You Know what I don't know what to think anymore?

Question

One of my favorite plays/movies is Inherit The Wind in which a man is put on trial for teaching evolution in an community that has found it unlawful to teach anything that goes against divine creation. Of course the prosecution has an absolute christian on their side and the defense has somewhat of an agnostic
on their side. But anyway the prosecution's front man dies in the end and the agnostic at the very end takes the bible and Darwin's origin of species and puts them together and walks out of the court room. Of course symbolizing that both could possibly coexist. So what I wanna know is it could it actually happen where evolution and creationism could coexist in the real world. Please do not talk about the validity of the movie I do know the back story of it. I am asking about the philosophy of the matter.

I know I asked it before but I want a variety of opinions so when answers stop coming in for one question I post it again because I know someone else wants to answer it but they just haven't seen it yet.

Answer 1

Look at it this way: God's a software engineer, and this universe is his software creation (stay with me here - promise it'll make sense). So, God knows that he wants to create something, and programs this universe. Now, he knows where it's going to start, and he knows how it's going to end. But as the program runs, it starts to get bugs, and does quirky little things (think Duck billed platypus).

So, in the course of this program, God desired things to evolve into humanity. He had to start somewhere. In order to do that (because if he didn't, a bunch of problems would have developed, and face it, the universe is complex enough as it is) he started off with primordial goo, then the program took over, with the eventual goal of humanity developing into what it is today.

Answer 2

According to Genesis, the Earth was NOT created until the ‘3rd day’ and the sun on the ‘4th day”, so logically its not talking about an Earth Day; hehehee, how could there have been a 1st and 2nd day without an earth or sun to gauge them—DUH!!

The Preamble of Genesis was supposedly orated to Moses from God, so it would have been from God’s POV—so how long is a day to an INFINITE Being?!?

2 peter 3:8 “but do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Though an EQUALLY possible translation of ‘thousand’ here is also ‘a thousand TIMES a thousand years.”-Big numbers were a little tricky in Koine Greek.

"A thousand times a thousand years" would be a million years, so then we are in the same ballpark as the evolution theories.

Then there is the whole question about where did all the 'wives' come from in the creation theory. Like Cain went off to the land of Nod and took a wife....where did she come from since there was ONLY Adam, Eve, dead Abel, and Cain?!? Where did all the other women comes from to make all the people?!? was it all INCEST?!? That was one rational put forth in 'the Book of Jubilee', old scripture prior to the bible where its was all incestuous relationships.

Then a creationist still has to explain all the fossils and archeological stuff that keeps getting dug up. Hheheee one explaination that I've heard is that is all the 'satanists'. Satanists dig hundreds of feet into the earth, even through ROCK, to put all the dinosaur fossils and other archeological stuff in the ground to lead people away from god. Hheheeee.

Every culture had its creation myths, handed down for centuries, then finally put into a written format. Why cling to one? Especially, when the bible itself says that the WORD is CONFUSED.

In Genesis 11, God came down and CONFUSED the WORD in the Tower of Babel story. This was in the generation following the FLOOD, so only one people and one language--one WORD. In OT prophesy, it says that God will not restore the WORD until the 'Day of Judgment'.

Zeph 3:9 For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.

A person also has to keep it all within CONTEXT though. Back in the day, people didn't have the benefit of sciences to explain things, so every that a person could not explain became the province of god.

When a plague would sweep through a community and kill half of the people. Why did some live, while others die? Bacteria and virus were too small to see, and it was 'easier' to say that those that died pissed god off.

Why does the earth shake, why does it rain, why is there drought? Most people have abandoned the mythologies explaining THESE things in favor of the science explaination. Look around your own home, all the things you do in a day that have been made possible because of the sciences. Hheheee and probably even more sciences involved in your daily life when you actually think about it.

...so the question becomes, when you so readily accept so many OTHER sciences, why can you not accept the science of evolution?

Answer 3

You do know that the story is based on a real trial, don't you? The major characters all had real life counterparts. Yes, you can harmonize Genesis and Darwin if you want. It will take "interpretation" but it can be done. In fact it has been done several different ways. But the fact remains, both accounts are talking about completely different things.

Evolution attempts to explain HOW biological diversity arose in the world. Genesis 1 attempts to explain WHY God created the world. With Gen 1 taken literally, they are incompatible without a lot of stretching and winking. Taken metaphorically, they are different subjects and so do not conflict. It's up to you how you want to understand Genesis in order to harmonize it, or not.

