Do You Believe in Evolution?
Amit Kumar Singh
Sunday, 15 July 2007 23:26 UTC
A Very Simple Question..
Do you believe in Evolution?
If Yes, then does it mean that you do not believe in God?
But how can you not believe in God?
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Hi Amit, Very interesting question! I do believe in God and also in evolution. Though I haven’t yet been able to digest that life came out just of organic synthesis and even millions of years later also we haven’t been able to find any other planet where also this organic synthesis occurred. It seems too simple a process to have not occurred on any other planet. May be it has occurred but in planets which are light years away. I’ve kept my fingers crossed :) Nevertheless, the idea of unicellular to multicellular to organ systems; from photosynthetic autotrophs to humans is perfectly fine and is complemented by large number of evidences and fossils. Now about my faith in God.. I don’t see it counteracting any of what I’ve said above. For me his existence stems from faith. And faith can be perceived only by having it. I guess, I’m going round-round, but if you also are a believer you must have realized that it is like explaining what is happiness! The feeling which you get when you are happy <=> The power which you perceive when you have faith.
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Amit,
You question is rather unusual.
Yes, I believe in evolution, but this faith doesn’t influence my religion.
Frankly speaking, I believe in God in a way that there is something (organisms or materia), highly developed than humans and is able to control us.
So, my point contains some ideas of evolution and some ideas of religion.
I don’t think that’s bad. -
Evolution or Creation is an amazing question to ask. For me it has to be creation for a simple reason. Life is too precious, too wonderful for no thought to be behind it. Consider the eye and what it can see or how the brain enables you to see what you are looking at. Open and close your hand, turn it around and think on what is going on to allow you to do such a simple thing. The connection between the brain, nervous system, muscles, bone and tendons etc is simply fantastic. Think also of your joints and how they move or that they give you the ability to stand, pick things up etc and this is just a tiny fraction of what your body is able to do. Now add in the countless millions of different animals alive on this planet today or that have been in the past. Evolution is too young, too cold to have been able to produce that amount of amazing variety or diversity.
One thing I hear constantly on nature programs is “we now think” suggesting a previous theory is not as rock solid a fact as it once was. Think on what we knew scientifically 100 years ago and what we believe to be the case now and our great, great, great grandchildren will laugh at us for how little we new. Science presents itself as “fact” but what it should do is present itself as “current understanding” as new techniques, discoveries etc disprove what was taken as cast iron.
Can I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Creation is fact; sadly I can’t but then that was what the Garden of Eden was about, man could either accept or reject God? It’s still the same today.
Can you believe in Evolution and God? I would say no. Evolution asks “there is no God, so how did we get here?” creation says there is a God and he created all that is. How long has the Universe/Earth been in existence? I don’t know as the Bible doesn’t really say. Apart from the 1st two chapters of Genesis and a couple of verses elsewhere, the Bible doesn’t really say much on Creation, it doesn’t give us the detailed answers we crave. If you believe in a God does it matter if you don’t have every detailed analytical question answered? If you did, what need would there be for faith?
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Amit, the problem here is more with your question than anything else. God is a matter of ‘belief’, but one does not ‘believe’ in any scientific theory – because science does not work like that. God is absolute, but scientific theories – even one as well-grounded as evolution by natural selection – are always provisional. Fanatical evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins fail to appreciate this categorical distinction, and this failure is seized on by creationists whose agenda is more political than religious. In fact, I’d say that creationism, while terrible science, is worse theology, for the following reason: faith is not such if it requires physical proof for its justification.
I am a senior editor of Nature handling aspects of evolutionary biology for twenty years. I believe in God, but I subscribe to evolution. Faith and Science are two different things, but Amit breaks this categorical distinction by inviting us to compare the two as if they belonged to the same category. This is the classic Dawkinsian error which is probably as damaging to science as any amount of creationism or similar fringe lunacy.
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Even laying aside Henry’s distinction, I don’t think there is an issue.
Evolution is a theory for a mechanism, which you may or may not subscribe to. The existence of God is a belief in a cause. The existence (or not) of a cause says nothing about the mechanism, so the two cannot cause problems for each other. The problems come when, like Creationists, you believe that the cause is also the mechanism.
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Remember that faith and religion are a creation of man, presumably coming about through a divine intervention/communication. Did we evolve into a species that was finally able to comprehend and contemplate our own existence, and thus turned to the supernatural to explain the unexplainable?
Or did religion develop as an interpersonal family relationship surrogate for our growing society during a time when tribal warfare and homicide were a way of life? Rapid population expansion and an abandonment of the hunter/gatherer culture following the agricultural revolution left us violent humans in a bind, since we suddenly became surrounded by people who were not part of our extended family. Usually this meant fighting and murder for the unrelated, but that would have undermined settling efforts in our nascent civilization, throwing the blossoming hierarchy into chaos. Producing bonds between unrelated people through religion in our expanding world may have provided enough reason not to kill/enslave other humans outside of one’s bloodline, as it rapidly became impossible for all those in a particular tribe to be related, and provided more stability for the permanent settlements. All were children of their God, and thus “related.” We never fully abandoned the inter-tribal fighting or enslavement, though, as battles between the different “religious families” continued, even today.
It is interesting to consider some of these types of arguments (mainly those of Jared Diamond) in this debate.
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I believe in evolution. I don’t believe in God, but those those beliefs (or lack in one case) have nothing to do with each other.
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While I am not a believer in God, belief in God and evolution are completely independent. They are only a problem for those people who like to tell God how he should have done things.
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I’ve just posted the first of a couple of blog entries about this very topic, in response to the publication last Friday of the book “Science, Evolution and Creationism” by the National Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine. The book is available free of charge if you download it as a pdf file from the National Academies Press website.
Henry’s distinction is an important one. However, implicit in any answer one gives to Amit’s question are the assumptions one makes about the God one is talking about. If, as a result of one’s assumptions, one can conceive of God working in or through or behind the evolutionary process, then there will probably be no inherent conflict between evolutionary biology and religious belief. If, on the other hand, one’s understanding of God, or of creation – as in Calum’s case – cannot encompass an evolutionary perspective on human development (perhaps because it is “too young” or “too cold” to have generated the diversity we see around us), then conflict between evolutionary biology and the possibility of belief in God seems to be the logical outcome. (Of course, one then needs to ask whether one has understood one’s doctrine of creation properly.)
In conversations such as these we all need to lay bare our assumptions and preconceived notions about God, and about evolutionary biology.
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Okie..
For a sec.. “lets get out of your comfort zone and stop using the brain you know.”
A Mom teaches her kid how to pray God and kid learn to have faith in God (even for math homework) because God is the creator of universe.
Kid grownup and reaches the university..
Where.. he learn the Big Bang cosmological model of creation of universe and Evolution..
What does the first question will come to his mind?
God is true or Evolution?
Here Faith and Science are on the same floor and I don’t know how to Categorized them?
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