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As promised, here's my take on creation and evolution. (Keep in mind that I haven't even begun seminary yet, so it's not like I've spent a huge amount of time studying the question or anything.) It is taken from an exchange on forum.gateworld.net, in which GateGypsy asked the following questions:
If you believe in Creation Theory
1. Do you believe the world was created in 7 days?
2. Do you believe that the world is only 6,000 years old (or whatever it is - much much less than the billions of years that it is).
3. Do you believe that god created everything just as it is - there was no evolutionary process?
4. If God created everything just as it is, then why so many imperfections? Why do we have the remnants of a tail? An appendix?
5. If god created everything just as it exists, then why aren't all animals the same the world over? Without evolution to encourage them to adapt differently to different environments? If animals didn't evolve but were created as is, why aren't there any mammals native to New Zealand (which broke off from the mainland before mammals evolved)?
6. If you believe that the divine creator aka god created a number of animals, then there was some sort of evolution to get us where we are today, how come we share so much of the same DNA? Surely those initial animals couldn't have inbred with each other - as they were already seperate species that wouldn't have been possible. There's only something like a 20 percent difference between our DNA and a fly for example.
7. if you believe that the Divine Creator simply had his or her or its finger on the button, so to speak, and everything flowed out from there according to what science has discovered, does this mean you think the bible is wrong? If the bible is wrong, then doesn't that mean the word of god is wrong? So how do the two beliefs reconcile themselves?
Here is my answer to these questions:
1. Do you believe the world was created in 7 days?
Define "days." Seriously. The first couple of days, the sun hadn't even been created yet. And then there's the quote in Psalms to the effect that a thousand years are as an hour in God's sight. So if you're defining "day" as a twenty-four hour period in which the sun revolves around the earth, no. But if you mean "a certain period of time," then yes. There's no reason God couldn't create the world in stages; keep in mind that there are actually two different creation accounts in Genesis, and they don't always match up with each other when it comes to what happened on each day. God works through processes; that is the main lesson of the Creation story (and much of the rest of Genesis, as well). What is evolution if not a process?
2. Do you believe that the world is only 6,000 years old (or whatever it is - much much less than the billions of years that it is).
No. See my answer to 1. Thousands of years are as an hour, etc. The Bible isn't a science textbook; it's not a history textbook either. Most of the earlier books were passed down orally for many generations before they were ever written down, and I don't think the ancient Hebrews had a concept for "billions."
3. Do you believe that god created everything just as it is - there was no evolutionary process?
Ditto. The creation accounts in Genesis are really evolutionary when you get down to it, they just don't say it as precisely. First the world is created, then small lifeforms emerge, then bigger, more complex lifeforms.
4. If God created everything just as it is, then why so many imperfections? Why do we have the remnants of a tail? An appendix?
See 3. Also, if everything was created perfectly to begin with, 1) where does free will go, and 2) don't you think it would get boring pretty quickly?
5. If god created everything just as it exists, then why aren't all animals the same the world over? Without evolution to encourage them to adapt differently to different environments? If animals didn't evolve but were created as is, why aren't there any mammals native to New Zealand (which broke off from the mainland before mammals evolved)?
See 4. Also, wouldn't it make sense to create creatures that are adapted to their environment, whether that adaption happens through evolution or God pointing a finger at them and going "Hey, Presto!"?
6. If you believe that the divine creator aka god created a number of animals, then there was some sort of evolution to get us where we are today, how come we share so much of the same DNA? Surely those initial animals couldn't have inbred with each other - as they were already seperate species that wouldn't have been possible. There's only something like a 20 percent difference between our DNA and a fly for example.
Why start from scratch when you don't have to? Besides, as I said in number 3, I don't believe that creation and evolution are necessarily opposed to each other.
7. if you believe that the Divine Creator simply had his or her or its finger on the button, so to speak, and everything flowed out from there according to what science has discovered, does this mean you think the bible is wrong? If the bible is wrong, then doesn't that mean the word of god is wrong? So how do the two beliefs reconcile themselves?
