Theory of Evolution and God

I have encountered several people who start jumping up and down when I express my interest in spirituality. What about evolution, they ask. What about mutations, DNA recombination? Where does God fit into this picture?

What is my take on evolution? I don’t really have a take on evolution. I am not here to get involved in the creationist vs. evolutionist debate. I don’t even know enough about evolution to get involved in the debate. It is an ongoing debate with lots of people having lots of interesting comments on this, and I haven’t followed the debate this far to make a valuable novel comment, or to take sides.

So where does God fit in? He fits in exactly where he always fitted. I agree with Senator John Edwards who says “I don’t think those things (evolution and God) are inconsistent.” Why should they be? If one believes that God molded us, built us up from sand or something, and instilled life in a nick of time, then sure, they are inconsistent. But I am not arguing about the way God created us. How God creates us is up to him, there is no reason why he needs to comply with our imagination. I am just stating that God created us. Let me explain.

Evolution states that different life forms changed one morphing into another, matter and energy and natural laws helping those processes. Now why couldn’t God be the cause of that? It is in fact consistent with the Indian scriptures which state that God impregnated matter with lots of living sparks, or souls (translated from jiva in Sanskrit). God interfered no further and allowed nature to take its course. He remained though as the witness, and remains even today. As Edwards says “The hand of God was in every step of what’s happened with man, and the hand of God is in every step of what happens with me, and every human being that exists on this planet”. Now which part of evolution proves this statement wrong? If we didn’t have evolution in our hands, and we wanted to disbelieve the existence of God, we could just say man appeared out of nowhere. Big Bang theory states that after a combination of gases this universe appeared. What was the cause of this combination? What was there beforehand? Something came out of nowhere, anyway. So not only does evolution not prove the non-existence of God, it does not even lead us anywhere closer to proving the non existence of God. All belief systems comply with a cause, a mysterious force that made it all happen. Why shouldn’t this force be living, why shouldn’t it be conscious? It performs processes which the best of scientists today aren’t even able to mimic, and it makes more sense for such a force to be more powerful than us, to have a higher mental faculty than us, to have far greater power than us. So why cant this force be living, breathing, creating? Loving?

Observing evolution closely, we have also noticed one thing though. Whatever nature does has a purpose, and purpose keeps us going, keeps us alive. When our body needs food, we are hungry. A man gets attracted naturally to a woman to keep generations going, and life thriving. Our natural need for things keep us going. When there is purpose to our eating, sleeping, and mating, why should there not be a purpose to life? Why should purpose end where we fail to understand it, when it is beyond our mental faculties? Why do we feel happy and sad, why do we have affections, attachments, why have we been given a marvelous mind? To maintain our bodies like animals do, to merely increase comforts to our homes the way birds do with leaves? We might as well be animals… Why do we feel empty when we get everything we want? Why have multibillionaires, who have the ultimate physical comforts find something lacking? Because we may have a purpose to fulfill, which we fail to understand and choose to deny… however, when we question the purpose of existence that is the beginning of spirituality.