Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution. Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how.
1. Evolution fits well with good theology. Christians believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God. What difference does it make when God created the universe--10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of how many zeroes in the date. And what difference does it make how God created life--spoken word or natural forces? The grandeur of life's complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.
2. Creationism is bad theology. The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more advanced than we are. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such humanlike constraints. As Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote, "The Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art." Calling God a watchmaker is belittling.
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature. As a social primate, we evolved within-group amity and between-group enmity. By nature, then, we are cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes and a society based on the rule of law are necessary to accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative sides of our evolved nature.
4. Evolution explains family values. The following characteristics are the foundation of families and societies and are shared by humans and other social mammals: attachment and bonding, cooperation and reciprocity, sympathy and empathy, conflict resolution, community concern and reputation anxiety, and response to group social norms. As a social primate species, we evolved morality to enhance the survival of both family and community. Subsequently, religions designed moral codes based on our evolved moral natures.
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts. Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin.
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics. Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.
Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced. The senseless conflict between science and religion must end now, or else, as the Book of Proverbs (11:29) warned: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."
singling no particular freeper out, I will observe that creationists do not seem particularly interested in pursuing data to be found in canned links posted by Patrick Henry.
it's a shame, but it seems to be a consistent fact of the ongoing Luddite War.
Apparently so. The first link isn't working today, but no creationist has mentioned it. (The rest of you have already seen that material, so you don't need to revisit those links.)
But I'm not being judgmental. Everything is true. It's wonderful!
There's never been a time when there wasn't a lot of land above water somewhere on the world. We can tell that for sure. There's no other way to interpret things like non-pillow lava, glacial scarring, well-preserved dry-land environments with delicate features such as animal tracks, and so forth. These things happened on land, whether or not they were ever underwater later. Furthermore, many of them--the tracks, raindrop imprints, insect or worm burrows, etc.--record tranquil features of surface life that would have been obliterated during burial in some ultra-violent catastrophe.
There is no place and no time that looks like water, water everywhere. It's not that the picture is totally unchanging. The continents have drifted, collided, separated, collided again, etc. However, there's always been plenty of land sticking up above water.
Thus, we can't find a great global flood anywhere, nor can creationists agree on where it supposedly is. Most of them say that practically the whole geologic column is the great flood, which is sillier than claiming it's in some small stratum somewhere. (If you're saying the flood sediments are the WHOLE thing or even most of it, you have to explain ALL the dry-land features anywhere up and down the column all over the world as somehow having been buried in one and the same flood. However, that's the typical creationist approach.)
well, I never did more than browse the article on the complete geological column, until now. quite a good article.
Oh yeah? Well, listen, Mr. I've been saying 2 + 2 = 5 for some time now. It's lucky for you that we're in the religion forum, where your ideas are entirely worthy of respect. But if I ever get you in another forum, just watch out!
I have faith in my link.
You're in the right forum.
you want cognitive dissonance? Amish clothing being sold over the internet is cognitive dissonance.
refusing to examine empirical evidence, and/or refusing to accept what literal mountains of such evidence indicate... that's something besides cognitive dissonance.
ah. thank you for clarifying.
yes, that is a puzzlement.
Indeed...when someone has to use all caps, sorry, but I just skim right over it...I refuse to listen to anyone who shouts at me in real life, and I refuse to read anything that is written in so many caps..
The 'low key' response is always much easier to read, and is of course, just much more pleasant...
You can't prove that miracles never happened, because miracles, by definition, don't follow physical laws.
However, such events as the Flood are physically impossible, and if they happened they left no trace in the soils of the past 10,000 years, and the current genetic diversity was poofed into existence following the flood.
in a civil forum, a rapier is as effective as a meat-cleaver, not so?
I also do not undertand this as well...to me, the very essence of having 'faith', is that it requires absolutely no evidence of any sort...if one needs evidence, then to me, it simply is not faith...
Ah, indeed...and more elegant as well...
I also do not undertand this as well...to me, the very essence of having 'faith', is that it requires absolutely no evidence of any sort...if one needs evidence, then to me, it simply is not faith...
You said it better than I did. I don't understand why the 'faithful' require evidence and are so upset at and need to attack anything which might be contrary evidence. They apprently require evidence of their faith, meaning, by definition, they have no faith.
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