Do You Believe in Gravity?
Do you believe in Gravity? Why? Have you actually seen Gravity Waves, or Gravity Particles, or the Gravity Fairy? Let’s assume not. So why do you believe in Gravity? Is it because you’ve observed that things tend to fall down? Believing that things fall down is not the same as believing in “gravity”. After all, it is gravity that keeps the moon up in the sky. It is gravity that causes the Earth to orbit the sun, rather than simply crash into it.
For that matter, do you believe that the Earth orbits the sun? Why? You’ve never been to space. Outside of India, it’s only in the last 450 years or so that this idea has been accepted. It contradicts the bible, which says that the earth can’t be moved and that at night, the sun hurries back from the place where it set to the place where it will rise again. And there was some bit of controversy at the time. But by 1835, the Catholic Church had dropped any official objections to the heliocentric model of the solar system, and now anyone running around claiming that the Earth is the center of the universe is deservedly mocked. But why? Is the science so much easier to understand, compared to evolution? Is it so obvious that every person to even look into the sky can instantly tell that the sun is at the center of our solar system? Or is it simply that we as a society, on this issue, trust the people who spend their lives studying, making observations, and conducting experiments that continue, on a daily basis, to confirm that it is so?
“Theory” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Why, then, do we not trust the people who have been spending their lives studying, observing, and experimenting on evolution, when they tell us that for the past 150 years, countless experiments and observations have supported the theory of evolution, and zero have not? Is it the word “theory”? When scientists use the word “theory”, they don’t mean “something I’m not sure about”; they mean “something that can be proven or disproven with evidence.” Fossils are evidence of evolution. The adaptation of countless animals to their environments while sharing traits with other, distant animals is evidence of evolution. A complex organ whose inner workings we only begin to understand is not evidence against evolution. Theories are often incomplete; Sir Isaac Newton, for example, couldn’t explain how gravity acted at a distance. This question went unanswered until Einstein’s general relativity described gravity as an attribute of curved spacetime. This doesn’t make Newton’s Theory of Universal Gravitation “just a theory” any more than Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is “just a theory.” Nor did it make Newton’s theory “wrong”, only “incomplete.”
You can believe in God and still accept evolution.
The assertion of Intelligent Design typically goes something like this: a particular organ, such as the human eye, or biological trait, such as DNA, is so beautiful, so mindbogglingly complex, that it couldn’t have evolved by random chance; there had to be a designer. This position denies the power and wonder of God. ID ideologues hold that God designed us and created us, and our planet, and the animals. Evolution allows that God created a universe of laws so fantastically powerful, so beautifully complex, that given enough time, that universe was capable of creating a world on which life would begin in the harshest, tiniest forms, and over millions of years, evolve into a lush, green planet, populated by complex and fascinating creatures, including, eventually, a race he would eventually choose to embrace as the proudest result of his achievement: humankind.
Is it the Book of Genesis that holds you back? Put yourself in Moses’s place. You’re about to set down in Scripture, in the Five Books that will bear your name, all the divinely inspired knowledge that Adonai has bestowed upon you. You want to start at the beginning. How can you expect the savages surrounding you to understand that He created a vast and amazing maelstrom that, over the course of 13.7 billion years has resulted in the human race, something so fantastic that He has embraced them as his children, above all the other wonders of creation? These people don’t even have toilets, and you expect them to understand even the concept of “13.7 billion years?” Of course not. You explain it to them in words they can understand - everything happened in stages, and the greatest stage was us, and God is very proud of us. And you trust that these magnificent creatures, these children of God, will someday develop the capacity to understand the whole and true wonder of creation.
And it will never occur to you that your own words will hold them back, not even for an instant.
