What is the real reason for denial of evolution?

What features would a geologic formation need in order for you to accept it as evidence for an old Earth? What criteria do you use to determine the age of the Earth?

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Seems to me this points to this being more about power, control, and manipulation – creating and environment where questions are discouraged and only blind obedience to the accepted way of thinking is allowed. Thus the evolution issue becomes an easy thermometer by which to measure whether you are thinking according to what has been dictated or not.

Why?

Because science & evolution are usually used to deny the Existence of God in heaven, and to undermine Christianity.

Going beyond a mere humble description of what is happening (“inverse square law, mutation & selection”), science & scientific theories are used to reject any & all supra-terrestrial influences in earth history

So many “throw out the baby with the bathwater” to preserve their Faith.

Many want to (try to) use human science as a battering ram to break down Christianity & Religion.

They thereby infuse their own bias & hostility into what would, otherwise, be much more muted & non-offensive scientific assertions. And Religious people react to that anti-Religion bias “pork barreled” into the science.


There are many as-yet-apparently unique aspects of our Solar System:

Titus-Bode Law
gy = c [earth gravity x earth year = speed of light]
eclipses because Sun & Moon are the same angular size
Life
Complex Life
Intelligent Technological Life

All of the above are anomalies of structure & organization exceeding any of the known exoplanetary systems. You could construe that as evidence for some sort of supra-terrestrial “hand” at work.

Mutation & selection does not exclude a supra-terrestrial “hand” at work in either or both of those processes. Humans have from time immemorial claimed that supra-terrestrial Powers have saved some humans and condemned others – so influencing the “selection” side of the “evolutionary equation”.

Nothing makes evolution incompatible with a Divine Agent at work, even dominantly so, in earth history. If pure science could be divorced of the philosophical opinions of scientists then there would exist much less antagonism between Religion & pure science.

That may happen occasionally, but science and evolution are usually used to understand the natural world. And the scientific enterprise has been very successful. (Speaking of that, be sure to get your flu shot and have your blood pressure checked!)

I don’t find this an accurate caricature of the Christian communities I’ve personally been involved in where I wouldn’t mention evolution. In their minds it is about respect for God’s word and living life in submission to what they sincerely believe is truth. I can respect that.

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Moses was very successful also. So was Jesus, his movement converted the pagan Roman empire, something no European peoples ever did.

The claim is, there is a supra-natural factor in our otherwise natural world, and there COULD well be, even if such hasn’t been proven by human scientists.

Submission to the truth is good provided it is the truth one perceives for oneself, otherwise it is just submission to an expert. A friend just started teaching literature at Cal and is teaching Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment this semester. I mentioned that my favorite passage in any book comes from there. It was hers too and together we just about fleshed it out. For a secularist I guess you could call this part of my ‘scriptures’ and I cite it because I think it applies here:

“What do you think?" shouted Razumihin, louder than ever,
“you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird. Truth won’t escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people’s ideas, it’s what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?” cried Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies’ hands.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky was a very religious man as well as a great writer.

*Edited to say you obviously had in mind “sincerely held to be true”, not “cowed by authority”.

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I belive in God, so I don’t see what the problem is.

“It would still be interesting to hear from those who actually reject evolution. My assumption is that the primary reason is that you feel the interpretation you have of scripture is primal, and all else must follow in concert with that interpretation, but would be interested in hearing from you directly.”

We, at Reality Research & Development, reject evolution as the cause of life because our 31 years of research on the subject reveals the essentiality of super-intelligence (far beyond that of mankind) for assembling atoms into molecular machines like kinesin, ribosomes, etc. The three Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry (2016) worked for 33 years to assemble a few molecular machines that are almost infinitely more simplistic than any of the molecular machines built for our new cells every day of the week. How much intelligence and equipment does evolution have?

While my first somewhat snarky answer would be “The universe and all the time in the world” I have to agree that it is amazing, and would have to add the knowledge and intelligence of God, in agreement with you, though we may disagree on the details (and indeed I have no pretense of knowing the details of how he did it.)

I would add that the “cause” is a totally different question than the mechanism, and I give God all the credit.

5 posts were split to a new topic: Does Cell-Building Require Intelligence?

Thank you Phil for your reasoned comments.
We are not saying there is no micro-evolution but that even mutant cells have to be constructed.
Examples of the super-intelligent and careful assembly work for bases for our DNA: Adenine C5H5N5, Guanine C5H5N5O1, Cytosine C4H5N3O1, Thymine C5H6N2O2 .
From this we can see how carefully the counted numbers of the right atoms have to be selected from the adjacent blood vessel and assembled into the essential bases. Then assembling these bases to construct the DNA program for almost every cell is far more complex than any program Microsoft had developed, according to Bill Gates.
As to how this super-intelligent force (commonly called ‘God’ by our governments and the majority of our citizens), actually performs the work necessary at every cell construction site, is one of those indicators verifying “…so are my ways higher than your ways…” Isa. 55:9

A post was merged into an existing topic: Does Cell-Building Require Intelligence?

