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Christianity and Creationism are NOT the Same Thing

posted 16 years ago by gourlegr
54 replies | jump to latest

Given that there seems to be so much vindictiveness spilled over the creation/evolution issue, I thought I should clarify one thing. That is that Christianity and evolution are compatible! Indeed, while I believe the Bible is true and inspired, that does not mean the entire Bible is like a newspaper, giving pure history. Rather, there are different parts of the Bible that mean different things. For example, the Prodigal Son is one of the best-known Bible parables. It serves to encapsulate moral lessons in a way strict commandments, while important, cannot. To try to argue that that story is "literal history" would be to miss the whole point of what Christ is saying. Likewise, to insist that the first chapters of Genesis are literal history is to miss the point. They are moral lessons first I believe (although I would not say they are pure fiction--they probably are based on historical events but have been reformulated to create a cohesive, morally instructive narrative). Thus, evolution and Christianity are compatible. One does not need to reject science to believe in Christ. While I agree many young-earth creationists use faulty arguments and often seem to know little about science, that says more about the fallibility of human beings, not Christianity as a religion. Indeed, I was once a young-earther, but after understanding there are many Christians (such as Francis Collins) who accept Christianity and the neo-Darwinian paradigm, I decided to do so to. So I hope you who have been led to believe Christianity relies on "anti-intellectualism" and "blind faith" and ignorance now realize the truth-accepting what God reveals in Scripture does not require checking one's brain at the door and embracing superstition and pseudoscience.

[–] 16 years ago

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[–] EdmundOG 16 years ago

Christianity only means you accept the existence and divinity of Jesus. Catholics are Christians, and Christians are perfectly allowed to accept the stories early in the Bible as allegory if they so wish.

[–] gourlegr 16 years ago

You're right, Boogaman. Did the other poster assume Catholics aren't Christians? If so, that just shows ignorance is rampant on these message boards. However, perhaps I should be more humble and assume the person is just uninformed. Hopefully they will realize their mistake and walk away enlightened.

Jesus is my Savior and Lord.

[–] 16 years ago

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[–] kangolcone 16 years ago

Ha. Well by that logic I can't be a Christian because I am currently wearing pants made of cotton and a sweater made of wool. There's one violation. Also I guess my mother can't be a Christian because she recently planted tomatoes and peppers next to each other.

People who use the "all or nothing" argument are ridiculous. You can't be a Christian if you don't take everything in the Bible literally. GIVE ME A BREAK. Using the same thought pattern, science can't exist because it can't explain everything. Science is just a bunch of theories held up by circumstantial evidence.

Why do people insist on telling each other what is right and wrong all the time? People can follow religion without taking the Bible word-for-word, the same way that science exists even though it can't explain everything.

P.S. Sshelly- where did you get the idea that Protestants don't consider Catholics Christian? Don't just make stuff up to make your post sound more convincing.

My work is personal/ I put in work/ I work with purpose

[–] agentwhim 15 years ago

What a fascinating thread! I don't really understand the logic of all this, but surely one of the main points of religions generally is to give people a set of rules by which they should live their lives (commandments, lists of mortal sins, etc). Isn't this "telling [people] what is right and wrong"?

You seem not to understand the philosophy of science - there's no intention on the part of scientists to explain everything. The idea is to try to better understand the universe by developing theories and then testing them through experimentation. For the experiments to have any value, they need to be designed to disprove the theory in question - theories then gain credibility by not being disproved or they're replaced by improved theories when experiments prove them wrong. Thus, the fact that science doesn't prove everything is irrelevant - science is not intended to prove anything, it is intended to develop ever-improving models of the universe.

This is in contrast to some religions where a book is held to be true because of faith in its divine origin, rather than through evidence (as I understand it). Since the content of the book is fixed at some point in time, the debate shifts to one of interpretation of its content, rather than gradually improving the content as understanding of the universe changes.

Sshelly34213's assertion on the Christian view of Catholics is only slightly more mystifying than the idea of posting a link to a private video.

[–] 15 years ago

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[–] dudespell 15 years ago

The spiritists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecism) are christians too.

[–] davorb 14 years ago

Not according to Jesus.

[–] happyguy99993 12 years ago

The Catholic Church has accepted Evolution since the thirties. It is not as if it's a new thing.

I'm not going there to die. I'm going to find out if I'm really alive.

[–] Tyrione 12 years ago

All three Abrahamic Religions stem from the Old Testament and thus all major Monotheistic Religions are grounded in the same Mythos.

[–] agentwhim 15 years ago

This is a very interesting post.

You say "the Bible is true... [but] that does not mean the entire Bible is like a newspaper, giving pure history" and that you have converted from being a "young-earther" to a more science-compatible view of the world.

Since you've obviously thought about this issue, I'd be interested in your views on how you know which bits of the Bible are literally true and which are parables, metaphors or moral stories.

From an outsider's perspective, like mine, the creation story seems fairly fundamental to the idea of an omnipotent god, so rejecting it as not literally true seems like a radical suggestion. How do you know that the material in the Bible which describes Jesus as the son of God, the revelation of the commandments to Moses or the Passion narratives, for example, are (or aren't) literally true?

