How can a person have faith in god but no faith in evolution?
It boggles my mind that an otherwise fairly intelligent person can have no faith in a well studied and proven scientific theory, i.e. evolution, but then have faith in a supernatual being that controls all things in the universe, sun, earth, life, death, with his mind. How can this happen? Shouldn't people who live their lives solely on the basis of faith, allow some of that faith to be carried over to well respected scientific beliefs?
Isn't it hypocritical for people of faith who deny evolution to completely change their minds about the authenticity of scientific facts when it comes to medical science? "Sure I'll take this medicine that was provided by scientific research because it will save my life, but I reject other scientific research when it is inconvenient to my religion!"
Anonymous2006-12-04T07:28:03Z
Favorite Answer
What's hypocritical is that the people denying science are using a computer to do so.:-)
I'm sure they also avail themselves of antibiotics which are created based upon the WORKING evolutionary model. It's the very backbone of modern biomedicine.
Evolution is also where the evidence is. Creationism is in direct contradiction to the evidence.
In other words, it takes some really narrow minded, willfully ignorant people to deny evolution.
For the answer above me about the body being so complex..agreed it is but very explainable. Look at anything...starts out simple and then grows more complex and sophisticated. Why could God not have made life and used evolution as it's tool to make it grow and adapt to the world? I have no idea why people are so petrified that God might not have snapped fingers and <poof> present day humans were there
Anyway believe or not but until someone can give me a real, scientific, reasonable explination with evidence to support it I will take Evolution as it is the best idea we have right now
Irish Lass:: that is because you are confusing the layman's term thoery with the scientific term Theory..they are different and if talking about Theory of Evolution then it is using the scientific useage.
I assume you are talking of the modern theory of evolution (Modern evolutionary synthesis). The problem with this is that it really works well as a theory, but it falls short of answering the question "what is the purpose of life?"
That is answered by faith. Faith in God transcends the theory of evolution. Evolution can't and won't explain everything that faith can. Evolution is based on scientific method. Faith is based on knowing what is supernatural, which is beyond what science can grasp.
Some people care to know where they go when they die, either heaven or hell. Some don't care because science does not prove that you go somewhere because it cannot detect that there is something in man that lives on (soul/spirit).
I don't have faith in evolution. Instead, I accept evolution as the most satisfying explanation for the available facts in paleontology, comparative DNA, and comparative mtDNA. There is such overwhelming evidence for exactly what Darwin describes - life changing over time to adapt through selection - that faith never comes into it. Only fact does.
It seems absurd that anyone even clings to the idea of God as an incompetent architect, somehow incapable of any form of creation other than "special creation" of each and every kind of creature, one by one. God can create however he likes, and none of us can stop him. If the evidence shows it happened through evolution, then we have to have the humility to accept that our patrimony may include distant monkey-like ancestors. Our inability to accept that does not come from faith, which has never required belief in one by one creation of species; it comes from pride - who wants to picture a cousin in a zoo flinging feces?
A note about the cambrian:
First of all it is a lie to say there are no transitional forms into the Cambrian period. First of all, the Cambrian period illustrates only the rise of skeletal life - creatures with hard parts. Life had been in existence for billions of years. Even multi-cellular life was well established by this time. The transformation at this demarcation point is an adaptation that allowed creatures to thrive in a way they hadn't before. More importantly, it allowed them to fossilize in a way they hadn't before. Soft tissues rarely fossilize.
Nonetheless - make no mistake - there are transitional fossils to this time period. The Ediacaran fauna of the late precambrian era contains a number of soft bodied creatures, some related, some not to the Cambrian forms.
What is more important, while there is an abundance of life emerging in Cambrian fossils, none of it is modern life, other than jellyfish and sponges. The forms you see are much, much more primitive than modern forms - with the arthropods, for instance, you see only the long-extinct trilobyte and sea scorpions (which had not yet evolved to going on land.) Lobsters and crabs are nowhere to be found.
The cephalopods - the octopuses and squids - you don't find them. It will take to the Ordovician for anything like what we know today to exist, and even then, these octopus like creatures have a long conical shell.
I wish people would learn the difference between the fact of biological evolution and the theory of the mechanisms involved-the word theory is a straw for the creationists to clutch at. They latch onto it and think that theory means evolution is somehow in question when in fact there is no doubt whatsoever that evolutionary change in species occurs. Only how and why it occurs are subject to any conjecture and even then there is no competing theory to Darwin's. You just have to look at some of the answers above to realise you're dealing with people that have total ignorance of what biological evolution even entails.