SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE

Introduction

This essay is not about religion, but the human condition.  I, the author, am neither scientist nor theologian, therefore I am simply writing some thoughts about life as I see it.

Part 1 Evolution

I’ve been thinking again.  This time I’ve been thinking about life.  Sometimes thinking leads me into strange places, so bear with me while I see where this goes.

Now I’m just thinking about regular old flesh and blood, fish and fowl, bark and sap life.  Of these I consider myself to be at the top of the life forms.  Therefore I think everything on this planet is subject to my needs or wants.  Here is where I get into trouble.  Assuming all life started by chance and I am the product of evolutionary development, what kind of creature does that make me?  I don't see myself as some highly developed life form sitting on an ivory tower.  I’m sitting on a gigantic pile of bones.  I have killed my way to the top.  I have killed everything that threatened my developmental path.  I killed for food, killed off others of similar species and killed for sport. I have killed to impose my will on others and in times passed I have sacrificed(killed) my own kind for the greater good.  I do this because I think my right to live supersedes the rights of other living creatures.

If all life is the product of an evolutionary process then why is one life form of more value than another?  Truth is it isn’t.  In this system, all life is existing and evolving by living off one another.  In the grand scheme of things, I have no more right to exist than does a mouse.  The evolutionary process that put my species at the top of the list was simply chance.  In fact, if you look at the earth from the perspective of space/time I am a carbon-based infestation destroying its host planet.  That makes me the most undesirable of all life forms.

On the other hand, I may say all life exists at the expense of something else, just like I can’t produce energy without fuel, life is divided between predator and prey.  Well, I’ve never seen an impala stand there and let a lion walk up to kill and eat it.  That impala doesn’t think the lion has a right to eat him. So where does this leave me?  Do I just accept the fact that I am part of a chance system in this vast universe that exists by perpetually killing and being killed? 

Perhaps I’m being too harsh.  Perhaps nature is a happily revolving circle of life.  The grass grows so the impala can eat it, so the lion can eat the impala.  Then, in turn, the lion, in the fullness of years dies, as do the trees and grasses replenishing the soil so new grass and trees can grow for the impala to eat, so the lion can…  Hold on. There is no point in my trying to sugar coat it.  The evolutionary system is based on the self-sustaining principal of kill to live another day.  Knowing full well that I am only postponing the inevitable I will continue to kill until my last breath.  That is how the system works.  There is no big picture. It is simply a monstrous pointless circle of death!   

Part 2 Creation

Wait a minute.  I need to take a deep breath and count to ten. Maybe I’m overlooking something. What if there is more to life than meets the eye?  I mean, what if there is an unseen spiritual realm of intelligent beings?  What if creation wasn’t a chance happening, but the work of a creator?  A Creator with a plan. Could it be I didn’t evolve but was created for a specific purpose?  And that something went terribly wrong producing the monstrous world I live in.  Could this be where I got my sense of right and wrong?

In Darwin’s theory of evolution, there is no built-in value system of right and wrong.  It’s simply survival of the fittest.  So now I have to address the issue of where did I come up with a value system.  The idea that I have evolved into a higher order of life form that has come to realize there are a right and wrong is baloney. All I have become is a more perfect killer.  I have learned better ways, through medicine and food production, to sustain my species, and developed better means of killing.  All I have to do is look back over the last two hundred years to see that.

A by-product of my lofty life form is the ability to disassociate myself from the killing.  Other people do my killing for me while I live in blissful denial.  For my food, I have slaughterhouses (livestock), broiler houses (chickens and turkeys), and butchers to cut up the meat.  Commercial fishermen and processing plants provide me with seafood.  For people killing I have the police to protect me and my stuff and the military, of course, to enforce my national will on other peoples.  And because everyone is like me I have to use the military to keep others from forcing their will on me.  Oh, what a happy world I live in.

I like the phrase “it outta been different.”  Well, maybe it was different, “in the beginning.”  I like that phrase too.  The only source I am personally aware of for the theory of creation is the biblical account.  “In the beginning God created”.  God being my word for an unseen all-powerful intelligent being that has a plan.

Part 3 The Plan

Now bear with me as I’m no bible scholar and since God is beyond my understanding and the bible says God can do everything, my views are very limited, as was Darwin’s and his theories.

Basically, as I understand it, the plan goes like this.  In the spiritual realm, God is eternal and all beings were created by God.  At some point, God decided He wanted to create a physical world with physical life on it.  For the purpose of this discussion, I’ll limit His creation to the earth.  So, over a period of time, God did just that.  Created the earth, water,  light, and even time, then covered it with all types of vegetation that were capable of reproducing after its own kind.  Then God created animals, fish, and fowl.  And made them able to reproduce after their own kind.  The bible refers to a Garden of (in) Eden as the center of all this.  God created the plants as food for every living thing.  (Presumably, lions ate grass like bears do today.  There were no predators.)  Now, God created this paradise by speaking it into existence. Before I think, “What a fairy tale,” I have to admit the theory of evolution, that is, in the beginning, there was nothing and somehow I evolved from nothing, is pretty far fetched too.

The purpose of this paradise was to be home to the people God wanted to create.  People to be objects of Gods love and fellowship.  Not unlike our desire for children.  So, God created a first man and woman in “His own image” and told them to be “fruitful and multiply.” God told them to tend the garden and eat freely of all the fruits and vegetables. (They were vegans)  All, that is, except for one tree.  Uh oh, what’s up with that.

It seems all was not well in God’s spiritual kingdom.  There was a usurper named Lucifer, the fairest of all God’s created beings, that began to think of himself as better than God.  Lucifer began to undermine God's authority and recruit followers.  He wanted to overthrow God. Lucifer wanted to take over the rule of all of God's kingdom and creation.  And he wanted Adam and Eve to worship him. (And all future people.)  We witness here the birth of good and evil.  God is loving and good, while Lucifer being prideful and self-serving, evil.

