Darwin's God

Religion offers an easy solution to problems or experiences about which there was no obvious explanation. Before modern science, the sun rose each morning. Why did it? Without a scientific understanding of the relationships between earth and the sun, the most logical (at the time) was that (a) god performed this daily miracle. The rubber meets the road when the 'enlightenment' (a term I use to connote the replacement of a religious explanation of an event with a valid scientific one) encroaches on a basic religious belief based on one of the seven deadly sins, i.e. pride. It is vain and narcissistic to think that man is the ultimate end point of living things here on earth. The notion that man was simply created by a god six thousand years ago provides millions of Americans with a sinful pride that man is the perfect expression of God's will. This is the barrier that of necessity must fly in the face of scientific evidence that we are a work in progress, that we descended from lower animals via the process of evolution as set forth by Darwin et al. Until this seeming disparity is resolved, all the wrath (another deadly sin) manifested by those who persist in this prideful belief will delay and even prevent meaningful progress.