For the life of me I will never understand this
conflict between evolution and Christianity. I think it is simply contrived
and ridiculous. It is very much like the grief Copernicus got for his
discovery, he was attacked "as if" the theory that the sun and
planets revolved around the earth were a tenet of the Christian faith, but it
wasn't.
A Christian faith that is threatened by the theory of evolution is certainly a very weak
faith. I would like to propose another way for Christians to look at the theory
of Evolution.
First, lets recognize that the "mechanism" Darwin proposed is a tautology. Survival of
the fittest really says that in hindsight, the survivors survived...ok...no
great shakes there.
But what was Darwin's
real accomplishment?
At a point in time when Science was at it's peak of materialistic and
deterministic hubris, Darwin applied the scientific method to the history life,
and here is what he found.
1) That life was contingent. Contingent upon the rest of creation, its growth
and development was a mysterious interplay between nature and nurture, between
the individual and the environment, between the part and the whole. He
proclaimed all of life to be a unity and stated that in time and space we are
all interconnected to each other and to everything else.
2) That life was probabilistic, and consequently, it was not deterministic.
Darwinian evolution has no predictive quality, life is open ended, filled with
infinite possibility, and its history shows endless variety.
3) That all of life is one life. He demonstrated that all life is
interconnected, all of life is related to each other and to the rest of the
world. In time, he demonstrated that all life had descended (ascended would
have been a better word) from one initial instance of life. He did not explain
away the mystery of life, to date, science has not even touched upon the
mystery of life.
4) That life is transcendent,
Darwin, by applying the scientific method, rigorously and in a comprehensive
way, to life, determined that life was contingent, probabilistic, and it constitutes
a unity. He put science to Genesis, in no way contradicting it in word or in
spirit. He correlated the facts of science to the overriding image provided by
theology.
This was at the peak of Science's
deterministic and materialistic arrogance, and in one fell swoop he turned
science around, he changed the direction of Science's journey so to speak.
Somewhere along the line, the prodigal son of Science had diverged and gone
astray and now, with centuries of new knowledge and experiences under it's
belt, it had turned back around and begun a journey down a path that would some
day intersect and converge with the original path.
I just don't understand what all the contrived conflict is about. Please don't
give me that he provided design without a designer. First of all, he didn't,
second of all we are talking about a transcendent God, objective proofs are not
possible and in fact, are considered to be a form of idolatry, in that they
focus on the concept of God rather than the experience of God. There are no
objective proofs of the existence of God and there can't be, so this does not
hold up as an argument against the concept of evolution.
Rather than just blindly follow Kent Hovind’s anti-science rants, can you
explain what the real problem with this theory is?
