Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [74]
Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciensuality, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are supposed to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?
Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
CODA
Genesis Revisited
The fundamental difference between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design is the nature of explanation: natural versus supernatural. The problem with the supernatural explanations of Intelligent Design is that there is nothing we can do with supernatural explanations. They lead to no data collection, no testable hypotheses, no quantifiable theories: therefore, no science.
To demonstrate the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I offer the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. This is not intended as a sacrilege of the mythic grandeur of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythological saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this:
In the beginning—specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon—out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He created Quarks and therefrom He created hydrogen atoms and thence He commanded the hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process to release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing, so he created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light-years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 BC. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernovas, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed that sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt