I spent much of my life confused by the contrary claims of science and religion. I would have thought they both were seeking the truth. In my mature years, I decided to seek the truth myself. This book is what I came up with.
I put together a couple hundred short essays explaining how I worked out this dilemma in my mind. Over a twelve year period, I posted some of them on The Internet, first on websites where evolution and Intelligent Design were discussed, but soon on my own website.
I decide to write this book that includes 133 of these essays, all of them in simple, plain, easy-to-understand English, to show how I finally recognized what is more believable.
I included them in my book in the hope that others, who are also confused by the very polarized arguments presented by each side on this contrary, might see their way to reognize what is really true.
Excerpt
I have been following the arguments for evolution and intelligent design for most of my life, especially for direct creation by God. I was amazed by the contradictory arguments presented by every side on this controversy. It was very confusing to me because I was taught creation in my youth, and I learned evolution in college, and in my mature years, I had become very impressed with science and with the gifted and well-educated men I admired in science. For me, it was not easy to resolve this dilemma. I wound up debating it in my mind point by point. As I tried to resolve this problem, I started posting my thoughts on The Internet. This went on for about twelve years. Finally, I think I have come to a resolution of this problem and decided that creation makes the most sense. I had to rethink everything I learned in my youth. Now that I think I have resolved this problem, I decided to put some of my thoughts into a book. Perhaps they might help others who are wrestling with this controversy.
This book contains 133 short articles on how I resolved deciding what makes the most sense to me. They are not organized in any special order. They are just randomly arranged, starting with the earliest ones I posted on The Internet and finishing with the last ones I posted. I chose for the cover of my book a photo I took of a gorilla at The Cleveland Zoo. I was always fascinated with gorillas because they look so human when you stare at them, but it is obvious they are not human. They don't display that cognitive countenance humans do when you stare at humans. Try staring at a gorilla yourself and you will see what I mean. And gorillas do not grow smarter with the passing years as humans do. Gorillas have been pretty much the same for as long as the species have been on Earth (much longer that humans have been on Earth), but humans have become much more capable, even during the eighty-five years I have been on Earth. When you compare the accomplishments of humans with gorillas or any animal, it is perfectly obvious that there is a spectacular difference between humans and all other animals. I am fond of gorillas. God conferred on them a different nature than he conferred on me, but God caused me to "evolve," if you insist on using that term, from animal nature just like he caused all animals to "evolve" from the same natural elements the entire universe is comprised of.
The fact that you have written 133 articles on this subject leads me to believe that you are obsessed with it. That much repetition of the biblical story has a kind of indoctrination effect that leads to hardening of the thought process. It is probably quite comforting for you to know that you are not responsible for anything, God and God's grand design is.
Your argument about the gorilla shows that you do not have anything more than observational knowledge to prove your points. It all boils down to the single myth that is described in the Bible and used over and over again to deny what modern science keeps learning about our origins and the origin of the universe, itself. I am comfortable with the scientific explanation because it enables me to improve with knowledge and not worry about something as far off as creation and focus on the problems we will face in the next 100 years.
Where do viruses, such as Ebola and HIV, come from and why they are so aggressive? This book changed tenets of evolutionary virology, developing the concepts of aggressive symbiosis and plague culling, which explain much of the horror of plague virus
Our human genome is full of viruses similar to HIV-1. These have played an important role in human evolution and still play an important role in human embryology and day-to-day chemistry. Just how important are they to our evolution past and future?
