Darwin was right: just look in the bible

Darwin was Right. Just look in the Bible.
March 2007
On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth this month, it is time to put an end to the battle in the "culture war" between the Theory of Evolution and Creationism.
Or it is at least time to call that battle what it is: nothing more than a shell game run by people who like to hear themselves talk, and want to fiddle while America burns in the fires of global warming, increasing inequality, and decreasing educational achievement.
So let's be clear: Darwin was indisputably right about evolution -- but God got there first. Because the Book of Genesis was the first clue to our evolutionary past.
Anyone with a passing familiarity of the Theory of Evolution and Genesis can see right off that the differences between the two, while clear, are nevertheless so small that to fuel a "culture war" over them automatically qualifies one as a nihilist.
And a quick comparison with other culture's creation stories shows how uncannily similar Genesis is to evolution.
The vaunted ancient Greeks believed creation began with a giant black bird, Nyx, who mothered an egg with the wind, which she sat on for ages before giving birth to Eros, and the two halves of that egg created heaven and earth.
The Hindus believed the universe was a dark ocean, upon which floated a giant cobra in whose coils Vishnu was born.
The Chinese believed the universe was a black egg, in which heaven and earth were mixed until the god Pangu split the egg to also create heaven and earth.
The Mayan Popul Vuh comes somewhat close to Darwin as they believed monkeys were an early but failed attempt by the gods to create Man.
Yet there are no other creation "theories" which approach Darwin's like Genesis.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep."
That is as fine a writerly description of the earth which existed billions of years ago as Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould might have penned.
True, Genesis says God created Heaven and the Earth first, and then said "Let there be light". But that verse always brings to mind the Big Bang -- the light which ended all darknesses.
Genesis then goes on to support what the average citizen (or voter) would agree is the overwhelming logic of evolution: after the stars and planets (heaven and earth); came the land and oceans (firmament and seas); then came the lesser organic life of grass, herbs and fruit trees; then came animals: birds, fish and finally land animals; then on the last day human beings.
Does this square precisely with evolution? No. But for a text written some 3000 years ago, it is a remarkably prescient description of what Darwin saw in nature 150 years ago when he published Origin of the Species.
And that brings us back to the nihilistic "culture war" over Creationism.
That the very broadcast technology Creationists use to spread their views is wholly the product of the Scientific Method which imagined evolutionary theory is a screaming irony lost to them.
But then, ultimately, the televangelists and right-wing leaders who make this a battle in the "culture war" are not remotely interested in creation, God nor godliness. They are interested only in stoking the fires of resentment and alienation which give the Republican Party an electoral edge on "values" issues.
But what these nihilists really make war on is "doubt" itself. Doubt, the very foundation of faith, without which there can be no faith. They want to banish Doubt, the very thing which most stirs the human mind (God given or evolved). For the flip side of Doubt is not Certainty, but Curiosity. And it is curiosity which first got Man to ask "Why?" The answer has evolved over the centuries, but the question remains unchanged.
The partisans of Evolution, too, can learn a valuable political lesson from comparing Darwin and Genesis: This battle can and will NEVER be won by fighting it on the Creationists' terms. For there is no way to do so except to pry Believers-in-the-Book from their faith. And for, say, the white ethnics who vote Republican values over their pocketbooks every four years, their faith is often the most that they have. Not all that they have, but the most.
And there are those Evolutionists for whom this battle is not about ideas, but about forcing people to acknowledge that their faith is a fraud. There is truly a section of the Left which despises Christianity, whatever their reason. And thus they too fuel the nihilistic "culture war".
So on this august anniversary, let us pay tribute to Darwin (who like Galileo and Newton was a believer), let us pay tribute to him by declaring an end to the phony war over Creationism. Darwin was right. Just look in the Bible.
Joe Gannon, writer and teacher, can be reached at Ganvolp9@cs.com.