Hands up who believes in creationism/doesn't believe in evolution?

[MrsWobbleTheWaitress]

I know a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, so I kind of had this rather naive idea that people who didn't believe in it were very few and far between. But I just discovered someone I've known a long time, and respect a great deal, doesn't believe in evolution.

So who else doesn't? How common is it?

haha!

Ok, very hodge podgebecause I am very tired (please excuse my generalisation and misquotes)

In the beginning there was light - big bang

Then God created land and sea.

First he created the water dwellers

Then those who creeped

Then the birds and land dwellers

Then man.

I am paraphrasing hugely, but surely that describes evolution? Big bang, planet divides into land and water. water dwellers evolve into creepers then walkers and birds (which were dinosaurs) Then Man. Google it for a less crap more detailed argument.

Hmm, see that is why i dont tend to discuss it much, people do seem to get very rude if you dont accept evolution.

I understand the theory of evolution, have studied, had to write essys including it and with reference to it.

However imo it is a theory i dont accept. I am happy for others to and dont redicule them.

My 'evidence' for creationism is very personal, relating to me. An example of this is trhat i have always had 'premonitions' and seen events before they happened, from deja vu moments to full word perfect premonitions. This is a 'spiritual aspect' makes me believe in creationism.

I would ask others to accept these reasons as proof but they are proof enough for me, there are things in this world that cant be explained or proved so you just have to accept the best theory for you.

Um, BitterandTwisted, my recollection of Genesis was that God created the heavens and the earth and then did the "let there be light" bit. Which rather goes against the Big Bang-inspired order of events. It also claims that the earth was created before the sun was, which rather goes against current thinking of cosmology.

Finally, Genesis claims that land-dwelling grasses, trees and herbs were created a couple of days before there was any life in the seas. That goes against current theories about how life evolved on our planet.

Snorbs - Like I said, google the more definitive argument, I'm too tired.

I studied biochemistry at University and of course the science of life, understanding how genes mutate and are selected for by evolutionary processes and how those selected genes are transformed into proteins and entire life forms was meat and drink to me back then. Evolution was the engine of life as far as I was concerned.

However, there was always something bugging me. What process made the rules that drive the engine of life. Why does that molecule fit together that way? No matter how we reduce the question, splitting ataoms into infinite particles we will never know.

That is where God sits for me and that is where 'creationism' fits too. For me, creation is the process that devised the unknown and unknowable rules that bind the universe - not the literal creation of Adam and Eve.

As a scientist I therefore have no problem in believing in God or reconciling, evolution and creationism.

ABetaDad - please carry on the argument where I cannot - I'm off to bed.

2 Peter 3:8 ' But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.'

The six days in which God was supposed to create the earth / universe does not need to be taken literally as 6 x 24 hours. Is there a clue here ?

I'm a christian and on the fence re how exactly the world was created.

Yes I believe God was the instigater, the source of life, of everything... But how exactly he went about the business of creation, whether the biblical story of genesis is to be taken literally or as a metaphor, I just don't know and frankly don't care that much.

It does not have a bearing on my every day life as a human or christian, ie it does not make me a better or worse person whether I believe God made the world in six days or over thousands/ millions.

I look at the marvellous design all around and 'see' an intelligent mind behind it. In all my 39 years on this planet I never for a second believed it all appeared compeletly randomly from nothing. That's just .... silly. But at the ame time, the big bang theory, why not, but it would be God who made the bang.

Of course, there is an obvious question... but who made God ? When I think of it I always go back to some philosopher's thought ( can't remember who but read something when I was 15 and it stuck with me forever, just recall it was a secular book on philosophy ) that we are conditioned to think that everything must have a beginning and an end because, of course, that's our experience here and now. But maybe, just maybe it is not exactly true outside the reality we can observe, noone found the beginning and end of the universe as yet.

And of course, I can see lots of unpleasant ugly stuff, too, killer bacteria for example ( my very personal enemy !) Something went wrong with God's perfect creation when mankind let the evil in. It all makes good sense to me.

By the way...

I was brought up in catholic faith
( have been 'lapsed to a degree' for a number of years now, but definitely still a christian)

and am quite well read in its teachings.
I was never encouraged to reject the theory of evolution but to study it, probe new findings , all in the context of God's creation of course.

First two paragraphs of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution explain the cc position well.

Didn't work , oh well, my first attempted link on MN.

We have friends who are literal 7-day Young Earth creationists - you know, the "the Earth is only 6000 years old" ones.

