A Few Thoughts on Evolution

Last month, in reply to the controversy raised by Selman et al. v. Cobb County School District et al. the case in which a US District Judge declared that evolution stickers placed in textbooks by a public school board are unconstitutional, Russell took issue with the anti-evolutionist position advanced by the school board in the case.

But what if they are people of faith who make room for the possibility of a universe that is several billion years old, make room for the possibility of a planet nearly as old, but who deny the very specific suggestion that human beings evolved from other species of animals? What then?

Then, what they are doing, quite simply, is putting limits on God. That's the irony of all of this for me. They're saying that God is incapable of fashioning a being "in his own image" through anything but the use of rabbit-from-a-hat magic.

...In short, this topic manages to anger me both as a scientist and as a person of faith.

I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that the claim here is that God couldn't have created man through evolution--or, for that matter, that He couldn't have created the earth in two days, or ten days, had He chosen. The claim seems simply to be that He didn't. Anti-evolutionists seem to be taking issue not with God's power, but with the interpretation of the Bible that says that He used that power to cause evolution.

This calls to mind a broader question. Is not the basis (or at least a significant part of the basis) for the belief that Russell professes, that God has no limits, that the Bible says so? Is that not, indeed, the principal basis for believing in God as a being with the properties that Christians attribute to Him? The Bible also says that God created the earth and everything on it inside of a week. Yet Russell appear to allows for the possibility that this is either incorrect or is figurative in some way.

But if one grants that parts of the Bible are not literally true, could not the statement that God is all-powerful be similarly figurative? Or the very existence of God as a being, instead of a metaphor? Russell appears to take one of these three premises in stride, while rejecting at least one of the other two so vigorously that, as he says, it angers him as a person of faith. How are these three propositions different, except that one might be comfortable in believing one, yet not the others? And should the anti-evolutionists be similarly angry about, for example, a person of faith who makes room for the possibility of an all powerful God, yet denies that God has the power to, for some unfathomable reason, make the universe appear as if it were several billion years old, when in fact, it was created just as Genesis claims, some 5,000 years ago?

Comments

[JMOORE]

Hey guys. Your links to me use jurispundit.blogspot.com however I have moved to www.jurispundit.com The problem is that I have a redirection code on the blogspot site and readers tend to get confused.

Thanks,
J