Today's Rant:

"An Evolving Creation" or "Wait... why do we care?"


Ahh.... another semester has sprung, winter is waning..... what could better help you ease into your new grind then a moral issue laid to rest?
Well, you might want to stop reading.... now.

The issue of how life came to be on earth, and how man came to be so smart(stupid) has been argued at/to/around me by many people. One the one extreme, there are those who swear that a)there is no God and no afterlife and b)all life is completely accidental. Although this logic is reasonably sound (reject all direct human events and regard the universe only in terms of what you can directly observe). I reject it here because the implications are rather chilling and the rejection of the human experience makes it rather unfun to argue about..

One the opposite end of the spectrum there are people who hold some book in the air and claim that it is 100% true. They generally claim that some deity made the planet Earth some short time ago, and that all the evidence to anything else is a fabrication by man or deity to test the unbelievers. Specifically, we will deal with conservative christianity. Why? I'm irritated that they are spending lots of time calling people bad names and imposing their rather secular view on a larger audience (e.g. in schools) instead of spending their time being good little christians and trying to solve the real problems in the world.

Let's start by asking why creationism is important to christians:
Why is Creationism important?
The answer is (or should be): having God make the world in 7 days guarantees that an individual has freedom of choice. This is critical so that a person can choose to follow God. Some would say that it means complete acceptance of the Bible as the inspired word of God. I don't think this is required to be christian; there were lots of christians before the bible as we know it today was compiled, and since there have been many christians who cannot read. For a person to put complete trust in a document they cannot read means putting a lot of faith in another persons (who can read) opinions, which are just that. Furthermore, Jesus never said that people had to read the bible or believe the teaching of the Torah, Nevi'im or the Ketuvium. He only asked only that people follow his teachings. If it is possible to have Christianity without the bible, then it is equally possible to only partially ascribe to it's teachings.

So, if christians are mainly worried about freedom of choice (i know they aren't, but bare with me), then they should be assuaged by the existance of quantum mechanics. For whatever reason, most people think about matter in about the same way people thought about it in 1920 (or worse!). This newtonian point of view would lend the idea that all events could be predicted, given enough information. They believe if you know the starting position of all the matter in the universe, you can write history. This is not the case. At a quantum level, things don't behave right. Electrons tunnel, and their positions are dictated by probabilities, not absolutes. Further more, sentient life makes decisions based of predictions of unobserved phenomena. A postulate of quantum mechanics is that something in the absence of observation is poorly defined, and that by observation, the state of the object is changed (think about it this way: is making out more fun in front of your parents, or when they don't know about it) (this is implied by the Hiesenburg Uncertainty Principle). The result of this is that people must make decisions and predictions to account for these errors. Further more, even without human intervention, these lead to chaotic systems. In other words, with the same starting conditions, they produce different results.

My point: people have freedom of choice either way.

Now quit arguing and go make sandwiches.

2-10-04