Is it possible to believe in both God and Evolution?

[ChristineES]

She wasn't a pleasant person, but that statement is really unfair. She was murdered by a brutal psychopath who had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from American Atheists and whom she had exposed. David Waters murdered several people other than the Murray-O'Hairs, and once severely beat and urinated on his own mother. Madalyn wasn't murdered because she was a foul woman, but because she had the misfortune to cross paths with a truly foul man.

Probably it is unfair-- But the fact remains is that are certain people I very much admire who don't believe in God-- and she was never one of them.
I am not prepared to say she deserved to die or be murdered in such a brutal way, but a lot of theists didn't waste any tears on her (and that is probably unfair, too, but unfortunately only too true.)

 

[Mister_T]

He had not merely converted to Christianity, but had repeatedly and publicly vilified his mother before she disowned him.

Are there any particualar instances that stick out in your mind Bill? The almighty wiki seems to indicate that it was she who cast the first stone:

William J. Murray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William J. Murray is a self-professed born again Christian who might be best known to the public for writing My Life Without God and heading the William J. Murray Evangelistic Association. He is the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a socially conservative organization in Washington, D.C. He has been active on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist nations.
Murray is the son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair,[1] an American atheist activist who came to national attention during William Murray's childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, when she filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court of the United States, saying that compulsory prayer and reading of the Bible in schools was unconstitutional.
Murray's personal life before and after his conversion is known largely for its difficulties. As an atheist he had a history of drug addiction and alcohol problems, and he fathered a child in his teen years.
Murray converted to Christianity in 1980. His mother reportedly stated, upon learning of his conversion, "I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times" and added "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess."[2] He felt similarly negative toward her- some have compared My Life Without God to Mommie Dearest,[3] (written by Christina Crawford about her mother Joan Crawford), as he made allegations such as: "She was just evil… She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents' inheritance."[4]
William J. Murray is the author of several Christian and conservative books including Let Us Pray and The Church Is Not For Perfect People. His most recent book is The Pledge: One Nation Under God, for which the foreword, "A Washington, DC insider," was written by Congressman Todd Akin.

 

[Scuba Pete]

To equate the discrimination atheists receive with those that CHristians receive in the U.S. is dishonest and absurd. Bush Sr. said that atheists should not be considered to be citizens or patriots and got away with it. Can you imagine if some politician said the same about Christians? You're barking up the wrong tree.

You're the only one barking here. Just read what you have said about theists on this very forum.

You have made some horrendous claims against Christianity which have been proven FALSE. Yet, no apology has been given. Do you recall Bush claiming that atheists had murdered someone just because they were Christian?

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

There is no doubt in my mind that Evolution is a fact...Really, how can one argue against the ever present signs that the entire cosmos is billions of years old + in a continuous state of flux ? ( a realization which makes ‘ young earth creationism/ Biblical literalism a total non starter/ fallacy )
But...and this is a BIG BUT...that doesn’t mean that Darwinian Evolution, isn’t a total myth also , IT CERTAINLY IS, Based on dispassionate mathematics/ probability ( see The Wistar Institute’s Mathematicians destroy Darwinist arguments, see also ' the Anthropic Principle' )

***
To be sure, Natural selection is a puissant force, but to paraphrase an anonymous sage whose name I’ve forgotten :
‘ The mystery is NOT the SURVIVAL of the fittest, but rather the ARRIVAL of the fittest ’

***
Theists point to a Godly creator, Darwinists point to an absurdly unlikely blind evolution underpinned by random mutations ( albeit subsequently driven by natural selection )
But what about the panentheistic possibility of a purposeful and CREATIVE-EVOLUTION, which is subservient to both the conscious and unconscious volitions of both Creator as well as fleshly Creation ? ( see Neo-Lamarckian evolution, transposons/ jumping genes/ epigenetics, Rupert Sheldrake/ rational mysticism/ morphogenic fields etc... )
In my mind, the god inherent in nature is also the author of the all matter, space and time... The same unseen hands which shaped the heavens, could be continuing to wilfully manipulate DNA, as well as helping to shape human history, while still allowing for Man’s own free will ( incidentally, ‘ free will’ is something a dogmatic/ materialist science negates ! )
Panentheism, which is also perfectly compatible with a free thinking Theism, IMO.... would explain why overwhelming signs of biological design over untold eons ( see for example The Cambrian Explosion, see also ' irreducible complexity'/ Michael Behe
+ William Paley’s Watchmaker argument ) always appear astronomically improbable , if driven purely by chance

CHEERS ET AL !

