It is necessary to expand your mind in at least three ways:  One, you’ve got to expand it in the dimension of space. And to understand that the medieval church could not believe that small thing, the sun, didn’t revolve around the Earth, even after it was known the Earth was round. And now what we call the Milky Way is the galaxy that we live in, edgeways to us, and some of those big bright stars out there are other galaxies bigger than it and farther away. It’s a huge panorama to think against.

And you really need to understand why we know what we know about the dimension of time—you have to be able to understand at least the rudiments of half-life (the amount of time that it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its mass) and decay of radioactive elements and in particular radio-carbon dating, which tells us how old every campfire we ever find can be—because that carbon can be dated by the radioactive half-life.

So, it’s not a question of somebody saying, “Well, the world’s 5000 years old, and besides who the hell really knows….” It’s not like that. With the extension of intelligence of science, one can reach back past those 5000 years and read the history in the rocks that goes back millions and billions of years.

And in time and space, things have been going on long enough that there is light traveling toward us at 186,000 miles a second that’s been traveling for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and the star that gave up that light is dead and doesn’t put out light any more and that light isn’t even here yet and by the time that light gets here, that star will be gone, and maybe us as well.

So, to understand evolution, you need to understand a little bit about space and time. You also need to be able to hang together a concept. You have to be able to hang together a matrix of facts and put things together in a reasonable way.

“Intelligent design” to me seems to be looking for it after the fact. And intelligent design is sort of a relative thing, you know.

It’s also necessary to have a proper understanding of what a theory is, and the falsehood that the theory of evolution is something that’s just not really proved if it’s a “theory.”

That’s not how “theory” is used. For instance, in atomic theory, the way that we can tell that it’s true is that atom bombs blow up when we tell them to. It’s more than theory, it’s more than what you think about something, it’s a tentative discussion and investigation into how it actually works.

The idea of evolution is deceptively simple—that which is a good survivor survives, that which is not, does not. Seems simple enough. And that things are changed by mutation of various causes and there will be differences amongst the critters.

Of the ones that have mutations—98 percent of all mutations are lethal and the organism does not survive.  But of that 2 percent that does survive the mutations, some of them are not very good and some of them are better. And the ones that are better will probably procreate better and get more food and have bigger families and last more seasons and reproduce more than the ones that aren’t as fast, aren’t as swift, or didn’t come out as well. And that doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination.

And if you look back to a beginning of when this Earth cooled for millions of years before it became cool enough that anything could live on it. You can see that there is plenty of time for many things to work themselves out.

Now, the snowflake is considered almost miraculous because of all being alike (hexagonal), and different (because they all coalesce on a different particle of dust with different surface characteristics that fractally goes out into making the pattern of the snowflake). And it’s very crisp and precise and deliberate-seeming—a six-sided pattern. What is the miracle of that six-sided pattern? It’s the 60-degree angle structure of the H20 water molecule.

All of the creatures that reproduced and are here have lasted, and the heads/tail equation came up heads for them every time or they wouldn’t be here. But that’s not miraculous except from this end looking back at it, because it’s merely a description of what went down and which elements were reproduced and carried on.

I think life organizes against the entropy. It is our purpose and our function.

I would think it would be silly if science thought it had everything covered and if there were not areas that science did not quite yet understand. They have not yet put together their unified field theory.

Of course, science doesn’t have everything nailed down. But I am quite content for the part that we don’t understand yet to be called “the part we don’t understand yet.” Calling it “God” doesn’t make it be anything else. If you want to call it that and that’s what you want to do, go on right ahead, but it’s the  part we don’t understand yet, whatever that is.

To me, having to fall back on a God who snaps his fingers to bring this stuff into fruition is much, much harder to believe than natural processes working themselves out over truly immense amounts of time.

This assault of “intelligent design” against science is a great sin in itself as far as I’m concerned—an effort to put untrue things into the collective mind of humankind, to make us all a little bit dumber, a little bit slower, and a little bit less able to cope as human beings and as nations.

It is an evil thing to bring down the level of intelligence that we have worked at for all these thousands of years.