This is kinda of research question. I think some people don’t believe in God because of evolution. Because if evolution was not around, then people would really have to take a hard look on how they got here.
Sure there are other religions but I am talking about atheist here.
So here is the question is one of the main reasons you don’t believe in God evolution?
Second part, if evolution was proved absolutely WRONG would you be more inclined to believe in God?
If you say no, how would you explain everything and you being here?
Gee, I know a lot of other atheists, and I don’t think evolution enters into our reasoning at all—at least as a main cause. As for me, I have many reasons for not believing in gods, and evolution is the least of it (don’t many Christians believe that their God created the evolutionary process?).
" . . . if evolution was proved absolutely WRONG would you be more inclined to believe in God?"
You know, Bill, it’s more or less traditional when starting a thread of this type to say that it was inspired by “a discussion I was having over at the Pizza Parlor” (for those who are interested, the link to the specific discussion can be found in the Wildest Bill Pit thread). It just helps to clarify the reasons for your topic.
IANAC, and IANAA, so I suppose my take on things doesn’t matter to you, Bill, but frankly the one has nothing to do with the other, IMHO. My religious beliefs have nothing to do with my understanding of science (and, frankly, evolution has never particularly interested me that much, so I haven’t studied it intensively), and a change in how the scientific world understands how we got where we are isn’t (most likely) going to change what I believe.
Also, it isn’t polite to refer to Atheism as a religion. Just FYI, and for future reference.
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**Gee, I know a lot of other atheists, and I don’t think evolution enters into our reasoning at all—at least as a main cause.
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So it is a cause though?
Yes, some do.
Well I am taking a shot in the dark here. Say some evolution scientist you really respected found new proof that evolution was not possible. How about that?
Also I agree with what poly said can we not make this a creation vs evolution debate. This is more just a fact finding issue.
Wildest Bill, I think your question “” . . . if evolution was proved absolutely WRONG would you be more inclined to believe in God?" is a little invalid. As I understand it, evolution has pretty much been proved, on the small scale with fruitlies, other insects, dog breeds for that matter, and on the large scale with the unraveling of the human genome.
Unless you are talking about disproving the proof first…
Bill, my own atheism has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution—as others have said, a good many Christians believe in evolution.
If a scientist I really respected (as opposed to one I just thought was, you know, really cute) “found new proof that evolution was not possible,” I would would wait to see what the rest of the scientific community had to say about it. But it would take more than that to make me believe in the existence of gods.
People think about how they got here anyway. Evolution hardly answers everyone’s angst about “why am I here.” Even when they “believe it.” Not that I think there’s a question of whether or not to believe it. Just making a point.
This sounds like an attempt to make the statement that if it weren’t for evolutionary theories, more people would believe in god, and therefore, we’d be better off. Is this the plan?
In any case, my belief in god or lack thereof has nothing to do with the details of the evolutionary record. And just for the record, while there are theories OF evolution (i.e., Darwinian, Lamarkian) I don’t believe anyone really believes evolution itself is only a theory. Thus making this a moot point. People decide to believe or not believe in gods based on their own spiritual leanings, not the fossil record.
Nope. Since evolutionary theories aren’t particularly a factor in mine or likely anyone’s religious decision making, I don’t think it would have much affect on people jumping on the church-going bandwagon. Only my opinion though.
I assume if there were some eureka moment in which scientists realized that they were mistaken, it would be because they’d found evidence of some OTHER theory of…well…of evolution. Therefore, that’s how I’d explain it.
Agnostic, and biology has nothing to do with that - I try not to get natural science mixed up with metaphysics.
You do, of course, realize that even if someone were to “disprove” evolution (and good luck with that!), that wouldn’t make Genesis any more likely than say, my Viking forefathers’ cosmologies describing how the Earth was created from the body of the giant Ymir ?
There’s a gigantic logical gap between “evolution ain’t possible” and “god created everything, more or less as is, 6,000 years ago.” Even assuming that somebody conclusively disproved evolutionary theory, the only rational, scientific response is to ask “Well how did we get here then?” At that point, you go where the evidence takes you. And it quite clearly does not take you to Jack Chick on evolution. (Fixed your link, Tymp.)
Nope. I don’t believe in God because I can’t find any evidence to support such a belief. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing supernatural going on anywhere.
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Not really. There are plenty of areas that science is at a loss to explain. Look at the concept of Dark Matter. In a nutshell, we’re pretty convinced we have a good idea about the way gravity works, yet galactic structures indicate that either there’s a lot more mass out there or gravity works much differently than we think it does. The working hypothesis at this point is that there is indeed a lot of stuff that we can’t see, called dark matter. Various candidates from really massive black holes to microscopic black holes to planetary bodies to neutrinos with mass have been proposed as possibly being the culprits, but the truth is we simply do not know what dark matter really is, or if further work on the theory of gravitation will reveal an error on our parts, or if better measuring techniques might drastically change the scope of the problem.
If evolution were to be “proved wrong,” it could only be done by finding something else that fits all the evidence better. Considering the smount of evidence we are talking about, that is extremely unlikely. In any case, God has proven extraordinarily reluctant to provide any verifiable evidence of himself to date, so I’d say the ball is entirely in his court. God is certainly a possibility, but if he did whip us all up in six days, he created the universe to be intentionally misleading.
