Posted on 09/29/2005 2:21:03 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The year was 1838. In England, the Industrial Revolution was under way, but it had made rich only the owners of production, not the workers. In increasingly crowded cities, ordinary people struggled for their daily existence. Some of the poor rioted. The Poor Laws were under attack: Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics. It was in this pivotal year that Darwin, back from his voyage on the Beagle and trying to understand the forces that drove the origin of new species, read the works of Thomas Malthus, a parson and social economist.
In opposition to the utopian thinkers of the day, Malthus believed that unless people exercised restraint in the number of children they had, the inevitable shortfall of food in the face of spiraling population growth would doom mankind to a ceaseless struggle for existence. Out of that unforgiving battle, some would survive and many would not, as famine, disease, and war put a ceiling on the growth in population.
These ideas galvanized Darwin's thinking about the struggles for survival in the wild, where restraint is unknown. Before reading Malthus, Darwin had thought that living things reproduced just enough individuals to keep populations stable. But now he came to realize that, as in human society, populations bred beyond their means, leaving survivors and losers in the effort to exist.
Immediately, Darwin saw that the variation he had observed in wild populations would produce some individuals that were slightly better equipped to thrive and reproduce under the particular conditions at the time. Those individuals would tend to leave more offspring than their fellows, and over many generations their traits would come to dominate the population. "The result of this would be the formation of new species," he wrote later. "Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."
That theory, of course, was none other than natural selection, the driving force of evolution. Though scholars have debated just how influential Malthus was in Darwin's thinking, there can be no doubt that his view of the struggle in society enabled Darwin to appreciate the significance of the struggle in the wild.
If you had been following the "crevo" threads you would know that the current controversy is about the ACLU suing a Pennsylvania school for teaching precisely what you claim, that God may in fact be responsible for evolution. Evolusheviks and their ACLU lawyers don't like it one bit.
Joe,
Repeat this a few hundred times:
The Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with the beginnings of life or with the beginnings of the universe. It only has to do with speciation.
There is not a darned thing in the Theory of Evolution that would oppose creation of the universe and the initial creation of life by some deity. Nothing.
"Evolution, Theistic: One of three main cosmogonies (models of origins) commonly accepted in North America. It accepts the observations of naturalistic evolution but states that God guided and used evolution as a method of forming the multiplicity of species of life, the rest of the Earth and the rest of the universe.
"
Right. And that does not conflict in any way with the Theory of Evolution, which says nothing about the origins of life itself or of the universe. There's no conflict.
So if I believe that God created Man in His Own image, is that compatible with the THEORY of evolution?
In believing the Young Earth theory, you propogate the theories of pagan Greeks and Indians not the teachings of the Apostals.
Thanks for more insults and slander. You're so Christian.
Don't forget Adam Smith. We also have to hate Evil capitalism.
'In believing the Young Earth theory..."
Me? Nope. Wrong guy.
No not you, just added you to the post as something of interest.
Do you believe that God created man in His Own image?
"So if I believe that God created Man in His Own image, is that compatible with the THEORY of evolution?"
Sure. Not a problem. It all depends on how your deity made humans in his own image. Now, you must understand that I don't believe that at all, but that's beside the point.
If your deity is omnipotent, then it could have made man anyway it wished, including making man by having mankind evolve from simpler critters.
What is your deity's "image" anyhow? Does it look like a human being? Does it have a human being's parts? Or...just perhaps...does not not look anything like a human. What's your concept of the appearance of your deity?
Yes but not in the limited pagan view that you are pushing, because a physical view is a pagan view. God created man in his image spiritually. We have a soul that is a kin to God and is a part of God. We have the free will to choose between good or evil.
Tailgunner Joe: I have found this to be the case.
I happen to know some evilutioninikinoids (a/k/a "biologists"), and I know for a fact that they sleep underground during the day. At night they gather around a barrel-fire and sing:
By the light of the silvery moon,
I want to spoon,
to my honey I'll croon,
about lovely alleles,
mutating to the light of the moon.
Then they get drunk, put more tape on their glasses, and throw their pocket protectors into the fire.
Evil cretins.
Man is made in God's image spiritually not physically. How can He who has no form but is everything and in all things make man in His "physical" image? Of course, what happens if there is an alien species out there, whose image were they created in?
I don't know about you (I won't lie and falsely put words in your mouth as you have done to me) but I believe that Christ is a not just God in spirit, but also a Man in the literal flesh.
Sorry to blurst your bubble, but in Christ, God took on the form of man physically. There is a reason why no icons of God the Father are painted, only of Christ, God the Son. There is a reason why even saying the Father's name in ancient Judea was an instant death sentence.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
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