I’d like to somehow get past the primordial soup and monkeys
for uncles and all those unimaginable millions of years and say something
practical about evolution. I do think that science in the last few hundred
years has come up with some explanations that can really help us understand who
we are as a species. But how to get people to pay attention?
I realize that even that word, ‘species,’ seems to get some people’s
hackles up, but I really would like to get outside of the mere controversy
about people’s ultimate beliefs about ultimate things. Let me set aside, if I
can, for a moment, all that vast expanse of time and space that came before or
since ‘In the beginning …’ and state for the record that humans are astonishing
beings. Our conscious awareness, our ability to calculate pi, all the beautiful
and profound words and music we’ve produced, not to mention splitting atoms –
we are indeed special. To say that we are created in the image of God might be
one way of expressing that, I suppose.
And certainly God has been around for a long, long time. But
whether God is the foundation of everything that now exists or a concept that
has evolved alongside humanity is not my concern. And further, I don’t believe
that resolving - or fighting over – which God is which is very useful. And I
don’t see any good reason why my discussion of evolution needs to threaten
anyone’s cherished metaphysical or theological ideas.
But there is a new worldview around that has something
useful to say, some explanations that might help our self-understanding. I say
‘new’ in the sense that in all the thousands of years humans have written down
our thoughts and ideas, these last few hundred years are something different.
In a simplistic sense, humanity has gone from thinking about the world as a
kerplunk! kind of place to a world that is in process. Kerplunk! may not be
your first choice of words to describe the older view, but I think it is apt.
And now the new view is one that says that with rigorous investigation we are now
able to discover not just that something is what it is, but how it has become
what it is. A ‘how’ worldview, if you will.
For me, it seems obvious that the material world operates according
to natural laws over time. Whatever ideas about creation might mean to various
people, I seriously doubt that God spread those layers upon layers of rock as
if they were one flavor of icing on top of another with a cosmic spatula until
they hardened – or that God simply blinked those rocks into existence just that
way like I Dream of Jeanie. If nothing else – why would he?
I realize that it’s true that ‘process’ is something humans
have recognized for a very long time, but we have in the last few hundred years
only really begun putting the pieces more substantially together. I use the
word ‘recently’ advisedly.
This scientific worldview has expanded thinking about many
of the processes back millions of years – even billions. The only alternative I
see to this massive time-frame shift is either to stay with a kerplunk! way of
looking at things or to try to accept what the rocks and things are trying to
tell us. If we stay with ‘blink’ as our answer, that pretty much means we now have
to throw law and order out of the universe. Why should even gravity be a
constant we can count on or water freeze solid enough to walk on at precisely 32
degrees Fahrenheit if we can constantly toss ‘blink’ in whenever we prefer?
To me, there seems to be no way around the ‘very long time’
idea. If we’re going to even say something as simple as that limestone is made
out of the settled bodies of dead creatures with calcium in their skeletons who
lived in very old seas that were then compressed into stone that’s as hard as
rock it’s going to take calculable - but a lot - of time. Every physical thing
in the universe becomes a willy-nilly proposition if we can’t even look at the
Grand Canyon as a huge, complex example of the gradual small erosion that happens
in a bare field of soil after a series
of thunderstorms.
I really think that it was a big mistake for some people to
tie God’s hands to instants of time. But who or whatever God is, the linking of
God to specific amounts of time is an idea that needs to be undone however unsettling
that might be for some.
But I also think that with these newer ideas of evolution these
shifts in thinking about time are not only unsettling for a few very religious
folk. Although we are in a transition period in human thinking - and yes, some
individuals have blithely stepped from one side to the other - we are, as a
species, well entangled in kerplunk! kinds of thinking. Our individual lives
are measured in decades. A million is not in anyone’s direct experience. The processes
we actually see are not the same thing as all of that inexorable change over
time. They’re only hints. It takes careful observation and inference before any
human can imagine a coherent explanation for the present snapshot in front of
us now. The universe exists in an almost unimaginable time-frame for any of us – but that time is an essential concept
if what we see around us to make sense.
Consider this: if evolution tells us nothing else, it’s that
even scientists who don’t bat an eye at light-years and nanoseconds also share
the same kind of mind with all of the rest of us. Whether it’s a creationist or
an evolutionist walking alone on a dark night, when they hear a rustling in the
bushes their brain will tell their heart to pick up its pace - the hackles on
the back of their neck might stiffen.
