The Propheteer

Okay, so I said I wasn’t going to make posts like this anymore. Can we just revise that to “not often”? Bryan Adams (the blogger, not the singer) has a nice long post about evolution, creationism, intelligent design, and what should or shouldn’t be taught in schools. I’m not going to get into that. I’m not going to get into why religion has no place in the classroom (As separate from “in the building the school occupies”) other than to mention that it’s what I think.

What I am going to mention is why I think that the people who decrie evolution as denying the existence of God are missing the point.
Most of my readers know I’m Christian (that’s because I’m related to most of them). I’m often at odds with other Christians, and here’s one of the reasons why.

The most fundamentalist Christians insist that the Christian Bible is literal truth, written down by the hand of God himself. These people fail to account for the following:
a) Human hands put down the words. Regardless of Divine Inspiration, free will usually gets on in there and mucks with what gets said. Ever played “telephone“?
b) Do you really think that if God had said to someone, back when people had little concept of the vastness of time, space, and no concept of genetics, “Oh, and I set it up so that way back when, your grandfather three-million times removed was a nematode”, they would have believed him? Or do you think it more likely they would have just put down their papyrus and walked away to try to sober up?
c) The “Bible”, as we know it, is a group of books selected from a large number of writings, chosen specifically to exemplify the memes and cultural ideals they wanted most to push upon the populace of the time. And that even those books that were chosen have been translated and re-translated, not to mention edited and expurgated so that God’s Living Word likely has as much resemblance to God’s intent as a pizza does to a tomatoe.

There are those that argue that because God’s Will is omnipotent, the people that have handled the book have had no choice but to make the right decisions througout history. We can discount that argument for no other reason than that if it’s true, then no arguments on religion matter. God has made his decisions, free will doesn’t exist, and we’re all just running through God’s little script. I don’t believe that, and so, my little diatribe continues.

(Note: None of what I said above invalidates the wisdom that we can glean from the Bible. But stop taking it so seriously, okay? Or, if you really do, then go all the way. For example, the passage that indicates that homosexuality is evil also says that touching pigskin is punishable by death. So tell you what, you can make gay marriage illegal the same day you criminalize football)

So if the Christian Bible isn’t literal truth, where does that leave us in trying to understand the universe?
It leaves us grappling with the universe using the only tools we have available to us – scientific ones. Science has made some amazing discoveries. We’ve been able to examine matter and discover that all matter is made up of tiny pieces, called atoms. We’ve seen that those atoms are made of smaller pieces, and that those pieces are made up of things smaller than that. And we’ve been able to speculate with some degree of certainty that those pieces are actually something so incredible that I won’t bother to explain it here (But you can go to the string theory website to find out more). And all of this is absolutely incredible. And all of this falls on deaf ears when you try to explain it to someone with blind acceptance as lliteral truth of what was writ down by someone better than 2500 years dead. “No,” claim they, “when god said let there be light, it just was!”, completely failing to realize that Planck’s equation is much more elegant and impressive than unreasoned, inelegant “plop, we’ve got light”. Planck didn’t make this up out of whole cloth – before Max, light still used this principle – all Mr. Planck did was figure out what that principle was.

So, presupposing the existence of God, saying “he just said…” seems to be missing the point entirely. Any two-bit deity could have just summoned the universe into existence. The impressive feat, the point that exposes omnipotence, is that before ever creating quark one, God set up all the principles (or, maybe, the Grand Unified Theory) of physics and made sure they really worked and that we could discover them and put them to good use, before turning on the Planck, so to speak.

This same point is central to what I think about evolution. Evolution as scientific theory does nothing to diminish my faith in God. If anything, it creates a situation where faith is bolstered – because faith is all you have. What faith is there if you tell people “well, God created the world and Adam and Eve, and put them in a garden, of course it’s true”? That’s not faith. That’s knowledge,even if it’s wrong. Faith comes into it when you have to believe, in the face of no evidence whatsoever, that God is out there, and that he sent us his son to save us from ourselves. Awe comes when, from within your faith, you look at the fact that species, through a simple means of transfer of chemicals, make offspring, whose survival is based on how advantageous the chemicals mom and dad gave them happen to be.

Evolution is amazing – we’re amazing. And we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you.