Cre-volutionism

I am not an atheist... I'm closer to agnostic but not one either... I don't consider myself very religious or a highly spiritual person. But there are times when people claim that there is no higher power - that we just evolved into what we are today that I feel something deep inside me protest. I'm not sure if it's the years of being brought up a Christian or something else... But I do want to believe that there is more meaning to life on earth. We didn't just happen because this was the right set of permutations and combinations that ensured the survival of the fittest. Don't get me wrong - I know Darwin was right... We did evolve, but I feel there is more to why we have become who we are, than just chance.

Before going into the matter of why I feel there might be more to our evolution than mere chance, let me get into what I feel about religion. I grew up in Goa, which is a small state in India where you're usually either a Hindu or a Roman Catholic. My village was Roman Catholic, and everyone was very involved in church activities. My grandmother had been a staunch catholic, but somehow my father had been influenced into converting to one of the newer Christian churches which the US has plenty of. We were brought up under one of these forms of Christianity, and followed the Sabbath and kept away from unclean food such as prawns and pork. There was a lot of stress on what the Bible claimed at the time. My friends from the village knew that I wasn't coming to church with them because I was from a different religion. But they assumed I was a "Protestant", which at the time seemed almost like the worst thing I could be called. I didn't want to be different from everyone else at the time... I wanted to be able to go to the local village church on sundays like everyone else, instead of sitting at home with my parents and reading the Bible on saturdays instead. I think my grand-parents, especially my grandmother must have kept hoping that we would come back to the right path again - which according to her must have been the Roman Catholic church.

Twenty years later, things changed quite a bit. We converted back to Roman catholicism. Having been through the experience of moving through a much stricter form of religious devotion that tries to follow the Bible word-for-word, to the more ritualistic and older one in the Roman Catholic church, I feel that as Christians, so many times, we lay too much stress on our differences and too little on what's common (which is such a large portion of our beliefs). While I think I am going to remain a Roman Catholic for the rest of my life, I know that I am never going to claim that we are the special ones who know more about God's true plan for us than anyone else. I think we can look back at history and see enough examples of times when we have been wrong about several of our beliefs. If we still believe that there was some chronological sense to how God created the world as described in Genesis, we're being as head-strong as the pope who imprisoned Galileo for saying that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around.

I personally feel that creationism through evolution played the role of forming life on earth as it seems to have a higher likelihood of explaining life as it is today. I tend toward the belief that a higher power ensured that our DNA (and that of plants and animals), were fine-tuned... Probably a larger-than-life genetic doctor (who I would prefer calling the Creator) did it, to result in the wonders that we are today. And perhaps in his time-line, millions of years are not a big deal...! We are not perfect - but we are a tad too good to have happened only by repeated sets of trials-and-errors. Probabilistically, there is always the chance that if the universe is large enough to have innumerable amount of planets with several of them having all the matter that leads to conducive situations for life to develop, we might have ended up with our set of life-forms here on Earth. But until we discover other planets with some other life-forms on them, or know the full-extent of the entire universe, we cannot prove or disprove anything about creationism. At the moment, I give in to the view that we have gone through millions of years of protein-folding to go from the hydro-carbons, water and other molecules that compose us, to these complex life-forms that we are now, who can contemplate and even partially comprehend our own formation.

Mankind has gone from hunter-gatherers hunting animals or foraging for food, to settle down and start farming, exploring new lands, moving out to occupy them, trading, adapting to new life-styles and being able to occupy this beautiful planet from the hot equatorial regions of Africa where we originated from, to the freezing poles. And we have managed to balloon in population from what must have been a few homo-sapien erectus' who evolved from apes running around on all fours, to become the nearly 6 billion modern human beings we are today. We are making progress in understanding life, the science of not only the earth but also the universe around us, producing beautiful art, tackling problems such as disease, increasing the yield of plants and even other animals, and beginning to reprogram the very same DNA which programmed us genetically to become who we are... We are consuming the resources on this earth faster than ever before - exhausting the natural resources that were formed over thousands or even millions of years and we are probably going to finish most of the non-renewable and most precious forms of energy within this century.

So what exactly is the purpose of our being here? Why are we here? Are we here just to be part of a set of protein molecules that ended up folding by sheer chance into an interesting set of beings that can suddenly do a lot more? How did so many complex systems develop in life-forms? Right from photo-synthesis, respiration, the complex circulatory systems, the amazing immune-systems that protect us, the all-important reproductive systems that ensure future generations of the evolutionary process... the neural-networks that form the brains that we have... our consciousness... our realization of who we are... and yet, it isn't clear to me as to what we are doing here if there isn't a bigger plan out there. I want to believe that there is a bigger plan for us. I want to believe that we are not going to be just a set of sequences of trials-and-errors that occupy a small time-line in the zillions of other things that go on in this gargantuan universe. I want to believe that I can break free from the shackles of the human body - this flesh and these bones after they are no more... that there is more to me than just my beating heart, firing synapses and all the other life-processes that science claims is life in me... That the real me (probably my soul) is more than just the hydrocarbons that form my physical self... And I think this is the hope that has given rise to almost all religions in the world...

Almost all of them regardless of where they arose from, have so much in common... There is a constant search for a higher sense of purpose. There is usually hope for life after death... There is an inculcation of right and wrong things. Surprisingly and almost always - without any necessary direct-connection between these religions, most of the rights and wrongs of all these religions are strikingly similar, if not the same. All of them profess for/against the same basic things... Honesty, peace, harmony, integrity, love for all human beings and other virtues are encouraged, while violence, bad habits and so on are denounced. Some might say that God's were used by religious people or others with authority to be able to control the populace and wield their power on them. We might also say this is part of evolution - successful civilizations imbibed successful principles into their religions which led to these becoming the dominant ones in most of the principal religions of the world today like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Jainism, Sikhism and so on. But I would still argue that it is surprising that there is so much in common!

And yet, somehow religion has also been the primary cause of so much violence, intolerance, hatred and so on. For a moment, if we are to only forget which religion we belong to... and assume there actually is a higher power - a universal God or even many Gods for those who feel one couldn't have done it by himself/herself... What if he/she/they didn't care about which religion we really follow to get to him/her/them - just that we live by the right principles... Wouldn't this world be a much better place to live in? If evolution led to today's religions, why don't they evolve to root out the evils that corrupt them with issues that shouldn't be handled by religion in the first place...!

I think we've been blessed with the freedom of thought - we can let our imagination soar to wherever we want it to. And whether or not we're religious, agnostic or atheists - all of us are part of an on-going evolutionary process. Evolution usually favors the best outcomes and so as time goes on, with increasing knowledge - just like we must've become self-aware all of a sudden one day in the distant past, we might discover the truth behind our true purpose... the truth behind how we really became who we are... if there really was more to us than just evolution... and until then, I feel we should allow ourselves to be free to decide what we want to believe... Because the basis and beauty of evolution is in diversity.

I think this world would not be as beautiful as it is, if we were all just clones of one perfectly evolved human being. May the wonder of life continue... and may we keep finding solutions to our problems in the innovative human spirit that has kept us going for thousands of years so that this experiment of life flourishes.

Life is a wonder - let us enjoy our differences! They help us evolve better - and if we do have a creator I am sure he must be smiling at how we are shaping up so far.