“People of faith are shooting at the wrong target. They should not be shooting at evolution itself,” he said...Instead of attacking evolutionary theory, the argument should be against the anti-theistic interpretation of evolution, he said.
I'll check back later for the fireworks. :-)
My personal belief is that God established the framework for evolution to flourish and prosper. How else were all things supposed to move forward?
I firmly believe in God and that God created the methods for science to explain the way things happen so our puny little minds could comprehend some of it. If He hadn't done that, He wouldn't have been a very smart God.
As such, it is a belief system, even a religion. Natural selection is one thing. A Closed Nature is a leap of faith.
There is no reason to think that God would have any use for junk science like evolution. It's bad science and bad theology in the bargain.
Magnanimous of him.
he's wrong.
I don't see how Christianity and Evolution can co-exist in anyone's mind. Evolution requires millions of years of death,pain, and disease. Christianity requires a creation that was "good" in the beginning. Death,decay, and disease did not happen until the first man and woman were cursed.
The Bible says we have the promise that the creation will be “restored” to its original “very good” state, and that there will be no more curse.
How does a theistic evolutionist reconcile the difference?
Wishful thinking aside....Philosophically, theologically, and scientifically, they are not compatible. Like it or not.
Evolution...buh-wah ha ha ha. What I love about that term is nobody understands what it means.
All life that exists today is all that is left over from billions of years, billions of life forms that are now extinct. What you see today is the left-overs who have managed to survive because they were lucky enough to have that special something. That is evolution. We are all left overs, we are the ones stuck in the mud, everything else has moved on.
Of course evolution and religion can co-exist.
However, dogma and ignorance tend to not co exist with common sence and logic.
How many times in these threads have I heard people say things like, "you can't be a Christian if you believe in evolution?" In this very thread we are told that evolutionary theory devalues the Lord, and that evolutionary theory makes Christianity a lie, that evolutionary theory attacks the sacrifice Yeshua of Nazareth made on the cross.
Is it possible there is another theological position? Of course. Here are some examples:
This one is taken from the article above: “By understanding the mechanics of this world, what one is really doing is praising and glorifying God,” Miller said. Kenneth Miller is not alone. This is indeed the theological position of many within science, including the biological sciences. In fact, this sentiment is much more common than is portrayed on these threads.
For another example, the director of the Human Genome Project at the NIH, a man by the name of Francis Collins, has said "I find my appreciation of science is greatly enriched by religion. When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, 'Wow, only God knew before.' It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me."
Here is another one: G-d the Creator and Lord of the Universe, which is the work of his goodness and wisdom; and Man, made in His image, who is to hallow his week-day labors by the blessedness of Sabbath-rest -- such are the teachings of the Creation chapter. It's purpose is to reveal these teachings to the children of man -- and not to serve as a text book of astronomy, geology, or anthropology. Its object is not to teach scientific facts; but to proclaim highest religious truths respecting G-d, Man, and the Universe. The "conflict" between the fundamental realities of Religion and the established facts of Science, is seen to be unreal as the soon as Religion and Science each recognizes the true border of its domain. This was written by the famous British Rabbi J. H. Hertz (1872-1946).
Anecdotally, most of the people that I have personally known from working in biology and geosciences fields are not atheists. Contrary to popular notions on these threads, many of them are church (or synagogue) going people, and most of them have some measure of religious faith. None of them believes that evolutionary theory, or other scientific theories such as plate tectonic theory, is necessarily in conflict with their religion.
Why all the fighting? What we are seeing in these threads, then, is not a conflict between science and religion. For most people, including most religious people, science and faith are not opposed to one another. What we are experiencing is a sectarian conflict. This conflict exists between those with a certain highly literal interpretation of the Genesis chapter and people who hold more mainstream viewpoints. The theological position of mainstream Judaism and Christianity (including conservative denominations such as the Southern Baptists) is that the Lord exists beyond scientific scrutiny. The creationism/intelligent design movement, on the other hand, seeks to validate the existence of the Creator by discovering forensic evidence that supports their theology. When the physical evidence does not square with their theological positions, it is the evidence and scientific method that become suspect. The result is the hostility demonstrated on these threads towards modern biology and science in general.
What we are seeing on these threads is a sectarian conflict. It is not "atheist science" versus Christianity at all. In actuality, this conflict is about the creationist/intelligent design movement seeking to elevate their theological position above the theological positions of others.
I read Professor Miller's book cover to cover and was much impressed with its clarity and content. The atheists have indeed hijacked evolution and turned it into an anti-theist theory.
