Christianity and Evolution

[Stumpy 256]

One of the weirdest things i've always found about Christianity has been the unwillingness to incorporate evolution into faith somehow. "Intelligent design" and young earth creationism myths are always rooted in misinformation or outright denial of settled science to the point of comedy (the banana video anyone?)

Interesting new book out that I've just seen a review of that I think I need to get hold of, that puts adam and eve as real people and common ancestors 750,000 years ago.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/mytho-history-evolution-of-adam-and-eve-quest-of-historical-adam/

If it reduces the gap between religion and science it can only be a good thing.

[wmw999 2,116]

Christianity isn't just young-earth bible-inerrant evangelicism. My father would have considered himself a serious Christian (his comment was that he always looked for the church that encouraged good questions, rather than providing all the answers), and he quite thoroughly believed in evolution as well. What's in the Bible was just a place holder of how to explain the origins of people to those people -- when they don't have the basis for knowledge.

Wendy P.

[kallend 1,621]

1 minute ago, wmw999 said:

Christianity isn't just young-earth bible-inerrant evangelicism. My father would have considered himself a serious Christian (his comment was that he always looked for the church that encouraged good questions, rather than providing all the answers), and he quite thoroughly believed in evolution as well. What's in the Bible was just a place holder of how to explain the origins of people to those people -- when they don't have the basis for knowledge.

Wendy P.

It's still a belief in fairy tales - just very elaborate ones with an establishment whose wealth depends on promoting said belief.

[billvon 2,384]

27 minutes ago, Stumpy said:

One of the weirdest things i've always found about Christianity has been the unwillingness to incorporate evolution into faith somehow.

From Pope Frances:

"God created beings and allowed them to develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one, so that they were able to develop and to arrive at their fullness of being. He gave autonomy to the beings of the universe at the same time at which he assured them of his continuous presence, giving being to every reality. And so creation continued for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia, until it became what we know today, precisely because God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the creator who gives being to all things. . .  .The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it. The evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of creation, as evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.

"God is not . . .a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life.  Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

[Stumpy 256]

@billvonI confess I haven't kept up with what religion thinks on this over the last few years (i did evolutionary biology for part of my degree in the early 2000's) but encouraging that at least some leaders are becoming more reasonable on this front.

[gowlerk 1,903]

1 hour ago, billvon said:

From Pope Frances:

He seems like a better salesman than most. But it is still nothing but his personal speculation on a matter that no human can possibly know or understand. In other words it is just made up shit, but with an attempt to frame it in a way that helps reconcile it with the little knowledge that we have. It is no better than sticking with the 6 day and one day of rest formula in the end. His job is to do the best he can to maintain the power of his church. 

[billvon 2,384]

1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

He seems like a better salesman than most. But it is still nothing but his personal speculation on a matter that no human can possibly know or understand.

But you seem to condemn people for their personal speculation on matters that no human can possibly understand when their speculation goes against things like personal liberties (i.e. the abortion issue.)  Why isn't doing the opposite - using that speculation to improve the acceptance and understanding of science - a good thing?

[gowlerk 1,903]

15 minutes ago, billvon said:

Why isn't doing the opposite - using that speculation to improve the acceptance and understanding of science - a good thing?

It is not neither a good or a bad thing. I'm merely pointing out that pretending to understand the nature of existence through the doctrine of the church, or any other doctrine is pointless by any objective measurement. The current Pope's move toward more modern and moderate positions is a good thing as far as it goes. But that is not very far. He is still the head of a very deeply flawed and powerful institution with a long and abusive history. 

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by gowlerk

[kallend 1,621]

3 hours ago, billvon said:

From Pope Frances:

...

 

It's one of the reasons Francis is very unpopular among the more conservative members of his church.

[JerryBaumchen 1,047]

1 hour ago, kallend said:

It's one of the reasons Francis is very unpopular among the more conservative members of his church.

Hi John,

I have read this on more than one occasion, from numerous sources.

I accept is as being factual.

Jerry Baumchen

[gowlerk 1,903]

2 hours ago, kallend said:

It's one of the reasons Francis is very unpopular among the more conservative members of his church.

Another reason would be that his origins are not European. Not that the church is anymore racist than other parts of society, but the power in it is mostly held in Rome by Europeans. 

Edited January 5, 2022 by gowlerk

[gowlerk 1,903]

5 hours ago, Stumpy said:

Interesting new book out that I've just seen a review of that I think I need to get hold of, that puts adam and eve as real people and common ancestors 750,000 years ago.

