Coram Populo: Questioning Faith
Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom, power, and love
Our God is an awesome God
Rich Mullins
I can't help feeling that the response from many religions to Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection has to go down as one of the most spectacular missed opportunities in the history of history itself. I think the Fundamentalist Christians are by far the worst offenders here, but that may well be because I have far more contact with Fundamentalist Christians than with adherents to any other religion.
If we are to take the first couple of chapters of the Book of Genesis literally, then the universe, nature, life, and all things pertaining thereunto came about as a result of Someone saying "let there be this! Let there be that! Sorted!"
Scientific evidence, however, suggests incredibly strongly that it wasn't quite as simple as "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him" (Genesis 1:27). On the contrary, it took billions of years. Which is just a little more than the human mind can really grasp. Oh, we can handle the number, we can dig the fact that a billion is a thousand times a thousand times a thousand. We can write the number (1,000,000,000), but we can't really imagine a billion. Especially not a billion years. That's just mind-buggering. But it seems to be the case that this lovely wee planet on which we live has been around for 4.6 billion years, was completely lifeless for the first six hundred million years, then some microscopic single celled living things appeared (contrary to popular belief, the theory of evolution doesn't even attempt to explain how that happened), the descendants of which, over the next four billion years, incredibly, unimaginably slowly, became us and all the animals, plants, insects, fish, bacteria etc that currently inhabit the Earth.
Fair enough. Now, it could well be that "...the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:7), but if that is the case, then Darwin and the many biologists who came after him were the ones who figured out what happened between "dust of the ground" and "man". I posted that idea in some community somewhere a year or two ago, and some high-and-mighty science nerd essentially called me a moron for not knowing that the modern theory is that life started in water, not dust. But I didn't mean it as a literal statement, I was merely suggesting the possibility that life is indeed the work of a Supreme Being (for whom the epithet "God" is a good title, summing it all up nicely in one syllable and three letters) but if God did put us here, evolution by natural selection was His method of doing so. Also, nobody has ever specifically suggested the dust in question was dry. Well, I didn't, anyway.
Anyway, here's why I think many of the various churches missed a golden opportunity: back in the day, I was myself a Christian. The church I attended used to sing the hymn I quoted above. As is normal for believers, they'd always be talking about how awesome God is. Fair enough. And creating a universe by means of "let there be this, let there be that" is fairly awesome, but putting it together over an unimaginable amount of time, and indeed arranging matters so that it pretty much puts itself together...that's just stunning! If there is a God (I'm not quite an atheist, but getting there. Although pantheism seems to make some kind of sense to me at this stage) then it seems reasonable to me to suppose that He'd find it far more interesting to watch over the eons as the things He set in motion come to life, and find their own way to live in the world.
So, the churches could have used evolution to further their aims. They could have said, "look how amazing the process of evolution is! Even if it happens without direct intervention, just the way it works is incredible! There must be some kind of intelligence behind it, no?"
But instead, they call it blasphemy. They say it's a lie spread by Satan to turn people away from God. They try to get it out of science classes, and replace it with "intelligent design" which is simply a dodgy first step towards having Genesis taught as historical fact. Which is just stupid. It does nobody any favours.
Besides, having taken quite an interest in this particular subject over the last few months, reading the works of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, etc, while also checking out what the opposition has to say on the matter, there's something very interesting I've noticed - the arguments against evolution, particularly from right wing Fundamentalist Christians, invariably come in one or more of the following three forms:
If you're a Young Earth Creationist, if you really believe that the universe was created on a single day 6000 years ago (because six thousand is a far easier number for our miniscule little minds to handle than four billion) then what you're really saying is, "Our God is an awesome God...but not THAT awesome!"
Because if evolution is a lie, then it's a lie told by God. Why would He do that?
Thank you, my loves, and goodnight.
