Darwin vs Religion

Great Debates
1

My professor recently started on the subject of Darwin. He informed us that a lot of people get up and walk out of the room when he brings up the subject of evolution. I don’t understand what all of the controversy is about. Evolution (in my own words) is simply a phenotype and/or genetic mutation that is more advantageous to a species than not when expressed, so it is favored by nature and continues to be bred into the genepool. For example, back moths that camoflauge with black trees as opposed to white moths of the same species that get eaten because they stand out like a sore thumb. That’s it, it is not atheism.

A lot of religous people have a hard time with this concept. Darwin was a very religous man as well. Is it hard to believe in some science and religion at the same time?

Upon my current understanding of the debate between beliefs, the most controversial terms of human creation come down to this:

Evolving from fish vs being crafted out of earth.

Discuss

2

You’re right. There is no necessary contradiction between faith and evolution. One of the biggest problems for this conflict is that so many laypeople have an erroneous idea of what evolutionary theory does and does not explain. I believe much of the debate can be defanged simply by making it very clear what the theory is about. It’s frustrating that theory is so commonly misrepresented as atheistic but that it’s also conflated (sometimes naively, sometimes dishonestly) with abiogenesis and the origin of the universe. I have found that people with a creationist bent become considerably less hostile when you tell them that evolutionary theory does not claim that God could not have created the universe and created the first lifeforms. Once they understand that evolution is not a creation theory they become…well, not receptive, exactly, but much less defensive.

3

Nobody would have been more surprised than Darwin himself that this controversy is still raging in the 21st Century.

4

Darwin wasn’t that religious, by the way. He started off as basically a cultural Christian but as his career and his discoveries went on, he became more and more agnostic.

5

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

6

One thing I’ve run into when discussing evolution is some people who think evolution and Christianity inherently conflict is they’ve never met a devout Christian who accepts evolution. On the other hand, I’m a devout Episcopalian, who grew up in a church where the congregation contained a larger than usual proportion of engineers. I didn’t run into the notion that Christianity and evolution are incompatible until I was in my mid-to-late 20s. I think I’ve surprised a few people when I’ve said that what I know of evolution enhances and strengthens my faith, rather than weakens it, because the intricate process of evolution is much more satisfying than a mere wave of a Divine magic wand.

I have a naturally questioning mind and I follow a form of Christianity which encourages that. Indeed, part of the blessing placed upon a child during my church’s Baptism service runs, “give him/her an inquiring and discerning heart.” Anglicanism, the form of Christianity I share with Mr. Darwin, is entirely compatible with science.

On the other hand, other forms of Christianity appear to place a greater emphasis on unquestioning obedience, just as some people are more comfortable accepting things as they’re told they are rather than asking questions. For such people, I can see how having the preacher say one thing and a science class another, or at least what looks like another, can be a bit disturbing.

CJ

7

I’m another religious person with no problems with evolution (and like Siege I was older before I ran into creationists), but a while back I read a book that helped to illuminate this a little bit, and thought I’d share.

It was actually a book on educating children, and most of it was quite good except for the science part, but the author insisted that evolution was one of the most important issues facing us today. Our attitudes about evolution, in her opinion, define how we treat each other and how we see the human race. Because evolution means we’re just animals, and that we can treat each other accordingly (i.e. without much care for each other), but if we’re special creations of God, then we know that we should be valuing our lives and treating each other as unique, special souls.

Or something like that; it was a long time ago. But that seems to maybe be part of why they get so upset about it; they’re looking at it as if it makes a big difference to how we treat each other and how we view human life. I don’t see it like that at all (I’m LDS and it’s pretty much an issue that doesn’t bother us one way or 'tother), but maybe that will help you out.

8

Heh. We were talking about this over here . (Although, that’s not what the OP was about; the OP’r came back and explained why we he was asking.)

