"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 

"Hey, hey, I'm the monkey, belly getting chunky"

This line, in fairness, was written a long while ago, when I smoked and ate food, and before I became the finely tuned athlete I am today.

But the question it begs is: are we related to monkeys? Or only to chimps? This is a question I ask myself every time I have a banana.

Several years ago  I read Charles Voldemort Darwins “The Origin of Species”. This was in the days when I was a Christian, and I was getting a little miffed at a lot of the simplistic explanations and dismissiveness towards anything scientific in the circles I inhabited. I think I read it  after I discovered that there were Christians I respected who didn’t think that a belief in evolution was incompatible with being a Christian. That in itself was a bit of relief. It’s very painful cutting off the blood supply to parts of the body, for instance the brain, because you happen to think that God wants you to.

So I read the book and the lightning didn’t strike. I mean the judgemental lightning. The book itself was never going to set the world agog as pure literature. It is very methodical, detailed, and to be quite frank a little boring. But it sets out it’s argument very clearly, and it was a kind of revelation to me. It enabled me to think about the world as it actually appeared to be rather than as I had been told it was by years of  fairly “fundamental” evangelical christian upbringing. And as a result I found myself breathing air that felt a little bit fresher and more honest.

If you like reading and are the littlest bit interested in the why’s and wherefores of our being here then I would recommend it. But if you have faith, don’t expect it to take your faith away. Belief in evolution has nothing at all to do with belief in God. It only messes with the world view of a particular kind of mindset that boxes God into a corner as a kind of Magic Conjurer behind the Curtain.

It happens that these days I would describe myself - simply in regard to faith because this is not a label that has loads of other beliefs attached to it - as an agnostic atheist. Google it. But that fact is nothing to do with Charles Darwin, who only ever described what he observed, and he observed a lot. He simply, and really quite bravely, drew the obvious conclusions in an age where the power brokers were using the bible as a science textbook. As some still are in parts of the world. He is esteemed for his incredible thoroughness and clarity of thinking. Not for declaring “Avada Kedavara” in the face of the Almighty.



"Hey, hey, I'm the monkey, belly getting chunky" is from my song A Cord Of Three Strands (unreleased).