Can you be a true Christian and believe in evolution?
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photo taken from albertmohler.com
Can you be a true Christian and believe in evolution?


photo taken from albertmohler.com
Can you be a true Christian and believe in evolution?

No, evolution is false, no matter what Science says. Science is so corrupt and so is the medical system. All these doctors want is the money. 30k for a surgery? Yea right. They think that because they go through a few years of medicine, they are a walking god? Give me a break. They are no better than organized crime members.
I wouldn't go that far Zack as to say they are like organized crime members. They are, however, crooks, 99.6% of them. One surgery, a simple in-and-out procedure, costs more than double a years salary for an American citizen. That's absurd. That surgery is worth at most a few thousand.
This applies even to pediatricians. We see them banking hundreds just for a weekly visit. All a bunch of crooks and liars. They need to be regulated.
Anyway Zack, way to go off subject here. I believe you can be a true Christian and believe in evolution. Just because it says that we come from apes and stuff, doesn't mean there isn't a God and Christ didn't live!
Yeah I mean they aren't deliberately killing people, they are doing the opposite.
"That surgery" usually does cost only a couple thousand. Especially if it is routine or performed at a specialty clinic.
Unless you are in NYC I guess. Where you are regulated to the gills.
Sorry Zack, but you are dead wrong on all parts of your post.
It is not just the Doctor that gets paid – Hospital operating room, attending nurses, anesthesiologist, and the list goes on to cover literally everything that is used during the surgery. Oh, and have you found out the cost of 16 years of medical training before the doctor can charge for his/her services? 16 years, Zack, that is how long it takes to be trained BEFORE the doctor starts surgical training(and THAT can last up to eight years more)!
Now, about the question of religion . . . . ;
The study of religion is called Theology – meaning theories, or ideas.
The study of science is the compilation of enough theory to give it credibility to be thought to be true.
Evolution, just like religion, is nothing but a theory.
Just my not-so-humble opinion.
It is possible to be a real Christian and believe in evolution, although evolution (as opposed to special creation) is a mistaken idea, in my view, and not in agreement with Scripture. An outstanding evangelical Christian theologian and apologist, Bernard L. Ramm (1916-1992) believed in theistic evolution. I do not agree with that view, but I do not doubt that Dr. Ramm was a true Christian, and well worth reading on the subjects he addressed.
Papadawg is right on the money here. Surgeries often cost an upward of 10K for basic procedures, to cover all the costs involved. I don't know of many procedures that cost a few thousand, Sun Tzu…maybe wisdom tooth extraction?
I don't know where you guys are. But it's not that hard to find doctors out here who can perform routine in-and-out surgeries in the low thousand(s) range. They're usually specialist clinics that deal in the same boring operations every day. If something is costing many thousands of dollars, it's either not "routine" or there are probably sunk costs involved that can be stripped out (but cannot be because of regulatory compliance issues).
Evolution never conflicted with religion. Evolution is talking about the trends and generals. And the religions are talking about specific events.
If the evolution is right, that does not mean God didn't create Adam on his image. That because, the evolution is talking about the way of creation without specific cases. And the religion is talking about actual events without talking about the way of creation.
And remember, evolution will never be able to deny the exceptions. For that, God can create what ever he want, without even the slightest ability to distinguish his deeds from natural deeds.
It actually never been a threat to my belief in Islam also.
Evolution never conflicted with Christianity. Evolution is talking about the trends and generals. And Christianity is talking about specific events.
If the evolution is right, that does not mean God didn't create Adam on his image. That because, the evolution is talking about the way of creation without specific cases. And the religion is talking about actual events without talking about the way of creation.
And remember, evolution will never be able to deny the exceptions. For that, God can create what ever he want, without even the slightest ability of us to distinguish his deeds from natural deeds.
It actually never been a threat to my belief in Islam also.
If you believe that a deity created a male human and female human and that is how people populated the earth then you do not "believe" in evolution. If you learn what evolution is, identify the mechanisms involved, and take the time to carefully and thoughtfully do research to understand that it is present everywhere you look, then you cannot fully believe the tenets of Christianity or any other religion that requires its adherents to accept creation myths as fact.
You can't honestly sit back and deny the evolution OF evolution. We all accept that Darwin was wrong in the details, but Science is proving everday that Darwin had the general mechanics right. Species change over time, the grow longer appendages for using and making tools, they change social and ecological habits as the climates and their surroundings change, it happens, theres proof. The problem comes in when an overly religious individual closes their mind to the idea of change. If you live your life through one book and believe only what it says you are closing yourself off to 98% of the world around you.
I understand you believe creationism happened, but I'm willing to offer proof of evolutions changes to mand, beat, and plant; what PROOF are you offering that God created man from the Earth, and woman from man's rib…. PROOF!!! The burden of proof is on you creationists. Faith alone is not proof of an occurance, the bible alone is not verifiable fact because it's old. Age does not translate to immediate veracity. As a scientist, I must demand proof of God's Creation. Creationism is not a theory, it's a mindset. Theories have verifiable evidence, theories are laws in progress: Relativity, Gravity, Physics, all "theories" who have become verifiable laws. Evolution is right there, a theory whose time is quickly leading to law. With no verifiable evidence creationism is less than theory…. it's Atlantis
The problem here is that if you are a believer in creationism you are using faith as your check to "prove" creationism. If you think this way then you place no value in science which requires, even demands, verifiable testing of every theory.
