Don’t confuse two different things

Dear Editor,

Ropati V. I’m afraid you are confusing two very different things. Evolution is not the same thing as origins.

Evolution is what happened after the earth began. Evolution does not in any way address HOW it began.

That is a completely different issue. Evolution is a fact. It has been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt. Even the Catholic Church accepts almost all aspects of evolution.

As for beginnings or origins, that is a different scientific question.

As Wendy notes below, Lawrence Krause and others have put forth theories about how a quantum fluctuation may have brought the universe into being.

Others such as Sir Roger Penrose have theorized that the universe constantly recycles. In trillions of years it will essentially dissolve, and without matter, there is no space, and without space, everything goes back to a single point, and the whole thing can start all over again.

Our universe may be eternal. The simple fact is that we still don’t know. What we do know is that there is not a single bit of compelling, objective evidence for any supernatural being.

There’s no good reason to assign the universe to some god. Our ancestors thought the gods brought lightning and floods, and drought and pestilence and volcanoes and earthquakes and comets - and all of these and more have been proven wrong.

Giving a god credit for things we don’t understand is called the “God of the gaps” argument, and it’s a terrible argument, particularly since those “gaps” have almost disappeared.

There are but three things we really don’t know yet that believers assign to their god because we haven’t figured them out. One is how the universe began, the second is how replication first occurred in order to start life, and the last is how consciousness works. 

There are very good scientific theories for all of these, and no good reason to assign them to the gods, until we’ve completely exhausted all other options.

As for the garden myth, it’s a story of horrible child abandonment. Yahweh creates the kids with no knowledge of good and evil. He tells them not to eat of the tree, but they don’t know that disobedience is wrong. How can they, until AFTER they eat of the fruit? Satan correctly tells Eve she will not die on the day she eats of the fruit, as Yahweh had said (he was wrong or lied). Satan correctly told the kids that the gods did not want them to be like them - knowing good and evil. Gen 3:22 confirms this.

Satan told the truth. Upon being caught in lies, Yahweh kicks the kids out and curses them and all of us for doing something they couldn’t know was wrong. What parent would ever do this to his innocent children?

Fortunately the whole story is bogus. DNA evidence quite clearly demonstrates that we came from a pool of early ancestors and not a single breeding pair. There was no original sin. There’s no need to be “saved” whatever that means.

 

Patrick Gannon 

Samoa Observer

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