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.

One side believes that life begins either at the moment of conception, or sometime shortly after that, (there are various opinions, but this particular side of the line all agree that life begins while a baby is inside the womb). Those who hold to this, believe that inside a mother is a human being who has full rights as a human. If you killed this human, it should be the exact same thing as if you had walked up to someone and fired a gun on them.

Some people have been convicted of manslaughter for harming a pregnent woman and killing her unborn child, so this viewpoint is not something that is entirely ridiculous. If, for a moment, you could imagine that some people were killing babies who had just been born, you might be able to imagine the same sort of horrified reaction that the people have who believe that unborn children are fully human.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that an unborn child is not quite a human yet, but rather something similar to cellular tissue (there are also varying opinions  on this side of the argument as well). These people see the issue as enforcing laws on a woman that could affect her entire life, just because some other group believes that cellular tissue is human.  If the government created a law that said anyone who has cancer cannot remove it, because the cancer is a living thing,  then that would be the same sort of law to these people.

The line is clearly drawn where people believe that life starts and someone becomes human. Is it at the moment of conception? (which is the view that the Catholic Church holds). If so, this would mean that certain types of birth control are committing murder anytime a woman uses it.  Others hold that a child becomes human after a certain stage of development in the womb, such as when it starts sucking its thumb or moving around. Still other people believe that a baby is not a human until it is born and takes its first breath. Anything before this is non-human, and can be destroyed with no moral bounds being broken.

There is no clear scientific data on this topic. The accounts range wildly. Viewpoints are debated constantly and with much yelling and spitting on both sides. Few topics can bring up so much emotional energy in people. Personally, I have no answers, as I have never studied up on the topic of the unborn. My point in writing about it is to define exactly what the debate is about, which many people seem to miss out on, and that is simply when life begins. The entire debate fascinates me because both sides have such powerful arguments, but all the while the simple point seems to be overlooked.  I am not sure why this is.

If it were the future, and we had the correct technology, I think that people should be sterile unless they go through some kind of process, such as getting a simple injection or taking a pill…almost like reverse birth control. This way, having a child would require a certain amount of thought. Anyone who wanted could still  have children, but no one could accidentally become pregnant; however, this is currently not the case, and figuring out whether abortion is killing a human (and thus committing murder) or rather a case of violating a persons rights  is an important topic of our time.

Maybe a certain amount of cells should be required to be qualified as a human, or perhaps the first heartbeat. If this point could be agreed upon, we might be able to arrive at a happy medium for both sides.

“To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by. If a man lives by the love of God, and obedience to God’s law, as far as he has recognized it, then whatever wrong opinions the man holds are outside of him. They are not true, and they cannot really be inside any good person. At the same time, no matter how many correct opinions another man holds, if he does not order his life by the law of God’s love, he is not a child of God. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.”

This quote sums up much of what I believe.  A person can hold many opinions about what is real in the spiritual world and what is not. Some people do not think there is a spiritual world.  My personal thoughts on the matter are that there is a God, and that humans are spiritual creatures who will live forever; however, what I think is not the most important thing. It is how  I live my life on a regular day to day basis that really matters.

If I bring up Christianity often, it is because when I was growing up, I had quite a bit of training in that particular religion, and as a result I have a fairly good grasp on contemporary Christian thinking. I am not anti-Christian; however, I disagree with much of what is currently held as Christian doctrine. I feel that there are many errors being taught as solid biblical teachings that are not really in the bible, but are rather extreme slants and interpretations.  For example: A very common and widely held Christian idea is that unless you say a certain prayer that goes something like “Dear Jesus, I accept you as my Lord and Saviour and ask that you forgive all of my sins.” then you are not “saved” and you will go to hell forever when you die.

This idea is a very strong drive for the people who hold it to do as much as possible to convince other people to accept it as true, and to say the prayer so that they won’t go to hell.

