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."
PING...amateurs at work.
eh?
then how did it get here?
PH certainly did NOT post it in the religion forum, and it got hijacked into the religion forum somewhere around post #50, as evidenced here:
To: Thatcherite
We got moved to the religion forum. I don't know the rules that the mods apply here, so I'm out.
59 posted on 09/18/2006 5:16:42 PM EDT by PatrickHenry
If PH didn't put this in the religion forum, and *you* didn't put it in the religion forum, who, pray tell, did?
well, by your own strongly worded demand ("Keep this kind of nonsense in the category of 'agenda driven science fiction'"), evidently you *do* have a problem with *whoever* made the decision to relocate this thread into the religion category.
so do I.
but that is neither here nor there.
My schedule precludes my continuing this discussion at the present time. God's best to all.
rofl.
eagles' wings and apron-strings, I see.
very well.
No Coyoteman, I am not asking you to back up your claim. I not only believe your claim is valid but I have seen enough to validate it myself.
I also believe that those wishing me to back up my claim have studied the subject enough to know that my claim is equally valid.
now testing whether the metronome swings in both directions, or one alone.
They were never associated, except in the writings of some anti-science hucksters.
The content of most posts indicates the underlying mind as disengaged.
props for equitable treatment.
The thread did not originate in the Religion Forum. Who does have the motive, means, and opportunity to move it there?
empiricism must not be applied to the observable and recorded behavior of participants, it seems.
*shrugs*
different forum, *different* rules.
Metronomes keep a constant time; they don't swing. Jazz swings.
blues grooves.
baroque rocks.
*sigh*
this thread may have originated in healthier climes, but belongs here now. I'll see you where the sands may be reddened.
Dr. Wiens has a PhD in Physics, with a minor in Geology. His PhD thesis was on isotope ratios in meteorites, including surface exposure dating. He was employed at Caltech's Division of Geological & Planetary Sciences at the time of writing the first edition. He is presently employed in the Space & Atmospheric Sciences Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It would not be inconsistent with the scientific evidence to conclude that God made everything relatively recently, but with the appearance of great age, just as Genesis 1 and 2 tell of God making Adam as a fully grown human (which implies the appearance of age). This idea was captured by Phillip Henry Gosse in the book, "Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot", written just two years before Darwin's "Origin of Species". The idea of a false appearance of great age is a philosophical and theological matter that we won't go into here. The main drawback--and it is a strong one--is that this makes God appear to be a deceiver. However, some people have no problem with this. Certainly whole civilizations have been incorrect (deceived?) in their scientific and theological ideas in the past. Whatever the philosophical conclusions, it is important to note that an apparent old Earth is consistent with the great amount of scientific evidence.
As Christians it is of great importance that we understand God's word correctly. Yet from the middle ages up until the 1700s people insisted that the Bible taught that the Earth, not the Sun, was the center of the solar system. It wasn't that people just thought it had to be that way; they actually quoted scriptures: "The Earth is firmly fixed; it shall not be moved" (Psalm 104:5), or "the sun stood still" (Joshua 10:13; why should it say the sun stood still if it is the Earth's rotation that causes day and night?), and many other passages. I am afraid the debate over the age of the Earth has many similarities. But I am optimistic. Today there are many Christians who accept the reliability of geologic dating, but do not compromise the spiritual and historical inerrancy of God's word. While a full discussion of Genesis 1 is not given here, references are given below to a few books that deal with that issue.
As scientists, we deal daily with what God has revealed about Himself through the created universe. The psalmist marveled at how God, Creator of the universe, could care about humans: "When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man that You care for him?" (Psalm 8:3-4). Near the beginning of the twenty-first century we can marvel all the more, knowing how vast the universe is, how ancient are the rocks and hills, and how carefully our environment has been designed. Truly God is more awesome than we can imagine!
My responses have been to show how Evolution is just what it is: too lacking in testability, testing, and test results, to be called scientific theory. Also, to point out how human beings (and animals) have abilities that are simply not addressable by the vain materialist philosophy at the heart of Darwinism.
Go ahead with your pseudo-science, if you must. That is not my turf.
No Coyoteman, I am not asking you to back up your claim. I not only believe your claim is valid but I have seen enough to validate it myself.
I also believe that those wishing me to back up my claim have studied the subject enough to know that my claim is equally valid.
Your claim, back in post #232, in bold, was as follows (in response to my post, in italics):
You should be very careful of the "science" you find on creationist websites. They do not do real science; they have all the answers figured out and they are bending facts every which way to make things come out the way they want. That is not science!"Evolutionists" (actually paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and a host of other 'ologists) are expected to back up their claims. They do not start with a goal, and bend and twist data to reach that goal. If they did, creationists would not be constantly accusing them of changing their theories, and other scientists would hound them out of the professions. And that is the way it should be; when new data is uncovered, any parts of a theory that are incorrect will be modified or discarded; anyone who fudges data is driven out of science, and there is no second chance. That's the way science works.LOL, the same can be said of many evolutionists past and present.
The creationist websites, on the other hand, routinely state that they are committed to "proving" scripture, and that anything that does not agree with scripture will be ignored.
An example of this is found in the article Baraminology—Classification of Created Organisms, by Wayne Frair, Ph.D, published in Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol 37. No 2 pp. 82-91 (September 2000) and reprinted at CreationResearch.org. This states in part:
GuidelinesIn accomplishing the goal of separating parts of polybaramins, partitioning apobaramins, building monobaramins and characterizing holobaramins, a taxonomist needs guidelines for deciding what belongs to a particular monobaraminic branch. These standards will vary depending upon the groups being considered, but general guidelines which have been utilized include:
1. Scripture claims (used in baraminology but not in discontinuity systematics). This has priority over all other considerations. For example humans are a separate holobaramin because they separately were created (Genesis 1 and 2). However, even as explained by Wise in his 1990 oral presentation, there is not much relevant taxonomic information in the Bible...
Did you catch that? To paraphrase: Scripture claims have priority over all other considerations.
This is not science, and any pretense that this has to being science has just been blown out of the water.
And this is very common on creation "science" websites. Readers are invited to check this out for themselves.
So, to wrap things up:
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