In his book, Finding Darwin's God, Professor Kenneth Miller leaves no doubt that evolution is good science as an explanation of the origin of species. In fact, it is practically incontrovertible. The fossil record and extensive biology research has revealed that over time, evolution has added parts that expand, improve, and sometimes completely refashion living systems. Creationists and the Intelligent Design movement discount evolution because they fear that it will somehow render Christianity wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. The following prose quotes numerous provocative passages from the book that describe both the science and reasoning use by Professor Miller in his search for Darwin's God, a God that is fundamentally consistent with the God of both the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The information presented below has been extracted, cut and paste directly from Professor Miller's book:
Evolution of a Theory
At its heart, evolution is a minimal concept with two points. First, the roots of the present are found in the past; and second, natural processes, observable today, fully explain the biological connections between present and past. The explanatory power of evolution derives from its simplicity. Natural selection favors and preserves those variation that work best and a new variation is constantly generated by mutations, gene rearrangements, and even by exchanges of genetic information between organisms. The result is more complex life forms over hundreds of millions of years.
The increase of data supporting evolution and other scientific disciplines led to the rise of scientific materialism which was an assumption that actions taking place at each level of nature could be explained through the effects of actions at lower levels. Heat was molecular movement. Sound was molecular vibration. Light was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Materialism asserts that everything fit together perfectly and each level of nature was part of a machine with predictable and understandable actions operating according to well defined rules. These rules seemed to imply blind, pitiless indifference Could there be anything left for God to do?
The quantum revolution quickly destroyed this Newtonian certainty. Quantum theory makes it possible to construct, according to principles of physical law, a genuine machine whose actions are indeterminate. Experiments on matter and energy demonstrate that an outcome is always unpredictable, in principle. However, although we cannot predict the outcomes of individual events with certainty, the overall outcomes of thousands of such events fall into a very predictable statistical pattern. These probabilities give order to the physical and chemical world and is the reason why quantum indeterminacy does not produce universal chaos. This inherent unpredictability is not a matter of inadequate scientific knowledge, rather it is a reflection that the behavior of matter itself as indeterminate and therefore unpredictable.
The discovery of the unpredictability of nature means that the clockwork assumption of extreme materialism and future predictability is wrong. Thus, we can conclude that God's universe is not locked into a determinate future and neither are we. Quantum physics tells us that absolute knowledge, complete understanding, and a total grasp of universal reality will never be ours. Thus, we can conclude that life is not merely chemical matter that blindly follow the determined instructions of the machines within us.
Furthermore, if we could reconstruct exactly what the ancient world was like, we still could not predict which would have been the winners and losers in the evolutionary sweepstakes. The ancient lottery was to some extent a matter of chance. The natural history of evolution is unrepeatable because the nature of matter made it unpredictable in the first place.
Impact of Indeterminacy on Evolutionary Theory
Remarkably, this very indeterminacy has to be by any definition a key feature of the mind of God. There is only one alternative to unpredictability, and that is strict predictable determinism. We have progressed so much in self awareness and understanding that we now know there is a boundary around our ability to grasp reality. We cannot say definitively why it is there, but this boundary is consistent with the handiwork of a Creator who fashioned it to allow us the freedom necessary to make our acceptance or rejection of his love a genuinely free choice. Breaks in causality at the atomic level make it fundamentally impossible to exclude the idea that what we have really caught a glimpse of what might indeed reflect the mind of God.
Furthermore, natural laws and chance may equally be instruments of God's intentions. There can be purpose without an exact predetermined plan. If we can see the hand of God in the unpredictable events of history, and if we can see meaning and purpose in the challenges and trials of our daily lives, then we can certainly see God's will emerging in the grand and improbable tree of life. Given evolution's ability to adapt, to innovate, to test, and to experiment, sooner or later it would have given the Creator exactly what he was looking for; a creature who could know and love him and who would eventually discover the extraordinary process of evolution that filled his earth with so much life.
The indeterminate nature of quantum events would allow a clever and subtle God to influence events in ways that are profound but scientifically undetectable to us. Those events could include the appearance of mutations, the activation of individual neurons in the brain, and even the survival of individual cells and organisms. Chaos theory emphasizes the fact that enormous changes in physical systems can be brought about by unimaginably small changes in initial conditions and this too could serve as an undetectable amplifier of divine action.
God, who always has been and always will be, can transcend time and therefore is the master of it. Mankind traverses time in a linear fashion. An eternal being who is present everywhere could easily act to alter the space-time continuum in ways that profoundly affect events. As mankind is locked into a single point in time and moving forward, we wouldn't have a clue. God would then exercise exactly the degree of control he chooses.
A religious person could therefore surmise that when creatures evolved who were ready to know God, being worthy of souls, his work would have reached a pinnacle of power and subtlety. At that point, God decided to reveal Himself to us. This would serve to complete the physical and spiritual reality of human nature. Thus, the evolutionary forces then become just one more tool of the Almighty. That evolution helped to create our capacities for both faith and science is undeniable. To maintain that either is thereby invalidated fails the test of logic
The contingency and improbability of our origins and the particular history that led to us, helps us to understand how truly remarkable we are and how rare is the gift on consciousness. Furthermore, if another group of animals had evolved to self awareness and shown itself worthy of a soul, God would not have been less pleased.
