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Nov. 24, 2005 The evolution debate going in the United States right now has inspired a lot of people to make the claim that it is possible to be a believer and an evolutionist at the same time. Many at the same time will tell you that it is not possible. That evolution destroys the foundations of religious viewpoints and so should be shunned. Personally I have found one thing to be true about the duelist position. People that want to believe in both just seem to be trying to deceive themselves. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I see over and over people that want to believe in their all powerful creator, and at the same time believe in one of the most powerful proofs against him. One thing that all religious traditions have in common is their own little stories about how earth and life on it came about. They don’t all agree. The Bibles account of how things came about are very specific (and contradictory) but that is only one account. Hindus have another account, as did the ancient Babylonians and the Greeks. That’s part of what it is to have a religion. Its one of the main reasons that religion was invented in the first place. To answer the seemingly un answerable. To simply say that something was not answered did not seem to be an acceptable answer. Instead fanciful stories of gods and demons and spirits had to be invented to explain what we couldn’t on our own. Funny how these characters all had such human characteristics and frailties of personality. Some of them represented our human ideas of what ideal characteristics should be, some represented the opposite. Some were just the necessary supporting players in the show. How could it be any other way since it was humans, with human concerns and questions that were making these stories up? Now we live in a time when slowly over all of the intervening time many of the questions once answered by religion no longer need to be answered with escapes into the surreal. The mysteries of how the world works are little at a time being discovered. Yet still some cling to their indoctrinated beliefs. Unwilling to give up the programming of their family and society they hold on to justifications for the supernatural in a plainly natural world. Whatever the choice evasion its really all the same. Whether its an appeal to religion to interpret the “moral implications” of scientific discovery’s, or the oft cited cry that science and religion “answer different questions” it really all comes down to one thing. People advocating positions like this are unwilling to let go. The myriad justifications always sounded to me like the kid that gets caught with chocolate all over his face. He knows his mother is mad at him so he will make up any story he can think of to explain the mess on his face. When his mother shoots one story down he makes up another one. It can keep going as long as mom is willing to tolerate the behavior. The trouble with the religious evasions against science is that there is no mother for people to explain themselves to. The stories made up to protect your pet beliefs can go on and on as long as you like. When the one issue of the conflict between faith and science comes up we are free to stick our collective mental fingers in our ears and no one will stop us. Don’t fool yourself though. Religion and science are in conflict. To attempt to reconcile the two is requires that you lie to yourself, pure and simple. At steak are not just two different explanations for every event. The conflict between the two as pertains to the origin of species is not separable from the conflict between the two of them as pertains to the age of the earth or the origin or morals. That’s because the specifics of the story are not the real conflict. If Genesis claimed the age of the earth was 4.5 billion years instead of the customarily accepted 6 or 7 thousand it would still be wrong. If the two accounts of Genesis in the Bible harmonized perfectly with each other they would simply be uniform in their incorrect account of origins. This is true for Biblical accounts, Hindu accounts, Indian or Eskimo accounts or whatever other accounting for the origin of life you want to pick. All of them are wrong. The story isn’t what is important to their being wrong. It is the entire framework of thought. The framework that says explanations are to be had solely from your ancestors and from documents from the past. This framework tells people to ignore the proof the world provides for how things actually work. Religion is inherently conservative. It seeks to convince you that no matter what you are seeing in front of you, it is the stories that were handed down to you that are true and correct. To ignore them risks either some form of hell or maybe just the disrespect of your elders and those around you. It is a framework of thought that has been proven incorrect so many countless times. From the shape of the earth to its rotation, to the placement of the stars, all the way back to one of its more important tenants, the origin life on earth. I’m not saying that science can prove where life came from, I know it cant. But I do know that the religious stories for how it came about are pretty easily proven false. Most religious people will admit to you that 90 percent of the story in the Biblical account for the origin of species is pretty ridiculous, and the origin of man in particular even more so, but still people cling. Unwilling to give up the whole disproven framework they will deliberately choose to believe in just parts of their stories in a colossal effort to not give up on these strange beliefs. The scientific mode of thought is the only one so far found to be viable in the real world. It encourages the discovery of new ideas. Questioning what you believe is essential for this line of thinking to work. If your beliefs about how the world works do not fit new data, it isn’t the new idea or new data that gets thrown out, it’s the old belief. The burden of proof can be high some times to convince some one of the need to discard old beliefs but the possibility must exist. This is why the two modes of thought cannot co exist peacefully. If you want to be a scientist or you want to be a learned person, than you have to learn what science has to say about the workings of the world. You have to learn the scientific mode of thought. The mode that says evidence is required for any workable belief to exist. The mode that says that any belief, if confronted with damning evidence, must be discarded. This mode of thought is in direct conflict with the religious framework. The point of view that says no evidence can shake my faith. The best you can do is keep them separate, but that’s sticking your fingers in your ears again. Its not asking yourself the hard questions, and giving yourself the honest answers. As long as you try and balance the two in the same person there will always be something amiss. ------------ About the author: William A. Hurt is not a writer by any means, just an occasional participant in the debates that interest him. The author is currently serving over seas with the active duty military and is an active member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Help keep Church and State separate, www.ffrf.org Email: freethoughtadvocate@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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