Creationism/Evolution
 

It always gets me this argument. I was in the Navy in 1989 and in A School, there was a son of a minister whom I became friends with. He was able to show how BOTH were very attainable at the same time.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say one of God's days equal one of our days. If God is an omnipotent power then one day could equal thousands, millions, even billions of years. We know it took Millions of years to form our Solar System let alone for any life to develop on Earth. Even Biblical scholars don't argue that the Solar system took time to develop. This points to one being able to say a day in God's life could be millions of our years.

Same goes after life appeared on Earth. It took millions of years (as we know time) before man appeared on the planet. If you take the Bible literally, man would have been alive to see ALL life forms on Earth, but by fossils we know this not to be true. That in fact life was here long before man. This is more evidence that one of God's days is millions of years.

With those criteria, it can be said that God when he made man didn't just make man, but as with Earth, man may have needed time to develop. Hence, evolution. And evolution itself could have taken one of God's days, but in our time it took thousands of years.

So in using this theory, this hypothesis, one could truly show how evotionism and creationism could be one in the same.

There is as much evidence to support Creationism's version of the beginning as there is Scientology's version. Trying to join evolution with creationism is a last attempt by the Church to keep people filling the pews in light of evidence that clearly shows that the Bible is incorrect in its account of creation, and there is absolutly zero need to dilute science with religious speculation.

You're missing the point pan6467. What you described is as (far as I know) the official view of the catholic church. But it's not creationism.

it is obviously possible for someone to believe that the bible's creation myth is a figurative story that can be interpreted in a way that somewhat aligns it with science (as CSfilm pointed out this is not creationism since it does not support a literal interpretation of the bible), but personal religious intrepretation is hardly the point. Everyone is free to believe whatever they like religiously, however scientists and schools are not interested in reigion be it literal or figurative.

*edited cause i forgot a word and thus sounded like a complete idiot.

This is one debate that my buddies and I went over time and time again in college. None of us were (are) religious, but seeing as 1/2 of the group turned to religious studies majors to get out the easy way, this was often a heated topic of discussion around the keg!

And it always came down to just not buying the creation theory. Show me some proof, and I'll believe it. We are just too puny to know anything, shit, there's a million holes in the evolution theory, but at least it makes sense. Well, to me at least!

What you are speaking of is called the "Gap" theory. There are several modifications of what people believed happened.

Ben Franklin believed God was the "Great Clockwinder". In other words he started things out and things evolved from there. He gets the credit because he started the process in the first place.


Some believe that each "day" during creation equaled thousands of years.

Some believe that there is a gap of thousands, millions of year between day 6 and day 7.

Personally I find it hard to believe both. To reconcile one with the other takes more faith than I think I have.

I would hope this would be an antiquated argument.

Why do we have to focus on the Bible as being literal truth? Is anything more metaphorical than Genesis?

I'm not sure why someone mentioned Scientology in this thread... L. Ron Hubbard isn't exactly the world's most reknowned expert on evolution.

Anyway... here's what we know: There is evidence that mutations have occurred over time by looking at fossil records. By looking at birds on different islands in the Galapagos Islands there is evidence that mutations have occurred to create several closely related species with different advantageous traits to help them eat in their environments.

Darwin obviously wasn't right about everything - he's sexist and racist. However, there is evidence to support that some of his basic ideas hold some water. It is a theory certainly, and people are continuing to try to test it out. So I don't accept it as a absolute fact, but I certainly can't accept Creationism when the story that it is based on is so obviously metaphorical.

raeanna74, wasn't what Franklin, as well as other enlightenment thinkers, belive in Deism? Which, and I could be wrong" is the belife that God set everything into motion and then left?

The argument that pan6467 puts forth is pretty darned mainstream; it simply involves reading some of the statements in the Bible as metaphor, as hundreds of millions of Christians do.

But with the advent of the scientific age, there were and are those who insist on taking the Bible literally as written (or at least the parts that they're happy to talk about). So when it says, "The First Day," that's what they believe it was. A day, not the Pre-Cambrian era.

It's an argument that's impossible to win or lose. An omnipotent God could choose to create the universe in seven days, yet manufacture all the evidence of evolution and of billions of years of geological history upon the earth and among the stars. Of course, to my mind, that's the sort of God who enjoys coating toilet seats with superglue and tipping over occupied outhouses. Likes his little jokes, in other words.

