While asking me about my religious standing, a young lady
asked me, “So do you believe in evolution?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I don’t see how we came from apes” she started “and I just
don’t see why people believe something just because someone said it or wrote it.”
She remarked.
“Me neither” I said strongly. “But isn’t that what people do
with religion?” I asked.
She remained quite.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not that I just believe: I have been convinced.”
“What’s the difference?” She asked.
“I didn’t just choose to believe something because I liked
the way it sounded, or felt obligated to believe it because others did” I
replied, “I have actually read The
Origin of Species and The
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. And I used discretion and critical thinking to
make up my mind!”
“Oh”, she said looking up to me with a bit of surprise.
So, I asked her, “How many people do you know say they do
not subscribe to biological evolution and yet have never read any of the
scientific literature on it?”
“Hmm” she said quietly while looking down in thought. “I’d
say about...all of them” she said with a rising intonation as if asking a question.
I said, “As I started reading these big works I was astounded
with the amount of time, research and evidence that Darwin
presented in his writing. He clearly had the ‘stuff’ to lay the foundation with
and it wasn’t just a bunch of ideas he was throwing against the wall. It was such
a flood of information that it was so simple to just connect the dots. Given
this information and being that it is still in consensus with modern science,
which has since presented even more
evidence of Darwin’s theory, how
could I deny it? I’m a reasonable person and I’d be lying to myself if I did.
And you’d do the same.”
“I didn’t realize that it was that serious of a work. I
thought it was just...random theories” she said. “But I’ve never read it so I
guess I just don’t know.”
“A lot of people think that…but they forget or had never even known that
science doesn’t work that way. It utilizes the
scientific method. And that is
what set’s it apart from religion.”
