In the beginning, by some random accident some random particle blew up. Fourteen-and-a-half billion years later after helium turned into hydrogen and other elements formed and so on, and giant orbs of gas formed to become stars.
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, a star formed with a disc of rock and gas combined together to make multiple smaller orbs or planets orbiting around this star. 93 million miles away from this star, a particular orb of rock combined to make the Earth, water and life building materials. About 1.5 million years later a single-cell organism swam its way to life. Further evolution lead to multi-celled organisms that eventually grew limbs.
These limbed beings learned to walk, talk, fight, create territorial borders and create long distance communication devices. This is evolution.
Or, God did it. This is the easy copout to remove your intellect to explain your world.
The story of where we came from has become a long series of “evolutionary” explanations to give meaning and understanding to our world.
There is a concept called Occam’s Razor. It says, given two explanations, the simplest explanation is usually best. Simple is a poor word though. It should be the well-organized logical explanation is the right one. Well-organized logical explanations may sound complex, as they should be. But as you should know complexities are bound from simple statements of fact or proven sequences of tests that lead to a scientific theory. Charles Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution” is complex but his logic is elementary.
For example as Kenneth Miller says in his book, Finding Darwin’s God, quoting Darwin, “All living things are engaged in a struggle for existence.” Miller proves this by just tending to your garden, where Miller as a teenager witnessed tomatoes ravaged at the “onslaught of cutworms, red ants …” The tomato that survives and is desirable to eat explains Darwin’s Natural Selection. Miller and Darwin explain that you can predict this behavior in other things. For instance, you can see the same thing happen in bacteria.
E. Coli, under the right conditions, multiplies exceptionally fast. Scientist can track their adaptability and even possibly prove evolution. E. Coli can be killed with citric acid. Not too long ago Michigan State University’s Richard Lenski observed that E. Coli, after prolonged exposure to citric acid, became resistant; this research also found that you could pump good genes into E. Coli to treat various diseases.
According to a June 14, 2008 article in Times Online, scientists found bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol. This science helped create crude oil using E. Coli pumped with certain genes to eat organic material and create oil as a byproduct.
If one person or single entity did this, I would love to meet this “Creator” for the sole purpose to say, “Good work, man, but, why the wars and existence of hate and personal anguish?” If it was a sequence of accidents, all I can do is to make the world better than my parents and ancestors left it. Worrying about pleasing someone/something I will never meet or understand seems unnecessary. Science and evolution allow us to change our lives for the better rather than placing the responsibility on a divine creator.
Occam’s Razor is not about the easy explanation (God did all this) being the right explanation. It is about the simple explanation (natural selection or evolution) being the right explanation. Placing God as the creator offers too many opportunities to ask questions that there might not be answers to. Science uses tested experience to explain the world.
Maybe denying God is to deny the concept of belongingness to the world. By this, religion shouldn’t be doctrine, but rather an idea and have faith that the world can be explained by science. Science and religion, as cosmologist Carl Sagan said, are one in the same, for the pursuit of truth. They just differ on the path to achieve that truth.
This is not to say God doesn’t exist. It just means that at this current time science has no proof of the existence of God. But, if one has a sense of the supernatural, to them the experience is real and personal. Science can’t prove this as fact.
Scientists have repeatedly revised their story of origin whenever technology gets better or more proof is found in an area. Religions have not. This is where the fissure is, this is where things need to change and then maybe the world will be more connected. If people deny evolution, they are denying medicine, space exploration and advancement of human intellect. God and Darwin can coexist. Darwin could’ve been using science to explain God’s universe. If God actually reads this article and shows himself at a press conference then this article is null and void.