Surely evolutionary theory is utterly incompatible with standard Pauline theology, as understood and taught by many evangelical churches?
God created a perfect world (Eden). Adam and Eve (i.e. humans) were part of this perfect order. In Eden there was no sin… and as such, no pain or death or suffering.
Paul is pretty clear that death and disease are the results of sin, and specifically human sin. This is why Christ had to suffer and die on the cross… as propitiation for Adam and Eve’s sinful acts. As such, we can be free of death (a restoration that extends to the whole of creation).
But this suggests that before Adam and Eve existed, there was no sin… and thus no pain, or death, or suffering.
The fact that countless millions of animals experienced pain and death before humans appeared suggests that death did not enter the world as a result of human action, but was there from the start. Which implies that God did not actually create a “perfect” world.
If death is part of life, if suffering and pain are integral to a perfect creation, why the need for Christ’s death? You can argue that it’s in the spiritual realm that Christ’s death has its effect, but Paul is pretty clear that it’s a victory over physical death. But science shows that the “perfect” order to which this restoration will apply never existed, meaning Christ’s death was meaningless.
I don’t want to debate my understanding of evolution or pretend that a casual example in a post here represents that understanding. FWIW I can assure you that if we don’t find monotremes all over the place, they probably developed locally in isolation. What…their entire reproductive model crapped out everywhere else when they moved out from the Ark? Monotremes used to be all over the place but the Australian/New Guinea ones are the only ones left? And repeated for millions of other species? That’s ridiculous.
But I want to return to your topic: “…evolution is consistent with the Bible.”
No, it’s not.
The Bible has the duration of the timeline wrong. It has the order wrong. It has the geography wrong. It has the cosmology wrong. It has a false story about a flood covering the entire earth wiping out all living things except one family and a bunch of animals on ark–this is at absolute odds with evolution. And other errors too numerous to mention.
Now perhaps you meant to say this:
“Evolution is consistent with the Bible as long as you don’t take the Bible literally, and as long as you assume that wherever the Bible disagrees with evolution, it must be using poetic or allegoric language.”
I’ll grant you that. What’s to debate, then? The Bible, by those holding to that definition, cannot be wrong.
I am of two minds on this. The first is that while Jesus was preaching a new and different message regarding the observance of Judaic laws, he also became a political figure when proclamations of his divinity and Messianic nature reached the Jewish rulers and the Roman occupiers. While his crucifixion may have originally been political in nature (the death of a Jew seen as the Messiah appeases to Roman occupying government) it was eventually seen to serve a spiritual purpose: to redeem individuals from the wrongs they commit when they have no way to redeem themselves. The Crucifixion became a way for people to admit imperfection, wrongdoing and guilt without the risk of falling into a self-destructive spiral (I’m a sinner, there’s nothing I can do about it, so why bother?). It has become a way in which we can forgive each other and get on with life.
My second take on this is the result of the theology I was raised with. Through the liturgy I grew up in, the whole idea of Original Sin, added post hoc to Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden, never was an issue. I/we didn’t care about why mankind is sinful to begin with. I/we were more focused on incorporating God’s will into our lives and living them out, after admitting our wrongs and receiving God’s forgiveness and unconditional love.
So the short answer is that my theology and life are based on a post-Resurrection view of Jesus that doesn’t require Original Sin the way that Crucifixion-based Christian theology does. Jesus’ death and resurrection is not at all meaningless, because it is a constant reminder to me of the possibility of living a resurrected life after having experienced spiritual death in the form of sin.
Is God big enough to mean what He says? Is it more likely that a God who is far above all, would have to distort the story of His magnificent creation (that He wants man to know about), or is it more likely that man has it wrong?
I haven’t read the whole thread, so apologies if this has come up already. The biblical creation story is inconsistent with evolution in that the bible says that god intended to create humans whereas evolution has no aim to create a specific type of organism. Rather, those organisms that are best adapted to their environment will survive. If the environment still favored large reptiles today, then we wouldn’t be here.
