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Sunday, November 6, 2011

Creation vs Evolution

Ah, the seemingly endless debate of whether we came into existence via a singularity known as the Big Bang, or a single voice stating, "Let there be light" (1). It is the epic battle between those who follow science and those who follow religion. Each side seems to be completely blind to the other's assertions, passing them off as baseless, twisted accounts of the facts, fairy tales, or altogether ignoring the other's claims. Neither the Creationists nor the Darwinists can give ground without their very foundations being rebuilt; they are mutually exclusive (2).

If you view the universe as starting with a bang and slowly coming to this amazing age of knowledge, you can't figure out how those idiots in the pews can hold on for so long to their faith against your scientists' onslaught of empirical evidence. If you view the world as being created by a Divine Being, you cannot understand how someone cannot accept the Word of God to not be true; everybody you trust believes in the Bible and tells you it is the absolute truth—how can these strangers come in and tell you everything you hold as sacred is based on fairy tales?

To frame it in another point of view, Christians have an almost innate ability to ascribe everything that happens to them as something God wanted them to experience, or how God was so merciful to them in their time of need. Jesus must have done it because he is in control of everything. Evolutionists, on the other hand, can do nothing but attribute every interaction as random chance; there is no way for them to account for all the variables and describe it all as a neat formula, and there is no apparent pattern, so it must be random. Admitting there is something or someone controlling the universe introduces the metaphysical, and that cannot be tolerated in real science.

These kinds of comparisons could be done all day. Simply put, one side will do everything it can to place all the meaning of everything as something God has, is, or will do. The other will do everything it can to remove anything related to God, citing the actions of a supernatural being cannot be measured and, therefore, cannot be accounted for in the equations.

Without one side giving up on something of their foundations, they will be forever locked in combat. Christians cannot believe evolution without invalidating a part of their Bible (Genesis), and that would in turn falsify their entire Scripture. Evolutionists cannot accede to a god, for that would invoke the realm of the immeasurable.

While the two adversaries will never reconcile without ground giving, both sides can learn from each other. The Christians need to become more scientific. Create a compelling alternative theory for everything they do not agree with. If creationists do not like the consensus of geology, they should come up with their own complete theory and timeline. Without a workable theory, they are simply poking holes in Darwin's theory.

The laymen of the church need to know more, question more; defending their faith is impossible otherwise. Sunday School should be about learning about the Bible, and about the world around us. Where else is the layperson going to learn about the world from a creationist point-of-view? How can one defend heavenly things if he does not understand earthly things (3)? Question the Bible, respectfully, but ask why and how God did something the way He did. Perhaps by understanding what the Bible is telling them about the world and how God created it, they could fill those pews with more people.

For instance, how do Christians reconcile dinosaurs with their view of history? There actually is evidence of dinosaurs in the Bible, but very few people know that—it was not ever taught in any Sunday School I attended. I would reckon that most believe that the dinosaurs died out due to the flood, but how does Noah's ark figure into that if Noah was instructed to take two of every animal? These are the kind of questions that need to be answered in church. (4)

While most Christians do not seem to have much imagination outside of "do good to others," Darwinists should learn to curb their imagination. Two items that comes straight from the imagination are dark energy and dark matter. Both are things we cannot see or detect directly; we can only infer that it is there, even though so much is supposed to exist. The only reason these dark labels even exist is that we cannot explain the data without an extra "something" to make the equations work out.

Wait a second, there's something we can't measure in any way (5), but we know it is there? Sound like anything those creationists promote?

Let us not fool ourselves by overly complicating the issue. This debate, this controversy, this war, is simply the question of whether we answer to a higher power than ourselves. Creationists believe in their God and that they will go before Him at the end of their life and will have their lives recounted for all to see. Evolutionists, by taking every vestige of God out of their science, hold that their life has no real meaning. Your purpose is to "further mankind?" By your own admission, mankind only came about by chance, and there's no real purpose in random happenstance. (6, 7)

Both sides do their best to answer the question of whether they will be accountable for their actions, albeit with drastically different preferred outcomes. Do we come from sludge and have no purpose in life (7), or do we have a God who loves us enough to give us the freedom of choosing to follow Him or not, and then sacrificing His only Son to give us a chance of being with Him for eternity? Once we die, do we go before the most powerful being in the universe and tell Him we screwed up everything about our puny life, or do we fade into nothingness?

What are the implications of each side? Christ followers have to renounce their sinful ways to get into heaven. Ape descendants have no heaven and no higher power—no reason to do anything, good or evil (8). And, that is the reason we are having this argument of the ages.


I plan to explore this topic more here on RI, going into more detail of many of the points raised in this introduction article, as well as other pertinent subjects. I welcome any feedback that you may have, good, bad, and beautiful criticism. Leave a comment, or perhaps a link to your own articles, I would love to read your thoughts on the subject.


1) This statement is used as a literary device and is meant to depict creation as a whole and not the literal moment when either the universe or mankind was created.
2) Surely, someone reading this is thinking that God could have created the Earth with long ages; however, this doesn't make any sense. Why would you believe in an Almighty Lord and not believe his very own book where he states—in plain language—that he created the universe in six days? Is it possible? Yes, but it is a slippery slope.
4) Batten, D., et al. The Creation Answers Book. Ch 19. Creation.com URL:http://creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter19.pdf Accessed: 2011-10-26. 
6) Wikipedia. Popular view of the Meaning of Life Accessed: 2011-10-26.(Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/62iNZ6ZSw)
A common theme of these summaries is to advance or further mankind; however, to have a purpose to further something, it must have a purpose to begin with.
7) http://creation.com/wm-provine-evolution-=-atheism-no-purpose
8) http://creation.com/evolution-no-morality-dawkins

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