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To: steelyourfaith
"Are Darwinism and Creationism mutually exclusive? Why couldn't Darwinism be God's mechanism? "

No and yes. Unless you want to put God in a box and deny Him the power that you are too scared to understand...

484 posted on 09/28/2006 10:27:18 AM PDT by Al Simmons (Holocaust deniers and other anti-semites are the lowest form of human scum.)
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To: Al Simmons
No and yes. Unless you want to put God in a box and deny Him the power that you are too scared to understand...

Well jeepers, Al, how 'bout a little credit for trying to be brave? Most biologists probably are believers of some sort, and think in terms of an overall divine plan, through some sort of guided evolution, but that's not the issue here. Believing that there is a divine plan doesn't necessarily interfere with one's study of the particular processes of evolution, any more than it necessarily interferes with one's study of history.

Creationists, perhaps, don't have a problem with micro-evolution, it's speciation that they can't accept, mainly because of its implications for the emergence of the human species. To preserve the special position of humankind within the order of nature, they have to insist that every species is the product of a special act of creation. Otherwise, one would not be preserving the uniformity of natural laws.

Clearly, there are still plenty of people who hang on to the notion of six days of creation, but they are not where the debate is. The Creationists who are actively opposed to Darwinism now talk of Intelligent Design, regardless of the time-scale involved. They insist that there are no transitional forms and that the complex systems of particular species are irreducible, so that they could have no function in a half-complete state.

The problem is that even high school biology teachers don't generally know much about evolutionary mechanisms, so the slide from a notion of guided evolution into pure Intelligent Design is an easy transition.

The Creationists are not all fools, by any means, but even their best arguments are shoddy special pleading, for the most part.

Most biologists, paleontologists and physical anthropologists in the US, whether they are believers or not, have no particular problem with the religion-evolution relationship.

There are a few biologists, mostly in the UK it seems to me, who insist that evolution abolishes God. That seems to me to be as thickheaded a position as that of the most dyed-in-the-wool Creationists.

Unfortunately, the hardline "Science Disproves God" crowd do far more to strengthen support for Creationism than any argument made by the Creationists.

698 posted on 09/29/2006 3:44:51 AM PDT by steelyourfaith
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