Do you believe in:
- Evolution, old earth
- No evolution, old earth
- No evolution, young earth
- Not sure
0
voters
Inspired by Anthony on Twitter.
Personally, it doesn’t wreck my Faith one way or the other. My Boss is a young earther (Protestant). The Priest who taught RCIA when my Wife became Catholic leaned more old earth. I could go either way, but I do not believe we came from apes if that is what is meant by evolution.
Science tries to explain how God created; Religion tries to convey why God created.
Your last sentence is perfect. I never question the “why” of God….
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A friend of mine (Ademar Rakowsky) works for the Kolbe Center and has written several articles supporting young earth. I encourage all to give it a look. Personally, I’ve held pretty much every possible position except atheistic evolution. Bottom line is I wasn’t there when God did it, but I am here now.
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I guess that the right discipline of science here is cosmology? (Or is there an abstraction of cosmology that would apply to both the history of the universe and of the earth?) My favorite personal observation is that the universe doesn’t have to have a terminal moment at either end to be finite. It would be physically valid for the past to extend infinitely and the future to extend infinitely, based on a finite definition and a central moment only, and so it would degrade into complete dispersion as you approached the infinite past, and either complete dispersion again or perpetual collapse in the infinite future. I really think that the tragedy of the “enlightenment” is that the real breadth of possibilities here has not been explored because of the constraint that science must contradict religion somehow or another. (I said constraint, but it’s a priority even!)
I always have to add… It would even work for there to be an equivalent of collapse-in-reverse going backward in time, which would be similar to the big bang theory but not the same. To help visualize the perpetual universe concept that begins and ends in dispersion, imagine a universe of three particles that collect nearest each other at a certain time, having come from different directions and proceeding again away in different directions before and after that time. To me this is the most intuitive way for the universe to have presence in time, anything else would be more complicated.
I mean it’s pretty hard to deny evolution. There is fossil evidence of the precursors to us: human beings. Like Denisovans. There were bones found in a cave a few years back. There are other hominins proven to have existed. Evidence of them is in museums and labs right now.
And "micro"evolution has been observed to happen rapidly in certain isolated species, right before our eyes. It usually takes so long that you can’t see it. Under extreme conditions, tiny changes in a species can really add up if those particular individuals keep reproducing more and passing on more genetic material.
We have carbon dating proving the earth has been around for more than 6000 years. Did someone plant all the 500 million year old trilobite fossils in the ground next to the 500 million year old rock? No that’s just how much time went by and during that time creatures changed, and it’s beautiful! God did all that.
Btw we didn’t come from apes. We had a common ancestor with apes. A creature a long time ago, that doesn’t exist anymore, split into several different species over time due to environmentally isolating factors: one of them was apes, some of them were precursor to humans, and there were others.
I think God probably loved the early hominins too and it challenges the line between animal and man and I guess that’s probably why people resent the whole concept on some level. I’m ok with it though. We’ll evolve too and I wouldn’t want humans in 4 million years to decide God didn’t consider me a real person because no evidence remained that I had the ability to communicate in the same way as future humans and I looked very different from them.
I just don’t think we need to ignore clear facts to believe in God and be in awe of his creation and I would feel silly and disingenuous doing so.
I think that when “God created the heavens” it means God made matter as we know it in this universe begin to exist, possibly in other universes too. He made there be a big bang and he made sure everything would happen in such a way that someday we would exist because he loves us.
Actually, I think much of the perception that we should take evolution from granted stems from the error that similarity is causality. The simple truth is that there is no “non-circumstantial” evidence of evolution. The only context in which we observe what is incorrectly called evolution is in the adaptation of a species to it’s environment. This adaptation is in fact not evolution, it is rather a mechanism that the organism has in order to learn. Evolution requires genetic change that an organism is not predisposed to.
Think about it. Bacteria don’t have memory, they don’t have brains. The way in which they implement memory and learning is through the only thing they have to do so, their genetics. Bacteria are designed to adapt through genetics. These adaptations happen within the parameters of the bacteria’s existing genetics, the bacteria is predisposed to these genetic changes, and if these genetic changes were forced by an external toxin then they would only be destructive. Humans and other higher level organisms do not benefit from genetic adaptation, and so their bodies even have mechanisms of the immune system to prevent these genetic changes, as opposed to the bacteria which have what I will call “parameterized genetics”.
I don’t think that anyone has ever actually determined what the cause of the genetic changes in bacteria are, probably because that discovery would help disprove evolution. I would bet $1000 that bacteria cause their own genetic changes, rather than their environment causing the changes as is assumed in evolutionary theory.
Oh, and one more thing, I did read one time a know-it-all trying to point out that this one fish “evolved” into a new species by changing it’s sexual nature somehow (it was some exotic sort of hermaphrodite really). No, that wasn’t a change in species, what that was was a changing of the definition of species so that we could now say, using the new definition of “species” that the hermaphrodite fish wasn’t the same species anymore. That doesn’t count as anything but wordsmithing.
But I do agree with you about the earth being old, in the sense of the material that is here being datable to before 6000 years. I think the landmark at 6000 years ago was kind of like the car leaving the factory. The car existed before it left the factory, it even existed in some sense before the factory in the minds of the engineers. But the car is only the car that was intended by the engineers at the time it leaves the factory. The same is true of the earth, the earth has all this time that it existed before it was time to “go on stage”. What is important to note is that nothing of moral significance happened in the material world before Adam and Eve, that really is the key takeaway from Genesis. It isn’t even incompatible with Genesis to believe that there were other humans that existed before Adam and Eve, so long as you hold that Adam and Eve were the first to receive the promise of eternal life, and so they may have been the first humans to have souls (this is a stretch, and not my personal belief, I only admit that it might be workable.)
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