There are many roads and few destinations

Picture and poem credit

Is Creation versus Evolution a fork in the road and do all come to that road seeking truth? No. If you think that is the case you have not followed the history of origins science, a oft-contended discipline that is rarely seen sticking even a toe into operational science. Allow me to use the analogy of the Road Not Taken (because I like it) by Robert Frost and begin to look at how we all get to where we are going.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

...Robert Frost

So I am sure many of us relate to this poem. I am quite sure that many times I have come to forks in my own personal road and taken the one that was more difficult and less traveled. Occasionally I have found that roads sometimes come back together again for awhile but more often they take one far away from where the other road would lead.

Do you think Evolution versus Creation is a fork in the road? I would propose that one has to travel for awhile to even get there. Once we are relatively sentinent beings (I think about 12 years old is about right) most of us have grown up enough to comprehend all these issues the grownups talk about and begin forming opinions that are not mirror images of our parents or the drivel that is served up by the media or just exactly what the teachers in school tell you. At some point you grow past childhood and can review ideas with a critical eye. Not that everyone actually does this, but the ability to do so grows on you, so to speak.

For several years I have blogged on this subject and traded comments with many people. I have studied it and taught it and read about it and practically x-rayed it and smashed it to bits and put it in a blender and done a chemical analysis of the results. The results are always the same.

The first fork in the road is the worldview fork. And fork is more like intersection. There are three major roads that diverge here - God, NotGod and NotSure. As it happens, even if you take the NotGod road you will still find turnoffs that would lead you towards God but as you near the end they no longer appear. The NotSure road continually branches off towards or away from God. The God road has intersections like crazy - Christ, Allah, Dagon and etc. I have found that if you do take the Christ road there are a lot of detours but you keep on heading for Christ in the end. But back to our movie.

Worldview impacts science tremendously, especially in the area of origins. Worldview drives people far more than does evidence.

If you take either the God or the NotSure road, you will come to the fork in the road pointing towards evolution and towards creation. You will also see one marked intelligent design.

If you take the NotGod road you will never come to any road marked creation or intelligent design. You will only make it to evolution. You will not find intelligent design. Your worldview has trapped you into only one possibility no matter how unlikely.

If you take the God road you will see all three but will feel lost if you go too far down evolution and, if you choose intelligent design you will just hop off at a creation interchange and stay there. So in the end creation is the road you want. Oddly enough a lot of folks who believe in God keep going down the evolution path despite the fact that with the Bible as your road map you will be hopelessly disoriented there. Even those who are rabbinical Jews and Islamists tend to avoid evolution, as it just does not fit into the notion of God.

If you take the NotSure road you may well be very comfortable with the intelligent design path because you do not need to think about a Who but only concentrate on the evidence. So it is true that someone who finds that intelligent design is the best answer for the questions of origin then naturally at some point one may start to wonder Who was the Designer....but that is not part of the science.

So I would say that the wise man will choose his first path carefully. If you go too far down the NotGod road you will enter a no U turn expressway at some point and the traffic behind you will speed up and there will not even be a berm on the side to stop and think, you will simply be funneled on down to the end. What is the end?

The NotSure road will tend to lead one to intelligent design. Once you realize intelligent design is the logical scientific view of the evidence, you find yourself contemplating the source of the intelligence. But strictly on evidence the intelligent design folks are front and center in terms of scientific evidence alone.

The God road will lead quite naturally to Christ who will take you straight to a quite different end. The road will be bumpy. If you do not choose the creation lane you can still get to the end but there are unpatched potholes there, beware! A Christian who accepts intelligent design and then concludes that God is the designer finds that the Bible fits the evidence hand in glove. You simply have to give God the benefit of the doubt in that if He is so much infinitely greater than we to be able to have made all things we cannot understand exactly how He did it for our minds cannot match His.

Yet Newton believed that by understanding how things worked he also drew closer to the Designer. Many scientists of the past believed that their research into the nature of the Universe was a Godly pursuit and I do agree.

~

A free discussion in the world of science would compare evolution and creation and intelligent design ideas on their merits. Evidence would be presented and analyzed on merit only. But this is not the world in which we live.

A free discussion of the world of history would include the Bible, for it is the best and oldest of documents that is far better supported by evidence than any other ancient writings (Old Testament) and thoroughly documented in more recent times (New Testament). Archaeologists working in the Holy Lands habitually refer to the Bible to help them locate and identify digs.

Those who chose the NotGod road have control of academia, media and the sciences - they are the ruling paradigm...for now. But remember the lesson of Galileo and Copernicus. They butted heads with academia and sciences and the ruling paradigm. They presented a view of the world that was not in any way contrary to God or the Bible or to common sense or evidence. What they believed was simply contrary to the popular and accepted belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Rulers and clerics alike refused to even look into a telescope to see for themselves. THEY DID NOT WANT TO KNOW. They just wanted to stay within the comfort zone of their belief systems.

So now Michael Behe and Guillermo Gonzalez find themselves castigated as were Galileo and Copernicus for promoting ideas contrary to the ruling paradigm. Are the high priests of Darwin any less guilty of censorship and oppression than were the high priests of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time? I think not! But who won the day?

The Church (which was integral to the ruling class in those times) tried to prevent the spread of information of any kind. Bibles were banned and rudimentary printing presses smashed and their operators flogged and executed. Yet Gutenberg produced a Bible and soon Bibles were being published and read far and wide. Once the Bible became relatively common the level of the education of common man grew greatly. People could read and learn and think and innovation flourished. It was not the "Renaissance" of the nobility that changed the world so much as the "Reformation" broke the shackles of the ruling class off of the common man and released him to grow and learn and flourish.
Information is the enemy of the tyrant and the friend of the free. Even now Hugo Chavez is an enemy to information, having jailed the owner of Globovision for daring to present information that cast Chavez in a negative light. Do you applaud this? Even now in this country there are those in high places who wish to take control of the voices on talk radio and monitor and control content on the internet. Do you think they have our greater good in mind? Did you know that Barack Obama had a website set up where his followers could report people who posted negative things about his administration? It was taken down after bloggers everywhere put the link up on their own sites and asked followers to report them!

So you who wish to stomp out creationism and intelligent design? You are on the side of the censor and the tyrant. How does it feel to work so hard to stifle the flow of information? How can that make you happy? It will not do any good. You see I believe the truth wins in the end. The theme of the history of man is that we make the same old mistakes over and over again and every time truth is stifled in one place it leaks out somewhere else and ultimately prevails.

Information. Design. You can run from them but you cannot hide, they will get you in the end.