Science Fiction served for a long time as a general
tool to cut through the fog we live under and show how better ideas could
work to give us better lives. It also explored all kinds of avenues we
could walk hand-in-hand while we fantasized how to obtain the missing
elements voided from modern societies.
Citizens who
vehemently defend the status quo look for whom to blame for changes
wrought by their own activities. Scientists don't hear such complaints for
long before they begin investigating: After all, don't you think that what
people complain about must be what they're interested in getting set back
right?
The answers science
comes up with aren't going to be the ones common people feel willing to
support. Biological scientists and archaeologists have been digging up and
opening up new insights on a regular basis for more than the past 100
years, and as they find their ways deeper into their subjects (I'm not
doing this on purpose, I swear) predictability has increased to a status
that cinches the reliability of their claims about evolution's role in
Creation: Whether or not God did it, Evolution is how it happened! It is
the method.
What I cannot
understand is, why the controversy? Why is evolution perceived to be a
threat against religion? If religion holds all the truths of existence,
why does it (as a body) worry that something will come along to knock it
off that pedestal? Why do religious leaders seem so unable to cope with
factual findings that offer extreme verifiability compared to their own
claims to knowledge about prehistory?
Old methods that
prove inadaptable get replaced. That's evolution at work: If the old
cannot be reconciled with whatever renders it obsolescent, its artifacts
will be soon deemed to be collectors' items, to be studied with a smile
that humanity used to do things that way, and also that we feel glad it's
not regarded as true anymore.
Don't you feel that
way about animism, the great-great grandparent of today's religions? It's
a cinch history will look back on us with the same condescension we look
back on the quaint beliefs of ancient hominids and wonder, "How could they
be like that?"
You think not? Look
at all the different beliefs there are that are different from yours.
Don't you wonder about them, "How could they be like that?" Do you not
realize they are looking back and folks just like you and wondering, "How
could they be like that?"
The role science
serves is to look at questions like that, and try to find accurate ways to
explain them. |
