Hello good chaps, I am currently a high school student studying at a Christian based school. In our bible class, we are discussing the ideas of how the origins of life began and about if evolution is the solution to how current life was formed. Personally, my belief is that God created everything in the beginning but evolution happened to create the society we have today through natural selection. Now some of you might beg to differ, saying that the big bang started all this or evolution never existed. Are you also 50/50, or do you take one side more than the other? Evolution by science or creation by God? Your feedback will be well appreciated! Thank you!
Hi Chorrizo, and welcome to the forum. I also believe that God created everything, and that evolution is the name we give the biological process of his creation. I donât think there needs to be any conflict between science and God, because learning about science is simply learning about the way that God made things. âAll truth is Godâs truthâ is a helpful way for me to think of it. So I donât have a problem believing in something like the big bang, but I believe itâs simply our description of what God did â it did not just randomly happen on its own.
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yes, but do you think that the big bang is how the universe was created and that God created the big bang? To me, I think that the explanation at the beginning of Genesis is the truth of how everything came to be.
I guess I donât see a conflict between them. For all I know, the big bang could simply be the result of God saying âLet there be light.â
Its not mentioned in the bible though, the big bang is just a theory created by scientists, so how can we combine that with Godâs will? We donât know really how except whatever the bible states
Yes, most scientific ideas arenât mentioned in the Bible. But that doesnât stop me from accepting them, because science is simply observing and trying to understand Godâs world. It sounds like you believe the Bible says something that directly contradicts the idea of the big bang â is that right?
I donât believe it contradicts it necessarily I just believe that the big bang never happened. It is a theory made by scientists to give us a somewhat explanation of how everything came to be.
and yes i do agree science is observing and understanding Godâs world but it doesnât explain the reason why they work the way they do, or why they have to function specifically that way
Hello Chorrizo_Bean,
Please note that Iâm just a commentator and donât speak on behalf of BioLogos.
"the big bang is just a theory created by scientists"
To be specific, it was proposed by a Roman Catholic priest and astronomer/cosmologist Georges LemaĂźtre. http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/lemaĂźtre
"Evolution by science or creation by God?"
Why choose this dichotomy in particular? It seems to me not an either/or, but rather a both/and issue. Natural science cannot in principle contradict Divine Creation. For example, Pope Leo XIII noted: âtruth cannot contradict truth.â
"evolution happened to create the society we have today through natural selection."
Even Richard Dawkins rejects the application of Darwinian evolution to society. He wrote: âWe have to get our âshouldsâ and our âoughtsâ from some other source, not from Darwinism.â
A key question here for balance, yet one that isnât often asked: what are examples of things that donât evolve? Addressing this will help to circumscribe evolutionary processes, and resist âevolutionâ from turning into âevolutionismâ a kind of âtheory of everythingâ (which is usually based on a naturalistic worldview).
Scripture is filled with Creation (but not âdesignâ) language. Yet turning Divine Creation into a âtheory of everythingâ (answering why? always with âbecause God created it that wayâ) also constitutes a misuse of Scripture. This is now known as âcreationismâ.
Finding the right way to speak of both Divine Creation and biological evolution seems to be the best way forward. Good wishes with your fellow students in dialogue with your teacher(s) towards finding the right balance.
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but it can still be half half. There are records of evolution like natural selection, the fossil record. We can believe that God made everything in the beginning but then creatures evolved into what they are today
So God only created things long ago, and you are not a creation of God. Did your god die or lose interest and wander away?
The God I believe in created the universe with natural laws to govern it so that it has some reality and substance of its own. The purpose was for a relationship with living beings so God is a shepherd not a watchmaker or designer who can only put together machines, dolls, and robots. That is a notion of Deism and not Christianity or the Bible. God create beings with a life of their own, so they learn, grow, make choices, and develop on their own while the shepherd watches over them. In this way we are all creations of God and not just a couple of golems long ago made by the magic of some ancient necromancer god.
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What? No. I am Christian and I believe in the God who created everything as said in the bible. Yes there are natural laws but we canât explain how or why theyâre there. Only God knows
But if God created you and every living thing coming into the world then God is creating all the time all around us and we can watch Him doing it, right?
âŠthat is what science does.
no science doesnât explain Godâs powers, it just explains what he already made
So you are going back to the idea that God only created long ago and you were not created by God.
You cannot have it both ways. If you were created by God then God is still creating and that means scientist can watch it all happen. To be sure they donât see Godâs role in it but they can still see the effects in all that physics, chemistry, and biology happening right in front of them. And what they see is evolution, all right there in the genetics which they can measure and predict.
OR⊠are you suggesting a Deist sort of belief where God just wound up a big clockwork machinery and just watches it go. Most people donât believe in that sort of thing anymore because it was all based on the antiquated science of the 19th century with Lapaceâs demon. All that changed in the 20th century with quantum physics and chaotic dynamics which showed us that the universe wasnât any such clockwork machinery at all.
The Big Bang theory might be a good example for how theories do come about in science. To be more precise, the BB theory was devised by scientists to help explain the evidence they had collected. Thatâs how all theories operate, as explanations for the facts science discovers. It started with Edwin Hubble who observed a correlation between the distance to other galaxies and their movement and speed. As it turns out, galaxies are all moving away from us, and the further away they are the faster they are moving. These are the facts.
So why is the universe this way? Scientists, like Lemaitre, began to think of what this process would look like if you ran it backwards. Obviously, it would mean that all of the matter in the universe was in one place at some distant point in the past. This is what the evidence led scientists to conclude. The BB theory was never invented just to have an explanation, but was instead a process of following the evidence. Since Lemaitreâs time, even more evidence has been discovered for the BB, such as the cosmic microwave background.
I am certainly not going to tell you how to combine scientific discoveries with theology, but I think it be helpful for you to understand that scientists have reasons for accepting these theories. They arenât produced from thin air.
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And by the way⊠the cosmic microwave background radiation was found by one group by accident while another group was getting ready to look for it. BB theory predicted it at a temperature around 5K and it was found at 4.2K.
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In addition to the bing bang. In my opinion such a great emergy cannot exist alone . So God is the only possible solution where this energy could come from
Whatâs interesting to me is that growing up I use here that the Big Bang theory was evidence that God started everything suddenly, as if with a bang, and now days I am seeing Christians move further away from it. By Christians, obviously I mean the ones who are not accepting science.
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Whereâd you get that from?
Itâs 2.72548±0.00057 K