Recker's World
Reason 41
I started to understand evolution
One of the big changes in belief for me was going from Creationist to believing in evolution. There have been a bunch of mistakes creationists make about evolution that they spread, often wilfully. Here are some that really stood out to me as I started to understand it better.
· We did not evolve from monkeys. We simply share a common ancestry
· Evolution is a known fact. It is proven. It is not “just a theory”. It’s a theory in the same way as gravity is a theory.
· Evolution has no goal in mind. We are the inevitable outcome of millions of years of evolution. Not by share fluke.
· There is no such thing as Macro-evolution. Macro-evolution is simply micro-evolution multiplied.
· Abiogenesis (how life came into existence) is NOT evolution. It has nothing to do with evolution, except for the fact it started the process of evolution.
· It is not the teaching that life came from nothing. That’s what Christianity teaches!
Evolution is solely about how life came to evolve, not how it started out in the first place. There are only theories about abiogenesis, but one thing I did realise was that for anything like that to happen there had to be something to start it, something that had always been there. That didn’t mean it was a god. Any explanation for how a god could be there can surely be applied to anything at all, even basic life-giving elements.
As a creationist I certainly did my fair share of mocking evolution, but only because I didn’t understand. The Christian ‘understanding’ of evolution is actually a warped view of evolution. For instance, one of the creationist’s favourite arguments to use against Evolution is the ‘Pile of Blocks’ analogy. It is a classic example of how they just don’t get it.
The creationist takes a box of plastic blocks, say Lego and starts to shake the box. He then asks you, ‘How long do I need to shake this box before it will form into a perfect model of a house?’
Of course, you are going to answer, ‘That's impossible. Even if you shake that box for a million years, the blocks will never form into a model of a house’.
The Creationist then says something along the lines of, ‘If it's impossible for a house to form by shaking the blocks, how can evolutionists believe that life could evolve into what it is today - life, which is far more complex than this box of blocks? The chances of shaking a box and producing a house is far more likely than life evolving into what we have today!’
Of course, any person who even has a remote understanding of evolution knows this is an absurd argument. For one thing, a box of blocks are not organic life forms. They have no ability to grow or mutate, unlike a living organism, so there is no comparison. Secondly… and the biggest issue of all, the goal is to produce a perfect model of a house. The thing is evolution has no ultimate goal whatsoever. Human life evolved because of the environment, not despite the environment. This is where many creationists slip up. They look at it completely wrong. I used to do the same.
To understand evolution, the person who uses the above argument needs to look at their analogy from a different perspective. You shake the pile of blocks and you see what you get. You may find you have the perfect home for some other life form. Perhaps that life form would find it extremely comfortable and they might even marvel at how God created all these piles of plastic blocks especially for them to live in. These block-dwelling creatures will thrive. They may even end up becoming the dominant life form on the planet because of it. This is how evolution works. Those beings, which are best suited to their environment, are the ones that are going to thrive. All the others will become extinct or be forced to adapt to the environment.
For we humans, we found it difficult to live in piles of blocks so adapted and took the blocks and made houses out of them.
This is how it is for mankind. It is why mankind have turned out the way we are today. It was only inevitable that we would thrive. If the earth's environment had been any different, we probably wouldn't have or we would have evolved into something completely different. Maybe some other type of species might be dominating this planet instead.
I can imagine now that somewhere out in this universe there may be a planet completely different to ours where totally different types of creatures thrive. They may even come to our planet and see it as ugly an inhospitable. Oxygen may be toxic to them, water may be like acid. Plants and shrubs may seem like monstrosities. It's true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What may be amazing and beautiful to us as humans may not be the same for other life forms. Just imagine a fish trying to live out of water!
Trying to calculate the odds of human life evolving to what it is today is blatantly silly and missing the point. Evolution has no goal and it’s not trying to achieve anything. There is no house being built. What we have today is the inevitable outcome due to the ‘shaking of the plastic blocks’
