Must BE PRoofa GAhd
It’s always the same frustrating thing on Natural Science social media posts that highlight an impressive feat of evolution and natural selection. Today, it was a post narrated by David Attenborough explaining the negative electrical charge that flowers possess and its interplay with the positive charge held by many pollinators, like bees. Once pollen is picked up by the bee, the plant itself experiences a net drop in electrical charge, which other bees can supposedly detect, thus being notified that there is not pollen available at present and to come back later once the anthers have produced more. It’s an interesting phenomenon, easily explained by physics.
But the religious fundamentalists always step into the mix - once again knocking down any faith one might have in the ability of our species to mitigate its own slow slide into idiocracy and general decline - expressing a shaming disbelief that anybody could learn about such a phenomenon and still not believe in “god”. Myself, in turn, would express a shaming disbelief that anybody could learn about such a phenomenon and not understand that the concept of amounts of time and processes at work here are much greater than themselves and whatever concept they may have of their human-centered “god”. Why is your inability to grasp a concept which plenty of other people can see occurring before them both on a macro and micro scale - through an understanding of DNA sequences, phylogenies, natural selection by environment and even firsthand studies of organisms with extremely fast generational turnover rates like insects and bacteria - somehow evidence of anything else except that the culture that you were brought up in and the education system that you were subjected to (the entire Southeastern quadrant of the United States, I’m looking at you) failed you? I’m not mad at these people nor resentful of them at all, I’m just depressed about our future. The fall of Rome and the commencement of the dark ages didn’t happen overnight - it took a few hundred years. Is that what we’re presently experiencing?
Why do the simpletons always turn things like this into an argument about religion for their silly concept of “god”? The concept of natural selection and evolution and the vast amounts of time that it takes for both to occur on a macro scale are indeed hard to grasp at first, but they are even harder to grasp if you don’t try because you are immediately throwing your own half-formed ideas about how the world should work and “creation” into the mix, especially if you have no concept whatsoever of the geologic timescale or how the information we as a species used to puzzle-piece the concept together was acquired (ie fossils, radiometric dating, molecular clock phylogenies, etc.). Imagine if you were to take someone from the 12th century and time-travel them to the present, and upon seeing a pocket device that can portray video and sound of another human being from the palm of your hand, explained that it was obviously sorcery of some kind. This is what’s going on with highly religious people stepping into the comments section on social media posts that highlight fascinating phenomena regarding natural sciences.
Further, I don’t see why any concept of “god” and evolution and natural selection have to be mutually exclusive. If you’re religious, you can still believe in both, but that would require a rejection of some of the poisonous things that you’ve been conditioned to believe, like the idea that humans are the most important species in the universe, ecosystems are expendable because Earth is just a temporary stepping stone on the way to “heaven”, and everything was put here for us.
Through out history, religion has been both a blessing and a curse. It has served as a somewhat necessary moral backbone and code required for large groups of a recently-evolved species of ape whose behavior and impulses were still in many ways dictated by its primitive animal neurochemistry, and its also been abused as a tool by individuals and small, powerful groups of said species of ape to enrich themselves at the expense of the collective and keep themselves in power. Whatever the flavor of religion, however, whether it’s any of the “big three” global ones or the many smaller ones which are somewhat localized, the root of the problem here is human myopia and anthropocentrism - a failure to “zoom out” and have any greater perspective on things then our own small and fragile lives and the tiny windows of time that we are afforded a glance at life and the processes of the biosphere and lithosphere here on Earth. This “inability to zoom out” and see any greater perspective - and, when we try to, the ease with which we resort to incredibly simplistic, anthropocentric explanations for such - has been and will continue to be the thing that eventually causes our decline and collapse as a species.
