Strong Verbs Are Just Better

In 2009, when the champagne is uncorked in celebration of Darwin's legacy, we might pause to consider the presuppositions we bring to the question of what his theory tells us about God. There are essentially only two options. Either the wonder of human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a creator. It remains a mystery to me why some people claim it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.

OK, OK, I'll be the first to say I don't understand evolutionary theory. I like my intellectual puzzles nicely preserved in manuscript form, thank you.

HOWEVER, all this binary stuff really shits me. "Do you think intelligence came out of nowhere" is the kind of question the creationists used to ask at school, and it made sort of sense coming from them, given that a) a fair treatment of evolutionary theory wasn't exactly available at my school and b) there aren't exactly a lot of cunning monkeys running around my home town. But this dude's a Proffessor of Mathematics, presumably he knows that evolutionary theory doesn't say intellgence popped into being with Homo Sapiens (despite the fact that you might think so from the species designation). There's such a thing as a SCALE. DEVELOPMENT. IT HAPPENS, people.

As a subset to this: this kind of mindset is all homocentricism. People can't seem to shake the idea that human intelligence is something vastly different to any cognition shown by animals, instead of a matter of scale. *Grumbles* Mind you, non-homocentric approaches to Christianity are pretty hard to find.

FURTHERMORE. The other thing that shits me when intelligent people dumb things down to create a binary- either because they think the general public won't understand it, or because they're being rhetorically devious- is that it presupposes that evolutionary theory and theistic belief are incompatible. *Stabs things* Like there aren't plenty of mostly-sane Christians out there of varing degrees of intelligence and education who can cope with the idea of God bringing life and intelligence out of mindless matter over a space of time considerably longer than seven days. *stabby stabby*

(*Grumble* As a subsidiary rant: and here was me thinkin' that losing faith would mean I didn't get angry about this sort of thing. GAH.)

(Subsidiary note # 2: Hi Dad. Mum doesn't know about that last set of brackets. Kindly don't mention it just yet.)