Evolved

It could appear to someone that with politics taking the direction they have this election year, a future of ignorance would be possible. Not about everything. People will want better and better consumer goods and services. Study of climate, origins, and the cosmos might not be funded since they are believed to directly contradict religious dogmas.

Why there is such an opposition to the science of evolution and the origins of the universe is odd to me. Consider that our constituents at the molecular level are replenished from the matter around us. At this moment I am made of of atoms that last week were walking around in a chicken and others were growing on a tomato plant. I don't believe that would contradict anyone beliefs.

And just as true, my body's growth was organized by the operation of a strand of substance that has been passed along for billions of years all the while undergoing modifications, additions, deletions, insertions, and finally combination... until at long last it was delivered into the zygote that would grow into me. I see nothing particularly miraculous about a process like that unless you consider the likelihood of such a fortuitous sequence of events occurring without fail.

The alternative view to avoid contradicting dogma is a first human being made as a mud sculpture. But then somehow, that sculpture manages reproduction using the mechanisms alluded to above.

 While some religious traditions have come to acknowledge their creation accounts as allegory, some fundamentalist ones here in the USA haven't. A figure of 6,000 years has stuck with many because of some dubious calculations by Bishop Ussher in the 17th century. Despite incredible advance of knowledge, many still cling to this time frame and consider a scientific refutation as Anti-Bible or Anti-Creator. Bill Bryson offers a beautiful synopsis of the science behind our current estimate of the age of the universe. Many scientific disciplines converge on a figure of 14.8 billion years. With little effort and some science background, any of us can duplicate the elements of this modern calculation. This convergence is a quality of fact. It is true whether one believes in it or not.