By Chuck Robison
It’s time for Darwin to retire. In 1859 Darwin published the Origin of the Species and from that point forward, Christians have been threatened by the implications of what he proposed. When I say Christians, I mean that portion of Christians who feel called upon to defend the Almighty. Imagine that……defending God!
That, however, is the crux of the problem. God’s defenders are currently composed of about 46 % of the American population, more in Texas, of course, and they have so misconstrued the issues in our evolution, that it is time to walk away from it and into a future given us through our own experience of personal evolution. Here are some examples.
Darwin did not propose the survival of the fittest. He proposed the survival of the least weak. That’s why you see in the animal kingdom that the sick, the infirm and the damaged animals are the food target of predators. This natural process strengthens the herd. And yet even Darwin’s most ardent detractors actually believe in the survival of the fittest. It is a key component of our current crisis of greed.
Einstein said that God does not play dice….which seems to contradict Darwin, but Darwin was trying to explain a complex system that had no seemingly workable explanation in 1859. Had he been writing today, he would have had a mountain of scientific issues to prove his case, from chaos theory to quantum biology. But the idea that this is a random crapshoot does not work in our world.
Finally, when asked about where did the first cell come from that was dropped into the pond, he replied, “God”.
God’s defenders feel it important to view the Bible as literal, despite the fact that it is filled with one allegory after another, and the meaning of these allegories changes over time, as does our understanding of everything else. But seeing the Bible as literal makes good sense if you are trying to connect with something totally currently invisible and available only through Faith, and you are looking for absolute certainty.
With this short summary, it can be said that Darwin has been so misunderstood that it is time to put him back on the shelf for a while.
But here is the main reason. Science is going to go on regardless of what Christians believe. In a free country, it is perfectly fine to raise children with a belief that the entire world is less than 10,000 years old and was created in 6 days. But not all parents want their children to enter a highly scientific and technical world hobbled from their beginning by a lack of understanding about how things work, and a fear of science.
When we believe that man showed up less than 10,000 years ago, fully developed and fixed for all time, we slam the door in God’s face by saying the creation is all done. By defending God against Darwin, we are not concerned with the past, we are actually trying to control the future. The very idea that man has no more growth or development ahead is dangerous. By losing sight of the fact that the human brain is still in the process of evolution towards a more perfect state in which a still-superior pattern of consciousness is possible, we tell God that He cannot move beyond where we are right now.
Evolution says that there are worlds and states that we cannot even imagine now,
because we are not sufficiently evolved to sense, perceive or understand these worlds. But as our bodies unfold and grow slowly over time, as God intends through an evolutionary process, we will experience new levels of consciousness and understanding that will require new skills and attributes not currently available to us now.
To become that future human, we need to conform our lives to a more simple lifestyle, reject the greed that our society breeds in us and be willing to be open to how God is working today in our world to bring us to a higher level of understanding and consciousness. And Peace.
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