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Stream of Consciousness

KT's picture

On Tuesday, Professor Grobstein talked about how evolution doesn’t strive to get to a place, it strives to discover new places. To compare this to creationism, this conjures up analogy for me: creationism is when your honey tells you to get dressed up for Valentine’s Day because he’s taking you somewhere nice. You don’t know the specifics of where you’re going, but you know that your sweetie cares about you is taking you somewhere that you enjoy. Evolution is packing up the family truckster and just getting on the road…no particular place to go. In the truckster, all I would be able to think about is what route to take, and in particular, how do I make my decisions if there’s no goal and therefore no framework on which to base them? Maybe I should just take in the sights, sounds and smells along my voyage and live in the present… the road is the goal. But how can I make sense of all of this without having a frame of reference? It seems like the present will always change if it makes you revise how you thought of the past. So again, how do I choose a direction? One idea might involve the role of culture. So here’s my “story” about that: maybe in lieu of “true” rules, our cultures create artificial ones so we have a basis for our decisions and don’t devolve into a huge befuddled mass of humanity. How our culture comes up with its rules despite the overall lack of a goal, I don’t know. Hmmmm.

 

Comments

mgz24's picture

Known vs. Unknown

 I think that this is an interesting way of looking at the two, and that this view can they be used for most things in life.  It shows, for instance, just how many things the idea of evolution can be applied to.  It's a way of dividing the world into a known (creationism) and an unknown (evolution).  It also, I think, brings up the question of whether or not the two ideas are really even comparable.  As I'm sitting here now, however, I can think of many examples along the lines of the "family truckster", but can't come up with examples of the creationism.  This then takes me back to really questioning the idea of creationism, because the idea that everything is how it is for a specific reason just doesn't work in my mind.  You could say, well education (for some) is a "creationist" example, because if someone wants to be a doctor they go to college then to medical school then into residency, but it isn't that simple, because they may decide half way through that they don't want to be a doctor, or that they want to take time off, so even here there is not a set plan.  And in the Valentine's Day dinner example, what happens if there is a snow storm, or a flat tire, or any other bump in the road?  It seems to me that the idea of creationism should be a valid one, but every way I look at it, it keeps coming in as inferior to evolution. 

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