inter faith

[percival]

It's all nice and easy to be an inter faith enthusiast when you talk to moderate Christians, Buddhists, Taoists,
etc. - but whenever I encounter a specific sub group of Evangelical Christians, namely the one illustrated by the
Creation Science Fair,
I can't suppress a strong urge to retch. (I found the URL in sff_corgi's journal.)

I've nothing against fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity - but if science is twisted in line to support a world view that is often diametrically opposed to my ethics, that crosses the line.

For example, I can accept the argument that women should stay at home to look after their children because the children will benefit. But I will never accept an "argument" that takes women's lower pay to be a justification for excluding women from the work place.

As for the demonstration of the difference between Uncle Steve and a monkey, and the experiment to create life from inanimate substances - oh please. That just goes against the grain of scientific method - and demonstrates no grasp even of the popular scientific literature. (Notice how I suppressed a SNARXY comment about Uncle Steve.)

That said, I could probably live with my children adopting these views - or living with somebody that has these views. I'd just hope they'd snap out of it again ;)

Comments

[cynthia-black.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't get to the 'Creation Science Fair' via your link, but I could hazard a good guess as to what it's like.

I think a lot of fundamentalist Christians get a bee in their bonnet about creation vs. evolution simply because the latter is taught as fact when it is actually only the theory of evolution. When it comes down to it, you need as much faith to believe that all life started as an accident and that we evolved very suddenly from apes, then virtually stopped evolving thereafter, as you do to believe that God created the world with systems and laws and rules to help it run.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Well yes, you are right - evolution is a theory, but it happens to fit very many observations of the natural world, which you could classify as facts.

Also, current evolution theory does not hold that we evolved "suddenly" from apes - if you look at the family trees, development of human faculties was slow and gradual, over hundreds of thousands of years. Tool use, speech, art ... all this emerged over the millenia, consistent with the speeds that evolution theory postulates for other species.

As for us not evolving anymore: humans may seem to have stopped evolving mainly because we value human life much more, and many lives that would have been destroyed before can now be lived, thanks to, for example, Christ and the values He promoted.
Survival of the fittest is not acceptable in human societies anymore.

However, biologists find smaller animals, insects for example, evolving all the time - mainly becoming resistant to the very chemicals designed to kill them.

Actually, a theory that I find very fascinating is that of the Anthropic Principle, postulated by F.A. Tipler, if I remember correctly. This Principle states that we were designed to evolve towards God, and is consistent with much of contemporary physics.

Thank you for your response, it's much appreciated!

percival

[jennlee2.livejournal.com]

I think the evolution "from" apes thing is a bit of a misnomer. The evidence points to both species evolving from earlier species which evolved from earlier species which at some point a long time ago were the same, so it's more like apes are cousins instead of grandparents.

I do think humans are still evolving, we just can't see it as well because we only have a small time-frame in which we look. And as you noted, we value human life more, and this likely has an effect in terms of natural selection.

Thanks for the most interesting topic this morning!

[drakanjel.livejournal.com]

That humans may indeed be evolving, yet with a smaller point of reference, is an interesting idea. Could this explain the difference in the lifespan of generally healthy humans being significantly longer now than it was, say, two hundred (or more) years ago? Even those who do not use conventional medicine tend to live longer than they would have in other times.... (and those who do not use ANY "modern" technology - i.e. the Amish)

[soupytwist.livejournal.com]

To add to what perceval said, a 'theory' in science isn't quite the same thing as it is normally. Something isn't a theory just because people randomly thought it up to explain something - the title 'theory' is only granted when it's been rigorously tested under fair conditions. After all, it's the Theory of Gravity, and nobody goes around saying that's just as much on faith as any religion.

Sorry, I always have to respond when anyone says something like that. :)