I'm a full-fledged heathen, so it's all about the evolution for me.

http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi is a good place to discuss such things.

Genesis 1:5 says this: God called the light "day", and the darkness "night". And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day.

There's your definition. My understanding is that the specific Hebrew words are unambiguous on their definition of a single day and its length. This too is probably debated somewhere, however.

I agree with Rodney that the argument between creationism and evolutionism is ultimately impossible to win or lose. It all hinges on how much people are willing to take on faith, and how much they must see in front of their faces.

Just to point it out, most medieval theologians also believed that the 'days' of Genesis were metaphorical, though they went the other direction, teaching that God created everything instantly.

What do we call a day? A 24 hour period of our 365 1/4 day calendar? We see the morning, mid day, sunset, and night, but thats because we are stuck on this planet in one spot. We have defined our days on what works for us. We can not define a day for God by our scale. I would agree on the evolution idea. Why is it easy to believe that in seven 24 hour days, everything in this world was created out of thin air by god, but we don't believe that creatures could be changed over time by god? Was god not allowed to evolve creatures or allow evolution over time? We have tail bones. There functionless. I'm not saying I was a fish or primate, but I can't say I wasn't evolved from one either.

MerKon4, you brought up an interesting thought about the length of a day. We measure our calendar by how long it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun. If a god created Earth, think it would have been using Earth-time to measure creation, BEFORE PEOPLE EXISTED TO CREATE EARTH TIME?! Also, as MerKon4 pointed out, Earth time is not even perfect, hence the leap year. So by saying that a god used an Earth calendar, is like saying that the Earth is the center of the universe, and last time I checked, that just isn't the way it is. But if everything in the universe was created by Earth-time, think the god would have used a Pamela Anderson calendar? I would have.

Not that we can come to definite answers on this subject, but simply to play devil's advocate....

Absolutely true. We can, however, use the definition that was given in Genesis, which if you believe was inspired by God, would be His definition. And just as a side note, you would have a substantially harder time sitting down without a tailbone.

Of course, this is assuming that whatever people "create" hasn't already been thought of by God. I suppose you can go that route, but I don't.

I brought up Scientology because its account of creation (not really a creation account, more like an explanation of how life got to Earth) is just as plausible as that in the Bible, yet people laugh one off and not the other. There is as much proof for either! Therefore I see no reason to believe either one, and I'll just stick with a scientific explanation that doesn't rely on faith based conjectures.

You just said you see no reason to believe in either one, but you still choose one?

Either way, I agree with you on the fact that both are plausable explanations, but the word faith is becoming more transparent. Everyday, the bible and its accounts are being discovered and true and provable, just as evolution and science can prove their points. I take the stance that I believe in God as the creater of the world and humans, but I believe evolution and science in showing us ways on how it was done. Not everything God does had to be mysterious or instant. Heck, maybe he had some fun with it while whipping up the cosmic pudding. WHO KNOWS...

Couple of quick thoughts on this subject :

1. Scientific interpretations of anything, but specifically the origination of life, also require and are based on faith. You have to believe that our interpretation of the data is correct, that the instruments are measuring what we think they are measuring, etc. If you follow that chain of logic out far enough, it all leads to faith on a set of beliefs as well. For example, a few thousand years ago we would be talking about things in terms of Fire, Earth, Wind and Spirit or something, before the idea of atoms and molecules was latched onto. In my opinion, science, like religion, is a tool to understand the world around us. In fact, most religions incorporate old science into their doctrines. I personally reject a strict adherence to either Creationism, or pure Evolution.

2. I read in a book called A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber, something akin to the following: That if you consider the permutation and combination of molecules to form the DNA structure of humans to have occured more or less randomly to find favored combinations for survival, that this process would take something on the order of a 100 billion years, minimum. Our best estimates are that the universe is 13 - 15 billion years old. Thus, there would not have been enough time for a process based on simple random chance to have produced us. I don't say that it's proof, but I think it's an interesting point that there is more going on than meets the analytical, objective eye of "science."

all theories can be disproved, but however much pro-theory evidence you find that never actually proves that there can be no counter example (cf Karl Popper)

evolution is a good theory and pretty much fits the facts we have, so I'd have to go with it for the moment

argument (2) is interesting, but I don't really know enough to comment fully. However I suspect that DNA changes are far from random in nature.

that evolution being true is not a proof that there is no god - any logician could tell you that. it annoys me when people argue that way

mind you, can you imagine an omnipotent being trying to explain to some fairly ignorant tribe thousands of years ago exactly how he created the universe? metaphor would be the only way for them to make any sense of it at all.

