http://richarddawkins.net/articles/485753-biologos-don%E2%80%99t-tell-people-that-genesis-is-fiction
Despite my initial links, there are really two questions here. Is belief in God and evolution possible (or viable), and is such belief compatible with the Christian scriptures. In as much as we can point to many individuals who embrace both the Christian faith and evolution, the possibilty of holding to both is a certainty. "How" those who do so is another question. It also very certain that Evolution and the Genesis account, as read (in a direct hisorical sense) are at odds. The question then becomes, how do Christians who embrace both full bodied evolution and the authority of scriptures do so. At minimum, they must read Genesis as something other than a direct historical account. At max... they may just assume Genesis to be a soley human document.
A plea from a Christian (Rachel Held Evans) who embraces evolution, not to make evolution a Faith deal breaker.
http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/09/when_atheists_and_baptists_agree.html
Albert Mohler (head of the Southern Baptist Convention) respons:
http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/10/01/evolution-when-atheists-and-baptists-agree/
Rachel Evans responds to the response. (I must add, while I am far from convinced of the the case for evolution) I deeply appreciate the tone or Rachel's Response.
http://rachelheldevans.com/al-mohler-response?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RachelHeldEvans+%28Rachel+Held+Evans+-+Blog+Posts%29
The Origin of the Species not only challenged prevailing scientific views but also shook the deepest roots of Western culture. Darwin’s view of life contrasted sharply with traditional beliefs of an Earth only a few thousand years old, populated by forms of life that been created at the beginning and remained unchanged ever since. Darwin’s book challenged a worldview that had been prevalent for centuries. (AP Biology 7th Ed, p439)
Challenge to religion is twofold.
1) Departed from the teaching of the Bible
2) Proposed adequate and comprehsive natural mechanisms, reducing or obliterating the need for a supernatural explanation KJ.
It is also irrelevant whether various religions differentiate between natural and supernatural. Once again, this is the TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, people. Wake up. The teleological argument demands a diametrical opposition between "designed" and "evolved". The terms are mutually exclusive. Something evolved doesn't have a designer, and is therefore not designed. Something designed has a designer, and is therefore not evolved. Evolution, by definition, does not progress through the arbitrary whims of a designer. Design, by definition, does not occur through the blind forces of evolution.
--69.209.242.45 04:19, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Hmmmm, although I agree with the sentiment, there is no diametric opposition between design and evolution. Evolution does not exclude the possibility of design, it merely makes it redundant as an explanatory factor. Design does not exclude evolution, it just says that design at some point in time was involved with the origin of certain features of life/the universe. -Superiority 06:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
I've reverted all this. It may be that some of it could be reinstated (in modified form), but most of it was simply a matter of misunderstanding. A lot of that was terminology (e.g., to call it the argument from design is question begging, as was explained at the time of the change; premises can't be logically sound — they're either true or false, accepted or not accepted), but also of matters such as the relationship between the design argument and evolution (many people believe that design does indeed occur through evolution; in fact, that's the main position among non-fundamentalist Christians). The article needs work, but as a process, not as one person coming in, swearing and shouting at us, and making wholesale mistaken edits. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:27, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Excerpt from a Wikipedia discussion page (Teleological design). Comment posted August 2005
Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.
ERNST MAYR: WHAT EVOLUTION IS
Introduction by Jared Diamond
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html
Notre Dame ReSource: Evolution and Christianity
By: Dennis Brown
Date: July 18, 2005
A renowned philosopher from the University of Notre Dame supports recent comments by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn that belief in evolution as accepted by some in science today may be incompatible with Christian beliefs.
“Cardinal Schönborn has it right,” said Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of religion. “Evolution means different things to different people. Some of these things are perfectly consistent with Christian belief, but others are not.
“Some think of evolution as the theory of common ancestry: Any two living things share ancestors, so that we and the poison ivy in our back yard, as well as other living creatures, are cousins. This is surprising, but compatible with Christian belief.”
Problems arise, according to Plantinga, when “scientists and others take evolution to be a process that is wholly unguided and driven by chance, so that it is simply a matter of chance that rational creatures like us exist. This is not compatible with Christian belief, according to which God has intentionally created us human beings in His own image. He may have done so by using a process of evolution, but it isn’t by chance that we exist.”
Plantinga adds that the idea that “human beings and other living creatures have come about by chance, rather than by God’s design, is also not a proper part of empirical science. How could science show that God has not intentionally designed and created human beings and other creatures? How could it show that they have arisen merely by chance. That’s not empirical science. That’s metaphysics, or maybe theology. It’s a theological add-on, not part of science itself. And, since it is a theological add-on, it shouldn’t, of course, be taught in public schools.”
http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=12242
Evolution and Christianity
By: Dennis Brown
Date: July 18, 2005
Evolution and Belief in God (or in a God who is active in the creation of species) are incompatible:)
Only a tad more than one in four teachers really believes in evolution as scientists conceive of it: a naturalistic process undirected by divine beings. Nearly one in two teachers thinks that humans evolved but that God guided the process.
Can we count those 48% of “guided-by-Godders” 0n our side? I agree with P. Z.: the answer is NO. Yes, they do accept that our species changed genetically over time, but they see God as having pulled the strings. That’s not the way evolution works. The graph labels these 48% as believers in intelligent design, and that’s exactly what they are, for they see God as nudging human evolution toward some preconceived goal. We’re designed. These people are creationists: selectivecreationists.
To count them as allies means we make company with those who accept evolution in a superficial sense but reject it in the deepest sense. After all, the big revolution in thought wrought by Darwin was the recognition that the appearance of design—thought for centuries to be proof of God—could stem from purely natural processes. When we cede human evolution to God, then, we abandon that revolution. That’s why I see selective creationists like Kenneth Miller, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins as parting company with modern biological thought.Jerry Coyne http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/
From Baptist press http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=21375
Mohler, a young-Earth creationist, says the Bible is clear about the way in which God created the earth in six days. He argues that Christianity and evolution offer opposing views of human origins.
“Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions,” Mohler writes. “But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant (me) model of evolutionary theory at the same time.
“... I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.
“But there have always been Evangelicals who asserted that it might have taken longer. What they should not be asserting is the idea of God's having set the rules for evolution and then stepped back. And even less so, the model held by much of the scientific academy: of evolution as the result of a random process of mutation and selection."
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