How can theists believe in Darwinian evolution?

Yup.
No True ScotsmenSo the only Christianity is your view? Catholics are not Christians?
I guess that would mean I was never a christian. Cool. But I know alot of people that wasted a lot of time praying to Jesus and Mary. I guess those rosaries were a big waste..

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Hi Balder-dash Well, that's one way to deal with cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the problem is not with "a Darwinian model of evolution" .. but rather with your "believing in a divine place of existence for humans" being a strict interpretation within Christianity OR at odds with evolution.Evidently we have other chrisitians that don't have this "believing in a divine place of existence for humans" problem.Enjoy.

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Rebel American Zen Deist
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Weird. I actually agree with Bolder-dash.His description of evolution's place in biology is still kinda skewed (the whole goo-to-you-via-the-zoo thing), but I agree with the essence of the argument. In fact, this is something that I have thought about a lot. As I see it, science in general - and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in particular - does reveal a universe that appears to be unguided and in a sense purposeless. This is what makes ToE such a boogyman for creationists - it demonstrates that natural, unguided forces are sufficient to explain even the most complex life forms. It doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. It merely says that God isn't necessary for the world to be as it is.You know how we tell YECs that if the world isn't billions of years old, then God sure tried to make it look that way? Well, if God does exist, he also took a lot of trouble to make sure that it looks like he doesn't.I can see my way around believing in a deistic universe, I suppose, one in which God's purposes and patterns are well beyond what human beings can understand. Who can know the mind of Brahman? But if Bolder-dash and I can agree on one thing - which I never would have thought possible before today - it's that the personal God of Christianity really isn't compatible with the wide open and empty universe that we find ourselves in.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John LydonWhat's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a new puppy? The puppy eventually grows up and quits whining.
-Steven Dutch

But this is what pretty much all theists imagine. They see something that looks random, undirected, wasteful, cruel, unjust and stupid and then they somehow imagine that it's all part of God's will and part of his ineffable plan.Look at the apologetics produced every time there's a major earthquake. You never hear any preacher explaining that God didn't want it to happen and that it was down to forces outside his control, do you? No, they all explain that somehow it must have been part of God's plan and that we must have faith that he knows what he's doing.And they manage to believe that even if they know that the immediate cause of the earthquake was slippage along a tectonic fault.So there's nothing to stop a theistic evolutionist from applying the same thinking to evolution.I would be the first to say that this is a silly way to reason, but then I'm an atheist. My point is that there's nothing uniquely silly about applying this reasoning to evolution (as you seem to imply) because it's the same bog-standard reasoning that theists apply to everything else.Indeed, the theistic evolutionist seems to have a rather easier time of it than the apologist for earthquakes. What looks more like the working out of God's plan --- a natural process which kills a hundred thousand people, or a natural process which produced the human race?

I would ask you Jar, from one Christian to another, where do you place Scriptural revelation (God's word to us) with natural revelation? This really is where the debate boils down to in the end. I haven't read this whole thread yet but up through the half way point have seen ZERO ref to the Bible itself and what it says. I'm curious as to your thoughts on this.Edited by Flyer75, : No reason given.

Well, he did say in Message 24:

Except Scripture clearly lays out what or who a Christian is...thus far I've seen from jar that he believes in GOD, nothing more. That is about a loose of a definition of a Christian as one can find out there...call it the Bono version of how to get to heaven..."I'm alright, your alright, we're all alright"You won't find this humanistic reasoning of Christianity anywhere in Scripture.Maybe I misread Christ when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes unto the Father except through ME". So Bono is wrong when he claims that the Buddhist or Hindu is equal in the end with a Christian who has put his faith in Christ.I know this rant does nothing to solve the TE debate for now but I thought I'd point some of these things out.

You are correct Huntard....I just read that a few min after I posted....lol.So, he doesn't place Scriptural revelation real high....would you agree.If Genesis is clearly allegorical....I'd say the resurrection of Christ in Luke is nothing more then Dr. Luke's play on Greek mythology.

Yes. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be had from it though. Amongst other things, yes.

Anyone who places their faith in Christ as their Saviour and for the forgiveness of sins is by definition a Christian...Catholics would apply Theo. But one saying they believe in GOD is falling a little short of the definition...jar may respond and clarify that he does believe in the virgin birth, incarnation of God to human form, death and resurrection which would end discussion of this subject for now.

Well, Jesus didn't really write that, now did he?Also, you don't even know if he did or did not say that, or that he wasn't mistaken.

You are certainly fun to discuss with here Huntard, one of my favs here...lol.Yes, you are correct but I'd like to shy away from this debate for now. I prefer to keep this focused on the TE himself who claims that he does believe the history of certain parts of the Bible, maybe even that exact quote, but refuses to believe Gen 1-11 as history, even though there is zero biblical evidence for believing so (again, specific revelation vs. natural revelation).

So did all your questions for me get answered?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Why, thank you Flyer. I must say you're one of my favourites from the "creationist side" as well. Fair enough, it would be a bit off-topic I guess. Well, that would indeed come down to the fact that it's contradicted by "natural revalation". But lets await more TE's to see what they have to say.

But each individual human also comes into being by a "natural, unguided mechanism", namely a sperm fusing with an egg, and you have no problem with believing that individual humans have souls. Yet somehow you think that we couldn't collectively have souls if we as a species were produced by an equally natural process.Think about the doctrine of the soul. There are a number of ideas of the soul, but here's a fairly common one ---When a sperm fuses with an ovum, a spiritual entity known as a "soul" somehow comes into being and is attached to the zygote.This is not a mere physical entity like the chromosomes, with the sperm contributing one half of the soul and the ovum contributing the other half. It's a spiritual entity which would survive the physical destruction of the zygote and go off to Heaven (or Hell, or Limbo, depending on your theological leanings).The creation of the soul and its attachment to the zygote is therefore necessarily a supernatural, miraculous act.For reasons best known to God, he chooses to attach souls exclusively to human zygotes rather than to chimps, monkeys, giraffes, rocks, or little bits of string.Now, once one is prepared to swallow all that, then the theistic evolutionist is free to say that at some point in the evolution of our lineage God decided that we'd passed the bar of things worth attaching souls to.Of course, I think this whole thing is ridiculous, but then, I'm an atheist. My point is that the ridiculousness lies in the conception of the soul (pun intended). Once you've got past the intrinsic silliness of the concept, there's no reason that a theistic evolutionist's application of that concept is any sillier. (N.B: This is not to say that all theistic evolutionists do reason in the way that I've suggested. But they could if they wanted to, and I don't see how you could object to it without objecting to the concept of the soul per se.)Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.