Intelligent Design Creationism and Evolution as Myth
The entire problem is mixing of contexts, categories, paths of understanding. Our culture is fixed on the idea of One. One King, One God, One Country. One Vision.
The problem here is One Truth. There probably is One Truth, but human experience is simply too big to fit in a knowable One Truth. Most people muddle along in their multiple inconsistant truths and suffer the occasional cognitive dissonance. Some work harder and attain a delusion of One Truth. There are few things more toxic than that delusion.
Here’s a real easy and familiar example of One Truth not being enough: Sunrise. We all know how it really works, the whole rotating spherical planet thing. But if you go out early in the morning you see another truth, the bright circle rising from the edge of a flat (or hilly or mountainous) surface. I don’t know about you, I have no problem with the two very different versions of reality, and when the Moon is also visible I sometimes integrate them mentaly, picturing how the three are positioned. But mostly, the rotating sphere truth is good for doing astronomy and understanding where sky things will be in the future and thinking about space travel. The other truth is good for everyday life and art.
Back to the topic: evolution and intelligent design creationism. The big problem is that evolution is a lousy myth. No characters, just an endless parade of creatures where no individual matters, only the statistical efficiency of reproduction in slight variations. No forward moving plot - the popular idea of “evolving toward” is not part of the theory. No resolution. No way of giving life experience meaning by metaphor. The beginning is outside the scope of the theory, the end is too. The story moves far too slowly. Evolution is a cold, hard story with only two things going for it: 1) it is true, and 2) it is useful for understanding organisms.
The fact (and there is enough solid science backing it up that it is FACT, scientists call it theory because scientists don’t call anything a fact, theory as sure as science gets - Thog’s Theory of Special Gravitation* is also a theory) that it is true is a problem. Evolution is an inadequate path of understanding for human existance. If there is One Truth, either evolution is false or human existance is understood only in a cold characterless and plotless way.
ID Creationists want evolution to be false so that human existance can be understood through a better myth, one in which there is at least a character, an “intelligence”. If they are honest and not just biblical literalists in disguise, they don’t even care what that character is, as long as there is one.
The other side, backed by evidence and science, fight back against the wrong delusion. The real delusion, shared by both sides, is the idea of One Truth. The idea that a myth is only a fabrication of ignorance, that we are too smart to need myth, that man can live by bread alone.
God created this glorious world, as surely as I woke up this morning, as surely as that shining disk rose above the edge of the world. But that is not scientific truth, that is not something I can back by evidence. If there is only One Truth, one path to understanding, then I cannot know that and for me to say it is dishonest. I am not being dishonest.
Noah built his ark, as surely as you will someday have to stand up for what is right and preserve what is important against the consequences of bad things others do. Did it happen in a historical, scientific sense that can be verified by evidence? The question is a matter of trivia, the answer probably “no”. Is it true? The truth is defined by your character. Are you Noah?
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* Thog (the name may not be entirely accurate) formulated this theory before the Creationist earth existed. The theory is:
Where we live, if something isn’t being held up, it falls down.
