Today is Chucky D.'s 200th birthday. Cue balloons and cake and hookers and drugs. Biologists do it up RIGHT!But after that, down to business. An article from CNN commemorating the birthday has this scary -- er, terrifying -- no, apocalyptic passage:
"A Gallup poll released this week shows that 39 percent of Americans say they 'believe in the theory of evolution,' while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36 percent don't have an opinion either way. This follows an earlier Gallup poll on the issue, conducted last May, that found only 14 percent of Americans believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. Forty-four percent believe that God created human beings almost overnight within the past 10,000 years, and another 36 percent believe that God guided humans' evolution from animals over a much longer period of time."
Wait, what? WHAT?! These numbers cannot be right. There's no way. There's no POSSIBLE way that only 39% of Americans accept the theory of evolution. No. Uh-uh.... But this is GALLUP. They do this stuff all the time. I can't believe that Gallup would botch the numbers that badly.
FOURTY-FOUR PERCENT of people think that an invisible man created humanity out of nothing, instantly, in the past 10,000 years. The U.S. population is around 300 million. That's equal to 132,000,000 people who think this. Millions and millions of people. That is a huge, scary number.
Now of course I could rant about this all day. (And I might.) But I'm not interested in arguing with people who are so committed to their delusions that they are content to fly in the face of reason and evidence and logic to believe in a fairy tale. That's... well, it's not good, but there's no use arguing with those people. No, I'm after that 36% that believe "God guided humans' evolution from animals."
Honestly, it reminds me of parents who try to teach their kids about Santa Claus. When someone supposedly reputable (your parents) tells you the story of a magic fat guy who breaks into your house and leaves toys, you believe it because you're a dumb kid. As you get older, you think of questions: at noontime of Christmas Eve, was he delivering toys to Chinese kids? What about houses without chimneys? How does he fit billions of toys in one sleigh? If Santa is flying around, does he coordinate with air traffic control to make sure his flight path is clear? And parents, rather than admit that it's a story (albeit an important character-building one), perform mental gymnastics to explain away these questions: Yes, he starts in Australia and spends one hour in each time zone, following midnight around the world. Sometimes he goes through doors or windows if there's no chimney. He periodically goes back to the North Pole to pick up toys when his sleigh runs out. And yes, Santa obeys all relevant aviation procedures while in flight, and respects the proper no-fly zones in hostile countries (where he hands toys out to relief workers to distribute).
This is similar. People already believe in one story, and they are so desperate to cling to that story -- even though the truth is much easier and simpler to accept -- that they perform some quite impressive mental gymnastics to keep the original story intact. For some reason, people have this idea that "reconciling faith and science" means that faith and science need to coexist in the same place at all times, otherwise you're believing in one in exclusion to the other. Why does believing in God AND evolution mean that the two are directly related? Why can't God's involvement in evolution be no more or less than his involvement in everything else that goes on? Why can't God be God and do godly things, and let biology explain evolution?
Let's take the belief of this 36% to its conclusion, lest we rest our faith on half-baked ideology. Let's pretend that God is the manipulator of mutation and recombination and multiplication, He guides the amino acids to their destinations, He arranges the codons and the proteins and His divine hands fold our tertiary and quaterniary structures into the Holy Puzzle that constitutes our being. He is the force that drives us to eat, and sleep, and hunt, and procreate. He has crafted ecosystems over millions of years by piecing together the genes for sharper claws, stronger wings, and longer beaks, and breaking and re-making the environment to favor those children whom He saw fit to grace with the fruits of His sub-cellular works. (Still no word on what the deal is with the platypus.) But now we have a problem. Evolution is directed by our mutations, our DNA, our chemical gradients. If God controls our cells, then that means our action potentials and our neurons and everything is also under control. We've now given up a whole big chunk of philosophy: the idea that our decisions and actions have some consequence, and that we have a free will to speak of. Now, I'm not a philosophy or a religion major (ahem), but I think that's a major plot point in the Deist worldview: you must act a certain way, and consciously make decisions that would please God, or be punished. But with our brain tissue under wraps, God controls what we think. Our decisions are not our own, and therefore our behavior cannot be used to judge us.
Obviously this is ridiculous. Now you can probably come up with all sorts of conveniences and plot twists and contrivances to try and make your theory sound LESS ridiculous (God only influences the environment, not our bodies! God influences chance events but doesn't make crazy things happen -- except for miracles! etc.), but that's just proving my point.
Which is this: the truth is simple, it doesn't need to be complicated by trying to mash together two theories which work perfectly well on their own. Let God be God, out there doing whatever it is God does, and let our biology and our physics and our evolution be as they are -- as we know them to be.
Also: God's not real. But I'll settle for separation of church and cell.
No comments:
Post a Comment