Originally posted by Furball
I am completely open to religion. I am not religious nor am i against religion. I would love there to be a God and i keep an open mind whether to believe in god....
However, the belief that there was a garden created by god, with a male and female, adam and eve etc. perplexes me.
I genuinely mean no offence to you Seagoon, from my perspective i am confused on how someone who is so educated can appear to believe in something, which to me, appears to be so far beyond belief that it is almost fairy-tale like. How does the religious view tie in with the proof of evolution?
Again, i mean no disrespect and would be happy to edit this out if you want me to.
Hi Furball,
No offence taken, its a relevant and common question.
First in answering your question (and this will pertain to both Filth and Silat's comments as well) I should note that I was not raised as an evangelical Christian, in fact for most of my life I despised Christians, thought the Bible was a bad joke, and that Jesus was an utter ninny. I enjoyed making fun of and running down all things Christian and regarded the continuing elimination of the Christian faith and its influence from the culture as a good thing and a sign of progress. I was a practicing occultist and one of my particular peeves was the "narrow-minded" antipathy of Christians towards my own beliefs and practices. One of my central assumptions was that Christianity was inherantantly illogical, ignorant, contradictory, and fideistic. I also felt sure that I, who had barely read the bible, understood it far better than people who read and studied it every day of their lives. I dismissed evangelicals as mindlessly dogmatic, although I myself unquestioningly accepted certain scientific paradigms as "fact," as did all of my friends, this was especially the case because I had been indoctrinated in these principles since my early youth.
For instance, I didn't go to church on Sunday, but on Saturday I went to the local Arboretum without fail and visiting naturalists and biologists taught us the standardized doctrine of Darwinian evolution.
After I became a Christian, I went through exactly the fundamental change of heart and mind that Lizking and I were discussing in the posts above. The things I once hated, I now loved. But I must admit to having initially had a certain uneasiness when it comes to dealing with the issue of Evolution, I believed in the garden account as the origin of man (as did Christ see Matt. 19:4-5 for instance), but how to reconcile it with everything I had been taught?
Well before even becoming a Christian, I'd been reading in the science mags of the increasing splintering and feuding within the scientific community over Darwinian evolution. Evolution, as you know, is a scientific paradigm created to "explain the available evidence." In science, when the evidence exceeds the ability of the paradigm to "hold it" then a change in paradigm or "paradigm shift" occurs. These paradigm shifts can be quite traumatic because men are dogmatic by nature and seek stability (we fear change), and once we become comfortable with a certain explanation of the universe, finding out that it wasn't quite right and needs to be replaced causes a certain amount of panic.
One such paradigm whose parameters were long ago exceeded by the available evidence is Darwinian evolution. For instance, the hope of Darwinian evolutionists was that eventually we would discover transitional lifeforms to explain the "missing links" in the fossil record, that we would find evidence both in biology and paleontology that the variety of life goes from less to greater variety, and many other things that have not come to pass. Also there was the problem of the Cambrian explosion (i.e. that instead of going from fewer to greater lifeforms, the fossil record indicates exactly the opposite) then there were problems biologists were discovering as they learned more about DNA and its mechanics and finally coming close to the frightening conclusion that mutation will not work as an engine for evolution.
The argument and frustration in the science journals lies in the fact that Darwinian evolution is now so established in our society (particularly in teaching) that its truth is now religiously defended. Men like the late Stephen Jay Gould (who was himself a militant atheist) have railed against what they call "Darwinian fundamentalism" and how it is holding up the progress of science to new paradigms.
One of my quirks is that I'm a voracious reader so I began discovering that much of the existing evidence is now pointing inexorably towards intelligent design, but that when this is discussed by scientists (even doggedly non-Christian ones) the scientific community explodes in an uproar. Therefore research, like the DNA markers that point to two common ancestors for all mankind or the wealth of astronomical data that contradicts the "principle of mediocrity" is either suppressed or treated with embarrassment.
The fact is Furball, that whether one believes in the biblical account, the scientific community is struggling to come to grips with the fact that the available data no longer supports (if it ever did) the traditional Darwinian explanations for the origin of the species. They are having grave difficulty moving on though, in an ironic reflection of the same resistance society showed from moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the solar system.
I happen to believe strongly that the more data we have, the stronger the evidence for intelligent design and two common ancestors for all humans becomes. In other words, the doctrine of special creation is becoming more established, not less. So while I may in fact be quite stupid (and aren't we always the last to know?
) the doctrine I happen to believe itself is actually increasingly credible.
For some good laymen level introductions that will get you started on this, you may want to pick up
Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson or
Intelligent Design by Dembski. Please note, my purpose in writing the above is not to convince you of either position per se, simply to show a) the actual complexity of the issues and b) that it is not necessary to be entirely out of touch with reality to believe the testimony of scripture regarding creation.
- SEAGOON
