Creationism vs. Evolutionism: You're Both Wrong!

I visited my cousin Jeb down in Tennessee awhile back, and shortly after dinner I found him sitting out by his scrap heap in the middle of the night, having missed supper. We were all wondering why he missed a meal, so I had gone to investigate.

"Whatcha doin, Jeb?" I ask.

"Waitin' fer it to ee-volve," he says.

"For what to evolve?"

"The junk." He hooked his finger into the handle of a jug, tipped it up with his elbow and took a swig.

"Wanta pull?"

I took a pull of moonshine before I asked him, "What makes you think it'll evolve, and into what?"

"I don't much keer whut. If'n I can't use it, I can sell it."

"Yeah, OK, but what makes you think something's going to evolve out of your junk pile?"

"That fella Dick Dawkins said so on TV. Why, he said you don't even need no junk to start with. It'll all come from nuthin' if'n you wait long enough, 'cept it takes a truckload o' dynamite. I figger I got me a head start here with all this good junk, and I don't need no assplosion."

"Oh..." Jeb had been watching TV again.
"How long are you willing to wait?" I challenged.

"Shit, I got time. Nuthin' but, these days."

"You got 14 billion years?"

"Shucks, it oughtn't to take that long. That other feller, a big important preacher type who wrote a book, says the whole world is only 6,000 years old. So I did me some 'rithmetick. I figger Dick Dawkins could be right about ee-volution, but he's off on his timing. I got a shot at a new fridge, or mebbe a pickup truck. All the raw goods is in there."

Jeb had a point, if you believe what you hear on TV, or read on the internet. I find most of it unbelievable. If you surf the web as much as I do, you can see that the inane debate between creationists and evolutionists is raging. And if you think a bit, you know they're both wrong.

The creationists adopted the term "intelligent design," which I liked, but then they keep demonstrating that they have no clue what it means by smugly claiming that God only ever did one thing - created the world, as is, idee fixe, no changes allowed, no new thoughts ever. And he did it about 6,000 years ago.

The evolutionists, who are merely using the theory of evolution as a trampoline for atheist arguments, rant incessantly about how stupid religion is, particularly Christianity, and how therefore there is no God, and everything came randomly from the primordial soup, which came from the Big Bang, which came from Nothing.

Neither side can ever prove anything about their arguments. One quotes religious scripture, the other quotes scientific dogma, which isn't much better than scripture.

And, infuriatingly, both sides try to use their confabulatory arguments to tell the rest of us how we ought to live. Get out of my face, all of you.

They're both wrong. They're both stupid. They're both insulting the intelligence of the universe, the intelligence of God, if you will, and my intelligence.

I know two things for certain: 1. You can't make something from Nothing. 2. Everybody has a new idea every now and then, even God.

It's unfortunate that the word God has to get involved, because that name conjures up very narrow images in everyone's mind, and they're all different. The problem is, few recognize that everyone else's definition of God is different, so they think they're communicating. They're not.

If you go back to real scripture, like the Torah, it says the name of God can't be known, is not pronounceable. They write it as YHVH. Then some fool pronounces it: "Yahweh." OK, dude, by definition, that's not God. Because you pronounced it. God isn't God's name either, because it can be pronounced.

Sometimes I like to pigeonhole the debate by saying, "Atheists and theists both make the same spurious argument: They pretend to know the unknowable." But then, most people don't have any idea what I mean. What I mean is God is unknowable. So is the absence of God.

The late, great Jesuit priest/philosopher Anthony DeMello came pretty close to being excommunicated when he wrote (and I paraphrase) that anyone who claims to know God is either lying or delusional; that the only honest opinion about God is agnostic.

Intelligent design is a wonderful term. And what it suggests to me is not what it means to the creationists, or the evolutionists. It means that an overarching, supreme intelligence designed the universe to be exactly what it is: Infinite, ever-changing, ever-growing, mind-bogglingly beautiful, impossibly complicated.

What else could a true God create? You see, the word God to me means All That Is, the entire universe, known and unknown (to Man), visible and invisible, quantum, micro, macro and anyway it exists, throughout all time and all dimensions. Omniscient, omnipresent, omniverous, omni-everything. Infinite Intelligence is the term Napoleon Hill used. I like it.

The puny creationist arguments that God (whom they know personally, and they're on first-name terms with his family) made the World some 6,000 years ago, and it's always been the way it is, whole, complete and immutable, is just nonsense, and it belittles God to the point of ridicule. They can carry their God around in a shot glass, a thimble, so tiny is He.

And the atheist/evolutionists scoff, and say, "God didn't do that, because He doesn't exist. Nature did this, starting with Nothing, working nights, for 14 billion years. This is all just a big, inevitable accident."

Insulting. Totally lacking in appreciation for the wonder of it all. Both of them.

To say either that all this life and consciousness and intelligence arose out of random happenstance of electrons, or that some critter bigger than us, but not so huge, did it with magic, is equally inane.

The problem is that God is so big, so all-encompassing, so infinitely intelligent that neither side in this kindergarten debate can wrap their minds around it. And therein lies the awe, the wonder, the utter amazement of it all.

I'm tired of watching such small minds debate such a big question. I prefer to listen to great minds.

An Albert Einstein quote fits here: "He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."

We can no more define God than we can draw a map of the universe, or than a flea can describe an elephant (though the flea has a better shot at it). Nor can we deny God, not credibly.

And to quote Einstein again: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."