For Your Consideration...
INT: A BIG COLUMN-Y BUILDING
Thales, a man with a white beard probably, gathers his robe and stands up straight.
THALES
(pacing)
Students, write this down: "All is water."
Anaximenes, a student, begins doing as told. But after writing "All is" his hand stops.
ANAXIMENES
(whispering to himself)
No. Not again. Every day it's "All is water. All is water. All is water." I can't believe this stuff anymore. I've got to make my own way.
Anaximenes writes something down.
We see his papyrus (or whatever). It reads "All is air."
He grins into the camera.
Steve Miller Band's "Jungle Love" begins to play.
TITLE CARD: The Presocratics.
Who said philosophy can't be fun? Well, fun is a weird word for it, I admit. The point of my strange little screenplay is to point out that the biggest debates of the early philosophers seem to us now to be silly. It's surprising, however, to realize how much these issues still affect us. So, here we go.
Evolution. It's a controversial issue among Christians. But is there any importance to this issue or are we just getting into scraps over trifles? First we have to realize that evolution did not start with Darwin in 1859. The basic worldview of evolution has been around, from what we can tell, since the Presocratics (500s BC). What do I mean?
Well, the Presocratics (Greek philosophers before Socrates) argued that the world is at bottom made up of one kind of stuff. Their debates were over what that substance was. Thales said all is water. Anaximenes said all is air. Heraclitus said all is fire. Notice, though, that they all have the same assumption. Namely that everything, from corn to aardvarks, is all made up of one kind of stuff and that the differences, though visibly striking, are insubstantial.
Skipping quite a bit, in 1859, Darwin put forth the idea of natural selection, as a mechanism to account for how one living thing changes into another. The New Darwinians add mutation so that natural selection has something to work on. But underlying this is the same assumption, that everything is made up of the same kind of stuff--the differences are superficial.
We as Christians, however, believe that the world is full of distinctions. Man is not God. Life is not death. Heaven is not hell. Christ is not Satan. Men are not women. Animals are not men.
Evolution teaches that all things arose from a primordial ooze. We hear the evolutionist credo: "All is slime."
And we say no, thanks.