Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Why Is It Always Evolution?

I have been dealing with something from the very beginning of the semester that some people may agree with, and some people may not. I have a professor at school, we will call him Prof. E., who relates everything, and I mean EVERYTHING back to Evolution. He teaches it as fact, but the last time I checked, Evolution was a theory. Yet, it is perfectly okay for him to teach it as fact and I feel that by doing this he is insulting my religious beliefs. He even said himself the first day of class that he did not want to say anything bad about anyones beliefs or religion, yet, isn't teaching us that the processes of the brain and the way our brains grew correlates directly to how we evolved from lesser species talking bad about ANY religion?

Now let me just clarify that I am not saying that Darwin was completely nuts, and that the concept of evolving can be true to a certain extent within each species. Certain adaptations can be made, and environmental factors can make small changes within species, but I don't see how the entire complexity of the human body, and the world for that matter, could have happened just by pure accident and that we used to all be part of some primordial goop that randomly turned into bacteria which evolved into a fish and so on. If this were true, then wouldn't species that have been around for millions of years be gone because they evolved out of the state they are still in now? If fish evolved into frogs or whatever, then why do we still have fish? If monkeys were inferior to the human species and we supposedly evolved from them, then wouldn't it hold true that all monkeys would have followed suit and there wouldn't be any left? I mean, I'm sure some fancy Dr. somewhere can come up with something to diffuse or "answer" these questions, but I still won't believe or understand it. If it was such a good theory and it explained everything, then why would it say that the white race was the most superior biologically and basically fuel the fire behind such radical thinking as Hitler's idea of an Arian race, or the Ku Klux Klan's idea that everyone else besides White, European men are inferior and should be destroyed in some rotten genocidal warfare. I just don't see how something like that can be right.

Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, I feel like every time Prof. E. mentions Evolution, I'm expected to jump on board, yipping and hollering in favor of the idea when I really don't believe in it completely. And I worry that if he asks a test question about it, I will either be forced to lie about my beliefs in order to placate him, or go against his idea about what is true and put down my own beliefs and pay the consequences for it in my grade. I think if teachers and professors aren't allowed to talk about religion, and schools and certain institutions are supposed to separate church and state, then they should also separate Evolution. Everyone is worried about offending the minority group of people, yet no one cares about the majority of people who have some type of religious belief and who are being offended by this but not speaking up because it's an accepted scientific idea. If we are going to talk about theories of where the world came from in Evolutionary terms, we should be allowed to include all different kinds of religions' ideas about it too. Maybe I'm the only who feels this way, and maybe everyone else doesn't see it as such a big deal as me. But I have a feeling that when Prof. E. asks the entire class a question and the "right" answer is Evolution, yet there is dead silence in the class because no one wants or thinks that to be the right answer, it gives me the idea that I am not alone in this.

1 comment:

Roxanne Ocasio said...

I'm fortunate that I only had to take two science classes. I felt exactly the same way, especially since we then had to write a paper about evolution. I'd always gone to Christian schools, so I didn't know a thing about it. Anyway, I wrote my whole paper about how I thought evolution was wrong. Needless to say, he didn't like me much after that. :P