Updated Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Who am I?  Why am I here?

 

Cosmic questions, those.  Forever and before, philosophers and theologians in long or grungy beards and long tattered or tie-dyed robes, black tie, tatters, and tattoos, atop mountains gazing at the Milky Way or the smog, have pondered those questions.  In caves among the bats, at lecterns under klieg lights, at cocktail parties, these questions have been toyed with.  Celebrities and ghost writers at life-time award ceremonies. Hooded monks in dank cells and haute-accoutered models on runways.  Grad students in seminars, puffing pipes or pot; Gurus and heretics hot-footing it over burning coals or flaming blogs, or burning at stakes. Cool answers all over uTube, like, I am a totally tattooed zombie here to make a difference in the world and save the planet and the whales from Wall Street by rioting for social justice and free contraceptives, with my AK40 and 200 decidbel 500 watt e-drums.

I’m the Creationist Curmudgeon, is who I am.  I’m a creationist, and I’m here to put curmudgeony essays on the web.  Evolution will be “Evo.”  Evo activists, “Evoeans.”

I’m so old I remember when Evolution was still a theory,  as Darwin had created it.  Darwin presented his data.  God His. Take your choice.  That was the golden age of science.

No longer.  It’s different now.  Having cut my teeth on theories and theses as a biology major, as a research fellow in a university laboratory and had a career as pathologist in a clinical laboratory, engrossed in investigative journals and sometimes participating in writing peer-reviewed and footnote-festooned articles for them, I would not have believed the change if I had not witnessed it myself. Learned, objective, histoiorographic analysis alone cannot convey the magnitude and nature of the evolution of Evolution.  It would be a startling PhD thesis.  But thumbed-down.

In the court and from the lectern rather than in the field or the lab, Evo has evolved from theory to doctrine to law and beyond: from the incarnation of inductive science to the blue-faced grinning avatar of deduction, from a posteriori to a priori and no looking back. No longer a tool of science, it is science itself.  No longer a theory subject to verification, it has become the supreme standard whereby every other theory, yea science itself, ecology, sociology, medicine, theology, theosophy, astrology, feng shui, necromancy, bloggery are to be calibrated and judged, curriculums molded, accreditation accorded, court cases decided, grants awarded and awards celebrated. Evolution has metamorphosed from a moist translucent larva yet to crawl up from the primeval swamp into a iron-clad horned, fanged, tusked, smoking monster running amok in seminars and blogs, theme parks and churches, NatGeo and courts.

Darwin theorized; judge Jones apotheosized. Once Evo was taught; now it’s mandated.

O that Evo had stayed in the swamp and away from the court!

If, at the beginning of science, just a couple of centuries ago, the scientist was liberated and beholden to none, certainly not to the philosopher, and bore no brand seared into his shanks, no logos plastered all over his lab coat, he’s now a creature of vested and conflicting interests, and proud of it.  A chimera with the brain of a biologist and mouth of a philosopher or PAC political ad-maker, the “evolutionary biologist" is not ashamed of it, proud of it, like a gay out of the closet.  Well, OK, I’m a creationist biologist, and I’m supposed to be ashamed of it.

But I'm simply adhering to the protocol that an evolutionary biologist follows and is awarded for. When a creationist biologist does that -- believing Genesis 1, he starts with Creation as the given, and sees evidence consistent with it -- is he not paying homage to the Emperor of science, the Evo Empire? So why the outrage?

Nonplused and bemused by the evolution of the controversy, whiplashed by its jerks; resigned to the new breed of metaphysicians and Doctors Of The Philosophy Of Science, who, like 18th century gentry, don’t go near labs themselves but tell the others how to function in there and what to deliver from it; mellowed and dispirited by age and angst, I have evolved from scientist to curmudgeon, from polemicist obsessed with arguments to essayist writing for the fun of it.

I have left the academic peer-reviewed arena.  To less jaunty more jousting minds than mine have I left the contest.  For the facts and arguments, data and strata, fossils and footnotes, not just whimsy, it is to these wise and capable scientists, scholars, and logicians you must turn.*

In these essays I’m less interested in bickering over how life happened than where life leads to.  And where life leads to is not to nowhere, nothing, a black hole sucking it in and ejecting it out, and back, and out, mindlessly, pointlessly, randomly.  It leads to Intelligent Design.com, wherein are designers if not The Designer.  As I see it -- he that hath eyes to see let him see -- It leads farther than that.  It leads to God.

It isn’t just a matter of different scientific theories and decorous debate any more. It isn’t just a inconsequential historical question of whether God created the earth and life or random materialism did, but a right-now question of where God and Evolution want to take us.  God knows.  Evo doesn't seem to.   Intelligent vs. mindless processes in action.

On one hand Evo bemoans how intelligent life exterminates itself. But does that matter if life is just vibrating particles?  On the other hand, that hand having evolved separately from the first hand and neither hand knowing what the other is doing, evolution is no longer satisfied with winning a mere argument and disposing of God.  Evo seems to want to evolve us on into Posthumanity, a race of vritual SuperSpiderBatman persons of whatever gender that out-gods God Himself, with a society to match.   By utilizing all the breakthroughs in special effects movies and pharmaceuticals and academic curricula, biotechnogenetics, the courts, and celebrity smiles, Evolution is all set to evolve from quaint Darwinian natural selection to directed, managed selection, and if that involves devolution to discredited eugenics, well, it’ll be done right this time, with a friendlier press.  Huge political, religious, personal implications, on a global scale. It’s a war, and not just a culture war, but a war for life, not just its origin but its destiny, for the soul of mankind and whether such a thing as a soul is even allowed, this war between Creationism and super-evolving Evolutionism.

I could wish the creator had equipped and commissioned me personally to fix bayonet and charge over the barbed wire blogs and seminars into the fray, but He didn't.  Anyway I'm too old for combat duty.  I am not the one to win it for creationism as Eisenhower and Pappy Boyington won it for western civilization in WWII.  A band of brothers is out there doing that.*   I’m not the chaplain either.   So why am I here?   Like Bob Hope in WWII, I'm here in the trenches  to entertain our troops going into battle, that's all.   (Meanwhile across no man's land, merriment, even giddier than mine, I think, is being dished up by, for example, my curmudgeony doppelganger.  Off limits without gas mask.)