Belief has no bearing on reality because anyone can "believe" whatever they want independant of proof. I "believe" advanced civilizataions exist in the universe beyond ourselves, but I cannot yet prove this. I am going on "faith". Creationism is a purely faith-based argument that tries, velied at times though it may be, to "prove" religion, especially Christianity. Dinosaurs on Noah's ark? Really?
Evolution is a theory in the sense that any statement meant to explain something is a theory. Creationism is also a theory. It doesn't even matter that one is a product of myth and one has been discovered through experimentation. Both are theories only until the point of asking for proof. Evolution is provable beyond a shadow of a doubt. Many of its exact mechanism are as of yet unknown to us, but that doesn't disprove the verifiable, observable, testible proof of its reality.
Creationism is supported by Christian-minded "scientists" who deny such things as carbon dating, basic geology, biology, and reason.
Creationists ask the world to accept their "theory" along side evolution the way string theory and exists along side other explanations of the way the universe works. It doesn't. Creationism in all its iterations is a religious theory being proposed as a legitimate alternative scientific theory to the nature of life.
Someone who believes that a diety created a man and woman and all the animals cannot truly, honestly believe in evolution as the evidence expresses it because to accept evolution is to accept the timescales involved in the process, something creationism in all its forms treats like an annoying little cousin that gets in the way.
Ok you two, you seem to have beaten to death the fact that creationism is based on faith. Yes I am very aware of this, and this is why I have never suggested that it should be taught in schools. Rather, neither theories should be taught, as neither are scientifically sound.
Seeing as everyone seems to avoiding my questions at every turn I will give you another chance to answer them, or face the fact that evolution has some major problems. These are my copy and pasted questions from the other debate.
How does the big bang answer the question of who laid the “cosmic egg”? The first law of thermodynamics proves that matter and energy cannot just appear. Also how do explosions result in increased organization of matter. Has an explosion in the history of the world ever created ordered complexity?
If you are a Christian who believes in evolution, that doesn’t mean that you don’t love God, it just means that you are very impressionable, maybe you aren’t very smart, and someone in a lab coat told you about evolution. You may still believe the whole on the cross story, you just replace your own theory in place of Genesis. You are simply mislead, you still believe in Jesus and his teachings.
ok firstly I think it's important to clarify the big bang doesn't work just by itself. You need to understand that the addendum to it is the oscillating universe theory which states at some point the planets/stars/universal matter will finally lose all its speed due to proximity gravity and will eventually collapse back into itself again. Once all the matter is again condensed down into that infinitesimal point (much like the singularity in a black hole) it will erupt back out again, spewing the basic universal matter to start all over with basic hydrogen combining into complex matter. This may have happened countless time already.
Secondly, you are correct about the 1st Law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it merely changes shape or form. But what you are ignoring, or what you ma not be aware of is that energy and matter are not bound by size and shape. All the matter in the universe can be smashed down to the atomic level removing all the space between atomic particles. So while all the matter in the universe is condesnsed, it's still ALL there.
Thirdly, yes explosions on a universal level can create order. In the simplest explanation I can provide: Say we've had this huge explosion, and all matter in the universe has spewed out in the smallest atomic form possible, hydrogen. 1 Proton, 1 Electron. Hydrogen A has a tiny gravity, so does Hydrogen B. The two pass close enough to react attractively to each others gravity, they begin spinning in a pair, they now have twice the gravity of Hydrogen C who is attracted in next, they now have three times the gravity of Hydrogen D, so on and so forth. Gravity I must inform you pusty is a law now, no longer a theory. In this manner, stray particles following an explosion in the low gravity spacial atmosphere create order.
So the reason this orderly explosion doesn't work on Earth is that the Earths gravity is so so massive that any particles created by a terrestrial explosion are automatically reacted upon by Earth gravity, their mutual attractive gravity is what we would call negligible. So yes, explosions within the history of the "world" have created order, They are responsible for the formation of every planet, star, comet, asteroid we see. So finally it comes down to your first question. And I'm sorry you had to read this WHOLE diatribe to get to it. Big Bang does not answer the cosmic egg theory, it has never attempted to answer it. Science cannot describe what was outside this tiny ball of universal matter, that is still currently conjecture. BUT, what I feel cannot be denied is gravitational interaction, thermodynamics, astro physics… these are laws now, not theories. If you feel God was the catalyst of the "Big Bang" I can't argue that with you, but to say it never happened is a little close minded.
Apologies for the length of my reply below. But these areas of science are directly related to my everyday work. thermodynamics, electric wave theory, gravitational constants in radio frequency. I can prove these things because I design and build equipment based on these laws.
