From: gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Evolution implied by the Bible
Date: 4 Jan 93 17:00:16 GMT
Organization: DSC Communications Corp, Plano, TX

In article <martin.726047840@marsh> martin@cs.curtin.edu.au (Martin Dougiamas) write
s:
>Christians among you: explain this.
>
>If Man was created only thousands of years ago, and we are all
>descended from common stock... why is there such a wide variety
>in our genetic pool today?
>
>Do you believe that the ancestors of people as diverse as South
>American forest pygmies, Zulus, Europeans and Japanese were the
>same as yours only a few thousand years ago?  If you do (and you
>must, if you take the Bible at all seriously) then you must believe
>a great deal of evolution has occurred since then.  If not, I 
>would like to hear your arguments.
>
>If you do admit this much evolution can take place in such a short
>time (hundreds of generations) then what objections can you take
>against the extension of the idea to the theory of Darwinian
>evolution as it stands today?
>

The idea that the creation took place five or six thousand years ago
is a new addition to Christian teaching and it is not subscribed to
by all, even not all fundamentalists.  It was a British clergyman,
Bishop Usher or Ussher, who decided to calculate the generations 
and years indicated in Genesis and came up with the conclusion that
the world was created at 10:30 in the morning on such and so a day 
in 4004, BC.  The wide acceptance of this reading, or similar ones that
take the years and days in a materially literal sense, was a result
of an increasing materialism that had overtaken Christianity long before
it had become the paramount world view of science.

In earlier ages, the sense of continuous calendar and clock time was not
so strong as it is now, and words like "generation" and "year" and "day"
were full of meaning far beyond the mundane practical sense that we
give them today.  Ask any Jewish Bible scholar about the meaning of the
Hebrew word for day, "yom".  This word, as it appears in Genesis, bears
within it connotations of vastness, of a vast cycle of time, with a beginning, 
a growth, a fulfillment, and an ending.  The "yom" of a day of creation
can then be seen as it was originally experienced as a great macrocosmic
day, of which our microcosmic earthly day of twenty four hours can be seen
as a small microcosmic reflection.  If we learn to experience our "little day"
in its living aspect -- from the unordered rest ("chaos") of night and sleep
to the rising of the sun, its development to the high point, then decline
to the evening and a new period of rest - we can develop a feeling for
the vast, rhythmical process by which creation occurred and lend to that
feeling a sense of proportion in time and space that is truly worthy of
the magnitude and grandeur of the universe and of the earth and man.

The issue of creation in six twenty-four hour days and the literal interpretation
of the generations from Adam to Christ is really a red herring that occupies 
too many people with trivialities that do injustice to both science and the
profound wisdom of the scriptures.  The latter, however, are expressed not in
terms of hard measure and number but in terms of pictures -- even mythical
ones in some cases.  But these myths and pictures are not simply fairy tales
but rather pictorial expressions of objectively real spiritual-material events
and processes that cannot be expressed in languages that have developed around
the things of present day material reality.

As for evolution, the question is not whether there was evolution, but how
it happened.  Darwinism postulates that the higher forms, including man, 
evolved out of lower forms, going back to the first emergence of living
forms out of non living substance and energy.  Another, spiritual-material
view of evolution would envision the reverse, that the lower forms came 
later into existence, precipitated out of a more spiritual form into harder
substance, and the last to appear in material form was man himself.  In one
sense it could be said that Darwin was right about the fact of evolution,
but it was the apes that evolved from man and not the other way around.  This
alternative view of evolution would view the biblical record in a different
way than either fundamentalists or Darwinians (whether Christian or not).

The existence of the different races of man does indeed point to a long and
varied existence of the earth and the human race.

Gerry Palo (732327.2006@compuserve.com)
Xref: sparky alt.atheism:25741 talk.religion.misc:25910