For the life of me I am not able to understand why it so important to religious people (only in the U.S.) to try to disprove the theory of evolution, or explain it away as only being a “theory” when the natural change of species has been going on for millennia, and is clearly shown through fossil records.
The religious belief that God created every living being seems to infringe on Darwin’s theory, yet even the Pope (sorry for the lack of a link, lost the page. If you google it, send it to me so I can add it back) has acknowledged that evolution would fill a lot of the holes in the biblical record. Sure Noah could not have had 1.8million species on that boat, but he could have had several thousand species, which were created by God, on that boat. Those species have evolved into all the species we have today, over time. Yet, that has nothing to do with the current fight about evolution.
Intelligent design is supposed to be an alternative to evolution. It is an alternative, and also completely wrong. So much fossilized evidence exists to support evolution that it is laughable to try to explain it away. Species on Earth have evolved. Case closed.
The fight that the religious people really need to get into is existential. There is either ‘Creationism’, which relies on believing that some entity built the entire universe one day when he was bored, or there is the ‘big bang theory’, which supposes that the universe was formed when a small meteor hit a huge mass in the middle of space. Both of the possibilities seem pretty false. In either case we have to wonder what created the creator.
If you look at existence logically there would be no existence. Whether you happen to believe in a God, or a ‘big bang’, something had to have happened prior to make that happen. Some one, or some thing, would have to create the God. Some one, or some thing, would have to create the huge mass (and small meteor that smashed into it) to make the ‘big bang theory’ plausible. Human understanding has yet to evolve to a level where we can theorize about it.
Petroglyphs and Hieroglyphs of long dead peoples certainly pre-date the bible, and are very obvious in the oral traditions of most people. Tell the same story enough times and it becomes the truth. But quibbling about evolution is just silly.
Scientists only argue that species have evolved over time, religious zealots have only argued that God created everything, while giving the species free reign to evolve over time. It is only the nutjobs in the U.S. that have argued that God created all 1.8million of them (the species so far discovered) and put them on Noah’s boat.
The existential part of the question is what we should really be looking at. Science doesn’t try to explain away the formation of planets and universes (religion does), science just wants to know who created the creator. Religious people often argue that life can not be created without life, so, who created God?
I don’t have any better answer on the atheist side. Someone had to send the huge mass that turned into the known universe rolling, then had to make a huge meteor hit it. Is there a God? That is an existential question. The problem becomes that, no matter how far back you go, you will never find the person who set the whole world to rolling. Even if you happen to find the creator of the whole universe, who created him?
Who created God?
I was actually looking around on the internet today, I didn’t find much of interest (goat porn sites aside), what I did find was the Sims. In the world of the Sims, they have no idea that you are controlling their actions, but, they do whatever you tell them to. Could it be that the human race is just a huge game of the Sims on someone else’s computer? They don’t know that they are digitally animated little characters, they don’t know that someone is watching their every action, they just do what they do. Were those little suckers to start to think existentially they might rule the world.
It all has to go back to who created the creator though. The most powerful entity of all time can’t possibly have just materialized, there must be evidence of that, right?
Yeah, the bible.
I have duct tape, it is pretty similar. Similar insofar as it is horribly useless, means nothing and can’t be substantiated. Yet, the duct tape performs fabulously, the bible gives way under the smallest amount of stress or scrutiny.
Duct Tape must have created the universe.