In the first case, anyone who tries to take the Bible as a scientific textbook is going to run into trouble really quick. It was never intended to be such. If it were, there'd be periodic tables and chemical formulas and such. It is a religious document, designed to teach how God wants us to live by giving examples of how people have lived in the past, how they've done well and how they've screwed up. It is also designed to teach us about faith, and how God works in the world, through stories of how he's done so in the past. In the second case, this depends on whether you believed the Bible is the direct word of God (what I like to call the dictaphone method of writing) or the inspired word of God, where he spoke through people who chose to let him do so, and still had their own free will to shape what they wrote down.
I believe in the second, partly because I don't believe God would choose to compromise the free will of so many people to such an extent, and partly because it explains a lot of stuff that is otherwise incomprehensible to me. Given that, what use would an illiterate Hebrew tribesman (who were the ones first passing down the creation story) or a liturgical priest (who were, for the most part, the ones who wrote them down) have for the precise way in which the world was created? Did they really need to know about Big Bangs and dark matter and redshift and continental drift and dinosaurs and birds in the galapagos islands? No. Did they have the educational basis to understand all that and communicate it clearly even if God had tried to tell them? Almost certainly not.
When you combine all those things, the occasional factual innacuracy when it comes to scientific matters is inevitable, and understandable. It doesn't detract at all from the main point of the Bible or the Judeo-Christian faith, despite the efforts of people on both sides of the religion/science debate to make it the litmus test of Biblical credibility.
That's my take on the whole creation/evolution debate. I hope this has been helpful to anyone who reads it.
If you believe in Creation Theory
1. Do you believe the world was created in 7 days?
2. Do you believe that the world is only 6,000 years old (or whatever it is - much much less than the billions of years that it is).
3. Do you believe that god created everything just as it is - there was no evolutionary process?
4. If God created everything just as it is, then why so many imperfections? Why do we have the remnants of a tail? An appendix?
5. If god created everything just as it exists, then why aren't all animals the same the world over? Without evolution to encourage them to adapt differently to different environments? If animals didn't evolve but were created as is, why aren't there any mammals native to New Zealand (which broke off from the mainland before mammals evolved)?
6. If you believe that the divine creator aka god created a number of animals, then there was some sort of evolution to get us where we are today, how come we share so much of the same DNA? Surely those initial animals couldn't have inbred with each other - as they were already seperate species that wouldn't have been possible. There's only something like a 20 percent difference between our DNA and a fly for example.
7. if you believe that the Divine Creator simply had his or her or its finger on the button, so to speak, and everything flowed out from there according to what science has discovered, does this mean you think the bible is wrong? If the bible is wrong, then doesn't that mean the word of god is wrong? So how do the two beliefs reconcile themselves?
Here is my answer to these questions:
1. Do you believe the world was created in 7 days?
Define "days." Seriously. The first couple of days, the sun hadn't even been created yet. And then there's the quote in Psalms to the effect that a thousand years are as an hour in God's sight. So if you're defining "day" as a twenty-four hour period in which the sun revolves around the earth, no. But if you mean "a certain period of time," then yes. There's no reason God couldn't create the world in stages; keep in mind that there are actually two different creation accounts in Genesis, and they don't always match up with each other when it comes to what happened on each day. God works through processes; that is the main lesson of the Creation story (and much of the rest of Genesis, as well). What is evolution if not a process?
2. Do you believe that the world is only 6,000 years old (or whatever it is - much much less than the billions of years that it is).
No. See my answer to 1. Thousands of years are as an hour, etc. The Bible isn't a science textbook; it's not a history textbook either. Most of the earlier books were passed down orally for many generations before they were ever written down, and I don't think the ancient Hebrews had a concept for "billions."
3. Do you believe that god created everything just as it is - there was no evolutionary process?
Ditto. The creation accounts in Genesis are really evolutionary when you get down to it, they just don't say it as precisely. First the world is created, then small lifeforms emerge, then bigger, more complex lifeforms.
4. If God created everything just as it is, then why so many imperfections? Why do we have the remnants of a tail? An appendix?
See 3. Also, if everything was created perfectly to begin with, 1) where does free will go, and 2) don't you think it would get boring pretty quickly?
5. If god created everything just as it exists, then why aren't all animals the same the world over? Without evolution to encourage them to adapt differently to different environments? If animals didn't evolve but were created as is, why aren't there any mammals native to New Zealand (which broke off from the mainland before mammals evolved)?
See 4. Also, wouldn't it make sense to create creatures that are adapted to their environment, whether that adaption happens through evolution or God pointing a finger at them and going "Hey, Presto!"?
