Hi Jeanie

I’m sorry but it does all get a bit confusing. I’m going to use books as an analogy which isn’t totally accurate but it will hopefully give you an idea of what I’m going on about.

In short we each carry two sets of genes, one from our father and one from our mother. They are broken into chromosomes and let’s say for argument that number 7 is the instructions for making a leg. For this analogy we’ll say that the chromosomes are like books so to find out how to make a leg you’d look up book 7. They aren’t actually broken up that way, not even close but the analogy is accurate as far as it goes and so should still be accurate enough to show you the problem I was trying to explain.

So you have one book from your mother and one book from your father telling you how to build a leg. They are different because they come from two different people though both are probably workable legs with just minor details being different. Your mother may have shorter legs than your father with finer toes and flatter nails for example. You’re body was built using some pages from each so you are a composite of features from your father and your mother.

We have observed that the letters in the books can be changed and that most of the time that will make no difference to the books because it happens in bits you don’t read or the changes are so subtle that they don’t change the meaning of the book such as making an O a little bit shorter but still an O. There are some changes however which do change the meanings of the book, in these cases the letters actually change to something completely different. Both of these are called mutations. In most cases they will simply lead that part of the book to make no sense but occasionally, very occasionally, one of those changes makes the book better. That’s called a beneficial mutation. These changes are mostly random and they are what makes evolution inventive.

OK so don’t stress too much about that bit if it doesn’t make sense to you. The upshot of it is that Adam and Eve, if they were human, could have just two of each book so they could have between them just four toe nail chapters. If evolution is not inventive today we must be the products of mixing and matching the chapters of those same four books so there can be at most four different toenail chapters out there. For the animals on the ark there were either two of seven of them. That makes, at two books each, either four or fourteen different versions of each chapter.

Each different version of a chapter is called an Allele and, as you can see, there are a very limited number of them if the bible story is true and evolution is not capable of inventing new ones. We have only sampled a very small number of humans yet we already know of many more than four different versions of some of these chapters. Over fifty versions in a number of cases so either the bible is wrong and we did not start from just two individuals (and animals did not start from just two or seven individuals) or evolution is capable of creating new, successful, functional chapters in our books.

That’s the gist of what I was saying.

Does that make sense Jeanie?

You are right we are far too limited to ‘get it all’ but we can look at pieces and work out some amazing things. Can we find god or prove he does not exist this way? No I don’t believe we can but we have found nothing so far in all of the areas we have explored that makes a god necessary to anything at all in this universe. People are still free to believe in him/her/it/them but for me I see no reason to, if he’s real we may work that out one day, if not we’ll probably never know for sure, but for the moment there is no good reason to accept any of the thousands of gods we’ve invented so far as more than fantasy or wishful thinking IMHO.

Russell