Faith and Darwin

Daniel Hallam Steinbeigle is a sissy. He also prefers to be called Dan. But he is still a sissy. I say this because I started a job last week. Eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. This alone has left me completely exhausted. I am not sure why or how, but I no longer seem to be able to do anything once I return from work. Perhaps it is the waking up at 6. Perhaps the doing of actual work. Either way, there it is.

The important part though, is that I work at BYU recycling. We get lots of paper. And books. One of those books I found sitting on a box. It has no cover or title page. I have no idea who the author is, but I have started reading it. It is about religion and the rise of pantheism and paganism. Rather than discuss the varying errors that have cropped up in religions across the globe, the author decides instead to catalog all the truths that are common among the various sects. Here is where I insert my disclaimer: the text is very christian biased. But the idea itself is sound. I like the thought of looking through world religions for common themes and mythologies. One of the ones mentioned by the author is the commonality of the diluvian theme. Many religions contain some version of the story of Noah's ark. And all religions (I maintain that atheism is included here) have some form of God or supreme being. They all have a creation story. To me, this speaks of some basic desire of the human being to have these ideas in his/her religion. Even the basic desire to have a religion at all seems to me very fundamental. Why, though, do we feel this compulsion to form a relationship with deity? What need are we satisfying?

I would say that all human beings follow some form of religion. You might argue that atheists do not, but they do. They believe that man is the supreme being. There is no God because there does not need to be one. This may not hold true for all atheists, but if you look honestly and closely, I firmly believe that you will find that all atheists have found something to replace God. Why do we all have a religion? To answer this question, I put myself in somewhat of a conundrum. I have to look to my religion as a base for my answer. I believe that we consist of both a spiritual being and a physical being. These two combine to become the person you are right now. The basic desire to follow some form of religion, to form a relationship with deity, stems from our spiritual nature striving to connect to the source from which it originates, or, God. The physical being, through the mind, lays over this heavenward straining, various filters and patterns which it dubs religion. Where then do we get the commonalities across faiths?

If you look at the world religions you will see that some ideas or stories exist in different religions. Some of these similarities are due simply to one religion existing as an offshoot of another. In other cases, the two sects in question are completely unconnected, either geographically or demographically. In these cases, I would submit that they speak to some primordial religion. It would seem that the easiest way to connect these ideas is through a common ancestry. Would it be so strange to think that in the beginnings of mankind, there was a religion followed by all humans? It doesn't even seem too farfetched o say the faith was established by whatever creator put the people there to begin with. There were few enough of them that it would have posted no problem at all to have 100% membership. As populations grew segments of the group would leave and, over time, would lose contact with the original population. Of course they would take with them their religion. But if they lost contact across newly formed borders, what is to stop the religion from evolving with the species? Just as many species of finch can be traced to a common ancestor, so can world religions be traced to a common parent.

Of course, so much of human history is unrecorded or otherwise lost it is impossible to prove this. However, I think the idea is sound. Religious evolution. Where evolution in life takes that which is improved and perpetuates it, religious evolution corrupts that which was perfect. So now we have to ask, how to we get back to the original?