Evolution of Thought

 

Did you guys like when movies were shown in school? On the one hand, it was better than work! On the other hand, the educational movies were mostly boring. Not exactly “Saturday Night Fever.” High schoolers are notoriously sleep-deprived and don’t like listening to teachers, so sitting in a darkened, warm room watching a boring movie selected by an even more boring teacher was practically an engraved invitation to a nap.

But every once in a while, one of these movies stuck with me, and I recently remembered a movie called “Inherit the Wind.” The movie I watched in high school was a black-and-white produced in 1960. I was excited that a remake was released in 1999, and that is the one I watched this week.

“Inherit the Wind” is a dramatization loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial which took place in Tennessee in 1925. A high school teacher is arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in school, “a violation of Public Act 31428, Vol 37 of the State Code which makes it unlawful for any teacher of the public schools to teach any theory that denies the creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

It’s this progressive teacher against practically the whole town of Heavenly Hillsboro, the Buckle of the Bible Belt. A couple of Yankees, an attorney and a journalist, come to fight for the teacher in court. It’s a story about stubborn resistance to change and growth, fueled by violence and fear mongering.

The good people of Hillsboro know in their bones that God made man in seven days as stated in the Bible. How does this Northern attorney stand a chance in fighting this case? *Spoiler Alert* In the end, the attorney uses the Bible to fight the case. Here is the timeline of Creation as stated in Genesis:

Day 1: The Heavens and the Earth

Day 2: The sky

Day 3: The land, seas, and plants

Day 4: The sun, moon, and stars

Day 5: The birds and sea creatures

Day 6: Land creatures and man

Day 7: Rest

So this attorney concedes that God did create all these things, but that the length of the days were not defined as we know them before Day 4 when the sun, moon, and stars were created. The attorney argued that Days 1 through 3 could have been 25 hours, 30, hours, 10 years, or a million years long! Creationism and Evolution don’t have to be mutually exclusive!

It was all just a big misunderstanding. Our narrow, limited human minds could not wrap our heads around the greatness and limitlessness of God, creating a ton of defensiveness and inhibiting our ability to appreciate the wonder and opportunities that we have been graced with. Religion often has nothing to do with God.

It breaks my heart that the Catholic Church has refused to acknowledge same-sex marriages because I know that this causes a great deal of pain. It isn’t lost on me that the Methodist Church is also battling with this issue that seems to be a no-brainer to me. A lot of Christians don’t accept LGBTQI folks, and that is super hurtful as well. Because what if we have had a misunderstanding? I can’t believe that any of us beautifully flawed and vastly different people created by a loving God are “not right.” It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Here’s what the Bible says: “He who made them from the beginning made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.”

We currently look at genitals to define male and female, but what if wieners have nothing to do with anything? What if we were supposed to be counting arm freckles or nose hairs to determine who’s male and female? Or maybe male and female is defined by something that we can’t even see or haven’t discovered yet? We humans have gotten things totally wrong in the past, like when we thought that the flat Earth was carried on the back of a giant turtle.

Just something to think about.
Thank you for reading, my friends!