quote:
This is a general reply because several of you responded. My goodness, there are many who have used evolution to disprove the Bible. The creation account in Genesis. Noah. The age of the earth. Are you saying I'm making this up? That evolution supports these things in the Bible?
I don't think people have used evolution to disprove the
Bible, merely
Bible inerrancy. Not the same thing.
quote:
No, evolution goes against the Bible in certain places and that's just a fact. I think the most important thing is Adam and Eve and original sin. If that is wrong then there's no point to Jesus and I might just as well then quit going to church and get drunk every saturday night. I'd rather sleep in anyway.
This is a good statement of the problem. However, it relies on the logical fallacies of the
Slippery Slope and the
False Dilemma, implying that there exist only two positions: The Bible is totally and utterly inerrant or totally and utterly wrong.
In practice, there exist a range of possibilities within that range. Even an out-and-out athiest like me accepts the historicality of some of the Bible and the vast majority of Christians accept that some of the Bible is allegorical or, in places, just wrong.
However, there is a sense in which evolution can be used against religion:
Dawkin's argument is that before evolutionary theory atheism was as much a belief structure as theism, since the problem of origins still remained. Even Hume stumbled on this point.
Dawkins argued that Evolution by Natural Selection, in providing a naturalistic explanation for life, made it possible, for the first time, to be an atheist for
naturalistic reasons.
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