To understand where we came from, understanding
evolution is essential. A loud voice from a minority of religions is distorting
what it is and how the theory developed. When I was rethinking my beliefs, I had
to go back and review it.
Before Darwin, alternatives to religious origin
stories were being floated. Then the Galapagos Islands were discovered off the
coast of Ecuador. That country has continued to protect them, like the treasure
they are, to this day. The climate there changes often, putting pressure on the
flora and fauna, and the islands create places for the species to isolate and
evolve into new species, making it a living laboratory.
Darwin travelled there soon after they were
discovered and collected data. He followed that data to create his seminal
work, The Origin of Species. He was a religious man and knew his ideas would be
controversial. He struggled with publishing them. Sorry for the history lesson,
but I didn’t want to clumsily introduce evolution. There are many
misconceptions.
There were errors in the theory and it was not complete.
Darwin included in it that he did not know what the mechanism was for how species
evolved. That’s DNA, it was discovered later. I’ll leave it up to you to look
up “theory” or anything I’ve said for more details. A key to my “spirituality
of materialism” is that scientific methods were employed. That includes the
principle that we are never 100% certain about our conclusions. So, any errors
that have been found in Darwin’s original work do not result in the dismissal
of the full set of data, the evidence, or the logic applied to them.
Conclusions based on them may change slightly, but the basic ideas have stood
the test of further scientific inquiry.
In my search for a spiritual practice, I have found
that all of them include “mystery”. The Old Testament has a story of Moses not
being allowed to see the face of God. Jesus taught in parables. Muslims don’t
allow images of Muhammad. Buddhism has very little to say about the origin of
the world. I have never understood why religious people have a problem with
science changing, and continuing on a constant search for more answers. Answers
almost always lead to more questions. This seems to me to be a spiritual quest,
to know ourselves better. When universities began in the 9th
century, they were closely tied to religions. We seemed to have lost that the search
for meaning and the search for facts came from the same curiosity about ourselves.
But I digress, or is this my central theme? I’m still
figuring that out.
The importance of evolution, and that we are evolved
from what we call “non-living” matter, is that it means each of us is not
special. And no one is special for knowing that each of us is not special. The
parents I had, the school I went to, something I saw on TV that I don’t
remember, Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra, all added up to me thinking my knowledge
of the history of the universe is meaningful. Some people think it’s sad that I
think meaning comes from something as inert as billions of years of protons
rearranging themselves into my brain and my guts. But the people that think
that, went to a different school, and listened to different podcasts, and their
protons arranged differently.
I think the sadness comes from the thought that each
of us has very little effect on the whole of the universe, or even on parts of
this planet within our lifetime. Even for the names that we know from history,
the people who are said to have had a great impact, do we know who they were,
or what it was like to be around them? Very few people will know me, but that’s
true for those famous names also. We know the thing they did that made an
impact, but not much more. “Insignificance” is another topic I’ll need to get
back to.
Evolution is not just new species and it’s not just DNA.
It’s a long line of tiny changes, with millions of individual combinations. It
takes thousands of years for a complex species like ours to develop. The fun and
the joy are in experiencing those unique combinations. With language, we have
added another dimension, a way to pass on thoughts and ideas within a lifetime
and through the ages. Using the theory, we can look at our primate cousins and have
a sense of how we developed as social creatures when we lived in the jungle. We
can look at early language and symbols carved into rocks and paintings on cave
walls, and get a sense of how we developed moral codes and ethics for living
together.