I would agree. Since I see no one doing that, I am not sure of this statement’s relevance to this discussion. In particular, your concern about cherry picking scriptures according to personal belief does not seem relevant. There is a very large body of elaborated belief (and a much smaller kernel of essential doctrine) that has never depended on a literal acceptance of all scripture. (In my tradition, for example, sola scriptura has never been a basis for theological tradition and was actually an aspect of a heretical schism.) My personal beliefs are quite orthodox for the essential teachings–which are based on a few thousand years of interpretation of scriptures and my religion is coherent.
Here’s something interesting from hindu mythology - the Avatars of vishnu have a rough resemblance to the evolutionary ‘stages’(if i may use that term)… let me see how much i remember
The first one was a FISH (ocean-life); the second one was a turtle(amphibian); next came a pig(mammal); then finally (after a half-human and some kinda pigmy human) comes the full HUMAN Avatar.
i have found this interesting.
I think as has been said before, ‘accepting’ evolution may not be mutually exclusive of ALL religious ‘beliefs’.
I’m a real naif in this area but isn’t establishing a coherent system by disregarding parts of scripture sort of “cherry picking?”
For example, aren’t the “essential teaching” whatever we decide is “essential?” That is, I don’t think you are compelled to accept any particular sect’s scriptural interpretation however long it’s history.
The issue is that it is the entirety of the sect that does the picking and choosing. Many people write down thoughts or stories or hymns that they feel are important to understand the divine. The group who shares those beliefs look at all the works that have been written and declares that this work or that one says something very important that must be preserved to pass our belief to future generations. Within that work, there may be more and less profound messages, aspects of stories that were included for narrative or poetic flow and not to make a theological point, hyperbole or other literary devices. So, along with the writings, additional commentaries spring up to clarify the exact position of the believing group on different issues. Judaism has given us the Talmud. Islam has its Hadith. Christianity (at least in its two older forms) have the writings of the Fathers combined with councils and synods that point to the core truths and explicate them.
This is not to say that an outsider cannot dismiss this as simply people picking and choosing what to believe. I am not arguing that any of this makes or proves scripture “true.” However, the faith or beliefs of the group are carried forward by the group, not by individuals (as indicated by the word “personally” in earlier exchanges).
What I am pointing out is that many people, today, are influenced by a rather small and recent movement among one group of believers who put forth the idea that the scriptures came first and that they must be taken literally, ignoring the traditional meanings that have been imputed to those scriptures for hundreds or thousands of years. The scriptures proceeded from the earliest faith and provide a touchstone for belief, but the belief of the group does not reside in the scriptures (except in a number of odd groups who have lost their understanding of how scripture is composed or has been used through the ages).
FYI, turtles are reptiles. The English language is a bit conflicted about turtles, in that we sometimes use tortoise for the land dwelling variety and turtle for the aquatic type, but often “turtle” for both. Either way, they’re all reptiles, even if they live an amphibious lifestyle (not to be confused with true amphibians, which are a seperate class of animal altogether).
Reading this in the light of a new day, I can see that the statement is obviously false. People here have accepted evolution and still have religious faith. Ergo, accepting evolution is not destructive of religious faith.
Maybe so but It does seem to me that the interpretation that is accepted is an individual choice. In addition it appears that even in the general acceptance of an interpretation there is a lot of individual selection of which parts of it to regard as important and which parts can be blown off as trivial. The phrase “cafeteria Catholic” didn’t arise from a vacuum. Although there is no such phrase in common use I would assume there are also "cafeteria Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, " etc.
No argument whatever about this.
Are you sure? It seems to me to be more accurate to say that they evolved in such a way as to comprehend… Are you not assigning a purpose to said evolution when you say “in order specifically to…?” Are you postulating intent to the evolutionary process?
I bow to your semantic correction. Just goes to show how hard it is to speak about evolution w/o making that mistake. After all, language didn’t evolved in order specifically to communicate ideas about evolution. 
Good one. And you’re right, it is hard to do. I don’t know why, but whenever I hear something like that, it just sticks out.
I understand. I try to avoid that kind of language, but it just slips in too easily. Especially in the fast paced exchanges that can take place in communications on a message board.
Ain’t it though. Even Isaac Asimov in one of his essays was describing the evolution of primates fell into it. He wrote that in primates the eyes were brought around to the front of the head for binocular vision. In a 1000 word essay on a complex idea shortcuts are necessary and cause all sorts of misunderstandings.
If you keep letting yourself get convinced by such things as demonstrated facts, you are going to have lots of trouble in religious arguments!
Tris
Nice one, Triskademus!
Let me explain how my acceptance of evolution deepens my religious faith. I’m a programmer by profession. In fact, I’m building a scheduling system today at work. I’ve seen my skills and my code evolve over the years from simple, bare-bones systems to increasingly complex systems. I’ve seen the code behind projects grow in complexity as requirements are fulfilled and the needs of the users are considered. I’ve also written my share of temporary code which is used for setting up one part of a project and then discarded when that section is complete. I know that when I’m working on a very complex project, I’ll build one section, get it up and running, then build the next section, then tie it all together and the order in which I build these sections isn’t necessarily the order in which they’ll be used.
The current project uses a log on screen. Ten years ago, this would simply have gone out to a table and checked to see if the password matched the user id. Nowadays, a standard log on screen for me allows three tries before kicking the user out, letting the user know how many tries he or she has left, lets the user change his or her password, and defaults to the user id of the last person who used that computer. The code that does this is dependent on a bunch of other functions. If I were looking at this from the sort of mindset which I gather opponents of evolution have, I could say, “This can’t have been built up over time – look at all the individual components which are required to make it work right.” Since I built it, I know how and why those components came about and how (or if) they worked before those components were in place. No doubt as my skills continue to improve, I’ll discard things I’m doing now and replace them with better and more efficient methods.
