Evolution vs Creationism...what do you believe?

[Karl_K]

what they mean when they say they believe in evolution but also believe man was created as man in the form he/she is currently.

I do not believe that.
Man has changed over time as designed but if one were to go back to the time of the first man we would recognize each other as man not man and apes or "common ancestor".
Btw all the evidence that applies to common ancestor can also be explained by "common creator".


Since I have been studying casting.
Lets say I cast a car and a boat add wheels to the car and sails to the boat.
They are alike in that they have a common creator and common building blocks.
They also have a common ancestor the building material I cast them from, they were also created in the same way so it would be no surprise that a study of the material they were made from would show them very similar.
A study of how they were made would also show them to be very similar.

 

[Matata]

The more interesting question for me is why people believe in a creator. Let's leave religion out of it because each religion has its own interpretation of the relationship between its god and its believers and the purpose of that relationship.

Let's just presume that something that has far more power than anything we can imagine made the universe. Let's call it CM for cosmic mind. Why is it important for those who believe CM exists to believe so?

 

[kenny]

The more interesting question for me is why people believe in a creator.

Unanswered important questions drive many people bonkers.

Believing there was a creator ostensibly answers the question, "Where did everything come from?"

 

[Sky56]

The size of the universe, the enormity of light years for example...science itself fuels my belief in the Creator.

That said, I understand the complexities of belief and non-belief, and am fascinated by the study of comparative religion...and I feel no emotion towards atheism or religious beliefs, I believe as I do and am interested in and accept the fact that others do not believe as I do.

 

[Matata]

Believing there was a creator ostensibly answers the question, "Where did everything come from?"

For me, the mystery miracle awe is in the notion that it all was a random act, a cosmic burp. I find it utterly boring to think that either a supernatural being or an alien being created all that we are and all that we see. Where's the fun in that? But the chance meeting of two particles that perchance sparked the flame that became us, now that's interesting.

 

[kenny]

Believing there was a creator ostensibly answers the question, "Where did everything come from?"

For me, the mystery miracle awe is in the notion that it all was a random act, a cosmic burp. I find it utterly boring to think that either a supernatural being or an alien being created all that we are and all that we see. Where's the fun in that? But the chance meeting of two particles that perchance sparked the flame that became us, now that's interesting.

Well.

For me the whole subject evokes little more than a big shrug of the shoulders, a yawn, and an, "I don't know."

Apparently, people vary.

 

[chrono]

I recall watching a documentary stating that our brains are wired to believe in religion.

 

[missy]

My husband and I saw The King and I on Broadway yesterday and here's a few wonderful and insightful lines from that play. Very timely for this thread and I wanted to share it. You gotta love Rodgers and Hammerstein.

King: I think your Moses shall have been a fool.
Anna: Moses?

King: Moses, Moses, Moses. I think he shall have been a fool. Here it stands written by him that the world was created in six days. Now you know and I know that it took many ages to create world. I think he shall have been a fool to have written so. What is your opinion?

Anna: Is that why Your Majesty sent for me at this hour of the night?

King: That is not reason, but first I wish to discuss Moses. Now, how am I ever to learn truth if different English books state different things?

Anna: The Bible was not written by men of science, but by men of faith. It was their explanation of the miracle of creation which is the same miracle whether it took six days or many centuries.

King: I still think your Moses shall have been a fool.

Anna: As you wish, Your Majesty.

Later in the play after the King's character has deepened he has the opportunity to expound before a group of visiting British officials who will be reporting back to the Queen Victoria regarding if he is a "barbarian" or not. The King's pride is wounded by that very suggestion and in order to impress the visiting officials he shares some of his newly acquired knowledge on the topic.

Anna: His Majesty made a rather interesting point about Moses. When he was reading the Bible.
King: Oh, yes. Now Moses is very fine illustration of little-known fact that men of faith and men of science, by contradicting each other, always manage to arrive at same conclusion.

