Creationist vs. Evolutionist?

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

In light of modern science, this issue is a very important one. How literally do you read Genesis?

Might as well start this one off with a little joke, since I imagine that this could get fairly serious. I had a debate about this in another forum that I am a member of, but to no success on either front. As it turns out, I was looking for the answer in all the wrong places... all I had to do was pop on Google and find forums in which God Himself had actually posted.

www.flooble.com/fun/genesis.php?page=1
Page one is ok, but it gets better

Enjoy

Ok, now post your views.

[Alejandro]

Nice find. I always wondered how it all happened.

I do not think there can ever be a conclusion to this debate.
Science, and religion are relying a scarce amount of evidence. They both require a large amount of faith, one a little more than the other.
I do believe in Creation, though. But fighting for Creation to be taught in schools I think is a bit far-fetched, and I think evolution should not be taught in school. In every single class that we take in schools we do not learn about the origin of the equation we use, we just use it--often with no questions asked. In physics we learn about waves, in mathematics we learn about sine. In both cases we just use what we have at the present. I do not think biology should delve into the beginnings of life.

Just my two cents.

Grace and Revolution my sisters and brothers,
Alejandro

[Kenny]

Yeah,

I have like 30 pages of debate on my forum. It has never come to an agreement, just boredom of debating and no one to debate with.

[Soulfyre]

Stephen,

I'm glad for the manner in which you phrased your question, "How literally do you interpret Genesis," as opposed to "Do you believe in Creation or Evolution," which establishes a dichotomy with which at least some would take exception. I certainly believe in creation, and joyfully affirm the Nicene Creed every Sunday--without crossing my fingers when I say "I believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible..." Few Christians deny that a process of evolution has indeed taken place. The greatest disagreement arises over the assumption that all life is ultimately descended from single-celled organisms, or, that life occured spontaneously as a cosmic accident from previously inanimate primordial soup. This understanding becomes particularly problematic in Genesis 2, where it is stated (v.7):

[/i][/ul]If one takes this chapter to be simply the retelling of a "creation myth", then we must struggle with the fact that according to Matthew, Jesus referenced His teaching concerning divorce (Matthew 19:3-11) to verses in Genesis 1 (v.27) and 2 (v.24). I find it difficult to believe that Jesus, who claimed to be the "Truth" and said "He who has seen me has seen the Father" would reference verses in Genesis in support of His point that, if they were not literally true, would be confusing at best and deceptive at worst. And I must admit that I am not entirely comfortable with a theology of "created potentialities". Now I admit that if I find out in heaven (God willing) that a monkey is--well, if not my uncle several times removed, at least a distant cousin--I will have a great laugh over the whole thing. But at this point in my understanding (small as it is), I am not yet ready to "give up the ship."

I must admit that I am not convinced entirely of the "seven twenty-four hour days" approach to Creation (since there are, in fact, legitimate approaches to Genesis 1 which do not require such an understanding, and do no violence to the text), or the catastrophism of young-earth theorists who insist that the global flood is responsible for all geological strata (although I have been given to understand that the semblance of geological strata were formed very quickly by the Mt St Helens eruption and glacial flooding). But I am admittedly willing for one who supports Evolution to give us his or her best, realizing that my ability to sift abstruse scientific details from geology and the life-sciences is decidedly limited.

In any case, I hold my own opinions with humility, and an entire willingness to learn more. And while I do not think that specific understandings of Creationism should be taught in public school, I think that current educators should be willing to point out weaknesses in current Evolutionary theory, and should not be immediately averse to such terminology as "intellegent design", since such an assumption does not, in fact, require theism (some scientists have even postulated extraterrestrial influence--which I think is poppycock, and harder to believe than a more literal understanding of Genesis--but it does illustrate my point).

I will be contacting an evolutionary scientist, who I hope will also interact with us. I have heard him before, have found him very gracious, and will (if necessary) wave the "statement of faith" requirement for him so that he may participate freely in this discussion, should he so desire. If his posts are long, I will have him send them to me, and I will put them in a virtual drive accessible on the web so that we can review them. I will also try to contact a supporter of intelligent design for participation. That way we may discuss this issue with some resources. I realize that at best, this will be problematic, for both sides in this debate, which is often fueled by more vitriol than lovingkindness, claim that the other does not approach the issue fairly. Evolutionists say that those that support intelligent design are unwilling to submit articles for publication for peer-review. Intelligent design-ers counter that they would submit articles for publication if a skewed screening process did not prevent them from being published. And not having the insight into people's hearts as my Lord Jesus Christ had, I cannot arbitrarily take sides, and am not competent to judge the veracity of these claims and counter-claims. But given our own inadequacies and those of a fallen world, I take to heart James 1, vvs. 5-7:

[/i][/ul]And I pray that we all may know when it is wisdom to say, "I don't know; I wasn't there."

