This’ll probably get shot down fairly quickly as I am not a Bible scholar. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained. Here goes.
Evolution is incompatible with the story of creation as told in Genesis. In Genesis Adam and Eve ensured that all their descendents were tainted with original sin. Now, if the story of Adam and Eve never happened then there is no such thing as original sin. If there is no such thing as original sin then there was no need for God to send down Jesus to die for our sins and wipe the slate clean. Consequently, evolution destroys the reason for Jesus’s death and resurrection. Hence, evolution is incompatible with a belief in God.
Where am I going wrong?
When I took Physical Anthropology in college the professor gave this little speech at the beginning of the year. I’ll have to paraphrase of course.
“This class deals with evolution, specifically the evolution of human beings. This class has nothing to do with the origins of life, the universe, or whether or not intelligent design was behind it all. In this class we look at the physical evidence and study theories and conclusions based upon that evidence. This class is not geared towards proving or disproving religious theories.”
I don’t see why the two can’t be compatible. A lot of people already believe that the whole “Earth was created in 6 days” to be a metaphor. Who isn’t to say that the earliest lifeform that could be identified as human didn’t evolve once removed from the garden of Eden? I know I don’t believe in God or intelligent design but I don’t see why evolution and religion have to be mutually exclusive.
It is interesting that while Catholicism is very retrograde in many subjects it is surprisingly progressive in some items. Evolution is one of them. The church does consider that God could have made use of natural, evolutionary, original causes in the production of man’s body. But, as Catholics believe, the human soul indeed had a divine origin, and Adam got the first one, It seems to me that that takes care of the problem of finding wives for the sons of Adam and Eve.
First of all, the Biblical creation story isn’t really about the creation of the known world/universe/whatever. It’s a metaphor for the creation of a new society, just as all creation stories are. The progression of what the JCM (that’s JudeoChristianMuslim) god created and when parallels the 7 generations of gods in the story that previously held for Mesopotamia. Thus it represented the concept of a god that subsumed all previous gods, just as the new form of society subsumed the previous yearly cycles of nature around which the old societies were based and marked the introduction of more permanent social endeavors.
Actually, the OP has correctly and fairly laid out the issues that some Christians (not Jews or Muslims and also not all Christians) have with Evolution when placed in opposition to the Creation narrative. The issue is actually not so much with the Creation narratives in chapters 1 and 2 (from which some other Christians as well as some Jews and Muslims draw their opposition to the scientific presentations of cosmology and historical biology), but with the narrative of the Fall. There is one thread of belief held by some Christians that the ideal world, where neither pain nor death had entered, must have existed for the sin of Adam and Eve to have brought that to ruin, leading to the eventual redemption by Jesus. If the world had existed for millions of years, with animals killing each other for food throughout that period, then it challenges the notion of idyllic Eden and the Fall.
It should be noted, of course, that, while Original Sin does tend to be a central notion in most Christian denominations, the actual meaning of Original Sin is not limited to the narrative of Genesis. There are many perspectives including, but not limited to, the idea that the Fall was a metaphor for humanity’s predisposition to sin, and not a single event in which the first ancestors committed a specific act.
For any particular group’s views on Original Sin, you really need to look up their particular expressions on the topic.
For those who accept a literal Eden and a literal Fall, I do not see any way to reconcile their beliefs with the discoveries of science (which is why they are so persistent and the battles onn the topic so fierce–they see science as an attack on their Truth). For those of us who do not hold to a literal reading, there is far less problem with accepting science while maintaining our belief.
Look up an archaeologist named John Romer, especially his book Testament, c 1988, Henry Holt and Co., New York. Alternatively, there are videotapes of his television shows which cover essentially the same material. Here’s a website that cites him and goes into my point a little bit better, down where it says 5000 BCE.
Right. Once we get past the problem with the Literalists, for whom the problem is “if some parts of the Bible are accurate and others are just metaphorical, how can we tell which is which?”, we get into the stickier issues of, OK, so this is an allegory of something that happened in the realm of the spiritual evolution of mankind… how the heck can we reconcile it with what seems to have happened in the physical world?
For Christians who accept the reality of biological evolution, like Catholics, it can eventually boil down to “it’s a mystery of Faith” just like the Trinity or transubstantiation. Then the Fall (eating the fruit of knowledge of Good and Evil) refers to some point in human spiritual development when Man decided to take it upon himself to define what is good and what is evil, causing a rupture in a previously harmonius participation in God’s plan (BTW, it’s assumed He HAS a plan; what if He’s winging it??? ). The result was unhappiness, insatisfaction, and awareness of death – EVEN if physical death was actually happening all along, NOW we’re dealing with souls going into the Sleep of Death, and it anguishes us to think about it.
Dammned reply button…
… so this needs to be corrected by an intervention of God on Earth. HOW, and WHERE and WHEN the “Fall” took place, becomes unknowable info that has to be taken on faith.
I hope this is not a distraction from the OP’s question, but as I remember reading Genesis,God just put some gaurds around Eden when he cast Adam and Eve out. Since the entire earth, except the deepest Jungles have been explored> Eden would still be here and could be seen by the space orbitors.
I do not see why one could not believe in God if they choose to, and still except eveloution. As I recall it:The punishment for Adam’s and Eve’s sin was death of the body, there was no referance to a soul in that part of Genesis, (or lose there of). I believe evolution of thought came about when people saw someone come out of a coma and decided that if the person was dead(as they could have thought he or she was) they then decided something else must be other than the Body and I believe the word soul came from that.
[QUOTE=monavis]
I hope this is not a distraction from the OP’s question, but as I remember reading Genesis,God just put some gaurds around Eden when he cast Adam and Eve out. Since the entire earth, except the deepest Jungles have been explored> Eden would still be here and could be seen by the space orbitors.
[quote]
A Literalist would tell you – without any actual supporting statement to that effect in Genesis – that the original physical Eden was removed from Earth during The Great Flood. These guys have an explanation for everything even if it means they have to recur to nonscriptural extrapolations or inferences.
). The result was unhappiness, insatisfaction, and awareness of death – EVEN if physical death was actually happening all along, NOW we’re dealing with souls going into the Sleep of Death, and it anguishes us to think about it.