MORE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL: Does God have to be mentioned to be evident?
One summer about 8 years ago, I took a group of teenage girls from my church congregation in upstate New York, to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. The heat was crushing. I grew up in southern California and went to the beach every summer. But the soggy heat that day on Rehoboth Beach was beyond my experience. I quickly brushed up on my body surfing skills and stayed in the water. Until I noticed the leathery brown, giant horseshoe crabs cast up all over the beach and floating in the waves. It brought to mind past biology classes and the discussions of evolution therein, something about horseshoe crab fossils. Around that time I also had an intense conversation on that subject with family members, also people of faith, who know and appreciate the theory of evolution much better than I.
Since then I have not thought much about it until recently when I began noticing a barrage of snide remarks in editorials, television programs, magazines and on the internet about Intelligent Design and Creationists. Yes, it is political, on both sides of the issue. There is plenty of ungracious talk and plenty of religious fervor on both sides of the issue.
I am a fan of science fiction (in spite of the fact that writers of science fiction rarely mention religion or God except in the context of “primitive� or “extinct,� (but that is a subject for another time.) I also enjoy reading books (basic, layman) on physics, especially in the realm of quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, the big bang or not, etc. I struggle to grasp what I read. The math is way beyond me but I still enjoy the effort, and the insights. So I give it some of my precious time and limited talent for such things.
Now back to the theory of evolution, and the fuss being kicked up about including intelligent design in the classroom. I don’t personally have any need to make sense of the theory of evolution in relation to my faith. The world of science and academics has adopted it as the most useful and compelling explanation of life on earth. Fine. My children have studied it in school and their belief in God as far as I can tell, didn’t suffer. It really doesn’t affect my life much at all in deep and significant ways. Why? Because for me spiritual things come first and spiritual things do not have to be justified by science. There may be some agreement, there will be many contradictions. But I am committed to that research which goes on in the laboratory of spiritual experience (more about that later.) My faith does not rely on proving or disproving anything that science has to offer about how the earth was created. My faith relies on my own experience with living by faith, living not just for now but also for the hereafter, living for a purpose greater than myself, and knowing about Christ by living his teachings as I have come to understand them. Perhaps that is why I love science fiction and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics. There are some truly astounding ideas out there in the realm of science and in the realm of the spiritual that to the natural man don’t make sense, yet they still work.
That said, I can sympathize with anxious, religious parents in local communities and local school boards who want to have a say in how and what their public schools are teaching their children. Allowances have likely been made for such cultural sensitivities in cases far more marginal. And taxpayer money has been used for far more foolish notions, without a doubt.
“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.� 2 Peter 3:3-4
September 29th, 2005 at 3:56 am
I don’t think evolution being taught as a theory in a classroom is so wrong. I was open minded for it in my biology class that’s all our science teacher asked of us religious students. In the end I was not convinced. I am though convinced we have evolved over time as humans like I know our brains have become more advanced.
I agree, quantum mechanics and physics is some interesting stuff. The other day my Chemistry teacher was saying that even as chaotic as the world may seem around us, underneath that is a world of order where atoms remain in everthing and in every place all at once by their elemental status. It made me think of how God is a “house of order”. I think God is science because if that is the nature of the universe, by whatever discoveries we have come to prove and believe to be true, then God must have meant for it to be created like that. There are probably just some things beyond human comprehension that we can’t be fully understood about our universe, but one day beyond this life it can be comprehensible. Such as believing my surroundings and the objects within them is just empty space; when you think in terms of atoms and mass. It is hard because I can feel it, smell it, taste it, and see it. So how could it be empty, but that is my human comprehension speaking. When in reality things aren’t always as they seem.
September 29th, 2005 at 4:30 am
I had a geology teacher once that when talking about the geological record said more or less this is not a precise quote ” and here the species just disappeared, died out for no apearent reason. Like god made a mistake!” the last line actually is a quote. He was a great teacher good guy but he was so totally faithful to evolution as his dogma. The idea that this creature that he was speaking of, trilobites the ancestors to the horseshoe crab, was done the time was up and their purpose over just wasnt available to him.