For what it's worth, I agree with this completely, with the caveat that evolution is an incomplete explanation as well at present. It does seem more consistent, based on what we think we know at present. It's also an explanation of "how," and descriptions of how, in my opinion can't approach a question of "why" in anything more than an indirect fashion.

I can't verify the second one either, although I think that Wilber had some sources. He argued from a starting point of the statistical calculation regarding randomly typing monkey producing Shakespearean work, pointed out that the monkeys would take something like 100 billion years, then pointed that DNA is much more complicated than Shakespeare, etc. I just thought it was interesting. I'm personally of the persuassion that everything has a deeper meaning than simple scientific explanation. The rules of science are there for our convenience; nature works just fine even if we don't understand it.



I guess that's another one for dogma versus spirituality.

Precisely. Or "spiritually enlightened" people thousands of years ago trying to describe their insights in terms that people would understand without personifying the "deity."

In any case, I personally don't understand the personification of God, and thus I don't fret too much over the interpretation of how many of God-years = 1 man-year. I take the whole thing as an anology; really as part of an anology which was pretty useful in providing some sort of structure to society for a while. I'll bet that if we're still around in a few thousand years, that all of our stuff now about the Big Bang and so forth will be encapsulated in some sort of new religion as well.

You mean like giving us free will and sending us to hell if we don't use it right?


The argument of how the universe was created is simply a deduction of whether or not a series of highly improbable events that led to life is more plauisble than the divine will of a supreme being. One is right, but neither is easy for the human mind to understand in its entirety.

What makes the events highly improbable?

Even Einstein who for years claimed to be an atheist finally admitted that the universe was so perfectly random that it could only have been created by a higher power.

Sometimes I believe we are just a computer program on someone's screen, much like a Sims game and random things are sent to us to see what the outcome would be.

In fact I would love to see someone develop a computer program usiing all the man made history, weather patterns and natural events that we "know" and starts the program running from today and going into the future very rapidly, so that maybe one of our minutes equals the programs year and see how well it predicts the future.

Perhaps in 20 minutes we would see a true picture of 20 years into the future.

Assumptions:

1) God is not stupid.
2) God wants us to believe and understand His word.
3) God can do whatever He wants.
4) The Bible is His word.
5) God is good.


Observations:

1) Genesis states that the world was made in 7 days.
2) The world seems to have taken a bit longer than that to form.

The observations here do not appear to fit our assumptions. We do not expect God to lie to us and if He wanted it to believe His word literally, He would not have made the universe seem so clearly to have taken longer than seven days to form.

So we are led to the conclusion that He was using a crude metaphor. Why, if it would cause misunderstanding? Surely if He had not meant 'day', when He said day, He would have added "By the way, I don't really mean 'day'" for clarity.

Keeping it simple for the primitive tribes? Then why not cut out the days altogether. "First I did this, then I did that... and, boy did it take a long time". Now I just thought of that myself and I'm pretty stupid compared to God. Couldn't he have thought of it too?

Also, if you're going to pick and choose which bits of the Bible you take literally and which you don't, you may as well chuck the whole thing out and start again. After all, who's to say He really meant "Thou shalt not"?

uh, good arguments but I don't ever want to do poetry appreciation with you ;)

I hope you are not insinuating that Einstein was a creationist.

I constantly see the "even Einstein believed in god" argument being thrown around whenever there is a science vs faith argument going on.

The incredible irony of it all is that my beliefs are infinitely closer to Einstein's beliefs than a christian's are.

What Einstein refers to as a God, most of us would refer to as a Grand Unified Theory of physics.

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Actually, both theories rely on "faith".

If God exists, he probably created us. But who created God? The Bible says he has no beginning and no end...so he always existed. The idea that God always existed is the leap of faith.

If God doesn't exist, where did the molecules/protons/space dust/etc come from...essentially all the "stuff" that evolutionists say we came from? Who or what created these? To say that these basic elements always existed, is the other leap of faith.

