Chapter 1.                   Part D 

         Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of Science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue Science. However, what their torments mean to our argument today is nothing. Their anguish does not have any bearing on what Science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.               

                 

                                                       Charles Darwin

         In the mid 1800’s, Darwin hit the faithful and the institutions and beliefs by which they lived their lives with the biggest of all of the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. Life, by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, had evolved on Earth from a few simple cells over the course of millions, or perhaps billions, of years. 

         Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all the life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. The fossils in the rocks all over the world show the steps by which life developed and spread. Chemical and physical evidence gives consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this Earth, developed from a few simple cells, by gradual increments, over millions of years.

         Where was the Bible then? Genesis puts the creation of all that is into a time scale of six days. The Theory of Evolution basically says that this model is ridiculous. Furthermore, the theory seems to imply that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all of the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the concept of God is not needed in their discussion of what this universe is or what human beings are. It isn’t even relevant.

         The Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that the church authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. The scientists who believe that it does give a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying and silly. The evidence is there. Mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternate explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events that they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t Science.

         In fact, how can the “faithful” - who, every day, get most of the comforts of their way of life from things that scientists have found - be such ingrates? It's a sure bet that however much they may want to attack and criticize the whole activity called “Science”, they don’t want to starve and they don’t want their electric power turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious, inscrutable “swamp vapors”.    

         On the other hand, the point of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is much more complex than what the last couple of paragraphs portray. But for now we can sum up this small section on the Theory of Evolution by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience, and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

         The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with some bits of one ancient tribe’s history woven in. God was like Zeus or Wotan. A fiction created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.