Darwin Swings, Gets A Piece Of It, Sends It Foul
[Wherein I posit that our beliefs in the legitimacy of evolution are
based on a basic fallacy and will, in retrospect, be seen as naive]
My pal and I both had Harleys and we wanted to take a trip, and both immediately said, “the four corners.” So we went. Okay, you purists, so what if we put the bikes on trailers and drove out from San Francisco in style and comfort? As an aside, both of us had been closely following the O. J. Simpson trial, and we were only two hours into our trip, and still listening to a San Francisco radio station, when the announcer ended a song and told us that Judge Lance Ito had just announced that the jury had reached a verdict and it would be read at ten o’clock the next morning. Because we didn’t know where we wanted to go first, we didn’t know where we’d end up that first night, and we decided not to miss the verdict by being in some tiny town looking for an open bar with a TV, so we headed for Las Vegas and checked in at the MGM Grand, where we entertained ourselves, slept, had a gourmet breakfast at Wolfgang Puck’s place, and headed for the sports area where a gi-normous TV screen would have the verdict.
I remember how odd it was that the entire casino, basically a huge, huge room, filled with people at slots, craps, poker, roulette, blackjack, every game generating its own noise and its people talking shouting or cheering, all making a constant energetic hubbub of background noise and then moments before the verdict was read, the entire place shut down. No one was pulling the handles of the slot machines, no one was shouting commands to their dice at craps, no one telling the dealer to “hit me” at blackjack. No roulette wheels were spun. Over breakfast, Tom and I had asked ourselves if the people “out there” in the hall would even know that the verdict was about to be read. Gambling on the verdict was officially banned in Las Vegas, but we knew a lot of money was about to change hands in the next couple of minutes. Maybe some wouldn’t care; they knew they’d hear about it eventually, and probably sooner than later. But the entire place slowed down and then became quiet, and then silent, as the verdict was read, and then silent a moment more, and gradually the noise level came back up, but it was a little different. I guess there was more talking in hushed tones than before. Maybe the house was reflective, and that was it. If anyone shouted, I didn’t hear it, and the noise level reached its former intensity about three or four minutes later. But this isn’t about O. J. Simpson, this is about God, and I doubt you’ll read another essay with those two words in the same sentence, and from there I’d like to go in a different direction, and so we move along on our trip..
Our second night we were in Flagstaff, Arizona, and from there we kept one of our rooms for the next few days, unloaded the bikes, loaded our saddlebags, left the SUV, the trailer, and our excess stuff in the room, and headed for Monument Valley. After this, we would head for Arches National Park in Utah, then to Mesa Verde, the remarkable abandoned Anasazi settlement in Colorado, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the annual balloon festival, where we crewed, viewed, and rode in the balloon. Very, very cool. But it’s back to Monument Valley for an epiphany or two. (Spoiler Alert: it’s two.)
With full disclosure in mind, I will allow that there may have been some smokeage involved, but that would only have increased, but not misinformed my epiphanies (Damn! I wasn’t going to tell you that!) So it’s our first day on the road on our bikes, and for me it’s my first such day ever. I’d taken day trips on the bike from San Francisco. I’d go over the Golden Gate Bridge and as far north only as Greenbrae, the head west past Fairfax and into rural country past Woodacre out to the ocean, then north into Sonoma County and any number of beautiful roads past forest or ocean, your choice, and then back through Fairfax, south on 101 across the bridge, and home. But now we were “on our own” and on a trip, and I remember looking over the ledge at the tourist site at Monument Valley, seeing the road way down below, and that was where we were going, and I was hoping for decent roads, as I was still a new rider, but it was the lack of decent roads that day that taught me to be a better rider. Describing those lessons might be interesting for some, but we’re close to an epiphany so we must move on.
Riding around at ground level, my Alert Level went from orange to green, and as I grew accustomed, then confident and comfortable with the barely graded, often rutted dirt trails that the map had disingenuously called roads, I began to relax and get into the moment, and from there it didn’t take me but a minute to know that I was enjoying the heck out of this, but that something was different, and I went into multi-task mode: I was watching where I was riding, I was looking at what was around me, and I was wondering what was different. Was everything OK? Yes, I felt great. Was I too stoned? No, of course not. I never over-indulged, and hadn’t taken but one puff once we were down there.
