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."
On the other hand, there are blog articles related to these topics, often lacking in science content, which obviously belong in the blogger forum, or sometimes chat. But there is no need for the creation of a separate science forum. The news forum seems entirely appropriate.
You may recall, about three years ago, there were a few extremely disruptive posters who were trying to get all science articles banned from this website. Fortunately that effort failed, and most (but not all) of those disruptors managed to get themselves banned. There is no reason to revive their cause by considering a ban of science articles from the news forum. The problem isn't with the subject matter, it's with a few disruptive people. The problem will be easily handled with a few "Stay off this thread!" posts from the mods.
I can not agree that ELS has been thoroughly debunked - applying a little critical thinking shows that the criticism is lacking. This is especially true of the talkorigins website - basically just a 'talking points' site for pro-evolutionists.
Maybe one of you has found some better criticism(s) for the hydroplate theory explained by Walt Brown on his creationscience website -
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/PartII.html
- but I'm not holding out any hope that it won't be nit-picked on some minor point rather than a thorough refutation of all data presented.
Archeology continues to uncover facts that support the accuracy and truthfulness of the Bible everyday.
Included in this - the dead sea scrolls - show that these writings from the old testament are accurate and were indeed written hundreds of years (approx 1000 if I recall correctly) before Jesus Christ.
Nothing about Psalm 22 is vague - some Bible students even think that Jesus last words may have been a full repeating from Psalm 22. Either way he uttered words from both the beginning and ending of Psalm 22 while he was being crucified. Furthermore, many of the prophecies about his life and death were fulfilled by others in His life - including the evil King Herod.
Maybe you should 'pull your heads out of the sand' before the time of your own demise...
See post #449
Hey, that's a great idea! All the evolution threads should be on the religion forum!
Good post. It deserves to be repeated.
Except that Bible Code math can locate almost any phrase you want in almost any lengthy text, or even in random text. I notice you didn't respond to my example of this.
The mischaracterization of science that is often seen here hurts not only the conservative movement, but also the very thing that helped make the U.S. so great.
If we lose science in this country (or even the perception of such) we lose far more than just a few scientists. We will lose being the leader in this world. And with the radical Muslims wanting to take is down, that would be a very bad thing IMHO.
The uniqueness for ELS is in finding related words, phrases, names, cities, and dates in the same passages of the Torah. Not finding things in a random fashion - which is what you get with any other text not written specifically to make an absurd refutation. The text from your example was not from any known literature.
For instance, member(s) of confession A may aver repeatedly that members of confession B are in danger of hellfire due to its assertion of doctrine n. Absolutely no evidence to the contrary by a member of confession B will convince the A posters that it is their confession which is in error as to the truth of the matter. The only solution is for both sides to make the argument – respectfully - for the umpteenth time in the hopes that some passers-by may be persuaded.
Since posters behave this way over doctrinal issues, why would they behave any differently where their doctrines intersect with science?
Here is where definitions get in the way. For the scientist, the term "faith" has no bearing on a scientific theory such as gravity or evolution. The theory is nothing more than a model describing observed phenomena and related facts.
OTHO, there are many that view a theory of science in the very same way that faith is viewed.
Thusly, the arguments get heated because the scientist is promoting a pure natural view of the theory whereas the non-scientist is adding a faith component to the theory thusly tagging it as anti-God or bigotry.
So why has science been hijacked to the religion forum, where the arguments and methods of science are not respected?
It makes no sense to argue science with apologetics. You have said yourself that no statement is too stupid to be believed by someone.
But this isn not how science works and how science reasons. Once a stupid idea has been discredited by facts, it will never come back in the same form. At the level of specifics, it will never come back at all.
The only science we are losing in this country is from public education which fails to educate the students at a rate that is even competitive with other countries - other countries which by the way have no problem presenting both sides of the evolution arguments.
Furthermore, imho we are a world leader when we stand up for truth and justice - something that is lacking more and more as we move away from God, ethics, and morals...
I've heard an intepretation of Genesis 1 that in verses 1 and 2 where it states, "1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters," that there could be an interval of billions of years between verses 1 and 2. That's possible, I suppose.
The basic conflict between the premise of evolution verses the Biblical account is that Gen. reports that two human individuals were specifically created by God "in His likeness" (in their spirits resided the Spirit of God), and that the Bible's account presents Adam and Eve as historical figures. They are part of the geneologies found elsewhere in scripture. Also, if we're to accept the rise of man through evolution, we are required to consider the first 10 or so chapters of Genesis as myth. The problem is, when in the biblical narrative does "myth" end and real history commense? At the story of Abraham? The Bible account doesn't differentiate between characters such as Adam, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham. The narrative is a seamless flow that leads from the earlier people in Genesis into those who are acknowledged as historical figures.
Evolution may have occurred (although what evidence there is isn't conclusive), but the Biblical account maintains that man was specifically and specially created by God, that God "breathed" in His own Spirit into the spirit of man. In other words, all of life, aside from man, may be the product of evolution, but man, as he is, is not.
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