I've studied evolution, I've been fascinated by such topics since i was young. I'm still young, and i've gotten the hang of it. But whilst reading through an evolutionary worksheet, me and my friend found two arguments or holes in every statement we read. I believe in adaptation and natural selection, it's logical, after all. However the time scheme doesn't fit. It has been proven that floods, volcanic eruptions and perhaps even meteorites and such speed up the process of carbon dating and other methods of finding the age of things. They know this, so to find the real age, scientists compare these objects with other items in different areas that are in the same fossil layer, so they are out of the area of that particular occurrence which sped up the aging process. what they don't consider is that, the particular flood which sped the age up, had happened world wide. That the meteorite which destroyed the city of Sodom to create those pillars of salt hadn't just affected the immediate area around it, but the whole continent. These events can speed the aging process up by millions of years. They've found that changes or adaptation doesn't require 10's of thousands of years to occur – within several generations the skin colour can change and the skeletal structures can change as well. Evolution does occur, but not the way they say it does. not within millions of years, but within thousands.
We've all studied evolution in school, and we've seen what proof's its had to offer, but have you ever studied creationism, have you ever looked in from the other side to see what you've disregarded so easily as "myths"?
so what made all that energy which is squished into that small condensed thing which expanded to start of with, who put that whole process into action
why do they react in that way? why do the laws of our universe make so much sense? a scrambled tower of lego doesn't make much sense, why does an explosion that came out of nothing allow hydrogen to attract each other and form a pattern which makes sense, which makes life? why do they spin? why not just pass straight through each other. they might have physical forms, and it might be impossible, but it doesn't need to follow what we believe is possible and impossible…
A scrambled tower of legos doesn't react that way because the ravity of one lego is negligable compared to the gravity of the planet. All earthbound terrestrial objects are subject to planetary gravity. In space, where massive objects are so far apart, small particles can react towards each other with inherent complimentary gravity. This is what causes small (tiny) space aprticales to group together and eventually form planets, suns, comet, asteroids etc etc.
Some carbon dating tests on animals that died weeks ago result in millions of years according to carbon dating. Just throwing that out there.
That doesn't mean carbon dating is an incorrect form of science. It means some moron lab technician made a mistake with his mass spectrum analyzer. Carbon dating is incredibly accurate form of measurement which dates materials based on the amount of carbon-14 left in it. Carbon-14 is a naturally occuring radiometric isotope which decays at a half-life of 5730 years.
BUT Pusty, carbon dating isn't used in dating of objects over 50,000 years old because it's accuracy level decays after that point. Nearly all carbon14 would decay after ten generations (aprrox 57,000 years). For higher age applications we use uranium-lead dating and uranium thorium dating which have much higher half-lives.
But radio carbon dating isn't used for ancient samples aside from defining the fact that radio carbon is inaccurate over 50,000 years (give or take a few 1000). For ancient samples we use alternative methods of dating using isotopes and elements with much longer half lifes.
i.e.: Uranium thorium dating, uranium lead dating, potassium argon, fission track dating, Optically stimulated luminescence dating…. all these methods and more, expand our understanding of the timeline of our planet. You can't just go to agegenesis.com and read only about the inaccuracy of carbon dating if you aren't going to look for alternative methods.
So how can you be sure that it is accurate, how can you be sure that outside variables haven’t tainted the results? Can you say that the age of something is correct and have nothing to measure it against? And no I’ve never heard of agegenesis.com, also how do we know that carbon14 has a half-life of 50,000 years? I’d be interested in knowing how scientists came up with that number.
Evolution has some holes in its theory as does creationism. After all they are both "theories"
I dont believe either one because we will never know the truth until we die anyway.
carbon 14 has a half-life of 5730 years not 50,000. The reason were are so sure about carbon's half -life is because it is so short. Using mass spectrometers and gas chromographs we can count the number of carbon 14 atoms in a sample. Upon death all living things have a balanced amount of carbon 12 vs carbon 14. As the creature decays the carbon 14 decays also, but the carbon 12 stays the same. So by counting the number of carbon 14 atoms and comparing it to the stable number of carbon 12 atoms you can see how many half-lifes the sample has gone through.
Being that carbon 14's half-life is so small we can easily count minor changes in c14 numbers over short time intervals with high accuracy. Say a sample taken in controlled laboratory conditions, monitored initially with equal carbon levels is allowed to decay over a set period of time, the results are easily measured rather than an element with a higher half-life count.
Evolution has proof as well as holes Ian. Even though Darwins "Origin of the Species" is flawed it details time oriented changes in species which DID happen. Animals and humans have changed over long periods of time to adapt to surroundings. This is irrefutable. The scientific definition of the word theory includes the clause that it must have proof to back up its hypothesis, so while it is not yet a scientific law like gravity and planetary motion it cannot be called a theory without a modicum of provable data.
I ask again, where is the proof of creationism. I can prove species on this planet have changed over the last several millions years through fossil records and geographical changes. You however cannot prove that man was created through dust of the Earth, nor that woman sprang into existence from mans rib….
Without evidence creationism is NOT a theory, it is a story.
Are you a raving atheist? Because I was an atheist at one point in my life, but nothing I ever said sounded as arrogant and offensive as your comments.
/Agree