Some Christians think that Genesis is an allegory for the way the creation really happen, told in a way that nomadic shepherds 3,500 years could understand and remember. The actual details of creation are not the point of the first two chapters of Genesis. More important are man’s relationship with God, original sin, and all that jazz. Of course, that’s just what I hear.
If you try doing a search on Triskadecamus’s or Polycarp’s posts on this subject in the past, I’m sure you’ll find a better explanation than the one that I gave.
You are confusing (as do the fundies) creation and the Genesis story. Evolution and Genesis are incompatible (unless you look to Genesis as allegory). There is absolutely no incompatibility with evolution and the belief that a god created the universe.
Quite frankly, if your “it’s one or the other” paradigm were true, than the large majority of Christians in the world, who believe in intelligent design (or at least the sects they adhere to proclaim that).
Absodamnlutely. And most Christians are content to accept Genesis as allegory–a story of the greatness of God the Creator and the fall of man from His grace.
dolphinboy, I know they’re the most vocal, but Biblical literalists are very much not the majority.
As a Deist, I believe God provided the push and a little vision, and then it happened…
I have a little problem with ID arguements, not that that isn’t a good description for what I believe, but that they are sometimes used to put God into Science (and then God into Science into the Classroom). While I have FAITH that God provided push and vision, I don’t have a problem with astrophysics or evolutionary biology leaving God out – and would prefer it does so.
I see little difference between teaching Creation Science and teaching ID.
Its the difference between finding God in science and putting God there.
He didn’t say belief in God and evolution it was evolution and creation. Even though that is different it is still possible, in that one believes that God created everything through the process of evolution. However, it would be a stretch to accept as fact the story of Adam and Eve as portrayed in the bible and then say that evolution took over after that.
Creation doesn’t necessarily mean a literal retelling of Genesis. If God says, “Let there be a Big Bang,” and then has nothing to with the universe after that, then that is still creation.
And I see nothing contradictory about the existance of both the second law of thermodynamics and the lost civilization of Atlantis. Just because there never was, in actual fact, a lost civilization of Atlantis does not mean that such a civilization, if it did actually exist, would have violated the second law of thermodynamics.
Unless they powered their glowing crystals with perpetual motion machines or some such. But we can easily imagine a lost civilization of Atlantis that adheres to the laws of physics.