I defy you to find the term "Mother Nature" in any of several tens of thousands of pee-reviewed articles in any scientific journal of evolutionary biology.
Talk about your straw-man argument.
Not necessarily true. Nothing (except the Bible, by some interpretations) says that God couldn't use evolution as his method of creation.
Funny. No proof or documantation about any of it. The Bible is 2000 years old, and the evolution minions are just getting started. I wonder how long it will take the Darwinites to catch up with reality?
Could be just me, but I'd consider a big 'ol hole in my lip "harm."
And his inventions of polio, syphilis, and mad cow disease. /satire
The only theological issue of importance for Christians is whether or not Jesus Christ redeemed us by dying on the cross for our sins and conquered death by rising from the grave three days later.
If He did, then all this other stuff is irrelevant.
If He didn't, then all this other stuff is irrelevant.
Any free-marketer understands this. The invisible hand of the economy is not a real invisible hand, it is merely an abstration to describe how the behavior of millions of disparate, self-interested agents can create ordered systems from their own separate actions. The market is not God, and the fact that some companies thrive and others fail, that some industries rise and others fall, is not a reflection that God has made a choice. The "invisible hand" of natural selection is no different. God chooses species no more than he chooses buggy whips and widgets.
If there were evolution, my dog would evolve to do some useful purpose, such as taking the trash out to the curb. The cats would figure out how to use the can opener by now AND humans would evolve so that we could scratch our own backs.
The important thing to remember is that we have a common enemy, today, which seeks to force acceptance of an undifferentiated humanity; where all peoples will be equalized and homogenized in a Socialistic World Order, that denies even the existence of God. We have times for these intellectual debates, because the wise men who charted our course, a little over two centuries ago, did so fine a job. And those men would not have seen this debate as a question of whom is virtuous. They would have seen it rather as a skirmish in an ongoing pursuit of truth--in which the injection of acrimony has no place whatsoever.
As J.C. Nott, a pioneer American Anthropoligist wrote well over a century and a half ago, "Man can invent nothing in science or religion but falsehood; and all the truths which he discovers are but facts or laws which have emanated from the Creator." It is the pursuit of that truth that enobles--not the angry insistence of a particular explanation for a very complex pattern of data.
Men of good will and honest Faith can be on any of at least a thousand different sides of these questions--and at that I probably understate the virtual infinite variety of possible explanations for the same data. Have fun with the debate, but do not forget the more immediate worldly problems that face even your right to have that debate.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Of all the arrogant, conceited, self-important #*@()@(*#@#()@s, to tell me that my theism has "nothing to do with the real world," if my theism doesn't agree in the "how" with his theism.
Later on Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and such completely surplanted that explanation with our current model of celestial mechanics.
Just because we dont understand something, be it spots on a fish or Good versus Evil, doesn't mean that we have to invent a distinct, separate, pre-existing, intelligent sentient being who thought it all up and brought it into being -- the cycle us engineers know as design and develop.
So who designed and created God?
My take is that what we call God is essentially the anthromorphization of some principles of organization of the universe that we don't understand yet, and may never understand.
And just because something is based on elementary principles doesn't mean it has to remain trivial. I see that in computers, in a simplified way. I've worked or studied from the level of electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, up through solder and transistors, integrated circuits, operating systems, system libraries, and applications. Something I think that is often overlooked in these discussions is the way that systems layer complexity, with each layer forming on the previous, taking the previous layer as the atoms, and forming new structures which become the atoms of another layer organized along entirely new principles.
Each layer isn't (usually) rocket science. But the end result is far far from the lowest level atom. You won't get anywhere understanding Diablo II Expansion Pack by thinking of it as a bunch of 1's and 0's. And even the 1's and 0's are an intermediate layer, formed on transistor gates and magnetic blips, which in turn require a couple layers of physics to understand.
This view seems to qualify for the usual definition of "atheism", in that it denies the existing of a distinct sentient Being and Creator, or God. But it's closer to Deism, if you bend its notion of a "supernatural" deity to mean "outside nature as we understand it". And it reaches conclusions for morality and the proper role of government much closer to what Christians, not Atheists, usually reach.
Weren't one or two of our founding fathers Deists? Ah yes. A little searching on Google yields: THE DEIST ROOTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA by Robert L. Johnson .
I think I will read that. Thank-you very much for posting this -- it led me to what might be a good find.
This might be the way you guys want it to be, but its not how many people see it. I'm a Catholic, the Pope tells us that its ok to accept evolution, as long as the soul is left to God i.e. the soul did not arise out of an evolutionary process, but is instilled by God. The way I see it, God started the whole thing off, perhaps even actively created the cell, like Behe says, then let evolution take its course. I see no conflict, but you guys want to force it into it an either/or choice because of your interpretation of religion. Believe what you want, the "real world" will keep moving regardless.