What was it? Was I uncomfortable? That was the key. Once I answered that no, I wasn’t uncomfortable, I caught what it was, and it was simple. I had never realized before that by being in a car and looking out at something, you are Inside, and that is Outside, that they were two different environments, and I’d never before made that distinction. But now I was Outside and looking around, and it was different. Of course that makes sense when you read it, and it would to me too, but this was a new, clear, visceral understanding, and it was simple, nothing earth-shattering, and I dug the new knowledge and I rode on. And soon I came to another understanding.
We were riding around between these 1,000 foot-high Mesas, which are these cylindrical pillars about a mile around that stand straight up from the ground and end in flat, featureless surfaces. Just as the ancient Colorado River gradually ate away at the stone and formed the Grand Canyon, so an ancient ocean ate away at this forlorn ground, leaving only a few pillars of stone after it had passed into history. And there I was, riding around between these pillars, and during one of our many scenic pauses, I got it: see the tops of those Mesas over there? The tops of those used to be the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, they’d find fossilized and shells and stuff from the ancient ocean bed up there. Just like they’d found fossilized shells in the Alps. Where I was riding used to be ground beneath the bottom of the ocean. And right then I understood geologic time as I had never understood it before. Before, it had been a concept, and I understood it as a concept, but this wasn’t a concept, this was evidence, this was the real world and I understood at once that I now had a different understanding of geologic time, that the inexpressible vastness of time now made more sense to me, and with that came an understanding of the… enormity… of time, and how possible, how logical it all was. And that was the second epiphany of the day. With those two, and the whole being-on-a-motorcycle-in-beautiful-weather-in- Monument-Valley thing, and everything else involved, it was a really nice day. I have photos.
Last Friday on the Bill Maher Show, a United States Senator told us that he did not believe in evolution, and I hadn’t thought about that until now, but when I did…
I feel sorry for that guy. I feel sorry for the millions of Americans who agree with him. I know there are millions or billions who also believe that, but I’m an American, I was brought up on an American culture, so that’s who I know and that’s who I’m talking to. I’m talking to you, Americans, because I know you can do better.
In 1650, Bishop John Ussher calculated the date of creation by reading the clues in the bible. He read that Adam lived to be 930 years (and bore his first son at 130), and Methuselah lived to be 969 years old, and he added that to his calculations. Then he went to the Genesis 5, the chapter with all the ‘so-and-so begat this guy, who begat that guy, who begat the next guy…’ calculated how many generations there were, then estimated the average length of each generation, multiplied by that, came up with 3,442 years, calculated the year of the beginning of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar at 562 B.C., which was where the names in the bible left off, and subtracted the 3,442 years since his reign, added the two together, subtracted from the current date, 1650, and came up with 4004, B.C.
As a fun aside, let me rip off an unattributed source, probably from wikipedia:
A London bookseller named Thomas Guy in 1675 began printing Bibles with Ussher’s dates printed in the margin of the work. Guy’s Bible’s became very popular—though their success might be as much attributed to the engravings of bare-breasted biblical women as to the inclusion of Ussher’s chronology. In 1701, the Church of England adopted Ussher’s dates for use in its official Bible. For the next two centuries, Ussher’s dates so commonly appeared in Bibles that his dates “practically acquired the authority of the word of God.
For the exact date, Ussher figured that God would do the deed on a significant day, like an equinox or a solstice, and as when Adam and Eve found themselves in the Garden of Eden, the fruit was ripe, so it must be harvest season, and that solstice in that year was on October 23rd. Now come on, people, these days we should all know that’s ridiculous, but some of us still can’t let it go, even though you knew that. And then there is the majority who don’t know that that’s how it started, and they’ve been told the 6,000-year-thing all their lives, and they just won’t let go of it. That’s who I’m talking to.
If you people would care to look, there are tens of thousands of trained, experienced and accredited scientists out there who know the age of the earth, and then there are maybe a dozen fruitloops with any spurious kind of scientific background- or not- who stick with that 6,000 year canard. If you believe these deluded Luddites, then I’m talking to you.
