Is Evolution a form of religion

Faith & Science Conversation
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Thanks, Richard; this is definitely enough to provide better context for a meaningful discussion, though there is quite a ways to go before I will feel that I really understand where we agree, and where we disagree, so that we can then discuss how important the disagreements are.

Is there really any difference between the belief that God created the universe in a Big Bang, and created it so specifically locating everything that life would develop, and the necessary modifications to genes would be introduced at just the right time so that we all would descend from a single organism, and the belief that God intervened directly as organisms were evolving, and changed directly the DNA to cause the next offspring to be a different species?
In both cases, God knew exactly what had happened, what was happening, and what will happen. And in both cases, God knew that the outcome was exactly what He wanted it to be.
Also, as you so clearly point out, it cannot be proved which of these occurred.
The thing missing in this whole discussion is the question of the existence (or lack of existence) of God. For Christians like me, who believe that God exists, without having a scientific proof of God’s existence, the real point of important distinction is whether a person believes that God exists, or not. How God established His world, exactly when He felt it was appropriate to intervene directly in the process, and what exactly He had set into motion so precisely that He didn’t have to intervene, is not very important at all, and there is no way to prove what was intervention, and what was proceeding just by following the laws of physics.
When I began to understand the reality of the Creator existing outside of the creation, and started to understand that time as we experience it is a part of the created universe, and began to understand some of the actual truths about time, and started to understand that God looks at this universe from outside of the space and time and mass and energy of this universe, then it became clear to me that God really did create a universe that does function exactly as He designed it to function, and it really doesn’t matter at all exactly how He makes it fit His purposes.
This does lead me to my next question for you: When you ask whether evolution is a form of religion, are you specifically assuming a form of evolutionary theory that denies the existence of God?

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How many times do I have to say this?

The first Creation account is not the same literary type as the second one, which is similar in type to the serpent/fall story, but these are not the same literary type as the Cain and Abel story, and none of these are the same literary type as the genealogy in chapter 5.

Reading them as all one type is not only idiotic, it’s highly disrespectful towards the writers, the (apparent) redactor, and the Holy Spirit – especially the last, because the Spirit didn’t inspire those writings to be read in a modern worldview, He inspired them to be read in the worldview in which they were written. I’ll repeat an important principle here: the scriptures were not written to us; we are reading someone else’s mail – and that means we have to do our best to read each part the way that the first hearers would have understood it, which means we read the multiple literary types in Genesis 1 -5 each according to its type. The final redactor didn’t see fit to change the literary types, so we would be arrogant indeed to treat them all the same.

Then there’s this, which follows immediately the part you cited:

“Biblical materials and affirmations – in this case the symbolism of Creator and creation – are treated as though of the same order and the same literary genre as scientific and historical writing. “I believe in God the Father Almighty” becomes a chronological issue, and “Maker of heaven and earth” a technological problem.”

The literary aspect is what drives me up a wall; many people don’t even grasp that there are different types of literature! and similarly that there are (or can be) different worldviews. Those are why the Christian study center just off the university campus had courses in literature and in worldviews; it’s almost impossible to study the scriptures until people can grasp that there are many literary types and several different worldviews in the scriptures.

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A line that caught my eye:

“Students have difficulty in thinking, feeling and expressing themselves symbolically.”

I knew a Lutheran priest/pastor who a seminary kept trying to convince to join the faculty to teach church history and history of theology. One thing he insisted on – and which was part of why he never got hired – was that students should take courses in ancient poetry as part of an effort to expand their ways of viewing the world. The Old Testament department loved the idea of a term or two studying Hebrew poetry, while the New Testament department didn’t really care, but it was the systematics folks who rejected the idea.

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There are still a few journals that I interact with where physical copies are required (100-year copyrights, and stuff from the '40s wasn’t published online).

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Who says so? You?

That does not conform to a single redactor. A single redactor would have a single viewpoint.
The whole point of the commentaries in 1 & 2 King is that it is a specific theological viewpoint. A single redactor would not include the opposing Chronicles. It would be self-defeating.

Richard

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Evolution does not acknowledge the existence of God, it denies His invollvement. It claims that everything was achieved by random deviation tempered by natural forces of survival and/or domnance.

I am happy for the big bang to be God’s inital words. That would be good theology. But to remove Him from designing creation is not.

There is no part of evolutionary theory that suggests that God guided the mutations, or that He “tinkered” along the way. Evolution is a singular process with no goals. Any “design” is governed by Natural Selection or Survival of the fittest.