Current mood: Philosopholopholopholophical
Current music: Tangerine Dream - "Sleeping Watches Snoring In Silence"
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom, power, and love
Our God is an awesome God
Rich Mullins
I can't help feeling that the response from many religions to Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection has to go down as one of the most spectacular missed opportunities in the history of history itself. I think the Fundamentalist Christians are by far the worst offenders here, but that may well be because I have far more contact with Fundamentalist Christians than with adherents to any other religion.
If we are to take the first couple of chapters of the Book of Genesis literally, then the universe, nature, life, and all things pertaining thereunto came about as a result of Someone saying "let there be this! Let there be that! Sorted!"
Scientific evidence, however, suggests incredibly strongly that it wasn't quite as simple as "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him" (Genesis 1:27). On the contrary, it took billions of years. Which is just a little more than the human mind can really grasp. Oh, we can handle the number, we can dig the fact that a billion is a thousand times a thousand times a thousand. We can write the number (1,000,000,000), but we can't really imagine a billion. Especially not a billion years. That's just mind-buggering. But it seems to be the case that this lovely wee planet on which we live has been around for 4.6 billion years, was completely lifeless for the first six hundred million years, then some microscopic single celled living things appeared (contrary to popular belief, the theory of evolution doesn't even attempt to explain how that happened), the descendants of which, over the next four billion years, incredibly, unimaginably slowly, became us and all the animals, plants, insects, fish, bacteria etc that currently inhabit the Earth.
Fair enough. Now, it could well be that "...the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:7), but if that is the case, then Darwin and the many biologists who came after him were the ones who figured out what happened between "dust of the ground" and "man". I posted that idea in some community somewhere a year or two ago, and some high-and-mighty science nerd essentially called me a moron for not knowing that the modern theory is that life started in water, not dust. But I didn't mean it as a literal statement, I was merely suggesting the possibility that life is indeed the work of a Supreme Being (for whom the epithet "God" is a good title, summing it all up nicely in one syllable and three letters) but if God did put us here, evolution by natural selection was His method of doing so. Also, nobody has ever specifically suggested the dust in question was dry. Well, I didn't, anyway.
Anyway, here's why I think many of the various churches missed a golden opportunity: back in the day, I was myself a Christian. The church I attended used to sing the hymn I quoted above. As is normal for believers, they'd always be talking about how awesome God is. Fair enough. And creating a universe by means of "let there be this, let there be that" is fairly awesome, but putting it together over an unimaginable amount of time, and indeed arranging matters so that it pretty much puts itself together...that's just stunning! If there is a God (I'm not quite an atheist, but getting there. Although pantheism seems to make some kind of sense to me at this stage) then it seems reasonable to me to suppose that He'd find it far more interesting to watch over the eons as the things He set in motion come to life, and find their own way to live in the world.
So, the churches could have used evolution to further their aims. They could have said, "look how amazing the process of evolution is! Even if it happens without direct intervention, just the way it works is incredible! There must be some kind of intelligence behind it, no?"
But instead, they call it blasphemy. They say it's a lie spread by Satan to turn people away from God. They try to get it out of science classes, and replace it with "intelligent design" which is simply a dodgy first step towards having Genesis taught as historical fact. Which is just stupid. It does nobody any favours.
Besides, having taken quite an interest in this particular subject over the last few months, reading the works of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, etc, while also checking out what the opposition has to say on the matter, there's something very interesting I've noticed - the arguments against evolution, particularly from right wing Fundamentalist Christians, invariably come in one or more of the following three forms:
- Misunderstanding the Theory of Evolution (often misunderstanding what the word "theory" means)
- Misrepresentation of the theory
- Outright lies.
If you're a Young Earth Creationist, if you really believe that the universe was created on a single day 6000 years ago (because six thousand is a far easier number for our miniscule little minds to handle than four billion) then what you're really saying is, "Our God is an awesome God...but not THAT awesome!"
Because if evolution is a lie, then it's a lie told by God. Why would He do that?
Thank you, my loves, and goodnight.
Current mood: Philosopholopholopholophical
Current music: Tangerine Dream - "Sleeping Watches Snoring In Silence"