In Madagascar, a lemur taps the bark on a tree, listening for the different sound when behind the bark there is a hollowed-out space where bugs live, and that is what the lemur is looking for. He taps, listens, then eats away at the bark until he gets to the food. If we believe Darwin exclusively, then we must believe that somewhere in the long-ago there was a lemur with the one-in-a-billion genetic mutation that impels him to tap on bark and discern the difference and understand what it means, and that that one-in-a-billion lemur reproduces and creates offspring with that same genetic mutation, and whose reproductive enthusiasm is great enough to pass the mutation down the line, eventually populating the entire species with that “successful” mutation. Well, I say bollocks. And that is the basic fallacy with which we legitimize what we think of as evolution. What if the plant or animal with the once-in-a-species mutation dies or fails to reproduce? Aren’t the odds of that happening greater than for believing that they passed it on and it became dominant? How many people do you know who play the Lottery have won? Anyone?
Millennia ago, and lasting for a hundred thousand years, an Ice Age enveloped what is today’s climactically severe Honshu Island in Japan, where somehow the beech tree developed a response to all the heavy snow and ice, and turned the climate change to its advantage, and the beech trees survived while others did not. Are we to assume that a genetic mutation occurred in one tree and that tree replicated endlessly until all the beech trees on Honshu were resistant to the weather? A genetic mutation? In a tree? And it passed it on? (I admit that my reasoning here is purposefully devious in that I have not allowed for the possibility that a genetic mutation might have occurred in one seed at the exact right moment when the climate changed, enabling this mutated tree to survive while all the other beech trees in the land perished. I acknowledge that this is, statistically, possible, but I suggest that the odds against it are sufficiently astronomical to dismiss it from this discussion. And this goes for all flora as well as fauna.) I think we’re forgiving a lot by accepting Darwin as inerrant, but this thing with the beech trees is too much. No, my friends, that was not a genetic mutation any more than the lemur’s learning about tapping on bark or the changes wrought in any other species of plant or animal, that was the will of God.
Understand, please, that I am not speaking of a humanized God who, as He is aware of all, is aware of the plight of the beech trees, considers the issue, conjures up a solution, points His finger and wills the matter resolved. Instead, I’ll ask you to consider an entity so overwhelming, so incomprehensibly… everything that… It… cannot be understood. Oh, it can be seen or heard from, but that is more of the same and comes later. Understanding God is far beyond our capability, it’s true, but it is not past our capability to look for the will of God. Think about a plant that grows by absorbing water and sun and minerals, and sometimes just water and minerals, and sometimes just water and sometimes just minerals and sometimes just sun. As simple an organism as a common weed will turn matter into energy, and then energy into matter as it grows. We look at it and understand it as the driving force of nature. Okay, I agree, but what is the “driving force of nature” but the will of God?
When a simple plant like a sunflower turns to face the sun every day, turning on its stem to keep facing the sun in its path along the sky, can we believe that a long-ago genetic mutation in one freakin’ plant caused the survival of the entire species? I think it’s a lot simpler my way, eh? Can it be that millions of generations of the plant perished until somehow this mutation occurred? Nope, will of God.
Look, when you eat, you turn matter into energy, and that, by definition, if you’ll allow me, is miraculous. Yes we understand what occurs on a chemical level, a physical level, a caloric level, and others, but what drives it? The process is a transmutation, and there is the miracle. Transmutation occurs, but what drives it? Look inside the transmutation and what drives it is the will of God. And that’s a really beautiful thing, when I think about it, so I like to think about it on occasion. Wouldn’t you? It’s not a full-time thing, you understand.
So I can’t believe that I’m actually agreeing with the Intelligent Design people, ‘cause I usually hate those bastards, but this time they’re right more than they’re wrong. They’re right that it’s God that’s causing the changes and everything, but it’s not the humanized deity they’re expecting. It’s children that need to humanize God; to understand God, children reduce God to a smaller, more human, more recognizable image, but as adults we should be able to grasp the more elusive, less definable concepts. And also: this whole “God told me” thing has got to stop. Some of you who say that are even sincere, and I admire that, but you’ve got to learn about solipsism, which is the inability to differentiate between what you think and what you know. Think about it, and how about some humility while you’re at it? Thanks.
