What do you think about evolution?

Post Reply New Topic

Agreed. Critical thinking and religious literalism go together like oil and water.

There's a dichotomy if Genesis is taken to be a literal, objective, inerrant narrative of the history of the Universe, the Earth, life on Earth, and its origins. The timescales given by the literal interpretation of scripture and modern, evidence-based science for the creation of the Earth and the arrival of humans and other life are massively and irreconcilably different. But if we don't insist on the literal inerrancy of scripture, there's not necessarily any dichotomy at all.

There are Christians who believe the ark and the flood were a metaphor rather than literal.

That GIF is a good illustration of the point, but as a Disney fan, I can't resist pointing out that ironically, in the movie "Sword in the Stone," Merlin represents reason and scientific discovery in contrast to the Medieval setting .

^ Yeah, that’s true.

It’s a good movie. I really enjoyed the book series too - The Once and Future King.

I think most reasonably well-educated Christians don’t believe in a worldwide flood, but I can’t find any recent statistics on it.

But even the religious dont have to take the Bible literally.

Some say 'evolution happened' but god helped it along (the rogue Catholic priest and paleontolgist De Chardin had a whole theory based on that in the 1930s-the Vatican ex communicated him, but restored his name fifty years later). And though evolution does a good job of explaining how life developed in the three billion years since it started its not real good at explaining the transition for non life to life. So some say "god made the first cell". I dont think that you need God even for that first cell on earth, but Im not gonna argue with folks about it. But I do argue with folks who take the Bible literally and think that the earth formed only 6000 years ago.

Indeed, the modern Church of England for example has been known to say that scripture isn't meant to be a science or history book, which neatly sidesteps a lot of embarrassment for them. Unfortunately the Deep South of the USA hasn't moved with the times, and that's where a lot of the totalitarian religious power moves are coming from.


Evolution, to my mind, is easier to grasp, at least as a concept, than the life-from-inorganics process. It helped me when I saw PCR first-hand, where decidedly non-living, short nucleic acid chains reproduce themselves in a test tube. It's all down to the binding properties of the 4 nucleic acids - Cytosine binds to Guanine and Adenine binds to Thymine. Given that, it can be seen how "complementary" nucleic acid chains can spontaneously form by the nucleotides binding to an existing chain, so for example the chain CGAT creates a complementary chain GCTA, which can then create a further chain CGAT which is identical to the first chain, and a non-living molecule has reproduced itself. I can't explain how all that happened on Earth as proto-life, but unlike some closed-minded religionists I don't insist on the existence of the "god of the gaps" to explain what I don't know. There's enough known to show it's plausible that life came about naturally rather than supernaturally, but I can see how people unfamiliar with the right bits of chemistry might find it very hard to see, and most people don't know much chemistry.

There are "Christians" who treat the Bible as a smörgåsbord of beliefs from which they can pick and choose verses as they see fit -- interpreting those very same verses as either fact or metaphor (and sometimes both), also as they see fit.

Stars do undergo a different type of evolution. It is called stellar evolution. However much like the evolution of life doesn't deal with the origin of life, stellar evolution doesn't deal with how stars form, only how they change over time after they have formed.

Geological Gradualism is the term for how the nonliving lithosphere works. Mountains gradually wash into the sea. Layers of sediment build up. Strictly speaking "evolution" is only how living species emerge. But evolution fits right into geological gradualism because of the vast time scales involved.

There are actually plenty of us who profess Christianity who also embrace a divinely inspired evolution. It doesn't have to be just one or the other.

I refuse to believe that I came from a monkey.

Me too.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/libr ... cat02.html

Why not?

We had to come from some thing that wasnt human before becoming human.

Genesis says we were fashioned out of mud.

Why is "mud" better than monkeys?

In fact both things apparently actually happened (so to speak). The first cells formed in the primoridial ooze at the bottom of the seas of the young earth (aka "mud")...and then four billion years later the chimps branched off from the old world monkeys and one of the three kinds of chimps became us while the other two became standard chimps, and bonobos, respectively.

Well, humans apparently did come from mud. The Bible just leaves out the intermediate steps.

Hello, all.

I am an Atheist and have zero belief in anything like Creationism. The idea that we evolved from other animals intuitively makes sense. However, I do not see how anything like Evolution as currently proposed could have worked itself out in the currently accepted timeline of existence. I KNOW how long the Earth has been around, and more importantly how long it has been able to sustain life. The kind of random mutational fluke progression/adaptation to environments as proposed would take forever. And a day. I am not convinced that there isn't some kind of intentional mechanism that guided our progress upward, call it what you will. And I hate seeing how closed minded adherence to today's accepted theory shuts down reasoned discourse.

Have a great day!