I got partly inspired to post this because of videos like this, still pushing the “Intelligent Design” theory, even though other religious people accept the fact of Evolution:
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Since it’s Charles Darwin’s birthday, I felt like posting this:
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Thanks for the reminder, Yazmin.
Yes! February 12, 1809, was Charles Darwin’s birthday.
A day for atheists to celebrate.
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Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day.
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I have never understood that if one accepts evolutionary theory then they must be an atheist. Evolution does not speak to abiogenesis, but explains how that life evolved into many species. While not probable to atheists, it may be possible, as I see it, that a vastly superior entity may have initiated that life’s spark.
Was that entity a deity? If it was, it was not at all anything that resembled the deities of human imagination. I once described “Life, The Universe, and Everything” as the mere droppings of some entity, who was so far removed from humanity that it wasn’t even aware of its act or the events that arose from that act.
That is as close to a belief in a supernatural deity that I can come.
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Why would it?
Why would an “entity” do that - “initiate life’s spark”? For what purpose? To what end? None is apparent.
Or if it didn’t mean to, was just absent-minded or distracted and “dropped” things that resulted in - what? - the universe? life on earth?, what does that mean for us? Nothing I can think of.
Why strive towards a belief in the supernatural at all? It is surely a nugatory effort.
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Well of course, evolution conflicts with the biblical story of creation. So unless a Bible believer compromises and concedes that the creation story is just an allegory, they have an unresolvable problem with Darwin’s theory, and must therefore denounce it.
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No of course it means nothing to us. It was just an exercise in what I would accept if I thought a unsubstantiated supernatural entity might have started a Big Bang, which resulted in “Life, the Universe and Everything.”
And, why wouldn’t a super entity mess around with stuff? Look at all the stuff humans have messed around with.
And, there is a lot of life and nutrients in the droppings of any entities, so why not in the droppings of a super entity, which exists outside of what was nothing at the time he deposited said droppings? Or maybe it tossed its droppings into the membrane that separated its universe from the nothing that became ours?
The point is my imagination is as good as any other imagination, but I would have to stretch it that far to accept that “The Creator” exists.
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I understand. It’s a game of imagination.
Theological fun. With a very human superhuman.
“To be outside of nothing” could be a song in a musical about a social climber.
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Yes, you are correct, Liz. There are Christians that do think much in the Bible is allegorical, especially the Theologians, including many who preach to a congregation. They know that belief in a god that loves, guides and punishes humans, the Father God, is a comfort to believers, so they refrain from revealing any of their thoughts that might be otherwise.
Check these out if you wish:
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That was my game of pretending what if. Theistic evolution is a real thing. Theologians, who accept evolution, exist and do not have a problem fitting their God belief with it.
Science fiction by Parke Godwin, “Waiting For The Galactic Bus” is a novel about two superior beings, who get left behind on a field trip to Terra. Being bored during the early waiting period, one of the brothers mentally nudges a primate just a bit and the resulting chaos over the millennia begins…Humanity, Civilization, Religion with heaven and hell because the beings have residual energy after their bodies die. The bus to pick them up takes a long, long, long time to return to Terra’s sector of the Universe, and is not about to make a special trip to retrieve the brothers. It is an amusing tale, which continues in a sequel, “The Snake Oil Wars” but I have never read that one.
There is a much more convoluted set of novels by Micheal Greatix Coney, which involves an Arthurian tale, but the premise is the same; that a superior being makes a stupid mistake that advances a primate species, thus creating the problem of intelligent life that was not supposed to evolve.
I remember thinking about how believers accept that there was Nothing until God began to create. And if there was Nothing, then God had to be outside of our universe-to-be. I asked in a forum that if there was Nothing, then did God use parts of his body to create Something? Matter is energy and not nothing, so if the only matter/energy was God, then it must have used some of its matter/energy to create Something that is Everything, right? Which is why God is said to be in everything, right? It was an Evangelical Christian forum with a section designated as “Atheist, where you can discuss with atheistic thinking.” I got no converts to the idea of God droppings.
Nor for the corollary; if God created everything then who created God? That was my first atheistic question to our minister when I was very young in elementary school. A typical question I have been told for early questioning children, later move away from belief and on to atheism.
God, of course, just is and has always been, to which I replied in later years, that Matter/Energy just is and has always been.
I like “to be outside of Nothing” and may work it into a poem. Thanks, Jillian.
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Strange that a lot of REPUBLICANS want there to be Someone In Charge of Everything.
Someone Up There to provide for us, command us, instruct us, punish us. reward us.
A KING.
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No, evolution is NOT compatible with the Bible account of the creation of this little world. The human species was NOT created. Evolution is a fact.
There is no BEING presiding over this universe. And no reason to believe there could be such a being.
Footnote: I find C.S.Lewis’s theological and Christian-morality writings intolerable. (I have found that he got some political ideas right but that doesn’t exonerate him.)
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I got it. But, Jillian, evolution does not have anything concerning abiogenesis. It only speaks to how life evolved, not how life began out of non-life. That leaves room for speculation on the part of believers.
A lot of Democrats and Independents also want to believe that there is Someone In Charge of Everything, too. Plus, even some non-theists want there to be a “Reason” for life, and a “Purpose” for human beings, and spend their lives sometimes searching for those things. There is no reason or purpose for life, even human life. It simply is. But if there is one that is needed, it is the same as all life, continuance of its genes.
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The god of the monotheistic religions is clearly not good, going by the human conception of goodness. Going by that, if this cruel world was a deliberate creation, it could only be by an evil creator. (Just one little example. Multitudes of its “creatures” can only survive by regularly eating other “creatures”.)
No god made man. Man made gods. Anthropomorphic gods.
The one-god inventors stupidly insist “he” is good. It would be more sensible to call “him” an evil god.
A good god could not do evil and evil is with us constantly. An evil god could occasionally do good for the fun of it. Could use apparent goodness, happiness, beauty, love to woo “his” human creatures - and then laugh as they suffer and call upon “him” to help, cure, save them. Such a story would at least fit with our experience.
No omnipotent god can be invented who is not a sadist.
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True, no one has yet discovered what makes life. What “life” is.
But the god explanation is not merely unsatisfactory, it is indefensible.
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I don’t disagree, but that is not what the theists believe and many have fit their idea of God, the Creator, into Evolutionary Theory. That is their choice, as much as we might reason that it is a form of childish thinking or possibly insanity. It IS satisfactory to them and they will defend it with all their capacity to do so.
I would rather have believers that accept evolution than believers that will only accept the fairy tale version of creation.
The point I have been attempting to make is that accepting evolution does not make one an atheist or does not require one to be an atheist.
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The book you mentioned sounds interesting!
It’s a fascinating question to ponder - how the mutation that generated the beginning of the ability to reason in primates began, and evolved.
Was there ever a point where an ape looked around himself at the other un-mutated apes and thought - " who am I and what the heck am I doing here??"
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Well, Christians, who believe in a Creator Deity think that God did the nudging or that God made a separate creation within what was already evolving; The Garden, that is, with Adam and Eve, etc.
That is one of the suggestions about who Cain took up with…the other intelligent species that was an evolved primate on the planet.
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Their defenses fail. All of them.
It cannot matter what they believe as long as they do not have the power to impose an orthodoxy.
Yes, belief in evolution is not the same as non-belief in gods.
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