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."
Consider the humble gerbil. Although not incredibly smart, it is curious, courageous, and gentle, rarely biting when handled. When a litter is born the father gerbils care for the babies as well, grooming them and collecting them when they wander. Unlike mice, gerbils rarely cannibalize their offspring. Their only failing is a tendency to brawl like drunken sailors on occasion. Would that all of us had half the moral character of the gerbil.
I currently mourn for the passing of one of my gerbils, stolen and critically wounded by my cat this weekend, but never uttering a squeak. Such was my respect for the gerbil that I took it to the vet for emergency euthansia. RIP, little gerbil.
WRONG... "Survival of the fittest" implys things.. many things..
Life comes from life is merely one of them..
About the "schools"... any conservative cares what is taught in "schools".. Are you a liberal?... Do you care what is taught in "schools"?.. Example; most High School Seniors in Mexifornia cannot find Mexico and Canada on a Map... But they do know they are primates that evolved from monkeys and the monkeys evolved from some other mammal.. THEY know this even though its not a proven fact.. Must be why they act like monkeys performing RAP music.. Which is a good imitation of a Chimp... with Chimp like behavior patterns..
Survival of the fittest has implications..
I am a Christian. Some might even call me a "Bible Thumper" whatever that is.
I do not believe the earth is only thousands of years old. There exists hard, proven archeological evidence against that being possible.
But I will say that a year to us is nothing to God.
Well if it's a LAW, it can't be broken, can it? And if it's in latin, it must be true.
Alas, it's just and observation that maggots don't form from dead meat.
LOL.
Darwin never used either phrase.
The theory of evolution is a continuum, the tree of life, common descent, life from life, omne vivum ex vivo. It doesn't allow for life to pop-up other than on the tree.
Caution; Staining at a gnat you might swallow a camel..
Or at least make your orginal question seem trivial or a diversion..
That would Latin, capital L.
Sure it does, it's just doubtful that it has on earth, and highly unlikely that it will on earth now that organisms inhabit pretty much everywhere and are ready to gobble up any organic molecules as soon as they are formed.
Sure it does. We just have lots of evidence that it hasn't happened in the last few hundred million years. We also have reason to believe that any chemistry that might move toward life would be consumed as food by existing things.
I am just amazed at the lengths you will go to avoid admitting that the quotation was fabricated out of thin air. I don't have time right now to detail how silly this quote sounds when attributed to Darwin, but here's a down payment:
The modern science of abiogenesis addresses a fundamentally different question: the ultimate origin of life itself. Pasteur had proved that abiogenesis was impossible for complex organisms. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution put forward a mechanism whereby such organisms might evolve over millennia from simple forms, but it did not address the original spark, from which even simple organisms might have arisen. Darwin was aware of the problem. In a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker of February 1 1871, he made the suggestion that life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, [so] that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes". He went on to explain that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." In other words the presence of life itself prevents the spontaneous generation of simple organic compounds from occurring on Earth today - a circumstance which makes the search for the first life dependent on the laboratory.Source
Oooooooh. Great minds and so forth.
Trying not to make it personal.
I quite impersonally admire your intellect as well, oh brother in pondscum!
Making a poster bow down is tiresome and distracting. But you are welcome to retract your claim that Pasteur said "absolutely nothing about biogenesis." You could be the model poster.
In other words, there is no circumstance in which you would admit that an error has occurred, or having occurred, you would not seek to excuse the offender.
Both of these quotions appear frequently on these threads. They seldom originate from evolution advocates. The fact that they are persistently misapplied is not a happy fact.
Thank you, and welcome to FR.
Since structural organic chemistry was practically nonexistant at that time, Pasteur can hardly be cited as an authority as to what chemical reactions are and are not possible. All Pasteur demonstrated was that organisms identical to already existing organisms cannot spring into existence fully formed in a matter of months. This demonstration has no resemblance to the origin of life on earth.
Fine. Pasteur addressed the biogenesis theory of his time. But not biogenesis as it has been understood for the last hundred years. Not even as it was understood by Darwin -- which is the frame of reference for the current discussion.
Darwin's warm little pond seems rather quaint today, but his discussion of biogenesis lead to Miller, and Miller has lead to more sophisticated experiments.
Feel free to thump to your heart's content. None of the evolution advocates around here will quarrel with you for that. You are wise to accept the findings of science, and not to let it interfere with your faith.
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