The Simple Guide to the Universe
 

At the lowest level, you have people who think the world was born out of m-Lotta's own womb because it was lonely and dark, then she spawned humans to keep her amused. When warlike civilizations developed, so did priesthoods, for the men who were not adequate warriors but had some political intelligence. Governmental rules and religious sanctions grew up together at this time (i.e., tax-collectors and priests). Whores, too, because women didn't get totally deprived of their goddesses and their own form of worship for millennia, until the Christian popes suppressed them by inventing the Virgin Mary as a chastity figure and the Mohammedans installed the harem as a social structure.

The majority of human beings could not have cared less one way or another -- they were too busy dealing eking out a living, with the priests blaming them for their sins or whatever to explain floods, droughts, famine, plagues, wars, and earthquakes. In due time -- although people never lost their conditioning that everything that happens is "God's Will" -- the scriptures became available to the masses, along with the development of technology, printing presses, a wage economy, etc. Reading the Bible by barely literate people (much worse than having semi-literate priests explain it for you) led to some very silly interpretations, which we still have to deal with today.

Among the worst of these is the literal interpretation of the Bible -- if it said anywhere that the moon was made of cheese, there would be some idiot that would believe that and probably kill somebody who denied it. Nowadays, all but the most stupid and stubborn fundamentalists at least acknowledge that the world is round and that there is a solar system where the earth goes around the sun. Whether dinosaurs ever existed 70 million years ago is another matter: Your Bible people claim that the fossils are the remains of animals that didn't make it into Noah's Ark some 5000 years ago. Anything geological that proves the existence of Earth over a billion years is written off as fakery set up by Satan or God (why would God fake things like that?) to mislead the secularists. The denial of such scientific evidence for religious reasons is irrational, to put it politely.

Now, what is Evolution? Very simply, it is the gradual transfomation of animal life forms into other animal life forms owing to environmental conditions. This is a proven fact; the mechanism of it is explained by Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, which has never been disproved, although modified by discoveries in genetics since then. Evolution itself cannot be denied, however it occurs (Natural Selection or Act of God). Creation Science, which the Christian idiots want to be given treatment to in schools, basically states that all life forms were established by God at creation time (a few thousand years ago) and is immutable -- no dealing with extinctions of species that have occurred in our own time or way in the past, no dealing with possible mutations into new species (such as the HIV virus). Humans cannot be related to monkeys, because God says so -- if they share physical features, that must just demonstrate one of God's early experiments in structure (on the fifth or sixth day of creation, I guess, depending on whether fish come into it).

There is no question at all, when you observe animals (even if only on "Nature" on PBS) or read the literature, that the only difference between human beings and 'lower animals' (especially the ones that most resemble us, the apes) is a matter of linguistic communication -- not that that means that much, for it is presumptuous of us to think the sparrow's 'chirp' and 'churp' mean the same thing -- and conceptualization. The latter is the feature that makes us the dominant species in overmastering the environment. (And yes, I will grant you that as far as we know, no other species can 'conceptualize', although creatures like cats can certainly 'anticipate' or 'guess'.)