Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny—A Science of “Once Upon a Time”

Everyone intuitively recognizes that if God exists, He must be a spirit that does not have physical qualities or occupy any physical spatial location in the physical universe. In excluding God, the Creator, we are left with a physical universe that must be explained on its own. Here is the way Dawkins attempts to do it:

“Once upon a time, natural selection consisted of the differential survival of replicators floating free in the primeval soup. Now, natural selection favors replicators that are good at building survival machines, genes that are skilled in the art of controlling embryonic development. In this, the replicators are no more conscious or purposeful than they ever were. The same old processes of automatic selection between rival molecules by reason of their longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity, still go on as blindly and inevitably as they did in the far-off days. . . .

“In recent years—the last 600 million or so—the replicators have achieved notable triumphs of survival-machine technology such as the muscle, the heart, and the eye (evolved several times independently). Before that, they radically altered fundamental features of their way of life as replicators [How does he know this?], which must be understood if we are to proceed with the argument.”