 

[Sunstone]

Welcome to the Forums, Hela!

 

[fantome profane]

There is no doubt in my mind that Evolution is a fact...Really, how can one argue against the ever present signs that the entire cosmos is billions of years old + in a continuous state of flux ? ( a realization which makes ‘ young earth creationism/ Biblical literalism a total non starter/ fallacy )
But...and this is a BIG BUT...that doesn’t mean that Darwinian Evolution, isn’t a total myth also , IT CERTAINLY IS, Based on dispassionate mathematics/ probability ( see The Wistar Institute’s Mathematicians destroy Darwinist arguments, see also ' the Anthropic Principle' )

In science there must always be room for some doubt. It there can be no doubt it is not science, it is dogma.

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

Fantome Profane :

In science there must always be room for some doubt. It there can be no doubt it is not science, it is dogma.

And yet the representatives of the National Academy of sciences, while providing ' expert' testimony in court, called evolution a ‘ scientific fact’ and judged it to be on the same solid grounds as ‘ the theory of gravity’....BUT by evolution, they actually meant Darwinism, a very narrow interpretation of evolution, underpinned by random mutations...Darwinism is NOT an established fact, scientific or otherwise...

***

as for yours truly, I was giving MY OPINION/ sharing my personal beliefs, in the above commentary, which is certainly fair game/ being forthright...I was NOT presenting my own ostensibly ‘ scientific’ hypothesis as Darwinism purports to do... Nevertheless, the universe IS dynamic, it IS certainly changing / evolving /expanding ...that certainly IS a firmly established scientific/cosmological/astronomical fact...

Incidentally, if the glaring weaknesses inherent in Darwinism can NOT be openly discussed in science class, nor can any of the alternative ID arguments be presented there... or anywhere else, in the inner sanctums of scientific institutions/ scientific journals etc...( In part. for fear that ID scientists will be slandered / blacklisted when it comes to job opportunities / their career prospects etcetera )

Then it is Darwinism which is not science BUT DOGMA...

 

[sandandfoam]

the glaring weaknesses inherent in Darwinism

Could you outline these please?

 

[Willamena]

Then it is Darwinism which is not science BUT DOGMA...

Considering that "Darwinism" is not a science but a fabrication of Creationists, that shouldn't be surprising.

 

[crystalonyx]

You're the only one barking here. Just read what you have said about theists on this very forum.

You have made some horrendous claims against Christianity which have been proven FALSE. Yet, no apology has been given. Do you recall Bush claiming that atheists had murdered someone just because they were Christian?

Sure, Bush is going to say something like that. LOL

 

[Hela cells/lab pandemic]

StephenW:

Could you ( Hela ) outline these ( weaknesses inherent in Darwinism ) please?

All of them ? That would take forever, not that I’d know them all of course, But here’s just a handful of major sticking points, from memory, and without necessitating my writing a *&!!! Book...

1) The Strong Anthropic Principle:

physicists assert that all the mandatory material prerequisites for life, had to already be present within one nanosecond of the Big Bang. This covers everything from the weak and strong atomic force, the rate of universal expansion, various properties of subatomic matter...yadda yadda

One famous physicist ( too lazy to look up his name ) estimated the odds of our Anthropic ( aka life nurturing ) cosmos arriving spontaneously. at a bare minimum as ten to the exponent 40 to one against, which is analogous to saying that the odds would be : ten thousand, trillion, trillion, trillion , trillion to one against...

To defeat such odds , anti-theistic/ Atheistic cosmologists have been compelled to contemplate the arrival of ten thousand , trillion , trillion, trillion , trillion, universes whose physical properties were spontaneous / arbitrarily set...

But this is incalculably understating things IMO...Since even in an Anthropic Universe like our own, it still seems astronomically unlikely that the first living cell could ever appear purely by chance.