The Bible declares that humanity is a specific form, made in “God’s image”. Now that may be human vanity but the theology is still that we are a deliberate creation and not the pinnacle of Godless evolution.

Richard

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Just about every significant scholar of the Old Testament. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered one that would disagree – they may argue over exactly what literary type the second Creation account is, or whether the first one really counts as temple inauguration literature, but those are details; the literary types are obviously different in the Hebrew.

Moving the goalposts: the single redactor is for the Pentateuch (some will argue that Joshua should be included; I never made up my mind on that one).
And a single redactor can still have multiple literary types as well as retain worldview elements from his source documents. Just as an illustration, an oft-quoted writer here did poetry with at least two different worldviews involved, several different kinds of prose, children’s fiction, adult fiction, scholarly articles, popular articles both commentary and persuasive . . . I think that covers it.
Heck, in my university days I wrote papers from at least three different worldview perspectives!

Oh – and yes, a single redactor would in fact include both what we call the books of Kings and the books of Chronicles; the rabbis I knew at St. Louis University would have gotten a good laugh at the idea that a redactor wouldn’t include both. Not including both would be a very Western thing from a modern Western sort of worldview that quite likely wouldn’t even have occurred to someone in the eighth century B.C. or so.

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Here we go again with you demonstrating that you understand neither evolution nor science itself.

Evolution does not “deny His involvement”; science cannot measure the divine so it cannot include it in any way – or do you have a “divine-o-meter” tucked away somewhere and are just waiting to reveal it and earn a Nobel Prize?

Because that’s what science observes – yet even so it cannot exclude God because a few interventions here and there would be indistinguishable from random activity.

No one “removes” God “from designing Creation” because He never shows up! As the Psalmist notes, He is a God Who hides Himself, so if it bothers you that God does not show up in evolution (or geology, or astronomy), then go complain to God – He’s the One Who arranged things that way (but not totally, given how a number of my fellow students ended up Christians due to studying evolution).

There is no part of evolutionary theory that rules out GOd from guiding mutations or tinkering along the way – unless, again, you have that divine-o-meter hidden away somewhere and haven’t revealed it yet.

Incorrect: evolution appears to be “a singular process with no goals”. As one of my botany professors observed, up until researchers found tentative evidence how flowering plants might have evolved, the idea that heavenly intervention – or alien tinkering by galactic grad students slumming in our bit of the galaxy-- was responsible was as valid as any other notion. Not a welcome idea to most scientists, but there was no evidence to excude those.

And given that evolution so far appears to be guided by natural selection (saying “survival of the fittest” is redundant), then life in fact proceeds from design – system design.

Make up your mind: do you want science to be run by theology, or theology guided by science, or not? First you argue for one, then for the other!

That’s a nonsense statement – evolution has no “pinnacles”; every species in existence is equally a “pinnacle” of evolution because it has survived. Although, if you measure by how long any given species has survived, then humans aren’t really in the running!

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It is not me who has to make up my mind. I know where i stand. Unfortunately you do not know where either of us stands. One minute you are extolling the virtues and details of evolution as taught by science and the next you are claiming Godly intervention. Make up your mind! Either you are extolling evolution from a scientific point of view or you are not.

If you are claiming godly intervention then you cannot argue with me about anything, especially from a scientific standpoint.

One day you might be able to distinguish between academic authority and the Church.

Precisely. Probably one that is not literal.

The two accounts are placed there for a reason. Perhaps you have not found that yet. As I said, you are quite happy to rationalise The first creation story, why not the second? There is just as much nonscientific content there.

Richard

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The unstated, hidden assumption here does seem to be the real problem with the question as posed that started this thread.

Richard, did you mean to ask whether the particular evolutionary theory that all living things descend from one original organism was a form of religion? I think this might be specific enough to be a real question.

If that is the question, then the answer, demonstrated clearly by @St.Roymond, is that this specific theory is not a religion. It is a scientific theory, with all the characteristics and limitations implied by that statement. This theory says nothing about the existence, or lack of existence, of God. The scientific theory stated in correct scientific terms says that it cannot address the question of whether God exists.

I think the error of logic that underlies @RichardG 's position is similar to a major error of logic that my brother, a serious YEC believer, makes. Richard, just because most people who don’t believe God exists believe that all life descended from a single original organism, it does not follow that all people who believe that all life descended from a single organism don’t believe that God exists! We have many counter-examples, strongly demonstrated in just this thread!

