I really can't understand why people can't just accept that God could have made life that evolved. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive ideas?
I believe in God. I believe God made humans. I believe that the biblical creation story, is just that, a story. Just like every culture has a creation story, this is the creation story of the Jews. I believe that many Bible stories are just stories not factual events. I do not believe that the Bible is a scientific text book. That doesn't mean I can't learn from bible stories. It doesn't mean that the Bible is not a holy book.
I don't understand why some religous people can't accept that maybe God was smart enough to make earth and life and know that we would come to be someday. What is time to God? Our lifetimes aren't long enough to see the evolutionary changes but we can see evidence in DNA and fossils. It's all just a blip to God.
God didn't make chickens with wings so we would have something tasty to eat with a spicy sauce. I'm sure at some point in history chickens could fly. I don't think God would make creatures with unneccesary appendages. Look at how different the animals on Tasmania and Australia are, doesn't that illustrate natural selection?
Religion is not science and it shouldn't be. They are separate realms. One is of faith and the other is of fact. Galileo is the perfect example of why the religion should stay out of scientific endeavors. I think that history will look at Creationism the same way we now look at the thought of Earth being the center of the universe.
Boudica,
That was an excellent summary of a simple truth. I was never able to explain it that well.
The point about the chicken wings is very good.
Just like every culture has a creation story, this is the creation story of the Jews. I believe that many Bible stories are just stories not factual events. I do not believe that the Bible is a scientific text book. That doesn't mean I can't learn from bible stories. It doesn't mean that the Bible is not a holy book.
You are right about the Bible. Adam and Eve is the creation story of the Jews. It is not more or less correct than other creation stories (and it is in fact the same creation story shared by Sumerians and most Semitic tribes including Israelites).
The Bible is a collection of myths, legends, and stories. Some parts are myths (and were never meant to be understood literally), other parts are legends (and have a true core), wile other parts are true stories (or possibly true stories).
For example Adam and Eve is a myth. That's why their names, Hebrew for "human" and "living", are so generic. A legend or true story would be able to mention a name or title.
The stories of Noah and Abraham are legends. I am convinced they have a true core. That's why the characters have titles (but not names).
But later stories, like Salomon's story, are probably very close to historic truth. That's why the characters are mentioned by name.
I'm sure at some point in history chickens could fly. I don't think God would make creatures with unneccesary appendages.
Precisely!
Have a good week.
Gah, this subject has been done to death on JU!
well, I'm doing it again - lol. Sorry to bore you.
Thanks. I'm glad someone gets me.
I have read through Genesis, and all throughout it, people, places, and things are given names. Most of these names are generic and have generic meanings, or specific meanings. But they're all words that mean things. Like, if they came across a really big mountain, it would be named some Hewbrew word that means "Really big mountain." So I don't see how the first man having a name that then came to mean the whole of the human race, and the first woman having an equally generic name, proves or disproves anything.
We still give names today that have generic meanings. Does that mean all those people are made up too?
That is because you are not aware of the linguistics involved.
"Adam" is not a name, it really is a word. Mankind wasn't named after him but vice versa. The Semitic word "adam" precedes Genesis.
Yes, the words mean things. And in this case the word meant "man".
I am talking about millenia-old legends, not current events. Today we know who, say, "Vladimir Putin" is. But in an ancient legend, we can safely deduce that the more specific a legend is, the more likely it is that we can find evidence for the legend's factuality.
We will never find evidence for the (literal) Adam and Eve story, simply because we have little to go by. "Eden" is simply the name of a region in Mesopotamia. The word is Sumerian and means "steppe". It presumably designated the land outside the marshlands.
That word is the only "fact" we have in the story. Other than that we only heard that "man" (as in mankind) and "living" (as in alive) lived there.
Believing in the literal truth of all of Genesis is denying what the Torah is.
Torah means "law" and the history and myths contained within it merely serves as a help in interpreting the law.
