My high school biology teacher paced around the room explaining how amazing the Miller-Urey experiment was, how it was an answer to so many of the questions that had troubled us for centuries. He ranted on and on, and then at the end of the class, he said, it all happened, with the will of God! He also used the same catch phrase whenever he was covering evolution. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was apparently supervised by God. At age 13, I had the sense to realize that this could not have been the will of God. Wasn’t he too busy watching over Adam and Eve, making sure they stayed away from the apple? I wondered why was it that I had figured it out that God had nothing to do with evolution, and my teacher insisted that the man upstairs was intelligently designing this all.
Truly, if you subscribe to the irrefutable evidence presented by physical anthropology, primatology, archeology, linguistics and genetics, proving the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species, you have to conclude, Eve did not come out of the missing rib of Adam. We have evidence that the genus Homo diverged from Australopithecines about 2 and a half million years ago in Africa. A far cry from the less than 10,000 years of age the Abrahamic religions assign to the Universe itself. Along our way, several species have become extinct, others evolved, including the half a million years ago evolution of the Archaic Homo sapiens, the forerunner of anatomically modern humans.
So we deduce, that the Abrahamic religions truly “lie” about the Adam and Eve creation, hence the stories of their roaming about the gardens of Eden must also be false. We know their explanation of the creation of universe defies all natural laws of physics and is little more than a fairy tale. One tends to ask, in the light of such blatant lies, why must one believe in the rest of the inarguable fairy tales?
Birth without conception, rising from the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, splitting the moon, splitting the river Nile apart, truly could not have had happened. So then comes the notion, perhaps our explanation of a higher being is completely misunderstood. The stories in the scriptures are nothing short of a Hollywood movie, and the dramatic sequences are nothing that a human cannot have created. There is absolutely nothing in a holy book that warrants for an intelligent design that is worthy of someone who for example created an organism as complex as say, the human eye.
While in engineering school I actually came across professors using the Quranic verses to explain geological phenomenon like tectonic plates and geo-spatial movements mentioned in innuendos in the Quran. Doubt, was always there in my mind, when I questioned the lack of relevance to the actual theories. Truly, I could take the recipe for a Jalapeno stuffed herring and make it sound like it explained why black holes existed!
The journey from being spoon fed belief, to gulping it down at one’s own will, to refuting it and accepting the fact that there is no such thing as intelligent design, is a long and arduous one. It warrants courage and a continual quest for knowledge. It requires an open mind, and a willingness to put to test the hypothesis of all that I know was a lie. The more one learns, the more one realizes what a waste their entire life has been!
