Evolution vs. God
Okay so about a week ago I finally got around to watching this documentary called âEvolution vs. Godâ that some dude was passing out to kids from my school on their way home. I thought that this would be like the time when a guy was outside my middle school passing out bibles when I was like 12. But this looked different. Everything about it screamed anti-religion. It literally had the Richard Dawkins quote, âFaith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidenceâ plastered onto the cover.  It looked like evolution propaganda (and I mean that in the best way possible). It was really strange to me, albeit intriguing, so I decided I would give it a try. Maybe it would be cool.
I was very wrong.
It started out okay; it was basically this guy (I think his last name was Fisher) interviewing people on the street, college kids majoring in biology or other sciences, and even professors in anthropology and related fields. The one thing they had in common was they all claimed to be atheists when asked. Mr. Fisher would ask them basic questions pertaining to why they were atheists, whether or not they believed in evolution, etc. But then I started getting suspicious when he asked them to name famous atheists. Most couldnât come up with anyone other than Neil deGrasse Tyson and classical scientists (to my surprise none of them mentioned Richard Dawkins, the only one I could think of). The narrator then took the opportunity to tell the viewer that many science and traditional atheist symbols were, in fact, not atheists, but agnostic or otherwise. These included Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and a few others. Richard Dawkins was the only one that was certain to be an atheist. Personally, this didnât surprise me, I already knew about Tyson, Sagan, and Einstein. It was as if they didnât know that it was a totally normal occurrence for scientists to be agnostic or even religious. But they presented it in a way that looked like they were trying to mock atheists like âohhhh look at all of these famous scientists that you look up to and probably thought they were atheists but NOPE, your godless world shall now begin to come crashing down around you lolâ.
Then it started to get annoying.
Mr. Fisher began asking people for examples of observational evidence of evolution, but not just any evolutionary evidence. He got hooked onto Darwinâs idea of a âchange of kindsâ. The people cited the fossil record and Darwinâs finches, which are both a couple of the best and most accessible pieces of evidence for evolution out there, but nooooo Mr. Fisher had to have physical evidence that showed him a âchange of kindsâ right before his eyes. When people canât give him a good enough answer off the top of their heads he uses this âlack of evidenceâ as his justification for evolution being unscientific bullshit. And now that they have âprovenâ evolution wrong they, of course, must prove their idea right; TIME TO QUOTE THE FUCKIN BIBLE YOU UNEDUCATED PLEBS!
There are multiple things wrong with all of this. The first of them being Mr. Fisherâs use of the vague idea of a âchange of kindsâ (I donât remember hearing this used at all when I learned about Darwinâs theory of evolution in my AP Biology class). What exactly does he mean by âkindsâ? Different species? Different families? You talkin dinosaurs to birds or what? The vagueness of the statement gives it a broad range of answers that would easily cause confusion and make it difficult to answer especially off the top of oneâs head. Secondly, of course these people wonât be able to answer your shitty question when youâre literally bombarding them on the street without notice, shoving a camera and microphone in their faces, and not giving them enough time to research evidence of the idea let alone answer the question. People have better things to worry about than giving you a satisfactory answer to a question about an idea they likely werenât even thinking about at the time. And Iâm sure that even if they did prove you wrong (which isnât that hard given time to think) youâd have just edited it out. Lastly, his focus on Darwinian Evolution doesnât take everything we know about evolution today into account. I do, in fact, have observational evidence of a âchange of kindsâ. It's called deoxyribonucleic acid you dickwad. DNA, ya know, the basis for all life on Earth. Look at any strand of that shit, look at any gene and you can trace it back to any common ancestor of any organism on Earth. Darwin didnât know what the fuck DNA was. You want to see dinosaurs changing into birds or apes changing into your annoying ass? The codes of life are as close as youâre gonna get until you have a time machine and a lifespan of a few million years. Is that a satisfactory answer, Mr. Fisher?
What angers me the most about all of this is how it was just a huge ideological scam. They purposefully slapped an anti-religious quote on the cover, they purposefully made the name of the church it was from unnoticeable, they purposefully made it look like the documentary would uphold evolution as the truth it really is, they purposefully disguised it as evolutionary education so they could trick people into believing what they wanted them to believe. This was being passed out to kids my age and younger because they know that science, evolution, and to an extent, atheism are becoming increasingly hip and trendy with teens like me and the younger generation at large. They knew we werenât being taught creationism in our science classes, so they took it upon themselves to deceive young atheists, believers of evolution, science enthusiasts, and people still very much figuring out just who they are into watching it and hoping their own terribly unscientific methods of coming to a conclusion would change their views and ultimately further their agenda. Iâm all for believing what you want, I don't hate religion or creationism, but I also firmly believe that scientific literacy is important. Itâs this kind of stuff that makes me lose hope in a scientific/technological revolution and the universal prosperity that it would surely create. I donât want to sound as if âitâs poisoning our youth!!â *shakes fist*, but I know for a fact that a scientific generation would fare much better and advance a lot farther than an overtly religious one.
âI donât have an issue with what you do in the church. But Iâm gonna be up in your face if youâre gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they ought to teach what youâre teaching in your Sunday school, cause thatâs when weâre gonna fight. And Iâm gonna tell you something: thereâs no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door telling the preacher, âThat might not necessarily be true.â Thatâs never happened. There are no scientists picketing out in front of churches; thereâs been this coexistence forever. So to have the religious communities knocking down the science door, thereâs something wrong there.â - Neil deGrasse Tyson