But what does it say about the origin of those supposed ancestors? All three of the mainline monotheistic religions teach that they were created as fully human. Science does not support that in any way shape or form.

[JerryBaumchen 1,047]

15 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

But what does it say about the origin of those supposed ancestors? All three of the mainline monotheistic religions teach that they were created as fully human. Science does not support that in any way shape or form.

Hi Ken,

^ This.

Jerry Baumchen

[Stumpy 256]

28 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

But what does it say about the origin of those supposed ancestors? All three of the mainline monotheistic religions teach that they were created as fully human. Science does not support that in any way shape or form.

From the review it sounds like he's actually gone about that the right way - but I need to read the book itself.

"After expertly summarizing the fossil evidence for the evolution of human personhood, Craig arrives at a stunningly precise conclusion: the historical Adam was a real individual, of the species Homo heidelbergensis, that lived in central Africa around 750,000 years ago. He bases this conclusion on a range of genetic, archaeological, and paleontological evidence."

He's also not implying "Adam" was the first being, merely that he is the most recent common ancestor from what I understand. There were other beings of the genus homo prior to that.

[billvon 2,384]

24 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

But what does it say about the origin of those supposed ancestors? All three of the mainline monotheistic religions teach that they were created as fully human. Science does not support that in any way shape or form.

Right.  But as that earlier quote suggests, religions are starting to get away from that sort of literal interpretation of the Bible.  The Catholic Church now sees evolution "as an effectively proven fact."

[Bigfalls 110]

 It is no better than sticking with the 6 day and one day of rest formula in the end.

If you look at the calendar, Sunday is the first day of the week so God took a day off before he did anything.

It looks like to me he belonged to a union.

[GeorgiaDon 340]

The Catholic church has been somewhat accepting of evolution for quite a while, albeit with an "intelligent design" slant.   Many years ago I spent a couple of years in a Catholic high school taught by Jesuit Brothers and our science classes included straight-up evolution without a whiff of Book of Genesis creationism.  By "intelligent design" I mean that evolution was presented as a process, a mechanism that was presumed to inevitably result in some sort of intelligent species although not necessarily of the anthropoid ape flavor, as God was an intelligent mind without physical being (much less an elderly northern European male).  Pope Francis is really just stating a long-standing view within the church.

That being said, there are some interesting twists or conflicts between Judeo-Christian theology and straightforward acceptance of evolution.  At the simplest level, there is an obvious conflict between believing that the Bible is literally true in every word, and believing in evolution.  Catholic theology has long been comfortable with "interpreting" the Bible, not reading everything (especially the old testament) literally but rather looking for the "deeper meaning".  Other more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have more of a problem because they think every word of the old and new testament are true exactly as written, or rather as translated in the King James version.

There is a deeper problem though, as I learned while discussing the subject with a student who happened to be an orthodox Jew as I recall.  Bear with me as I try to explain this.  The problem is that the "big picture" of Genesis is that God created humans as just a step below gods themselves, for example in being immortal (no death in Eden!).  Humans rejected God though (Adam and Eve eating the apple) which led to the "Fall" (fall from God's grace) and expulsion from Eden.  In this view it is the Fall that brought death and disease and suffering into the world.  After the Fall, it is the mission of humanity to struggle to return to the position they enjoyed before the Fall, by choosing to put God ahead of everything else.

From this perspective, the theological problem with evolution is that it eliminates the Fall, and with it the whole nature of the relationship between God and humanity.  We have been gradually (very gradually) becoming more "in the likeness of God" by a slow step-by-step process of evolution,instead of starting out god-like and taking a giant step backwards, then having to "earn" our way back to where we used to be before we decided that apples were tasty.

Of course all this seems like nonsense to me, but then again I am an evolutionary biologist by profession.  The discussion with the student did highlight an interesting difference in world views though.  I believe that the world we can see and touch, manipulate through experiments, and derive logical conclusions about, is the real world.  He believed that everything we can experience (see, touch, manipulate) is the illusion, and the "spiritual world" is what is actually real.  He could never accept evolution because that would negate the entire message of the old testament about the fundamental relationship between humanity and God.

In the end I told him he could believe whatever he wanted but he still needed to understand evolution well enough to explain it in an exam, even if he didn't believe it was true.

[gowlerk 1,903]

24 minutes ago, billvon said:

Right.  But as that earlier quote suggests, religions are starting to get away from that sort of literal interpretation of the Bible.  The Catholic Church now sees evolution "as an effectively proven fact."

