Something radical happened to me when I was 16 years old at Argo High School. My science teacher, Ms Moon began to talk about human evolution, she talked about, in so many words how we human beings, like other forms of life, have developed from aboriginal unicellular life by way of such mechanisms as natural selection and genetic drift working on sources of genetic variation. Natural selection discards most of these mutations, she argued, because they prove deleterious to the organism in which they appear, but some turn out to have survival value and to enhance fitness; they spread through the population and persist. It these mechanisms, or mechanisms very much like them, that all the vast variety of contemporary organic life has developed; we are all animals that come from this same Universal Common Ancestor by chance.[i]

We are all animals….animals by chance.  I heard nothing else she said. Animal!  I am an animal! I could not get my teenae mind around these words. How could I be just another animal like the rat, termite and dog! How could all of life itself come from purposeless mater? So I approached her and questioned her. She then gave me a project on Charles Darwin, who I never read before that day.

I found out after reading Darwin that she was partially right, we are all animals. But years later I learned that I was right all along, in another sense. We are not only animals.  We are sacred and special. And it is impossible for us or all of life to come by mere undirected processes alone.

My talk today is part one of the Blind Spots of Science.  This is the first section, which discusses what science is, how it contradicts naturalism and the conflict between religion and science.

 What do you think?