2 ) Darwinism Cannot Begin to explain the arrival of sentient life from insensate matter

The famous ' Miller Experiment ' which strove to explain the naturalistic origins of the first bio-molecules has been discredited , even by science orthodoxy. Indeed even the spontaneous appearance of a single viable protein , now appears completely untenable

Proteins require that dozens upon dozens of ( strictly left handed ) amino acids line up in precise order , and remain stable... Now there are 20 different left handed amino acids utilized by nature, so even assuming you had all of them , in abundance, the odds of their spontaneously arranging themselves correctly are reportedly vanishingly small.

The odds against DNA or RNA spontaneously arriving seems incalculably greater still...

But even assuming this was magically possible, as was the accidental arrival of living cells ( which IMO is pure fantasy almost ad infinitum ) This still doesn’t explain how a single novel gene could ever spontaneously appear in Darwinian fashion

The gene code is C-T-G- A ...which puts the odds of a single beneficial mutation at one in four...BUT a single Dna mutation doesn’t seem advantageous, and cannot be readily selected for via Natural Selection. A disadvantageous gene mutation, on the other hand could be selected for, since these often cause death, but that really doesn’t help us much...because we need many, many , many ( keep on typing many ) precisely orchestrated DNA mutations, before we can even begin to envision anything significant.

According to mathematician Stanislaw M. Ulam, "( see ‘ How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5):

" It seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent."

Mathematician Murray Eden pointed out that individual genes, potentially carry over a trillion bits of data. He calculated that it would be astronomically unlikely for ( for example ) E. Coli bacteria to randomly achieve just a single ordered pair of novel genes, even assuming that there had been 5 trillion tons of E. coli , covering the entire earth, for some 5 billion years !

Nobel Prize winning scientist Sir Fred Hoyle, proclaimed that :

‘ the probability of a cell evolving purely by chance, is akin to the odds that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard would give rise to a fully functioning Boeing 747.

3) The problem of irreducible complexity

Michael Behe ( see ‘ Darwin’s Black Box’ ) uses the term ‘ irreducibly complex' in reference to both bio-molecular machinery, as well as functioning organs , noting that in many cases - functionality would be negated, by the removal of even a single constituent part.

Behe and others have argued that the phenomenon of ‘irreducible complexity' similarly negates natural selection, as a primary mechanism for evolution. Simply put, intermediate and presumably non-functioning stages for sophisticated organs, could never convey any competitive advantage. In other words, of what possible benefit was a non echo locating bat's ear? Ten percent of a blind cat's eye? Or the mere nub of a hawk's wing, if the bird couldn't fly ?

The obvious signs of ‘ irreducible complexity’ vis a vis the design of fleshly organs, does NOT mean that some invisible creator / immanent godhood isn’t tweaking DNA behind the scenes, or perhaps even building upon earlier fleshly models, in an Creative / Intelligent Evolutionary fashion...

It merely means that the appearance of complex organs, cannot happen purely by chance ( even if driven by Natural Selection )

4) The Lack of Transitional Species in the Fossil Record :

Darwinism requires a slow but sure gradualism, featuring a plethora of incremental fleshly alterations, but nowhere in the fossil can these be found , as Darwin likewise admitted:

" The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed must be truly enormous ( if ,of course, his theory is anthing other than sheer nonsense ) Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

5) The Cambrian Explosion ..... wherein all the major classifications, known as phyla appear altogether and almost overnight ( i.e. within a paltry few million year span ) all by itself, is more than enough to utterly destroy the entire Darwinian paradigm IMO..

BUT THIS SEEMS LIKE OVERKILL !!!

Cheers Et Al..

 

[sandandfoam]

Interesting.Thanks.
SW

 

[camanintx]

1) The Strong Anthropic Principle:

How can you discount natural causes for the universe being the way it is when you don't even know how it came to be? The Anthropic Principle simple says that we have to take into consideration the fact that we are here. How does that extrapolate to an intelligent designer?

2 ) Darwinism Cannot Begin to explain the arrival of sentient life from insensate matter

Darwin wrote a book called "The Origin of Species", not "The Origin of Life." Evolution does not attempt to explain abiogenesis so this argument is a strawman.

