In my run through highschool I have had had three different classes now bring up human evolution. In the most recent, an Anthropology course, the question was asked “how many of you go to church?” a day or two before we began Human Origins. I had the terrible urge to ask the two students who said they did in fact go to church: how can your faith withstand the evidence of so much science? The fossils the dating the everything is against you! Please do not take me wrong, I mean no disrespect. (For once, I am ashamed to say that I have ridiculed the religious on more than one occasion, quite viciously at times.) I promise that I, at least, will not do anything like that, because I would honestly like some answers, having no faith in anything, myself.
What, exactly, do you think their going to church implies about their beliefs regarding human origins?
Don’t make the mistake of attributing to all faith groups the beliefs that are only shared by the most vocal subset.
Please bring some cites before you take a stance on this issue.
Please illustrate your evidence before you make this kind of statement. If you have evidence and facts to back your claims you will avoid much conflict over this subject.
A few do it by being lying sacks of shit. Most, however, do it pretty much the same way scientists do, ironically enough – they change their theories to fit the new facts. So most Christians have come to believe that the Genesis creation story is allegorical, not literal, just as scientists changed their theories about the world when (for example) Darwin’s theory of speciation won out over competing theories.
Having been raised a Christian and sent to a Christian elementary I would assume that as Christians they would believe that God made Adam and Eve, as I was taught, and all my peers were taught in school and church and home. Obviously not all Christians think that, but I am addressing the ones who do. Having reletivly limited experiance with other faiths I would not be confident to assert anything about what they believe.
Let me be more specific, though I thought who I addressed this to in the OP was fairly clear: How can you believe in Creationism when science quite clearly proves that there is a long, branching system of hominids that lead up to a culmination, our species: Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Creationism is, to me, the founding of the entire faith. You have to believe this in order to believe that God made anything and has any bearing on your life. Let me pose a second question: If you are a religious person and take a scientific view, ie: god made the big bang, which set of everything and then much later decided to spark up the old amino acids and see where they went and Genisis is all a big metaphore why would you believe suddenly that he wants to take such a direct hand as contradicting his own order by throwing in Virgin birthed Jesus or any of his miracles from old and new testaments. Why would he speak to us, why doesn’t he anymore? If he has so much imense power to create and destroy why bother being slow and scientific?
I suppose what I’m really asking is: what draws you to your faith at all? Why do you believe any of it?
I actually had a teacher in grade 7 try to tell the class that all fossils were fakes planted by the government to discredit the Bible. Obviously a right wing nut, but an amusing anecdote none the less.
My ex father-in-law is one of the most widely respected antropologists in the world. Harvard PhD., faculty at one of the largest research institutions in the world, National Academy of Sciences fellow, etc., etc. He is, in fact a Christian.
The problem here is not the Christian perspective on science, but your perspective on Christians, as others have pointed out already.
I need cites to prove evolution?
http://www.becominghuman.org/ <–more interesting
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/ <–more informative
Well, correct my point of view of Christians. This is an honest question asked out of true curiosity. Every Christian I have known on a personal basis has lost their faith, exept my mother who is a fundamentalist nut, not unlike the teacher I stated previously. I just want to know what drives your faith?
One must keep in mind, faith is where knowledge stops!!!
After that it is their Dogma, unproveable doctorine, vs. modern
day science, about how things came about. I’ll take science
over religion any day, they make you prove what you say is
true, someday science will show the true face of God, we may not
like the real truth. It may show us that we are not as special as
we would like to think. I think religion is a Testiment of Man’s ego.
This rephrased question is only more specific than your OP in that it expresses more clearly the dichotomy you have observed between creationism and evolution. It is not more specific in that the problematic second person pronoun “you” still does not adequately convey to whom this question is posed. Still more egregious in this quote is a hint of the belief that evolution is teleological, or directed towards an ultimate goal, which is just as dubious as the assertion that all life on earth was created by an omnipotent god.