God bless and keep you always,

Matthew (soulfyre)

[melinky]

My belief tends to run right along with Matthew's on this one. I agree that creationism shouldn't necessarily be taught in school, but I think it should be presented. After all, evolution is at this time, nothing more than a theory, so why not present all theories.

I'm also willing to sit back and say that I don't know exactly how everything was created. I think that for the most part the Genesis accounting of creation is symbolic in the sense that it is a story told in a manner that we can understand. I don't believe we can ever know how God does any of the wonderful, amazing things He does, nor do we need to. It's all part of my theory that "knowledge and understanding are on a need-to-know basis" and right now, God doesn't think I need to know.

Melinda

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

Well, this is a debate that I've had a lot of fun discussing in the past. That combined with a lot of good science courses during my education has left me fairly well educated on the subject, at least for someone that is not professionally involved in anything scientific.

This is going to be a long post, so I guess I better divide it into a couple parts. In the first part, I will present my personal beliefs on the subject of evolution and whether or not it is in conflict with Christianity. Next, I'll present the relatively new "Intelligent Design" theory, as far as I understand it. That should shed some good light on the subject and hopefully spark some good discussion.

Evolution: In Conflict with Christianity?

For where I am now in my journey of faith, I do not see evolution (and by that I mean macro-evolution: self-replicating molecules --> people) as being in conflict with the Christian faith. I do believe that we are the creations of God, but I have no problem with the belief that He created us via evolution. In fact, in certain ways, I could even see this as being more amazing than the idea of being "molded out of clay." The idea that God not only created us, but did so in a way that we can understand seems very powerful to me.

My interpretation of the book of Genesis is not a literal one. I see the actual creation stories presented in the first two chapters as stories from ancient time that hold religious truth, though they are not scientifically accurate. I believe that there a lot of truths to be learned from Genesis: We are the creations of God, we were created male and female and can unite in marriage, we are the stewards of creation, we are created in God's image (not physical image, but insofar as we have free will and a soul, etc), and other things like that. But as far as scientific accuracy is concerned, I think that the evidence is very much in favor of the scientific interpretation of creation. If anything, just the fact that there are two different stories should tell us that it's not the literal facts that are the point. In our post-enlightenment, western thought, we tend to be obsessed with facts. In ancient times, this was not the case... the literal and scientific facts were not nearly as important to the authors. We being who we are tend to hear this and think "So they were lying?" It's not that they were lying, its just the focus on literal facts was not the concern of many ancient authors, people who thought very differently than we do.

That being said, I do think that there is a theory that deserves a lot more serious scientific attention: that of "Intelligent Design."

Intelligent Design Theory

First, I should say that I'm not a professional scientist. Thus, I don't claim to be an expert on this stuff. Still, I think I have a fairly good handle on the basics.

To understand ID, you need to understand Darwinian Evolution. The idea behind Darwin's theory is that you start with an group of organisms. These organisms go about their business, living and reproducing. Every now and then, one of the offspring organisms is born with a mutation in their DNA. If this mutation provides that organism with an advantage, then that organism is more likely to survive, and thus, to reproduce and pass on the advantageous genes. The idea of Darwinism is a sort of "evolution through slight modification."

Now, as far as I know, Darwinism is still considered a theory. If you want to know how to kill bacteria, you might make the hypothesis "If I put this antibiotic on this bacteria, it will kill the bacteria." This is something that you can test... in fact, you can test is hundreds of thousands of times if you like. If the same thing happens for the vast majority of the times, you conclude that your hypothesis is either correct or incorrect.

Macro Evolution, as far as I know, cannot be tested like this. By definition it is a process that takes thousands of years. We can't go back in time to watch it, and we can't reproduce it in a lab. Thus, scientific technology being what it is, we can not prove Darwin is correct. Darwinian Macro Evolution makes a lot of sense because we have fossil records and things like that to examine. Since we can observe micro-evolution (modification of certain already-existent attributes within a species), and since we have fossils that seem to show us an evolutionary trend, we conclude that Darwinian evolution makes sense. Something else we have that supports Darwin is the massive amount of studies done that examine genetic similarity between organisms. These provide an even more plausible link between organisms. We can't prove it though. (This is where a professional scientist would really be helpful... to let us know more specifically what evidence exists to support Darwin).

