Different Strains of Creationism and Evolution
In a battle between Intelligence Design and Evolution there seems to be only 2 camps. There are many camps between actually.
For example, from pure Creationism to pure evolution, we can have the following strains.
1. Intelligence Design. God created every species from scratch.
2. Incompetent Design. God created every species. However, he’s not so powerful that he got it right the first time. So he created a lot of target practices and then copies the blueprint for those target practices for better masterpieces. These “Gods” maybe genetic engineers from Alien species rather than a Christian God. At least for some species, namely the genetically modified food, we know it’s true.
3. Guided evolution. God doesn’t create new species. He just guides evolution. So species show up by it self, and then God says, “Ah ha… I don’t like the Canaanites, so I help the Israelites to slaughter them all.” Perhaps latter He said, “Ah ha, I don’t like the nephilim, here comes the flood.” After a while, the species that survive in the gene pool are the one that God prefer.
4. Pure evolution. There was never a God. Life happened by it self.
You know what; from all 4 I don’t know what’s right. The option 3 is particularly danger. Imagine if your brother got murdered. The murderer can argue that it happens because God does not like your brother and prefer the murderer to survive in the gene pool.
Attributing atrocities to God rather than aspects we can control, such as lack of punishment toward murderers can leads to extreme situation.
Politically savvy murderers can then murder a lot of people avoiding the natural political costs. That’ll set precedence that’ll eventually make us kill each other.
Guess what, people do use that technique all over the world.
After Muhammad killed a lot of Jews (Banu Nadir), for example, he argued that God told him that the Jews plotted to kill him.
Given lack of evidence against the Jews besides those supernatural claims, many people believe Muhammad anyway.
Of course, to be fair to the Muslim, I must say that the same “trick” is used by so many other religions/atheists too. My Mom, for example, told me that the slaughtering of Canaanites is justified because God said so. The Genghis Khan argued that God granted him a mission to subdue those who refused to submit to him (with the exception of Mamelukes, I guess). Christians witch hunter also used religions to justify killing witches, pagans, and Jews. The Jews themselves had their share of genocide when they’re winning war.
It seems that humans like to kill each other. We just need a good justification for that and religions provide good hard to check justification.
This is the same reason, why many countries are secular. Secular countries protect innocents from unverifiable accusations and hence can more properly align their people’s interests to prosperity. Hence, secular countries, nowadays, tend to be stronger and richer.
Finally, vestigial DNA and vestigial organ suggests that at least one possibility is impossible. Number 1. As I explained in http://genetips.com/2007/08/19/is-life-created/archive.htm.