Are Creationists Right? Are Evolutionists Right? ... YES!

IF YOU STAND WHERE GOD STANDS, the answer is yes. If you stand where fundamentalist Christians and many others stand, the answer is Creationism and if you stand where atheists and many others stand, the answer is Evolution. Until a few moments ago, I was with that latter group of many others, a firm believer in evolution. Now, at 9:39 EDT, July 8, 2012, I am a "Yes" person, courtesy of a books-on-tape "Conversations with God" by Neale Donald Walsh, three books of 6 cassette tapes (yes cassette, I still have one of those on purpose) for each book.

Walsh's point, rather God's points, are these:

1. In God's world, everything is absolute, not relativistic like in ours
2. Ours is relativistic in order for our simple minds to make sense of things, to compare things to one another in order to organize them in our heads; God doesn't need to do that
3. That is why humans created the idea of Good and Evil, concepts unknown to God until we came up with them through our use of Free Will
4. Creationism vs Evolution is the same thing; God doesn't know the difference
5. 14 billion or so years ago God blinked an eye, so to speak, or maybe made a Big Bang, and the beginnings of a new Universe sprang forward.
6. Everything that needed to exist at some point in time after that, existed then, in some form including the ingredients for human life some 14 billion years later.
7. In that fashion, yes, God created human life in every sense that Christians believe [He] did, just not spontaneously in the form of Adam and then Eve a while later from one of Adam's ribs and only 10,000 or so years ago. Instead, just as miraculously, God provided the material and set in motion a chain of events that ultimately allowed me to type these words.
8. In that same fashion, yes, humanity evolved the way evolutionists say it did because that is the template God created from the get go.

Now God didn't know I was going to type these particular words, God just provided the environment that allowed me to, should I so choose, God could care less whether I did or did not or whether I change any minds with what I write. All God wants to do is experience through us, and everything else that was created, the results of the creation.

A final thought. Humanity is truly the masters of our own fate, God has seen to that by giving us TRUE free will. God doesn't care whether we like God or dislike God, although I suspect God would prefer the former; nevertheless, God will not punish us for whichever choice we make, for to do so implies there is no free will in the first place. God does not want us praying to God FOR something, God will not give it to you. If you pray to God at all, do it out of Thanks; that, I am sure, is all God wants for God has given you all God can give you for God as already given you Everything and doesn't need to do it a second time, don't you see. It is up to you what you do with it.

3/5/15 - IT WAS JUST REPORTED THAT A JAWBONE (this is a link) from the genus Homo was found in the Afar region of Ethiopia. What makes this one special is its age. You see, Lucy (species - Australopithecus afarensis), is the oldest known precursor to humans at 3.2 million years old. Then you have many fossil findings beginning at 2.3 million years old. This jawbone, however, has been dated at 2.8 million years old, smack dab in the middle of the million year gap of our knowledge. Scientist are expecting great things from this set of 5 teeth.

1/19/2019 - A new report just came out that a fossil found several years ago was finally confirmed to be one of the physical missing links in the evolution of apes into man. The fossil named Australopithecus sediba fills in a gap between the Lucy skeleton from 3 million years ago to "Handy Man", who is about 1.5 to 2.1 million years old. This fossil is around 2 million years old.

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, ESPECIALLY WHEN I GET FULL OF MYSELF, I need to remind myself where I really stand in relation to God and everything else, for that matter. (Sometimes I like to do this just to feel the tingle of awe it brings on.) A couple of decades ago I was in this particular exhibit in the National Air and Space museum in Washington D.C. standing in front of this HUGE map of space on the wall, awestruck. It was sort of like the the third picture above, but a 1,000 time larger; it was a big wall. On it were many galaxies and one of them was the Milky Way, our galaxy with its beautifully spiralling arms. Inside the Milky Way were many solar systems arranged all up and down the various arms of the Milky Way and there was an arrow on the wall pointing to a little bright spot on one of the arms; the sign on the arrow simply said ... You Are Here.

You might have been able to picture that in your head, and you might not have been able to, but let me use the three pictures above to try to achieve the same feeling I got when I read those three simple words. Look at the first picture and focus at the bottom of the upside-down pyramid, at what I guess is called the apex, except it is on the bottom. That point is the Big Bang; the point where God becomes the Universe. Below that point, you can imagine anything you want, but that is God before there was positive Time as we understand Time. Above that point is our reality.

Move up a little bit into the red-yellow shaded area; this is where Time begins "marching on." The thickness of that reddish area above the apex is around 377,000 years after the Big Bang. This is the point where the new Universe has cooled enough and become less dense enough that photons (think of light or Star Trek) stop bumping into to everything and getting destroyed; they can now go in straight lines like light is supposed to and the Universe becomes transparent.

Now jump up to the third pane, the one at the top; that is the Universe some 13.7 billion years later. In other words, today. Now, imagine you are lying down, atop that pane looking down through time toward the apex; that is what you are actually doing when you look up in the night sky and see far distant stars, you are seeing back in time. What do you think you would see? Well, if you could see Microwaves, you would see a soft glow of some sort way off in deep, deep space. That would be the second picture, you would be looking at the Universe, as it was 13.4 billion years ago, you would be seeing what is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CBR) radiation. So, here is where we begin our journey.

At that point in time, all there was in terms of matter that you would recognize are a bunch of hydrogen and helium nuclei running around all over space, there were no stars or galaxies, just bits of real matter, dark energy, dark matter, and a ton of building block particles with strange names like quarks, and gluon, and hadrons, and God particles. What you do know for sure as well, you are definitely not there; you must wait your turn; you must let time march on.

And, march on it does, expanding and condensing and growing, all at the same time. All of those green, blue, and white dots start merging and become the uncountable number of spinning swirls which begin to form from all those tiny particles with strange sounding names. The Universe keeps expanding still, unfolding before your eyes as you look down upon it from above, still not seeing where you are. Billion of years pass on by and now it is too much to take in at once, so you just look at one of those swirls, and you turn your gaze to the third picture.

You know it is today now, and you know you are there somewhere, because here you are looking for yourself, aren't you? So you gaze all over the third picture wondering where in this little corner of the Cosmos you could possibly be. ... Finally, you spy yourself, in that little bright spot, our solar system, on the bottom edge of the picture in the lower right-hand corner, sitting in your chair reading a hub,

There, I have found my place in the Cosmos.