Whew, what a thread… So, there are a few things I thought I’d bring up.
First, I’d like to address the perceived mutual exclusivity of evolutionary theory to spirituality or religion. As was already stated, believing in scientific theory and reason does not mean you can’t believe in your faith. In fact, if you haven’t thought about your faith and tried to disprove it to yourself, then it’s probably not as strong as it could be. There’s a thing called the ontological argument that can help you with that one, and it’s something that a lot of reason-minded people come across or come up with on their own when they start to think, “There’s some else going on here…” A simple logical argument for the existence of the divine does not cheapen your God, but it does make your faith a lot easier to explain.
The reeeeal simple version is: We know existence by it’s opposites, i.e., we know bad because of good, we know dark because of light, etc. We know finitude. So, we know the infinite (i.e., God). Another way to say it would be that we know imperfection, so therefore we know perfection. Our definition of God is as a perfect being. A perfect being is possessed of all perfections. Existing is a perfection, therefore God exists.
There are much better, in depth explanations of this arguemnt that you can find online, but that’s the short version.
So if God exists and is perfect, we can say that, in a Platonic sense, existence as we know it is a reflection of His Exisistence. Since our own self-awareness sets us apart from the rest of the animals and we can create complex structures and observe complex interactions and such, it’s not a stretch to assume that we are the closest thing around to God’s own image, as far as our dialectic and overall intellectual capacity is concerned.
Basically I’m just trying to say that logical thought can be applied to the question of Divine existence and such and makes for a better faith. Logic can corroborate interpretations of our religious texts if we let it. And a knowledge of the existence of a supreme being is helpful when you come to questions like, “How did life begin?” It lets you say, “God did it.” However, if we just took that answer for every question, we would understand even less about the world around us than we do today.
Therefore, we postulate randomness in the universe. After all, if you say there’s no Divine, and that everything in the universe is governed by scientific law that leads to the predictability of every electron everywhere, then we would have no responsibility for our actions and lives, as everything would be as a result of the prescribed patterns of every molecule moving along it’s regulated path. Since we know that we have will and such, as Descartes proved (cogito ergo sum), the universe either runs as dictated by the divine or by random activity.
The fact is, random activity alone is enough to produce life: put a trillion molecules in a box and shake it up, and there’s some chance that an amoeba with put out. Not likely, put possible. We don’t need God for that, we need luck. However, look to the ontological argument to prove God, and look to Ockham’s Razor, and it’s looking like God might have breathed life into existence. We can’t prove it or disprove it, but it seems plausible.
After that, we’ve got evolution or intelligent design or what have you. The thing I always want to tell closed-minded creationists who consider evolutionary theory to be mumbo jumbo is: your god is inferior to mine. Really, on a cosmic scale, your god is a chump, becuase mine is omnipotent, omniscient and just the Man in general. Seriously, if you don’t believe your god can create a complex environment carefully enough to have it produce first life, then natural selection and run on principles that emerge in its environment, then you don’t believe in an all powerful God.
The Theory of Evolution doesn’t attempt to say whether or not God created the universe, it just says how things work for us living things here on Earth. The fact of the matter is, if a sequence of events is demonstrated enough times with a degree of predictability, it is scientifically sound. That’s how we know about the existence of gravity, you know, throw something up in the air and it’ll fall on you. You could say, “Well that’s just a theory, there are holes in it. You don’t know why there is gravity or how it came to be, therefore it doesn’t really exist.” To that I say go jump out of a plane. When I hear about holes in the fossil record and how evolution can’t be seen in action, I think the same thing. Never mind that several of the better educated posters on this forum have mentioned that evolution can be observed quickly and drastically, as in insects that no longer exhibit insectile traits, I think that ignoring functional truth is just nuts.
A lot of the people I know told me that I don’t believe in “creationism” because I’m not a Christian. These are the same folks who let me know I just didn’t understand why I should vote for Bush because I’m not a Chistian. I didn’t disabuse them of their notion, because I’m sure the minister at my church wouldn’t be Christian enough for them either. He had to study to become a pastor, and get a doctorate degree and study other religions and stuff. A lot of folks think that kind of thing is anti-Christian, that all you need is a Bible, but in the educated world, that’s known as “knowing your field.”
Being a Christian is not about refusing all but the simplest interpretation of a flawed translation of a text written by a flawed man. It’s about faith, and that is a totally separate from being a numbskull. When a certain hillbilly took a recent election, I was in shock. My mom reminded me, “Well, I heard on the radio that some huge percentage of people, like almost half the people in this country still don’t believe in evolution.” It explained a lot. It’s really just a sign of a lack of thought, or at least intelligent thought. That how the people who know stuff think, anyway. God gave you a brain. Think.
It’s not hard to believe at all. We can see it today. Here’s an example. Why do viruses infect and kill people? Because they are being directed by a higher power? Of course not. That is simply what they do. There is no ryhme or reason, it simply IS.