A Case of Mistaken Identity

I think I've had the wrong perception all along. When I first started my "search for truth" I thought that the controversy was between evolution and creation. Looking at the blogs, comments, and rants it seems that the majority of the rants are from the atheists aimed toward the Christians, fundamentalist Christians in particular and from the Christians toward the atheists. Many creationists, particularly those in the ID camp support evolution. I have a sneaking suspicion that evolution is just the atheist's way of promoting their ideology and creation is the fundamentalist Christian's way of promoting theirs. Maybe that's why the so called evolutionists are opposed to the ID movement even though they support the process of evolution. It takes the wind out of their sails.

Singular or Plural

A comment on a previous blog got me thinking about the number of creators. It seems probable to me that something or someone was involved in the building of the universe and life but was it just one being or many. Many early religions believed in a number of gods. While this may have been because they didn't have the information available to us today to make their decisions, there must have been some evidence for it for so many people to believe it. Even in the Bible there are references to the God of Israel being, "mightier than the other gods" inferring that they believed there was more than one god.
I can't think of strong support for either option. I don't know why there couldn't be many creators if there was one. There does seem to be differences in the "powers" needed for certain events which may indicate different creators involved at different points. For example, creating all of the matter and energy in the universe would be a more difficult task than manipulating the genetic code to create a new species. On the other hand, one creator could have used different amounts of power. I wonder why the number of gods in people's beliefs decreased over time? Was it just inconvenient to have to appease many?

Human Evolution Continued

I was looking at the human population growth over the years and the growth curve is downright scary. There are now about 6.76 billion people living on this planet. 70 000 years ago there were less than 10 000 if the forecasts are correct. It took 60 000 years to get to a million. At 1 A.D., there were 200 million. We reached one billion only 200 years ago and three billion only 50 years ago. According to the human evolutionary tree, we evolved from homo heidelbergensis who existed from 600 000 to 400 000 years. There was a very small group of these human precursors but yet they went through many evolutionary steps in those 200 000 years to get to homo sapiens, us. Why are we not seeing evolution now? Why have we not evolved in complexity in those 400 000 years? There have been more people on earth in the last 200 years than there has been for the entire 400 000 years before this. The more people, the more possibilities for random beneficial mutations and the greater the probability of evolving. Not only that but we have greatly increased the mutation rates. With the production of pollutants, nuclear waste, and hazardous chemicals, our mutation rate should be much higher. Human evolution should be happening at an exponentially accelerated rate in this exponentially growing population.

Recognizing a Creation

What constitutes a creation? When do we decide that something is not a haphazard result of chance? We would recognize a computer, a picture of a computer, a row of trees, or a house as something that a human thought about and made. What does SETI look for as a sign of intelligence from other solar systems? In the movie Contact the script writers decided on a set of prime numbers as something that aliens might send in order to let others know that they existed. This would differentiate an intelligent signal for the random, haphazard background radiation in the cosmos.
I think it comes down to probabilities, organization, and patterns. A chair is something we recognize as being a creation. I saw a story of a person who makes shapes out of living trees. He twists, binds, and moves the trees as they are growing to create weird and interesting things. If he made a chair out of living trees in the middle of the forest and someone was to come across it, they would still probably conclude that a person created it although their curiosity would certainly be aroused. Probably no matter how "wild" the weird tree shape guy would make the chair look, people would still conclude that a person made it because the probability of trees growing into that shape by themselves is extremely small. Trees in a row would also result in the same conclusion. You could move every third tree off a random distance or even have a short row of ten trees and we would still conclude intelligent creation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it takes very little organization, complexity, and pattern before we recognize something as intelligently made. I can't imagine the human body as a result of chance. The probability would be infinitesimally small.

War and Peace

In a war there are usually two sides, two enemies that are fighting each other. They fire missiles, shoot, or snipe at each other hoping that eventually their side will gain enough ground to defeat the other side or at least weaken them enough so that they are no longer a threat. War is basically destructive. Both sides are trying to destroy the other. Sometimes this debate between creationists and evolutionists seems like a war. Neither seems inclined to begin any peace talks or look for common ground to form a compromise. War also creates sides. It needs the "them" versus "us" mentality to keep the war effort going. In the great debate, the efforts to bring people into your "camp" and have them on your side is also ongoing. It is going on in politics and the courts. War is about being closed minded. You need to block out the truth that the other side are human beings and probably a lot more like you than you'd care to admit so that you can justify shooting at them. Perhaps we need some peace talks. Perhaps we need a group of people to initiate some mediation between the two sides because war is destructive and costly for all who participate. Our efforts and money would be better spent on looking for answers.

Spiritually Oriented

I have been thinking more about the strong move toward religion in the former Soviet Union after 70 years of communist regime and their strict following of scientific atheism (see yesterday's blog). Is the belief in God or gods universal among cultures? I haven't been able to find verification and I am not an expert in the field but I think that every single culture that exists in the world has a belief in a God or gods. From the deepest jungle to the most isolated group in the Arctic, each society follows some sort of religion. Why would this be? Why didn't some groups come up with other possibilities. Why didn't some decide that something like evolution or aliens were responsible for the existence of life? The tenants of these two possible explanations do not seem any more far fetched than the existence of a Supreme Being. Wouldn't it seem logical that some group take one of the other possible explanations? The explanation that comes to mind is that within humans is a spiritual part that looks for God. There are many questions I have about the "God" explanation but the ubiquitous belief system seems to be a point in its favour.

Russian Religious Revolution

We had supper on Sunday with a couple who moved from Russia a number of years ago. They had a friend over who had just moved from Russia last Sept. We got talking about religion in the former Soviet Union. They talked about the new religious freedom in that country and the increase in church goers. I looked up a couple of surveys on religion in Russia and they both listed people who don't believe in God as less than 20 % of the population. I spend a month in the Soviet Union in 1986 when Gorbachev was just beginning to thaw the cold war and it was a very different situation, at least on the surface. The church buildings we saw in public places had either been turned into museums, been boarded up, or had been turned into warehouses and factories. The ethnic group to which I belong lived in the Ukraine and they told stories of the Stalin purges where anyone with a leadership role in a church was hauled off to Siberia, never to be seen again. Those who professed religion were denied promotions, ridiculed, and sometimes imprisoned. Religion was the opiate of the masses and the communist government did what they could to see that it was eradicated. Schools taught scientific atheism and evolution as fact with no other alternative. For 70 years the communists were in power which equates to about three generations of school children being indoctrinated with its teachings. Why are the vast majority now turning to religion?
One possibility is that it is a backlash against authority. People tend to push the other way when someone is forcing them down a certain path. It would seem odd that a back lash would last this long since it's been about 15 years since the collapse of the communist regime. Another possibility is that people search for meaning in their life and when they did not find it in scientific atheism, they turned elsewhere. A third possibility is that people tend to go with what makes sense. Looking at the universe with its trillions of solar systems and complex life forms and saying that it just happened is a hard sell. They often turn to other explanations that better fit with their view of logic.