As Fred explained to Doris in Miracle on 34th Street,
I’m not trying to “imply” anything. “You” simply refers to anyone who is going to answer my question and who believes in what I don’t. You just seem like you really want to take offence to what I’m saying.
And I’m not saying we were a grand and ultimate goal, either. I do think we have reached an evolutionary dead end. But I won’t cite or explain because then I would be hi-jacking my own thread.
You will probably be hearing this a lot around these parts: the plural of anecdote is not data.
For expository work, here is an essay on biblical illiteracy from which one can conclude that even among self-professed Christians, a faith-based lifestyle is becoming less common.
What draws people to faith in a religion ?
Fear of Death! Nothingness , the Big Black , Zero anything after
death, they don’t like that idea, so they make up some grand
unprovable story that makes people feel better about death,
people are so gullable, they are grasping at straws, that is the
crux of all world religions. The religion that you pratice is mainly
because of where you are born! If you were born in India, do
truly think you would be a Southern Baptist? Or Born in the
Middle East , you would be a Mormon? After that it is peer
pressure of the local faith that keeps you one of the flock.
what anecdotes did I ever claim were data? Again, you are not answering my question simply critisizing my phrasing. I don’t care about frigging semantics. I just want a christian to come in and try to explain how they hold on to faith. Did you ever think for a minute that I was not in here to bash Christians but perhaps have a question answered? And speaking of anecdotes vs. data I DON"T WANT DATA! I want some ones personal experience. IE anecdotes. If you don’t understand the question and can’t be constructive amore ac studio don’t post.
Franko that is pretty much what I was assuming, but I’m sure there must be more to it than that. I was raised Christian but openly rejected it. So it is not entirely true that pressure is what keeps ones faith. As for making up “some grand
unprovable story” there are people out there who are very intelligent who are Christians. And not all religion makes you feel good about death. Not all people feel the need to feel good about death.
I wasn’t seeking to take offence at your rephrased question, but the revisions you made were not sufficient to guarantee an unambiguous interpretation. A rephrasing that includes greater detail but fails to improve clarity is more specific but doesn’t necessarily add significant value to a thread. Personally, I would have rephrased your question as:
This rephrasing addresses the question to anyone who cares to conjecture an explanation, not just the creationists whose explanatory capabilities you find lacking anyway. If you only wanted a dialogue with people whose beliefs differ from yours, the debate would be pretty one-sided, with only yourself defending the conclusions of science against the conclusions of faith. By opening the debate to everyone, you gain allies on the side of science, in case the responses of the creationists turn out to be too difficult for one person to handle.
You cited your personal experiences with Christians who had lost their faith and then ask why this reversal does not occur in all Christians who seriously examine their faith in light of scientific evidence. Perhaps the data that you are reluctant to consider could shed some light on your observations.
I don’t want a debate though, you see. I don’t want to defend the scientists. The beliefs are not at the heart of my question, but the faith. I suppose in that case I have not in fact been very clear. I’m sorry.
I am searching for what it is that gives a person faith, even in the face of adversity. I would like some faith, seeing as how, as I stated to begin with, I am myself faithless. I see the draw however, to be able to believe even when the proof is lacking. I have a few things that I need to be able to convince myself of. Not religious, but still. I realise that perhaps you can’t learn faith from someone, but I would like to hear about it from some one other than my mother who simply dismisses everything else as a false and horrible lie…or simply doesn’t think at all.
All right, now I see where you’re coming from, and I’m sorry for misunderstanding what exactly you were asking. In that case, the cliched response from Miracle on 34th Street is too pedestrian a quote to adequately address your inquiry. Perhaps a better source of enlightenment would be Kierkegaard’s treatise Fear and Trembling.
From your elementary school Christian education, you probably remember the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. That he was able to overcome his natural fatherly instincts and put his trust in God is interpreted by Kierkegaard as evidence of his status as a “knight of faith”.
The following comes from an essay I wrote for a religion class in college.
Quoting from the same essay:
The page numbers refer to the Penguin Classics edition, translated with an introduction by Alastair Hannay.