They took their kids to a set of caves to visit - one of those lovely cave systems full of stalactites etc that took thousands and thousands of years to form, and asked the geologist who took them round not to put dates on anything as they wanted to teach their children "the truth" about the age of the planet. Strikes me as incredibly rude and controlling.

They home-educate (nothing wrong with that!!!!) because they don't want their children to be exposed to "modern scientific lies". They don' even meet up with other home-edders in case the discussion turns scientific and their children "question our beleifs". Poor little boys!

They are pretty extreme evangelicals and belong to a church where this is the norm.

I'm a Christian, and I suppose the summary of my posiion is that I think God created evolution.

The theory of evolution is incredibly successful. So much evidence supports it. I find it less 'wonderful' to propose that everything was created by a higher power.

To reject the theory of evolution in favour of 'made by god' is to reject science and reason. I could propose that fairies power my laptop - the evidence is personal to me, it doesn't impact on how anyone else uses their lap top etc... but such a claim would be ridiculous within the context of what we know about how a lap top works. And that is why creationism/ID should never, ever be taught as fact in our schools.

"people do seem to get very rude if you dont accept evolution"

I don't think it's rudeness it's incredulity. The same incredulity that I'd express if someone didn't accept gravity because the magic leprechauns were holding us all on to the earth.

I don't believe in god.

I do however believe in the fantasticness which is the world around us. How amazing is nature to be like it is, and evolve like it does. How neatly habitats and cycles work, how wonderfully organised it is. The world is amazing. Why can't that be enough, why does it's amazingness have to be attributed to a higher power?

"Sorry Nature/World, you're just not good enough to have done this all on your own, lets say a god did it"

Piffle and balls. Creationists are deluded and ignore fact and twist evidence to support their thin, ridiculous, ignorant theories.

I don't actually care if anyone thinks I'm rude for saying so. Just like I don't care about your religion or your god.

I am very lapsed catholic but still very much christian. We were taught in my very catholic primary and convent secondary schools, the theory of evolution as fact. Accepting evolution and God was never a problem.
I have never met a creationist of the 'god planted the dinosaurs to test us, earth is only 6000yrs old' variety.
I have however met quite a few scientists who are a lot more open to the theory part of the theory of evolution who say that it is very much only theory and there are lots of holes in that theory. I'd never questioned it at all until then!
Personally I now believe in evolution as we accept it..to a point. I think we've probably got it pretty near fact but I'm certain there are things we are missing and at some point in the future we will almost certainly have to change/adapt our understanding of it.

"RubberDuck RubberDuck, we got ourselves a convoy!"

You know, I really must get around to watching that film.

Re: evolution is "only" a theory. You misunderstand what scientists mean when they say something is a theory - it's not the same as the common usage of the word.

"Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)"

From: Five Major Misconceptions About Evolution (worth reading the whole article, actually)

Evolution is 'real' - the theory provides an explanation and a testable framework and all the evidence thus far strongly supports that theory.

It's like gravity - we all know that gravity is there...however gravitational theory provides us with the best explanation we have of what gravity is.

'theory' doesn't mean "idea plucked out of thin air" yunno!!!!

My mum went to the US two years ago to stay with her cousin whom she hadn't seen for 40 years. My mum is a practising member of the C of E, who believes in evolution, even though she might attribute the fact that the universe was there in the first place for all the big bang conditions to happen to God.

She came home foaming at the mouth at her cousin and her family as they were Creationists and had spent nearly the entire fortnight arguing the toss with them that Creationism is wrong. She said it was totally alien to her that Genesis could be interpreted in that way.

The thing that really bugs me about this is the self-certainty of people who've in many cases barely any post-16 science education to build their conclusions on.

lowerenergylightbulb - you point towards not 'accepting' gravity as a marker of utter imbecility. Gravity is incredibly profound. Think for just a moment. What makes everything pulled towards everything else? What is gravity? Hell - it could be Leprechauns as far as anyone knows. In terms of wide acceptance, we've only really managed to roughly understand what gravity does not what gravity is.

There is a lot of evidence to support evolution. But it is a hard theory to test - given the time scales involved, and given that you can't 'do experiments' on it. There is no particular reason to think that future forms of the theory of 'evolution' will be the same as the current form.

Commentating from the comfort of the rightthinking majority based on a few lessons, documentaries and articles does not make you a superior intellect.

'dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the devil to make us think the earth is cold'

I am going to adopt that as my personal philosophy. It is simply marvellous.

Oh , well, I think I'll stick with cold,

Aren't we mixing up our arguments here?

One discussion: some sectors of small town America act ignorant.

Another discussion: where did everything in the world come from.