To anyone who glossed over my last post thinking it was too long winded. I’ll paraphrase: We are all one superstring emanating from a constantly evolving centerpoint, that can be any single point in the unverse.
(I also believe that the Sun is a mass of gas releasing light and other radiation through nuclear fusion rather than a mass of light gathered together by God on the forth day. Is this another reason for me to be cast into a lake of fire?)
I am completely satisfied. I apologize for expectations you did not earn, or deserve.
To answer your question; for me, Christianity is a personal relationship with my Lord, Jesus. I understand the Bible to be the testimony of some people who came to know God. I think it is a great source of inspiration and faith for anyone that opens his heart, and accepts that it is his own heart that will be changed by the verses he reads. I do not accept it as the sole and ultimate source of faith, or a literal description of the nature of the mind of God.
The Bible tells the story of creation, as God told it to an illiterate migrant shepherd. I doubt that Moses would have gotten much from a discussion of quantum instabilities in a universe of zero volume, from which the actual phenomena of time and space were able to come into existence. I’m not sure I understand it, and I have a fairly good twentieth century education. “I am. I said let there be light, and there was light.” It is not false by even our advanced understanding, and it gives Moses a chance to keep it in his mind.
Metaphor is powerful. It allows us to see what is not visible, and know things we can never perceive directly. God used it, because we can’t handle the reality. God did make us from the earth. He didn’t bother to mention all the steps, because Moses wasn’t likely to live long enough to get much beyond Eucaryotes, if he did it step by step from the beginning. The details of biology were not the point of His message to Moses. So, He spoke in metaphors.
The people of the biblical period thought the world was flat the sky was a roof over it, and lots of things that are not true. Correcting those errors was not the task God chose. That task lies in the province of Man. So I traveled, and found no edge, and I flew, and found no roof. I did not come to doubt God because of those things. I studied biology, and biochemistry, and learned of the inhabitability of physical characteristics, and the variability of DNA transcription, and survival values, and hundreds of other things that are a part of why the theory of evolution has become so widely supported. That did not make me doubt God either.
And when Jesus came, He did not choose to correct the errors in cosmology, or biology, but rather He spoke of love, and judgement, and charity, and duty, and human things. I don’t recall anything He said that can be thought to bear on evolution, or creation. But He did give me some direction on what I should consider most important. “Faith, hope, and love, these three abide.” “Love thy God, and love thy neighbor” “As you have done it even to these, the least of my children, so you have done it to me.” He had a lot of stuff to make sure we understood. Biology didn’t make the cut.
Now, it may be that there are other explanations for the diversity of life, and that survival and reproduction of variations in genotype are not the mechanism behind the observed facts. But to propose that it is wrong, you would have to find examples of logical predictions that are based on its same assumptions, and are demonstrably false. If you do so, science will listen to you. The theory will be modified. The new theory will be stronger for it, and your contribution will be remembered for centuries. But there is no reason that it should change your faith in God.
I hope that helps.
Tris
“Stoning non conformists is part of science. Stoning conformists is also part of science. Only those theories that can stand up to a merciless barrage of stones deserve consideration. It is the Creationist habit of throwing marshmallows that we find annoying.” ~ Dr Popper
I don’t see why this should be surprising.
Being a Christian requires believing in many nonsensical, irrational, or contradictory concepts, depending on the flavor of Christianity – eg that Jesus was “wholly man and wholly God”, or that obviously irreconcilable scriptures are both/all still true (for “Bible believers”), or that the gospel accounts are to be credited.
When you’re dealing with a Christians, you know from the outset that you’re dealing with a group that has a high capacity for suspension of logic and reason.
Btw, I don’t mean this as a joke or an insult. It’s simply true.
Maybe in the same sense that being a physicist requires believing in nonsensical, irrational, or contradictory concepts, eg. that light is both a wave and a particle, or that time passes faster or slower depending on how fast you’re moving, or that weirdness about quantum mechanics.
:rolleyes: Saying so doesn’t make it so.
Yes, I would agree with that. Same for Buddhism. That’s why I say I don’t mean it as an insult. But it is certainly true that Christianity requires an irrational “leap of faith” and the ability to hold contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously. So this instance (+Christ +evolution) should not be particularly surprising.
I second Hugh’s sentiments. I’m still mostly in my pissed-off-at-Christianity phase to be honest, but I’m very glad to have people like Polycarp and Siege around. You’ve (unknowingly) helped me to deal with my reactionary anger about Christianity, and for what it’s worth, I thank you for presenting me with an image of the beauty of faith.
