Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney

Author:Julia Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15. Sister Charatina's Theory Of Evolution & God Is Not Nature

Now, of course I accepted the theory of evolution. I remember Sister Charatina telling us all about it in 8th grade, how we, as Catholics believe in evolution. We weren't like some of those uneducated protestants who believe God literally plopped people onto the Earth in one fell swoop.

She told us, "This is the way it happened: God set everything in motion in order for humans to evolve. Then there was a specially pre-ordained moment when there was the very, very first human man and woman. Because think about it. There had to be some moment when there was the very, very first man and woman. And that was Adam and Eve. And that's when God put a soul in us. And then everything else happened exactly as it says in the Bible." And then she sort of encouraged us not to think about evolution so much anymore, because, "After all," she'd "just explained it. Right?"

In any case, the idea of evolution wasn't threatening to me in any way, I just didn't really understand much about it except that over time animals change or something.

I thought that "The Origin Of Species" would be way too scientific for a person like me to read. Personally, I had avoided science at all costs in school. In fact, I had this prejudice that doing well at science was somehow an admission that you didn't have the complexity of mind or subtlety of character to take on the humanities. Science was for people who couldn't handle ambiguity and needed black and white answers, people who couldn't get in touch with their feelings and had nothing left to think about.

But to my surprise, "The Origin of Species" was actually very easy to read. And truly a page-turner. And Charles Darwin described evolution in ways that Sister Charatina had not. It was a lot more scary and chancy and frightening the way Darwin explained it.

The next day we visited an island where the Blue-footed Boobies were tending to their new babies. The Blue-footed Booby babies are the cutest animals in the world, almost to the level of absurdity. They have this bright, white, longhaired fur that sticks out all over, and these blue beaks and feet, and these huge plaintive eyes.

Usually the Blue-footed Boobies have just one baby per pregnancy, but every once in awhile they have two. And when they do the stronger sibling usually pecks the brains out of the weaker one.

So we were looking at all these adorable Blue-footed Booby babies and then we found one pecking the brains out of its weaker sibling. And the naturalist was telling us that this was routine. That now the frigate bird would probably come soon and carry the dead baby off to feed its family. That's the way it went.

And I looked at this poor doomed Blue-footed Booby baby, with its brains hanging out of its head. And we sort of looked at each other in the eye for a moment.

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