From: u9264442@cc.uow.edu.au (Andrew William Easton)
Newsgroups: aus.religion
Subject: Re: Creation & Evolution - the great side issue.
Date: 26 Aug 92 02:33:37 GMT
Organization: University Of Wollongong

callum@bain3.bain.oz.au (Callum Gibson) writes:

(stuff deleted)
>Evolution says that man had a shared ancestry with animals but the bible says
>that God created man in his own image, especially.  Death entered the world
>through sin, but if we'd evolved then death would have been in the world
>already.

What makes you say that? I can't see any reason why that would be the case.

  Surely this is a major theological dilemma.  Death came because
>Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then
>God cast them out of the garden so they couldn't live forever.  He killed the
>first animal as a first blood sacrifice to cover their sin (nakedness).  So
>there was no death before sin entered the world.  Yet it was actually an
>act of love to introduce death so that they wouldn't have to endure that
>shame and separation forever.  So then, that is the very basis for Christ
>coming and the need for his death.  If death was already in the world (and
>it would have to be for evolution) then it would not explain the fall of the
>world, it would not be the "wages of sin" and creation would not be heading
>for ultimate destruction when Christ returns as Peter describes in the verses
>just after the ones I quoted above.  God created things perfectly, with
>man and woman in a perfect relationship with Him.  Therefore, he would not
>have created them with death.  That's why every animal as well as man was
>vegetarian.  There was no death.  Anyway, that's one theological problem off
>the top of my head with the implications of evolution.

>> people do not automatically reject the idea of a Creator once
>> they accept the theory of evolution.  They are largely independent
>> issues.  The existence of a scientific explanation of the 
>> history of life on earth does not rule out the existence of a 
>> Creative God behind the process, any more than the existence
>> of a theory of meteorology rules out the view that God sends 
>> the rain.  

>Sort of.  As I said above, there's more behind it than just the scientific
>description of what happened.  I mean, what is the reason we are so tempted
>to believe in evolution?  It's because we want to make it compatible with
>science, we want to believe scientists more than God.

No, we just want to explain what we can see (one of the central reasons for
any religion). The Lord never said that the world did not evolve, so we are 
not disbelieving him to say it did.

  God didn't need to
>take six days, he could have taken six seconds.  It's only because we believe
>scientists (and how many of them have Christian backgrounds) that we would
>believe evolution.  Charles Darwin explicitly set out to destroy the notion
>of God creating the world and apparently says so in his notes.  Why would
>we want to believe him?  If you're a Christian, why believe scientists,
>fallible human beings with biases just like the rest of us, over the Word of
>God?  Okay, you've said that the issues are independent.  I think the example
>above is just one that shows they're related.

>> The issue of the relationship between God's activity and
>> the domain of scientific theory is important.  If we believe
>> that once a domain is described by a scientific theory, the
>> activity of God is ruled out, then God is going to be seen to
>> have less of a role in the world as science progresses.  This
>> is needless.  Once we see that science *describes* the activity
>> of God in creating/sustaining the world, we can see that God
>> is active throughout all of his creation, as the Bible describes.

>But the former is exactly what has been happening.  If creation can be
>described by natural processes then you don't need God, you don't need his
>rules.  If an unborn child is just a collection of cells with no soul, and
>looks just like the embryo of a fish, elephant, and any other animal you
>care to mention,

so are you denying that it does? Embryos look similar in the early stages of
development. That is afact of life, no matter what you believe.

 then what does it matter if we kill it?  The Creation Science
>Foundation attributes of lot of modern society's attitudes to the ideas that
>are in harmony with evolution, namely that there is no God and that the world
>just got like it is of it's own accord.

They are not the ideas of evolution. Evolution does not deny God, and there is
no proof (although some people believe it anyway) that the hand of God was not
involved.

>> Best wishes,
>cheerio
bye.

The Bearded One..... 

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