issue #22

I have always been a student of science and have had my dose of theories on evolution, natural selection and stuff; and all that while, I have also been brought up in a deeply religious environment ( though my prayers to God were mostly limited to exam hours :-) ). So when it comes to believing in God, I am a bit ambivalent; in fact, I try not to think about the contradictions at all because that confuzzles my mind.

For it's difficult to believe in God (who created humans) and "also" believe in the evolution of man from the amoeba. Yet, children all over the world come back from school laden with scientific theories of creation and then pray to God, their creator, before going to bed; and no one comes forward to clarify this confusion. Further, both Creationism and Evolution have large loopholes, contradictions in them which doesn't help either.

For sometime now, some researchers have been proposing the theory of Intelligent Design(ID) as a middle ground between religious Creationism and scientific Evolution. They basically believe that evolution did have a part to play in the development of organisms but not everything can be explained by it; formation of complex structures like the eye, and man himself, have been possible due to deliberate external intervention by some intelligent force.

The problem with this theory is that there are several variants of it, and the ID community is split several ways, each often ridiculing the others, and all drawing flak from both Creationists and Evolutionists.

So did God create man on the 6th day? Or was it Evolution? Was it a mixture of both? Or some radically different explanation exists? Whatever it is, it's time we shed our passive acceptance of two ridiculously opposite theories and took a stand.

-sumandatta
(editor)

PS: Our comment-hungry author rhea has written up a wonderful story this time in shorts but has only posted half of it blackmailing us for comments before she posts the other half! The first part is so yummy, I have to relent to the blackmailing and pray to all the readers to put in some comments plzzz.... I really wanna know what happens next to the couple!

in this week's issue:
shorts | rags2riches | poetry | challenge | bondspeak | images | critique