Philip Bell and me

We both had reasons to hate boarding school:

Around the age of ten I remember learning about evolution at school but I didn’t believe it at all, nor through my secondary school years. In fact, I endured the mocking of my peers in the dormitory of my boarding school and defended a literal Adam and Eve when I was around fifteen.*

Around the age of ten, I started dropping belief in evolution, after c. one year as a Christian trying to fit my previous belief (Evolution) with my new one, and failing, and also because I came across books somewhat advanced for my age, in which origin of language, memory by DNA and origin of DNA's ordered complexity were discussed - leaving me with a sense of disbelief, finally.

I was at a boarding school during terms from autumn 1983 to spring 1987. I had my fifteenth birthday there. And apart from there being no dormitory's in mine, the experience was similar.

Here is a difference:

However, there was a limitation: “I had no apologetic arguments to back it up.”

I had Ur Intet, a booklet by Edgar Andrews, and it later came out in English original with same choice of texts as this Swedish edition, as From Nothing to Nature.

I particularly remember being impacted by the evidence of comparative anatomy and the pentadactyl limb: the similarity of the bones of the five digits and limb in different animals. I readily swallowed the homology idea, that the human arm, dog leg, bat wing, and dolphin flipper had all sprung from a common ancestral animal. I was a theistic evolutionist of sorts by the age of eighteen.

Edgar Andrews had shown there were not ever any unspecialised animals with just four protruding and unfunctional blobs, developing from there to hind legs and wings, to legs and arms, to four arms, to four legs, to fins on a fish. And that evolution from specialised to specialised was a no no.

When I took time off from strict Young Earth Creationism ("the Catholic Church wouldn't allow evolution and deep time if it were all that bad" - I had meanwhile converted or started converting, since the one argument that did stump me was where Protestants had the Bible from if Catholicism was corrupt), it was more to a non-evolutionist very light version of deep time - basically two or three times the span of the Biblical chronology and lost civilisations along the way ... 10 000 BC must have looked like in Robert E Howard's books about Conan the Barbarian, or perhaps somewhat less cynical. Or so I thought.

Going to "evolution from amoeba to astronomer" or to accepting carbon 14 datings as final ... it didn't cross my thought. But dendro seemed fair and square for 20 000 years back ... and Hans Hörbiger's idea of eternal ice I hadn't heard of, but his idea of a succession of moons, and each provoking giantism just before falling onto earth and provoking a cataclysm, well, it came nice and handy - any memory of lost civilisations of giants could be from such pre-Biblical or post-Genesis 1:1 but pre-everything-else-Biblical times.

It ditched that complacency with even moderate deep time when reading St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei.

I was somewhat disappointed by the interview, not in so far as God not creating cancer before the fall, but rather because his experience of cancer genetics didn't put him on a trace of another - scientific - impossibility in Evolutionism. Earliest eucaryotes (on that theory) will not have had more than one chromosome pair, but we have 23 ... when a chromosome splits, you don't get two times the setup "telomere, genes, centromere, genes, telomere" but at least one of the parts must lack parts of that set up. Robertsonian fission should ring a bell to a cancer researcher, right?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
XXIst Lord's Day after Pentecost
memory of St. Hedwig of Poland
17.X.2021

* Former cancer researcher vs creation compromise
by Jonathan Sarfati | This article is from
Creation 42(4):16–19, October 2020
https://creation.com/philip-bell-interview