…FROM THE WOMB OF EVOLUTION SPRANG

Now that I’ve left Paley’s Watchmaker Theory in smoky ruins (I can almost see the metaphorical smoldering from here), let us explore one of my favorite concepts: more proof that evolution formed this world.

From the womb of evolution, sprang religion.

Little doubt that there will be wide and varied responses to THIS one, all righty.

No magic tricks, nothing up my sleeve. No fancy legerdemain, long complex formulas, statistical analyses, I will use nothing more than simple cause and effect with a dash of sense to prove my point.

Of course, the presupposition is that evolution (which is the backbone of biology, and the source of many wonders we employ in modern medicine today, take THAT, Intelligent Design!) is a theory that has sufficient evidence to back its play.

By theory, I mean of course, from answers.com, definitions 1 and 2:

1. “ A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.


2. The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice: a fine musician who had never studied theory.”

So we begin.

In the beginning, back when first our ancestors swam the murky depths of the ocean, the thought (or concept, or perhaps just a whim: who’s to say what prompted the entire thing?) occurred to move towards the light, in one of our far-flung ancestors. It may have been an accident: likewise, movement of the school towards better hunting grounds.

And so it began. That upward drifting, that reaching towards warmer waters, that ever always-out-of-reach circular thing that cast bright shadows through the liquid atmosphere.

Why that first air-breather flopped onto dry land, gasping air instead of water, is a mystery yet unsolved. Food, perhaps, or some form of activity that threatened survival (volcanic or otherwise), that required an escape onto the sand.

From there, the progress was always upwards and onwards. Up and up we strove from there. Growing always, reaching for the sun. Until our hairier great-great (far too many of those to list here) grandfather/mother began to climb upwards. Because, after, all, up is good. The offspring is inevitably smaller than the parent: so from birth, all land-locked creatures are always looking in one particular direction more than any other. For food, for behavior to mimic, for all things good and proper.

Even as our ancestors took to the treetops, again the progression occurs. Upwards is good: upwards is where the predators weren’t, as opposed to the ground: upwards is where the food is: down is a plummet, the fall, the rending tooth, the bloody claw.

So perhaps Chesterton wasn’t so far off, after all, inasmuch as his concept of ‘instinctive’ worship.