I’m amazed when Biblical and Koranic literalists blow themselves into a typhoon over the science of biology. Life, including Homo sapiens, is but a small part of our scientific understanding of the universe that clearly runs contrary to their beliefs. Why all the fuss from some trucker from Kansas who wants to teach his kids that cows were made exactly as they are right now, in such a way as to be nearly totally for the benefit of humans? Don’t they realize that there are many other problems with their myth? Science learns more and more (almost daily now), bringing a great amount of certitude as to how things came to be as we currently observe them.
For instance – “God created the earth”. Why obsess on whether man has chimpanzee as his closest living relative, when science is quite positive about how the Earth was “created”? Wouldn't that be a larger problem to confront? I suppose they could claim that science is just having some insights into how God created the Earth, but such acknowledgment would still put them in the uncomfortable position of having to deny the literality of their sacred texts.
We know that this particular “creation” is merely a work in progress. Is god still creating the Earth? The Hawaiian Islands continually pop up and grow larger. Iceland is being ripped apart. The Himalaya Mountain range is growing, California is splitting off from the North American continent, etc. The Earth has reshaped over and over and continues to do so. The livable atmosphere has varied greatly.
“In the beginning” there was nothing habitable on the planet at all. After it became habitable, it wouldn’t have immediately been survivable by humans and cows. Only microorganisms could have existed in the original habitable environment.
These are scientific facts. Shouldn’t these facts bother biblical literalists as much, or even more, than evolution? And yet they seem to act as if the only obstacle to a biblical understanding of the universe is this damn annoying idea that the atheistic Darwin came up with. It’s just one more of those strange anomalies in dealing with theists.
Amazing Earth Part 1
Amazing Earth Part 2