home school evolution questions

Philip,You said, "I read your theistic reasons and appreciate your faith-biases somewhat."I knew when you asked your question about the applications of evolution to faith that our faith basis is very different. You asked about Christ on the cross and heaven and hell. That is almost the only focus of modern Christianity. Our focus is on life and the ability of the Spirit of God to transform a person, step by step, into a completely different person. Instant creation is a great match for the altar call based, instant transformation mentality of most churches.I apologize if this is the wrong thread to bring this up, but the apostle Paul once said, "I am confident that he who has begun a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Messiah Yeshua." We believe that if we aren't confident of the same thing of every one of our members, and if we can't see it happening across the board, then there's something desperately wrong with us as a church, and we have to find out what it is.We do have that confidence, based on what we see happening, and as we watch it happen, we watch it happen in a very Darwinian way, with a lot of struggle to survive and a lot of trials along the way. We don't focus much on heaven or hell, no matter how important that may seem to everyone else. I can't say I even believe in heaven or hell, except to say that I certainly believe in an afterlife, and we have confidence that to be in Christ is to be in him eternally, if we remain in him.I don't know how much application evolution has to the get saved so that you're guaranteed heaven mindset. It has clear and constant applications to the ongoing transformation we are watching and experiencing in our midst, though.One more quick thing. It's not surprising Augustine would agree with his predecessors, but my knowledge of church history starts getting vague by the time of Augustine, and I've not read much from him or his contemporaries. I was referring to pre-Nicene writers, which used to be an area of expertise for me.

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It seemsed to be that they simply got scared. They had been convinced that to be a good Christian you weren't allowed to accept modern scientific thought, and when it started to make sense to them intellectually, the congnitive dissonance caused them considerable pain.
_____________________________________Can I tell another story along these lines?When I was debating on the CompuServe forums I was not with the church I am with now. I was mostly alone. I debated Christian theologic issues a lot, and with an unusual familiarity with the early fathers and a deep knowledge of very early church history, I won most of the debates. Like I said, I considered myself God's gift to the theological world, although I've recovered from that disease, I hope.I used to print off my debates and bring them home from work to show my wife and the only close friend I had, whom we were sharing a two story house with, he and his wife upstairs, me and my family downstairs. We liked discussing the debates together, and it was pleasant, because I was normally winning.When I started realizing I was being slaughtered in the evolution debates, I started asking sincere questions rather than challenging the evolutionists, but the "cognitive dissonance" you mentioned was so strong that I was scared to show the evolution debates to my friend or my wife.It was only weeks later, when I had checked out eight books from the library, read through most of them, sorted out my thoughts, and prepared a defense for my conversion to evolution that I dared show them the questions I was asking. We were already somewhat "heretics," due to having picked up a lot of early churh theology, but evolution was too heretical for both my wife and my friend, and they about had heart attacks.When I joined the church/village that I am now a part of, my friend was very interested, until I presented my case for evolution the church and we embraced it as at least probably true. Then he used evolution as his excuse for staying alone.I definitely understand the pain of the "cognitive dissonance" you mentioned. Definitely.

There's no way my wife has anything resembling the interest to read a book on evolution from any view point. She listened to me over time, but I don't know how settled she was with the whole topic until we adopted a belief in evolution as a church. In fact, there are about 80 adults in our village, and there are probably a few who are still somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of evolution, but my wife is completely settled by now.You asked what my fear was. It embarrasses me a little to say it, but my fear was not that "the Bible would be wrong," but my fear was the reaction of other Christians. I wasn't officially in any church at the time, but my circle of "like-minded" believers, both nearby and more distantly, would have been extreme conservatives. My wife wore a head covering at the time, and so did the wives of most of my friends. I wore only long-sleeve shirts, not short, and I had friends who objected to tapered haircuts as worldly and microwave ovens as too luxurious. One friend asked me to move my encyclopedias (yes, in my house) to a higher shelf so that children would not be able to get to them and see immodest pictures.Sigh...In a circle where people routinely ostracize each other over the length of their shirt sleeves, you can imagine the reaction I expected--and got--to becoming a believer in evolution. Needless to say, I tried not to bring it up.However, one thing did bring it up, which was accusations against the scientific community as liars and conspirators. Such accusations make my blood boil, because they are always leveled by people either ignorant or completely close-minded or by people guilty themselves of lying and conspiracy.As far as being shielded from evolution, I wasn't. I was lied to by the Institute for Creation Research, but I'll take full responsibility for being uninformed and biased enough to believe them.