I can’t find who did the original quote but this sums up some thoughts on how one ought to react to that:

Today’s aggressive atheists couple bad reasoning to good science. The right response is good reasoning, not bad science. Richard Dawkins and his ilk make the claim that modern science somehow disproves God or renders Him irrelevant. Instead of challenging the fundamental illogic of that reasoning, ignorant Christians are taken in by it, and thus are panicked into trying to prove that modern science itself is wrong. It only serves the purposes of the atheists to have conservative Christians proclaim, “If evolution is true, Christianity is false”. While most Christian adults can remain happily scientifically illiterate, waves of Christian young people each year are forced to engage with the reality of biology and geology in high school and college classes. Many of them come to realize that their trusted Christian parents and teachers have misrepresented the case regarding evolution. They find that evolution is in fact true. So “If evolution is true, Christianity is false,” what do they then conclude about Christianity?

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Does Cell-Building Require Intelligence?

Great quote!

In Eden, Adam undermined God’s commandment (don’t eat) by adding his own (don’t even touch).

So when Eve found out she could touch without problem, then she doubted all she had heard and so boldly ate

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But it is the experience of those who ARE targeted by refusal to hire and rejection from churches, small groups, homeschool co-ops, or family, and generally being treated as a non-person.

Maybe for some people and in some contexts, but I don’t think it is the case for most people. I don’t believe that most Evangelical creationists are power-hungry manipulators bent on mind control. I don’t think Christians who have been ostracized over their evolution views usually experience it as an attempt to manipulate and control so much as just a rejection, and I don’t think the people doing the rejecting are consciously trying to “dictate” what others are allowed to think. They believe the Bible does the dictating and they thought we were all on the same page about that.

There is a lot of genuine grief involved on both sides; on the side of the EC Christian over lost relationships and networks that were valued and the fact that they can’t be authentic and be accepted. On the side of the Creationist Christian over their perception that someone they cared about has walked away from the truth and rejected their well-intentioned efforts to hold them accountable to what they thought were shared core tenets of faith.

I understand spiritual abuse is a real thing and that it happens in Evangelical contexts. But it’s not fair or accurate to characterize all instances of people responding negatively to fellow Christians views on evolution as abusive, even if the results are painful.

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Well the only solution I see to this situation is bring the sword of truth to it and divide those beliefs which produce such behavior from those beliefs which do not. And I operate from a principle that when a belief is useful and convenient for a purpose (such as power and manipulation) then this is most like the real origin (original motivation) for that belief. Thus I am committed to promoting a Christianity which is entirely useless for the purpose of power and manipulation.

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Since the beginning, absolutely every single time that humans have gazed at the heavens…

With larger and more powerful instruments…

Every single time…

More and more, fainter and fainter, dimmer and dimmer objects…

Have emerged from the darkness into human view…

Humans have never ever one time NOT been surprised by all the wonders out there…

From Galileo observing moons orbiting Jupiter, to the Hubble deep fields…

Yet, human astronomers have already retired…

They sweep their arms across the whole sky, and confidently declare the all clear, alleging that they…

All of the sudden…

Have now observed all of the normal matter throughout the universe…

Having canceled 100-200m optical telescopes that might reveal otherwise, everyone has declared the search over…

We are now to blindly believe in phantom ghostly dark matter and dark energy…

And pay endlessly for hyper expensive particle accelerators and other fancy gadgetry to hunt the same…

When with the same money we could build kilometer scale telescopes that could pick out everything out there

It’s too much to ask to put eyes on the skies…

Rather we are to blindly believe in phantom dark matter and dark energy…

Without “risking” further and more detailed observations

Scientists wrote equations of Big Bang nucleosynthesis in 1948, which equations claim our universe has so little matter in it that we have already observed it all, and they are above and beyond observational scrutiny

Blind belief, in science?

Or is it actually the case that we know everything already?

I apologize for the sensitive analogy, it’s all I could come up with right now, but it’s like a US marine standing outside of Baghdad, at night, and directly observing only 6% of the outsides of the buildings, declaring to have accounted for everything, sounding the all clear, and then starting to dig ditches outside the city (analogous to underground dark matter detectors on earth outside of the heavens) to be sure and tie up loose ends

Guess we just have to take their word for it

Very frustrated at what I perceive to be blatant flagrant hypocrisy