Oh man I hate when I have a mental blog entry backlog.
I had a long and pleasant couple of days involving all sorts of fun familial bonding, including relationship-redefining experiences with both my sister and my quarter-brother1, the former taking the form of a four-hour long conversation, the latter the form of a discussion on the elemental structure of matter, the fundamental oneness of the Universe, and also that infinitely varied formula that is Scooby-Doo. (Watching it with him made me realize that man, Shaggy and Scooby were such chumps. I mean, they had nothing at all in common with the others—and certainly didn't have any desire to go around unmasking monsters all the time. They were only kept around because they were so damn easy to manipulate. It's sad, really. Mind you, I didn't tell him that.) I also had some good chattings with my Non-Biological Grandmother Equivalent, which is always pleasant when I don't feel overwhelmingly guilty about not doing it more often.
The long conversation with M. was great for many reasons. For one, because it proved that we have more to say to each other than what we say on the phone. (It's amazing how long two people can spend going through the manifold perturbations of the classic "what's up with you?/not much, you?") But it was also just a really good conversation, the kind I don't get enough of with my peers, those washed-up old farts, let alone with not-quite-14-year-old girls2. To be fair, it did start out as a not-quite-14-year-old conversation, centered around the many various parts of Jessica Biel's body which M. considers to be fundamentally unfair, but by the end it had gone through more transformations than a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger (or did they only have one each?) and somehow wound up being a theological discussion. Man, I really do love good theological discussions. (That's why I stopped reading Monadology.)
In the course of the discussion, M. managed to do something that nobody else has ever quite managed to do to me; she threw a monkey wrench into my belief that evolutionism and faith, far from being diametrically opposed, are in fact entirely complementary. I was proposing a concept of God as a Creator who set the first life into motion but did not guide its evolution. An analogy, which I didn't think of then but later, would be an apple seed; you expect it to grow into an apple tree, but you don't know how many branches it'll have. A similar situation could be imagined when God created the first few strands of DNA, though in that case one might say than an omniscient God would know how many branches there would be, but wouldn't meddle. M. seemed to be fine with this concept, and didn't object to the idea of accepting it as a combination of (but not compromise between) creation and evolution3—except for one sticking point. She essentially pointed out that if one believes that humanity is special (which we both do; I'd earlier claimed that there was something of the divine within every human life) and particularly if one believes that humanity was specially created by God (which she firmly does and I'm considering), a tear opens up in my theory: God can't have taken such a hands-off approach to evolution as the one I was proposing and still been able to create humanity. She therefore saw the big problem with evolution as being in the single step from ape to man. It was a damn good point, and it actually kept me up late that night. I mean, I don't doubt that there are plenty of creationists out there who would agree with her, but I've never had a single one of them tear me down so elegantly as this girl who's still 13 till the end of July. Obviously my own faith in evolution isn't shattered or anything, but now I have to make significant changes to my Grand Unification Theory of the origins of life4.
There was also some great stuff in there on the Garden of Eden and the humanity of Jesus and the nature of free will, which, M. claimed, is the single greatest proof of God's love for us5. She may not always sound all that erudite in my blog comments, but our Lulu, man, she ain't no slouch. You should have heard the lecture (which she kindly related for me) she gave a black classmate of hers with a tendency to see racism in everything, after he claimed something along the lines of "Africans were the only people to suffer through slavery". Aw, man, it was scathing. Apparently the kid never called anything "racist" while she was in earshot for the rest of the year.
- I've decided that rather than subtract and be left with a non-brother, I'd multiply to get a quarter-brother. It doesn't make much sense, I know, but this is my family, remember.
- Although honestly there aren't many not-quite-14-year-old girls who I stay up talking with until two in the morning, for obvious reasons, so maybe they're all good conversationalists and they just hide it really really well.
- I should be clear that the discussion was not really about which of the two is right exactly. We accepted both as possible explanations, if not equal ones. This was more an attempt to determine whether the scientific one (which has the advantage of parsimony) could be squared with the belief in an unobservable Creator without sacrificing either way.
- Actually, theoretical physics is a good analogy to make; you have quantum physics, and that's true, and you have general relativity, and that's true, but you can't put them together to get a theory of everything that makes any sense. That's sort of how I feel trying to wrestle together my understanding of science with my concept of God; just because I can't doesn't mean either is wrong exactly.
- Of course, it might not be all that surprising that a teenager sees the granting of total independence as an act of incredible love, but it's still an excellent point.
abstemiously posted by Martin Marks at 10:53 in the evening // one comment by:
