Come Into The Light

light1Last night I watched Creation, a film about the life of Charles Darwin and how he came to write On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. What I found especially moving was his own struggle against the authority of religion and the beliefs of his religious wife. With religion he had no qualms, but the fear of breaking his wife’s heart almost stopped him from finishing his book.

In one of the scenes, Darwin described to his friend, a reverend, how some caterpillars never become butterflies because parasitic wasps lay eggs into them. Once the egg hatches, the wasp larva will feed on the flesh of the caterpillar, leisurely devouring it from the inside, killing it slowly and painfully until all that is left is an empty shell. And then the larva will emerge as an adult wasp, ready to mate and repeat the cycle. When confronted with such cruelty in nature, the reverend simply said that it was really not for them to speculate on the mind of God.

How convenient it was for the reverend to say that they had no right to second-guess God’s reasons while religion has eternally claimed to have the ‘revealed’ word of God and stubbornly holds on to this ‘revelation’ amid contradicting evidence, insisting that it is the truth.

Ah, Truth. A word not to be taken lightly. How do we know the truth? That is a very hard question, but we can ask an easier one: How do we know if something is false? For starters, we could shed the light of science into claims asserted from behind the dark shroud of ‘authority’. If there is a God, he/she/it gave us eyes to see and minds to interpret what we see. Science isn’t asking us to believe anything; science is merely asking that we open our eyes.

Religion’s authority is derived solely from what they claim to be ‘divine revelation’. Who indeed would dare question an instruction or doubt a story if it was God Himself who said it? To answer that, one simply has to look at the deists’ definition of ‘revelation’:

Revelation: The act of revealing or of making known. In the religious sense, revelation usually means divine revelation. This is meaningless, since revelation can only be revelation in the first instance. For example, if God revealed something to me, that would be a divine revelation to me. If I then told someone else what God told me it would be mere hearsay to the person I tell. If that person believed what I said, they would not be putting their trust in God, but in me, believing what I told them was actually true.

Now the lack of credibility of this hearsay revelation is not as sinister as the supposed message from God. Religion is basically telling us that this life is infinitely less significant than the next. And because of this, a lot of people fail to live their lives fully in terms of time and freedom, and some don’t get to live a life at all. And for me that is the ultimate wrong.

If religion is this influential in the Information Age, just imagine how powerful it must have been at the time of Darwin when knowledge could only be found in a few books held by an elite few. One of this few is religion of course, and they even have their own brand of ‘knowledge’ which they gladly publish and distribute.

Fortunately, science is steadily keeping up. Religion has practically let go of the literal creation story, shifting to a metaphorical translation disguised as Intelligent Design, but this too is losing ground to natural selection. Then there is the question of the origin of life itself, to which abiogenesis, although not yet a scientific theory in the strict sense, is offering plausible explanations.

With these significant grounds being conquered by science, religion is desperately holding on to its last bastion of authority in its claim for holding the truth: the origin of the cosmos. And with this I remember what Richard Dawkins said in a debate with John Lennox:

“Cosmology is waiting for its Darwin.”

9 comments

  1. The bible is not just hearsay, it is plagiarism. There are numerous mythic deities that are just like jesus christ and they all came long before he supposedy did. The story of the egyptian sun god Horus is virtually identical to that of jesus. Born dec 25 of the virgin Isis, birth accompanied by a star in the east, had 12 disciples, performed miracles, walked on water, raised the dead, was betrayed by typhon, crucified was buried and ressurected after 3 days. Same with Krishna, Mithra, Attis. Even the story of Buddha shares so much of the same storyline. Sorry to dissapoint but the Bible is pretty much copied from other cultures, primitive religions and mythology. Crucifixion and resurrection story? try Baal from Babylon. How about Hercules, the son of Zeus, born by a mortal woman, Hera wants him dead as a baby, (Herod anybody?) went down to the underworld, died as a mortal then ressurected by his father to be with him in olympia. Sounds familiar?

  2. re hearsay: its not! its a written recording of eyewitness testimony.

    also, what do u mean by:

    ". And because of this, a lot of people fail to live their lives fully in terms of time and freedom, and some don’t get to live a life at all"

    dont get to live at all? example?

    • @GabbyD: It is hearsay as far as you and me are concerned. We were not there when the Bible was written, and these "eyewitness testimonies" have been passed on by spoken and written word (there were no printing presses then) from generation to generation and has already undergone several translations.

      An example of people who "don't get to live at all" because of religion would be the women in Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power.

      • 1. ur argument is that eyewitness testimony matters only if the eyewitness is alive. thats not true.

        in that case, ALL of our knowledge of history should be thrown away.

        2). ah ok.

        • Let me put it this way. Let us assume that Jesus is really God incarnate. Now, did Jesus himself write the New Testament? In the book of Matthew, for example, it was Matthew who wrote, "Jesus said…". That is already hearsay. Now add to that the fact that there were no printing presses at the time of Matthew, and what he claimed to be the words of Jesus were passed on verbally and by writing (not photocopying or other high-fidelity reproduction) from generation to generation.

        • even in the absense of malice information is not that easy to transfer, absorb, and transfer again….

          take rumors, grapevines, scuttlebut or things of that nature, we often associate the imperfections in information as something born of malice; it is not always the case. that's just how information can potentially morph into something else.

          lets just say Jesus is god, he signifies 100% of all those knowledge you so love. does it follow that a disciple can absorb all that 100%? 90% perhaps? Next question would be can he diseminate 100% the information that he has absorbed?

          Is he overeager to spread the word of his master, embelish or exagerate, you know as excited folks always do, 'well my guy is better than that!' that sort of thing. There are afterall many gods in atiquity, he needs to get noticed. Then again maybe he is a discipline journalist beyond his time; he says it as it is? What if he cannot articulate fluidly by writing? what if he can't speak latin to good? multiply that handicap by thousands…Do you still have that 100 percent?

          And I am still not supposing there is a liar or any malicious intent yet….

  3. No, science do not ask us anything, either believing or openings our eyes. For science is a compilation of the result of the process of reason (knowledge). It is up to us each individual to read,learn and understand those compilation and apply to our own life or to evade. Science is knowledge about reality, the physical world we live in, it is true, definitely absolutely a recognition of the facts of what is real-reality, existence.

    Have you ever observed that religion is trying to merge with science in a very subtle ways? Religious/theistic ideas mixing with the body of knowledge?

  4. i didn't enjoy much this film because it focused on his relationship with his family and friends rather than the arguments for his theory. i was hoping there would be a kind of trial court or something .. ^_^

    the bit about the wasp i have read earlier from dawkins' greatest show on earth. dawkins must have gotten it from darwin .. ^_^

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