scientist, you see. What they should have said is matter is not capable of producing teleonomy (the study of aims or purposes). It’s the language of the scientist, perhaps, but that is where the grand difficulty comes in (for the evolutionists). The whole of the DNA molecule is the sheerest form of teleonomy that you can think of.”

I asked him his opinion of the Orange County teacher rebuked for teaching creationism in public school classrooms.

“I don’t mind as long as you teach students how to think. If he genuinely was trying to teach them to think, I would praise him for it.”

I asked Wilder-Smith if he ever eschewed his science for pure faith. “I try to keep my white coat on all day long, if you know what I mean,” he said.

But don’t most creationists believe in it on blind faith?

“I find that regrettable,” Wilder-Smith said, “because faith is not every man’s subject, says the Holy Scripture.”

We only had a limited time to talk, but I didn’t want to leave without expressing my frustration. I told him I didn’t understand how scientists could look at the same empirical data. . .

“And interpret it differently?” he said, finishing my sentence.

“To me, that’s one of the marvels of being human,” he said. “The world would be awfully boring if everybody thought the same about everything.”