What’s It All About?

©2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com

#FirstCuppaJoe for Wed Sep 28 (thread)

Faced with the continual bombardment of bad news — wars, people having their homes destroyed by weather and fire, rampant crime, occasional episodes of genocide — it’s common to think: “How could a loving God allow this?” The answer is simple, God has put the human in charge of Earth. It is on US, to get things worked out, to create a more egalitarian, and a more utopian planet. How are we doing, so far? Pretty lousy. Will we create that utopia, or will we all perish from an ecology that we ignorantly broke, by pursuing short-sighted, greedy over-use of the Earth’s natural resources?
I’ve been working on a piece, a potential full-length book, entitled “A New Genesis.” The thesis is: that old, Biblical Genesis needs to be thrown out, because it in no way (not even metaphorically) represents the way humanity came to be.
November 24th will mark 163 years since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Ever since, the battle has raged between science and fundamentalist Christianity as to which account of creation should be accepted: The Bible or Darwin?
In the meantime, archaeology and paleontology have exposed thousands of new rock-layers of fossil evidence, clearly demonstrating the actual history of both Earth’s life, and that of human societies.
Neither life, nor human life were created in one seminal six-day event. However, the jury is out on when humanity received that quantum-leap of intelligence and innate computational ability to understand music and the ever-deepening abstraction of language and mathematics. The gulf between humans and the next-most intelligent animal, seems unbridgeable. This hints at some purpose behind the billions of years of Earthly evolution. When did that quantum-leap occur? At what point do our primate ancestors start leaving artifacts? Where in the geologic strata did intelligently crafted tools, petroglyphs and cave paintings appear? I wrote another article comparing God to a vintner, perfecting the Earth as one would barreled wine until just the right moment to add a catalyst to the vintage. The catalyst is that mystery “something” that caused the quantum-leap.
If this “theory” of human origins is accurate, then so what? What is the purpose of it all? Each of us is so temporary, and our influence on human events so tiny, given the entire scope of history. For any of it to make the slightest sense, there has to be a more eternal plane of existence to which we ascend upon death. The “sense,” is two-fold:

1. Our temporary existence is practice, training, perfecting ourselves for that eternal plane.
2. Human life — which has persisted these millennia and will probably continue to persist — is a test, for this particular animal on this particular planet. The result: success or failure, is of interest to God and everyone else who inhabits that eternal plane.