[quote]pushharder wrote:
BetaBerry wrote:
Fergy wrote:
So now believing in God makes you a creationist?
I’ve asked this question here before, still don’t get it.
So for the sake of discussion, what does one do…someone who does believe in God but does not believe He created?
[/quote]
“what is theistic evolution” Alex. Belief in the divine origination of life and/or the cosmos, but that God let evolution run to the point it is today, or perhaps “guided” it a bit, but left it essentially up to natural mechanisms.
A creationist is someone who thinks the Bible has scientific basis.
Which it doesn’t.
I don’t know what existed prior to the Big Bang, and I may never know. I won’t exclude the possibility that God created the universe with the Big Bang. Alternatively the universe could have existed in some other form, or perhaps time is a circle/sphere. I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to know either.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
BetaBerry wrote:
Fergy wrote:
So now believing in God makes you a creationist?
I’ve asked this question here before, still don’t get it.
So for the sake of discussion, what does one do…someone who does believe in God but does not believe He created?
[/quote]
It’s been discussed here before. Believing in God and believing in religion (and the tales that come with it) are two completely different things. It’s like when I asked how can someone assume that God spoke to Pasteur but not to Darwin. One can believe in God and still accept the fact that things happened a certain way, which can be explained by means other than magic. Accepting evolution has nothing to do with denying your faith in God. So what if science can explain how things happened? You can still believe that there is a God, and that He “created” things, so to speak, only not in the way that a book written by men says, but a different way, a way that men are only now able to understand, because of scientific advances. A way men could not possibly understand 2,000 years ago. You can believe that God is the “origin” of all things, or that God is present within all things, or living beings. That has nothing to do with evolution.
Please do no confuse faith (in a superior being) and religion.
No, that’s not how I see it. I guess the way I think of it is that if there is a God, then He might be within all things, and be the origin of things, but not that God would have actively created life as we know it. It’s hard not to think of time in linear terms, so people tend to think in terms of “maybe God created the conditions for the big bang”, and it could be so, but as Makavali said, we don’t know anything that far back, and maybe those events are not linear. This standard linear thought is the reason why we try to hard to explain “where things come from”, or what point zero is. Maybe there is no point zero.
That said, I don’t know if God exists or not. Assuming He doesn’t exist would involve about as much faith as assuming He does exist. I’m not a person of faith so I cannot come to conclusions if I don’t have the facts. I have no faith in human kind either, and since facts show over and over again that we are nothing but flawed, I cannot follow any religion, for they’re all created by men, all of them created with a purpose, and most generate ignorance and animosity.
I prefer to base my decisions on facts, not faith, and it is a fact that things did not happen as the book of Genesis tells us.