And one further point: If you accept that God intervened every time when a change in species happened during the evolutionary process, how does that say that the changed species is not a descendant of the one from which it was derived? In a very real sense, even if God specifically intervened at every single change, all living things could still be descended in a very real sense from the one original organism. Or do you believe that God started from scratch each time He made a change, and yet made all of those changes in such a precise manner that the whole DNA structures look so similar that they could be modifications from a single source?

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Inasmuch as it is based on conjecture and extrapolation rather than empirical proofs yes. Having established this one “Beleif” all other evidence will be interpretted accordingly be it DNA sequencing or how to interpret specific fossil evidence. Even the statistical statement that 2% difference is significant is massaging the figures to suit the conclusion. In point of fact that 2% contains a very large number of differences. 2% of 2,000,000 is 4,000.
(example not the actual figures involved)

Richard

PS I am not saying that there is no empirical data, only that is it corroborative at best. In terms of a murder trial, there is no body.

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How do you answer @St.Roymond when he states that he knows several people personally who have been searching explicitly for contrary evidence, and have failed, many times, to find any contrary evidence? This attitude is drastically different from the attitude you ascribe to those scientists, and your language in discussing anyone who disagrees with you seems to indicate that you have placed all of us into one bucket.

I am concerned about this attitude, because I have run into a very similar mistake in discussions about YEC. And it all seems related to another fact that just came into focus this morning: God created a universe where we do not need to know absolute truth, in microscopic detail, in order to predict very accurately what will happen on a human scale. In fact, it is not possible to know both the position and state of motion of any single electron! Specific example: We don’t need to know anything about any single atom or molecule in order to build a gasoline engine that works just fine, most of the time - and even when it doesn’t work, we can fix it without dealing with the atomic scale. Similarly, not everyone who believes that we all descended from the same original organism believes that God doesn’t exist. And this is true even though it does seem that everyone who doesn’t believe that we all descended from a single organism does believe that God exists.

Richard, this kind of statement is exactly what I think @St.Roymond is trying to warn you against making. Please be much more specific if you are saying that someone is wrong in his or her interpretation here. List the interpretation exactly as stated by the author, and provide justifiable rationale showing exactly what of the stated interpretation is faulty. If, for example, the author stated that it is 98% certain that something is true, then your statement that 2% means something appears on the surface to be irrelevant, because it was something already incorporated into the interpretation.

If you want to believe that the 2% likely interpretation is true, and the 98% likely interpretation is false, that is your right. However, it is misleading, and seriously undermines your credibility as a rational critic of science, for you to claim that the 98% likely interpretation is absolutely false, because it disagrees with something you believe, and you do not show any scientific rationale for your claim.

If you want to argue science, you need to use science. If you are able to show where the science is wrong in detail, that is a valid point (I haven’t seen you show real, significant scientific errors in any of your posts). If your only point is that real science disagrees with something you believe from theology, I would suggest that you reexamine your theology, since God created the world that has been examined by scientists. Even the bible tells us to look at God’s creation to learn about God!

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There is no more evidence to disprove it than there is to prove it. How can you? The process exists. It is just the scope of it that is in question. And, unless you can go back and look, you will never be able to prove it one way or the other. it is a belief.

The law says that we are innocent until proven guilty. Science says that evolution is true unless disproved.

And that is the catch 22. You cannot disprove Evolution within the “laws” of science. (although i have tried) I have tried to show that the evolutionary process cannot change beyond a basic form (such as reptiles, bird, mammal etc) And Evolutionary evidence is very, very scarce on these things. All the evidence points to adaption within the same basic structure (Galapagos finches etc) Even the change from reptile to bird is very dodgy (But it relies on a view of the use of feathers that cannot be proven either)

IOW You can only play in the scientific playing field. So they have the home advantage every time.

Richard

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That is true. There is no teleporting back. Something to do with entropy and the arrow of time perhaps, but no matter how many fossils we dig up, or genomes we decode, we will never be able to view the epochs of evolution progress in front of our personal eyeballs.

So Richard, where does that leave us? Will one guess always be as good as another no matter how much evidence accumulates? Is my assertion that velociraptors were actually advanced alien overlords just as valid as conventional science just because it cannot be personally negated? I’m not meaning to be satirical. We cannot prove an hypothesis about the past evolution the same way as a mathematical theorem, so how would you suggest we evaluate the validity and strength of an inference?

Is an inference the same thing as “just a belief”?

