Votive of the Creational Event

 was an ecclesiastical order with a direct descent from the sort of fundamentalists who'd in the past had the idea of a giant with a big beard and a nightshirt making humans out of mud being taught alongside the Theory of Evolution. Such people had also, for some reason, tended to be extremely hot on the defensive capabilities of machines for which the only possible use was to forcibly insert a lump of metal into another human being from a distance. At the time, such people had been increasingly dismissed as irrelevant, held by any balanced and reasonable observer to be a waste of a perfectly good set of opposable thumbs.

The simple fact was, though, that over the centuries religions themselves go through a form of Darwinian selection — belief-systems that were utterly opposed to observable fact (that children look different from their parents, for example, which is all that "evolution" really means) must either adapt to the facts, die, or end up entirely composed of the sort of clinical schizophrenics who'll believe in anything, up to and including that hamsters are in league with table lamps to beam microwaves into their brains. And since clinical schizophrenics were not the best people to be building churches and handing round collection plates, they tended to die out in any case — of starvation, or when the church they thought they had built properly fell on their heads.

The adaptation, in the end, the ultimate reconciliation between Religion and Science, laid in a simple expansion and redefinition of the relevant terms. As early as the eighteenth century, any reasonable and reasonably-educated Christian thought of "Cod" as not some physically literal big beard in the sky, but as what Rupert Gilhooly would have described as: "Everything in the whole universe, right? All the planets and particles and whatnot, and how they all sort of fit together and work."

The Order of the Creational Event were, in fact, some of the least spiritual people around, drily examining and documenting the physical processes of the universe since the Big Bang with absolute precision and an absolute lack of faith as such, but in the terms of spirituality — which had come to mean specific things with as much technicality as calling something a "meson". And with quite as much lay-impenetrability as someone going around and calling things mesons, when you didn't know what a meson actually was. (PROSE: The Infernal Nexus)