Didn’t I just write a post about this topic? Yes, I seem to recall that I did.

This time the topic comes to me from the most unlikely of places, my History and Systems of Psychology course. The topic of the week for the discussion board is as follows:

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was a direct challenge to the widely accepted church views on creation and evolution.What do you believe about evolution and creation? Discuss the history of Church/Science conflicts.

I expected when the discussion began that it would be a nice quiet discussion based on the facts at hand, as well as being relevant to the text and the material of the course. Instead, it has turned into an opportunity for the rabidly impassioned Christians of the course to pick up the flaming pitchforks. The first post on the topic started off citing scriptures and ended by accusing scientists of being “blind”, “not able to know what it is to be human” and “too prideful to see the truth”.  I am not usually the type to fall for responding to such a post, but this time I did. My response pointed out that there is no evidence of God, and that using creation itself as evidence was like proving the Earth is the center of the universe by pointing that the sun travels across the sky. I also pointed out a few logical issues with the person’s post such as her colorful use of ad hominem style argumentation.

So far I am the only person who has posted who has been on Darwin’s side of things, then again we agnostics have to defend each other, since no one else will. My opinion on the topic is that we cannot prove the existence of a divine being, and as such any theories that are based on the assumption that there is cannot be proven either. I feel that because of the fossil record and what we know of the way organisms develop that evolution is a much more likely explanation for existence. Religious groups seem to want to disprove or discredit evolution by stating that it relies on a series of “accidents” to create an intelligent being. The interesting thing about evolution is that it only requires one accident, the mixing of amino acids to form a few proteins, which can then chain together to form organisms. The rest of the process just requires a few hundred millennia to sort things out. The other argument that I have seen is that “everything” must have a creator. I like this one because it is sort of like my theory that “everything” must have a container. The flaw with this argument comes when you look at “God” itself, if God created creation, then who created God? Some sort of Uber-god? Maybe, but that’s just one step removed from the same problem again. So just like in my container theory, there is no solution, and the theory of the religious are once again invalidated due to an argument that ends up requiring an infinite number of adaptive explanations (due to the fact that every creator must have a creator).

Sometimes I believe that life would be easier if I did have the capacity to believe in the same things as everyone else, but unfortunately, my experiences do not allow me to have such faiths.