Is Evolution a Radical Idea?

I was referring to God's cruelty, not the animals'.

It is not cruel for animals to slay each other without man around to consider it so. Nor cruel for God to use the device of evolution to arrive at where he arrives at. Cruelty is mans construct and only arrives with man.I know people who baulk at a lobster thrown in a pot and wonder. Its cruel to throw a man into a pot - not a lobster.

It is cruel to cause innocents to suffer. Pain is pain no matter who or what is feeling it.

Good point. What I actually had in mind was that the passion of Christ on the cross was a spiritual vehicle that provided a mechanism whereby we could be made right with God.The physical act had spiritual ramifications.

There is no such thing as innocent without a sense of right and wrong. The two are entwined.Lobsters innocent?

But lobsters might feel pain. If I twisted Ted Bundy's tits 'till they bled, it would still be cruel.Now I personally look more fondly upon a lobster, than Bundy. Infact, a lobster has more worth than him, to me. Perhaps we should eat Ted, We've already cooked him.

I meant animals are morally innocent, iano. They are not capable of sin.

I'm not convinced one way or the other as to whether the fall occured at a specific time or not. The most convincing argument that I've heard was that Adam and Eve represented the first creatures with human spitiruality thereby making them the first creatures with the ability to know right and wrong. This would be consistent with what you are saying.However I think we would agree that only humans have a sense of right or wrong and as humans haven't been around all that long then it would follow that prior to that time morality did not exist. Once again, I see no conflict between evolution and Christianity. It isn't that moral judgements are subjective but I also don't think that sin is a black and white thing either. I believe that sin occurs when a person makes a conscious judgement that goes against the commandments of loving God and our neighbour.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

God was around and it is God who is responsible for that killing field that we call nature.

If they are not capable of sin then innocence and morality are irrelevant notions - much as one might be inclined to feel otherwise. It is a common occurance for humans to project humanity onto their animals. But inappropriate all the same.They are dumb.. dumb... dumb. The "we are 95% chimp" brigade
notwithstandingThink about it from the other foot/claw for a minute. Does not 5% of the genome not have a very big canyon to brigde. Thats some fine tuning. Evolution of the gaps Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

First off Robin thanks for the discussion on the fall. I hadn't considered it in those terms before.I sympathize with your point of view. To be honest I usually, when possible, will carry a bug out of the house rather than kill it. I wonder though if we don't anthropomorphize nature too much. I contend that we are the only creatures that know we will die. I'm not sure that death to animals or bugs has the same sense of tragedy that it has for us.I know that good and evil exist. I know that life exists and I believe that without God nothing would exist. I don't know what limitations or criteria that there were for creation. God didn't have to bother at all. All life dies eventually anyway and if life is eternal then does it matter that much when it happens.Not a perfect answer at all because we aren't going to have perfect answers to questions like this in this life time.I think I've said it here before, but when I move on to the next life I'm definitely going to all the lectures.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

Me too - since I became a Christian. Purely out of respect for the engineer who put all those tiny mechanisms together though. The engineer in me must bow to a genius. Not that its the only part of me that pays homage{AbE} And I don't give a monkeys how he arrived at it: creation as is or by a process of evolution. Either are jaw droppingly astonishingly mind bogglingEdited by iano, : No reason given.

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And I don't give a monkeys how he arrived at it: creation as is or by a process of evolution. Either are jaw droppingly astonishingly mind boggling

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I care.It's really wonderful to understand how things work.

I'm talking about animal pain. Animals--at least the higher animals--feel pain, I would assume.Now I don't know if fossils can tell us if, say, a dinosaur had a developed nervous system enough to feel pain. Maybe somebody knows.I'm just going by what I've seen of modern animals, and they seem capable of feeling excruciating pain to me.God is responsible for that pain.Edited by AdminJar, : No reason given.Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.

Evolutionism tells us that God is not needed.