"A White Dove Flies In With The Starlings"

Evolution For Dumb Animals Like Me.

I want to try and get a grip, for my own benefit, but also for some of my Christian friends and relatives, the one's in denial about scientific evidence,  of my understanding about the theory of evolution and how it impacted on my journey through Life. And why it is important. It might not interest you in the slightest, but feel free to come along for this little ride if you like. Or simply to correct me.

In the scientific world the word "Theory" means, to put it in my own words, "The best explanation available at this moment in time. One that has been thoroughly criticised and tested, taking into account all the observations, and calculations and logic that can be mustered by puny human beings". It doesn't mean an educated guess. The two things are very different. Scientist's DO make educated guesses, but those guesses don't constitute a theory. They are merely ideas that needs to be tested.

There was a day when I believed the bible to be the Word of God but had also come to realise, after reading Darwin's The Origin Of Species, that the theory of evolution was not in fact an idea that was invented to attack and  dispense with my faith in God, but simply a well reasoned method of explaining the process of how organic life (as opposed to the fabric of the universe,  earth, the planets, the stars) had come to be the way it was. Again, two very different realities.

So I was trying to reconcile my faith and science. And I wrote a poem at the time, though it is long lost, questioning why it was possible to believe the words of Jesus: "For I tell you that from these stones God is able to raise up sons of Abraham", but not be "allowed" to believe that God could cause humans to evolve from lower life forms...famously, from monkey's. Human's from stones? Yes! From Monkey's? NO!

Huh! Why? I just couldn't imagine God sitting there thinking, "You know, this turning stones into humans thing. It's a doddle. But I just can't seem to get these goddamn monkey's looking the right way."

These days, long after Darwin, the process of evolution has been demonstrated again and again. I wasn't there at those demonstrations, and I don't pretend to understand the whole shebang, but there is an AWFUL lot of evidence to say that they happened, and that they prove the evolution hypothesis even more thoroughly than Darwin did. They show the way some members of species develop physical adaptations which, if beneficial in their environment, often lead to them being passed on down the generations. These little adaptations have been witnessed happening. They happen all the time. And trillions of little adaptations, over thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of years, add up to the sort of crazy sounding stuff that demonstrates...as conclusively as these things ever can be in the scientific world...that we have VERY GRADUALLY evolved from the tiniest of life forms. From Amoeba to A Me.

As a Christian this struck me as amazing. It made so much SENSE. God stopped being a Magician behind a Magic Curtain who waved a Magic Wand and made everything appear. She became an Artist, a Potter, who slowly, patiently, touched and waited, and nudged and waited, and caressed, and looked, and pondered, and breathed life in a wonderful and infinitely varied direction. Even if that only involved designing the first seed of life which held within it this Multi-Life potential.

In other words it enhanced my faith. And my reasoning. And the fact that I no longer actively believe has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. So it makes me very sad that some of my Christian friends and relatives feel duty bound, with a little bit of a push from some self deceiving, possibly charlatan, "scientific" authors, to try and deny and discredit the Science story. Or, if asked to  look at the evidence, suddenly say that it really doesn't matter  HOW life, our lives, came about.

But it does start to matter when faith files for divorce from reason. There are plenty of believers who manage to reconcile faith and reason in a way which doesn't make their faith look like a badly drawn cartoon.

We don't have to be at war with the observable world. One way or another, we are designed for living in it.


The line "A white dove flies in with the starlings" is from the Fee Come's Fourth song Be Still (My Beating Heart) - May 4th 2013