It is a legitimate question in a way but your premise is highly flawed as previously noted. Most Christian denominations believe in evolution or at least do not directly contradict it. I was raised Methodist for example and we were never taught anything contrary to evolution. My mother was even a science teacher at the time that taught it for God’s sake. I am nominally Episcopalian now and it is the same way. The Catholic church is also very pro-science in its own way despite popular belief. It is only a scattered group of fundamentalist and evangelical churches that directly refute evolution avidly.
That is actually a real answer that some of the fundamentalist and evangelical churches give. They say that dinosaurs are named in the Bible using terms like the above. They also claim that they coexisted with man. You have to interview each of those groups separately to find out the full version of their story however. They are like conspiracy theorists. They all believe that there is some type of trickery or hidden message involved but differ greatly on the details even among each other.
I don’t really know how Muslims break down on the issue but I think it is largely the same way based on the professional ones that I have known. Jews certainly don’t have a problem with evolution as a general rule. I don’t know that much about Eastern or African religions.
Had you worded the question as “How do religions that hold to a literalist interpretation of the bible explain dinosaurs?” you would have gotten straight answers without the joking. By making your OP sound as though every religious person holds that the bible is literally accurate, you wound up getting comments that attempted to correct that error along with some attempts humor.
Jews and Muslims do not have a single viewpoint any more than Christians do. There are some Jews and some Muslims who hold to a six day creation belief in the manner of Christian biblical literalists who provide “explanations” such as these two:
[ul]
[li]The dinosaurs lived alongside humans but have since died out, with some being named in the Bible (behemoth and leviathon);[/li][li]the dinosaurs never existed, but Satan planted rocks that looked like “dinosaur” bones to tempt men to stop believing in God.[/li][/ul]
I suspect that there are some Hindus or some Buddhists or some others who also reject the age of the earth as science has determined it, but they are not so widely published in the U.S. that many know what their attitudes (or “explanations”) are.
I’m not sure what the OP is aiming for, but perhaps he might want to look into the concept of Non overlapping magisteria. The concept was formed recently but it has plenty of antecedent: the Episcopal church I grew up in didn’t discuss scientific matters much and never dissed evolution. (I recall a sermon when science was mentioned, but certainly not in a hostile way).
Anyway, I think the existence of parasitic wasps challenge the standard monotheistic framework more than T-Rex does.
No: The Universe is 186,000 billion years old!
ETA: Traditional buddhist doctrine tends to emphasize how old the universe is, not how young. Think in terms of billions of years.
Doesn’t make much difference to my answer. All religions make vague claims and they can interpret and re-interpret those claims as required. Parts of their holy books can be taken literally or treated as allegorical or partial as required to make them fit with what the religion needs to believe to fit with the dominant worldview in which the religion operates.
In the beginning man created god and he continues to shape his god as required.
You can really easily dick with the results by changing your wording. For example, the linked study completely fails to consider the position of many mainstream Christians (theistic evolution). Some believe that God “guided” evolution, but by the wording in that study, it sounds like intelligent design. Those that believe in God but don’t think it’s a goal-directed, constantly tinkered with system are forced to choose the “best fit” answer, likely answer #1. Of course, the 46% is a lot harder to justify, and in this study at least it is pretty unambiguous, with 10,000 years specified.
It’s also not a good comparison, given that “humans” are a single species and “dinosaurs” were a large group of species. A more equal comparison would be comparing dinosaurs to mammals; and mammals were around back then and are still going strong.
A lot of them point to the flood for things like that and also radio carbon dating error due to that. There is also somewhat of a good ‘religious’ reason to because the flood was not just a reset, but also it was obvious that God changed things here with the post flood world, for instance man doesn’t live 100’s of years anymore after the flood, so something with time may have been messed with.
The other one I heard was God created the young earth to look old, not to deceive us, but to teach us about time and space, about perceived and actual reality.
The one that said Satan put them there to deceive us I have only heard from this board, not saying it’s not circulating their in some religions, but really this arch demon thing walking about with a cart hiding dinosaur bones. Like where would he even get them, I guess he would be capable of interstellar travel and can get them from another planet.
I think you missed a few words there, but again you are making a huge error. The RCC, to focus on just one example, has no problem with the idea that chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor, and that ancestor would be called an ape.
Your OP stated that no religion accepts “evolution”, which is simply wrong. You are now saying you really meant “natural selection”, but you are wrong again.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but instead of blaming us for not understanding you, I think your need to look at your own premises and recognize that they might be wrong.
When I was little I just assumed that all the Bible stuff happened in the Middle East while dinosaurs roamed the earth in North America. Worked for me.
John Mace, I have no problem being called wrong. As I’ve said, religion is not in my wheelhouse of knowledge, and is think most folks can figure that out by reading my OP. I’m not making excuses here. I didn’t realize when I wrote the OP that it would be so ambiguous, or cause folks to misinterpret what I said. But those misinterpretations are MY fault, not yours or anyone else reading the thread and trying to understand what the hell it is I’m trying to ask.
