Well, earlier, I said that my thinking has no doubt been influenced by my childhood and that I was raised by believers, and so this was also no doubt what was the initial impetus to my present faith.
However, as I matured from childhood to adulthood, I would be influenced by more and more forces outside of my parents and the faith they thought they were raising me in. I say thought they were raising me in, because quite simply I didn't really care. I heard the stories, but I didn't bother to listen. Who I was listening to where my teachers at school. Later I read heavily the works of David Quammen (sp?) and Stephen J. Gould in the field of natural history, and I also enjoyed learning about particle phsyics and in time string theory. Each new fact made me hungry for more.
But I also had to laugh at much of what I read. Evolutionary scientists who would anthromorphisize their own theories: "the male lion will kill the cubs of any other male lion should he get the chance because he desires for the female to come into heat thus giving him a better chance to pass on more of his own genes." Sure that is what he instinctually does and it produces that result. But to say that the male lion is actually desiring to pass on his own genes, and that he considers the odds. Natural selection is natural, it isn't something that species desire, consider options, choose a plan or action, and then execute. It merely is what it is and the assignment of motive is purely a human emotion misplaced on the creatures we observe by transference.
I also realized that if evolution is completely accidental. Then not only is their no motive for the lion, he is just reacting, but there is not purpose in it either. Why is it important for species to survive? It isn't. Perhaps the individual creature values his or her own life for all struggle to survive when our lives are threatened. But for what reason? Again, it is all part of the hardwiring just like it is for the male lion to kill another male's cubs. And the idea of intrinsic value to anything is again a human construct. What difference is there if atoms of carbon are animated to process oxygen or if they are staticly locked up in a diamond?
So to, whether a slug or a gazelle, they are both equally successful on in terms of evolution. For evolution is nothing more than the survival of the fittest, not the most advanced. How many species of the genus homo have there been that have died out? Obviously the earthworm was more fit to survive than our primate ancestors.
And what of us today? If we die out as a species in 100,000 years or a 100 million, what difference would that make? And in short, the answer is none, for all I learned in science is that there is no value to any of this except that which we give it ourselves. It is like seeing two flowering plants growing beside each other and cultivating one of them for our gardens and killing the other as a weed. The only real difference between them is our perception of them.
And is that not true of so many other things that we value? We fight wars with one another to preserve "our way of life". Is there any instrinsic "good" in one way of life over another? Isn't it all just choosing which weed we are going to cultivate and call a flower? In fact, are there any real values at all in the world. Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? We agree on these things as societies I suppose, but again it is all about survival. For if survival of the fittest is really the key and I can get you to keep rules that I can learn how to avoid, then I might have some slight advantage. Let me cuckold your wife and rape your children; if it serves my interests, this is all that matters.
This is all the logic behind the science, but I don't find that to be the way that people really think or believe. Time and again, I find that people everywhere have values. All people, everywhere have values. The relgious and the non-religious. Some see them as merely that which keeps society ordered, as trappings left over from supersitious beliefs of the past. But I think they have another source. I think they call us to lift our eyes beyond ourselves and to actually look for the "good".
We don't always define it well, and certainly we don't always define it the same. But everyone seems to recognize that out there beyond us, there is something that we can call "good". Again some will place that good in society, others in religion, and others still in their own personal pursuits, but well all share a seemingly innate desire for valuing some things as good and others as not good. And rather than seek that which we call not good, universally we seek that which we call good. Why is that? Why do we care so much more for the good than for the bad or indifferent? No other species pursues good the way we do. They pursue comfort, food, sex; but not good.
And in my thinking I believe that we desire good, because we are made to pursue it. It too is hardwired into us the same as the male lion is hardwired to do those things which he does. But the pursuit of the "good", that does not appear to be something that one needs in order to succeed on the evolutionary tree. So, how do we come by it? I don't think we do. I think it comes by us. That is I think it is placed in us by an outside source. It comes to us from something greater than ourselves. It comes from something greater than the elements we are composed of. It comes from something that is wholly "other" than us. And I happen to call that "other" God.
