Creation and Evolution

This is adapted from my post to a thread on Polipundit's web site. The ACLU was at it again, and it proved to be a hot-button issue, with over 150 posts. Since most of them were quite good, I commend the whole thread to you. This post's title is a link to the thread. I hope you enjoy...

It seems to me that Creationists and Evolutionists aren't fighting over the facts, nor the implications. This fight isn’t about genomes and verses, laws and courts. It’s about fear. Evolutionists fear backsliding into the depths of ignorance and superstition. Creationists fear losing our ability to understand and control what we’ve learned, what we’ve wrought. They also fear that we’re creating a new form of superstition, that losing one form of ignorance only begets another, one we’re ill equipped to understand, never mind control.

Each is afraid of a simple statement: "I don't know." “I don’t know” what happens when we start reaching the irreducible markers, “proof points” if you will, of Divine Creation. “I don’t know” what happens to Faith when the mechanisms of thought are duplicated outside the human mind.

“I don’t want.” As a Creationist, “I don’t want” the Wondrous Void boxed up in a helter-skelter welter of dissertations, equations, and conferences. As an Evolutionists “I don’t want” to halt the quest. For God, ironically. But no, it isn’t about God, either.

I have a little pet theory. My theory is that God, in our daily lives, is about our relationship to our selves, our family, our village, our tribe, our nation, and the World at large. Determining the composition of lightning only tangentially affects our appreciation for, and relationship with, The Divine. I don’t believe that either needs to concede much to the other, for they address separate concerns. For example, even if we deduce the mechanisms of thought, how do we explain Free Will? Probability theory only goes so far, after all.