Ain\'t nature wonderful (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, September 16, 2010, 09:24 (5182 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

BALANCE_MAINTAINED: By Creationist, I mean that the Earth, Life, the Universe and everything was created by a UI. And, for what it's worth, you ought to reread Genesis. It NEVER, and I can't make that any clearer, NEVER says that he created each species individually. It says that God created genres of species, but it doesn't even speculate on the method he used to do so.-B_M: The theory of evolution is actually congruent with the accounting given in Genesis provided one does not stick to a literal 24-hour day and other Literalist non-sense.-This discussion began when I thanked David for the fascinating examples of "wonderful nature", and applauded his referring to the incompleteness of Darwin's theory rather than dismissing it outright as the Creationists do. Since you then said that you yourself were a Creationist, I had to define what I meant. I'd have done better not to mention them at all! According to the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, the source of Creationism is "the biblical book of Genesis, according to which the different species of living things were separately created by God." Well, those are the Creationists I was referring to. If they have misinterpreted the Bible, perhaps that is their fault, or perhaps it's the fault of the translators, or perhaps it's the fault of Moses, who didn't make himself clear. -I only know one such literal believer personally, and he assures me that God created all species separately about 10,000 years ago. While I'm on your side, I would never use a word like "nonsense" in my discussions with him. If Genesis is to be taken seriously, then dismissing interpretations that are different from one's own is surely no better than an atheist's dismissal of the whole shebang as nonsense. The King James translation uses "after his kind", while my 1981 version says "according to its kind" (as in "God proceeded to make the wild beast of the earth according to its kind and the domestic animal according to its kind"). I can quite see why exegetes would interpret this as "species", and it would be interesting to know how Moses' original word distinguished between "species" and what you call "genres of species". But we needn't argue about it since you are clearly against a literal interpretation anyway, and therefore presumably in favour of the evolutionary explanation of different species being descended from earlier forms. As I hope I made clear, I also see no conflict between the theory itself and belief in a UI that created all the mechanisms. The theory does not deal with how these mechanisms arose in the first place, and I get just as irritated as you when famous scientists try to make out that evolution and religion are incompatible.