Many consider atheism to be a belief system, which is of course contradictory. The definition of belief is an acceptance of something as true, by way of an emotional and often spiritual sense of certainty. As such a belief system is not underpinned by an opinion based on known facts. Belief is the sort of system used to explain ghosts and gods. I have no doubt a good many humanists of the modern day employ the same gut thought in their belief of mankind as god.
But anyone that has worked through the information that is readily available in this current slice of time and concluded god does not exist should not have to suffer the label of atheist nor believer – both being constructs of faith societies.
We think, therefore we are.
God based faith is a perfectly acceptable medium for those that make a conscious effort towards ignorance. And there are a great many that put a lot of thought into building complex constructs to perpetuate this ignorance.
But in this modern world where we have so much knowledge it really does take that leap of faith to ignore the truth before our eyes. The moment you accept evolution as being the journey of life you must have problems with faith. You can wriggle and plot on ways that evolution fits into the genesis stories. But the problem you will always have with that Jewish Genesis account of this worlds creation, is that it evolved from Babylonian stories adopted by incarcerated Jewish slaves. How do you ratify as truth a legacy of stories that evolved via word of mouth over three thousand years ago, stories that evolved through hundreds of successive generations that really did not have a single clue about anything other than agriculture – the great perpetrator of human life on this planet.
It is only in the last four hundred years that man has started building a knowledge that has been underpinned by great thinkers such as Newton and Darwin. And most of what we know today has been learned in the last one hundred and fifty years. If faith is a wilful step of ignorance, actually believing those legendary genesis stories as a truth today is an act of stupidity.
Believers with faith tend to focus on those that prise open their clam shut minds, so it stands to reason Darwin would become the focus for those that scuttle from cover. Anybody that has read the origin of species will know that Darwin knew little of what he was opening the door to and a lot of what he thought was wrong when correlated with what we know today. But we should consider Darwin wrote in a time when most people thought the world was seven thousand years old, that fossils really were the remains of animals that didn’t make it onto Noah’s Ark and that a glowing Caucasian created everything you behold. Which makes Darwin quite remarkable.
But Darwins principle of evolution through natural selection is a seed for thought that can only grow if you open your mind. Believers will make chanted claims such as: ‘Incomplete fossil records’ without the slightest comprehension of what they are talking about. Of course what we know is incomplete. Does that mean we shut up shop and stay ignorant?
A sense for reason will acknowledge that we cannot take a three thousand year old text as a definite truth ordained by a since absent deity. A sense of reason will take a simple truth and look at in context.
We did think the world was seven thousand years old and then it we thought that maybe it was older. Thought evolved as we studied more and came to realise through successive thoughts that the world was four billion years old. Since that time, with the information we have learned in that time, we have come to think the world might be four and a half billions years old. We are big enough to know that any statement of known fact is based on what we know at that time. We know that what we learn may change that, but we are not so ignorant to believe that what we know is right and will always be so, because someone told us so.
We know that the world is probably over four billion years old and cellular life probably appeared very shortly after. We do not know how that occurred. It is very likely we will never know. Of course we will never know anything for certain, we can only take what we learn and shape our thoughts with what we learn.
It was thought that single celled life quickly evolved to multi celled life. But we now know that single celled life was probably the only form of life for almost three and one half billion years of this planets life. We know that repeated meteor impacts almost wiped out life on this planet on multiple occasions and that somehow single celled life evolved only six hundred million years ago into multi celled life.
We do not know exactly when of course. It was about six hundred million years ago. And then multi celled organisms continued to evolve around the simple Darwinian principle of survival, that when resources for propagation fail the best adapted to the environment will survive.
And so through a continuous cycle of growth and changing environment on this planet through hundreds of millions of years, through ice ages and through the absorption of carbons into the ground from all cellular life and then through the shifting plates of this earth’s surfaces and the molten fires of volcanoes that released carbons to create a shield that warmed the earth’s surface that melted the ice. Through meteor impacts that wiped out dinosaurs but not all life, through the continuous flux of weather and temperature and mutation in reproduced cells that in turn perished and sometimes survived. We eventually come to life as we now know it. Which is thought to have branched out from other life forms about six million years ago and further branched out to closer incarnations of Homo Sapien two and one half millions years ago.
We do not know everything of course. And to say we do is just plain wrong. We know evolution is what brought us to this point. Evolution will never change as a substantiating concept for our existence but it would be ignorant to assume what we now know will never change. Just as we build and re-assess our knowledge of all things. Humanities great legacy is the quest for knowledge and understanding, despite its tendency towards belief.
It is a great shame that those with faith have held sway over humanity for so long. And that humanity through this still struggles to wriggle free of belief. But then I suppose there would be little for me to write about.
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