God AND Science

This started out as a comment, in response to a comment...but it got so long I decided to just make it a post. Besides, I think it's interesting.

I do need to give a little background. An earlier post had to do with us old folks learning to love being old for all the real reasons it's pretty cool.

Sure we're not as pretty or agile or sexual (san chemicals) as we once were, but there are a lot of benefits to not being self-absorbed, vain, insecure, unformed, unfinished and dumber than a box of rocks. (I speak only of myself, of course.)

A commenter took exception to my describing aging as "natural" because he believes that the bible testifies to a perpetually young, perfect, vital humanity before the "fall".  He believes that our natural state is young forever. And that old age is unnatural...introduced by sin.

Now I totally respect his religious beliefs, but I don't agree.

In fact, I think the way we are is so elegant, and so logical I can't help but think the Intelligent Designer meant us to be just this way.

I honor the Bible, but I don't understand it as being the "word of God" with every passage being literally true history.

I think of it as the chronicle of a people's relationship with their God. And it is human understanding that informs it, with perhaps, divine inspiration...but certainly not divine dictation.

My idea of the "fall" is when our brains/minds developed to the point that we became able to distinguish good from evil.

Before that, we were in a state of bliss because we were in a state of perfect moral ignorance. We operated according to our animal nature, because that is what we were. We were nothing more than bundles of instinct.

It is when we became fully human that the concept of "sin" originated. We could make choices. We transcended instinct. That is the moment when we were "expelled from the Garden" of blissful ignorance into the harsh reality of choices and consequences; of fore-knowledge of death and the sad appreciation of the transience of all we love and value.

Remember, the fruit that caused the expulsion was from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It was the moment we became free agents with free will...with all the doubts and difficulties, conflicting emotions and goals inherent in human intellectual development.

In my opinion we became better, higher, more evolved beings that the simple contented ones we had been before, grazing among the other animals, living short, brutal lives, but not minding it, because we didn't have the capacity to intellectualize it...and had nothing to compare it to anyway.

Adam biting the apple is a metaphor for the same moment portrayed in "2001 A Space Odyssey" when the ape absently tapping one bone against another forms the first abstract thought—makes the leap from animal to human. Kubrick called the sequence "The Dawn of Man".  It still gives me chills to see it. It is the moment we began. The moment we left the garden of innocence and instinct and moved into a landscape of choices and consequences; of knowledge and the sorrow and pain—as well as the joy—it can bring.

I believe the biblical story of the "fall" of man is really one of the "rise" of man. Of that single moment in time...that first self-awareness...that first abstract thought...that first knowledge of choices, of free will...and of good and evil.

For the record, while the Theory of Evolution is incompatible with Creationism, it is certainly not incompatible with idea of God as Intelligent Designer.  There is no reason why God should be assumed to be incapable of creating the Big Bang, and designing evolution as science understands it, to result after billions of years in the development of Man (and beyond?)

It is absurd and anti-intellectual, as the Marxist and atheists do, to offer only the choice of Creationism OR Evolution; of Religion OR Science.  It is perhaps their nearness to our primitive animal nature that prevents them from being more creative and inventive in their thinking.

The Gunslinger
(Sorry in advance for making the trolls "think" too much.)