So, what’s with the tree.  Well, it seems the fruit of the tree held the knowledge of good and evil that had erupted in God's kingdom.  So God says “You may eat of every tree in the garden except this particular tree.  If you do eat from it you will die.”  Of course, I don’t know if the fruit of the tree actually held hidden knowledge.  However, the act of them eating the fruit would be an act of disobedience and would open a floodgate of evil into them.  Lucifer, knowing this, enticed Eve to disobey God and eat from the tree.  Bingo, she was filled with the knowledge of good and evil.  And just as Lucifer had said, she didn’t drop dead.  Instead, she was instantly full of herself.  “I don’t have to obey anyone.  I can do as I please,” she must have thought.  She held life and death in her hands.  She felt like a God!  What she didn’t know was that act of disobedience forfeited her eternal life.  “You shall surely die.”  And cut her off from spiritual fellowship with God.  At this point, she was not unlike the other animal's God created.

Well, Adam went looking for Eve and found her, all aglow, standing by the tree.  She then enticed Adam to take a bite of the fruit.  Now, this isn’t biblical, but I think that after Adam ate of the fruit he looked at Eve standing there naked and thought, “WOW!”  It’s been downhill ever since.

Realizing now that they were naked Adam and Eve made aprons for themselves out of leaves and hid from God.  Of course, being God, He knew what they had done and was extremely disappointed with them.  God kicked them out of the Garden and they took their evil side with them.  Then God cursed His creation.  Now it was weeds in the garden, predator, and prey and through Cain, their son, I learned how to kill.

The battle between Lucifer and God intensified until finally Lucifer and his followers were cast out of God's spiritual kingdom down to earth.  The bible says, “Woe to the inhabitants of the earth.  That great serpent Satan (Lucifer) has been cast down.”  The bible says he took a third of the angels with him.(Demons)  In Satan’s fierce anger at being cast out of heaven, he and his demons are like “roaring lions looking to whom they may destroy.”  So, according to the Bible, Lucifer (Satan) and the evil he introduced is responsible for this stinking mess.  Not chance and evolution.

Adam and Eve brought the knowledge of good as well as evil into my consciousness.  That is the reason for the dichotomy.  I have to kill to live, but I hate it.  Back to my earlier question, “So, where does this leave me?”  Am I stuck in a world filled with evil, driven by my own good/evil desires?  Is there no hope?

Part 4 Deliverance

   In the generations after Adam and Eve left the Garden things got really bad.  Violence and evil finally reached a point that God “repented” of making man.  On all the earth there was only one family that held to goodness.  To make a long story short God destroyed everyone on the earth except Noah and his family.

Noah and his family then repopulated the earth.  More generations passed and of course, mankind was in a mess again.  Again, one man, Abraham found favor with God.  God was so pleased with Abraham that He promised him his descendants, through his son Issac, would be many and that He God would bless them and establish them as His chosen people.  God told Abraham all the land, that became Israel, would belong to his descendants forever.

So, over the centuries God nurtured Abraham's descendants and created a people out of them, the Hebrew people.  Most everyone knows the story of Moses and how God lead him and the Hebrew people out of Egypt into what became the land of Israel.

The centuries rocked along and Israel waxed and waned in God’s favor while the rest of the world continued to kill and be killed.  At some point, the Hebrew people, because of their identification as Judeans, began to be called Jews.  In time the people of the bible became divided into Jews and gentiles.  In other words the Jews, God’s chosen people, and everyone else.  By now the situation in Israel was really looking grim.  They were under Roman rule and hating it.   The situation looked hopeless for both the Jews and gentiles.  Now even though God had kept His promise to Abraham, that the Jews would remain His chosen people, God never the less loved the gentiles just as much.  They were, after all, His creation too.

Since God is all-knowing.  None of this caught Him by surprise.  Before the foundation of the world, God had a plan.  A plan to deliver both groups from bondage to evil (sin), which leads to eternal death (“you shall surely die”) and reconcile the whole world to Himself.

Part 5 Messiah

For more than a millennium God had spoken to Israel through prophets.  From the beginning there had been a thread of hope, the promise of a Messiah(Savior), God would send.  Someone to deliver them from the mess their world was in.  Well, God finally did.  The bible says about two thousand years ago God became flesh in the miraculous birth of Jesus.  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believed in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

From the earliest times, the man understood that there was no forgiveness without the shedding of blood.  God, having put this knowledge in their spiritual DNA sent His "only begotten son" Jesus, the Christ, who being completely sinless, would be God's blood sacrifice for my sins and be killed instead of me.  The love of God was poured out on mankind in this great sacrificial act to redeem God's creation, me and you.

God said that if I admitted my sinfulness, believed that Jesus died for my sins and that He rose from the dead defeating death, I would be forgiven.  And in addition, I would be born again by the indwelling power of God's Holy Spirit, thus giving me eternal life.

The Bible further states that at some point in the future Jesus will return and resurrecting me, I will join Him.  At that time Satan and his followers will be bound for one thousand years awaiting final judgment and the destruction of the old cursed world. God will then create a  “New heaven and a new earth” where there is no sin or death (predator and prey) and I will live in an eternal “Garden of Eden” with God and all those who believed.

Well, that's how I understand the two theories.  Perhaps if I were Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or some other persuasion I would be more broad-minded, but since I'm not I'm limited to Evolution or Creationism.  After due consideration, I feel I must recommend the latter.  Creationism is a no-lose option.

  Marshall Kimbrough-Warren