10.5.14

to my fellow Believers: evolution is true. Move on.

If you believe in God, you do not need to worry about evolution. I've spent most of my life thinking about religion and science, so trust me. It's all good. Or, don't take my word for it. Here is Charles Darwin himself on evolution: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume [Origin of Species] should shock the religious feelings of any one." In fact, here's my best advice to any religious person who worries about evolution: go read Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. You might be surprised. I read it. I loved it. As a religious person myself, it made a ton of sense to me, it gave me another way to think about God. Just please read it - or stop having an opinion about it.

I would like to stop here. It's really not worth the effort. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that evolution by natural selection is true (they disagree on the details). Scientists are real people like you and me. There is no conspiracy here. Can we please just accept it, be humble, and move on? That should be enough. Why waste our breath.

Okay, fine. Let's play on.

I suppose it's a little more complicated than this. In all honesty science does make us change our religious beliefs sometimes. And that can be hard for some people. Smart theologians, like Augustine, were well aware of this. They said you should never read the Bible as a scientific text. That solves the problem before it starts. So if the Bible implies that the sun moves around the sun, then stop reading it as a book about astronomy; treat it as a metaphor (or myth, or just disregard it...they obviously didn't know that back then, c'mon give them a break!). With evolution this is no exception. If you believe that God created human beings in one instant - as if we just popped into existence like some ghost or something - if you believe that, then you probably have to reconsider. Human beings were created very slowly on this earth, over millions of years. We adapted, mutated, procreated, changed, and fit into our habitat the best we could. We all have common ancestors, we all share roots, we are all connected to animals, to life, to everything. That's how God chose to do it, and it's amazing if you think about it. Like the heliocentric theory, it's humbling.

Consider this: Evolution is a beautiful system that you could thank God for (I do)

We wouldn't be here if not for evolution! Evolution is a system whereby the species that are best fit for a particular environment survive. If you believe in God, then you believe that God "thought up" the system, engineered it, guided it, made its' laws. If you don't believe in God, then evolution stands on its own. No harm in that, right? But let's be clear: evolution allows species to adapt and thrive. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty smart to me, pretty wise from a survival standpoint. Let's just say that if it wasn't this way, if survival depended on blue eyes or short legs instead, the endangered species list would be much, much longer. We would't be around to enjoy our huge brains.

Evolution says we came from monkeys!
Well, apes actually. Chimps and Bonobos are our cousins. The point is that we all come from common ancestors, a tree of life with probably one trunk - which means we all probably came from a single-celled organism. God made us from dust, and to dust we go, right? I find it humbling that we came from animals. The moral message is clear: respect animals, respect life, respect the earth. Again, when moral principles are practically written into nature, as discovered by science, we should probably be thanking God.

But Richard Dawkins says...
Don't listen to him. He's dumb (as a philosopher, not as a scientist).

Doesn't evolution paint a bloody picture of nature?
Animals that are not fit to survive tend to die out, yes. And animals fight over resources. I suppose you could call that harsh. But how could it be any other way? The earth is finite, resources are finite. Luckily human beings have the ability to transcend this. "Blessed are the meek, the downtrodden," says Jesus. We don't need to kill our weak, or let them die. Because we have morality. However, we are not off the hook just yet. There is something to this. God is all powerful. Could He have made a better system? Perhaps. Something to think about at least.

9 comments:

  1. Genesis 1:29-30 "And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so."

    According to the Bible man was originally a vegetarian. This isn't the case according to the theory of evolution. Genesis 2:21 shows that man was created first. Evolution claims man came from a woman.

    "We wouldn't be here if not for evolution!" If God is omnipotent then why couldn't He create man like He said? Would we not be here if this was the case? Surely if God is who He says He is and His word is true then we would still be here.

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    1. I thought early human diets were indeed vegetarian - almost exclusively (mostly due to the fact that meat was hard to get and hard to come by). for example, check out this site: http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/early-human-diets/5511123/

      As for "Eve" coming before "Adam," science hasn't seemed to make up it's mind on that. There are conflicting studies apparently, according to wikipedia article on Mitochondrial Eve:

      "A recent study (March 2013) concluded however that "Eve" lived much later than "Adam" – some 140,000 years later.[10] (Earlier studies considered, conversely, that "Eve" lived earlier than "Adam".)[34] More recent studies indicate that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam may indeed have lived around the same time.[35]"

      If you go back and read Genesis chapter 1, you will notice that there are actually two, separate creation stories. You are referring to the second creation story. In Genesis 1, for example, plants are created on the 3rd days of creation, animals the 5th, humans the 6th day. So..if you stick to chapter 1 you're good to go.

