http://www.thedailybeast.com/video/item/oreilly-and-dawkins-debate-evolution
First check out this video. I've posted this video for two reasons: 1) to shed light on Bill O'Reilly's tricks and 2) to open up the floor for debate on this touchy subject. A friend responded to the post by saying that science can't explain everything about the human existence. I responded with the following:
"Maybe it can't explain everything - yet - of course that doesn't mean that we should be satisfied scientifically with a particular religion as the missing link. The kind of thinking that yearns for scientific explanation by way of faith is the kind that will never seek to truly explain what we don't know - and that leads us away from understanding the Universe to our full potential. In my humble opinion, there is no science without the divine - each scientific discovery is further proof to me of the existence of God. However, I couldn't be satisfied if I conceded that those things we can't yet explain must be God - that gives us license to cease understanding the unknown. Finding out what we don't understand is one of those gifts of being creatures in a divine Universe."
Furthermore, it's not really the point if God is or isn't the missing link of understanding in the natural world. It becomes tricky when we start assigning explanations without proof to the missing links. Creationists can thump their Bibles all they want, but really, are they more tuned in to what happened from Big Bang to the beginning of the fossil record? And was it God (aka Jesus' father) or Allah who did the banging? Once again, human beings could easily get into an argument over whose god started the Universe, and whose god is the best. We all know where that leads us ... the group with the most political power ends up oppressing the other groups. Clearly, when a group is defeated by force or maneuvering of political power, their beliefs become null and void. See Native American history for proof of this occurrence.
Really, is it a Christian God who created the Universe? This is what Creationists would have us believe. As 25% of the world's population is now Muslim (and this number is growing), I wonder if we are in for a surge in Islamic creation theory.
While we all may have a personal theory about how and why the Universe was created, unless we have scientific proof, it's best to leave those theories out of the public school science class. This is exactly the sort of thing one should openly discuss in Philosophy and Religion classes, at church, or at the dinner table. But it cannot and should not have a place in Biology 101.
