Thursday, February 12, 2009

Darwin and me

Today we celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin. Here’s a quote from him that Google found for me:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.


I admire Darwin immensely, and I use a personalized version of this quote for expressing my disbelief in a higher power.

I am a devoted atheist. I don’t know the exact word for what I am, but I often use Existentialist—ultimately, we are individually responsible for the destiny we create for ourselves. (TonyN should find that statement a pleasant visitation to the past.)

I believe in the sanctity and beauty of life, that there is no reason that the world couldn’t have evolved to create such beauty in ourselves and nature. As Darwin stated, why would a super-being have created complex symbiotic predatory relationships when they seem generated of necessity to adapt to one’s environment? And why isn’t that scientific rationalization beautiful enough to say there is no god? Isn’t there beauty in belief that the universe can create itself in all its complex iterations?

OK, I can’t write more on my dissertation for atheism. I have a bad case of the yuckies, and I’m feeling sort of vertiginous.

1 comment:

eeny meeny said...

Life without a Higher Power is such a relief. I create my own destiny. Can be scarier, but feels a lot less judgmental.