The bird that broke my brain

When I was in high school, I walked past a poster advertising a talk on evolution.

I can't remember who was giving the talk, but he was a visitor, and the poster made it clear that he was a religious man, and the talk would be about explaining why evolution was bullshit.

Now, when called to fill out a form, I'll always put "Anglican" in the box asking for my religious beliefs. I attended Anglican services each Sunday until my mid-teens when I was confirmed. I then promptly became one of those people who goes to church only on Easter and Christmas and pretends to ignore the whispers of the other parishioners. Today, I don't go at all.
I still put Anglican on the forms though, because "I believe in something, but I don't know what it is and I think the man-made mechanisms of religion often make dumb moves" doesn't fit in the little boxes they give you, and always sounds like a cop-out. I should just put "hippy".

But when I saw that poster, I immediately wanted to see this man talk. I was a nerdy, sci-fi driven teenager, and was fascinated by how stuff worked. I believed wholeheartedly in evolution but was intrigued as to what this man's argument could be against it. I had not yet grasped the concept of faith and so approached everything like a science problem. I needed answers.

So one day I sacrificed my lunch break - an island of free-time held in the same high regard as my Nintendo 64 - to see this man speak. Unsurprisingly I was the only skeptic, as few children had given up their 40 minutes of running in a circle to hear about evolution being bullocks unless they were already on the same team as the speaker.

But I pointed my giant curiosity ears at this guy and was promptly fascinated.
The part of his argument that I recall goes like this, nomenclature may vary:

The Humming Bird, and why it proves that evolution is lame:

This bird eats the gummy stuff out of the backs of flowers, and that's it. It does this by hovering in place and using its long, skinny beak to suck it out.
It needs three interconnected systems to do this: It's wings beat fast enough to allow it to hover, it's spouty-nose-straw gets back into the flower and its digestive system is specialised to turn the gunk into mega-wing-power.

So, with all of these systems needed to survive in this way, how did it evolve? If evolution happens with one tiny change every bazillion years, and only when necessary - the antithesis of Madonna's career - how did it end up like this?

Why would it evolve super-hover-wings if it was still eating cheeseburgers off the ground like all the other birds? If it had thrown away a beak and replaced it with a goop straw first, would it not die, as it did not yet have a stomach to process goop and could not hover to get it? Why would it's stomach evolve to eat goop first if it would need the other systems to find it in the first place?

With that in mind, it makes much more sense to believe that some force had said "I demand Goop-Eating Hover Bird" and it had sprung forth fully-formed from the rib of some other, lamer bird. The name was later changed for PR purposes, just like the "Grind-Toof Cloppy Dog", or horse.

This example blew my mind. This man, pre-empting Intelligent Design by a decade, had delivered exactly what my comic-soaked brain had needed. Religion, but with hokey pseudo-science answers!

I was energised. All I believed was suddenly thrown into question. Maybe this all made sense after all! And so, riding the crest of the wave of inclusion, I shot up my hand and told him of a pet theory of my own.

God - Presumably smarter than the average dude.

Here's roughly what I said. Keep in mind I was probably 15:

"So, God made everything and everyone, yeah? And we've got Jesus and stuff and other people have Muslim God and Buddha and stuff, and everyone fights about who has the real God. But, if God made everyone, couldn't it be that he made everyone different? Wouldn't all our differences be part of the plan? So, having made everyone like that, couldn't God have appeared to everyone, but in a form that he knew would most appeal to that group of people? So couldn't it all be the same God, and we all just see him differently? Wouldn't God treat everyone the same?"

To me, it made sense. Surely our differences are intentionally instilled by God, as he made everything and is all mysterious and stuff. If this was true, we could all hold hands for, like, ever and ever.

He mulled what I had said for about .013 of a second and replied:

"No. Our God is real. Everyone else is going to Hell."

Thoughts of the two of us debating the finer points of religious theory over a bottle of fine port evaporated.

As did much of my interest in organised religion, which I came to view much like a party full of stoners - it can be kind of fun, but you go home early because you can't get a good conversation happening.