The Cause and effect of human history

By Dan Barber

When I look in the mirror I see that my nose and ears have grown as I’ve aged. It would make me feel better about it if my sense of smell increased rather than decreased and my sense of hearing increased rather than decreased, but no… when did cause and effect go out the window on that evolutionary question?

Maybe if we humans survive on earth as long as the dinosaurs roamed the globe our kind will improve through the evolutionary process… if our growing intellect, intelligent aliens from another world or an asteroid doesn’t destroy our planet first. If that happens then our colonists on Mars will start a heated debate on whether it was God, humans, aliens, or an asteroid that destroyed earth.

If the anthropologists have it right our ancestors climbed out of the mire of ignorance about 200,000 years ago to start the climb on to the evolutionary family tree. From what I’ve read, our forefathers/mothers only started putting down the record of human activity when a clan member decided to spruce up the cave with paintings of animals and other creatures. This activity may have been brought on by the hope of improving the hunt or from ingesting some hallucinogenic berries. Then about 6,000 years ago someone figured out that the doodling they were doing in the mud with a stick could be letters, language and symbols they could use to express an idea to other members of their tribe just by drying out the mud doodles to show them. I personally believe that all of these human activities have caused science and religion to butt heads.

Some orthodox theologians believe God created humans about 6,000 years ago. Maybe they confuse the beginning of human life with the advent of the written record of the human experience. If this is the case it would be much easier for the orthodox to make their case for divine creation by simply saying “metaphorically speaking…” before making any bold statement about what God created. If those believers try to argue their religious points as fact with scientists then they will lose every time. On the other hand when some scientists state that all knowledge is gained through observation or through the use of laws of nature, laws of physics or through experiments demonstrating cause and effect. I would ask them who created the laws of nature, who created the laws of physics and the big one, “what or who created the big bang?”

A couple of years ago I had a conversation about faith with one of my granddaughters when she asked me what I believed… Did I believe in God or Science?

I explained, and wrote in a blog afterwards, that I believed in both because I feel that science cannot exist without God, and God can’t exist without science. 

At about that same time a news story was broadcast about some physicists working on trying to recreate the Higgs Boson also known as the “God particle”… or the spark that science claims created the universe in a “Big Bang.”  The scientists stated that they discovered the particle… but couldn’t really see the spark because it was rediscovered in a mathematical formula… we just had to believe they were right, in other words we just had to have “faith” that their discovery was real.

On one of my favorite TV programs, one of the physicist characters told his physicist roommate that his mathematical formula only worked because he had to create several other universes to make it work.

“Faith,” a belief in something, or maybe the hope, that something exists without physical proof. I was told in my Sunday school class when I was a child that no one could see God, but we know that He exists, we just have to accept Him and have faith.

I have a conversation with God everyday. I thank Him for allowing me to wake each morning so I can have another day of doing what I really enjoy.  I thank Him for the beauty of the Universe that he created from the wonderful “God Particle.”  I thank Him for creating this great planet for all his earthly creatures to live on. I thank Him for the conversations that I can have with my grandchildren who have the faith that their grandfather is mostly right in what he says. I thank God for the laughter of my grandchildren when they laugh at my stories and jokes. I thank God that I can still learn from the wisdom of my family and friends.

Yes, I believe that God and Science are inseparable… without one it is not possible to have the other. And yes, metaphorically speaking, God has a sense of humor; why else would He give old people bigger noses and ears without the added benefit of better smell and sound?