If there has ever been a debate that is more useless and pointless as the “Evolution versus Creationism” debate, I have never heard of it, yet many people feel very strongly about both sides and consider this to be a question of the highest priority.
C.S Lewis, when writing about this topic, noted that “..You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like , ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 am on January 15th and saw so and so’ or ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such and such a temperature and it did so and so.’ Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a person is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science-and a very useful and necessary job it is too. “
What this amounts to is that the claims of Evolutionsts and Creationists both tend to rely on a lot of theories, however scientific they try to make them sound. We simply do not have the means to time travel and observe what really happened during the formation of the world. Nor can we replicate something that (theoretically) occures over thousands or millions of years, nor do we have the power to create life. There can only be speculation on these topics.
I am not sure how evolution turned into something that people felt necessary to teach at schools. Would a person studying science not be a good scientist if they had never heard about evolution? How can holding to a theory about how the earth and life formed cause someone to have good scientific practices? Why is it so incredibly important that evolution be in all school books, while creationism is removed? The very argument that the theory of Creationism not be in school books would, by logical sequence, also dictate that evolution not be included either. It also seems to me that teaching evolution as a fact (which appears to be the goal) would promote bad scientific methods.
I know that many people will rail at this and say that evolution is widely accepted by all “vaild scientific organizations.” The problem with this line of argument is what these people mean by “valid” is people who believe that evolution is fact, or at least the best theory, so basically what they are saying is that “all scientific organizations who accept evolution are the ones who believe evolution is the best scientific theory.” , or, more simply put “we agree with the people who agree with us.”
As far as Creationism goes, I am not sure it matters one way or another to spiritual well-being. A person can accept either theory without offending anything spiritual. It may be at the end of times one finds out that God used a little evolution in the creation process. If a person believes in God, then any sort of evolution will have only happened with Gods full knowledge and interaction, or not have happend. God will still be the same God. A persons spiritual beliefs would be very weak beliefs if they hinged on a particular guess at how things looked while life was forming.
At the end of the day, the real question about this would be: Is this really something that needs to be anything more than a friendly discussion? If not, then why is so much time and energy being put into promoting guesses and speculations that simply cannot be validated by any means available to us?
My particular request for people who comment on this is please do not make statements that are presenting theories as some kind of irrefutable fact. In this case I think the Evolutionists are worse than the Creationists. I am constantly getting statements like this: “Love, loyalty, and altruism within one’s community evolved as adaptive behaviours.” …ummm so because this person believes in evolution they can now make statements about how love came to being. I even hate worse these same people who begin their sentences with “1 million years ago…” as if this person knew what was happening 1 million years ago.
My attitude would be much different if this debate were about something that we might actually be able to validate. Like “Is there life on Mars.” We will probably be able to find this out sooner than not, of we dont destroy ourselves first, but unless Time Travel becomes a reality, we will not in this life be able to know what things looked like 1 million years ago…or 10,000 years ago for that matter. It is, and will remain, a mystery.
s Meister
11 months ago
Are you out of your mind? Evolution has been accepted for many years now as more than just a theory. Through the use of carbon-dating scientists are able to determine the exact date of fossils and determine their place on the evolutionary chain.
You clearly need to study up more on this topic before writing about it.
endle
11 months ago
yes yes, I have been around and around with others about these topics; however, no one has been able to produce a reasonable explanation as to how people are coming up with these “facts” when none of them can be proven.
They are all based on a series of guess-work, sometimes in circles of reasons such as “carbon dating is accurate because we know that life evolved over millions of years so therefore we are able to see that carbon dating is giving us millions of years-old readings”
If evolution is not a correct guess, then the entire model falls apart and all dates arrived at by this method would be totally inaccurate.
nate
11 months ago
And yet again you speak daring truth I’ve heard few admit. In many Christian circles it is held that creationism is the view of the enlightened and that there’s a conspiracy against them or at least that they are misunderstood. Outside of those circles many scorn the idea of creationism completely, not even giving it any consideration at all. I find myself more and more disgusted with the debate in general and I have to wonder if the world would be a better place if people started enjoying the world around them rather than getting riled up about how it came into existence.