Cantuar, it doesn't work to judge a group of people by a quote from one person.
THis is not just one person, it's an Anglical bishop. I don't think people get inot positions like that by being dead set against eveything the church stands for.
I'll take your word on this, that these are the man's words, but for future reference, it helps to have a source.
I gave you a source. Here it is again:
http://www.oxford.anglican.org/docs/101618522743334.shtml
What does he mean by "myth?" Which part of the Bible is that?
Cantuar, how can this statement be supported?
No point asking me. You could always ask him:
bishopschaplain@dch.oxford.anglican.org
According to Genesis, man sinned after the world was created. Before, there was no death. To me, this sets Creation and evolution on completely different sides. Evolution supposedly works on "natural selection," so only the best-fitted animals will continue to survive. This kind of "cleansing" is sort of a nazi-esque idea.
No death before the fall? So nobody ate anything? Or were plants somehow not alive back then but they are alive now? Isn't this asking a bit much for people to accept? If you've ever watched nature programmes on TV, you'll see the struggle for survival going on now. Natural selection in action. OK, so maybe it didn't happen before the fall, but ever since people were able to write down their observations, naturalists have written about the weak members of a herd getting eaten by predators, of weak hatchlings being disposed of by stronger siblings, of predators starving to death in lean years. It happens. Nothing Nazi about it; a balanced ecosystem doesn't set about exterminating entire species; that's a human characteristic.
I think you just confirmed that evolution is atheistic. That God isn't involved.
No, I don't think evolution is atheistic. The scientific endeavour as a whole proceeds under the assumption that observed phenomena have natural explanations. That isn't peculiar to evolution. The presence of natural explanations doesn't rule out supernatural input, it simply acknowledges that supernatural input isn't detectable by the scientific method. Even in the face of a miracle, the scientific method would stop at "cannot be explained." It wouldn't say "It must be God." A lot of things have appeared to have no explanation until further research was done. Science always has to assume that "don't know" means exactly that.
But, ma'am, do you believe this is a good thing, that only about 7.5% of scientists believe there is right and wrong, for example?
Why would they beleive that? Most of the atheists I've come across have said that morality is not God given, they haven't said there's no morality. You may disagree with that, but that's another matter.
Cantuar, please help me understand how you do an experiment in evolution.
What sort of things were you thinking about? Does observing populations of fish, birds, or insects for several years under lab or natural conditions and documenting species formation count? I gather that nothing to do with fossils counts as an experiment in evolution in your mind or you'd have mentioned it, since it's well known that there's a lot of that sort of work going on. Has anybody watched a fish evolve into a dinosaur? No, because nobody has lived that long. But people have done experiments in phylogenetics and found they agree with results of experiments in palaeontology. Research in population genetics is providing theoretical predictions of evolutionary processes.
Here's a couple of examples:
http://dbbs.wustl.edu/Programs/popbio1.html
http://www.ebc.uu.se/zooeko/evolecol.shtml
For the next five or so years, i have continued to believe in evolution. As for my education, i'm no expert in science. All i know about Creation i learned from different books and films.
If you aren't an expert in science and you're having problems accepting evolution, which is a rather central part of mos tof biology, on what basis did you decide you didn't believe it any more.
No, ma'am. By "weak," i mean spiritually.
Well, obviously I can't judge that. However, when a Lutheran pastor can say "there is no conflict between good science and genuine faith" and when an Anglican bishop can, in different words, say likewise, and when most of the biblical literalism I see involves doing whatever it takes to discredit anything it perceives as an enemy, I'm having a hard time seeing spiritual weakness in the former case and spiritual strength in the latter.
Don't think i'm against science. But some of the things that have recently snuk into the category of science are not science.
Yes. But I can assure you that evolutionary biology isn't one of them. The "scientific" study of astrology that a French university wanted to introduce probably counts as pseudoscience masquerading as science. Evolution doesn't.
Just take a look at the National Library of Medicine database. It includes references to just about every article in biology that's relevant to medicine published since 1966. Plug in terms like "evolution," Molecular evolution," phylogenetics" and "speciation" (remembering that a lot of scientists use "speciation" to refer to identification of species rather than formation of species) and see how many papers come up and the diversity of the subject matter.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi
If you're going to reject evolution and geological stratigraphy and radiometric dating and cosmology on the grounds that they contradict the Bible, that's entirely your business. But if you try to say that science agrees with you and that science is mistaken or fraudulent to promote these things and that your evidence is based on what creationist websites tell you without trying to go back to the original sources to see what they really say, then you're going to find yourself in a never-ending fight with the scientists whose work you're helping to attack. If you want to know what evolution really says and why it says it, don't rely on its enemies to tell you.
