Christians can't afford to oppose evolution [says evangelical-biologist]

Chicago Tribune ^ | 27 November 2005 | Richard Colling

[Right Wing Professor]

The real debate is about macro evolution not micro evolution

That's right. All we know is that interest compounds at 4% APR. That's totally different from saying the bank account will double within 18 years.

[Theophilus]

Evolution has been observed.

Whatever.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" That he believe that God created life and was one of the first IDers."

He put the statement about God breathing life into the creation after worrying about the reaction he was getting from the religious. He was never very happy with it.

As for being one of the first ID'ers, that is 100% not true. His entire book, "The Origin of Species", was an attack on the predominant design paradigm, specifically Paley's "Natural History: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature" (1802).

[bobdsmith]

No one is arguing about birds' beaks changing size and color.

But that requires an increase in information.

[Smokin' Joe]

That, too, implies a religious structure (for the belief in God), just not the substitution of the theory of evolution for a deity. Those who most religiously defend Evolution (with a capital 'e') do so as a substitute for the belief in a deity, not in addition to such beliefs.

They have replaced God with a theory.

People express their faith in whatever beliefs they will.

Personally, I believe God can use any method He wants to populate a planet--who am I to argue with God?

However, I can see more balance in one who would undertake scientific investigation not to the exclusion of, but in addition to their belief in a God (or Gods, as the case may be).

So often the theory of Evolution is held up as somehow 'proving' God does not exist, that all creatures great and small are derived by chemical or biological accident.

We casually throw around vast numbers without fully comprehending their scope (for instance, how long would it take to spend a Billion dollars at one dollar per second?--just over 1900 years).

Then the argument is polarized by assuming the days of Genesis are 24 hour days, and that only one or the other is correct.

An all-powerful entity could certainly accomplish anything in so short a time, without the logistical, bureaucratic, and regulatory encumbrances of human projects, but the bottom line is that either scenario boggles the human mind, one for its sheer of duration (4.6 billion years) and the other for its vastness of accomplishment and apparent lack of duration.

[THEUPMAN]

There is no rational way to reconcile evolution or the "big bang" with the Bible. They are diametrically opposing theories.


I wont bother replying to some of these folks around here who don't believe the Bible. But I would like to say you are correct. And I would like to add this ....

Evolution depends on the cycle of life and death , selection ...
but before Adam took from the tree death was not in the world.

In order to believe in evolution, one must throw out the entire doctrine of sin.
And with it goes the need for a Saviour.

If death didn't come into the world because of the sin of Adam then the whole rational for the messiah is gone.
There is no room for compromise.
stand firm... the time is short

[LauraleeBraswell]

Really, in the original text- The Torah from which the bible was in the first translation the Pentateuch, and today in the there are and always have been two separate Genesis creation accounts. Each with a different chronology compiled together by ancient Hebrew scribes.

[Dimensio]

Those who most religiously defend Evolution (with a capital 'e') do so as a substitute for the belief in a deity, not in addition to such beliefs.

Please stop misrepresenting the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain the presence of biodiversity given existing observations of imperfect replication, natural selection, the fossil record and -- as discovered more recently -- observations within DNA across species. It is not and has never been an attempt to "replace" any deities, it's merely the best natural explanation for a specific event given observed evidence.

So often the theory of Evolution is held up as somehow 'proving' God does not exist, that all creatures great and small are derived by chemical or biological accident.

The theory of evolution "proves" no such thing, and anyone who claims as much is misrepresenting both evolution and science itself.

[mlc9852]

I'll go with God created man after plants and animals.

[Dimensio]

Whatever.

I guess that's one way for creationists to deal with the evidence and observations: ignore them and pretend that they don't exist.

[balrog666]

I guess that's one way for creationists to deal with the evidence and observations: ignore them and pretend that they don't exist.

Is there another way?

[Dimensio]

Evolution, and the "big bang" are totally incompatible with what God states in the Bible.

It should be noted, however, that you seem to believe that shameless lying is compatable with what God states in the Bible.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Can you please re-state?

