“Can you still be a Christian and believe in Evolution?”
The DJ answered quickly with a matter of fact: “No” and moved on to the next topic. For reasons that will become clear in the course of this blog, and future ones, this irritated the hell out of me! As I started dialling in to address this guy, he ended his show. So I present here the fictional conversation we may have had:
In your Philosophy, God created the world and everything in it, right? So he made the sun, moon, trees, air, water and everything else? He also designed it so that liquid behaves like a liquid, right? That is, he made it with the characteristic that it would flow downwards to the lowest point thanks to another of his creations; Gravity?
This is truly remarkable! We take it for granted, of course, because we are used to it, but it is truly amazing. Quick question: where in the Bible does it explain this phenomenon? Which book deals with the intricacies of fluid dynamics? None?
Similarly, God created electricity! He designed all matter using tiny building blocks we now understand as atoms. We also now can describe and utilise various parts of the atom: we know that electricity is the flow of electrons from one atom to the next; we can explain how this ingenious creation works. Amazing! Another question: where in the Bible does it explain electricity?
Neither of these phenomenon are explained in the Bible because that is not the purpose of the book! The Bible is an answer to the big “Why” question of life. It gives purpose and meaning, hope and instruction for living. It is not a catalogue of “How”. How does water flow as it does? Well, scientific method has explained the difference between solids, liquids and gasses. How did God make electrical charge occur? Again, scientific enquiry has shown us the answer of the electron. Neither of these answers rules out the hand of God in creation, they just explain how He did may have done it. The evolution debate is a similar scenario: a potential answer to the how, not the why.
So why then is the evolution debate a more contentious one? Why do people get upset about this explanation of the “How” and not the others? Is it because the theory insinuates we evolved from monkeys, and according to Christian philosophy we are made “in Gods image”? Is it because: “God is not a monkey!!!”? Again, surely this is faulty logic? Manufacturing processes involve many stages; couldn’t the manufacture of the human species have involved many stages? (And isn’t this self-important notion of the human species hubris in the first place? (Particularly considering Gods own admitted love of even the lowly Sparrow.))
Surely denying evolution out-right is tantamount to saying:
“I believe God created me. I don’t know how he did it, but it definitely wasn’t like that!”
Another question: why not? Why not that way? Can any human claim to understand the mind and workings of God?
On the other hand: why does the other side of the argument cling so strongly to the idea? 800 years ago we knew the earth was flat; we KNEW it! What will we know tomorrow?
Maybe its time we stopped fighting about these things and started getting excited about the possibilities of learning and understanding the universe we live in. Maybe it’s time we stopped getting scared every time our conceptions were challenged. Maybe its time we realised we don’t know all that much yet. Maybe its time to understand what the difference is between religion and science, where these things meet, and why we need both of them.
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Thanks for joining me on this journey! Read on by clicking here: http://talkingattheceiling.blogspot.com/2011/07/theosophical-anthropology-distance-to.html
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