On the way home last night after the play my dh and I were discussing this very topic and my husband said for some people, sometimes, faith trumps rationality. And he has a point. Many of us not only want to believe we *need* to believe. It is a strong part of (for some of us) our identity so Chrono, maybe you have a point. Though I think rather (for many of us) our brains are wired to fill in the gaps of understanding. Kenny, I agree, that unanswered questions drive some of us as you say "bonkers".
If there is a gap in knowledge or a gap in understanding many of us fill it in with something that makes more sense to us.

 

[smitcompton]

Hi,

Personally, I think if you want to talk about wired, I think its a survival mechanism that we try to fill in gaps of what we don't understand. We have great imaginations and fill in the gaps accordingly. Survival makes that necessary. Very basic.

Annette

 

[kenny]

I recall watching a documentary stating that our brains are wired to believe in religion.

That makes perfect sense.
We've invented zillions of them.

 

[kenny]

Hi,

Personally, I think if you want to talk about wired, I think its a survival mechanism that we try to fill in gaps of what we don't understand. We have great imaginations and fill in the gaps accordingly. Survival makes that necessary. Very basic.

Annette

Very basic?
Huh?

I don't 'fill in gaps".
I survive.

What's wrong with telling you questioning children (or questioning adults), "I don't know the answer to those questions." ?

IMO it's either fear or arrogance or both that prevent one saying saying, "I don't know."

 

[telephone89]

I believe in science, and thus evolution. To me, creationism always seems cultish, and like a cop out for real answers. I feel the same toward tarot reading. I would 100% believe if it had any speck of truth, but the reader will always have a back up. Oh the death card - it could mean youre dying, or someone close to you, or maybe you have a fear of death, etc etc etc. And then, if it doesn't come true, it's because a) you don't believe or b) you changed your destiny!!!!11! So, no, I don't believe in creationism.

I also find it interesting that as time goes on, people start trying to justify both together. In this thread, but I've also noticed it IRL. When I was younger it was very much black and white. If you believe in a god/the bible, then you don't believe in evolution. Now that science has shown more, people are starting to shift. Eventually, the shift will become further. As people get more knowledge, there is less need for fictional creators.

 

[smitcompton]

Hi,

To survive you have evaluate, plan, execute many challenges and situations that come along. For example, When I have a new ache or a pain or symptom, I try to figure out what may have caused it. I may try to figure it out, but have found I am wrong in many cases. I try to find cause and effect. I fill in the gaps as my own knowledge tells me. But since I don't have all knowledge, I am either misled or just wrong about many things.

But we learn as we go. Since you Kenny know everything, you certainly don't have fill in any gaps. You just survive, no thinking?

Annette

 

[kenny]

Since you Kenny know everything, you certainly don't have fill in any gaps.

Actually I am the one stating, "I don't know."

You write that I don't have to fill in any gaps, but nobody 'has to'.
Actually, nobody has 'filled in those gaps'.
The gaps remain, just with warm and fuzzy tape over them.

... You just survive, no thinking?

To the contrary, it is thinking itself that results in realizing people don't and can't know certain things.
Not thinking (turning of the mind's reasoning and the requirement for evidence) results in people believing and even being sure they know stuff that is unknowable.

 

[smitcompton]

Hi,

Kenny, I don't think we disagree. It was just your statement to me of "Its basic" Huh?" By basic, I mean fundamental to the human mind that it questions and seeks answers, thus wired.

Annette

I didn't see the rest of your post at the time. Someone was at the door.

 

[kenny]

Kenny, I don't think we disagree. It was just your statement to me of "Its basic" Huh?" By basic, I mean fundamental to the human mind that it questions and seeks answers, thus wired.

I totally agree.
We are wired to be curious.

Seeking answers is good, but making them up (but pretending you didn't) is bad.
Doing this to billions of people is worse.

 

[partgypsy]

This sums it up for me!

me too! (Tyson quote)

 

[diamondseeker2006]

both, that they are not mutually exclusive.
I believe that evolution happens because it was created that way.
Evolution happens but there is 0 evidence that man evolved from apes(that pesky missing link that anyone who studies it will quickly find out about) and I believe that man was created as man.
That the animals and man and even plants are related because they were designed using the same building blocks and creator.
Without getting too far into religion that is about all I can say.

