Lemme rock yer Sunday real quick: Must Evolution and the concept of a Higher Power be mutually exclusive?

Question

Any wild Missing Link theories?

OK Good Start
but
C'mon folks
Wax Philosophical for a moment....

Answer 1

No. If God can do anything, He can design a system whereby His creations evolve.

Answer 2

Ultimately the question comes down to the origin of life, and the thoughts a person has regarding it. Nobody was there to see what happened to begin the reproductive process (the "chicken or the egg" question). The mystery of how reproduction began is not addressed with any certainty with mainstream evolutionary teaching. Darwin himself struggled with the question.
Each person that questions their existence will come to their own conclusion, so no, I don't believe God (or any Higher Power) and evolution must be mutually exclusive, because individuals will hold different views on why they are here.

Philosophical enough? ;)

Answer 3

Absolutely not.
It's only a very narrow view of religion that comes into conflict with the idea of evolution, that of the literalists. To the literalists, God is anthropomorphic and there is little mystery in spirituality - all is as written and all questioning must stop there.
As for the missing link theories, they're not very intellectually honest. There will always be a missing link no matter how much evidence you put forward for the descent of man. A missing link simply means we have not found all of our ancestors in one continuous line. If the idea of a missing link was pushed to its most absurd conclusion, we would have to find every single fossil of every single descendant of one line of humanoids over a 3 million year span. Of course, that could never happen and as long as it doesn't, detractors can always claim to the existence of a missing link.

Answer 4

I don't think they are or that they have to be. The problem is that some of us are to ignorant and to superstitious to see the connection. Blind faith and charlatans have to be eliminated from the equation, and the fact that when we talk about religion we have to eliminate every and all present sects that call them self so.

I don't really have a problem with a higher power, but i have a very big problem with the personal concepts and pictures many have been painting of it, i have a big problem with them trying to impose that on others, and i have an even bigger problem with those who say they have a direct line with it and that i have to accept without question what they say come from it. If there is a higher power it could only means at the present time that it is so transcending, so beyond ours present mental capacity that we have to evolve up to a point where we can grasp a more clear and reasonable picture and concept of it.

Everything in nature evolve from a seed to fruitfulness, from immaturity to maturity. I think nobody can say where man's evolution is really heading to, or what he will be able to know and do in the future. It is OK to speculate and to have opinions, but to pretend we know and to pretend we have a absolute answer i think is very stupid and arrogant.

Answer 5

No.

To read what gets posted here on YA, you'ld think that "scientists & evolutionists" are all god-hating heathens who are striking at the lifeblood of someone elses religion.

I suspect that it comes out like this (and very frequently - several times each week) due to a) confusing opinion with fact , b) confusing spirituality with a medievil view of religion c) a lack of interest in understanding what the other side is saying or why they are saying it. The result of these elements in play are that for the most part the exchanges resulting from god/evolution questions are incendiary, pointless and highly repetitious; full of angry accusations that lead to nothing worthwhile. I don't answer there anymore. This was a fluke.

Peace on earth,

;-)

Answer 6

Absolutely not. Evolution says nothing about the existence or non-existence of a Higher Power. Evolotion is complete compatible with any religion that not make absolute statements on the origin of the species. If an "invisible hand" stirred the pot, no fingerprints are evident.

Answer 7

Some people have tried but I think religion and science are mutually exclusive for a very important reason.

The problem is how do you determine truth? Religions depend upon belief for determining truth. But the problem you have is that if you have other beliefs in conflict, and there are plenty of religions around with very different beliefs that are in conflict, you have no way of determining which is the correct belief and which is not. Other than killing or subjugating all the "incorrect" believers, that is. In other words, the "truth" of belief can only be determined by force, wars, threats, or subjugation of one type or another. "Truth" for them is nothing more than a contest of who is the strongest and most brutal or seductively persuasive.

Science resolved the issue of how to determine truth by requiring a verification of any hypothesis. The idea or concept must be expressed as a testable hypothesis and must be tested by people who are eager to expose the flaws in other tester's works, if any exist.

This means that the models of reality that science comes up are exposed to a process that validates their truthfulness, or how close they come to matching the behavior of what they describe.

So, as no religion's beliefs can be verified, no belief can be even expressed as a testable hypothesis, all religious beliefs are flawed in a significant way.

If you try to merge religion with science you would be attempting to say that some things don't need to be validated, that there are "truths" that are so special that no testing of them is needed but you have to treat them as though they have the same validity as something that has been validated. That is nothing but an abusive corruption of science!

That has been tried in Communist Russia and in Nazi Germany. In communist Russia, Lysenko's biology was imposed on the entire field of biology and its beliefs were politically protected as they supported the basic tenets of Marxism. They could not be exposed as a fraud by any testing.

In Nazi Germany, and in the USA, eugenics was proposed as a science of genetics. It also was a fraud that supported a particular political agenda based on assumed superior races.

Even today the fundamentalists of the USA are attempting to impose creationism or "intelligent design" on biology courses to replaces a legitimate science, the theory of evolution. These people neither care nor understand the importance of verification in science. Their religious and political agenda is to control thought so that their beliefs cannot be questioned. They thrive where they can suppress an doubt.

So the difference between belief and verification is an enormous gap that cannot be bridged. They are mutually exclusive and must remain so, otherwise you have corruption of science.

Answer 8

I really don't think it has anything to do with a missing link.
You only have to look back to the 15th or 16th century to see the evolution of mankind.
Does that mena mankind wasn't created by a higher power, absolutely not.

Answer 9

In general, no. But Evolutionary theory is incompatiblewith most theistic texts. The Bible, for instance, says that all creatures beget offspring "after their own kind", which excludes transition.

Answer 10

Of course not. God created an evolutionary universe.