- Location
- Retired in Minneapolis
I've had an idea that blends evolution and creationism for me. Let me see if I can lay it out for discussion.
Going back in time to the big bang I face the challenge of thinking is this chance or planned. If it's chance then everything coming from the event is chance. If it's planned then everything coming from the event is controlled.
Fast forward to homo sapiens. Chance...could be. If this was a planned event in a series of experiments, it would work.
I don't know the Bible well enough to converse in scripture. The line that I've always heard is that man is created in God's image. The phrase 'God's image' is what I think of when we think of homo sapians. All the rest of the itterations were all building blocks in creating 'God's image'. Think of the waste basket of crumpled papers next to a writer's desk or the the scrap bin outside the door of Edison's lightbulb experiments:
When Thomas Edison was interviewed by a young reporter who boldly asked Mr. Edison if he felt like a failure and if he thought he should just give up by now. Perplexed, Edison replied, "Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp."
If Edison is a metaphoric god of the lightbulb then how many ways did God try to get things right when He made homo sapiens.
Another way that I think of 'God's image' is to consider Earth as Gaia, one organism. This actually works better for me. Is this image the one that God wanted to create?
Yesterday I went for a hike to a site where a flood cut through millions of years of rock. It was amazing to take three hours and walk back millions of years. Along the way we saw the remains of algae blogs, single cell creatures that were the size of oatmeal, bivalves, coiled shells, 'belly prints' of a lobster-like critter that would have been about three feet long and foot prints of large dinosaurs. What an amazing day!
What do you make of the Creation Museum? They have humans of some species mixed in with dinosaurs in the displays. That is so wrong...millions of years separated them. Mixing things up that bad removes any credibility and teaches wrong things to people, not just children.
I've never read Darwin's books but I've read a bit of biographical info on him. He was a religious man and didn't feel that he was being sacriligous in the least. His ideas didn't just spring into his head. He built his ideas on others that came before, including his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote this in about 1800:
Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!
I certainly don't mean this to be a challenge. I like to understand how people can balance creationism with evolution.
Going back in time to the big bang I face the challenge of thinking is this chance or planned. If it's chance then everything coming from the event is chance. If it's planned then everything coming from the event is controlled.
Fast forward to homo sapiens. Chance...could be. If this was a planned event in a series of experiments, it would work.
I don't know the Bible well enough to converse in scripture. The line that I've always heard is that man is created in God's image. The phrase 'God's image' is what I think of when we think of homo sapians. All the rest of the itterations were all building blocks in creating 'God's image'. Think of the waste basket of crumpled papers next to a writer's desk or the the scrap bin outside the door of Edison's lightbulb experiments:
When Thomas Edison was interviewed by a young reporter who boldly asked Mr. Edison if he felt like a failure and if he thought he should just give up by now. Perplexed, Edison replied, "Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp."
If Edison is a metaphoric god of the lightbulb then how many ways did God try to get things right when He made homo sapiens.
Another way that I think of 'God's image' is to consider Earth as Gaia, one organism. This actually works better for me. Is this image the one that God wanted to create?
Yesterday I went for a hike to a site where a flood cut through millions of years of rock. It was amazing to take three hours and walk back millions of years. Along the way we saw the remains of algae blogs, single cell creatures that were the size of oatmeal, bivalves, coiled shells, 'belly prints' of a lobster-like critter that would have been about three feet long and foot prints of large dinosaurs. What an amazing day!
What do you make of the Creation Museum? They have humans of some species mixed in with dinosaurs in the displays. That is so wrong...millions of years separated them. Mixing things up that bad removes any credibility and teaches wrong things to people, not just children.
I've never read Darwin's books but I've read a bit of biographical info on him. He was a religious man and didn't feel that he was being sacriligous in the least. His ideas didn't just spring into his head. He built his ideas on others that came before, including his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote this in about 1800:
Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!
I certainly don't mean this to be a challenge. I like to understand how people can balance creationism with evolution.
I went to Catholic school until 4th grade when we moved. The school that I went to had nuns and 'civilian' teachers. We'd alternate every year. In second grade we started studying the Bible. The nun told us that the 'days' in the Bible were part of the story. They weren't meant to be 24 hours or a week. Same with people's ages. It was a story and we were to learn the message. That fit for me then and it fits now. I guess it might have been my first exposure to allegory and metaphor. She even did a good job of explaining "Though shall not kill' given war and police. We were too young to talk about the death penalty. I can't remember how she dealt with 'Thou shall not commit adultery.' My folks told me that it meant acting like an adult when you were too young...I took that to mean not to get too big for my britches...or, as John Mellencamp said, 'Hold on to sixteen for as long as you can. Changes come 'round too soon make you woman and man.'
