Adam+Mistretta+week+7

In “Finding Darwin’s God” Dr. Kenneth Miller presents a conciliatory belief that the concept of evolution can coexist with the religious belief that God created humankind. While his logic is convincing and his credentials are undeniable, I must plainly state that I consider his theory to be an example of the religious community grasping at straws. His argument is based on the idea that the existence of god should not be proven by the things we do not know, but rather by the things we do know. Eventually, we will solve almost any mystery about how the earth was created or how a plant produces flowers, but what if this is does not disprove God, but rather strengthens Him. This is an interesting theory, but it is full of holes. The fact is, that while Dr. Miller may not use religion to explain the unknown, this is still where religion comes from. Religion, all the way back to the spiritual beliefs of tribal peoples, comes from looking at things like the sun, or flowers, or an eclipse, or lightning, or any other natural phenomenon, and saying, “I can’t figure out how this works, so it must be divine.” Religions have been used to explain the complexity of the world around us for millennia. Dr. Miller says, “ If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. ” This is true, but that is one very large //if//. On the other hand, //if// reason is not a gift from God, then the entire argument collapses, and what evidence is there that reason is a gift from God or anyone else? The facts of the matter are these. The Bible clearly and explicitly states that God created man in His image. Is it //possible// that this is an abstract and that it doesn’t actually mean humans were created instantaneously as we are? Yes, it’s possible, but isn’t it infinitely more likely that the //humans// who wrote the Bible simply didn’t know about evolution and as such didn’t realize that by writing that man was created instantly they were contradicting observable fact? It is no different from claiming that the 7 days of Genesis were not actual 24 hour days. This is possible, but once again, any common sense would tell us that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of the age of the Earth and as such didn’t realize it was inaccurate to depict human coming into being on the fourth day of the earth. Believers are grasping at straws when they say that science and religion are just the same story being told differently, the reality is that evolution directly contradicts the teachings of the Bible. This is not intended as a way of killing religion however, that is why faith is called faith. Any person is free to maintain their faith in a God above us and even that God created us on the fourth day of existence, but these people must also accept that any evidence which is going to be found in our physical realm will tell an entirely different story. Simple probability tells us that the complex and vague interpretations of the Bible which allow it to coexist with modern research, are all much too unlikely to be taken seriously.