So I still agree with some of the evolution stuff. Look, in Russia some people started raising foxes (and God help me if some of the facts here are slightly off, but the story remains germane), and after being raised domestically like dogs, by the third generation, they started changing to look like dogs. Skeletally, their muzzles decreased in size as they were no longer foraging, their coats grew more like dogs’ coats, and there were other changes. Within three generations. I saw it on PBS, so there. And everyone knows that antibiotics are no longer of much value, as the viruses they were created to defeat have changed, making them impervious to treatment. Everyone knows that the viruses have mutated to survive, and that is the general description of classical Darwinism. And I’m good with it. Darwin was largely right, he just didn’t add God to the equation.
I think that people are resistant to letting go of this ‘Intelligent Design’ thing because they’re afraid that if they agree with the scientific findings, that God will be eliminated from the equation. And it would be true that God has been absent from any scientific discussion, but you will not have that here. I believe in God, and I see His work in everything. I see his work in evolution. God is not nearly excluded from my view of evolution. God is the driving force and His will is done, and the God that works over billions of years is a God whose contemplation leads to awe. Mine is a God of magnitudinous and infinite proportion, capable of working His wonders over ages beyond our comprehension, over space and time and matter and consciousness in ways beyond our understanding. And that’s a really big God, and frankly, I think He kicks the shit out of the God who looks like us and knows every one of us and answers Sally’s prayers for an A on tomorrow’s spelling test.
We now know so much more than the tribal people who gave us the first written stories that have been compiled into the bible. Those humble people didn’t know what a cloud was, much less the sun or the stars. These were a primitive people, some just past tribalism, some still were still tribal. And yet their words echo today and rule much of how we think. A God that can produce, from start to finish, from flaming ball to sustainable world, this world and all of its history, all of it’s present and past flora and fauna, all of the planetary upheavals and… everything, and He did it all in six days, six thousand years ago. Now that’s an accomplishing God, and His will be done, no question about it, but the God that does it over four billion years is pretty special, too, if you know what I mean. And I see these nature shows, and every plant and every animal has developed its style of living and procreating, and each is a reaction to its environment, and I see the finger of God in each of these reactions, by which I mean changes, and I see it in the millions of years that it took to carve out the Grand Canyon, and the kind of geological time that it took to make a Monument Valley.
But then there’s the field mouse changing the color of its upper fur to match the darker volcanic soil, which would camouflage them against attack from predatory birds above. Their bellies remained as white as they used to be, but their backs darkened when they moved to the new lava fields as a home. This miracle didn’t take millions of years, it took a few generations, maybe a couple of years. I don’t think that God decided to move this tiny flock into new territory and issued a directive to change the color of their fur. But I see the will of God in it happening so rapidly. But I also have no problem seeing the changes that take millennia to unfold, and that’s what I wanted to say today to the people who disbelieve the unquestionably overwhelming, verifiable documentation that the earth is about four billion years old, and that humanity shared common ancestry with what are today apes and chimpanzees, but that we diverged and no, we did not come from apes.
I think God is inexpressibly beautiful for His way with this planet over the past four billion years, and yeah, a shout out to God for the way He handled the whole universe thing, and I am in awe of God and I honor Him as much as any man, woman or child, and my God took the time He took, and did what He did with us, and I respect that and I do not question that, for such is my faith. But I wonder why there are those who can’t see what I see, that God is greater than what they see, that there is more to see if they would open their eyes to see it. It’s not an illusion, it will be not a hallucinatory figment that will fade from one viewer to the next, this is real, this can be seen and felt and known if you are open to it. God is beyond comprehension and does what He wants and I can’t believe that He doesn’t want us to see His glory, know His glory and be awed by it. No matter how far you can see, you know you can always see farther, and I urge you to look farther, to look beyond what you see now. God will be waiting for you, willing to show you more, but for now, let’s let then be then. For now, look a little farther, look at the changes that take those millions of years and look inside the transitions, and you’ll see God, you’ll see more of God than you used to, and that’s a good thing. And let the teachers and the religious leaders see it and proclaim it. You won’t lose God, you’ll know and love and honor God even more. I know I did.