      Yes, you are right: God can do anything. Therefore, He wouldn't need evolution to create life, plants, humans, anything. So....we just literally popped into existence, is that what you really think? that God literally spoke, and we just showed up. c'mon God is much better than that, he's not some cheap magician on stage doing slight of hand...why would God create the beautiful laws of nature and not use them?

      thanks for the comments.

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  2. Time to start looking for those transitional fossils Darwin was after. Should be oodles of them. ;)

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    1. there are, you just don't know about them. Fossils do not keep well, as Darwin was aware of. So there's not as many as we would like.

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    2. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/lines_03

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  3. Harvard professor Stephen J. Gould is famous for declaring that transition fossils
    are lacking, so evolution must have occurred in rapid spurts by mysterious genetic mechanisms, separated by long periods of stasis. He called this concept "punctuated equilibrium." This was his attempt to cope with the absence of transitions above the level of created kinds:
    "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of
    paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
    nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."-Gould
    Within scientific circles Gould drove home the point that transition fossils are lacking. Yet in speeches to the public in the last few years he has directly contradicted himself, boldly claiming that transition fossils are one of the three best
    arguments for evolution! His prize example? Whale evolution. Yet scholars such
    as Ashby Camp and Dr. Duane Gish have documented that the "transition fossils" Gould
    mentions in his whale evolution model are recognized to be specialized side branches, unique
    creatures distinct from whales and one another. (Gish, Camp) Nor do they appear in the proper
    order in the geologic strata. Evolutionary lineages do not flow from the fossil evidence, rather
    Darwinian beliefs must be imposed on (selectively cited) fossil evidence, with many
    assumptions, to "see" a Darwinian transformation. Gould’s prize example involved fudging to
    create "transition forms," which begs the question – why are the trunk and main branches of
    the evolutionary tree perpetually missing from the fossil record? The best answer is that they
    never existed. Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, says "Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are
    no transitional fossils… It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to
    another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such
    stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."

    It is true that the ages of the fossils you linked to are an assumption. When dating the Grand Canyon’s basalts there are places on the North Rim where volcanoes erupted after the Canyon was formed, sending lavas cascading over the walls and down into the Canyon. Obviously, these eruptions took place very recently, after the Canyon’s layers were deposited . These basalts yield ages of up to 1 million years based on the amounts of potassium and argon isotopes in the rocks. But when we date the rocks using the rubidium and strontium isotopes, we get an age of 1.143 billion years. This is the same age that we get for the basalt layers deep below the walls of the eastern Grand Canyon...How could both lavas, one at the top and one at the bottom of the Canyon, be the same age based on these parent and daughter isotopes?
    The assumptions on which the radioactive dating is based are not able to be proved but plagued with problems. As this article has illustrated, rocks may have inherited parent and daughter isotopes from their sources, or they may have been contaminated when they moved through other rocks to their current locations. Or inflowing water may have mixed isotopes into the rocks. Physicists have carefully measured the radioactive decay rates of parent radioisotopes in laboratories over the last 100 or so years and have found them to be essentially constant. Does this mean that scientist should assume they have been this way for billions of years. That goes against everything science is about. Radioactive dating assumes that the decay rate is constant but from a little research one can discover that this isn't true.

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  4. I see you are paraphrasing, in your own words? Did you read both creation stories in Genesis? what did you think? Did you read the Origin of Species? What did you think?

    Again, you are pointing out that fossils are lacking. everyone agrees. The fossils we do have support evolution or, at the very least, are compatible with it. I suppose your solution to radioactive dating is the Bible? I'm not going to pretend that I know about the details of how radioactive dating works so I'll leave it at that. Humility is a great virtue of the Christian faith.

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  5. Do you believe the Bible is true?

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  6. I believe parts of the Bible are true, parts are false. It's a huge collection of books with different authors having different purposes when writing. I believe the New Testament is far superior than the Old Testament. As for the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, I believe they are all true, simple as that. I think Jesus portrays the truth about God much better than some of the stories in the O.T., which frankly disgust me. But I also think there is a lot of truth in the Old Testament, especially in Proverbs and Psalms. I believe there are several layers of "truth" to be found in the Bible. Historical truth, literal truth, and scientific truth - these are all subservient and lesser than a higher truth that the Bible is trying to get at -- that is, spiritual and moral truth. We should judge the Bible on spiritual and moral truth, not literal truth. Cheers!

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