Karl says beautifully what I believe. Thanks sir!

+1

All I will add is that I have unwavering belief in a Creator. Exactly how or when this happened it is not something I worry about. It's the job of scientists to try to figure all that out. I trust they are right on some theories and sometimes they are not. Sometimes new evidence comes along to change ideas they have. I do not see that science and faith have to conflict, personally. So the poll is not really worded in a way that works for me.

 

[missy]

I like this passage I read and will share it here. Science and Religion can coexist but facts are facts and religious belief is based on faith not facts. IMO.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1018_041018_science_religion_2.html

science does contradict a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible—on the origin of the universe—which says that God created heaven and the Earth and the species on it in six days.

Scientific evidence shows that the universe was actually formed about 13.7 billion years ago, while the Earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first humans date back only a hundred thousand years or so.


Like other scientists of faith, Primack, who is Jewish and reads the Bible regularly, argues that the Bible must not be taken literally, but should be read allegorically.

"One simply cannot read the Bible as a scientific text, because it's often contradictory," Primack said. "For example, in the Bible, Noah takes two animals and puts them on the Ark. But in a later section, he takes seven pairs of animals. If this is the literal word of God, was God confused when He wrote it?"



Science is young. The term "scientist" may not even have been coined until 1833. Ironically, modern physics initially sought to explain the clockwork of God's creation. Geology grew partly out of a search for evidence of Noah's Flood.

Today few scientists seem to think much about religion in their research. Many are reluctant to stray outside their area of expertise and may not feel a need to invoke God in their work.

"Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy," said Brian Greene, a world-renowned physicist and author of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. "If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it."

There is, of course, no way to prove religious faith scientifically. And it's hard to envision a test that could tell the difference between a universe created by God and one that appeared without God.

"There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator," Greene said.

Instead, Greene said, science and religion can operate in different realms. "Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?" he said. "But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. Why is there a universe at all? These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with."

But is a clean separation between science and religion possible? Some scientific work, including such hot topics as stem cell research, has moral and religious implications.

"Religion is about ethics, or what you should do, while science is about what's true," Primack said. "Those are different things, but of course what you should do is greatly determined by what's true."



In a 1997 survey in the science journal Nature, 40 percent of U.S. scientists said they believe in God—not just a creator, but a God to whom one can pray in expectation of an answer. That is the same percentage of scientists who were believers when the survey was taken 80 years earlier.

But the number may have been higher if the question had simply asked about God's existence. While many scientists seem to have no problem with deism—the belief that God set the universe in motion and then walked away—others are more troubled with the concept of an intervening God.

"Every piece of data that we have indicates that the universe operates according to unchanging, immutable laws that don't allow for the whimsy or divine choice to all of a sudden change things in a manner that those laws wouldn't have allowed to happen on their own," Greene said.

Yet recent breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum mechanics, for example, also suggest that the workings of the universe cannot be predicted with absolute precision.

To many scientists, their discoveries may not be that different from religious revelations. Science advancements may even draw scientists closer to religion.

"Even as science progresses in its reductionist fashion, moving towards deeper, simpler, and more elegant understandings of particles and forces, there will still remain a 'why' at the end as to why the ultimate rules are the way they are," said Ted Sargent, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Toronto.

"This is where many people will find God, and the fact of having a final unanswerable 'why' will not go away, even if the 'why' gets more and more fundamental as we progress," he said.

Brian Greene believes we are taking giant strides toward understanding the deepest laws of the universe. That, he says, has strengthened his belief in the underlying harmony and order of the cosmos.

"The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand," he said. "If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it's OK with me."

 

[kenny]

Interesting.
Thanks for posting, Missy.

 

[Matata]

I think this is an awesome video about our place in the vastness of space. Doesn't particularly mesh with the discussion here but didn't warrant it's own thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eh5BpSnBBw

 

[missy]

Thanks for sharing the video Matata. I enjoyed watching it. It's all about perspective.