Do You Have “Strong Beliefs?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of ”belief” lately. Everybody has beliefs, and they vary a lot throughout the world. In fact, I can’t really think of two people I know that have the exact same set of beliefs about the nature of life and the universe.

And yet, all over the world there are organized systems of belief called “religions.” In my life, I’ve known a great number of people who have claimed to belong to these religious groups, and I’ve always tried my best to understand their beliefs. But I’ll be perfectly honest, I sometimes get confused.

Throughout the years, it has become evident to me that people really don’t know what they believe - that is, they have not actually given any clear reflection or thought to even their most fundamental positions regarding life and existence. If you disagree with me, then hold on because I can easily prove it. All that I ask is that you follow a few logical steps with me, and I will show you (even with an open mind) how some people’s individual beliefs are just fundamentally flawed.

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For thousands of years, mankind did not know anything about where he was. People living in the Holy Roman Empire, for example, thought that their empire encompassed the entire universe. It’s same with the oriental Dynasties in the east. If somebody told you that there were dragons beyond the sea, you would have no good reason to believe otherwise. How would you know? That is what the world was like for much of the development of civilization.

Obviously, religions flourished during this era of human history because it gave people an answer. The story of Genesis, for example, provided people with a way of making sense of how life started. It gave people something to tell their children when they asked “Why are there clouds?” and “Where do people go when they die?” For thousands of years, religion provided the answers. Some faiths cunningly used the notion of a dual afterlife (heaven/hell) to instill moral rectitude among its subjects. Amazingly, it still persists to this day. Others taught that life was recycled into a new carnation until the soul had been purified. And for years, those beliefs were widely accepted as being factual.

When people in the Christian belief system were asked “Where did we come from?” they were told that god had created the Earth in seven days, and that all humans were descended from a single couple. And for centuries, this was also considered to be factual. And since many families currently living in North America are directly descended from the people in Holy Roman Empire, many of our beliefs and traditions have evolved into what we might call “modern Christianity.”

As the centuries marched on, and with the rise of the scientific method, people slowly became aware of the naturally occurring processes of biological development. It is called “evolution,” and it is a completely verifiable and readily observable fact of life. And yet, we still encounter some people who claim that they “do not believe in evolution” - in other words they still cling to the antiquated explanations of life on Earth. Many of them “believe” that the Earth itself is only several thousand years old. Pardon me if I sound close minded, but I find that to be an absolute insult to the virtues of knowledge and rationality that are so integral to human development.

Essentially, these people are saying that science has yielded incorrect results, right? They are basically saying that the entire network of established scientific minds is wrong. They say that evolution is only a theory despite the fact that it is proven… that the Earth is young despite a plainly obvious fossil record… that dinosaurs are a myth despite the presence of bones, or even that dinosaurs walked with man!

But HEY… that’s okay. If you choose not to believe in science, then I won’t put your beliefs down. It’s perfectly allowed. People can believe what they like in this world, and I’m in NO position to stop them.

BUT!!!

If you do not believe in evolution, or in the scientific method, then why do you go to the doctor’s office when you’re sick? Do you think he pulled that influenza vaccine out of his ass? Or could it be that modern medicine is inherently based on the posits made by science? Maybe you should think about the centuries of biological testing and scientific scrutiny that went into making that little vaccine possible. It’s the exact same testing and scientific scrutiny that says humans evolved, and the vaccine seems to work.

I think that most people today accept science as an explanation for natural phenomenon that they can see with our naked eyes. Why don’t people believe the natural processes that they can see under a microscope? You know, it was hundreds of years after the death of Copernicus that people finally started believing that the Earth revolved around the sun. How is it that even today some people still insist on denying similarly proven posits of science?

Simply put: to deny evolution is to deny a LARGE MAJORITY OF SCIENTIFIC FACT.

This is how I see it. There are only two ways your beliefs can make sense:

1) You accept evolution because you accept that science is a verifiable and observable reality of our existence, and evolution is inextricably tied to the rest of established science.

OR…

2) You maintain that all people on Earth are descended from Adam & Eve roughly 4000 years ago, that they were ejected from the Garden of Eden, that dinosaurs terrorized the Roman Empire and then mysteriously buried themselves under oceans and glaciers, and that thousands of mankind’s best thinkers have methodically collaborated over hundreds of years only to be wrong.

A lot of people like to avoid these two realities. But straight up… it’s one or the other. They’re mutually exclusive! There is absolutely no middle ground, because they contradict each other at the most fundamental level.

So when I ask people where they stand in their so-called “strong beliefs”, it’s no wonder that they have a hard time answering. The reason is simple. They don’t actually know! They don’t actually think about it, because if they did then they would run into concrete walls at every turn, and it become obvious that their “beliefs” on evolution are based on a complete lack of awareness.

“Blind faith” they say. I think that’s absolute horse-shit. It’s just being blind.  

But like I said, I know lots of religious people. And I don’t think they are stupid. I just think they have to struggle their whole lives to define what they believe, but they can never come to any kind of conclusion. But then again, who among us can?

And just because you accept evolution, it doesn’t mean that you can’t accept god. The POPE believed in evolution! Evolution explains HOW… but it still doesn’t explain WHY. And science never will explain why. There will always be a place for faith and spirituality. But COME ON! Evolution as much fact as the Earth revolving around the sun! Do some freaking reading for once! 

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PS. It’s important that we teach our children evolution correctly:

As opposed to the incorrect way (the gross over-simplifications of the church):