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Even this is enough for me. I am not expecting you or anyone else to just fall in line with me. I am used to being out on a limb.
What I want is for you (et al) to understand the ramifications of what you believe, and understand that it is still, ultimately a belief. I do not have to beleive in evolution as it stand, and you actually aren’t believing it either. You have squeezed God in, but not to my satisfaction.(or enough, truth be told)

Not exactly. But the inferences of evolutionary theory are extrapolations, that is, it works here so it should work there. Normally that would work but the here and there are not comparable. The short examples of evolutionary progress do not compare with the giant advances that the theory claims. Changing a beak is not the same as changing a whole metabolic system.

I do not wish to keep going back to the DNA but, it is circumstantial at best,but you are claiming it as decisive. You have seen this connection and nothing I can say or do will alter it

Do you know this illusion?

illusion
illusion619×850 101 KB

You will naturally see either the pretty woman or the old hag. Once you have seen it you will find it difficult to see the other

That is what I am claiming about the DNA sequences. You see the heredity. You do not see anything else. (it may not be there, of course)

Just the element of doubt is all I ask for.

Richard

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I have admonished you before about lying about what others here say, but here you do it again.
I try to explain what the theory of evolution actually says because you repeatedly get it wrong, and I point out how elegant a system it describes – if you think that is “extolling” it, fine.

I also explain that science cannot rule out God’s intervention, that’s just basic university mathematics. And what science cannot measure it cannot include – but nor can it exclude.

The church is not, despite how you want us to think, anti-scholarship. But given a church that allows the views that the scriptures can be wrong and God can be evil, I want nothing to do with any such church because it is the synagogue of Satan.

I don’t “rationalize” anything, I follow the text – which you put yourself above to the point of saying the scriptures can be wrong and God can be evil.

So? The meaning of the text does not rest on any scientific view.

I’m beginning to think you deliberately lie about others here because you have been corrected repeatedly about what others have said yet you continually repeat false statements about others.

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Yiu have no right to

That is insulting God’s holy bride to which Christ is the high Priest.

And you acuse me of insulting the Triinity?

Be careful what you accuse me of. That is not your place either.

But the reality of it does, And you are claiming a reality. You cannot have an Original sin without an original sinner. And you cannot eat a forbidden fruit that cannot exist in reality.

You are deliberately ignoring such things

As for your view of evolution

That system does not include God. You know this and no technical subterfuge over science and God will change that. You extol nontheistic evolution.but claim to include God. The two are mutually exclusive.

Richard

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This is only relevant if it is a war. If this is a war, I only see one side trying to make it a fight, and that is you… and you are (most of the time) very vague about what you are fighting about, using terms without clear definition, and not stating critical assumptions.

What are you fighting about so antagonistically? Is it more than the question of whether all earthly life is descended from one original organism? And if it is only that, why is it a fight with me when I believe that God knows what He was doing, and I believe that He got it right, for His purposes (though not necessarily for what any or all humans think His purposes are!)?

Have you even read what the other guys and gals are saying? Science only claims that any theory explains a lot of data, is very explicit about what it explains, and what it does not explain, and offers for future researchers the opportunity to test the theory by proposing tests that would distinguish between the subject theory and any competing theory that also explains the things that the theory under consideration explains.
If, as you have stated in the case of evolutionary theory and the question of single original organism, there is no proof either way, then science says exactly that.

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Yes - but … it matters what you think people should doubt. When they’re supposed to doubt stuff like “well - maybe they’re wrong and cigarettes don’t cause cancer after all” … the only good answer to these proven liars and merchants of doubt is to tell them: “NO. Just No.” Been there done that. What’s established beyond a reasonable doubt is that if you want to be wrong about the world 99% of the time - then follow the doubters of established consensus science. These ‘skeptics’ are unequaled with how consistently wrong they’ve been. In fact I’d be surprised to learn they even have the 1%. They’re so consistently wrong, that if someone ever manages to be intelligently correct about something on that side, then a scientific revolution and eventual Nobel prizes are involved. That’s how rare it is for conspiracy theorists to be right. So when you hear one, and if it’s about anything that makes a real difference to you or your family or your faith … run the other way.

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It appears, even though it has been explained to you a large multiplicity of times, you will never be able to make the distinction between science, the methodological naturalism that both Christian and unbelievers engage in side by side, and your mistaken concept of evolution somehow expecting to incorporate God into the methods of science. In other words, you cannot redefine things to suit you and say this science includes God and that does not.

Maybe you have heard before that evolution and meteorology are equally theistic?