The Story of Man (Continued)

The Evolutionary Story of Creating

An Evolution Out of Nothing

 

     Instead of starting with a big bang let’s start where all great ideas start—a quiet room and a blank wall. God is sitting in the middle of nothing thinking about nothing with nothing to do when it dawns on him—and He’s not even sure what “dawns on” means, but he knows that whatever he decides it means that’s what it will mean; but anyway, it dawns on Him that He is lonely and that things are not going to get any better. He knows where He has been and knows where it’s going and it frightens the hell out of Him because He’s still only in the early stages of eternity even though it seems like it has been going on forever.

     Bottom-line: He ain’t seen nothing yet!  Even though he’s seen a lot—of nothing. He knows He is the only one who can solve His problem. There is no cavalry and even if there were, He suspects they would be late.

     “Today,” God says to Himself, cautiously optimistically, “is the first day of the rest of my life,” wondering as He says this if “my” should have a big M or a little m.

     He wonders how the first day of the rest of His life will begin. Will it be a big bang or a big surprise—a big surprise mainly for the man and woman who wake up to discover that they’re at the end of the planting season, it’s time to harvest the crops and there are no slaves around to do the heavy lifting.

     What he wants from his new friends is what everybody wants out of a friendship. He wants his friends to know how important they are to Him—and vice-versa.

     The problem creationists have with the evolution story is that man is hardly in it while evolutionists complain that there is hardly anything in the creationist story except man.

     But could both be overlooking the big Wooly Mammoth in the room? Maybe man is as important as the creationists think he is but maybe, just maybe, putting mankind at the end of a long chain of slow moving events was just the introduction God intended to demonstrate that importance. Maybe the dinosaurs are simply the greatest opening act in history, no more and no less, and mankind is still the biggest headliner—the way God always intended him to be.

    Obviously, the creationist’s story was too easy and man never did get the full grasp of just how lucky he was. He woke up in Eden with absolutely no knowledge of volcanos, tundra’s, rush hours or plain old dumb luck. By the third chapter—and these are very short chapters—man had turned his back on his only new best friend and lost, in the process, a piece of real estate, the likes of which he would never see again.

    But there are some monkey wrenches in the monkey story too.

    Evolutionists protest that the creation story is a story that relied heavily on incredible imagination, bondless enthusiasm, and not much common sense—one you might come up with if you didn’t know an atom from an Adam.

    Well, duh! Moses—a chief contributor to the creation story—was, after all, a man who wandered in the desert for forty years just trying to get back home. He didn’t know what an atom was, so he did the best he could with the only Adam he had.

    So, in the end, what is the story of man’s beginning?

     Obviously, the evolution story is nothing more than the creation story with an earlier beginning and a little more pazazz—not a different beginning, just an earlier one. And the creation story is nothing more than the evolution story with all the details missing.

    God can and must be in the new and improved comprehensive story of man but so can the dinosaurs and monkeys. In the new story, God has to be more than just a folk hero pulling rabbits out of a hat and dropping man in a garden. He has to know a little science. If creationist have no problem with God writing the book on religion they should be able to credit him with writing the book on science, also.

    To recap, creationists simply have to have a brain and evolutionist have to have a heart and both have to brave-up and not be afraid of the truth. And God has to be more than just a wizard.

    But He can do it. He can do it short and quick or He can do it long and tedious. For all we know, He could have already done it both ways on different occasions and we’re just the third or umpteenth attempt at getting it right. If He wanted to, He could even do it upside down and put Australia on top and England down under and believe me no one would be the wiser.

    Or this could all be nothing more than a practice run with the real show starting tomorrow after He gets a good night’s sleep. He certainly has all the time in the world to get it right and all the time in the world to kill, if, in fact, he’s just fooling around. The truth is, He may not have done anything yet. We may just be an idea floating around in His head.

The Story of Man

    

The Evolutionist's Story

     Evolutionists, or as they prefer to be called, scientists, ascribe to the Big Bang Theory and estimate that the universe was created in a single, stupendous light show about 10-billion years ago.

 

     Our own solar system, including our Earth and 7,8, or 9 other planets, depending on what day it is and who’s counting, entered the cosmos with all worlds spinning around five and a half billion years later. Because the Earth was pretty damn hot in the beginning, cockroaches didn’t show up until at least a few months had gone by and things began to cool down.

 

     Around 3.8-billion years ago, living cells began floating in the oceans—floating because they were only single, lonely cells without a clue. Double living cells came later but were not much better than one and pretty much just as lonely. In fact, two is just about the loneliest number of cells since the number one, but they were able to advance our culture in a small, incremental two-cells-at-a-time manner—and so, evolutionists claim, it was around the time that double living cells showed up that cells stopped floating and began experimenting with the basic dog paddle.

 

     Dinosaurs made their entrance around 225-million years ago, hung around for a truly uneventful 150 million years, and then all of a sudden, around 65 million years ago they just decided they had had enough, called it quits and started digging their way to the center of the Earth to get away from it all.

 

     It wasn’t a good idea and they only got a few thousand feet before hitting a stone wall. This is what is generally referred to in geological terms as the end of the dinosaur and the beginning of petroleum.

 

     Man showed up about three score and three million years after the dinosaurs left, unaware that dinosaurs had ever even existed, until about 150 years ago. This explains why man gets so excited every time he finds a dinosaur bone in his back yard, no matter how small, and curses for all to hear, “Well dad-gummit, there’s a bone that I could have used in my gas tank.”

 

     Around 25 million years ago, the first deer set four feet on the planet—roughly 23 million years before man, 24,999,500 years before gunpowder and 24,999,900 years before the invention of the automobile. One would think that this was more than enough time to prepare for being the animal that man most liked to sneak up on and surprise the hell out of, but one would be wrong. We still get that “Where the hell did you come from” look from a deer every time they see us.

 

     Although he has been a significant addition to the earthly landscape over the last 2-million years, scientists are quick to point out that man had been, more or less, good for nothing for more than 99% of that time, not  making any truly memorable mark in history until about 10,000 B. C. But when he made his move, he did so in a big way.

 

     It wasn’t a big bang kind of way. No explosives were used in any way although some animals were hurt in the process. Man’s biggest accomplishment at first was just getting off his knees and standing up—"one small step for mankind but one giant step for monkeys." Once he was up, there was no holding him down.

 

     Sure, mistakes were made. It’s been rumored that an early ancestor of Benjamin Franklin rubbing two stone wheels together in a primitive attempt to make fire created mankind’s first rapidly advancing prairie fire—driving hundreds of families out of their caves. But in time, man became the master of his environment moving quickly from the production of tin cans to bronze statues and the next thing you knew, there’s a 450-foot pyramid sitting there in the middle of the desert, saying, “Hey world, look at me.”

 

     And that was just the pyramid talking. The men behind the pyramids were even cockier. They would balance themselves at the top of those peculiar, pointy pedestals, gaze up at the stars and the moon and boast,

     “This is just where I’m going when I’m dead. You ought to see my beach house. I LOVE being a Pharaoh.”

 

    It would be just a few thousand more years and man would be flying to those same stars and hitting golf balls on that same moon.

 

     Yes, mankind certainly knew how to put on a show and he wasted no time in turning Earth into his own private little playhouse. Hell, ten thousand years of evolution for the dinosaurs, even the last ten thousand when they should have been getting the hang of it, never amounted to more than poking another spike out of their back or finding room for another row of teeth.

 

     Evolution has been very good for man and man has been very good for evolution. You couldn’t write a better autobiography for a species than the story of evolution.

(to be continued)