6. If you believe that the divine creator aka god created a number of animals, then there was some sort of evolution to get us where we are today, how come we share so much of the same DNA? Surely those initial animals couldn't have inbred with each other - as they were already seperate species that wouldn't have been possible. There's only something like a 20 percent difference between our DNA and a fly for example.
Why start from scratch when you don't have to? Besides, as I said in number 3, I don't believe that creation and evolution are necessarily opposed to each other.
7. if you believe that the Divine Creator simply had his or her or its finger on the button, so to speak, and everything flowed out from there according to what science has discovered, does this mean you think the bible is wrong? If the bible is wrong, then doesn't that mean the word of god is wrong? So how do the two beliefs reconcile themselves?
In the first case, anyone who tries to take the Bible as a scientific textbook is going to run into trouble really quick. It was never intended to be such. If it were, there'd be periodic tables and chemical formulas and such. It is a religious document, designed to teach how God wants us to live by giving examples of how people have lived in the past, how they've done well and how they've screwed up. It is also designed to teach us about faith, and how God works in the world, through stories of how he's done so in the past. In the second case, this depends on whether you believed the Bible is the direct word of God (what I like to call the dictaphone method of writing) or the inspired word of God, where he spoke through people who chose to let him do so, and still had their own free will to shape what they wrote down.
I believe in the second, partly because I don't believe God would choose to compromise the free will of so many people to such an extent, and partly because it explains a lot of stuff that is otherwise incomprehensible to me. Given that, what use would an illiterate Hebrew tribesman (who were the ones first passing down the creation story) or a liturgical priest (who were, for the most part, the ones who wrote them down) have for the precise way in which the world was created? Did they really need to know about Big Bangs and dark matter and redshift and continental drift and dinosaurs and birds in the galapagos islands? No. Did they have the educational basis to understand all that and communicate it clearly even if God had tried to tell them? Almost certainly not.
When you combine all those things, the occasional factual innacuracy when it comes to scientific matters is inevitable, and understandable. It doesn't detract at all from the main point of the Bible or the Judeo-Christian faith, despite the efforts of people on both sides of the religion/science debate to make it the litmus test of Biblical credibility.
That's my take on the whole creation/evolution debate. I hope this has been helpful to anyone who reads it.
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Re: Dogmatic thinking
Date: 2006-05-18 09:08 pm (UTC)From:Just a little clarification -
If that pantheism statement would run:
"From the Christian point of view pantheism is not acceptable, because..."
any scientist would be OK with it. But it runs "This is not true..." without giving any good/proven reason. "Says who? For whom it is not true?"
It seems like semantic problem, but I think it is an approach, system of reasoning, hardly acceptable for scientifically minded person.
Re: Dogmatic thinking
Date: 2006-05-21 02:16 am (UTC)From:Neither pantheism nor Christianity nor any other religion can ever be proved or disproved from a scientific viewpoint. They are belief systems which depend on many things that cannot be objectively measured or even proven to exist (souls, to name one basic element that every religion I am aware of shares a belief in). Generally, there are a central core of beliefs which are dependant on faith (souls, the existence of God, afterlife, etc.). Then there's all the doctrines that surrounds the central core, which can be debated much more thoroughly because it depends partly on the core beliefs but also partly on everything else in the world, the things that can be proven objectively.
There are a lot of things in Christianity which can be profitably debated, as there is with any religion. But when you start discussing the core beliefs, there comes a point at which the only possible answer is "because I believe it to be true." That's the case with any religion on Earth. Neither side can prove or disprove it; if you believe in it you agree, if you don't, you either argue the same point perpetually or agree to disagree.
Insisting on evaluating the core beliefs of any religion scientifically is kind of like assuming you can put a screw in with a hammer. I suppose you could get it in, but it would be difficult and cause damage because it's not the right tool for the job. Some problems, you use a hammer. Some you use a screwdriver, or a wrench, or a rivet-gun. You get the best results if you use the best tool for the job, and that's as true of critical thinking as anything.
Re: Dogmatic thinking
Date: 2006-05-23 01:54 am (UTC)From:One more question:
do you really believe that when Rodney blew up entire planet (trying to make the Ancient weapon to work) it was the result of dogmatic thinking?
For me it was curiosity/overconfidence/arrogance mix.