The OP therefore does not accept the actual theory of evolution. Instead, he believes in a close relative that allows god to nudge things along so they turn out exactly as they did.
Yeah, agree with this, but this only true for a literal reading of the bible. The number of Christians who take the bible literally is much smaller than the number who don’t. If you don’t take the stories literally, then the bible is about as consistent with evolution as Grimm’s fairy tales. If you do take it literally, then there’s a lot more wrong than whether or not it agrees with evolution.
My point was that saying the bible was consistent with evolution was wrong because they’re not on the same level, one’s a well tested scientific theory and the other is a book of stories written by superstitious men centuries ago.
Shrug, this is just same argument you always hear from Christians. ‘Well, it may have happened that way, but god did it.’ They can’t prove it, and so far it can’t be proven wrong. If that’s what they need to sleep at night, fine.
Scientific consensus holds that whales and birds evolved from land animals, yet the biblical account has them appearing one day (or many thousands of years, by your interpretation) earlier.
It is, as you say, a myth, a fable, composed thousands of years prior to any scientific understanding of evolution. This does not gibe with being a “simplified” version of “the evolution theory,” let alone an account revealed or inspired by an omniscient creator.
No, I’m not. I fully accept that the creation story is a fable. I could also accept it as allegory, although I haven’t seen any convincing arguments as to what the allegorical truths behind the creation myth are.
Can you quote me a scripture on this? By what authority are you making this assertion? Does Jesus exclude people who believe in evolution from salvation?
Ahem. Quoting scripture would be Christian turf, not the eminent domain of a poster who’s apparently on the atheist side
But what the eych-ee-double-hockey-sticks.
Genesis 1.26-27
Doesn’t really sit well with “we most probably evolved over millions of years from apes, themselves descendants of small mammals who survived the dinosaurs, not because we were meant to be but out of essentially environmental coincidence ; and indeed are still further evolving into something else”, does it ?
Nor does the “dominion over all beings” reconcile with the idea that we’re just one random species among billions, no more no less - but I’ll admit that’s more philosophy than hard science.
Now, I’m being disingenuous here. I know you were picking nits over Rand’s formulation, just as I (and you) know that by “Christian” Rand meant “Christian who takes the Bible as litteral truth”. I believe you were angling to say that one can be a Christian without taking everything in it at face value. But (and I’m playing Devil’s advocate here) if you’re on the opinion that some of the Bible is hard fact, and some is to be taken with a grain of salt because God was dumbing it down for the teeming millions… how do you know which is which ?
I agree with Kobal2’s post, but I thought I would respond to you directly anyway.
Evolution is a process of “descent with modification.” Google that phrase for some good reading. In short, it means that over a long period of time the species of organisms that live in a certain environment are those that are best suited to the environment. For example, at the bottom of the ocean some fish make their own light (because one freaky fish was born with a random genetic variation that caused it to make its own light and it survived better than other fish, so its genes spread).
Therefore, according to the theory of evolution, the only reason humans came into existence in the first place was that they were better suited to their environment than other organisms. Evolutionary theory does not require the existence of humans.
The Bible, on the other hand, posits that god made man in his image. Therefore, if one is a Christian that believes in the Bible, one must believe that god decided to make man. He couldn’t have decided to make man using evolution as described by the theory of evolution because that theory posits that there is no predetermined endpoint. So, a Christian could only believe in “evolution light,” which is a gradual process where one species turned into another with humans as the predetermined end point.
It’s far more likely that there is no god and that the biblical version of how things are is all a fairytale. What reason would god have to distort anything? Why wouldn’t he want man to know the details? Only flim-flam men behave that way!
Most of the arguments I’ve seen so far here rely on the Bible to (dis)prove the existence of God. While this might fly in inerrantist-fundimentalist style Christianity or Madeline O’Hare style atheism, it does not fly when one looks at the Bible from the point of view of those who wrote it. The Bible is a divinely-inspired human document that attempts to describe something that is beyond human comprehension. It is a record of how people experienced their spiritual lives in the environment they lived in rather than someone attempting to prove the existence of God using Aristotelian and Platonic logic.
