Christianity and Evolution are Incompatible

For starters, I want to first point out that PRO has already done exactly as I was hoping to avoid and has conflated Christianity and Creationism. He even quotes me when I say:"PRO will be arguing in support of the position that Christianity and the theory of evolution are incompatible" and then soon after he says:"The theory of evolution can not be compatible with creationist, for some of these reasons". I wanted to avoid this conflation for several main reasons:1) Christianity does not equal Creationism. Christianity is a religion as I clearly defined, while Creationism is "the belief that the universe and living organisms originate from specific acts of divine creation". 2) One can be a Christian without believing in creationism as I defined above. Now, of course if you are a Christian you believe in creation in some general philosophical sense that God is the explanation for all that exists, but one is not bound to the belief that God specially created things in say six literal 24-hour days. Nor is one bound to the belief that God specially created things over a long period of time. Rather, a Christian is perfectly within his/her rational rights to believe that God endowed nature with the ability to bring about the vast array of life we see today. Therefore, it seems obvious that there is no reason to think that there is something inherently contradictory about believing in Christianity and the theory of biological evolution. If PRO wants to try to make the case that Creationism, the belief that the universe and living organisms originate from specific acts of divine creation, is the only way in which a Christian can be faithful to the text, then the burden of proof is on them to show us why. As of now, no such argument has been made. Now, even though PRO really has made no such arguments showing why the theory of evolution and Christianity are incompatible, I will answer PRO's question:1) "If Evolution is true, if your life came about by accident, everything you know, all the animals, the very condition of the earth that enable you to survive. It's all meaningless, life has no purpose. "PRO does not actually explain why evolution would rid us of any meaning or purpose. Evolution being the way in which our physical existence came about no more rids us of meaning and purpose than knowing that there is a physical process that is involved and is necessary prior to our birth. In other words, just because we know the mechanism that is required to conceive a new human being is the joining of a sperm and egg from a mother and a father, that doesn't mean we are void of purpose and meaning. Furthermore, evolution is not merely a physical process of mere "accident" as he/she proposes. As Ken Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University explains:"One of the great mischaracterizations of evolution is that it's driven by random chance, that things just happen. People like to say, 'I don't like to believe that I'm just an accident. ' Well, you're not. What evolution says is that the variation that crops up in a species is indeed unpredictable. We can't be sure what will happen next. But that doesn't mean it's random. .. But the reality is that evolutionary change is restricted. It's restricted by the laws of physics and chemistry. It's restricted by the nature of molecular biology. It's restricted by the constraints of developmental biology during development. Most importantly, evolutionary change is governed by natural selection, and natural selection is not a random process at all. Natural selection selects for successful phenotypes, for successful combinations of characteristics that actually work, and that's not random at all. " [1]So in short, one does not need to believe that life came about "accidentally" in order to believe evolution explains the diversity of life on this planet. Therefore, PRO's question is flawed from the start. 2) "why is it, when you ask an atheist, do you believe in living forever? "I am going to mainly ignore this question because I am not an atheist and quite frankly how an atheist answers a question about the afterlife has no bearing on this debate. One can easily believe in God and an afterlife and affirm evolution. PRO has the burden of proof of showing why that can't be true. Lastly, PRO says "On the other hand, if creation is true, you can find satisfying answer to the purpose of life and what the future holds. " Here I think PRO is referring to creation in that broad philosophical sense that God created all things and sustains them as it says in Colossians 1:17 - "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. " But one is not required to believe in Special Creation which says that God specially created each and every plant/animal and made them appear immediately as opposed to some natural process like evolution. On this point, I would agree with PRO that a world bereft of God is a meaningless world, but PRO has not even begun to explain why one cannot believe in God and believe in the biological theory of evolution. As far as I can tell, one can easily believe in both. Furthermore, PRO has not even begun to explain why one cannot be a Christian and believe in the theory of evolution as an accurate description of how the full range of biological complexity came about. I challenge PRO to do that. SOURCES:(1) . http://www.pbs.org...(2) . http://biblehub.com...