In my estimation, both theories rely on the same amount of faith. Thus, a person saying God created us is just as "crazy" as someone who says God didn't create us.

Occam's razor. Bringing God into it simply adds another entity to the model, one we can more easily explain things without. Therefore the non-God model is more efficient and is best adopted until it makes less sense than the God model.

People who believe in the God model are roughly twice as crazy as those who believe in the non-God model.

Non-God model assumptions:

1) There's a load of complicated stuff. Look, there it is.
2) I guess it's just kind of.. there.

God-Model assumptions:

1) There's a load of complicated stuff. Look, there it is.
2) I guess something really really complicated must've made it.
3) But I guess the really really complicated thing was just sort of... there
4) And that it would, despite assumptions from outside the model that it is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving, still make something that such a being would not possibly make unless it was all irrational.

They came from nothing. At least, this is the common consensus among scientists, I believe. In fact I've read, that there is speculation that the sum total of all time-antitime, and matter-antimatter is zero.

Herk

Deist (Wester's Dictionary) "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason."

"Most Deists believe that God created the universe, "wound it up" and then disassociated himself from his creation. Some refer to Deists as believing in a God who acts as an absentee landlord or a blind watchmaker. A few Deists believe that God still intervenes in human affairs from time to time."Deism

There are some minor differences between deists as to how the world got started and how it continues.

I don't remember where I read it but I remember reading sometime in highschool about Ben Franklin using the words, "The Great Clockwinder." I may be wrong but that's what seems to stick in my head.

I know I should just let this thread die, but...

So he is arguing that the only way DNA could possibly be formed is if the exactly right group of molecules happened to bump into each other at the same time and stick together?

Ok, first off we must be careful to make sure that what is at stake here is not evolution, but materialism (or maybe non-interaction-by-god-ism). Even if someone we to come up with a devestating unrefutable proof that life's first ancestor arose due to a physical phenomena, it would not damage Darwinism in the slightest. (This argument is often put forward as a proof of Christian Creationism)

First of all, we can apply the apply the Anthropic Principle to the argument as it stands:
It claims that it is unlikely for life to arrisen on this planet by physical forces. But the point is, that if life had not arrisen, we would not be here to wonder about it.
It becomes much more probable that life would arise on a planet (as opposed to [b]this[/i] planet) when you consider all of the billions of stars in all of the billions of galaxies.

Second it assumes the primacy of DNA. It is certainly likely that DNA originated from simpler forms of chemistry (such as RNA which in turn perhaps originated from something even simpler?).

Third, and most fundamentally, it assumes that the first living thing was created by truly random forces. More than likely it bootstrapped itself up from non-life by evolution. Crystals, clay and other such replicators being the proto-life. (See Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by Graham Carins-Smith, The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene both by Richard Dawkins for more. Also Steps Towards Life by Manfred Eigen is supposed to be good, though I have not read it).
Theists often level the charge at atheists that science has no idea how life arose on earth. Ian Stewart remakes that this is false; "we have too many ideas".

I remember reading somewhere in the Bible that to God a day is like a thousand years and vice versa.

Here it is:

2Peter 3:8
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

While I do believe in God created, I also believe that over years evolution has run it's course as it contiues to do so today. I don't believe that the earth is only six or seven thousand years old I also don't believe that the earth is six or seven billion years old. To think that we've only come/evolved this far in the billions and billions of years.... just doesn't make any sense to me.

metaphor n.
the application of a name or descriptive term or phrase to an object or action to which it is imaginatively but not literally applicable (e.g., killing him with kindness).
(From The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

simile n.
an explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’, as in Wordsworth's line:I wandered lonely as a cloud / A very common figure of speech in both prose and verse, simile is more tentative and ...
(From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms in Literature)

Here's (yet another reason) why the first few books of genesis must be a metaphor:

If they were literally true, Adam and Eve's sons and daughters must have had many, many incestuous relations in order to populate the planet. Yet, seems there are plenty of condemnations of incest in Leviticus and elsewhere.

another reply
 

I am a firm believer in evolution being a buddhist and agnostic, but an idea always runs through my head. I believe absolutely in evolution but maybe if there is a God he takes hand in these events. We may descend from monkeys but maybe God wanted it that way. It is all a step toward further enlightenment and spirtual awakeness.
I like to believe in God sometimes just so I feel justified in living, because I know that I am not getting enough done on my own but maybe if I am following God's "great plan" I am actually doing more then I think am.