 Please show me where the has church abandoned the view that Genesis is a literal truth. Certainly almost all members have, but officially? No way.

[GeorgiaDon 340]

7 hours ago, Stumpy said:

Interesting new book out that I've just seen a review of that I think I need to get hold of, that puts adam and eve as real people and common ancestors 750,000 years ago.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/mytho-history-evolution-of-adam-and-eve-quest-of-historical-adam/

If it reduces the gap between religion and science it can only be a good thing.

The "scientific" idea that Adam and Eve were real people came up back in the 1980s out of early studies of mitochondrial haplotypes.  Basically the idea was to sequence the mitochondrial genome of a large sample of people from all over the world, then use mathematical tools to arrange these sequences to look for commonalities and arrange them in a phylogenetic tree (somewhat like a family tree).  The sequences closest to the base of the tree would be presumed to be the closest to the original ancestral sequence, and the geographic source of the sample that gave that sequence would be presumed to be the geographic source where humans originated.

When the analysis was first run, it generated a phylogenetic tree that had at its base a single ancestral sequence that came from Africa.  This was interpreted as "mitochondrial Eve".  It was "Eve" because we inherit our mitochondria from our mother as there are mitochondria in the egg but not in sperm.

The study generated a huge controversy when it was published.  It was quickly determined that the analysis that was used is highly sensitive to the order in which the sequences are loaded into the calculation.  Basically the analysis takes the first sample, compares it to the next, then compares the "sum" of those two to the next sequence, and so on.  It was just chance that an African sample came out as the lowest on the tree and so "ancestral" to all the rest.  When the order of the sequences was changed, the analysis gave a different "mitochondrial Eve", sometimes from Asia, sometimes from South America, etc.  That it always resolved down to a single "Eve" was also an artifact of how the analysis ran.  In the end this approach can only generate a fairly large number of phylogenies, each as likely as any of the others.

The idea that there could have been a single female and a single ancestor of the human species is biologically nonsensical.  There is no evidence that species ever evolve that way, and plenty of evidence that too small of a population size will cause the population to completely crash (leading to extinction) due to lack of genetic diversity.  There are many examples of the adverse effects of excessive inbreeding.

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by GeorgiaDon

[Coreece 189]

1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

All three of the mainline monotheistic religions teach that they were created as fully human. Science does not support that in any way shape or form

It's not a science book, if it was, the 2-3 page creation story would've been 1000s of pages of biology notes and physics equations - everything a Jewish sheep herder wants for Christmas.

Most of it would've been burned by 70 A.D anyway and lost forever, that is if they didn't already use it as heavenly fodder to keep warm in the wilderness.

 

(sorry, I just don't know what to say anymore.  we've all been here 15-20 years and have discussed this ad nauseam.  Is there like a schedule of repeat performances for some audience I don't know about?)

[gowlerk 1,903]

32 minutes ago, Coreece said:

(sorry, I just don't know what to say anymore.  we've all been here 15-20 years and have discussed this ad nauseam.  Is there like a schedule of repeat performances for some audience I don't know about?)

It will all be over just as soon as everyone adopts my point of view and comes to the same conclusion as me. Unless of course I change my mind in some way. Then I will have to let you all know what to think next.

[billvon 2,384]

1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

 Please show me where the has church abandoned the view that Genesis is a literal truth. Certainly almost all members have, but officially? No way.

That quote was from a Pope.  I don't think you can get more official than that.

[billvon 2,384]

40 minutes ago, Coreece said:

(sorry, I just don't know what to say anymore.  we've all been here 15-20 years and have discussed this ad nauseam.  Is there like a schedule of repeat performances for some audience I don't know about?)

Well, it is the place for politics/guns/religion discussions on DZ.com.  I mean, this is what it's FOR.  You always have the option of not participating in a thread if you feel it's useless or redundant.

[gowlerk 1,903]

Just now, billvon said:

That quote was from a Pope.  I don't you can get more official than that.

Oh, you certainly can. You could put it in writing and make it part of the the theology. The pope has made many comments that are personal opinions and not policy.

[Coreece 189]

10 minutes ago, billvon said:

51 minutes ago, Coreece said:

(sorry, I just don't know what to say anymore.  we've all been here 15-20 years and have discussed this ad nauseam.  Is there like a schedule of repeat performances for some audience I don't know about?)

Well, it is the place for politics/guns/religion discussions on DZ.com.  I mean, this is what it's FOR.  You always have the option of not participating in a thread if you feel it's useless or redundant.

My bad, really didn't mean to be "that guy."