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."
No. The debate is with regard how long creation has taken.... The duration of creation, if you will.
Which specific absolutely unambiguous statements of science are you referring to?
The science I know of is CONSTANTLY changing its story in all areas of observation as our tools become more accurate and effective.
Blindsided!
How do you interpret Genesis 1:27? If God made man in his image, is he an ape or do we go back to pond scum?
At the point that man became conscious of good and evil, or, if you will, at the point that man became "as one of us."
That is a misunderstanding of the refining process of science. Details change at the edge of our knowledge, but well-established central theories (the example under discussion being evolution) are supported by untold millions of data points, 150 years of observations and attempted falsifications. Relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, yet for 99.99% of practical purposes Newtonian Mechanics remains true; how could it be otherwise? Newton's work survived hundreds of years of practical application and observations without anyone noticing that it was incomplete.
Take modern genome sequencing. Practically every way that the genome data *could* have come out would have falsified common-descent. Case closed. Done and dusted. Evolution would have been dead and buried, indeed creationists predicted before the molecular data came in that it would falsify common descent. Yet what actually happened was that the genome data for every species that we sequence confirms the very precise predictions of common-descent, in spades. That is why even prominent IDers like Behe and Denton endorse common descent of life on earth; they know that the data in that area is unambiguous.
I think point three is weak at best.
But the biblical literalists, as they define themselves, will tell you that the Bible and evolution are wholly incompatible.
I'm not one who thinks the Bible contradicts evolution. But what I interpret as allegory representing an underlying fundamental truth is interpreted by them as something else entirely.
But it's undeniable that there are those in each camp who see a huge and irreconciliable difference between Special Creation and evolution.
That is a good argument, but unfortunately it doesn't take into account the very crux of the Fall, which is man's choice to disobey God. If man simply became "aware" of good and evil, and did not choose it, then there is no argument for the Fall, which is central to Christian theology.
scottdeus12: Um...this is quite a leap, don't you think? Shaped from dust vs. shaped from something living are two different things.....
An analogy is a comparison of two different things.
I wonder if your studies have encompassed visiting any university libraries. Visit one, and you will find literally tens of thousands of volumes and articles of data, experiments etc concerning evolution across numerous scientific disciplines.
Below in this post is the scientific evidence that supports separate creation of kinds:
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[Sagebrush rolling]
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Perhaps debate is stifled, in the same way that debate about the proposition that the earth is a hollow sphere that we are living on the inside of is stifled. If you want to overturn the central paradigm of biology then you need to bring substantial physical evidence to the table. The "creation of separate kinds" proposition is lacking this. I don't buy conspiracy theories in which the conspirators gain nothing, and have to co-operate in their tens of thousands for over 150 years.
that link didn't work for me.
Bailing out for the night placemarker
It's interesting though that at the points of man's "fall," God expresses concern that may will become as God. Can something that made us more God-like actually be a fall?
well, it *is* an accurate model, based on a large number of data points, and has successfully predicted the discovery of yet more data points.
Why Christians and conservatives should NOT accept evolution.
If they accept macroevolution they believe God is a liar.
Care to explain that?
If evolution is false, God sure left a whole lot of phony evidence on the Earth for us to find.
The only ones saying that "God is a liar" are those who suggest that the fossil record was faked by God to make the Earth appear to be billions of years older than it actually is....
It is, after all, only with the cessation of naivete (the "fall" as you put it) that man became capable of knowing, or distinguishing, good from evil and God from serpent. "Choice" is indeed a lesson of Genesis 3. But the effectively preordained "choice" of an ignorant and all too easily deceived man to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not the heart of that lesson.
Ho boy, this is straying pretty far into theological debate. :-) I want to answer that but I don't have the time to construct a complete answer. Do you mind if we take this off forum?
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