Spirituality Guide

In the previous post I talked about the possibilities of the beginnings of both the Universe and of Life. They range from random chance on everything to God making everything happen in an ongoing manner.

There’s a common problem with every one of these - what was there before the Universe? Once we posit that there WAS a ‘Before’ then any of the scenarios becomes possible. This is where the whole Creation argument belongs, while, with the exception of number 5-c, evolution could be a factor in the development of all of them.

Instead Evolutionists like to get pulled into the whole ‘there is no God’ argument and Creationists like to get pulled into the ‘He didn’t need Evolution’ argument. I’ve come to the conclusion that as stated by Edward de Bono, the creation of funnels to categorise things is a very bad thing. More and more the funnellers expand their definitions of ‘other’ to include more and more people who aren’t exactly like themselves.

It starts with (say) Democrat/Republican - the Funneller identifies with all Democrats and everyone else gets dumped through the Republican funnel. But then s/he begins to notice that not all democrats are the same - in fact some have decidedly Republican ideas and leanings - wham, down through the Republican funnel they go. The process continues until the only people who are identified as ‘us’ are those with almost exactly the same ideas, ideals and thoughts as the Democrat.

We see it in the Christian /Islamic/Jewish camps, where they subdivide themselves based on criteria that are meaningless to anyone not of their creed. We see it in Evolutionists where they subdivide according to Absolute Random Chance, Punctuated Random Chance, Guided Evolution etc. We even see it at a higher level where Believers and Atheists are seen as being opposites, yet both are believers - they use the subject of belief to isolate the other group. The true opposite of both of the groups is actually those who have no belief - mostly these are Agnostics. Agnostics withhold belief, preferring to wait for evidence.

Funnels are bad and a lazy way to think. In this debate (Evolution versus Creation or ID) the opponents usually enthusiastically embrace the funnels, willfully dividing the debaters into a variety of labels and spend their time lambasting the opposition with no hope of ever converting them - they aren’t arguing about the same things!