The idea that God somehow has to conform to human perceptions or to how God is portrayed in the Bible is misguided at best. The same type of argument exists in Islam as it explains why the Qu’ran can only be read in Arabic. The standard explanation is that Arabic was the language that God speaks. The other way to look at it that God spoke to Mohammed in Arabic because that is the language Mohammed spoke. So too, God is presented in the Bible because that is how the authors were able to understand God, not because the Bible presents an accurate or exact perception of the true nature of God. If both Islam and Christianity believe in a transcendent, omnipotent and omniscient God who made the Universe and Man within it, then it does not follow that this same God must conform to human scripture and belief.
This is simply incorrect. The Bible is considered to be a history and a prescription on how to live your life only by those who don’t believe it to be the true Word of God. For those who believe it is God’s literal Word, sent to us from God, it not “intended” to be anything, it simply is God’s Word to us to lead us to salvation in our Lord Jesus Christ. Note that leading us to a redemption is not the same as “how to live one’s life”. Redemption has to do with the state of your soul, not the actions of your physical body. While the two are of course related, I believe most would agree that the state of your soul has more influence on your actions than vice versa.
Now, the Bible of course contains historical information about our world as well. And unfortunately, these days the majority of our world disregards it as allegory or poetry intended to relay moral lessons to the reader. The Truth is, however, you cannot logically state that you believe in Bible wholeheartedly, and then state that you believe certain parts of the Bible to not be true. With the exception of the passages where it explicitly stated that what is being said is being said in parable, that Bible does not portray itself as anything other than literal. So when we cut and paste what we believe to be true based on our pre-existing beliefs, then we are not being led to redemption as we are simply using the Bible to confirm what we already believe, and dismissing what we don’t as something that wasn’t intended to be taken literally.
Pardon the ramble, but the way this relates to the current topic under discussion is that the Bible is NOT consistent with evolution in the manner in which evolution is commonly thought of today. It does not negate the possibility of evolution, but it does negate the belief that we evolved from apes, or any other animal, over the course of millions of years. One piece of information that we learn from the Bible that, in my feeble understanding, could lead to significant discoveries in the field of evolutionary study, is that Bible DOES NOT say that God created man out of nothing. It DOES say that God created man from dirt and clay; and woman out of man’s rib. Now, this may sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but is it honestly any more unbelievable than saying we evolved from another creature? I don’t believe so. Especially if you are a Christian who believes that God ultimately created the heavens and earth.
My final thought is that we need to be consistent with our scientific beliefs. Many of the greatest scientific minds of the world will tell you that there is no law of gravity, simply a theory of gravity that is being proven constantly and consistently. This is a bit of an extreme example but the sentiment rings true. So many “intellectuals” have a 100% belief in a theory of evolution that has never even come close to being proven; a theory that cannot be proven without millions of years of scientific documentation and study. We have simply made extrapolations based on the information we have available. We are so quick to make positive statements based on what we “know” as we continue to seek to be thought of as “having all the answers” and “leaning on our own understanding”. To me, the most logical and intelligent path of knowledge is to say that: 1. We believe what we know. 2. We’re open to the possibility that we could easily be wrong. 3. We understand that there are some things that we simply won’t be able to understand. 4. We’re okay with not always having all the answers.
The theory of evolution is inconsistent with the Word of God.
It is not necessary to understand the Bible to be a believer in Christ. The message of salvation is very simple and is that Jesus died for your sins if you accept Him as your savior. At which point that person would be considered a Christian. Understanding how literal the scriptures are comes after that, after receiving the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the one who reveals the truth as He sees fit. He may or may not go into how literal His Word is with a individual believer. So it is entirely possible that a Holy Spirit filled believer in Jesus could think evolution is consistent with scriptures, because in their walk with Christ the Holy Spirit never had a need to reveal the truth of this particular matter IMHO.
