We have been involved with the question of Evolution for a long, long time. Today the argument centers on: How did we get here? The two sides turn out to be, “We got here through a series of lucky rolls of the genetic dice”, or “God planted us here because we are just the way he always wanted us to be.” In the 1920’s the issue was: Did we come from monkeys? Apparently no one wanted to be a monkey’s uncle. So for almost 100 years we have not gone very far in answering this question, and we won’t any time soon.
There is a much better way to look at this problem. Brain biology studies reveal we come equipped hard-wired to seek some connection with Divinity….all seven billion of us. Atheists remind us that we do not have to go along with the crowd if we choose, but the crowd is trying to find and express God. Let’s suppose the Bible is right when it starts off our story with, “In the beginning, God…” and lets suppose the Evolutionists are right when they see evolution as the mechanism God used to create all of this stuff we see every where. By the way, Darwin attributed the first cause to God. If you are able to drop your intellectual filters long enough to see this concept, you are ready to move beyond a hundred years of conflict with Darwin.
The conflict has been centered all this time on the question: Where did we come from? This is one of the Five Big Questions. The other four are: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? and What Time is it? All five questions are involved in this issue, but the one that will move us quickly beyond the past 100 years of conflict is: Where are we going?
Scientists are now entertaining the probability that we are still evolving….along with everything else on this good earth. In fact, the only two things that seem to have reached terminal evolution are the sharks and cockroaches……these rascals have been like this for a million years. Everything else is not like it used to be, or like it is going to be in the future.
Try this for a thought experiment: If you are over thirty, a part of your life was spent in a computer-free world. So you are able to describe yourself as pre- and post-computer. Now think about any six-year-old kid in America. He already knows a lot about computers and how to use them. These kids’ brains’ and neural networks are being re-wired as a result of hours and hours before computer screens. So right here we see brains being adapted to a new environment…..kids brains are evolving!
But, of course, this is threatening. Suppose we could look 100 years forward. We might discover that our newly evolved brains understand that much of what we see in 2012 as right and proper is, by that time, wrong and outmoded, or as the hymn says: “New truth makes ancient good uncouth.” If you are convinced and certain that your faith in the God you worship is fully and completely right, then the mere thought of being uncouth is a real problem. In some cases that has been enough to go to war over and in America today it is enough to divide us into at least two camps that can no longer speak to each other.
What if we hold the reins of change loosely and discover that evolution, as the process by which we change and adapt, has a target or a goal for man….and man is being propelled, step by step, into a different or evolved species. Today some of our advanced thinkers tell us that as we go to higher states of consciousness, our brains will have to activate what many of our scientists consider today as Junk DNA whose purpose we do not currently fully understand. Evidence is already present to suggest our brains are evolving to activate the mechanisms we will need to perceive new dimensions and new realities that are as hidden from our current senses today as electricity used to be.
God don’t make no junk and He is not finished with us yet. Ready or not, we are still evolving and the state to which we are going is as real as the state we have reached thus far through our long species-wide evolution. There is a target toward which we are headed and it answers the second question of the Evolution Controversy……where are we going?
“….take it”, Yogi Berra. We are fast approaching a fork in the road for the whole world. In his 1990 book Power Shift Alvin Toffler said: “For this is the dawn of the Powershift Era. We live at a moment when the entire structure of power that held the world together is now disintegrating. A radically different structure of power is taking form. And this is happening at every level of human society.” Things are changing, like it or not. 
In three years we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Luther’s nailing the 95 Theses on the door of The Castle Church in Wittenberg and the beginning of The Protestors Re-Formation of Christianity. There have been many 500-year cycles in History and we use the myth of The Phoenix to remind us of that. And each has ended and been replaced by the next 500 year cycle. But breaking up is so hard to do!