I stand by my assertion that it’s not the subject, but how it’s taught. I have never had a hard time teaching evolution (within Earth Science, as we go over the fossil record). I have had some young-earth creationists in my class. The most rewarding discussions I have ever had came the year that I spend a day explaining how it’s not just either or. Too many people (YEC’s, usually) believe that either God created the world and man as taught in Genesis or there is no God, so all evolutionist must be atheists. Once you explain to people that there is a wide range of beliefs , they tend to be more open minded about discussing evolution.

I feel that science teachers need to spend time reviewing the definition of science and the philosophy of science before venturing into controversial topics like evolution, stem cell research, etc. Too many people have polarized the issues, so that now, you’re either evil or ignorant to your opponents.

9

Yeah, I don’t see a problem with evolution. To me it just better describes the “How” of God’s creation.

It doesn’t help the debate that many supposedly on the “Science” side of the debate accept the false dichotomy and run with it.

I’ve also always held a problem with the idea that we NEED to be better than animals. The assumption that animals themselves do not have souls, also that animals treat each other worse than humans do. I’ve never seen animals treat each other any worse than humans. We tend to anthropomorphize them a little too much. They have a different social structure than we do, kind of like the feudal societies of ants and bees. How is treating a worker bee as disposable different from a samurai removing the head of a commoner?

I believe we were created, that we evolved, and see no need to place us as spiritually ‘better’ than animals. It seems to me like this argument hinges around a bunch of false-dichotomies that if sensitively addressed could very easily be overcome.

Erek

10

I also believe that there is no conflict between the theory of evolution and any religious beliefs. I realize as an atheist it’s easy for me to say that, but there you are.

However let me play devil’s advocate for a minute and explain why I think some people are threatened by evolution.

First you have people who’s faith depends on a absolute literal reading of genesis. To these people day means day, and they cannot reconcile themselves to the thought that life evolved over millions of years. You also have people who are troubled by the thought that there’s no fundamental seperation between us and animals. I realize that theistic evolution does allow for differences, such as human’s being infused with a soul at a certain point in our development, but for some, this isn’t clear enough.

More importantly though, I think it’s undeniable that Evolution pushes God back from the immediate stage of reality. Rather than directly creating the world (Yes I know I’m mixing abiogenesis, geology, and cosmology in here) God takes on a more abstract role. Time was, the evidence of God was all around us in the marvelous structures of nature. Now we see those structures as arising naturalistically, with no need for a divine hand. While some people’s faith is strong enough to accomodate this, I understand why some believers would find it deeply unsettling.

11

The conflict arises when religion tries to explain physical phenomena. For much of our history, we looked to the Bible to explain things about the physical world-- the age of the earth, the workings of the solar system, etc. As long as religion sticks to spiritual matters, it will not conflict with science.

12

There are acxtually a wide range of views and experiences that shape people’s attitudes on this topic. Reviewing any of the (terminally numerous) threads on this topic on the SDMB, one will note rather soon that very many people who are quite devout have no problem reconciling religious (even Christian) belief with the science behind the Theory of Evolution. However, there are clearly people on both sides of the issue who really need to frame the discussion in terms of God vs no god.

As early as the publication of Origin of Species, individuals on both sides began arming themselves for a fight.

From the beginning, Thomas H. Huxley, a noted opponent of religion, began using the theory to bolster his own position that even if there is a god, we can never know anything about him (or her or it or them). In our time, Richard Dawkins has been fairly outspoken in claiming that science, in general, and the Theory of Evolution, in particular demonstrate that there is no god. Carl Sagan, while never going as far as Dawkins, was also not averse to indicating that a belief in a god was simply an invention of the mind of humans.

On the other side, the fact of evolution presents serious difficulties for adherents to certain variants of Christian and Jewish and Muslim belief. One of the prime teachings of that religious triad has been that God created the world good and that any evils introduced into the world have been the result of the Fall of Man into sin. Since few people would consider pain or violent death to be good, a history in which animals of increasing complexity survived by killing each other and died by attack or disease or other traumatic events over millions of years is in direct contradiction to their understanding of the Creation and Fall. There is also the issue of humanity being shaped in God’s image, which some people find disconcerting in the face of the unplanned nature of evolutionary results.
Noting that some people look to the bible as literal history makes them seem just stubborn if we fail to realize the underlying Truths that they perceive in that story.

