As I’ve mentioned in past threads, I work with a self-proclaimed “evangelical” Christian. This isn’t really a problem, in that he’s a super-nice guy, a hard worker, and generally a very interesting guy.
But, he has/had some very non-mainstream views on the age of the earth, evolution, science, etc…
I worked on him for a while myself (being Christian, but not particularly conservative), but didn’t have a lot of success.
Then I read about Francis Collins’ book ‘The Language of God’, and suggested that my co-worker read it.
He’s quite intriqued, although it seemed in a kind of “let me see how ridiculous this guy is” kind of way.
Time passes. Now, 7 months later, we’re at lunch, and he starts telling me about how he really is a big fan of Collins, and how he’s one of the most interesting and fresh Christian thinkers in a long time, and about how no serious Christian thinkers who are pondering science vs. religion are actually espousing the “young earth” idea, etc…
I was flabbergasted… this was the same guy who’d sent me Creationist websites to try to debunk my debate points, when we were discussing this 7 months ago.
Who knew? Apparently Creationists can change their spots!
The key to evolution is realizing that people who talk about “missing links” or “no way to get a whole eyeball via evolution” are easy to refute.
There are such fine gradations of everything being discovered constantly.
Find a diagram of the parts of the eye being built up from one animal to the next to the next, and the wind is out of their sails.
Same with gradations of non-life to organic molecules to strands of dna to viruses…
Same for opposable thumbs being built up in fine gradations from one primate to the next.
Okay, some math. If it takes seven months from the example above, 7 X 500,000,000 = 3,500,000,000 months, or about 292,000,000 years. You know, if we did them one at a time.
Or maybe by that time, we would have evolved into something completely different and they can’t deny it at that point.
Seriously, I am a Theistic evolutionist, and philosophically, have much more in common with Young-Earth Creationists than with Naturalists. The process how we came to exist isn’t nearly as important as to whether we came from a Creator or from mindless energy.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this is the line of thought that states something to the effect of “Something started the big bang” and “Evolution as intelligent design”?
Just curious. I think that creating humans through the process of evolution makes much more sense in the fact of sturdiness and strength of the species instead of just conjuring them up from sugar and spice and everything nice… whether it was planned all along or just an accident.
No, that’s the really astounding thing. That day at lunch, he went on to explain that he agreed with Collins’ “God in the Gaps” explanation of why intelligent design is incorrect.
I’m telling you, I’m completely floored by this. I can’t take that much credit- Francis Collins did the really heavy lifting, all I did was point my friend in the right direction.
