Modern Science: Dissolving the God Theory
As physicists, biologists, geologists, and cosmologists (among individuals from many other important scientific fields) have gone about their work over the last two centuries, they have systematically disassembled the God Theory. We now understand how distinct laws of our universe allow us to exist by sheer probability, not to say luck. The combination of probability and vast stretches of time negates any need for luck in your eventual existence, or even mine.
With no need for luck, we have no reason to assume that our existence requires any supernatural being and, without a need for a deity to aid you in coming to terms with your existence, the belief in one is an unnecessary extravagance. If God does exist, we would have existed without any divine interference since the Big Bang.
But did we need God for the Big Bang?
Decidedly, no.
There are many scientific explanations for the existence of the universe, and its hospitality towards life, that are much more probable than attributing it's creation to a deity (wiki: anthropic principle).
Any Creator that did intentionally play a part in the formation of the universe, with the intended result of our existence, wasn't omnipotent by any means. To go about making a human being by the processes that we know led to our eventual presence in the universe, is the laziest, most roundabout way to manufacture a product that has ever been proposed.
Furthermore, this Creator must have been malevolent, a sadistic purveyor who set the stage for a long drama filled with suffering, misery and death. Sure, interspersed with glory and beauty... all the better to offset the darker dynamics of life.
So why is religion so tenacious, defying reason and refusing to adhere to acquired understandings about our world?
Fear.
Humans tend to believe in souls and to believe that they are immortal spiritual beings. This concept is a mechanism developed to come to terms with man's obsession with his own existence, which is, in turn, the result of natural selection that began long before the first hominids ever evolved. All living things have survival instincts, religion is the result of consciousness infused amplification of this desire to go on living as long as possible.
Theists have a tendency to shelter themselves from the evidence that would defy their well wishing view of life. It is easy to discount the idea of single celled organisms eventually giving rise to a mammal when you don't truly understand the forces at work. Individuals that firmly grasp how mutation and natural selection function have no rational argument against its plausibility. To go on believing they must accept that it could have happened, but insist that it didn't, that God made us.
Creation pseudoscience seems to depend on the idea that natural selection and adaptation (their "micro-evolution") do occur. Noah couldn't have feasibly fit two of every species of animal that exists today into his Ark, so he must have taken "one of each kind" of animal (for example an equine kind, to cover horses, donkeys, zebras, etc.) and after the flood waters recessed they dispersed, adapted and diversified into the variety of life we see around us and in the recent fossil record. However this diversification is constrained by these "kinds" presumably at the genus level.
Contrary to this idea, a second definition for "micro evolution" is put forth by creationists, saying that animals can adapt, however adaptation can never result in a new species, disproving evolution.
Never mind that the ideas of "species" and "genus" are man made labels for poorly defined groups created by zoologists. Never mind that we have proven time and time again that genes from any organism can do their work in any other distinctly different organism.
Fruit-flies don't reject jellyfish genes. Nearly every animal in the world shares a common gene that produces sperm. Research has shown that this gene is transferable between species (for details Google: Boule). There is no barrier between species or kingdoms, except those that have been made with time, isolation and change.
Creation pseudoscience has adopted the terminology of science and set out to spread an educated form of ignorance, but it is not science, it is an attempt to imaginatively reconcile small pieces of what we know about our world with the writings of ancient and ignorant middle eastern tribesmen, and it repeatedly fails to stand up to reality.
Theists speak as if science set out to kill God. They fail to understand that science set out to find answers, and the answer was that there was no God to kill.
By Jacob Lewis
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