[–] Roquefort 15 years ago

The three primary scientific facts which support literal Genesis are:

(1)chromosome numbers, discovered 1905-1910, proved that the origin of the species is the fisrt male/female in the species ancestry with the species chromsomes, and reduced Darwin's writings to rubbish.

(2) honeybees and flowering, fruit-bearing plants came into existence at the same time, like 2 days apart.

(3) Huge deposits of sedimentary rock, such as the Grand Canyon, are the result of sediment which is the stuff at the bottom of the ocean, as in Genesis 6.

[–] agentwhim 15 years ago

1. This doesn't make sense. Can you explain what you're talking about here?

2. So... The first known fossil of a honey bee is around 35 million old and the first flower is around 125 million years old. Not exactly 2 days, is it? By the way, both fossils pre-date the creation of the planet, according to a literal reading of the Bible.

3. Hmmm... Noah's Ark (the 150m long wooden boat somehow containing examples of all the millions of species currently on the planet) was built to escape God's flood, which would probably have resulted in some sedimentary deposition. It isn't really the only example of sediment being laid down that you can think of though, is it? How about - say - rivers? There is also the small problem of the rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon being 2 billion years older than the Ark story's setting.

I don't really know much about this, but your devastating scientific facts don't really seem to be very convincing.

[–] Roquefort 15 years ago

1. Every species that reproduces with a fixed chromosome number must logically have a first mathematical occurrence of a male and female with the chromosome number.

Either (A) the entire species is the inbred descendants of those first two, or
(B) there were simultaneous multiple occurrences of the first members of the species.

2. You have flowers waiting 90 million years in anticipation of animals to cross-pollinate them. We reject your dating system.

3. You can accept uniformitarian geology as a choice, and base your dating system on that. We recommend catastrophic geology.

[–] agentwhim 15 years ago

1. ...and this destroys the Darwinian theory of evolution because...?

2. You said that honey bees and flowering plants came into existence within 2 days of each other. I didn't say anything about the more general category of pollinating animals. Who is this "we"?

3. Did we read that in the Bible, then?

[–] Roquefort 15 years ago

1. Darwinism cannot explain why chromosomal mutants would have an incentive to inbreed or why chromosomal mutants would have such genetic ability.

2. 'We' are those that consider radiometric dating less reliable then observable reality.

3. We conside rthe Bible closer to observable reality. There is no reason to believe that honeybees had ancestors that were in the early stages of developing the ability to convert honey to wax.

[–] agentwhim 15 years ago

I don't really believe that you're interested in observable reality.

Your goal is to find holes in Darwinism in the hope of proving that it isn't right, but that misses the point. As I mentioned earlier on, the scientific method works by trying to falsify existing scientific theories in order to better understand the way in which the universe works. Because of this, finding a problem with Darwinism isn't a problem for scientists - it simply acts as an incentive to look for an improved model which doesn't include the flaw. In fact, scientific experiments are normally designed to find problems with theories for just this reason - the usual process is:
- make up a theory which explains the known facts
- invent an experiment to disprove that theory
- perform the experiment
-- if the experiment disproves the theory go back to the start in the light of the new information
-- if the experiment doesn't disprove the theory, publish it so that your peers can try to disprove it or find a problem with your experiment
That's pretty much it! The great thing about this is that over time you gradually home in on a better understanding of things. Of course, there are situations where scientists have a fixed idea of how things should be (which is bad science) or where people head down blind alleys and get distracted this way (which is bad luck), but in the long run it should provide the desired results. (By the way, I don't know enough about evolutionary biology to comment on your specific point about chromosome numbers.)

On the other hand, from a religious point of view the goal is completely different. The religious observer sees a mismatch between the scientific view and the view presented in the observer's preferred holy book and then tries to find a hole in the scientific argument. This person then says "Aha! This theory has a flaw, so it must be wrong! My religious book must therefore be right.", whereas the scientist will say "Oh, this theory has a flaw! I must improve my theory to account for it." In other words, the religious person has a particular goal in mind, whereas the scientist (admittedly rather idealised in my description) doesn't. Both people see finding a flaw as a positive result, but for completely different reasons.

That's why I said at the top of this post that you aren't really interested in observable reality - what you are interested in doing is proving that the description in your holy book is true. To do that, you need to continually pick holes in the scientific view of the world in the hope that people will believe the logic incongruity: "I assert that only two possible explanations are valid: my religiously-inspired view or the current scientific view. I have demonstrated a flaw in the current scientific view, therefore my religiously-inspired view is true." The initial assertion is wrong - there are many possible explanations for how things are.

I'd have thought that religions would be better off concentrating on the role of faith, which doesn't get into these discussions since it doesn't depend on proof... but then I'm just an interested observer.

[–] Roquefort 15 years ago

[Your goal is to find holes in Darwinism in the hope of proving that it isn't right, but that misses the point.]

It could just as well be said that the goal of Darwinism is to find holes in the Bible.

One way to make high schoool biology more agnostic and less atheistic would be to teach about chromosomes before the teacher pushes Darwinist dogma. Then the students would see the contradiction more easily.

It is inconceivable that if chromosome numbers had been discovered before 1859 how Darwin's writings would ever have been printed.