Well, here it is hardcore. I’m guessing you have been waiting for someone like me to stick my neck onto the chopping block.
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I don’t claim to speak for all creationist but i think hate is a little strong. I would simply leave it as “don’t believe”. My personal reasons for not believing are first, i chose to believe more in the Word of God than the reasoning of man and secondly, to believe in an account that is always the same, never changes over one that changes over the course of time due to new information, warranted or otherwise. I don’t need scientific proof of what happened because, in my opinion, i have what i need. Of course to take this stance one must have faith since i cannot claim to understand all of the powers of God.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD .
9 "As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts
Isaiah 55:8-9
Being special is not the issue, IMHO, its being accountable. Man does not want to hear that he is accountable. If there is no God or Creator then man is the ultimate being and therefore only accountable to himself. If God does it exist but didn’t actually create things as he said he did, then there is a credibility issue. Either way, evolution is probably used more to discredit God than any other discipline of science and therein lies the rift.
Go ahead and blast away, i know its coming. “Explain this, explain that…” its the moment you have all been waiting for.
WRENCHEAD-if it’s your belief, through faith, then so be it-I can’t touch that. However if it’s you belief because you believe science has it wrong some how, then I will take issue with that.
How do you explain all the evidence for evolution? Do you explain it, or do you just have faith that it did not happen?
Also one other thing:
Mankind will do what it pleases with or without God. It is not accountability that makes people unbelievers (not all of them anyway). If you take the bible literally, then credibility is a huge issue-there are internal contradictions in the bible.
Also evolution may be used improperly to discredit God, but that doesn’t mean that it really does.
If God exists, isn’t man accountable to him no matter which way man came about?
As for the Bible, unless you worship the Bible, don’t you agree that god is responsible for what is found in the earth, directly? And that people wrote the Bible (no matter how inspired you think they were.) If God’s direct evidence in the earth for evolution (and there is a lot of it) contradicts what some person wrote in the Bible, which do you want to believe?
The real damage that this debate does to religion is from those who say, in effect, unless you believe that 1+1=3 you’re an atheist. At least some people look at this, and figure, well, since 1+1=2, I must be an atheist. Ta-ta church.
Yeah, but I suspect that that is a two-way street. Certainly Huxley got the ball rolling in the 1860s by latching on to Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species, (and caused Darwin no end of grief by misunderstanding and misrepresenting what Darwin had actually said). Of course, he was just grabbing a new tool for a fight that he had already been waging before Darwin pubished his book. However, many Christians have had no problem reconciling Natural Selection with the perceived myth of Creation, and have not attempted to use one against the other. In fact, when Darwin’s theory was rather dormant, it was a series of Christian scientists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky who did the work and did the math to show how Mendelian genetics actually provided the until-then-unknown mechanism and revived Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection.
I suspect that had some Christians not rolled Evolution, Literary Criticism of the Bible, and the “Search for the Historical Jesus” into one all-encompassing perceived attack, Evolution would not be a significant sticking point. (Note that, while there are anti-evolutionists outside the U.S., the frequently promoted fight of Evolution Vs Creation occurs in a religious context most frequently in the U.S. where Christian Fundamentalism was first conceived and still has its strongest adherents.)
—And this shakes the fundamental “belief” that only humans have souls (and therefore can go to heaven, or be damned).—
Catholic theology is, for the record, now perfectly fine with this, because they allow the possibility that God could have simply ensouled man whenever he pleased along mankind’s evolution. So they can accept both evolution and souls/special place of humans.
However, this is because on both pro- and con- sides of the issue, some key points get missed:
(a) Darwinian Theory makes absolutely no reference whatsoever to the existence or nonexistence of a God or creator. That some view it that way is the result of either reductionism or preset ideological agendas.
(b) Darwinian Theory does not, repeat NOT lead a scientist to conclude “man is the ultimate being”. Man = Crown Jewel of the temporal Universe is a special-creationist principle. On the contrary, Evolution posits that Man is just another being.
ONLY if for some reason we wish to impose upon God the restriction that He cannot ever use symbolic or allegorical language to get His point across. Remember, it is GOD that is Never-Changing. The way we understand the words used to describe His workings will of course change. After all you’re most likely not reading them in the original language.
That people with agendas against religion have grabbed on to Evolution as some sort of all-purpose God-disprover only points out how people with agendas will latch on to anything.
Also we have to keep in mind that the bible was inspired by God and written by man. Personally I don’t think people back in the day would have known what God was talking about if he described the process of life literally.
Last week our Humanists’ discussion group sponsored a talk by AHA President Fred Edwords in celebration of Darwin Day (Tomorrow - 2/12!) on the impact of Darwin on religion and Humanism.
IIRC, he suggested christian folk legitimately were threatened by evolution not simply because it was inconsistent with the Bible story of creation. But, if we merely resulted from a non-directed natural process, that means God did not create man and place him in and subsequently cast him from the garden. If that were the case, we would not have original sin, and would have no need for salvation - a major product line of christian churches.
He also said when he used to tell his kids to stop acting like wild animals they would respond, “But dad, we ARE animals.”
“Yes,” he would respond, but you are DOMESTICATED animals!"
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