For example, all law has to be applied AS IF all humanity have a recent common ancestor. It's the law. And Jews must treat slaves well because Jews were once slaves in Egypt. Even if Exodus turned out to be wrong as well, the story would still fullfill its purpose for the legal work that is Torah.
We know today that Adam and Eve didn't happen. I doubt that many people in the deep past believed that it was literally true. But the reason Torah contains the Adam and Eve story is not and has never been because humanity was created a few days after the world was created, but so that we can understand the law contained within Torah.
Christianity sees the Bible as a religious work that explains the universe. But that was not its purpose. Torah was and is foremost a Jewish legal tradition.
It was never meant to explain the world.
Domesticated turkeys cannot fly - it has been bread out of them. Wild Turkeys can fly very well.
Find a wild chicken.
hey! I SAW a Chupacabra! With my own eyes! (Ok, it was a video).
Here's one:
Wild chickens were/are native to Asia. Red and gray jungle fowl are thought to be the ancestors of modern chickens.
Oh, and chickens can fly...clumsily and not very far(a few feet), but they can fly. At least well enough to escape their enclosure and get up on roosts.
Modified appendages are present a lot. They are vestigial, which means they lose most or all of their original function. A great example is a penguin's wings that have become flippers.
As for our heavy domestic birds...they're just too big and fat to really fly. They've been selectively bred that way for thousands of years. Some domestic turkeys today don't even reach maturity (they still chirp like chicks) before they grow into monsters fit for the Thanksgiving table.
Anywho, evolution works...it's really easy to see.
~Zoo
The Zoo is back!
I raised my share of chickens for over a decade. I know what they're capable of.
Hell, I can even recognize some of their calls. Like "Here's food!" or "I'm sitting on these eggs and I'm going to peck you."
BOUDICA WRITES:
It depends on what you mean by "God could have made life that evolved". If you mean evolution of an acorn into a tree then there should be no objection for it's an unfoldment of a design. However, if by evolution you mean the development of a human man from a lower and different structural kind, as an ape for example, then, imo, it's very difficult to impossible to accept that God could have been involved.
Here's why....
LEAUKI POSTS:
I disagree that Genesis is not more correct....Genesis is 100% correct becasue it's writers were inspired of God...to date while we do not fully understand the meaning of those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Genesis, not one thing written in SS has been proven wrong or incorrect.
That's becasue the Old and New Testaments in their entirety are sacred and canonical becasue they were written under inspiration of the HS, they have ALmighty God as their Author.
Genesis teaches as does Catholicism that man is something more than a physical body, he is a living rational soul, a direct creation of God. That's why it's impossible to accept the naturalist theory that human soul is from an evoluted animal-type. As for the body of a man, I find it impossible to believe that a perfect spriritual entity, a soul made directly by God, could have the body of a brute origin.
As a Catholic, I cannot consistently accept any evolutionary theory that denies belief in God as the direct Creator of three things set forth in Genesis 1...
"In the beginning God created heaven and earth" 1:1
"And God created the great whales, and every living and moving creature,..." 1:21
"And God Created man in His own image..." 1:27.
Leauki, it's interesting to note that the word "created" only appears 3 times in Genesis 1. This tri-unity of direct creation by Almighty God forms the basic belief of Jews and Christians. It utterly contradicts mechanistic or naturalistic evolution which denies special creation.
I really don't see why christians think that Evolution could not be compatible with a creation story. It's incompatible with the idea that God said "behold" and every creature that exists today existed then. We all know creatures die out, share DNA, follow specific paths. Natural Selection can, for the faith-minded, be taken to mean "God-directed Selection" and work out the same way, with divine influence.
I don't even believe in any sort of intelligent design yet I can see how it could easily work. I don't see why Christians are so intent on sticking to old, insane, or science-contradictory ideas (T-Rex ate leaves and lived alongside Adam before the Fall!!! Cracked me right up.) when their faith can still fit inside science quite nicely in a lot of cases.
