One day while driving alone in my car---I don't know where I was driving or why---I heard an interview on NPR about a journalist who was lambasted because she admitted she was a creationist. I didn't get to hear the interview in its entirety, but I heard enough to know this woman was not extreme in her views. She didn't say evolution was wrong or invalid or anything that would make me blow her off as a zealot.
What she did say made me actually think that I, in my small little way, am also a bit of a creationist.
In the interview, she talked about the unanswered questions that predate humans and dinosaurs. The existential questions about how the earth formed and what happened that led to the spark that eventually led to animate life that eventually, over millions of years, led to animals and humans.
She remarked that since there is no definitive, solid answer for what happened that caused the emptiness of space to eventually become planets and stars and whatever, she chooses to believe that it was god.
And I found this terribly interesting because while I would never, ever, ever think of myself as a creationist because I firmly believe in evolution and do not think the world was created in 7 days and do not think dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and do not think god designed everything in a perfect little set-up, if I go back and back and back far enough, I tend to think that something godlike was first.
It seems reasonable to my understanding that a god (of some kind and certainly beyond all human understanding) set things in motion and then backed the heck off, allowing those cogs and wheels to turn and create and get us to this point.
That is as far as I get and, honestly, that is as far as I care to go.
I don't like to believe this is all a crap-shoot. I don't like to think there isn't meaning. But I also don't like to think god controls everything and has controlled everything since the beginning of existence. I think there are all kinds of strange movements in nature--vertical, horizontal, diagonal and some kind of "al" that we can't even appreciate in this dimension.
I stand in the middle ground, where I tend to feel most secure.
What she did say made me actually think that I, in my small little way, am also a bit of a creationist.
In the interview, she talked about the unanswered questions that predate humans and dinosaurs. The existential questions about how the earth formed and what happened that led to the spark that eventually led to animate life that eventually, over millions of years, led to animals and humans.
She remarked that since there is no definitive, solid answer for what happened that caused the emptiness of space to eventually become planets and stars and whatever, she chooses to believe that it was god.
And I found this terribly interesting because while I would never, ever, ever think of myself as a creationist because I firmly believe in evolution and do not think the world was created in 7 days and do not think dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and do not think god designed everything in a perfect little set-up, if I go back and back and back far enough, I tend to think that something godlike was first.
It seems reasonable to my understanding that a god (of some kind and certainly beyond all human understanding) set things in motion and then backed the heck off, allowing those cogs and wheels to turn and create and get us to this point.
That is as far as I get and, honestly, that is as far as I care to go.
I don't like to believe this is all a crap-shoot. I don't like to think there isn't meaning. But I also don't like to think god controls everything and has controlled everything since the beginning of existence. I think there are all kinds of strange movements in nature--vertical, horizontal, diagonal and some kind of "al" that we can't even appreciate in this dimension.
I stand in the middle ground, where I tend to feel most secure.
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