EVOLUTION
It seems clear that evolution is the explanation for all of life on earth and for the formation of the universe from the Big Bang on. I was introduced to evolution in college but that was in the 1950‘s and that was only 100 years after the publication Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. My college class on evolution was 70 years ago. Those 170 years is three times my current life span. So my lifetime has been one third of the time since the idea of evolution took hold and in my own lifetime, in the last five years even, there have been tremendous discoveries that have completely changed man‘s understanding of life on earth.
George Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest and cosmologist, who first posited the Big Bang theory of the entire universe exploding from the size of an atom but who also was a firm believer in the presence of God did this only twenty years before my college class in 1931. But I didn‘t hear about the big bang until I read about it in the National Geographic as a college teacher and was astonished to discover, after being acquainted with many creation stories including the Genesis creation story, that this was the wildest and most fantastic creation story of all.
But for me the tension between the purely physical big bang theory which required no presence of the divine and the human awareness of the divine in culture after culture, in every case omnipresent but differing radically from culture to culture has been something that I have not been able to deal with, being neither a scientist or a theologian. But like LeMaitre I find them to be completely separate and not connected with each other in any way. Evolution is how all live came into being and is how everything human has come to be through our DNA. From this perspective myth and religion are simply fairy tales, products of human imagination.
But at the same time, to me, it is quite clear that religion has been central to the lives of humans since we first became human. The divine in one form or another has been essential to humans. Lemaitre was sure of this, I am sure of this. Mythical stories seem almost to be embedded in us and guide humans through the confusion of everyday life. Faith in a God whom we cannot see or touch or hear is as real to many people as anything can be. And if people‘s religious identity is threatened they are willing to do almost anything to defend it, the cause of a huge number of persecutions and wars.
So I feel the fact of evolution in explaining the presence of all life on earth, including my life, a purely mechanistic, cause and effect random explanation is absolutely true, but at the same time the story of the creation of all of existence in 7 days, the Genesis story, is also absolutely true. And I have difficulty in syncing the two.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 