Sir : The splendour of the writing and the quota-
tions from the philosophers of both Mr Allsop and Mr Hogg make, if I may say so, direct thought on the existence of God more difficult than it need be (21 June). I believe it is pos- sible to indicate the existence of something in perfectly straightforward. physical terms, and the exercise goes something like this.
We now know, thanks to the nuclear scien- tists, Einstein, the biochemists like Crick and the theoreticians like Hoyle and Gamov (1 lump them together), the full story of evolution from the first hydrogen atom to the human brain, with remarkably few gaps. The story begins with a timeless electromagnetic field, a critical • build-up of positive and negative potential, the sudden introduction of that 'wavelength' of our universe, the speed of light, and there is your atom of hydrogen. It continues through the formation of suns and the nuclear production of all the elements, the formation of planets to the point where chemistry takes over from nuclear physics, to the point where biochemis- try takes over from chemistry, and so to the present day when the human brain, a fairly complicated electrical device constructed of living cells, is intelligent enough to comprehend what I have just written and to understand its own origins.
There was a man in the Hagenbeck zoo, before the war, who worked evolution back- wards. He took an ordinary ox, and by breed- ing from recessive strains he bred back, in something like four generations, to the extinct aurochs, with the prehistoric white stripe down its back. In order to make any sense of the evolutionary march-past and get down to the basis of all things, we have to do precisely that.
Now, the one recognisable aspect of the evolutionary process, if we examine it, is that it is a process of evolution. It is a process, not of creation, but of complication. If there is life today, there was life in the first fissiparous cell, there was 'life' in the proteins and amino acids, there was life in the elements, life in the suns. The whole universe is instinct with birth, life and death, just like us. In other words, life is not a new phenomenon. It goes right back to the beginning. Otherwise, it could not exist today.
The same applies to intelligence. The reptiles had brains. The invertebrate had nervous systems. The first cell had an 'adaptability mechanism' responding to external stimuli. The inorganic chemicals obeyed the rules, forming themselves, as if by magic or accident, into the proper evolutionary patterns. The atoms obeyed the rules. So did the protons and the electrons. What rules? We know that too. For if E equals mc2 then M is a function of energy and the speed of light. This takes us right back to that first hydrogen atom. If evolution never creates but only elaborates, there was the embryo of life in that atom, and the embryo of intelli- gence. Stop that atom, and what are we left with? There is no time. There is no universe. Then what has happened? Where are the life and the intelligence? In the rules themselves. In the whole staggeringly intelligent conception of what would happen if one little bit of energy was set revolving round another little bit of energy at the speed of capital c.
Absurdly enough, the Bible has it. `In the beginning was the logos.' In the beginning was the idea.'
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