Brianna I find ur words that scientist arnt interested in religion to be rather short sighted. Science is the only method in the 21st century we have of finding God, and im sure there are many physicists working in CERN etc. that take their work so seriously for exactly that reason. Science is the quest to fill the yearning for all knowledge. Knowledge of all things. Science and religion are the same to most ppl who commit their lives to either. Most of the best scientific minds of the past we're monks or nuns etc. and although science has proven the bible wrong, well it was written by mans hand and not Gods, that means nothing basiclly. So far it is the rest of the world that has decided science and religion dont mix, not the scientists or the priests, although there was a time of religious almost dictatorship in the middle ages.. it was the middle ages y'know, world was flat, the elements of creation were fire wind earth and water and witches were burned alive pretty often, yes back then science had a hard time because of religion, and yes religion has a hard time now because of science, but Everyone knows the bible doesnt describe reality in genesis, maybe it has no truth at all i dunno, but i do know that we are no closer to finding or disproving god than anyone has ever been. Science is mankinds attempt to understand Gods work, or there is no God and science will tell us what freak of nature is our creator instead, either way I know i need both science and God in my life.

I don't know about Franklin personally but people such as Jefferson in the Enlightenment were Deist. They do not believe in any type of miracles but instead believe that the world was set in motion by God in the form of "laws" such as gravity. And within these laws, the world grew. Thus, any type of miracle would be breaking God's own law rendering God inperfect.

Yes, it may be true it would take 100 billion years. but there is no "minimum" i believe. the "randomeness" is statistic and anonmoly is in fact very probable. Thus, i don't think it's important to question whether or not it's probable because the very fact that we are here to question this signifies the millions of other more probable universes exist without intelligent being to raise this very question. As time and space goes through every possible combination defined in the quantum mechanical universe, no matter how improbable, out of all the possibility, there must be one in which intelligeble being exist within the "13-15 billion" years.

now i'm repeating myself. but the point is the very fact that we exist along with the theory of multiple history along with the theory of alternate universe demonstrates that to question the probablity of our existance is essentially pointless as we do exist.

errrr... well there is actually scientific studies on the last point about dna mutation, it seems that in the asteroid belt between earth and jupiter there is a region of space which is very fine tuned gravitationally and any asteroids wandering into this area get flung by jupiters gravity towards earth orbit, several scientists have said thats its likely that Jupiter causes several asteroid strikes in our past, possibly much greater amount than we would get without this effect, and that these disasters give evolution a good sturdy push every so often as animals and plants need to adapt fast to survive. Basiclly it would seem that life on earth has been brought to the stage its at by natural selection and evolution, by Earths own chemistry, by the sun obviously, and that the whole process of evolution has been speeded up by our natural disaster accelerator that is the asteroid belt and Jupiter. However i would like to point out that yes Jupiters gravity well does save Earth from extra solar bombardment as objects hurteling in towards us from deep space usually head for the sun or jupiter, and if jupiter wasnt there it would be us, however the asteroid belt is vast, if during asteroid orbits they do stray into this area of jupiters gravity, i would like the statisticians amongst you to consider the rate of objects from our asteroid belt being flung compared with objects from deep space coming into our solar system, the likelyhood is Jupiter saves us but at a lot lower of a rate than which it throws massive boulders at us from our own belt.

In what ways has science proven the bible wrong? This is something that I have read on other boards and the best most can come up with is "theoretically" science has proven the bible wrong.

It's all a matter of perspective. Many people - especially those who tend to reject religion - can tend to forget that the people who believe in taking the Bible literally and who believe in Cerationism are an extremely small minority of Christian believers.

It's very true that many/most of the best scientific minds before the 20th century were religious scholars. Isaac Newton has said everything he did he did for the church, and he was probably an ordained minister at the time of his death. The difference now is the vocal minority fundamentalists. Religious scientists have never proven the Bible "wrong" per se - there has nearly always been the concept of the "two books" - nature and the Bible - neither of which can contradict each other. So, when science "proves" the Bible wrong, all it means is that it's time to go back to the interpretive table regarding what the Bible says.