3) The problem of irreducible complexity

Except no one has found anything irreducibly complex. The bacterial flagellar motor was promoted as one such claim until biologists came up with an explanation. Arguments from ignorance are not arguments.

4) The Lack of Transitional Species in the Fossil Record :

Every fossil is a transitional fossil. Just because you can't see these transitions doesn't mean they don't exist.

5) The Cambrian Explosion ..... wherein all the major classifications, known as phyla appear altogether and almost overnight ( i.e. within a paltry few million year span ) all by itself, is more than enough to utterly destroy the entire Darwinian paradigm IMO..

What you call a paltry few million year span is more like 70 to 80 million years, and appears to be explained more by preservation bias than any intelligent designer. More recent findings suggest a diversity of life existed long before the Cambrian.

 

[Scuba Pete]

Darwin wrote a book called "The Origin of Species", not "The Origin of Life." Evolution does not attempt to explain abiogenesis so this argument is a strawman.

Per the OP, this is the CRUX of the discussion. Can you believe in both evolution and God. That evolution is incapable of answering the origin of man is as good a reason as any for believing in both at the same time.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

1) The Strong Anthropic Principle:

The strong anthropic principle does not form any part of the basis for Evolutionary theory.

2 ) Darwinism Cannot Begin to explain the arrival of sentient life from insensate matter

And the Bernoulli principle can't explain the stock market crash of 1929; what's your point? No theory explains anything beyond the limits of its application.

3) The problem of irreducible complexity

Is not a problem at all. When you look at specific cases, every single one that I'm aware of has been refuted. When you look at the "problem" generally, you realize that it's based on a fundamentally flawed idea: that because we can't figure out right now how something works, we'll never be able to figure it out. This is bad logic. It's also completely untestable and unfalsifiable, so it's outside the realm of science.

4) The Lack of Transitional Species in the Fossil Record :

There is no lack of transitional species. Quite a few fossils have been found since Darwin's day. Quite a few transitional sequences have been discovered and documented.

5) The Cambrian Explosion ..... wherein all the major classifications, known as phyla appear altogether and almost overnight ( i.e. within a paltry few million year span ) all by itself, is more than enough to utterly destroy the entire Darwinian paradigm IMO..

How exactly do you think that the Cambrian explosion "utterly destroys the entire Darwinian paradigm"?

 

[gnomon]

Do you think it is possible to believe in both evolution and God/creationism.

Yes.

Apparently, my simple response of yes was too short for VB to accept to I will add that the Boxer two houses down from me was terribly upset that I woke him earlier. But Boxers are such cute and adorable dogs.

 

[Yerda]

Of course it is possible.

I found this article online. Worth a read.

Can You Believe in God and Evolution?

Some teasers:

Francis Collins

If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate.

Steven Pinker

What twisted sadist would have invented a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: If an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break his windows.

Michael Behe

I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence is very likely to be God.

Albert Mohler

Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions. But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.

 

[Jeremy Mason]

Doesn't Genesis follow the evolution steps?

 

[yossarian22]

Doesn't Genesis follow the evolution steps?

Don't birds come before land animals according to that?

 

[yossarian22]

Back to the chopping board are we

StephenW:
1) The Strong Anthropic Principle:

physicists assert that all the mandatory material prerequisites for life, had to already be present within one nanosecond of the Big Bang. This covers everything from the weak and strong atomic force, the rate of universal expansion, various properties of subatomic matter...yadda yadda

One famous physicist ( too lazy to look up his name ) estimated the odds of our Anthropic ( aka life nurturing ) cosmos arriving spontaneously. at a bare minimum as ten to the exponent 40 to one against, which is analogous to saying that the odds would be : ten thousand, trillion, trillion, trillion , trillion to one against...

********.
This claim is annoying. To use a famous saying, Put up or shut up. (Not to be rude)
Probability is empirical. We have only observed one universe. It supports life, therefore all universes must support life.
Also, perhaps you do not realize what the SAP means.
Anyhow, I am dying to see his calculations.
I mean the valid ones, not the crap which appeared in a paper over 40 years old. Already looked at it
Our professor used that one to show how not to use probability theory.