Maybe some more experienced internet forum participants can help me, as it is possible I completely misunderstood Philip's post. For example, I haven't the foggiest idea what an ex-nihilo rebirth experience is.What I thought I read is that Alan, myself, both of us, or all "theistic evolutionists" (if this means evolutionists who believe in God, then it encompasses at least 42% of the US population, after counting out about 50% that tell pollsters they believe in the Genesis account literally and 8% that are atheist) just prefer "liberalist interpretations" and that's why we rebut instant salvation and that ex-nihilo rebirth thing.Then he includes himself as one who has chided against instant salvation, and says we're all stupid for doing so. In fact, no one really knows anything, not even Schraf the rocket scientist, who doesn't even really understand relativistic theory.Then after including himself among us stupid people, he then tells us all the things he knows, including understanding the theory of relativity better than Schraf, so that we can all change our opinions to his.Did I read it wrong? I admit it was pretty difficult for a dummy like me to understand. For example, I can't rebut or agree with his statement that salvation is not by works of empirical phenomena, because I'm not certain what works of empirical phenomena are, nor whether he's suggesting that theistic evolutionists try to do works of empirical phenomena (wow, now that's a deep thought) or that theistic evolutionists trying to believe the "works of empirical phenomena" that they see in the universe.Finally, as my children have asked before, if someone dropped a penny off the Empire State Building, would that be an empirical phenomenon or would it be a work of empirical phenomena?

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I was recently talking with someone here about the dark side of Christian history. I made the point that any "ideology of utter certainty", religious or otherwise, was what made atrocities like the 9/11 attacks and the Holocaust possible. What is your opinion?

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Um...uh...I have to agree with you.We have some things we believe with certainty, so I don't know that I'm not incriminating myself and us by saying that. Although, one of the things we believe with certainty is that God really hated all our certainty and rudeness and worked very hard to get us to change.

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I am wondering what the nature of your church's "belief" in evolution is? Is it something you accept provisionally, due to the evidence, or is it something that you believe because you have all decided to believe it?

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You threw me with this one. I'm not sure what you mean. It's something we have accepted provisionally, due to the evidence. Isn't that the same as deciding to believe it?Do you mean made it a dogma or something? Our village is together, because we want to learn to follow Yeshua together. So, in order to live with us a person has to believe that Yahshua is really God's Son, or why would he be wanting to follow someone whose been dead for 2000 years? He also has to believe that God wants a people, not just some persons, because our whole focus is togetherness. You don't get to be alone here. Otherwise, we don't have any dogmas, not evolution nor much else at all. Everything else is provisional.Was that the focus of your question?

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Just to set the record straight, I am NOT a rocket scientist, and I DON'T understand very much about Relativity, nor have I ever claimed anything like this.

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I was wondering if he meant you were really a rocket scientist. I couldn't be sure.

John,The admin person is right. Don't get confused. I presented post 1 in this thread to my science/debate class at the "group home school" I help teach. I also teach Algebra, which I am much more qualified to teach, although I do have the excellent qualification in evolution of really, really enjoying the subject.My students are being taught evolution, and they are being taught that it is impossible to defend a literal Bible. The views I espoused on other threads I've talked to you in are indeed my views. The views I espoused in this thread were to give my students something to refute.It was helpful, however, to get a full-fledged, point-by-point response, in a typical debate forum format.. I will show it to my class. I never did get one earlier.

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That's why I asked about how your church, and the people within it, came to their acceptance of the ToE. I wondered if most of the people there just "believe" it on faith, and how many people have a more tentative, scientific way of thinking about it.

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Oh, now I understand the question. Um, most people here are not going to have the time or interest to pursue the evolution question. Some of the parents of teenagers are somewhat forced to, as their teenagers are studying it with me.On the other hand, in two weeks, everyone here will get some sort of introduction to the subject, because the 12 kids in my science/debate class are going to be debating two of the dads who are taking the creation side, and I'm pretty sure most of the adults are going to want to watch that.No one here is required to believe in evolution. When I first brought it up a few years ago, only two or three of the eighty or so adults here would really even have been open to it. On the other hand, we've had so many other of our basic beliefs shattered, that a lot of the old-timers were used to changing directions.Several of the men who were most bothered by the idea of evolution talked to me, and others sat in on those (informal) talks. It became clear rapidly that the scientific evidence was either overwhelmingly on the side of evolution or that I was interpreting the evidence that way and fooling everybody. Since we've never seen any good come from Bible literalism, I think our view became "evolution is true unless someone wants to study enough to prove Shammah wrong." (I'm Shammah.)Now, one of our men did come up with a Kent Hovind video, which made several of the men not want to be called a creationist ever.Also, one day I took the creation side in our living room with a couple of my students (way back at the beginning of the class), and when I told them that the flood laid the geologic column and sorted the fossils, with mammals above reptiles because they were able to get to higher ground, my wife about fell out of her chair laughing. She thought I was joking, and that I had made that argument up. I had to work hard to convince her that someone would really present such an argument.I tried to maintain my "devil's advocate" composure, but that's hard to do when someone's laughing at you like that.So, there's a certain amount of just taking things for granted here, because not everyone wants to have to take up science research, when their lives are busy enough as it is, but it is not just a "we say it, therefore it's true" kind of belief. Our people are probably too passionate to give in to that kind of thinking, anyway.