Evolution and Free Will
God fashioned a material universe in which the conditions of precise determinism do not apply and used evolution as the tool to set us free and to devise a universe that would make knowledge, love and service meaningful. By choosing evolution as His way to fashion the living world, he emphasized our material nature and our unity with other forms of life. He made the world today contingent upon the events of the past. He made our choices matter, our actions genuine, our lives important.
The care that God takes not to intervene pointlessly in the world is an essential part of His plan for us. If everything that happens on earth is God's will, then God is responsible for evil and suffering and God's goodness is compromised. However God can and does act in the world and is wise enough to act in ways that preserve our own freedom, allowing us to reap the rewards and consequences of our own free will. The ability to do good means nothing without the freedom to do evil.
Evolution and the Origins of the Earth
One of the most significant findings of cosmological science is that the universe did have a spectacular beginning several billion years ago. Hubble discovered that the most distant galaxies were moving the fastest, almost as though everything in the universe had been blown apart from a great initial explosion at a single point in space and time, an explosion know popularly as the Big Bang. Although this does not prove that the ultimate beginning must be attributed to the divine, neither does it provide a scientific basis for ruling God out.
Why would God waited 2 billion years for us to appear? Whatever God's characteristics, impatience is not one of them. A genuine believer will trust in God's wisdom and see history as the unfolding of his plan. There is no religious justification for demanding that the creator hold to a certain schedule of defined pathway. To God, a thousand years are as a twinkling and there is no reason to believe that our appearance was for Him anything other than right on time.
The Anthropic Principle
The possibility of life as we know it evolving in the Universe depends on the values of a few basic physical constants and in some respects is remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Recognition of this has led to the formulation of what is known as the anthropic principle, which states that the physical constants of the universe in which we live have to be favorable to human life because if they were not, nobody would be around to observe them. The fact that we are here means that the physical constants of the universe were set up in a way that made our existence possible.
The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous, implying religious implications. One could reasonably conclude that God created the universe so that we would be possible and also, that God is the source of natural laws and the reason for there being a universe in the first place.
A Common Thread
Darwin has lifted the curtain that allowed us to see the world as it really is and thus, he ultimately brought us closer to an understanding of God. We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, and from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology, we know that our tissues are a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge, we can see why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution. Our freedom as his creature requires a little space, some integrity, a consistency and self-sufficiency to the material world.
Miracles
What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition the miraculous is beyond explanation and do not have to make scientific sense. Miracles are specific acts of God, designed in most cases to get a message across and their rarity is what makes them remarkable. A miracle is more than a violation of the laws of nature but reflect a greater spiritual reality.
Symbiosis of Science and Religion
Science explores the empirical constitution of the universe; whereas religion provides the search for proper ethical values and spiritual meaning of our lives. Attaining wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains. A Christian has faith that God expects him to use his talents and abilities in God's name. He sees adversity as a challenge from God and sees apparent misfortune as an opportunity to do good in the service of both God and man
True knowledge comes from a combination of faith and reason. We can find God in the bright light of human knowledge, both spiritual and scientific. God fashioned a material world in which truly free, independent beings could evolve. He got it right the first time. God created not a creaky little machine requiring constant and visible attention but an independent would which was produced and is run by material forces.
By any reasonable analysis, evolution does nothing to distance or weaken the power of God. We live in a world of natural law and all that evolution does is to extend the workings of these natural laws to the novelty of life and to its changes over time. A God who presides over an evolutionary process is not an impotent, passive observer. God fashions a fruitful world in which the process of continuing creation is woven into the fabric of matter itself. He retains the freedom to act, to reveal Himself to His creatures, to inspire and to teach. He is the master of chance and time, whose actions, both powerful and subtle, respect the independence of his creation and give human beings the genuine freedom to accept or to reject His love.
Conclusion (Both in my own words and those of Darwin and Professor Miller)
Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species,
"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into on; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved."
"These elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us."
Using science from multiple disciplines, Professor Miller reasons that evolution allows for a personal and active God. Whereas God's physical intervention in our lives is not direct, his care and love are constants. To a believer, the strengths he gives are hope, faith and inspiration. As Christians, we should rejoice in the science of evolution and not fear but instead embrace Darwin's God.
And has for 150 years.
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller used this quote from his book “Finding Darwin’s God” as a central point in his speech about simultaneously believing in evolution and religion.
In the final analysis,
b'shem Yah'shua
you either believe in the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Israel
or you believe the lies of the Evil One.
Acts 17:26-2726. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
27. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.Romans 5:12-21
12. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
13. for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.
14. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
15. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
16. Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
17. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
19. For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20. The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21. so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Acts 17:24-26
24. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Was LUKE wrong about this? |
In the final analysis, God's nature changes when we change the description of God's acts.