All this changes, however, in the fundamentalist perspective. In that mindset, the Bible is ALL there is and anything that contradicts it is a temptation from the devil. This, I believfe, comes from an arrogant viewpoint and unwillingness to change and accept the idea they may be wrong. This is not as prevalent as one would think however - even the Catholic Church in its decision that birth control was wrong made it very clear that it was NOT an infallible decision and was not presupposed to be the final word for all time. In fact, most decisions by the Catholic Church and many other churches are made with this understanding, that they are based on what is known at the time and the current climate, but that new revelations and knowledge may always come and change the understanding to some degree.

In America the issue seems far more present than it really is. I believe this is a side-effect of the US being a primarily WASP country. There is a much higher instance of fundamentalists here than anywhere else as far as I can see.

Religion requiers humility, and if one cannot be constantly reassessing their thoughts and stances in regards to religion, then they are not approaching religion from a mature standpoint.

To quote bill hicks, "Dinosaurs, man. How come nobody in the bible ever mentioned anything about any fucking dinosaurs, man?"

If I'm not mistaken, there is a verse somewhere in the bible that talks about a big creature or something like that. I say this because I've heard that the bible has never said dinosaurs never existed, on the contrary this large beast is "proof" that the bible acknowledges their existence. Anyway, I've heard that argument before.

Again, it's all a matter of perspective. Fundamentalist WASPs like to look at the Bible as a historical book as well as a religious book, however this is not how it was originally looked at by any means. The Bible is a book meant to show man's relationship with God through poetic stories - literally true or not, depending on the instance. It is not a history book and was not intended to be one. Dinosaurs and whether or not they existed has nothing to do with the relationship between humans and God and, therefore, are irrelevant to the Bible. Combine that with the fact that the Bible was written at a time when people knew nothing of Dinosaurs and all the more reason they would not be mentioned.

I know a LOT of religious people, and I know, at most, 4 or 5 that actually believe that the story of Adam and Eve is more than just a poetic representation of the idea that God is the source of all creation. This is why I find the whole evolution/creationism debate pretty exhausting because it's essentially a debate over something that only a relatively small handful of habitually close-minded people see an issue in.

This difference would be far more relevant were the Bible written in English. Alas, it was not.

The time in which the Bible was written is a significant factor here. It was written at a time in which "literal" writings were not only NOT commonplace but they were extremely unusual. The common language and method of communicating ideas at the time involved poetic stories and metaphor. This can be seen simply by the many accounts in which Jesus is shown in the Bible telling a story that is not necessarily factual and leaving it up to the apostles to discover what it means - many times they don't fully understand it until after he is dead. Taking into consideration that the Bible is not a historical book but a book meant to convey the relationship between God and humans, it is not God's place to "give" us the answers, but our place to "find" the answers through free will. Again, the Biblical stories of Jesus make this very clear - the idea is that Jesus could have easily proven that he was who people believed he was by just showing everyone very clearly and out in the open, but that denies people the ability to deny God, thus denying them free will and denying us of the inherent dignity that goes with it.

SecretMethod: Does the law of gravity deny our free will?
It seems apparent that the law of gravity forces us to stay on the ground. All rational (and informed) people believe in gravity. People don't have the ability to deny that they are stuck to the ground, which denies them free will and hence their dignity.

How does this argument differ from that claim that we must accept God on faith, for if it was on reason, we would be lacking free will?

free will is the ability to choose what path one takes in life. Defying the laws of physics is completely different than choosing to steal or not, etc. Free will != you can do whatever you want. Free will != no consequences for your actions. It just means that you have the ability to make choices about your life and who you are.

As for accepting God on faith or on reason, both are equally free decisions. There is a big difference between using your own brain to reason the existence of God - i.e. coming to the conclusion on your own based on your life experiences - and being given irrefutable evidence thus denying your freedom to reject God.

It should be pointed out that, in the case of accepting or rejecting "God," it is a matter of leading ones life in a Good way, not saying the words "I believe in the Christian God." The words are meaningless. The person one chooses to be is what has meaning. Thus, I believe, as does the Catholic Church and I know many other religions (just as well as many DON'T believe this) that accepting God is not necessarily done in a single religion and can be done in almost any religion. We get caught up over the fact we all have different names for a "greater power," when despite the different names many times the ideas of how to lead one's life are the same.

Well what about the existence of mathematics?
We can prove certain things, and thus this apparently removes your free will to believe things contrary to the proof.