Intelligent Design theory, as far as I know, was developed by much the same process. We can't prove it, but we can deduce it from evidence that we have. ID theory hinges on something called irreducible complexity. The idea of IC is that you have a complex system that could not have evolved via Darwinian means. My knowledge of ID theory mostly comes from Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, and in that book (which is a great book... very easy to read and quite informative), he presents several systems that he believes to be irreducibly complex. The example that I remember the best is the blood clotting system. There are a lot of biological steps between getting a cut and the formation of a clot. Several of those steps involve proteins triggering other proteins which trigger other proteins which eventually lead to a clot. The key thing to note is that several of these proteins, as far as science could tell at the time Black Box was published, serve no other functions in the body than to be a step in the blood clotting process.

What does this imply? If there are steps that serve no purpose than to be a step in a bigger process, the system would seem to be irreducibly complex. It is highly unlikely that such a system could have evolved via a process of slight modifications. The problem lies in the fact that, until every piece of the system is in place, the whole system is useless. When one of those proteins that is just a step appears in an organism due to mutation, it doesn’t provide an advantage, because the rest of the process isn't there yet. In fact, it would even be a slight disadvantage since it would be a waste of resources on the part of the body. So, since every step is needed before you get anything close to a blood clot, the steps could not (it seems) have evolved one at a time.

The presence of such systems, if they are indeed irreducibly complex, would mean that such things could not have come about via standard evolution. Proponents of ID theory would say that they came about with the guidance of some outside force. An order of sorts would have to be imposed on the system to allow it to come about. God is, of course, outside the realm of science. Some choose to see God as that outside force, but that is a philosophical/theological choice on their part.

There have been some good arguments made as to how IC systems could have evolved, though they may or may not be good enough to refute the theory. I've got a good link along these lines that I'll try to post at a later date.

Here's an analogy that might help a bit: the mousetrap.

The mousetrap is irreducibly complex. It is made of a block of wood, a spring, a hammer, and bait, and all of these pieces have to be properly assembled and working, or else the mousetrap will not work. If you start with a block of wood, it will not work as a mousetrap. If you add a spring to it, it does not become any better of a mousetrap. If you add a hammer, it still don't do anything to the mouse. Only until you add the bait and set the trap will it be at all useful. This system is irreducibly complex because it cannot "evolve" through slow modification. Adding pieces, while it does make it closer to a mousetrap, does not give it any advantage, and thus, speaking biologically, will not get passed on to offspring.

One of the arguments against the idea of ID theory is that certain systems could have evolved because they started off offering an advantage of one kind, and eventually came to offer another advantage. Take wings for example: One theory is that reptiles were in the situation where having longer, thinner scales was an advantage... say for heat or something. Eventually, once these scales got long enough, they gained the ability to glide, and now had discovered a new advantage.

True, a block of wood is no good as a mousetrap, but it is good as a doorstop. A block with a spring is also no good as a mousetrap, but it might make a good clamp. This is one possible explanation, but it relies on a series of "just so" situations. For example, a block of wood might make a good doorstop, but that's not helpful unless the organism needs a doorstop.

There's a lot of theories and a lot of data on either side. Hopefully this post will at least makes the basics pretty clear. (Wow, I'm tied of typing).

[Kenny]

This presents my beliefs very well:

www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i4/theistic_evolution.asp

[rgrove]

L4E_WakaMol-King said:

In light of modern science, this issue is a very important one. How literally do you read Genesis?

100% literally. No reason not to. Please take a serious look at the work that is on the site Kenny provided for the reasons why there is no scientific reason to read it any other way than as it is written.

Yours In Christ,
Ron

[rgrove]

Here's a wonderful example of both evolutionary bias in the news media (an anti-creationist article was written and response was denied to AiG). Creationists do have scientific answers, and focus on them better than evolutionists. Evolutionists protect their religion no matter at all costs.

www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0628enquirer.asp

Yours In Christ,
Ron

[melinky]

I feel like I'm beginning to sound like Dana Carvey's Saturday Night Live charactor, "The Church Lady" when talking about the world today. But I have to ask, "Could it be... Saaaa-tan?"

In Christ,

Melinda