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So this is a rarity, I’m going to write a rant about something that has nothing to do with horror for once. Why? Well because it’s my fucking website, and I can write about what I want. But the other thing is that I am sick of hearing the same old arguments between evolution and creationism. This is, so far as I can tell, mostly an American phenomenon, however it is also a subject of debate in my country as well.

My Stance:

I am an Athiest. I was raised Anglican as a child until it became too much of a chore for my parents to drag me off to Sunday School in the mornings. I never had a bad experience in church, and I recall my times there fun — not because of the scripture reading and hymns and shit like that. That shit bored me to tears, no I was more interested in getting to ring the bell, do a few word scrambles in Sunday school class, and the opportunity to ring the shit out of the church bell when all was said and done. Then there was brunch, which I spent cramming cookies and other sweets into my mouth (On an aside, I find that the gluttony of the brunch in a Church basement hilarious since it’s one of the seven deadly) .

No, just like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, the idea of a God or Jesus Christ just didn’t sound very plausible. By and large, I look at the Bible as a morality story written by a class of people who were founding civilizations and needed a moral code. By comparison to people today, the writer(s) of the Bible (any one, take your pick) were highly primitive in intellect by comparison. The majority of the base morality in there is a guide book to not pissing people off: Don’t fuck your neighbours wife, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat. I mean these are corner stones to any civilization, they all translate to the basic idea that if we live in harmony and don’t fuck with anyone, they won’t fuck with us back and we can all live in unison. Great theory, and pretty much every other religion out there has the same basic principals. I’m not going to split hairs on all the questionable stuff in the Bible that we as a society have said are socially unacceptable (You know, stoning your disobedient kids, selling people into slavery that sort of thing).

Because here’s the thing: When it comes to religion, people still cherry pick what is acceptable and what is not. This is the book that some say is the word of God, and even the Pope himself won’t address the public and say you should stone your kids if they sass you off. There’s just some shit we don’t follow, and rightly so. The thing is, it all boils down to a matter of interpretation, and my view is that even the church realizes that it has to get with the times in order to keep the faithful happy, and inspire new people to have faith in a higher power. It wasn’t that long ago that Pope John Paul II was considering that condoms were okay, because the risk of Sexually Transmitted Diseases was a greater enemy than trying to convince the flock to deny millions of years of hard-wired genetic conditioning to do what the church tells them to do anyway: Be fruitful and multiply. It just so happens that the Church doesn’t always exactly like it when your being more fruitful than multiplying.

Which comes down to the hair splitter today, and the crux of my little rant here: The arguments that Creationism is the true origins of life in the universe and Evolution and the Big Bang theory are so much rubbish despite the strong scientific evidence that continues to support these theories.

Why Can’t It Be Both?

Faith is a powerful thing, I’ve seen some pretty fucking nutty things that people do in the name of faith. But I can’t help but wonder why Christians (every variation thereof) have such a hard time accepting the scientific facts that are being unearthed every day. It is the only faith that seems to feel threatened by the forward advance of science. That through scientific discovery, the story of Genesis is discredited, that Creationism is bunk. You don’t see Muslims arguing this, you don’t see Taoists, Shintos, Hindus — fuck even Scientologists don’t feel threatened by the onward discovery of the origins of our species and universe. These scientific discoveries threaten the foundations of these other faiths as well, yet you do not see these people attack the progress of science with such anger and resistance as Christians.

Why?

Now, remember how I said I was an Athiest? That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in a grand creator. Something created the universe. My standpoint is that whatever was powerful enough to create all existence is probably something so beyond my own comprehension that to try and attach human dynamics to it seem rather pointless.

And that, is really what religion is, isn’t it? Putting a human spin on things that we do not yet understand? I’ve read the Bible plenty of times in my life, and I can tell you that God acts pretty damn human a lot of the time. And why not? It was human beings writing about it. Humans who had no benefits of modern society, or the slightest understandings of the mechanics of nature around them. Whatever could not be understood was given a human trait and called a God. Every religion works like that. All the old pantheons (Greek, Egyptian, etc) had a God for every single thing that they couldn’t scientifically explain: Fire, Water, Wind, Life, Death. When Catholicism came around, they just took all the old Gods, put it in a metaphysical blender and mashed them all together into one big guy up in the sky. We’ve been in the sky, we’ve been to space, we know heaven isn’t directly above our heads, this is fact.

Does Heaven (or Hell) exist? I don’t know, talk to any dead people recently?

So if we’re so willing to accept certain truths about science, and that the religious world can adapt to some scientific discoveries, then why not others? Why is evolution so hard to believe?

God Works In Mysterious Ways

I am trying to say here is: Why can’t Creationism adapt itself to accept the science? I mean really, it would give you a lot more credibility. 

The way I see it is that evolution is more proof that there is a God, than Creationism is. Now that you’re finished doing a spit take, let me explain my line of thinking: As I said before, I believe that something created the universe, and this creator (sentient or not) is beyond our comprehension. The other thing to consider is that before the universe existed there was nothing. Ziltch, zero, nadda nothing. So if the creator of everything had no point of reference to create all existence how did he know to make planets, stars, life? Why suddenly people?

If you’re going to attach human characteristics to the thing that created us all, then consider some of the synonyms we use that also mean creator. One comes to mind for me: Inventor. Do inventors get it right the first time? Is the first prototype the final model that rolls out? Of course not. If we are so quick to attach a human face to a God, then why not in the idea of his creation of everything.

The idea of Genesis to me is interesting, because it tries to explain the creation of the universe to a society that really didn’t know much about anything. They knew how to feed and clothe themselves and build crude instruments and form a society. The idea that the universe was created in seven days an in the form that is very familiar to the reality we live in today is a nice little picturesque dream. But consider this for a moment from a matter of perspective. Not just from the society spawned the story of Genesis, but a perspective of a neigh omnipotent being that has the power to create with but a thought. Seven days? Before the universe existed days and numbers didn’t exist. Really if you think about it, “days” did not have a definition prior to the creation. Numbers are a human creation. We use them to keep track of things. Numbers can be simplified. If I were to accept the idea of Genesis, I would have to say that it was explained in simple terms to try and understand a concept that is really, beyond our ability to reasonable explain.

So when it came down to creating all life on this planet, perhaps this so-called creator did start with single celled organisms and worked his way up. I mean, how is that impossible to believe? It’s the concept as seeing the creator as an inventor. Put a logical progression into the concept, and perhaps Evolution can be something easier to swallow.

I am not telling you that your faith is right, or wrong. What I am telling you is that when overwhelming evidence suggests that the existence of our universe is vastly more complex than anyone first though (and I mean anyone, you, me, everybody on the planet), why see it as an attack on your faith? I mean, it’s all a matter of interpretation. Faith can be unshakable, but it should be mutable, with room to expand and grow to accept new concepts that we learn about the nature of the universe we live in. As I said, I think these discoveries be they ancient fossils found in Ethiopia, or the experiments being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider, these things shouldn’t put you faith in question — it should strengthen it. It’s proof of a more complex existence out there, and wouldn’t that say more about the creator you choose to believe in? He/She/It is the creator of everything, and you’re going to settle for a story about two people and a snake? To each their own, but I think that’s doing a discredit to the faith you believe in.