In my own studies of the bible, I have not found this idea. I think  that it comes from incomplete understanding of what Jesus taught rather than a deep grasp on biblical teachings. Specifically, there is a verse in the new testament half of the bible that says something like: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Even if you accept this verse to be 100% correct, it does not follow that people who have not accepted Christianity will be going to hell. The idea is far too problematical.  I can think of, off the top of my head, 3 different situations where it would be simply ridiculous to think that God would send people to hell simply because they did not “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior”

1. what if a child dies before it learns to speak. Will that child be doomed to hell?
2. What about all of the humans who lived before Jesus was ever born, or, lived on a continent where it was impossible to have heard about Jesus?
3. What if a person’s only information about Jesus comes from a psychopath who has a completely skewed version of Christianity and as a result, that person rejects Christianity on the grounds that it is the ravings of a lunatic and cannot be the true teachings of a loving God.

In each of these situations, it would be difficult for any thinking individual to imagine that a God who is based on love would send someone to be tormented forever simply because they were not “Saved Christians”

Yet, many many people hold to this very idea. They may come up with some clause that exampts certain instances, such as saying that children under a certain age are not responsible for themselves, or that people who were born before Jesus will be given a special chance to become Christians.
But to me, these clauses are stretches that are simply trying to enforce the basic idea that you have to hold to a certain opinion of Christianity are else you are doomed to hell.

Really, what all these clauses reveal, is the fact that it is impossible to attribute unfair practices to an all-powerful God while at the same time saying God is Love. The two ideas simply are at odds with each other. There is no stretch of belief-system that can make these two things dwell together happily.

What I have gathered from the Bible is that Jesus taught that if you live a certain way, you will come to develop a love for your fellow humans, and as a result, you will come to love God.  When this happens, it will be like being born again, because your life will take an entirely new meaning: where before you may have been a selfish, greedy person, you will now try to think of other people. Where before your main worries were to accumulate money, you now trust that God will take care of you, and that the more important thing is spending time with people.

So consider for a moment that Jesus really did teach living a certain way as a gateway to knowing God. What would that lifestyle be? Loving others as yourself, Give to the poor, Don’t commit acts of violence, Trust in God to take care of your needs. These are all very basic teachings, but imagine if people  started to live these type of things on a daily basis.

This brings up other religions. If other religions teach similar things, and Jesus taught that living like this was “following him”, then it could possibly be surmised that people who were making an effort to follow after these type of lifestyles might actually be living like God wanted them to be. Still further, God could be just as pleased with a Muslim or Buddhist who was living a certain way as a Christian who was trying to live a good life, or even an atheist who rejected the idea of God complelety, but still held to core beliefs that his own appetite was less important than other people not going hungry.

Would being a Christian suddenly be invalidated if all this were true? I do not think so. Spiritual beliefs are what guide us through our everyday lives; but if these same beliefs become a tyrannical idea that rejects everything else, then it may be time for a re-evaluation.  Christianity is not the only religion prone to this sort of fault. For almost every opinion out there, there is always some person who starts thinking that everyone else needs to be converted, and that they hold the key to ultimate truth. Fortunately, we are not subject to these tyrants in our inner-selves.

“.. we are in no way bound to accept any explanation of God’s ways and God’s doings, if the explanation does not commend itself to our conscience.”

-George Macdonald

At any rate, it was a nice change to read Jon’s article and get a different slant from a Christian’s perspective on this issue. The comments on his post had some interesting perspectives as well. I really liked the idea someone mentioned  about the state only handling civil unions, instead of making laws about marriage. That way, marriage would belong to each church or group of scientists or whatever organization  you belong to. If you marry under a certain church, then your marriage is based on that churches concept of what a marriage is.

This idea to me seems the most fair and equitable to everyone. Each group can formulate their own beliefs on marriage, yet at the same time there is a general consensus that people living together have certain rights.
It’s a mystery to me why this simple solution is not immediately adopted by all states, as it has such a simplistic yet powerful ring of fairness to it.