There is a local issue with rats that provides a lesson in evolutionary theory. This is the idea that many people who do not want to believe in God use to explain where life came from.
The basis of evolutionary theory is "survival of the fittest". By random chance, influenced by factors such as the effects of cosmic rays on cells, some members of a species will be born with characteristics that are beneficial, such as greater intelligence or better vision. These members will be more likely to survive long enough to pass along their genes than those without the beneficial characteristics. Eventually the entire species will be transformed into a new species that is better suited for survival.
A simple example of evolution is giraffes. A giraffe eats leaves from trees. It would be an advantage for a giraffe to have a long neck, in order to be able to reach more leaves. Every once in a while a giraffe was, by random chance, born with a long neck. These were more likely to survive long enough to pass along their genes so that all giraffes eventually had long necks.
The issue with religion is that some people have taken the theory further than the founding text, "On The Origin Of Species", and used it to propose that life itself originated by random collisions of atoms. This leaves no need for God to have created life and the theory has become the intellectual foundation for those who do not want to believe in God. Even though the original theory does not try to explain where life originated.
Even before I was a Christian I knew that this theory, while having some truth to it, does not really reflect what we see in reality. The only reason for a species to improve to the point that it changes into an entirely new species is that it becomes, by gradual random chance, more suited to survive in it's environment. This must mean that the "higher" forms of life, meaning more highly evolved, must be better suited to survival than the "lower" forms of life.
The trouble is that the "higher" forms of life, unless they can eat plants, are dependent on the "lower" forms for survival. Thus their suitability for survival is no better than the "lower" forms, if they are dependent on them for food. If one species is the "hunter" and the other is the "hunted", the "hunter" is no better suited for survival if it is dependent for food on the "hunted".
Living things are always more complex than their surrounding inanimate environment. If living things began in this environment with random collisions of atoms then the more highly evolved, meaning better suited for survival, a species is the more complex it should be. But this is not at all what we see. No one would consider the local rats as a higher species. Yet they are, along with species like pigeons and squirrels, abounding while many of the "higher" species are in danger of extinction.
What about ants? They are not a higher species but they are everywhere. If a nuclear holocaust destroyed humans, ants would still be here. Plainly and simply the "higher" species are not better suited to survival as evolutionary theory says they should be. Being more complex makes them more vulnerable to the cataclysms that occur periodically, from global warming to asteroid impacts.
From an evolutionary perspective neither animals or insects make any sense. Living things would be much better off being plants. An animal or insect has to spend it's life procuring food and will die if it doesn't succeed. A plant, in contrast, only has to do nothing and everything it needs will come to it. If a plant gets a broken branch it will almost always grow back. If an animal gets a broken leg it means almost certain death.
Early in this blog I put the postings about creationism and evolutionary theory on a separate blog. The original evolutionary theory doesn't try to explain how life originated, that was added later. Evolutionary theory has effectively become a major world religion and has distorted our thinking, as we saw in "Our Evolutionary Paradise", May 2024.
Here is a link to the creation blog. I discussed rats in "Reverse Evolution".
www.markmeekcreation.blogspot.com
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