Creationism and Evolution Reconciled

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It is both fit and mete that on the auspicious occasion of Spring and the Easter holiday we gather together, secular and religious alike, and try to bridge our differences. While Evolution and Creationism appear on the surface irreconcilable, with a little humility and a good heart we can reach across the divide and together find common ground.

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[WARNING: Not Safe For Work ! ! ! ! This post is rated “MA” for violence, strong language of a sexual nature and disturbing mental images.]

[A note on responsibility: The language in this post is entirely mine. The images and the underlying concept are stolen borrowed adapted under Fair Use exemption from the work of the brilliant artist, author and web designer Tom Weller, a kind, gentle and decent man who would never use the sort of language I do. His images are sampled here partly in the hope of providing him with the readership he so richly deserves. If anyone is looking for a creative website designer, give him a shout.]
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Most people not homeschooled are well aware of the principle of evolution by natural selection, first articulated by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. As applied to the appearance of humans, there is substantial fossil evidence that we are descended from a series of ancient ancestors:

Creationism and Evolution Reconciled 1

But not everyone agrees this is so. Biblical literalists insist that their Bible is inerrant, perfect and complete, and it says nothing about evolution but rather reports that God/Jehovah created all the creatures on Earth including human beings in their present form. So then, creationists assert, evolution must be a fraud.

In America today, a substantial majority of people believe that godly influence of some sort was involved in producing modern humans, while no more than 25% (depending on the poll) accept a strictly naturalistic view. Somewhere approaching half of all Americans reject evolution entirely and instead believe that humans and all other creatures were created as is by the biblical God.

The Texas State Board of Education recently voted to require that schools give equal credence to Darwinian evolution and Biblical literalist creationism. Since Texas wields the largest influence among textbook publishers right now, that decision may well influence science teaching across the entire nation.

Clearly, creationists are here in large numbers and aren’t going away any time soon. As an agnostic I am firmly in the Darwin-Wallace naturalist evolution corner, but as a humanist I want to reach out, to help find some point of commonality. I am willing to give just a little if creationists are too, and it is clear that literal creationist claims have at least one glaring, unanswered weakness; with whom did the sons of Adam and Eve mate?

According to the Bible God created the first humans, Adam and then Eve, perfect in form and innocently unaware of evil. After inexplicably abandoning these innocents to the wiles of Satan,

adam eve snake fall

God cursed them for thier arrogance, drove them from his presence and abandoned them to their fate. The Bible makes no mention of the disappointed God creating other humans, so apparently Adam and Eve were it. Eventually the two procreated and Eve bore three sons; Cain, Abel and Seth. Cain then killed Abel, leaving only two males to carry on the jewel of God’s creation. But with no females available, and the Bible very clearly does not mention any woman in the Beginning but Eve, how was it that billions of humans came to be?

Creationism and Evolution Reconciled 2

There can only be one logical answer.

Creationism and Evolution Reconciled 3
(modifications mine)

According to literal Biblical creationists, all modern humans must be descended from a couple of motherfuckers.

This seems harsh to me, even for so neglectful and vindictive a god as Jehovah. It was in searching for an alternative explanation that I came cross the brilliant solution of Mr. Weller. Let us accept, and here I am certain my creationist brothers and sisters* will join me, that while Jehovah was in a creative mood he also made an assortment of monkeys and apes including those we now see around us. And let us further suppose that among those primates were a few females that were kinda hot-looking, or at least hot enough for a couple of typically sex-starved young human males when they hooked up with those hot females who had gone out on the savannah on a warm Saturday night, looking to monkey around.

Creationism and Evolution Reconciled 4

Some of the monkey females went for the steady, upright Seth, while others (and ladies, you know who you are) were drawn to bad-boy Cain. The predictable result, courtesy of a merciful God, is that the boys were able to reproduce without having to fuck their own mother. Now, isn’t that a more decent and believable account?

I recognize creationists will have to accept that they are all descendants of monkeyfuckers and thus part monkey, but that seems to me a small price to pay to escape the literalist alternative. If however creationists want to insist on motherfucking as their preferred argument, I have no problem with their views being presented in school along with strict agnostic evolution and the monkeyfucker thesis presented here.

Teaching all three will certainly liven up the curriculum as well as what-did-you-learn-in-school-today-sweetheart dinner table conversations and subsequent parent-teacher conferences. Given honest presentations, I trust over time the kids will sort out what is plausible from absolute nonsense.

[* Literally. My brother and sister and their spouses are biblical literalists, insistently so. I have tried this theory out on them, but so far they are holding firm to their claims that inescapably imply motherfuckery. I can only hope that time will soften their hearts, and they can come to accept monkeyfucking as God’s real plan. After that discussion though, religion no longer comes up at family gatherings and so there’s a mercy.]

19 responses to “Creationism and Evolution Reconciled

  1. Excellent!

  2. hipparchia

    yes, that should liven up a few things.

    fortunately nobody in our family has had to resort to bringing up monkeyfucking [that i know of anyway] to redirect any dinner table conversations, but i’ll keep the idea in reserve if i should ever need it.

    ot: yes, i would a like higher-resolution photo of the cyclamen if you have one. the pinking-shears effect of blowing up the lower resolution photo to make wallpaper has lost its novelty now.

