SOME TRIPS BACK IN TIME (Posted 2010-04-26 09:07:22 by Ray Lopez) I've been spending some time lately reading online articles and blogs about many different aspects of religion, particularly the issue of science and religion. One of the many things that bugs me about the mostly vapid discussions you see online are the arguments made by folks on both sides of the believers/non-believers divide related to evolutionary theory. Most atheists tend to believe that one cannot be a Christian and simultaneously believe in evolutionary theory of the Neo-Dariwnian sort. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christians, particularly fundamentalists, who are quite happy to fit right into that stereotype. They'll argue passionately against Neo-Darwinian evolution, or at best will use the cringe-worthy phrase, "It's just a theory, not a fact." I happen to be a person of deep Christian faith who also happens to be a long-time student and teacher of evolutionary theory. To me, there is no conflict whatsoever between my faith and the paradigm of Neo-Darwinism. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a short article about this debate. I wrote this article for a little electronic magazine I was writing on the old StarText system. StarText was a text-based BBS and was one of the first online services and virtual communities in existence prior to the rise of the Internet. The electronic magazines on this system were basically like blogs. You could write whatever you wanted to, and then readers would send you electronic messages with their opinions on what you wrote. Two copies of my little e-zine (called the "Darwin Times") have been stored away on the Internet (I've since lost the other copies). Given my recent encounters with people who can't seem to understand how a person of faith can believe in evolution, I've decided to reprint a portion of an article here. I've not edited it, and paste it here the way it appeared on StarText back in 1991. ** Commentary: Evolution or Evilution?* _We have all heard it before for our entire lives. Unfortunately, many people are under the mistaken impression that to believe life evolved and IS evolving on this planet is to NOT believe in God and the Bible. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. This anti-evoutionary perspective has been around for as long as evolutionary theory has. One of the earliest opponents to evolution in general was the Reverend William Paley. In 1802, he published a book wherein he described all of the remarkable beauty, utility, and diversity of nature, and used this to defend his claim that God created everything by design. These ideas form the roots of modern creationist thought. Nowadays, people read the Book of Genesis in the Bible and basically say to themselves, "Yes, the Lord put together the universe, including all of the critters on this planet." Why should this view of Genesis preclude the existence or validity of Darwinism and of evolution in general? Because (supposedly) the Lord made everything AS IT IS! To say otherwise is to say that somehow the Lord is imperfect, that He must sort of try different things to find the right things that work. Well, I do not quite know how to respond to that. All I can say is this: Why does the story of Genesis recount, very broadly, the basic story of the EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MATTER ON THIS PLANET? Let's look a little more closely at the first chapter of Genesis. First, there was the earth, formless and desolate. Then came light, along with night and day. Then came the sky (our atmosphere), followed by dry land, called Earth, and patches of water called Sea. Then came the plants, then the creatures of the sea, and the birds. Then the Lord commanded that the earth produce animal life, herds and herds of it. Finally, we came along, and on the seventh day, the Lord rested. As a maven of science and evolutionary theory, this scenario sounds very familiar to me. As a matter of fact, it is the same, basic scenario that science recounts as the way in which the earth was formed, and the way in which life evolved on this planet. A formless planet forms an atmosphere from the gases it emits from volcanic eruptions, etc. Land is formed, and the seas are defined. Primitive plants begin to thrive as they evolve from some sort of "primordial soup." Millions of years later, there are primitive sea animals. They evolve into ever more complex animals, and eventually come to land, where they thrive and diversify. The reptiles give way to the mammals and before you know it, after only about 4 or 5 billiion years, here we are, reading StarText! Why did God tell us this story the way in which He did? I mean, if He wanted to, it seems to me that He could have just said, "The universe and earth were all created in one big swoop." Why didn't He? In my view, it was because He was telling us THE TRUTH. The truth being that He formed all of the life on this planet by letting evolution take its course. There is nothing wrong with saying this, in my view. Religion and the Bible tell us WHY things have happened the way they have. Science is telling us HOW things happen the way they have, with absolutely no reference to WHY. When Sir Issac Newton introduced his laws of physics, people did not chastise him for somehow messing around with the Lord's natural order of things. Instead, Newton was praised by some for having been able to describe the inner workings of the Lord's universe, and nothing more. In the same way, it seems to me that the mechanisms of evolution worked out by Darwin (i.e., natural selection) simply describe the inner workings of how our Lord has managed to create such a beautiful diversity of life on this planet. To ask HOW something came about and to ask WHY something came about are to ask two completely different questions. This is a fact most do not realise. Something else that often comes up is the fact that evolution has occured over billions of years, while the Bible clearly states that it took six "days." What is a "day" to the Lord? To me, it seems very presumptuous of us to think that one day is the same length to the Lord as it is to us. To the Lord, billions of years are probably the same as a day, or a week, or whatever. Who are we to say that God and the Book of Genesis must stick to a 24 hour day? Who's not to say that the Book of Genesis says six days because people then (and now) could not possible conceive of ANYTHING occuring over billions of years? These are some of the basic reasons why I feel that modern evolutionary theory need not contradict religious beliefs or thought. All of this is simply my opinion. Science and evolutionary theory deal with the HOW question of life on our planet. Religion deals with the WHY question of life on earth. These are entirely different questions, and must be looked at from entirely different perspectives. _ -------- There are no comments on this post. To submit a comment on this post, email rl@well.com or visit us on the web [ http://ratthing.com ]. .