Anybody Want to Argue Evolution vs "Intelligent Design"?

Imagine if I walked into your Sunday school class, church service or Bible study and asked you to consider using a purely scientific method to analyze a your Bible lesson or sermon for the day. How would that go over?

religious debates -- appropriate for church or theology class
scientific debates -- appropriate for science class

 

Well I'll be damned. I agree with JR.

 

Ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

You're right about the language, though. With Jesus jumping back and forth between Aramaic, Latin and Greek, puns become outrageous statements and vice versa.

 

Has anyone ever considered the possibility that God could have CREATED a world in which Evolution occurred? Or does it all have to be one or the other?

 

annnnnd, who first printed the damned bible? has the catholic church ever lied?

 

i think that whole timeline thing gets in the way, tony.

 

Sorry, I wandered off for a long while.

As for the question:

I generally regard Genesis as being more of a ... fable isn't exactly the right word, but more of a metaphor than a Powerpoint presentation on the specifics of the six days of creation.

It says he did all those things in a certain order. It doesn't say how, though, and I'm from the school that never took the "six days" as being six 24-hour days. Being God and all, maybe his watch runs a whole lot slower than mine.

The complexities of life are indeed a miracle. To that extent, you can certainly understand the hankering to find an explanation you can wrap your mind around.

Look around long enough and you realize that the writing of the Genesis story is predated by similar creation "myths" that are quite similar.

We did a stage version of Inherit the Wind when I was in high school. The Clarence Darrow character says at some point, "The Bible is a good book, but it's not the only book."

Enter Darwin.

As for those who seize on the "theory" issue, remember that the scientific underpinnings of gravity are merely a theory as well, but it seems to work pretty well in terms of keeping the coffee table on the floor.

 

As anyone's who's watched Inherit The Wind knows, failure to yield on this point is where literalists about the "six days" get themselves in trouble.

 

Eventually, everyone does.

 

You start to get at what I was going to post.
Those that believe in creationism also likely believe that God wrote the book of Genesis.
One day for God could be a million years or 100,000 years while we as humans interpret a day as 24 hours.
So God could have done creation through evolution.

 

I see a lot of misconceptions on both sides in these posts.
Evolution does not occur by chance. It isn't random. Natural selection occurs and those animals with beneficial mutations thrive, ensuring those mutations continue. That is a mechanism, not chance.
Evolution also doesn't say anything about the world getting better. It simply says things change, and through natural selection, beneficial changes (within a species) tend to last.
I don't know how anyone could deny at least SOME evolution. We see it all the time. People are getting taller. We've got a rash of this antibiotic-resistant staph infection now because the bacteria is evolving. We have different kinds of cats and dogs because of the way we have selectively bred. That is all evolution.
As for the Bible (which I believe), it was not translated over and over like the telephone game. We actually have Bibles now that come from earlier texts than the ones used to make the King James Version. I admit we don't have the absolute originals of each book, but we're a lot closer than most non-believers think.
For probably the first time ever, I'm with Old Tony. My God could have used evolution if he chose. The scientific evidence suggests he did.
Even the Bible says "the Earth became formless and void" in Genesis 1:2. Why did that happen? Does God create perfection? Obviously there's some sort of time lapse there. Why couldn't that be millions of years and why couldn't some evolution have occured in that time?