Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Three Mistakes (1 of 3)

1. It's only about the length of time

Trivializing the conflict between evolution and creation, many people (especially christians) confuse this as a matter of interpretation of the word 'day' in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. If "days" are to be treated in a poetic sense, then evolution might be the God's chosen mechanism of creation. This makes a person to be an evolutionist and at the same time creationist. No problem with that!

But not exactly! This line of thinking can be viewed as a misunderstanding of the word evolution. If it meant as a gradual God-chosen, God-guided process of creating, then there could be no problem. But evolution means otherwise in the context of modern science. It is insistent that evolution is mindless and unguided, positing that our existence is by mere chance and a stroke of luck contrary to an intelligently planned creation.

George Gaylord Simpson stated clearly that "[m]an is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." A similar statement was made through a Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) as exactly follows: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments." Here, NABT is positioning itself on a worldview that explicitly rules out the existence of God or His role in the creation far beyond the scope of the science itself.

At first, in their meeting in Minneapolis in October 1998, the body (NABT) voted against the revision of their statement. But three days later, a revision was made reversing their decision and agreed to remove the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal".

Certainly, evolution-creation is not only about the length of time.

Johnson, Phillip E. 1997. Defeating darwinism by opening minds. Illinois: InterVarsity Press.

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