The problem with Christian extremists is that they can't conceive of a God that creates the RULES of a universe and the potential for it to occur, and then what arises from those rules and potential in some natural way is "The Creation." It's a very narrow viewpoint.
It is quite feasible that some God did exactly what I stated: Created rules and potential by which life would arise from nothing. (Probably on billions of worlds.) It wouldn't arise at all without a God to make it possible, in this hypothesis, but that isn't good enough for the extremists. It has to arise THEIR way because a book says so.
I understand. They have a vested interest - namely they become rich when they die. Are there actually clear thinking people that don't see right through that?
Sigh.
Exactly~ Thank you, finally I find someone who believes similarly.
Two points:
One, it is not "Christians" who have a problem with evolution. All the major Christian churches accept and support the teaching of evolution. It is so-called fundamentalists from both Christianity and Islam that believe in "Creationism". Note that Judaism and Hinduism have different religious principles and fundamentalists of those religions are more open to evolution.
Two, if G-d indeed created each species individually, including man, He must be a very bad engineer and designer. But a god who is a bad engineer and designer is incompatible with the usual view of the all-powerful all-knowing god of Abrahamic religions.
I've been on vacation (away from home, work and computer) and am just now getting caught up reading some of the comments....
ICECIRO POSTS:
Iceciro,
"Evolution", in that man descended from apes, is 100% incompatible with the Creation according to Genesis. I tried to explain that in my post 12. First it must be noted there are 2 working definitions of "evolution"....Christians believe in "evolution" as in small genetic variation within definite limits of genera (kind), species or families ....we see this in all the varieties of birds, dogs, horses, bees, etc. God created the initial "kind" of plant, animal or sea creature and over time secondary causes they changed into all the different variations that are here today.....this "micro evolution" is real science...and is in no sense at variance or incompatible with the Scriptural account of Creation or Christianity.
The 2nd definition of Evolution was developed from Darwin's work in the 1800s. His pseudo-scientist followers theorize all plant, animal and human life, INCLUDING MANKIND, as coming from a simple cell that "evolved" according to a natural series of descent. It was given an anti or no God twist and has now become a worldview, a philosophy, an ideology. To date, Evolutionists have provided not one scintilla of proof, no physical or empirical evidence of "evolutionary" crossover of one species into a different one..with different DNA...I'm talking specifically about man's supposed descent from apes.
Special Creation, Christianity and certainly the Catholic Church all teach man is composed of body and soul. His soul cannot owe its existence to Evolution for it's a simple spirtual essence which makes us stand very far apart from animals. It is by our soul that we are made in the image and likeness of God and it is our soul which is the immortal part of us. It can therefore only come to us by way of God Himself.
OCK POSTS:
OCK,
Quite feasible? I don't think so especially since science itself (Pasteur, I believe) has already discredited spontaneous generation of life.
Apart from God, before Creation, there was nothing. God willed and there was something..thus created beings began. It say so in Genesis and again in 11Machabees 7:28. God said this is how all things began, and He must know.
Have you ever heard of the axiom, "out of nothing, nothing can come"? Nothing could never become somthing. Nothing has nothing to work upon and no faculties with which to operate. We are therefore forced to admit an Eternal God, a FIrst Cause, a Lawmaker.
leauki posts:
You keep saying this and it doesn't make any sense....
What do you mean "if"? While Genesis doesn't tells in the scientific sense, it does tell us that an All Wise and All Powerful Creator God did indeed create each species (kind) individually, including man. The world and everything in it was made for the glory of God. At the end of every creation day, Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31 has it that "and God saw that it was good" and in v. 31, "very good".
Scripture also tells us that all things are made of Him, through Him and in Him....which means all things derive their being from God's activity....that they are preserved by His continued providence and exist in His immense omnipresence. There is no way possible that God was a bad engineer and designer. Without His sustaining "hand", everythhing would lapse into its original nothingness...