If one’s world view depends on a particular understanding of the world as it is, whether that is that there cannot be a (knowable) god or that the very concept of pain is rooted in a story of goodness corrupted to evil through a sinful action, you are liable to be pretty fierce in proposing and defending your beliefs. Therefore, the discussion is always influenced by the Huxleys and Dawkinses who demand that religion close up shop and the Wilberforces and Johnsons and Dembskis who insist on either denying the possibility of Evolution or opposing its presentation.

Meanwhile, devout Christian scientists of evolutionary theory such as Dobzhansky and firmly atheistic scientists who believe that there is a place for religious thought in the world such as Gould get ignored by the extremes because they are not pushing the “correct” agenda.

It is important to note, however, when trying to figure out why the “other guy” just “doesn’t get it” that there may be a lot of issues of their overall world view that shapes their ability to accept either religion or the fact of evolution.

13

You can’t believe Genesis is the literal truth and also believe evolution occurred (at least as outlined by biologists). The two histories flatly contradict each other.

It is possible, however, to be religious without believing Genesis is the literal truth. But therein lies a problem. The more I depend on science and evidence to understand my world, the more I must reinterpret the Bible as merely “symbolic” or “metaphorical.”*And the more narrowly I understand its relevance. As archaeology contradicts the historical narratives in the Bible, I stop relying on it to understand history. As it fails to adequately explain the origin of species, I stop relying on it to explain my existence. As its legal instructions fail to be relevant in modern society, I stop relying on it as a source of moral and legal authority. If I find large chunks of it to be violent, sexist, racist and generally backward, I begin to treat them as symbolic or archaic. As I become more skeptical of superstition, I start disbelieving its miracle tales - some of the most central stories of the Bible.

So, frankly…I can’t blame fundamentalists for digging in their heels. Modern rationalism, no matter how religious, allows the Bible little more authority than a nice piece of spiritual poetry.

*I’m using Christianity as an example, but obviously this all holds for any of the major monotheistic religions - substitute relevant scripture for Bible as needed

14

Evolution may not be a creation theory only as far as the origins of life are not well understood. All extant and veritably scientific hypotheses about the origins of life depend entirely on natural selection; they just deal with pre-cellular reproduction, information transfer, and mutagenesis. If one wishes to set the cutoff of the definition of “life” at the cellular level, then Evolution could never be a theory of the origins of life itself; but we already know from the example of viruses that defining life thusly is at best problematic, and, at worst, too arbitary to be rigorous. In other words, there is, for the present, arguably no sound empirical justification for defining life as anything but a complex collection of matter that increases overall entropy whilst replicating, mutating, and therefore evolving.

Those religionists who are not bothered by evolution so long as it has nothing to say about the origins of life might feel less secure if they knew all present lines of scientific investigation into the origins of life rely upon natural selection. Hence, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that, as we come to understand more about the origins of life, a broader theory of Evolution might be the framework used to describe and explain the continuum from what we now call pre-biotic matter to cellular life, with the same basic elements (replication, information transfer, mutation, natural selection, speciation) playing a critical role, all the way from molecules to Man. Ergo, the God who somehow deliberately created life in a way that cannot be explained by natural selection may just be another God of the Gaps.

15

And yet there are some people (e.g. Pope John Paul II and the Dali Lama ) who are… shall I say… quite committed to their respective religions, but who can accept both spiritualism and science.
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And then there are people like Ken Hamm. This isn’t the pit, so I’ll be …nice. He suffers from so much CRI (Cranio-Rectal Inversion) that I have a hard time even understanding him. He’s the kind of person Robin Williams makes fun of.