Answer 4

Stephen J Gould (famous dead evolutionary theorist) once talked about "separate magisteria", by which he meant that he thought religion and science had their own separate spheres of knowledge and they should just respect each others as keepers of some kind of unique knowledge.

I kind of lost respect for him when he said that.

Evolution and Creation (even thinly disguised as ID) cannot both be true. The Genesis creation says that all life was created suddenly in their present forms a very short time ago, basically, within recorded history. (It's interesting when Christians talk about wanting creation taught, they only mean their own...not the Muslim, Hindu, Hopi Indian versions)

We can't hide from scientific facts. 150 years of cumulative evidence from a multitude of independent scientific disciplines have supported the basic prinicipals of evolution, refined the details ,and more importantly, failed to DIS-prove the ToE. (One of the most important concepts in science is that a theory must be testable, meaning it should be able to be proved wrong. ) Creationists go through some painful logical contortions to try and account for the scientific facts, but just by the principal of Ockhams' Razor...the simplest explanation is the correct one.

So, scientific facts support an unimaginably long period of mostly gradual change, explainable by natural principals. It removes the "need" of a deity from the equation.

Answer 5

A literal interpretation of Genesis and evolutionary theory are mutually exclusive. If one is correct, the other is not. I suppose you could take Genesis to be allegorical, but you would still have to make an assumption of whether or not God exists at some point. A lot of people (perhaps most) adhere to some form of "theistic evolution" which holds that evolution has been and is being guided along by divine source.

Answer 6

The evidence for evolution does not show a need or indication of any "outside" or "divine" intravention.

Creation as specified in the Bible appears to in the wrong order, and does not fit the facts as we know them.

Creationism as an attempt to discredit evolution and apply science to creation, does not use science but tries to cobble together poorly understood concepts and fabrications.

You may believe that God worked through evolution but there is no evidence to support this.

Answer 7

I don't see why not. I have been told by many that the perception of time is different in Heaven- so I have no problem with the concept that God sees time in a different light than we do. Thus, it could all have been done in 7 days- just not 7 of the days we're used to. And I don't see why God would necessarily just create, and leave it at that. Why not allow for some natural selection? Why not have change? Assuming that God is an intelligent being (not unlike the Flying Spaghetti Monster), having things in a permanent stasis would be terribly dull. Which leads me to why I developed my own, personal theory:

I actually know a grown woman who told me, one time, that Satan plants fossils to confuse us. This, above all, convinced me that the Fundamentalists are maybe just a little confused on things....and maybe don't have enough things to worry about..... ;)

Answer 8

Evolution and creationism both have utterly competing explanations for the origin of species on Earth. If you have to fit these two together, you'll need to cut chunks out of both of them.

It's possible to hand the job of abiogenesis over to a deity, and the evolution take it from the first cells to modern diversity. That just means curtailing your logical thinking at the first cell, but it really isn't necessary.

There are existing working, evidence-based explanations for all of these things. Adducing deities into the processes is unnecessary, and simply complicates the matter needlessly.

CD

Answer 9

There are many religions that accept both evolution and creationism. It is only fundamentalists who take the bible literally. They believe that because the bible says "the world was made in seven days" - it means seven actual 24 hour days. But the story of Adam and Eve is symbolic, not literal. There is no time with God. Genisis was a way of telling the Jewish people in terms they could understand, that God created them, the ensuing stories have used historic events as examples of how God was with them.

Answer 10

Sure they can coexist. My personal belief is that they do. Strict interpretation of time as stated in the Bible does not allow for such. But consider if, rather than the world and mankind being created in 6 24-hour days, it were created in 6 periods of time (spanning millions of years) through the process of evolution. One could refer to these periods as days to present a more understandable analogy for people to grasp. Why does one side have to be right over the other? In my opinion, scientific evidence can help us confirm what's written in the Bible better than it can disprove it.

Answer 11

I do think both can co-exist. Why not?
I was raised with a strong religious background, but I found that after attending college [I graduated from a college that required we take several religious courses], that there were other very vaild and interesting beliefs and religions, beside the one I was raised with.

I am also a biology and education major, therefore I can see those viewpoints [science] as well.

I am not going to say which parts of each are "valid", because who really knows for sure..?
But I do think that they can co-exist.

The question is: will people ACCEPT parts of BOTH..?
Good question :)