My point, though…there’s a third reason too, Siege. Some fundamentalists (I define a fundamentalist as he who believes in Biblical inerrancy, that we are living in the end times, millenialists, etc) believe that those fossils may have been planted by Satan in an attempt to trick us. I’m not sure if this belief is at all common outside of some fundamentalist sects, but the ‘Satan is tempting us’ was a common meme for most anything that went against church doctrine.
I wasn’t aware that this had been proven. I didn’t think there was near enough “evidence” that survived billions of years to prove conclusively that we all share a common ancestor. I’m not saying it is true or not true, but just from my very limited understanding of evolution (I subscribe to Scientific American, aside from that, I don’t really get science information) concrete fossil evidence or “proof” like you seem to be asserting doesn’t actually exist.
Now that’s not to say it’s not the accepted scientific viewpoint, I just didn’t know there was actually “proof” of it, as in real physical proof, not postulation.
Now you know. 
It’s not like it’s a single eureka piece of evidence and it’s not so much fossils that confirm it (although the fossil record meets all predictions for common descent) as it is the advent of genetic sciences. If you feel so inclined, google on retroviruses for an example.
Well, what is contradictory about believing in Christ AND evolution? Are the two really that opposed to each other?
For the record, I agree that Christians believe a lot of illogical, weird things. In the words of Tertullian, “I believe for it is absurd.” I just don’t think evolution contradicts believing in Christ at all.
This thread is predicated upon a lot of presupposing of what people many thousands of years ago believed.
Something I have found over the course of my life is that I have been unable to discuss certain subjects with people who had a stronger knowledge of them, but it was not because I didn’t understand it, it’s because I didn’t question it prior, and took it as self-evident. Sometimes the understanding is so fundamental that you don’t take it apart, and oftentimes the person who does take it apart and enhances all of our understanding of it, is the one who understood it the least to begin with. In order to take part in discussions of concepts that I have very easily taken to, I have found that I have to go back and learn the vocabulary, because it is my vocabulary that is lacking.
So the point I am trying to make is, that Moses may very well have had an understanding of concepts that we do not necessarily credit him as having, he just lacked the vocabulary with which to express them in any way meaningful enough to those around him, that his words would have lasted into modern times. So only the things that he was able to usefully communicate to those who would redact his words through the ages have survived.
In short, we don’t know what those from the past understood or didn’t, unless it was passed to us in a meaningful way that we were then able to interpret. Trying to base what we believe on what we think our ancestors would WANT us to think, is a futile gesture.
Erek
Interesting note redact was dictionary.com word of the day September 12, 2001
I keep hearing about these people- I have never met one in my life. Either that or the subject has never come up with them. The most Fundist churches I know in the area teach Young Earth Creationism w/ dinosaurs living alongside humanity & mostly dying out after the Flood.
Would it be churlish of me to say that Moses did not write Genesis?
I think that Tris was speaking figuratively but just for the record, the Pentateuch is probably a post-exilic creation. The Hebrew language didn’t even exist in the alleged time of Moses.
I heard the “God put the fossils there to test us” thing as a small child in a Southern Baptist sunday school in Lousiana but that was more than 30 years ago. I haven’t heard it posited seriously lately.
That’s why I talked about the people who redacted Moses. For all I know Moses might be a mythical character more or less invented during the Babylonian captivity to inspire the slaves. The only things I ever take as being true, are the things that I am experiencing in the given moment. As far as I am concerned my own birth is as mythical as Prometheus or Moses. Hell, so is Yesterday, the Chinese food I ate an hour ago is more compelling because I can feel it in my stomach, but I’ve never been to China, I only accept that it exists based upon a wealth of anecdotal evidence.
It was a possible explanation for fossils/ evolutionary theory put forth by JW’s (I was raised as one and have happily heathen for the last ten years).
Yes. 
Really?!?! Was it in the literature or was it just in the teachings of KH elders? I always thought JWs accepted YoungEarthism with dinosaurs (btw, technically JW YEC teaching is that Earth is 48000 years old- each Creation Day was 7000 years, and we are around 6000 years into Day Seven- “THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE”, 1940s.)
You’re not looking in the right place. I’ve actually heard people seriously make this arguement.
Shoot, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember if it was in the literature (if it were, I would guess the book they wrote specifically about refuting evolution), but I do remember the elders bringing it up (which if problematic - it was known that going to college was strongly frowned upon, but the literature often gave a gentler version. IOW, the official line was not always the same as the unspoken line, which, now that I stop to think about it, makes it hard to say if the ‘fossils are a test of faith’ is/ was a widespread JW belief or more of a quirk.) In either case, Satan takes a very active role in trying to lead people off the path, and does so through many means: music, ‘worldly’ friends, school, apostate literature, sports, etc…
I wish I could give you a better answer.