I was following your dialogue with elbucko.

[pby]

Adam was created on the sixth day and died at 930 years old.

[elbucko]

It does, however, provide a little insight into how some people on the other side could continue to believe in their own absurdities,...

Yes, as the imperfect creatures of a perfect creation we all have some "bad sectors" on our biological hard drives. I know a few bytes are toast on mine. I don't think that it's the bad sectors that are the problem as much as it is a lack of any awareness of them.

[WKUHilltopper]

"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?

Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"

Then why all the fuss about skin cancer?

[dread78645]

I never said that it was an established fact. He was the one that said the story was a complete lie. It wasn't, in fact, the women existed and most likely visited Darwin. Both sides have no conclusive evidence either way.

Other than his daughter?

II. Charles Darwin’s Daughter, Henrietta, Refutes The Story.

A. After the story had been revived in 1922, Henrietta stated in the _Christian_ for February 23, 1922, page 12, in an article titled: "Charles Darwin’s Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied," by Mrs. R.B. Litchfield.

"I was present at his deathbed, Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. ..... The whole story has no foundation whatever."

B. More details on the spread of this story and its rebuttal may be found in the book "The Survival of Charles Darwin: a Biography of a Man and an Idea" by Ronald W. Clark, published by Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1985.

-- The Lady Hope Story

Don't you find it interesting that a similar claim (deathbed rejection of his life's work and calling for Christ) was made of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, after he died in 1802?

The one fact you and he avoided was that Darwin considered himself a "Theist" even after turning away from the literal interpretation of the Bible. That he believe that God created life and was one of the first IDers.

Indeed.

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."

"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."

"I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion."

"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

"A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws."

"I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture."

"I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance."

-- Charles Darwin, selected.

[WKUHilltopper]

"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?

Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"

Oh, sorry, I forgot to add (I'm on a conference call and distracted! hahah). The Bible is clear that Man now caps out at 120 years. So I don't think splashing that stuff will do anything for adding to one's life. But I'm not saying that the UV thing isn't a rational theory prior to the destruction of Man. I would say the physics of the earth would have changed given it didn't even rain prior to. So maybe there is something to the UV thing. I don't know and it's speculation at best.

[WKUHilltopper]

"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?

Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"

Oh, sorry, I forgot to add (I'm on a conference call and distracted! hahah). The Bible is clear that Man now caps out at 120 years. So I don't think splashing that stuff will do anything for adding to one's life. But I'm not saying that the UV thing isn't a rational theory prior to the destruction of Man. I would say the physics of the earth would have changed given it didn't even rain prior to. So maybe there is something to the UV thing. I don't know and it's speculation at best.

[Smokin' Joe]

The theory of evolution "proves" no such thing, and anyone who claims as much is misrepresenting both evolution and science itself.

I fully agree. However one need not look far to find people who expound just such beliefs. I fail to understand how, in discussing their actions, I am misrepresenting the theory. I am only talking about the expression of belief of some (certainly not all) of the theory's proponents, not the theory itself.

Posters in this forum have decried the biblical account of creation, based on their belief in the theory.

Here, we see that belief transcending the boundaries of science and entering into the realm of religion.

That does not speak as to the merits or flaws of the theory, but to the behaviour of the humans involved, and the way they (mis)present the theory in particular, and science in general.

One of the most seriously flawed misrepresentations of the theory of evolution occurs when those who teach it simplistically teach that a species "wanted" some adaptation, and gained it as if by force of desire, rather than the somewhat involved processes of those not posessing specific physical attributes being eliminated from the breeding population over time (generations), simply by being less successful in adapting to changing environmental parameters.

Such misrepresentations fuel the fires of dissent and do no good either for theorists, science, or religion, as they distort any discussion.

Just as it is possible for a Christian to dispassionately study Islam without becoming a convert, it is possible for a scientist to study any aspect of the universe without discarding their belief in God, should they have one, most of us do not view God and science as mutually exclusive.