So I have a few more bumper-sticker observations! Of late, I’ve been seeing lots of Jesus/Darwin/Evolution/Truth/Crazy-ass Religious Nut fish on my morning commute. While I have to admit I enjoyed the humor, until I was overexposed to the whole thing, I still can’t grasp why there’s an argument in the first place!
Any way you slice it, evolution and creation are one in the same. Whether you believe in a god or not.
Hypothetically, let’s say for a moment that a god (i.e. creator and manager of the universe) exists. Let’s stipulate further that he actually wanted to tell humanity about how he created everything. Even further, let’s stipulate that for reason or reasons unfathomable to us, he decided that the best way to pass on that message was via one or more naked hermits living isolated in desert caves and eating bees to survive.
Given all this, we can see where so-called “creationists” got their story. Is it even remotely plausible that this prophet or prophets could have gotten the story right in the excruciating detail necessary to pass on the concepts leading up to evolution, much less evolution itself? Even if god spent a few years explaining the intricacies of how he engineered the big bang, set up the laws of physics, devised chemistry, caused chemical processes to give rise to biological ones, and used a results-driven eliminatory development process to arrive at his current release version of life, what would our hypothetical prophet have written down? Could he have possibly grasped what was being dumped into his head?
The wisest, most educated person on the planet 3000-5000 years ago couldn’t have comprehended that data, much less our half-crazed, unbathed bee-eater! And even if he could have comprehended it, by divine intervention, how could he have possibly explained it to other humans? Human languages of the time couldn’t even express the concepts needed to *develop* the language to explain it all.
Our hypothetical prophet would have had to fall back on the same techniques we use on our kids when they aren’t ready for the full details of an explanation: “Because God Said So”.
So we see that, regardless of divine inspiration, the bible’s creation story cannot possibly be relied on as objective fact, but rather as an allegory used to simplify an explanation.
And that’s only if god exists. Personally, I think religions are invented by power-hungry nuts who get off on telling other people how to live their lives….
Also, let’s look at evidence here. Creationists have two pieces of evidence, a somewhat dubious book written several thousand years ago by their “prophet(s)”, and the complexity of life. On the other hand, the theory of evolution is supported by billions of fossils, carbon dating, mathematical analysis, selective breeding practices themselves thousands of years old, and literally hundreds of reproducible experiments. Even if 90% of the arguments for both sides turned out to be false, the vast preponderance of observable evidence would still fall on the side of evolution.
Creationists who say that the sheer complexity and elegance of life are too great to have developed on their own still miss the point that our universe’s most awesome wonder is it’s inherent force to self-organize. Look for your god in that force, not in some silly self-contradictory myths written by people who could never have grasped the truths of the story they were telling anyway!
