I get road rage sometimes. Especially when the road I’m travelling has outrageously stupid signs at their side.

Let me explain.

I was traveling to my hometown last sunday. I spotted a sign outside a church not far from my destination. The sign said “EVOLUTION IS A FAIRYTALE” in huge capital letters along with some other stuff about the impending sermon. I did a double take because I had only heard of this kind of shit-disturbing south of the border.

I understand the need for civility and respecting someone else’s opinion, but this sign really pissed me off. The incontrovertible fact is that evolution happens. The theory part only represents the mechanism by which it happens. Our collective understanding of evolution has been studied and improved by hordes of scientists and thinkers since Charles Darwin sailed aboard the Beagle and dropped his bomb on us over 130 years ago. There are still some questions about the subject, but even so, evolution is not a hard concept to swallow. Science is all about asking questions and searching for answers. There may be questions, but there are a few facts beyond dispute.

Thus I was surprised to see the sign proclaiming such an idiotic thing. It’s difficult, because I ought to respect the sign maker’s opinion and keep my mouth shut. On the other hand, I feel duty bound to object to it as well. What’s a man to do?

Because this is my blog space, I’ll tell you what ought to happen in these circumstances. We should soundly criticize these sorts of things. I have no ill will toward people who practice any religion, but at the same time, we should not have to put up with religious propaganda trying to deny the facts of life. We shouldn’t have this fight at all. We shouldn’t cultivate a willful ignorance so that our views can be governed by a book that had it’s beginnings thousands of years ago. Recognize where there is wisdom, but let facts speak for themselves.

I’m not going to enter into a long discourse on evolution. There are loads of websites that can give these facts to you. It is easy to believe in God, and the theory of evolution at the same time. Even if you are biblically minded, it’s not difficult to reconcile a few billion years of life with a divine hand steering it along in some way. To my way of thinking, the universe is too vast and too amazing for it to have all started sometime in 4004 BC. I have no problem thinking about the presence of God, and the 60 million year old trilobyte fossil underfoot. Life is just too amazing to discount the hand of God. She has been at work over the course of billions of years, and the billions of years are well documented.

At the risk of starting a fight, I have to say the entirely literalist approach to biblical study is just plain wrong. There are passages in the bible that should be taken as metaphor to be properly understood. There are better scholars than I who can point out the exact verses and chapters. The conflict comes down to a literal versus an interpretive view of the bible. To reconcile the two camps, it seems like a no-brainer. There has to be some factual history in the bible of course, but modern science makes it impossible to take the bible literally from cover to cover.

In every age, humanity reinvents it’s understanding of the universe. There just seem to be a few too many who want to hold onto an outmoded and faulty understanding that doesn’t measure up. I’d love to be around in a few hundred years to hear what people think about the absurdity of our current understanding.

If you don’t think evolution exists take a look at timber wolves and chihuahuas. You could actually cross breed them if you could keep the timber wolf from eating the chihuahua. The two canines seem too greatly separated for anything like this to happen, but it is as possible as believing in God and the theory of evolution at the same time.