Evolution vs. Creationism

Nifty! Thanks for sharing.

Oh, it wasn't written for creationists. It was written for people who have to deal with creationists. Sometimes it helps to be able to argue rings around them, if you have to get up in front of some group like a school board and ask people not to do something stupid like throw out all the dinosaur books.

Some people don't know much about the things they hate. This makes it easy to out-debate them if your audience is remotely sensible. The challenge, alas, is that many people do not respond much to logic and facts, preferring other decision-making methods such as emotion or faith. Hence the mess this world is in now.

And that, you see, is precisely where most people go wrong: they think like mortals, not like deities. They don't understand the divine scale. A Being who creates a universe is not going to micromanage every molecule of it. Deities work best on a big canvas, and for that one needs big tools. So the gods make Laws of Nature. They sculpt gravity to manage matter. They create life and shape it with evolution.

They aren't going to design every last animal because that would be A) time-consuming and B) boring. The first is like drawing on a computer: you create a brush program, you don't put each pixel in place one at a time. You CAN work on a pixel-by-pixel level, but mostly you don't. The second is like growing a garden: you have a plan, you start things out, you give them some help, but you also let them do their own thing because that's the fun part. You want to find out what happens when you set up a good system and then let it run.

Deities are rarely as fussy or short-sighted as humans. They are more curious, more flexible, and more patient. Of course ... so are cats.

Go ahead! I'm delighted that you're so pleased with it.

Yes. Also there are some other traditions where the Supreme Deity is still around, but people rarely address Him/Her/It, preferring instead to work through intermediaries of more comfortable and comprehensible stature. The Celtic cosmology works that way with Ur Mawreth ("The Greatest") barely mentioned, and all the well-known gods and goddesses in charge of various spheres of influence. This model is kind of like a big company with many departments and department heads. You don't bother the CEO often, because that person is busy with the big picture; you go to the relevant department head ... and sometimes, you can even simply "push 1 to check your account balance." There are plenty of religions that have rote prayers or rituals for certain very common functions, and they are automated so they don't require Anyone's direct attention.

Voudoun is especially interesting because its deities are made from human souls. They were people whose talents were so big and memorable that even non-relatives kept coming to them for help, and nobody wanted to quit just because they died. That actually is one of the main ways in which souls mature. They move up to a larger and more permanent scale. Because they used to be mortal, though, they are somewhat more understanding of human challenges and limitations than more transcendent deities are.