Homo religioso
In the beginning was the Big Bang, followed by Inflation. Some ten billion years later a tiny planet, our Earth, formed from an accretion disk in a galaxy that was later to be named the Milky Way. During the Hadean Eon, the planet cooled and its petrogenesis settled to governance by radioactivity-driven tectonism.
In the primordial atmosphere, biopoiesis eventually generated the self-controlling, self-replicating assemblages of chemicals necessary for life. From the earliest minimal assemblages, ocean-bound life gradually evolved greater and great complexity. The earliest organisms derived energy from chemicals, and later organism evolved the ability to extract energy from the nearest star, the Sun. (Nature is full of complex and complicated systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS), which comprise a large number of mutually interacting and interwoven parts.)
Eventually, photosynthetic organisms developed the ability to generate oxygen. The toxicity of oxygen placed stresses on organisms yet presented the opportunity for evolution of greater complexity. Some organisms coped with oxygen-stress by enveloping other organisms that already possessed the metabolic machinery necessary to metabolize oxygen and/or to conduct photosynthesis. The regulatory path to multicellularity had begun.
Eventually organisms emerged from the sea and invaded the land. The planet experienced a number of catastrophic extinction events that pruned the numbers of species, opening new niches.
One such event resulted from the collision of an asteroid with Earth some 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub impact wiped out the dominant animals–dinosaurs–and permitted tiny mammals, including the primates, to prevail upon the land. Primates evolved from tiny insectivorous mammals and ultimately evolved into primates with a large brain/body ratio–our hominid ancestors. We share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest relatives from which we split about 5 to 7 million years ago.
Homo sapiens had emerged by about 250,000 years ago. Humans have a propensity, which is presumably absent in other animals, for inventing supernatural deities to "explain" that which humans could not yet understand. Some religious superstitions were written down by their inventors with the attached claim of having been dictated by the purported deity.
Ultimately, some of the more intelligent members of our species began to undertake systematic, empirical investigations of the natural world. These investigations yielded the information above (though in much greater detail), supplanting the need for God of the Gaps explanations. Not all Homo are particularly sapient, so Homo religioso continued to cling to supernatural non-explanations, inventing elaborate justifications for their superstitions.
In ill-conceived attempts to justify emotion-laden superstitious beliefs, some Homo religioso employ fallacious illogic and distort the established facts of science in inane attempts to substantiate their "Special Creation" by an invented deity.
The failure of all such attempts merely further demonstrates the fact that atheism truly is the most rational position to take with regard to reality.
In the primordial atmosphere, biopoiesis eventually generated the self-controlling, self-replicating assemblages of chemicals necessary for life. From the earliest minimal assemblages, ocean-bound life gradually evolved greater and great complexity. The earliest organisms derived energy from chemicals, and later organism evolved the ability to extract energy from the nearest star, the Sun. (Nature is full of complex and complicated systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS), which comprise a large number of mutually interacting and interwoven parts.)
Eventually, photosynthetic organisms developed the ability to generate oxygen. The toxicity of oxygen placed stresses on organisms yet presented the opportunity for evolution of greater complexity. Some organisms coped with oxygen-stress by enveloping other organisms that already possessed the metabolic machinery necessary to metabolize oxygen and/or to conduct photosynthesis. The regulatory path to multicellularity had begun.
Eventually organisms emerged from the sea and invaded the land. The planet experienced a number of catastrophic extinction events that pruned the numbers of species, opening new niches.
One such event resulted from the collision of an asteroid with Earth some 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub impact wiped out the dominant animals–dinosaurs–and permitted tiny mammals, including the primates, to prevail upon the land. Primates evolved from tiny insectivorous mammals and ultimately evolved into primates with a large brain/body ratio–our hominid ancestors. We share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest relatives from which we split about 5 to 7 million years ago.
Homo sapiens had emerged by about 250,000 years ago. Humans have a propensity, which is presumably absent in other animals, for inventing supernatural deities to "explain" that which humans could not yet understand. Some religious superstitions were written down by their inventors with the attached claim of having been dictated by the purported deity.
Ultimately, some of the more intelligent members of our species began to undertake systematic, empirical investigations of the natural world. These investigations yielded the information above (though in much greater detail), supplanting the need for God of the Gaps explanations. Not all Homo are particularly sapient, so Homo religioso continued to cling to supernatural non-explanations, inventing elaborate justifications for their superstitions.
In ill-conceived attempts to justify emotion-laden superstitious beliefs, some Homo religioso employ fallacious illogic and distort the established facts of science in inane attempts to substantiate their "Special Creation" by an invented deity.
The failure of all such attempts merely further demonstrates the fact that atheism truly is the most rational position to take with regard to reality.
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