    • grahamfirchlis

      Good to hear from you, h, as always, and pleased to know you’ve got that idea in your back pocket should the need arise.

      Cyclamen photo should show up in your inbox later today.

  3. blacksheepone

    hipparchia:
    you live a blessed existence.

    when I was in my teens, we asked this question in Sunday school: where did the wives of Cain and Abel come from?

    the Sunday school teachers answered, “the daughters of men.”

    we said, “what daughters, and of what men?”
    The Sunday school teachers took us all outside to play.

  4. Actually, according to most of the more-wingnuttish people (read: fundamentalists) that I have spoken to, it was a case of sisterfucking. They claim that Eve had many other children, all daughters., whose names are not recorded (them being women, and, um, insignificant in the larger scheme of things). And of course, they also claim there was nothing wrong with it: incest only became bad after the Fall, and , apparently, before then, Adam and Co were truly a family that played together…

    • grahamfirchlis

      Weeeeellll, except that isn’t consistent with the timeline in the Bible.

      The Fall happens in Genesis 3 (KJV):

      6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
      7: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

      and by the end of that chapter, vs 23-24, they have been expelled from Eden.

      It is in Chapter 4 that Eve conceives her first-born:

      1: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
      2: And she again bare his brother Abel.

      Eve’s third child, Seth, arrives at the end of Chapter 4, and finds a wife near his home:

      25: And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
      26: And to Seth, to him also there was born a son….

      No mention of a wife for Seth, so maybe the son was with Eve and not a monkey girl.

      But the strongest evidence for the man-monkey connection is with Cain, who fled his home to a far country in Genesis 4 after killing Abel

      16: And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

      where he found a wife, and made a baby:

      17: And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch….

      Eve wasn’t involved unless she was sneaking off East of Eden to boink Cain while Adam was tending his fields, and that leads to a question of just who exactly was Seth’s father so let’s don’t go there. Or perhaps literalists would have us believe that Cain wasn’t just a murderer but also a kidnapper and a sister-rapist?

      No; if there were daughters they must have been born after the Fall and everyone involved would have been aware of sin. But it is very difficult to believe that as meticulous as the Bible is with lineage, those daughters wouldn’t have been mentioned.

      The claim that women were too insignificant to bother with flies in the face of Eve’s being repeatedly cited both by name and as “the woman” before she received one, and wives of Cain’s progeny are listed by name in Genesis 4. Farther along in the Bible several women are prominently featured including Sarah, Rachael, and Ruth who gets an entire book named after her.

      Literalists have to choose. Either they go with mommyfucking or monkeyfucking and accept that the old scribes were being discrete, or they have to concede that the Bible is more metaphor than literal and that destroys their entire premise of absolute scriptural authority.

  5. Graham: your last paragraph is absolutely correct, of course. But we all know that. Of course.:) I am just repeating their justifications; I do not claim that they make any sense whatsoever.

    • grahamfirchlis

      Jorge, your sanity is recognized; I was just wanting to lay down a counter-argument for the record. Once you’ve jumped off the Belief Cliff, I guess you are free to just make up anything that suits your fancy. Bewildering to me, and to you, but there are millions and millions of them, most people actually, so it must serve some evolutionary purpose. Maybe it is nature’s way of ensuring that no species escapes extinction.

  6. Brilliant! I was one of those little kids in CCD classes many years ago who also asked the obvious questions. Yes, go out and play!

    The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world tastes good with roasted potatos and mint jelly!

    • grahamfirchlis

      Ah, Dugan, you’re a bad, bad boy! Thanks for the compliment.

      I had been working up an Easter Dinner Menu for Atheists post, but RL got in the way. I’ll share the dessert items, though; Resurrection Cookies (for-real Christianist recipe, with Bible readings and guilt!) paired with Open Grave cocktails.

      The meat course would naturally include open-pit fire-roasted lamb along with a heavenly slow-baked rabbit, accompanied by a medley of cruciform vegetables….well, you get the idea. I’ve stashed the draft for next year’s blogswarm.

  7. Oh, lso there is another version that involves the Nephilim and those “giants”. Under your interpretation, that could refer to gorillas as well…:) Also, much more interesting ar the apocryphal stories of women before Eve: Lilith and the nameless one. Perhaps the Lilim were the source of all those wives (still sister-fucking, but those would only be half0sisters, so OK?) Of course, most fundies have never heard about those. (I find them fascinating: mythologically, Lilith is an awesome symbol of feminine liberty and self-assertiveness).

    • grahamfirchlis

      Oh hell yes, a half-sister is almost like a cousin, so what could be wrong about that?

      The older religions are much more nuanced and interesting, true. Maybe in another 10,000 years Christianity too will have some of the rough edges ground off.

  8. Easter bunny stew! Made it once, with extra FD&C No 5 for colour.

  9. JAMES SCAMINACI III

    That gave me a great chuckle. Hilarious. That will get David Barton’s wrath riled up. Barton is the head of WallBuilders and a big creationist, but the spearhead of the “we’re a Christian nation” mob.

    • grahamfirchlis

      Thanks, James. Anything I do that gets under those folks’ skin is a job well done.

  10. Pingback: “Carnival of Evolution” highly recommended « Whenceforth Progress

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