Evolution: A fairy tale for progressives

When I was a child and I was being indoctrinated in school with the evolution meme, my teacher (who was actually pretty based) asked the class a question: "So which is it? God or evolution?"

I raised my hand and gave an answer: "Why couldn't God have simply created evolution?"

I got some praise from some classmates (especially the supposedly smart ones), but my teacher treated that answer as a cop-out and wasn't satisfied.

Looking back on that moment as a full-grown adult, I realize just how childish my answer was and just how childish I was for believing in evolution.

God, the Logos, the unmoved mover, can't create a nonsensical, chaotic process that magically transforms inanimate, microscopic particles into living, breathing, fully fleshed-out organisms.

For intelligent design to come from random chaos is ridiculous and impossible and would have no trace of God's fingerprints. My answer truly wasn't thought through and was, in fact, a cop-out. (I was in seventh grade.) The truth is that you do have to choose one or the other.

To my seventh-grade brain, evolution made sense.

"Animals just changed over time!" I thought. "The monkeys look kind of like us. We must have just come from them millions of years ago."

In retrospect, I think I and many others in my generation were subliminally psyoped by the liberal notion of "progress" that pervaded every aspect of our culture in the 1990s and 2000s. Clearly, we were more socially enlightened and technologically advanced than any other civilization in history. We as the human race were living proof that "progress" was real.

So why wouldn't that apply to biology as well? We must have "progressed" from tiny specks of dust to fish, to monkeys, to humans.

But if we think about this with just a modicum of rigor, we began to detect traces of absurdity. Take so-called transitional fossils — fossils of species that would link modern species and ancient species. We've found very few, if any, so few that evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould had to come up with an entirely new model (punctuated equilibrium) to make evolution make sense.

That's just one example. The deeper you dig, the dumber and more childish it gets.

As adults, we must learn to put childish things away. That means using critical reasoning skills instead of slurping up the slop we slurped up as a child. The superstition that we all came from monkeys is a good place to start.