Lily Tomlin—Chimpanzees and Darwin

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“Great men are those who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.” R.W. Emerson

Excerpt: BOFAW, Chap 1, “Lettie’s Question.”

 

The students were working out of lab guides and only had occasional questions. As I approached Lettie, a bright, highly motivated girl, she took her hand out of her pig, looked up, and asked, “Mr. Young, is this really important? Memorizing all the parts of a pig is a lot of work, and I was just wondering if it were really important in the big picture.”

In Stephen Hawking’s latest book, The Great Design, he properly opines that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. However, he then contradicts himself by attempting to use his “science” to prove that the concept of God is obsolete. One of his latest theories is that the universe is so complex that it made itself out of “nothing.” This not only contradicts the accepted laws of conservation of matter/energy, ironically it parallels the religious belief that God appeared out of nothing. Neither opinion can be proven so the mystery remains. Furthermore, Hawking has done exactly what Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey: The Secret of Life, properly accused scientists of doing.

“With the failure of those many efforts (creating life) science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living organisms which it could not demonstrate. After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own…”

This is exactly what Hawking is doing and spirit-blind scientists support him whole-heartedly.

Fellow countryman, Richard Dawkins, seems to be obsessed with showing that Darwinism can actually prove that God does not exist. Furthermore, he professes that those who disagree with him must be either ignorant or mentally challenged. The odd thing, in both cases, is that if God does not exist, why bother to try to prove a negative?

Devout Darwinists boldly point out that modern chimpanzees and humans share 97% of their DNA. Somehow, this too is supposed to prove that chance and competition created humans, a claim Darwin found “impossible” to believe. These scientists seem to fail to grasp (or acknowledge) that the 3% variation represents a quantum (and unexplained) leap to modern humans. Imagine a concert pianist playing a Mozart concerto which may last over 1 hour. His/her fingers fly up and down the keyboard, playing perhaps 100,000 notes. Again, imagine Michelangelo brilliantly painting the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel in Rome. Now, imagine a chimpanzee accomplishing either miracle.

Alfred Wallace etal, have properly shown that Darwin’s TOE can not explain how or why some humans are extraordinarily gifted, musically, mathematically or artistically.  There is simply no genetic model that works.

In 1985, Jane Wagner published a best-selling book, The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe. In another display of genius, Lily Tomlin committed the book to memory and took in on Broadway as a one-woman monologue. Her performance was not only brilliant, the message she was bearing was equally so.

“They said, “Trudy, we see now, intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg. The more you know, the less knowing the meaning of things means. So, forget the “meaning of life.”

I didn’t tell them, of course, I had.

See, its not so much what we know, but how we know, and what it is about us that needs to know.

The intriguing part: Of all the things we’ve learned, we still haven’t learned

where did this desire to want to know come from?…

We know a lot about the beginnings of life, Biogenesis.

But so what? What’s more impressive is that from biogenesis evolved life forms intelligent enough to think up a word like “biogenesis.”

So no matter how much we know, there’s more to knowing than we could ever know.

Isaac Newton secretly admitted to some friends: He understood how gravity behaved, but not how it worked.

We’re thinking maybe the secrets about life we don’t understand are the “cosmic carrots” in front of our noses that keep us going.

So maybe we should stop trying to figure out the meaning of life and sit back and enjoy the mystery of life.

The operative word here is what?

MYSTERY!

Not meaning.

This “need to know” may be traced  all the way back to the “The Garden” and may be why the eminent anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote; “The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed…Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since.”

It may also be why our 7-year-old granddaughter, after hearing a children’s version of “The Creation Story,” offered, “I think they should have eaten the apple. It has made life more interesting.”

Indeed!

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