Creation
- Wade Robins
- Jul 1, 2018
- 3 min read
Many millennia ago when our ancient ancestors began to develop predictive intelligence they began to wonder where they came from and what happens after they die. To console their curiosity they invented creation myths and supernatural deities. Depending on where and when our ancestors lived the myths would vary. The Legend of Trentren Vilu and Caicai Vilu originates from South Africa while the Genesis creation narrative comes from the Middle East. A complete study of ancient world history will reveal another hundred creation myths. Religious people will be atheist to 99 creations myths, but 1 they believe. Because a the Fiji myth of a giant galactic snake god is crazy, but a talking snake tempting a woman to eat a fruit to commit sin is reasonable.
Fast forward to the age of scientific discovery. Using telescopes and mathematics our recent ancestors began to understand our place in the cosmos. Science discovered how stars and solar systems are actually created and also calculated the age of the earth and the age of the observable universe with peer review repeatability. Though no scientist has never claimed to know with certainty how life began on earth, science has explained with sufficient evidence how life has flourished into the variety we observe today. No one has yet to successfully falsify the claim of evolution and it continues to stand as the foundation of Biology.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I ever denied the evidence of evolution. Those who continue to not understand evolution are either uneducated or delusional. To explain the details of evolution would be a whole other volume of books. Some religious scientists apologetically adhere to a belief that life has evolved as we know, but God did it. This helps explain why a “designer” created animals with so many vestigial organs and functions and also why 99% of all species that once existed are now extinct, but it doesn’t explain the Adam and Eve narrative. There was never a first single male and female homosapien. In a similar way I never went to sleep as a teenager and woke up an adult, the evolution of one species has never given birth for a new species overnight. Evolution is a very slow process that takes millions of years.
Scientists also know how stars and their surrounding planets form naturally over billions of years in accordance to the laws of physics. Religious scientists may once again argue that the invisible hand of God did it, but we are still left with unsatisfactory questions. Similar to the mistake of vestigial organs and the 99% of extinct species, this God has created trillions and trillions of uninhabitable waste planets and useless stars. I imagine a frustrated designer crumpling up yet another mistaken design and throwing it over his shoulder. But after some trillion attempts he got it right. Also, according to the Genesis creation myth, God took a whole day to create the sun, but only took one day to create the trillions of other stars. I would expect this mistake from the ancient society who invented it because they didn’t yet understand the sun and the stars to be the same thing at different relative distances.
This is only a fraction of the problems with creation myths. As science continues to discover and prove the questions of our curiosity, religion continues to fade into myth. We now understand Zeus doesn’t create lightning, but some still continue to hold to ancient fictions of intelligent design. And for some religions like Mormonism, Genesis creation is still the pinnacle of spiritual teaching in the temple. If by extreme implausibility the invisible hand of a omniscience supernatural deity designed the universe and all life on earth, then it certainly did a poor job with so many unnecessary functions and obvious problems.
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