Now, you’ve said something that I have never heard. I know that many Christians and Jews believe in Evolution. But evolution has not been an all or nothing proposition to the church for quite some time, correct? What I mean is, the Church (pick your favorite one, and when I say “Church”, I’m lumping in temples, synagogues, and anything else that could be the equivalent of a ruling body that determines religious doctrine and the belief of its followers.)
With that said, I understand that things in the RCC change as new information comes to light. And they have altered as appropriate things that may have been taboo to consider 150 years ago. I don’t think evolution can be seriously argued from the standpoint of natural selection and the tweaking of species based on changes in the genetic code that make them more likely to succeed thereby passing along its genetic makeup. However, you say that “The RCC, to focus on just one example, has no problem with the idea that chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor, and that ancestor would be called an ape.” [bolding mine]. Seriously? When did the papal sanction stating that Adam and Eve is just a nice story to tell children, but we really evolved from apes?
If the RCC believes this, that’s a new one for me and worth the price of opening this thread. However, I would think that somewhere along the line, I would have heard some screaming and moaning about this from somewhere… Do you have a cite to back this claim up, or is your religion your cite?
Has anyone else heard this, and do other religions buy into the “man from ape” theory? Because if that’s true, you might as well toss out both the OT and NT completely, as well as the Koran and any other religious “record”. If we all evolved from apes, then the bible is flat out nonsense on every level, stories told to make people understand why they are here when no other information was available to explain it.
The premise that god created man in his image is wrong, then. It is more correct to say that he created Apes in his image, and we just happened to evolve from apes. And since apes no doubt evolved from something, maybe THATS what god created in his image.
I mean no offense to anyone who believes in the bible, Koran, or any or all of the stories we are mostly familiar with.
Someone also pointed out that I should have used mammals instead of humans, since my OP was considering all dinosaurs. I guess that’s correct, but it wasn’t what I was going for in the OP.
I don’t want to scrap the OP completely. I think maybe I need to speak to someone that can interpret what I’m asking in the OP and re-word it in a way that makes sense from all angles. My intent was not to get the premise wrong, and I certainly don’t want to appear as if I’m changing my story as I go. My original question remains.
Maybe I just haven’t asked it properly to satisfy some of you. I can respect that, since this is a sensitive subject to many. However, I do hope that even if I have some errors, you can get the general idea of what I’m asking here.
If I state something wrong, like I said before, I have no problem with you all pointing it out. That’s how one learns.
On the other hand, I’m not asking someone to teach me a graduate level course in theology either. That’s not exactly fair or in the spirit of GD. If folks cannot understand what I’m driving at with my question, then we can pull the plug on it.
Here’s some interesting reading on it, Stink Fish Pot. Even going way back before JPII’s statements, we were not taught in religious education that the Adam & Eve story was literal fact. I was specifically told that we were NOT supposed to take it as literal fact, but that it was a sort of metaphor. Also, Catholic schools have taught evolution in science class at least since then.
ETA: The most interesting and perhaps relevant part of the article I linked is that the origin of things has not been presented as dogma, so there’s not an “official” RCC teaching on the subject. That’s for the best…religion shouldn’t get mixed up with science, as one doesn’t really have anything to do with the other.
[QUOTE=Stink Fish Pot]
If the RCC believes this, that’s a new one for me and worth the price of opening this thread. However, I would think that somewhere along the line, I would have heard some screaming and moaning about this from somewhere… Do you have a cite to back this claim up, or is your religion your cite?
Has anyone else heard this, and do other religions buy into the “man from ape” theory?
[/QUOTE]
I think one problem that may be contributing to the OP’s confusion is that there are lots of Catholics who do reject the idea of Evolution by Natural Selection. My mother would be one.
Missed the edit window… And if Catholics, who represent at least 25% of Americans and more than that if we consider only religious Americans, would just adhere to the teachings of the Church on this matter, much of this Creationism nonsense would become the minority view that it should be.
Yeah, I agree with that. The Catholics who get in bed with the fundamentalists on this kind of thing are weird to me…haven’t they ever been told the Pope is the antichrist by these types?
I chalk it up to Evolution by Natural Selection being one of those things that the human brain is not designed (hah!) to grasp very easily. Religion is just the excuse for being too lazy to fight one’s own ignorance.
The RCC had a couple of bishops in the 1800s who expressed “concern” about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, but by the twentieth century, no RCC leader was opposing it. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909 - 1919 notes that the science of evolution is fine as long as it is not used as a claim that there is no God. It is not supportive of Darwin’s Theory, but it was written around twenty years before Dobzhansky analyzed Darwin’s theory in the light of Mendelian genetics to give Darwin’s Theory a much firmer foundation in science.
Pope Pius XII, in 1950, made the first papal pronouncement on evolution in the Encyclical Humani Generis. In that document he made clear that he was not happy with the idea of evolution, (or his understanding of it), but that, as long as it was not used to claim that there was no God, he could accept the scientific descriptions of one species proceeding to another, including humans proceeding from apes.
Pope John Paul II, in 1996, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences noted that there was such a convergence of evidence from so many unrelated fields of science that evolution was clearly “more than a hypothesis.”
There was no “screaming” about this for the simple fact that the RCC has never openly opposed the Theory of Evolution. (Actually, there were a few protests against John Paul II’s address, but they tended to come from Evangelicals, not Catholics.)
