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."
I agree, but I also think this means we will never know the exact route that led to life on earth. I suspect this is what Yockey means.
Jeepers, RM! Give the guy time!
He's got psychic parrots (Rupert Sheldrake), the Electric Universe, Velikovsky, Native American dinosaur paintings, Halton Arp, Robert Bass, and the LENT-1 element transmuter to go yet. Gotta be discreet when you're a sneakback, ya know!
OK, I agree with that. My guess is that there will be a spectrum of possible routes to the initial proto-life, and once it's established you can no longer see the earlier steps (beasically because they've been eaten).
Reading the review of Yockey's book I encountered a concept that I hadn't heard before. Living things only decode the genome; they never encode anything.
Now that sounds rather bizarre and potentential mystical when you first encounter it. It look like a ripe plum for the ID crowd. Or possibly a confirmation of the algorithm at inception crowd.
But when you stop to think about it, that's what selection does. The genetic code varies for a number of reason with every instance of reproduction. Mutations, sexual blending, and so forth. Fatal mutations never get to conception, and selection weeds out the less competetive variants.
Over time variation and selection do the encoding.
Now we have a lot of folks on these thread who argue that this process can't add information, but Yockey, the evolution critic approved expert on information theory, says yes it can. And he further says that recent research puts this beyond doubt.
The suck-up theory of gravity.
One book I have read that's quite interesting (although not well-written, unfortunately), is Kauffman's The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Using graph theory arguments and data from the immune system, among other things, he concludes that something like 100,000 catalysts can cover all possible reactions. When the prebiotic "soup" or "pizza" reaches a critical complexity, it is inevitable that autocatalytic loops will form and start "evolving". His insight is that life "condenses out" of a much more complex mix. (Roughly speaking; I have to re-read it).
You deserve an award for one of the most interesting and engaging posts ever, a captivating and interesting read.
That's ok with me, as long as the questions are being asked progress will be made.
Thank you for your insightful post!
Thanks to you both for sharing your insights with me! Mary chose the better thing, the one thing needed, and it will not be taken from her; so speaks Jesus! (Luke 10:42)
Thank you so very much for your kind words, FreedomProtector!
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