One day long ago I heard something about the reason some tall trees shed the lower limbs and branches as they grow. As I recall it had to do with requiring more energy to keep those branches alive than the energy produced due to the reduction of the exposure of the sun on the leaves. It makes sense on a biological level when you think about it. The upper branches cut off the sunlight to the lower branches thereby limiting the energy produced through photosynthesis from those lower branches. Once a certain balance in the equation is reached, the tree does what trees do, shed the dead weight.
Some time later, and so long ago now, I was walking with my beloved son through the park. He was about 8 or 9 if I recall. By that point I had left the LDS church and was pretty early on my current spiritual path. I pointed out the trees around us and explained the afore mentioned principle. Then I asked him if he thought it was because the trees “learned” to do this on their own (natural selection) or because they were “taught” to this by a divine being (intelligent design). He thought about it for a few minutes, a few minutes that made me one proud dad of a thoughtful young boy, and said that he thought it was probably the long process of natural selection. Then he turned the tables on me and asked what I thought. I didn’t have to think. I think, I told him, that the fact that it took a long time for the trees to start doing that was part of the divine plan from the beginning.*
In the words of Ron White, I tell you that story to tell you this story.
There is an ever increasing divide between those who adhere to a faith based creation and those who follow a view of life supported by science. As one can expect in any debate that has only two options, the two sides are mutually exclusive. According to the “experts”, you can not simultaneously believe in intelligent design and natural selection. Equally as predictable the loudest voices are on either end of the debate and tend to drown out everything in the middle. Billy Nye** “preaches” that if you’re teaching your kids that the earth was created in six days you’re raising an intellectual moron while Ken Ham warns that if you believe in “evolution” you’re going to BURN IN HELL GETTING ASS FUCKED BY SATAN!@
I stand in the middle. I believe in a divine authority. You can call him AND her by any name you choose. You can have faith that everything past present and future is in their divine plan or you can believe, as I do, that they are there to stand us back up when we fall flat on our faces. I also believe that they are bound by the physical laws they helped design. I have faith that any true miracle in any religious text will, in due time, be able to be recreated by science once we have attained that level of understanding of the laws that govern our universe. Like it’s been said, yesterday’s witchcraft is today’s science.
The problem today isn’t that gods and science are mutually exclusive. The problem is that ancient man, having no idea how either science or gods work, decided to codify how god and science worked. The fact that we, so many hundreds of thousands of years later, are allowing a collection of letters and laws penned by largely uneducated farmers and shepherds polarize us so dramatically show that we really haven’t “evolved” as far as we’d like to think we have.
The bottom line here is that there is room for both concepts, gods and science, in a person’s life as I will illustrate.
My dog, Molli, fell terribly ill recently. She’d managed to get a piece of raw fish that ended up poisoning her (re salmon poisoning http://www.vetmed.wsu.edu/cliented/salmon.aspx among others). I am a priest and live with a priestess. My wife has done extensive research on this subject before it intercepted our life. If I were to follow the above model, my options were to either pray for a miracle or seek medical treatment. Lucky for me, I don’t follow the above model. While one could argue that the meds alone would have been enough to get Mo through it, I personally relied on my faith in the divine to get ME through it. I am reminded of a principle demonstrated in the LDS miracle of the sea gulls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_gulls). Pray like everything depends on god and work like everything depends on you. Of course, the cynic may point out that this is just a version of the prisoner’s dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma) but luckily I’m not a full blown cynic. @@
Depending on which side one chooses, man has been either gifted with or developed the capacity to learn many great and wonderful things. The specific canon that one follows does not, in any way, detract from this fact. The only distraction is the constant heated debate over why one side is right and therefore the other side is wrong.
I personally don’t care if someone believes or does not believe in a divine authority. What bothers me the most is when people on either side of the debate are so solidly entrenched or indoctrinated in their opinion that the two courses of action they have when they meet someone of the opposite camp is to convert or defend. I get it, you’re a Christian and take the Bible at face value. And yes, I see that you are an atheist that has scientific proof that faith in god is equivalent to believing in Superman. Big fucking deal to both of you! My life needs a loving and kind god and goddess to comfort me AND a brilliant doctor and scientist to cure me. And I like my world way more than a world without both.
*these are over simplified snapshots of our conversation for the purpose of illustration
**I have the upmost respect for Bill Nye who has worked tirelessly to make science cool and fun to the next generation
@I’m sure they didn’t say this but I’m prevaricating to prove a point
@@Mo did, in fact, recover quickly as soon as we got her on the correct meds
1coyote1wolf 