COYNE (2005) NEW REPUBLIC, 8/22&29/ 21-37

This 11 page dissertation underlines the strengths of evolution and its growing unpopularity. Intelligent design appears to be winning the public with scientific jargon and secular sounding theology. It indicates evolution’s disparities but has done little basic research of its own. Evolution must carry the torch of reason, but not dismiss the transpersonal.

At the moment, the Roman Catholic Church has changed its position and is now against evolution as well as most Evangelical Protestants. Intelligent Design maintains like Creationism that the earth imploded with the big bang into a well formed earth including humans roughly 6,000 years ago.

Evolution maintains that after the big bang, the earth slowly mutated through natural selection, adaptation, genetic drift, and genetic variation into life as we know it today. It took about 4.6 billion years. Humankind began to emerge after the ice age about 13,000 years ago. Evolution is used today in creating hybrids among animals and plants that are larger and more profitable to grow. The missing link is not missing. Human embryos are entirely covered with hair during part of incubation and HOMO ERECTUS is nearly identical to chimps with same torso but slightly different head structure.

(My own feelings are that evolution is presented by generally science teachers who may be dry as dust. They also may be cold and elitist. All the above puts them in the same league with abortion providers and used car salesman. On the other hand, intelligent design is introduced by a warm charismatic preacher who tells parishioners that there is a reason for their life, that a higher power loves them and that life and cosmology can be explained by religion and science without contradiction.

Again, evolution can mean but can not empirically support that God caused the big bang and in metaphorical terms created the earth in 7 days. A day in the life of God is not necessarily a day for humans. Further, such phenomena as punctuated equilibrium, chaotic bifurcation, and serendipity may suggest that God works in subtle but non-verifiable ways on and in the universe.)

In a post modern world that recognizes that humans are non-rational, the resurgence of neo-premodernism makes sense. The biblical story has a beginning, middle, and ending.
It provides closure. This is opposed to evolution that must explain in an ever-changing world without clear boundaries how natural selection goes on and on into nowhere or somewhere. In the process, some of the most adaptive creatures include rats and cockroaches as well as bacteria that superbly mutate to kill us all. )

Evolution needs to do its job on the theological side. They must underline that even without God, an individual however powerless walks the earth representing thousands of ancestors who came before and makes choices that carry way beyond themselves to the wider world as suggested by Chaos theory,. In the natural world, there still appears to be order.

By leaving a God outside the process, evolution loses ground now in terms of support, but later in terms of grants and other funding. Future students may not hear of evolution, but as a side bar as a flawed theory. Scientist may be the last to know that to exist; you have to win the hearts and minds of the masses. That is the group of people that highly talented science researchers may rarely talk to.