My mother was with the Salvation Army. She traveled all around the country, playing a clarinet on street corners, complete with the little red bucket and everything. With that kind of background one would suppose she was a fundamentalist. She was not! From a very early age she taught me that the Bible was broken down into many divisions. She told me that it was written by religious men who tried to understand the world through a religious slant. She preferred the King James Bible, she never told me why, and she taught me evolution.
Mom believed that a God that was great enough to create the universe was great enough to set up mechanisms whereby said universe could continue to grow, expand, and adapt. She believed that natural laws were put into place for just that reason, and once set up, God rarely, if ever, messed with the design. She did not believe in a literal Adam and Eve, and rejected the parting of the Red Sea outright. She viewed these stories as the efforts of men of limited scientific knowledge attempting to explain what was clearly out of their reach. And she was a Louisiana woman in the 1950's! That's pretty darn good any way you slice it!
And she left me with that mindset firmly embedded in my little Cajun head. She taught me to seek the moral lessons in the Bible. Just because someone wrote the story of Adam and Eve, which was clearly a metaphor, it didn't negate the moral teachings of Jesus. As a matter of fact, most of what Jesus taught was in the form of stories. He knew the people he was dealing with, and he had to give them his lessons in a form they could understand. There was no actual good Samaritan. He picked what the Jews considered to be the scum of the earth to demonstrate a moral point. This didn't make Jesus a liar, it made him a good Rabbi.
So we come to the subject of evolution. I can tell you categorically that I do not believe God Almighty spit in the dirt, formed a clot, and fashioned a man. I also do not believe that he jerked a rib out of said man and formed a beautiful teenage blonde wearing only a fig leaf, her soft blonde curls falling tactfully over her firm, pouting breasts, though I will admit that such a vision does peak my interest.
As I grew, and read more, I began to learn that after creation, or formation of living molecules, said molecules began a horse race toward improvement. The laws that God put into place worked well. The better molecule made more molecules like itself, and those molecules had a better survival rate than say molecule 101. And those molecules grouped, formed and reformed until primates appeared. Along the way good designs were kept, and bad ones fell by the wayside. Such a design is the reptilian part of our brain that keeps out adapting functions functioning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain. To quote part of this article " Under this model, the "neocortex" represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the "limbic brain" refers those brain structures, wherever located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that arose during the age of the mammals; and the "reptilian brain" refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behavior and other "reptile" behaviors. The three brains are said to act in coordination or competition in this variation of the model. While there is only general scientific consensus on the applicability of the model, some people find this to be a helpful model because of its broad explanatory value." Could this be the "snake" that enticed Eve in Genesis?
I believe that our species is very old and complex. However I do believe that a few thousand years ago, as this process did its magic, something did occur that made us different. We became aware of self. We began to consider where we came from, why are we here, who made us, where to we go when we die, why do we even consider that there may be a place to go when we die, and hundreds of other questions, while an ape has one thought, banana! And, in a tip of the hat to the fundamentalists, perhaps there was a type of "Adam," in that at some point in our history there was the first introspective man, the first man who considered "soul," and, perhaps in that respect, God did, in his own fashion, "make man in(to) his image."
While watching the debate something hit me. They were going tit for tat about the human gene pool, and the scientific section was pointing out how very very close Cheetah is to Brittany Spears while naturally the religious group was insisting there was a wide gap between the two, but let me suggest something here for your consideration. Scientific method insists that a theory must be able to be tested. This is the empirical rule. You must be able to demonstrate the relationship of the exception as compared to the normal population. This rule is often used to quickly get a rough probability estimate of something, given its standard deviation, if the population is assumed normal, thus also as a simple test for outliers (if the population is assumed normal), and as a normality test (if the population is potentially not normal).
They explain that this is the main reason for their rejection of the divine, simply because the idea cannot be viewed and tested, the entire theory resting only in the mind of man. But let's say for the sake of argument, the gene pool between Brittany and Cheetah is close. Damn close! Notwithstanding outward appearances, when viewing the DNA there are no major differences, yet there is something that IS different between the two. Something you can't quite put your finger on, and neither side of the isle can deny its existence. A delicious difference between watching Cheetah eat a banana, and say, Brittany eating said banana. That's the reason we have Brittany, yet we still have Cheetah. That's the God particle.
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