Monkey business

When Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ debated a creationist at a public event, a reporter for the Internet site, Buzzfeed, asked 25 people in the crowd, who considered themselves creationists, to write a question that they would like to ask Bill Nye. Then the reporter took pics of them holding up their questions.

More than 5 million people have viewed that clever report, and the comments of readers mostly take the creationists to task as unscientific-minded individuals in need of re-education. Granted, most of the comments are not ones that would stump Nye. Here’s a short selection:

“Is it completely illogical that the earth was created mature? Ie. trees created with rings, Adam created as an adult.”

“How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”

“Why have we found only 1 Lucy when we’ve found more than 1 of everything else.”

I love that one, but then there’s this one: “If we came from monkey, then why are there still monkeys?”

My own contribution might be a takeoff of that one: “If we came from monkey, then why are we still monkeys?”

So it’s easy to make fun. Some commenters even got into the grammar, ie. ‘their’ instead of ‘there,’ etc.

Recently, those same pics were reposted on Facebook and the science-oriented commenters took no hostages, so to speak. Several were so adamant in maintaining the factual reality of Darwinian evolution that they sounded, well, sort of like  fundamentalists. And anyone who didn’t agree was stupid or uneducated.

I entered the fray and commented that, hey, Darwinism is 200 years old and represents hardcore scientific materialism. I suggested that physical existence was derived from consciousness, not the other way around. Well, that didn’t go over well.

That made me a ‘creationist’ in the view of the pro-evolution commenters, who of course knew they are right. It seemed that any doubts about Darwin’s natural selection theory as the key mechanism for evolution meant the writer must be a Bible-thumpers.

Science is always evolving, making changes when old theories prove false. For example, medical students don’t spend much time studying the history of mainstream medicine, basically because much of it—like bleeding people with leeches—was just wrong. Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis put it this way: “The history of science is that we are always wrong.” That’s a humorous way of saying that science—unlike fundamentalist beliefs about creation and evolution—is always evolving.

But wait, it seems there is one area of science that seems less than open to evolving. Yes, ironically, it’s the science of evolution.

Of course, the bottom line here is that the debate is really all about God. There is no God in Darwinism or mainstream science. Atheism rules; God is a myth.

My take is different. God is consciousness. We are all about consciousness. That’s our true essence, our heritage, our true selves. Hence, we are all God.

No doubt such ideas don’t win favor with either side of the controversy, but they do present an alternate view. But enough monkeying around.