Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [75]
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that have life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals He would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum”—Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God created the pongids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, the Bible, in one chapter He said He created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.
And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.
Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation, God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world that God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists to explain all that.
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrun with skepticism, so God became angry—so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are over six billion of them. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank Me it’s Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
APPENDIX
Equal Time for Whom?
Over the past century, nearly every court case and curriculum dispute in the evolution-creation debate has included some form of the “equal time” argument. Well, even if we all agreed public school science classes should spend equal time on each perspective, we must ask, Equal time for whom? My friend and colleague Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, outlines at least eight different positions one might take on the creation-evolution continuum.* These include:
Young Earth Creationists, who believe that the earth and all life on it were created within the last ten thousand years.
Old Earth Creationists, who believe that the earth is ancient and that although microevolution may alter organisms into different varieties of species, all life was created by God and species cannot evolve into new species.
Gap Creationists, who believe that there was a large temporal gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, in which a pre-Adam creation was destroyed and God recreated the world in six days; the time gap between the two separate creations allows for an accommodation of an old Earth with the special creation.
Day-Age Creationists, who believe that each of the six days of creation represents a geological epoch, and that the Genesis sequence of creation roughly parallels the sequence of evolution.
Progressive Creationists, who accept most scientific findings about the age of the universe and that God created “kinds” of animals sequentially;