The Creator is either perfect or He created us. He cannot be both, because we are not perfect creatures.
One of my previous articles on Creationism has a list of major design flaws in human beings. You might want to check there.
God is both All Perfect and He created us.....God is Creator and we are the created....infinite difference in all respects.
The Incompetent Engineer.
Your god. Not mine.
LULA POSTS:
Being Infinite, God has everything in Himself which by His mere fiat comes into being. So, out of God Himself came the designs of the universe and all that's in it, including mankind.
God said, "Be light made, And light was made" Gen. 1:3
God said, "Let there be a firmament --Waters. And it was so." 5:6-7
God said, "Let the land appear. And it was done." 5:9
God said, "Let the earth bring forth the green herb --And it was done." 5:11
Psalm 148:1-5 "Praise the Lord, O sun and moon, praise Him all ye stars and light. ......for He spoke and they were made; He commanded and they were created."
God created all His designs out of nothing. This is a great mystery that can only really be glanced at by our limited minds. Man makes things and is dependent upon God's created materials to give them objective reality. Man works, God wills. God's creating is recorded in Genesis 3 times, v. 1, 21, 27.
This is God and being Pure Spirit cannot be weighed in a pysicist's scale, or analyzed in a test tube any more than can faith, hope and charity in Him.
You say:
My God is The Incompetent Engineer. I say, hang in there.... The discoveries of scientists lead more and more to the realization of His Creative Power and can only be accounted for by belief in an Intelligent Designer, God.
Here is a quote from a NYTimes article, back in 1930 which is relevant today....(italics is my addition)
"What do you mean by light? A beem of light comes speeding from a star, travelling hundreds of years and finally it reaches our optic nerve and you see the star. How does it do that? (Can Cosmic Evolution ever explain?) We have our corpuscular theory of light, our wave theory and now our quantum theory, our wave theory, and now our quantum theory, but they are all just educated guesses. About as good an explanation as nay is to say that light travels by the will of God."
My God is The Incompetent Engineer.
No, I don't. I say that _your_ god is an incompetent engineer. I base that statement on your description of his work.
_My_ god, the Eternal One, who is incorporeal and Who created us in His image (which means we don't look like Him but share with Him some of the attributes He actually has), did NOT engineer us imperfect beings, He took what his perfect universe produced on this imperfect planet and promoted it to a status we don't deserve. That was His gift to us.
And it is my belief that we should appreciate and be thankful for this gift, not promote belief in a false god that creates imperfect beings and shows neither compassion nor mercy to those "designed" or "created" with built-in diseases.
You and I apparently do not believe in the same god.
I live in Ireland, a very Catholic country, and whenever I talk about G-d with colleagues and friends, whenever I read what the Catholic Church writes about G-d and evolution, it is clear that they, most Irish Catholics, and I believe in the same god (and disagree only about the nature of the deity, not His love for us or His perfection).
But you and I disagree not only about the nature of G-d, but also about His abilities, His love for us, and His tolerance for our imperfection.
Clearly, we don't believe in the same god.
Whether you and I believe in the true god, if there is only one, will remain a matter of debate.
We can debate.
Leauki posts: #20
I believe in God Who is "I AM WHO AM" of Exodus 3:14. It is the term Christ designated Himself when He told the Jews of His existence before Abraham was born, who had died 20 centuries previous to that occasion. "I AM WHO AM" is the most exact and comprehensive name of God, Eternal, Self Existent, Infinite, without beginning and without end, or change, and the source of all other beings. You might be correct in saying we don't believe in the same God because the "I AM WHO AM" of Exodus does not fit what you wrote above especialy the part I highlighted.
One of my best friends and mentor, a man in his mid 80s, is now travelling in Ireland, his home country. He delights in attending Catholic Mass there. Last I heard, Ireland has held firm in rejecting abortion and staying away from the EU...is that correct?
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