If I can see a microcosm of evolution in the process of building a piece of software which lets people do their jobs better, why shouldn’t I be able to see God’s hand in the process of evolution which led to our world being as it is? If I can see change over time in my own, limited, extremely mortal work, why shouldn’t change over time be present in God’s unlimited, immortal work? I take pleasure in creating things, in seeing them take shape under my hands, whether it’s an elegant bit of code crafted for my employer, or a sweater I’ve knit by hand for a friend. As a Christian, I believe I am created in God’s image, not so much in physical form (God would not put up with this knee!) as in soul. If my soul takes pleasure in creation, surely God’s does.
CJ
This is Michael Shermer’s take on it. Good read.
Hey,
What happened to my last post?
I wanted to tell Cricetus how pleased I was that he found some substance in my supposition. He called it a cloud sandwich. well a cloud can be seen, touched, photographed and analyzed. Now what did he put the clouds inbetween? 
Monavis
Shame on me; I guess I wasn’t wide enough awake when I went to this post. Looking in the right place would have been so much brighter. I apologize. :smack:
The truth is the truth. It brooks no paradoxes or incompatibilities. The paradoxes come with a lack of understanding.
Science and Religion are not incompatible in any way. What is known as “The Scientific Method” was developed over thousands of years by people with relative degrees of religious belief.
Occultists generally refer to their study as “Occult Science”
Occult
Main Entry: 1oc·cult
Pronunciation: &-'k<, ä-
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Latin occultare, frequentative of occulere
: to shut off from view or exposure : COVER, ECLIPSE
- oc·cult·er noun
Science
Main Entry: sci·ence
Pronunciation: 'sI-&n(t)s
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin scientia, from scient-, sciens having knowledge, from present participle of scire to know; probably akin to Sanskrit chyati he cuts off, Latin scindere to split – more at SHED
1 : the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
So basically, Occult Science means “Hidden Knowledge”. Those trying to debunk religion and the occult are not doing it scientifically. They are taking their own dogmatic views from wherever they learned it and parading it as science. This generally works best when speaking for an uninformed audience, in the same way that religious demagogues have been doing it for years. There is no conflict between religion and science, there is a conflict between people trying to gain political influence in some circle or another, but this does not apply to the whole of religion or science.
If it is not true then it is not true, and anyone in the pursuit of the truth who comes across it will discard it regardless of what background they might feel a certain affinity toward.
The word Supernatural as it is most commonly used is a nonsense word, just as with truth, something is either natural or it is not. How can it be “extranatural”? This makes it quite easy to debunk the “Supernatural” as being untrue because the basic premise of being supernatural is simply silly. If you take the first definition of supernatural:
1 : of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil
Then anything that is completely theoretical is “supernatural” because it is not observable with one’s vision.
I have never once found an incompatibility between Science and religion. I learn new things and they expand upon my old knowledge, or they debunk something I used to believe, but the truth is the truth.
Deeper within our brain in the “lower” cognitive functions exists levels of thought that are not expressed by words, such as the emotional operations. These forms of conciousness are where the ‘feelings’ of our body are transported to the brain to be turned into ‘thoughts’.
So a lot of what is called “religious belief” is based off of ideas presented to a person in a form that they have no capacity to explain. While their attempt to explain what they have seen might be lacking, it does not necessarily mean that they themselves are incorrect or do not know what they are talking about, simply that they are confusing everyone they are trying to relate it to. These ideas end up becoming our myths and allegories. To hold anyone to some sort of external philisophical standard is ludicrous, especially when the person attempting to do so has already stated that they themselves do not believe in the standard they are attempting to apply to another.
Evolution is not random. I choose who I go to bed with, I’ve gone to bed with multiple partners and I have never bred with any of them. That is hardly random. The only place there are incompatibilities are in the arguments of semantics. If one believes a word means one thing, and another believes the word means another, then a conflict arises, but the way it actually works empirically, that’s the divine truth, whether you learned it from the scientific method, or talked to God during Meditation/Prayer is irrelevant.
A lot of people could benefit from a far deeper study of relativity. The essence of which is the joining of what otherwise seems incompatible. I doubt that relativity can be debunked, I think anyone capable of debunking relativity would find that in the end, it wasn’t relativity that was incorrect, but it was they who misapplied the theory. The question of whether or not it is all random or by design can be answered by the theory of relativity. In otherwords, you choose to believe whether or not it is random, or you are predestined to believe that it is random due to the accident of chemistry and physics that created you.
Erek
I’ve read the Bible; I know it has two contradictory accounts of creation within the first two chapters of Genesis.
I heard this statement once before, and after some questions and a discussion it seems that he thought there were 2 versions because Gen1 states that vegetation was created on the 3rd day and man on the 6th, while Gen2 seems to indicate that vegetation was created after man. But upon examination it is clear that chapter 2 is actually adding details about chapter one, specifically that some plants rees were not created on day 3 but added only after man was formed. This includes all the trees in the garden and also the field plants and herbs which require a man to tend them. Chapter 2 is therefore not contradictory, but simply provides further information, details, and exceptions not given in chapter 1. Is this the same reason you made the statement or is there something else?
I’d still vote for the bloke who can design a bacterium. Or a proto-bacterium. Or the “soup” the old bacterium crawled out of. Or the crouton on which he hitched a ride. Whatever. Origins crave a creator.