Love , Darwin, Truth and John McCartney

I had Andrew (who was home sick) and Ryan watch a movie on Darwin last week.  It sounds like a hard life, this homeschooling, but it's a small price to pay for missing the inanities of highschool, I told Ryan.

The movie was pretty dull.

It made Darwin sound as if he had Aspergers. Has every achievement been made by dissatisfied, confused individuals looking for their own answers?  Maybe contentment is an impediment to progress.  Satisified people don't need to move forward.  Or as one Aspergers proponent put it : if we left it up to the neurotypical people we'd still be sitting in caves grunting to eachother.  Or as they say at the gym:  progress only occurs outside of the comfort zone.

Darwin's discovery of an apparently common ancestor reminded me of Einstein's search for a unified theory of physics, one that explained relativity as well as quantum mechanics.  (This was another movie I made the kids watch two weeks ago, when Andrew was home sick!)

Although both men have been accused of trying to disprove God, I got the exact opposite impression.  The closer Stephen Hawkings got to explaining the universe, the more it became spiritual rather than scientific.  (Although I haven't read his latest book that apparently has him an atheist, he appeared quite the opposite in his earlier books.)

Darwin showed the unity of all living things.

Although his arguments were later twisted to support racist views, he actually felt the opposite.  He was first appalled by the savagery of the Tuerra del Fuegans in South America but later more upset at man's own inhumanity to man after he witnessed the brutal slaughter of Australia's aborginal peoples.  Sadly, he saw this as strong overcoming weak, as survival of the fittest, perhaps as inevitable.  But it didn't mean he liked or condoned it.

Nature.  Nature's way.  Man's nature.

But he also found a common link to all living things, to life, to the planet. 

Not only are mankind's genes 99% the same as a chimpanzees, one human's genes are 99.9% the same as another's.  Any other human, not just family, is 99.9% the same as another.  999 out of 1000 of my genes is the same as everyone else's on the planet.

I find that amazing.

I find it unifying.

I find it that "Namaste" spirit of divine love that bows to that same spirit in every living thing.

Have modern scientists found Einstein's "Theory of Everything?"  Can we reconcile Darwin's Theory of Evolution with Creationism, natural selection with a divine creator?

Could they all be different explanations of the same truth?  And does it matter?

Maybe universal love is the universal truth.

And let it be............