Is it possible for religion and evolution to coexist?

[Grumpy]

Below is an open letter which has been signed by over 7500 clergy and pastors attesting to the compatibility of scientific discoveries with the tenets of religious thought.

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Wisdom indeed!!!

Your thoughts???

Grumpy 8)

[Cathar1950]

It just goes to show you Grumpy that not all Christians are stupid or foolish.
One of the problems with reading some letters of Paul and thinking it is the "word of God" is when he says thing like the, ways of Christ are foolishness to men or something like that. I am sure some one can quote the passage and number from memory. Any way some times it seems that it gives them licence to be foolish and equate that with their religion.
Maybe Christianity seems foolish but not every foolish thing should be Christianity. I suppose that could go for anything.
It does show that some one is getting more press then they should.

[jcrawford]

Below is an open letter which has been signed by over 7500 clergy and pastors attesting to the compatibility of scientific discoveries with the tenets of religious thought.

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science

Your thoughts???

Grumpy 8)

Good Morning, Grumpy! Do any of these clergy and pastors discriminate against people with Neanderthal ancestry in their genealogies?

[McCulloch]

A form of wishful thinking and Ad Populum.

[Sandycane]

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[QED]

Ecclesiastes 11:
5God's ways are as hard to discern as the pathways of the wind, and as mysterious as a tiny baby being formed in a mother's womb.

Please remind me what the mystery is here.

Isaiah 13:

13And so the Lord says, "These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far away. And their worship of me amounts to nothing more than human laws learned by rote.[a] 14Because of this, I will do wonders among these hypocrites. I will show that human wisdom is foolish and even the most brilliant people lack understanding."

So what did he do to show this?

Jeremiah 17:
Wisdom from the LORD
5This is what the LORD says: "Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans and turn their hearts away from the LORD. 6They are like stunted shrubs in the desert, with no hope for the future. They will live in the barren wilderness, on the salty flats where no one lives.

What a childish thing to say. Might as well have said "if you don't believe what we've got to say -- you're kitten will die."

1 Corinthians 1:

The Wisdom of God
18I know very well how foolish the message of the cross sounds to those who are on the road to destruction. But we who are being saved recognize this message as the very power of God. 19As the Scriptures say,

"I will destroy human wisdom
and discard their most brilliant ideas."[a]

20So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world's brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense.

So someone actually figured that the message would sound foolish to some (or just like plain fantasy) and made some preparations in order to try and deter the inevitable skepticism. But here it says God has actually confounded human wisdom. That's an interesting claim. To what exactly does this refer? Or is it just more 'divine' rhetoric?

[Rob]

A form of wishful thinking and Ad Populum.

McCullock, isn't your knee getting sore? You provide not a shred of context for your interjection above, which leaves me in the dark as to exactly which preceding statement it is referring to, and therefore, what are you saying.

Grumpy, I believe what you are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, and I mean many, liberal Christians, as well as Buddhists, etc, that hold beliefs that can tolerate both science and religious faith to grow side by side, and they will be lead to step up to the plate in defense of science for the sake of truth when their children's education is threatened by the imposition of the pseudoscientific beliefs of Creationism.

I have been studying the Creationism-Evolution debate for a long time now, and it is already a fact that liberal religionists have stood shoulder to shoulder with scientists in the court rooms across this country arguing against creationism and for the fact of evolution.

Already, I am preparing my oldest daughter for this possible encounter with her more conservative fellows who are trying to push their religious beliefs into the class room under the name of so-called "creation science."

Neither religious nor philosophical beliefs belong in the science classroom. These would appropriately be taught in a philosophy or comparative religion class, but not in the science classroom where we expect our children to learn the methodologies of science by which we acquire knowledge about the material universe we live within, including the fact of our organic evolution.

[Jose]

Can you supply a link to where this information came from or, a list of names and church affiliations of the people who agreed to this statement?

Perhaps it might help to look at a collection of Statements from Religious Organizations. It's really not such a big deal to accept evolution as a reasonable explanation of the actual data from the actual world.

I suspect that there might be a couple of reasons that so many religious organizations and religious individuals accept evolution. The first is that they recognize the data and the implications of the data. If that's how the world is, why not acknowledge it? The second is that the occasional fundamentalist organization that does not accept evolution also tends to want to push their particular views onto everyone, and especially onto all schoolchildren. This is a bit of a violation of the Establishment Clause, and they see it as such. They want their children taught religiously-neutral science, and not someone else's religious views.

[McCulloch]

I suggested that this might be an Ad Populum argument by the fact that over 7500 clergy and pastors signed it. Would it be less true if 12 pastors signed it? Would it be more true if 30 million pastors signed it?

I suggested that it is wishful thinking to believe that there are "We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth. " For as long as we have been making religions and we have use science, there has been times where science has shown something to be untrue that religious leaders hold to be a revelation and religions have, in various ways, have been instrumental in the suppression of different paths of scientific research. It is wishful thinking to believe that these long established patterns of human behaviour will soon change.

I personally do not believe that there are two complementary forms of truth. Truth is truth.

[Sandycane]

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