Sunday, March 20, 2016

Evolution and the Ever Fucking After

   
In short, mutations happen. When there are forces at work that select for one trait or another changes happen. Traits are passed on.  New species emerge.

It can be easily proved. Ask any farmer who selects for a particular strain of corn or a particular flavor of pig. With a selection process - change happens. Nature provides an array of selection processes.

Things are the way they are because they got that way.

Now then. Assume that there is an afterlife. How does this fit in to this process? When life first emerged from the primordial ooze did the ever fucking after come with? Are there one celled creatures in heaven? And, what end would an afterlife serve?

All of this depends on the idea that the afterlife is ‘not of this world’. Some other existence. Some other dimension. But, again how would this fit in with the process of change, mutation, new life, change, mutation , new life . . . Where in all this would there be a reason, a need, an explanation for living beyond death?

Maybe it is just a human thing. Maybe we are special and we get an after life. Neanderthals too? China man? Australopithecus? At what point did we grow a soul that lives on? What evidence for this? To what end?

A religion that hangs its hat on life after death cannot embrace evolution. Evolution - the most unifying, simplifying, ‘explanifying’ idea in the history of science. You have to deny all of that. All of it to believe that you’re not really going to die. That you’re special. So you live in a stuck place where an old idea (evolution: 150 years or so) scares you and doesn’t fit in our world view. So you put on your blinders. Deny ALL evidence that doesn’t fit that world view and live in that stuck place.

And just bore the hell out of me.