North Park Murals 

We human beings are strange creatures.  

Evolutionary theory

Since participating in a lively discussion last Sunday with a bunch of people whose opinions I respect, I’ve been mulling over in my mind some of the troubling inconsistencies between religion and science that have interested me for a long time. In this post I’m not going to review the long list of conflicts between what science reveals about the universe, especially about history of life in the universe, and what religions say about those same subjects.  Mostly, I take an agnostic approach when thinking about the most glaring inconsistencies, but that’s a dodge I’ve decided not to use today. What has bugged me enough to cause me to turn my mind loose around the subject was reading a sentence that contained the words “fecund” and “memes” hooked together in the same sentence.  “The overlapping domains of science, religion, and philosophy should be regarded as virtual rain forests of cross-pollinating ideas — precious reserves of endless fecund memes that are the raw ingredients of consciousness itself in all its diverse manifestations.” James N, Gardner (The Intelligent Universe) goes on to say, “The messy science/religion/philosophy interface should be treasured as an incredibly fruitful cornucopia of creative ideas — a constantly coevolving cultural triple helix of interacting ideas and beliefs that is, by far, the most precious of all the manifold treasures yielded by our history of cultural evolution on Earth.” 

Without permission I am also quoting here the first paragraph of an essay by Susan Blackmore published in the October 2000 issue of  “Scientific American.”  I think I’ll leave it at that for now; but there is obviously much more thinking to do about evolution and theology… evolution and the history of religion, especially of the religion that I know best, Christianity.

“Human beings are strange animals.  Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures— from genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work — we still stand out in countless ways.  Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.”  —Susan Blackmore