The story of evolution is indeed that humans are directly related
to all of the other species. We – for all of our rationality – we all
are likely to act as if something might be there in the darkness - something about to eat us. Even if it’s simply
a dark night on a city street in which we are rationally likely to encounter a
creature no more threatening than a wandering house cat and not a mountain lion
– or even if you take a story, which some believe, in which they imagine it
might be a spirit from a supernatural dimension in those bushes, I think that it
makes sense that there is a reason that our human brain is the way that it is.
A process of becoming
simply makes who we are now as this special species fit with our experiences.
The simplest of common experiences shows that even in this modern millennium,
our brain prepares our body to run for its life – for a reason. Unless, you’re
determined to resorting to different kinds of supernatural magic that fill the
world with false appearances of process – of processes that never actually were
- it’s not that hard to trace that instinctive reaction to run back to
something that is more complicated than kerplunk! thinking. But let’s let that
one go, for a moment.
It is perhaps a little unsettling, if any of us thought hard
about it, for us to learn that it might
be more than mere coincidence that we share DNA - chemical coding you can’t see
with your naked eye, which determines so many of your physical characteristics
- with a cat or an amoeba. That we might indeed be related to each other
through long processes of change and long periods of time is not easily fathomable.
Evolution is not a simple story although some parts can be told quite simply. And
although I don’t think that religion needs to be entangled with these more
basic scientific explanations, the human mind – as it has evolved, or as it was
created to be, take your pick for now – our brain in fact tangles these kinds
of things together quite naturally.
We are born, each of us, with a brain that has the instincts
we see in other animals all around us. That should be unmistakable and it was
to many people long before Darwin came along.
And we are each of us also born into a human culture that
has come to imagine all sorts of ideas about how and why things are as they are.
Some of those stories are simply wrong. But it takes conscious effort to sort
through it all. Our brain is not a smooth crystal sphere the size of peach, nor
is it a cube of metal and silicon that a kerplunk! creator could just as easily have decided upon. This folded, complicated, fleshy organism, with parts that do appear
to come from here and there – that brain generally prefers taking things easy.
Who has time for all that rational thought? Life goes on at the inexorable pace
of time; we have a mate to find; children to beget; maybe we’d just like to go
out for pizza and a movie; and now just look: human beings haven’t yet sorted
everything out. But the problem becomes acute when I don’t like the way your
tribe looks or thinks.
If we look around us, we will see that it is quite natural
that human beings hold on to enough blurry or simply bad thinking that we miss
out on some really interesting new stories - if only because we’ve been told that
the new stories will undo some stories that we hold so dear.
And yes, science will in fact undo some stories – religious
and otherwise – that have been around for a long time – because the new stories
will turn out to be better stories – better explanations. I’m quite sure that
many God stories will still stick around. And it’s also quite certain that
religious stories and scientific stories will, on occasion, conflict.
But I’m pretty sure that reality won’t be undone by the different
stories we humans tell. But however we got here, humans are prone to take their
own tribe’s ideas much too seriously – even if they are right (although a
definitive ruling eludes us). Furthermore, for being the most rational species
on the planet, we frequently don’t use what reason we possess and instead simply
call each other stupid – and then it gets worse.
Where does all this discord come from?
The God side broadly says our confusion comes from original sin.
Evolution suggests that it’s something we inherited from our mother’s and our
father’s side – from way, way, way back. There are some nuanced differences in
the accounting, of course.
It’s not that I am simply saying that you should just listen
to all sides. Some stories make more sense than others. Some tellers of stories
have worked harder and more carefully at looking at life and the material world
in the working out of their stories. That should count for something. But at least you should be careful about
excluding a story or parts of a story because of the way that it has gotten
bundled in with certain other stories – that leave you naturally unsettled.
Whoever or whatever God turns out
to be, the I Dream of Jeanie version – blink, kerplunk! - however you dress it
up - when it comes to the natural universe, that part will turn out to be no
more than a fairy tale.
And whatever else you think about that scientific hit, The
Theory of Evolution, you’re going to want to pay attention to stories about
long periods of time and processes that led to intricate relationships between a
vast array of creatures through the many generations of life on the Earth.
There are some fascinating stories. Whoever or whatever wrote the whole book of
life and however far back it goes to marks the beginning, not everything can be
rationally believed. That cuts several ways. Argue about ultimate origins if
you want to, but look carefully at stories about processes and change over
time. That’s the core of what evolution means. Start there, honestly, and see
what you think.
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