[RW]
“‘God said let there be light.’ A wonderful analogy for the big bang?
[RW doing hillbilly voice]
No. ‘God said let there be light’ and went click.” [/RWdhbv] [/RW]

16

I think there are some fundamental misunderstandings about the idea of creation involved.

The first and main one applies to both Creationists and people who study the Big Bang. The concept of time breaks down the closer one gets back to the point of origin. Our concept of time is a series of comparisons. We know the passage of time based upon the movement of bodies through space in relation to one another. If we go back to the origin of those objects we have to move into a primal energy or primordial ooze state, where the differentiation between objects becomes suspect, and it is much harder to measure things because there is no discernable seperation. This is when one cannot see because there is no light, or they are blinded by the light.

So when we talk about Genesis, we are talking about a measurement of time (days) when God is in the midst of creating the objects by which our understanding of time (days) is pinned. We also forget the evolution of language over the course of time, and the additional subjective lenses our ancestors passed along to us that formed our very consciousness that is now viewing the point of origin.

In the Sefer Yetzirah it talks about that single point, Kether, which all movement is going between, ‘running and returning’. This single point is eternal, it is linear time as well as space, all contained within a single point. The Sefirot or Tree of Life that we form our basis for understanding and knowledge exist between Kether and Malkhut. Kether is the Crown, and Malkhut is the Kingdom. These points are one and the same, it’s a matter of polarity based purely upon the perspective of the viewer. The line between the two is the axis of Good and Evil(toward God, away from God, there is no such thing as away from God), as the Tree of Life is a 5 dimensional Hypercube. When one enters a state of Chokmah(Wisdom) Conciousness, they are collapsing everything down to a one dimensional state, where there is only God on both ends and what is in between God and God (oneself). So all of creation is in between two points in a singularity and we travel toward one away from one though the distance between us and God is always infinite, or more accurately there is no seperation whatsoever. After that it goes on to talk about how extra dimensions form out of these points, which I don’t really understand.

The Sefer Yetzirah is the Qabbalistic Book of Creation(Formation) and is quite old and has been studied for Millenia by Jewish scholars.

So the idea that Creation happened at some point in the past is a misunderstanding. Creation is constantly occuring, we live in creation. I once heard a Rabbi speak about how each millenium in what we know as “history” corresponds(approximately) to a “day of creation”, so right now we’d be approaching Friday Evening, if Sunday is the day God said “Let there be Light”.

So evolution would to me, state something about the sequence of events during the creation, and not point to an idea stating that it happened, and now we are living after said event. The creation of time indicates cycles, which is why we have cycles that repeat in order to measure time, such as seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. We take the fundamental building blocks, duplicate them and then organize them in new ways that add varying degress of complexity, but we are still operating within the bubble of “creation”.

The mistake that is made on both sides, is that neither side really understands the language the other is using, yet they are trying to disprove something stated in a language they can’t comprehend. Then it is exacerbated as it reaches the laypeople who don’t understand the language of either side, and merely take a side socially based upon a cultural identification with the person who’s views they are regurgitating.

A good way to think of this is to try and imagine how much time it took between the moment of conception when the sperm entered the egg, and it’s transformation from being a sperm and an egg until it split into two cells, being the beginning of…you. Contemplate all the words you are using to understand this process, and try to understand that you learned them long after this process occurred, and that your understanding of time is completely pinned to your experience of it from the moment I am talking about until now.

Erek

17

Excellent post by tnd.

The vast majority of New Agers like myself certainly have no problem with evolution and see it as a brilliant way for That Which Is to bring consciousness into being.

Different people need different myths, however, and right now the vast majority of people on the planet (whether following a faith of belief or atheism) take a Picean, us-vs.-them, all-or-nothing approach to the issue.

More flexible thinking will eventually prevail, however, as the myth of evolution has the facts on its side, and facts are immovable objects. People will get better at justifying their old myths to the new, and humankind will be better for it.

Give it time, and be patient with those who are not yet perfect, which includes us all.