As to origins, we can live with the fact that we don’t have all the answers, and we aren’t ready to throw their hands in the air and assume supernatural causes. It seems to me that it is far more reasonable to say “We can’t be absolutely certain how we got here, although we can make some pretty educated guesse based on the evidence,” than to seek certitude in a belief system with no supporting evidence and many problems of its own.
You know, in the past 90 minutes there have been 11 replies to the OP. At that rate, there’ll be 352 replies in the next 48 hours (in other words, it’ll be just like every other Wildest Bill thread).
As for the OP, all that “evolution” suggests (and you really should be more specific about what you’re referring to) is that a literal interpretation of Genesis would be wrong. Beyond that, it doesn’t preclude belief in Christianity.
My initial response to this would be simply, prove evolution absolutely wrong and I’ll answer the question.
But, for the sake of argument, granting your premise, I suppose if evolution were proven absolutely wrong I would have to break down and admit the earth was created when Odin and his brothers put Ymir’s corpse into Ginnungagap.
See above. I personally think the Norse creation myth sounds as likely as the story in Genesis.
I think that evolution is mostly correct. (On the short term type stuff that we can see, nobody’s got any other theory that explains things like bacterial resistance to antibiotics. It makes sense to me to say that evolution probably explains a lot of the long term stuff too.)
I think that it isn’t the whole story (certain things remain unexplained, so it certainly isn’t a complete theory, but I don’t want to hijack this thread so I’ll leave it at that).
Neither of these facts has anything to do with my (deeply held) belief in God. If I started confusing the different places in my head in which I keep science and religion, I’d have serious problems both in the lab and the synogogue ;j.
If suddenly somebody were to provide a more convincing theory that fits with all of the data we’ve got now (as opposed to evolution, which fits with most of it), then fine, we should go with that on the science front, but if that’s what brings someone closer to the religion of their choice, I think that that is awfully arbitrary. I doubt that said theory would show any one faith to be more correct than the other.
If evolution were shown to be 100% correct as-is, why would this preclude belief in God, anyway? If the opposite were to happen, why should this dictate a belief in God? Scientist-types tend to be very very leery of supernatural causes, since by definition those tend to be out of their sphere of things. Should this theory be falsified, a new one will be proposed. That’s all.
The original creation myths did not contradict evolution, but when priest-craft decided to make God a function of his hidden mystery (ie, life as test, judgment, beginning-end, etc) then the primitive idea of evolution contradicted their version of God, so evolution had to be contradicted to establish this specific theological version of God. This was done by simply adjusting (spinning) the factual story of Adam and Eve to represent literal non-historical creations, rather than historical symbols of the feudal colonialism of hunter-gatherers, which was merely done by enforcement of literalism.
If we assume that God contradicts evolution, does it follow that evolution contradicts God? No, since the possibility of God(s) still exists if we accept evolution (but it is a passive interpretation of God). However, the possibility of evolution becomes anathema if we carelessly accept that God contradicts evolution.
Evolution cannot be proven “wrong” (disproven) by knowledge (fact) or reason (understanding). Likewise, God cannot be proven to exist by knowledge or by reasons. If something calling itself “God” appeared today in nature, we could still have doubts, or think it might be an alien trick. So, the only real way for anyone to “disprove” evolution is to take away our ability to fathom it (which only a “god” could “do” and not by simply appearing). One such disproof of God infers that we can’t fathom his necessity, therefore God is confusion, absent and void, and therefore moot, and either does not exist, or is in the mode that we cannot make any assertions about God whatsoever (agnosticism or deism).
I would explain everything by saying the idea of God evolved by falsely accepting two contradictory assumptions: That nature is the divine realm, but that the divine realm is unnatural or opposed to it, which can be historically proven, thus proving evolution disjunctively.
Just for the record, I’m an atheist because I’m too rational to believe in fairy tales, wishful thinking, and religions (which are little more than fairy tales and wishful thinking in a prettier package, IMO). The fact that evolution annoys people like Wildest Bill is just a fringe benefit.
Wildest, the fact that someone believes in evolution doesn’t mean that they automatically don’t believe in God. Evolution and Creationism are (or should be IMO) superfluous in debating the existance or not of God. Take me for example, I am an atheist. I see no rational evidence for the existance of a God, none at all. I believe in evolution because it is the best theory in existance which explains all we know about how we came into being as we are now. On the other hand there’s my dad. He is a Christian. He also believes in evolution because in terms of the amount of factual evidence it explains it is far superior to creationism in every way. He thinks that evolution was merely the process God used in creating the world.
Also, if evolution was proved conclusively wrong (which is a poor hypothetical because I for one just cannot see it happening), I find the theory of literal creationism so utterly ridiculous that it would have to be substantiated by some physical evidence before I accepted it as a valid theory.
As most people have probably read into the context of the OP, Billy is fairly convinced that a lot of people are turned off to God by the theory of evolution, and would believe if that theory were not “in the way.” (Rather obviously, I disagree.)
When we got into the subject in a thread over at the Pizza Parlor, and he brought up the skepticism of the majority of SD folks, debating whether to start this sort of thread to prove his point, I told him to go ahead and I’d back him on doing it, because I was fairly sure it would prove him wrong.
Just so folks have some of the background on the issue at hand.