You make the claim that the reason Jesus did not provide proof that he was who he said he was because such a proof would undermine people's free will to believe as they wished.

Surely providing proof of his existence would not undermine our free will any more than everyday reality does?

[QUOTE=raeanna74]What you are speaking of is called the "Gap" theory. There are several modifications of what people believed happened.

Ben Franklin believed God was the "Great Clockwinder". In other words he started things out and things evolved from there. He gets the credit because he started the process in the first place.



Okay, I didn't read ANY of the pages, so I'm sorry for being irrelevent, and having no clue what the main conversation is about right now, but isn't that pure Deism?

If so, hmm, didn't know Ben Franklin was a deist, but alrighty.

Sorry, again.

forcing people to believe in God and forcing people to believe that 2+2=4 are two completely different things.

How so? What is the difference from the point of view of free will?

My take on this whole argument:

Evolution theory and darwinism are not necessarily one and the same thing (the theory of evolution has moved a lot since Darwin's time).

The biggest clash between science and creationism occurred when Creationists wanted the bible taught in US schools, alongside Evolution. The problem: there is no scientific proof to backup the claims of the creationists.

There are some really interesting resources regarding anti creationists, for example:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/

There has been a lot of discussion that "Hey scientists are christians, therefore they believe in Creationism". This is obviously false. Stephen Gay Gould in his book "Rocks of Ages" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...796565-6909550)
discusses how evolution and christianity are not mutually exclusive, and this has also been pointed out in this thread. One deals with "how", the other with "why" or perhaps "who". If you get a chance to read this, I would recommend it.

Gould is quite an interesting read on this. For more info:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/

My wife (the christian) and I (the agnostic) have had some interesting discussions about this, and I always find it interesting to read others thought on it.

You speak of "free will" as though you were Neo, in the Matrix. "Free will" does not mean you can jump off a building and fly, ingest poisons without harm, or bend spoons with your brain.

"Free will" has to do with the conscious decisions we make as normal human beings- acting on, against, and with our environment to produce a desired result. It is in our ability to make choices- not our ability to affect the physical reality of our surroundings- that the concept of "free will" resides.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Can't the same thing be said about science? There is no real scientific proof of evolution, just a lot of scientific theory.

Everything in science is a theory though, but every theory ever put forward has some evidence. Stuff like fossils prove that "different" things used to exist (e.g. Prehistoric man). These are seen as evidence of evolution. It is, however, a theory until someone comes up with a better explanation.

There is no evidence (at least that I have heard about) which can be used to back up the claims of creationists. The bible is definitely NOT evidence of anything.

And how does knowledge of the existence of God do damage to that?

Then my conclusion would be that either neither be taught as neither is "proof" only ideas and/or theories, or all angles be taught. Not just Christian creationism but any other creationism. Even the theories/ideas of creationism that leads to evolution.

I do like SecretMethod70's look on what the bible was/is about. It's not a book on proving science right or wrong or whether or not evolution happened the way scientists say it did, but rather a showing of the relationship between God and man.

Now on the "the bible is definitely not evidence" part, I was watching a show on either Discovery or PBS or History Channel that was talking about the "great flood" and how almost every major civilization had recorded or made mention of some great natural disaster about 5 or 6 thousand years ago. Of course I may hve been dreaming that I saw that. Sometimes my dreams have a way of coming to the forefront of my reality.
:crazy:

Well, you could decide not to teach evolution, even though it has become generally accepted that there is enough evidence to make it plausible (I'm not talking Darwin's theory, but "the theory of evolution" as is now taught in schools. But, I hardly see creationism as the reason for that. It has zero evidence at this stage.

I agree with you RE the reason for the bible - not that I believe in god, but what the book is supposed to be about :)

OK - the flood bit of the bible - If the bible said "in 1243 BC, there was a flood that went on for 40 days, and the entire population of river valley X was wiped out except Noah", then that might be evidence. This is not the case. You could also say (probably correctly) that the bible contains true historical references by using other historical texts to show that there was a flood around the time that the bible was written. This does not extrapolate into the bible being evidence in its own right.

Indisputable knowledge of God does not allow one to freely choose to accept God or not. And by accept God I don't mean say "oh, yeah, I believe in God" I mean to lead a life that is not inherently self-serving, etc.