To say that evidence of a designer does’nt exsist is really silly. My son 2 years old was born with a cataract in his eye. Every year we go to the doctor who removed the cataract for a follow up visit. As we sat there today I was contemplateing eyes. Why if there is no designer of the Universe did we get eyes? How did such a thing come to exsist? How did dumb matter decide that a retina was nessicary so that when light passed threw the lens there would be a focal plane for the image to form and then be transmitted to the brain? Wah? Huh? Tornado in a junk yard! It just happened cause life needed it to survive? I dont think so! Life could do just fine oozing around the primordial soup spliting sulpher molocules for hydrogen or whatever, with out eyes. We are just to complex, and the ecosystem and the solar system and the galaxy are just too perfect to be without some intelegence to have planned it.
September 29th, 2005 at 5:32 am
“Because for me spiritual things come first and spiritual things do not have to be justified by science.”
And that’s the crux. ID seems to mostly be a movement of middle-aged college-educated men who seems trapped between two worlds: a fundamentalist faith and the need to both appeal to AND disavow the secular world. This tension leads them to demand that their views be confirmed in some way by science, and this secular struggle leads them away from the path of faith. Worse, it gives atheists all the ammunition to disprove faith. If the truth of God rests not in a personal experience or communion with God but rather in a particular set of facts, that sets up God to be disproven if those facts do turn up. If the truth of the Gospel is determined by the age of the Earth, then we’re in really big trouble. Why even put religion in that position in the first place? Why try to make faith compete in a secular arena according to secular rules?
“How did dumb matter decide that a retina was nessicary so that when light passed threw the lens there would be a focal plane for the image to form and then be transmitted to the brain?”
Shrug. Actually, the evolution of eyes is one of the more well understood evolutionary progressions. It’s fine to be incredulous, but silly to take a personal lack of understanding as evidence of impossibility or even implausibility.
“Life could do just fine oozing around the primordial soup spliting sulpher molocules for hydrogen or whatever, with out eyes.”
To just touch briefly on this: many of the chemical components of which life is composed are photo-reactive: that is, the chemistry is altered depending on how many photons hit it at any given time. Granted that, it’s not hard at all to imagine that these different reactions to light could find some evolutionary harness and use in even very very early life (while others would continue to get along fine without this trick). Indeed, some of the simplest creatures on our planet have “eyes” that are basically no more than photoreactive dots that have very very simple effects on the creature’s behavior (like moving towards or away from light). From this point, the gradual progression to our sort of complex eye is actually not that strange at all. “Recessing” the spot gives a rudimentary sense of which direction the light is coming from. Adding more photoreceptors in this pit allows a calculation of varying angles. A thin film covering the put filters the light and with further development focuses it. And so on. All of these are examples of gradual, single step changes that take us from light spots to complex eyes with lenses. And, luckily, most of these steps are not even speculative: because the tree of life has branched off again and again, we have living creatures who have “eyes” at nearly every one of these likely stages of development (because, remember: advancements to, say, eyes are not something that is advantageous to every species, but only some, and once the lines have diverged, the same advancement is unlikely to happen elsewhere).
September 29th, 2005 at 7:03 am
Just because chemicals or elements are photo reactive does not persuade me at all that they will on there own create eyes. Oh look there is air I need wings? I used eyes today because I was looking at eyes, but there are alot of other things that just because they have certain properties are not capable of organizing themselves into systems and organisms. It is my belief that it took intelligence to organize things as intricately as they are, can I prove it?. A lot of the arguments against teaching intelligent design here are good but I am not persuaded either that it is some how damaging to our side. I also dont care if some how some ones faith is crippled because science some how proves for them that God is dead, they didnt have faith to begin with if that is the case. Creation bares witness that there is a creator! The fact that science is based on verifiability and testability, and “you just cant test for god” is not persuading me. I think that the dogmatic and religious adherence to evolution and the inability and even the impermissibility to look at some alternatives shows a weakness in the faithful of evolution! There are really good scientists who looking at physics and biology and astronomy say that there appears to be a designer and thats all I on the spiritual side of this am saying. I don’t care if it cant be proven just give me the benefit of saying “yeah its intricate and wonderful and it looks like someone coulda designed it”. Thats would be enough for me. Give kids in school the benefit of being able to think for themselves and question the dogma of our day!!
September 29th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
I couldn’t have said it better myself, Snowillard! Bravo! I’m glad to find more than just a few out there that see the same!
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