I was a child during the "space race" and became enamored with science at an early age. I was also raised a strict Lutheran evangelical. I suppose, looking back on it, that I formed a view that faith, hope and most of all charity sustain us when our scientific understanding of reality falls short. I have never believed that science could fail; only that it accomplished slow and painstaking progress toward more complete theoretical and more useful applied understandings. Like you, I continue to learn as much as I can about the current and ever sharpening set of understandings about our reality which we term the “scientific record.” Science and religion must coexist, I reasoned as a child, so the theory of evolution and theology must coexist.
If we can accept that the biblical Genesis explanation of creation is an oft-repeated oral history derived of a very old, perhaps even ice-aged scientific understanding of the origins of our reality, passed down with fidelity yet filtered through the lenses of contemporary civilizations of those early millennia following the worst stages of the last ice age meltdown, then some sense can be made of it. A barbell of Sumerian through Babylonian dominance to the north, and Egyptian dominance to the south, of course weighted the worldview of those pastoral wandering Hebrew tribes which in recent millennia ended up scripted into the canonized sayings of the monotheists.
Finally, genetic research has begun to unlock the actual corporeal and spatial evolution of our species. The series of humanity’s journeys from Africa to the Levant and beyond begins to emerge. Genetic research and the social sciences together explain right-handedness, a selective trait humans have bred into a strong preference. Do you see any reason that human sensations of the mystical and divine should not have also been selectively bred into our species, given its insatiable curiosity and longing for control, order and meaning?
In the end, I believe it matters nothing whether people succumb to the primitive Limbic centers astride our recently enlarged brains and maintain a belief in the mystical and supernatural, or whether a person by training and discipline of the greater masses of that organ comes to see the supernatural as a construct that covers the uncomfortable and unknown with the comforting and imaginative. As Douglas Adams once wrote, such people watch God disappear "in a puff of logic."
There are plenty of open questions in science today, not least of which is whether our historical worldview of a unitary reality must give way to plural or even infinite coexistent realities. The dizzying “E-8” theory of matter has led to some new subatomic particle discoveries. Dr. Lovelock’s Gaia (self-regulating planetary life systems) hypothesis has succeeded with a number of predictions already. The notion that inanimate (?) natural systems dynamically and chemically maintain an energetic environment with varied ecosystems in conditions most favorable for life forms to develop - regardless tectonic swirling of Earth’s crust or even the 30% brightening of our solar star - is so much more fascinating to me now – sorry, a theological treatise can't touch this.
This is especially so when you consider that stochastic interruptions in the gradualist's status quo - periods of extreme violence - provide a staccato in the long natural rhythms. These catastrophic periods clear or even destroy/regenerate habitats and communities for a harsh, usually brief and rapid strengthening and diverting of species who seem to will their survival. Five great extinctions have each changed the entire complexion of life on Earth in the deep past and the sixth is setting upon us now. Is this the harsh justice and kind benevolence of some higher power, or more simply the bumblings of a blind watchmaker named Nature? I cannot see that our choice in the matter makes a real difference in any sphere but that thin and fragile one, human culture.
So let us each stop our own violence, for nature will certainly provide. Let us unite our purposes toward the survival and extended development of the current top trophic species on Earth, humanity, and those untold others which support our continued existence for as long as that path remains open. Let us begin to act together on all that we know with reasonable certainty, for the actions of humanity have already proven a significant Force of Nature, even if unwitting and unintentional. Otherwise we become irrelevant, crass and by Charles Darwin's definition, not the "fitter."
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