You know I have trouble with the concept of billions and billions of year as well. It just seems so.........long ago. I can't remember things that happened last week so things that happened in the millions or billions of years seem totally unreal to me. And that apparently is what keeps many people from accepting the facts behind Evolution.
The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.
Damn that is a hell of a long time ago! But just because I have trouble comprehending this vast amount of time does not mean that it is must not be true. What it means is that I am just too stupid to fully appreciate how infinitesimal my time on this planet is going to be. The science is the science and the truth is the truth and that is the end of the debate.
Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective treatment of the physical evidence.
Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.
The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.
I would never let my own pesonal fears or prejudices keep me from continuing to further my knowledge base. I believe, if I believe anything, that as human beings we have a responsibility to learn as much as we can and to try and solve as many mysteries as we are able in the short amount of time that we are allotted. If nothing else it keeps me from getting complacent and thinking that I have nothing important to learn. If I ever learn everything then that will be a damned shame.
