Do God and evolution agree?

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I can’t see where the blind watchmaker learned to put what part where. If evolution solved engineering problems then it would have to solve every problem step by step while providing a food supply to everyone. Regarding the female pelvis, women get brought down to X-Ray to see if a normal birth is possible or a C-section needs to be performed. I study design and engineering, along with human anatomy. Form and function need to be integrated every step of the way. When designing things, certain rules apply. One can’t just throw paint against the canvas and get something worthwhile.

Biological engineering is just a mechanistic worldview. It tells people we are just animals, nothing exceptional and eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die. That approach leaves out critical information about human beings.
 
The Catholic response to that would be that because of the fall, we live in a fallen world.

Personally, I see intelligent design in the bigger things, such as the Big Bang-how did nothing become something? And what caused it to become something? I also see evidence in miracles such as the Tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents
 
edwest said:
There is no evidence that primitive microbes exist on earth-like worlds. Perhaps something will be found on Mars.
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Off topic, but…

Some scientists say asteroid impact events can, in a manner of speaking, splash material from one planet to another within the solar system. Thus it would not be surprising to find bacteria or other microbes on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system.
 
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Yes, I’ve read that but the question becomes, How did that material come to be?
 
edwest said:
I can’t see where the blind watchmaker learned to put what part where. If evolution solved engineering problems then it would have to solve every problem step by step while providing a food supply to everyone. Regarding the female pelvis, women get brought down to X-Ray to see if a normal birth is possible or a C-section needs to be performed. I study design and engineering, along with human anatomy. Form and function need to be integrated every step of the way. When designing things, certain rules apply. One can’t just throw paint against the canvas and get something worthwhile.
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I’m not sure what the reference to x-rays is supposed to mean. That medical didn’t exist before the 20th century. Before then, the methods to determine risks of pregnancy were far less exact, and the tools to deal with difficult pregnancies were far more crude. The fact is that the female pelvis is a compromise between two functions; bipedalism and live birth. A wide enough pelvis for the gestation period of human fetuses to extend to something approaching most other mammals would make bipedalism in females much more difficult, perhaps more like the semi-bipedalism found in other great apes. Our big brains simply mean we must be born prematurely as compared to other mammals. There are certainly more elegant solutions, but evolution only works with the raw materials that are already there. Novelty is illusion of time.
Biological engineering is just a mechanistic worldview. It tells people we are just animals, nothing exceptional and eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die. That approach leaves out critical information about human beings.
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Evolution doesn’t attempt to put a value on human life, or to express anything other than how humans (and all other organisms) came to be the way they were. Such questions are theological and philosophical.
 
edwest said:
Yes, I’ve read that but the question becomes, How did that material come to be?
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That’s a cosmological question, not a biological one. Evolution only requires that the raw materials be there. It makes no more attempt to explain how matter and energy came into existence than does theories of planet formation.
 
niceatheist said:
Evolution only requires that the raw materials be there.
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Does it? I think you’re conflating evolution with abiogenesis. The theories of abiogenesis only require that there are raw materials, an environment that’s not totally hostile to the development of life, and lots of time to wait for it to happen.

Evolution, on the other hand, speaks to what happens once living organisms have come into existence. 😉
 
God and evolution do not agree.

Evolution says there is NO GOD and the universe came into being by a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and over time things evolved through time over millions of years and humans are descendants of an ape like creature.

God’s Word says the earth was created in six days (Genesis chapter 1) and that man was created in the image of God.

God created man in His own image in the image of God He created him male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:27
 
thebible said:
God and evolution do not agree.

Evolution says there is NO GOD
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Not true. Some scientists overreach in this area and use science to justify their beliefs. Evolution in itself says nothing about God.
? Not sure where you get this idea.
and the universe came into being by a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and over time things evolved through time over millions of years and humans are descendants of an ape like creature.
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LOTS to chew on there scientifically, but yea, this is generally accepted science, and the Church embraces scientific discovery.
God’s Word says the earth was created in six days (Genesis chapter 1)
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But not 6 24 hours days as we understand them. Genesis was not intended even by the original author in this way.
and that man was created in the image of God.
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Very true, and that’s a theological statement, not a scientific one. We need to know the difference.
God created man in His own image in the image of God He created him male and female He created them.
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Yes. And here’s the problem when you conflate the bible with a science textbook: you make it hard to those who are vulnerable to embrace these truths, and you cause them to pull back from the bible and from faith. You cause them to stumble.
 
Nonsense. X-rays were discovered and then used during World War II. Man’s true identity needs to be established or man has no value outside of being alive. And that value is being violated.
 
You can of course cite references in peer reviewed and primary literature where it is stated there is no God.
 
Or check with Richard Dawkins who was read a portion of Genesis and denied its contents as being what actually happened.
 
We can see this in current biology textbooks:

“[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.”
(Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)

“Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.”
(Stephen J Gould quoted in Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (5th ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pg 15; (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 16.)

“By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”
(Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)

“Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.”
(Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed… D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)

“Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any goals.’ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”
(Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)

“The ‘blind’ watchmaker is natural selection. Natural selection is totally blind to the future. “Humans are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and brains “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the apparent design of life.”
(Richard Dawkins quoted in Biology by Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reese. & Lawrence G. Mitchell (5th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pgs. 412-413.)
 
“Of course, no species has 'chosen’ a strategy. Rather, its ancestors ‘little by little, generation after generation’ merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. “[J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth.
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)

“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “The real difficulty in accepting Darwins theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.”
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)
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Dawkins is not speaking as a scientist and has said numerous times that evolution does not and cannot disprove the existence of God.
 
Perhaps you should read The God Delusion by Dawkins. From the Amazon description:

A preeminent scientist – and the world’s most prominent atheist – asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
 
I have little interest in Dawkins’ writings on the matter. I read the selfish gene many years ago, found some parts interesting , some parts not. But even there Dawkins made it clear science cannot disprove the existence of God.
 
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