Brace!........the ramble is in full flow

Yo yo yo...
Right, sophomore blog post...now that I've come to the realisation that people are actually going to READ this, part of me comes with a tendency to go off on one and ramble and try and make unfunny jokes and vaguely witty comments.
I shall do my best to avoid that and focus on my audience of one.

So, revision is getting off the ground at 'the pace of an arthritic slug', but is starting all the same and days are longer and less wasteful. Result!

A great time at Borderlands regional celebration this evening....good talk....love and the church being the hope of the world, some ace stuff that has been buzzing excitedly about the grey matter about a stones and dwellings and other such things....but that's for another time!

I said last time that I may delve into the Creationism/Evolution thing.
So, I realise that I've come a way down this track to be able to reach a certain intellectual point, but I think all that knowledge has served to augment what can be reached with or without knowing the structures of amino acids and DNA and genetics etc.
Simply put, I don't think that it's academic suicide to say that it doesn't matter as much as some people are making it out to.

With a little help from Conor Cunningham's ideas put forward in 'Did Darwin kill God?', I'll try and explain why.

As I see it, it's only the extremists on both sides that have created and subsequently aggravated this argument and apparent gulf between science and God.
The extremists on one side are the fundamental Christians who, perhaps misguidedly, interpret everything the bible says to not only be truth, but exact, literal fact from cover to cover....hence the argument for creationism and the proposition that the universe is, give or take, 6000 years old.
The extremists for 'Science' are the ones that not only say that the world is a lot older than this and that life developed naturally, but take Darwinism and apply it to everything, ie saying that all ideas and impulses that we experience are like the genes by which evolution is proposed to have worked- by survival of the fittest- as each gene 'selfishly' tries to survive, so the ideas and impulses (or 'memes') survive selfishly too.
This suggests that everything that we know and are could be truth or fiction, as long as the meme can perpetuate itself, meaning that everything is subjective, rendering everything (including religion and its ideas about our existence) a fabrication, necessitating atheism.

They appear at complete loggerheads, and at face-value the battle between them seems valid.

We must notice the flaws in both of these approaches.

Firstly, these Christians. Until the time of philosophers and apologists like William Paley in the 1700s, there was no mainstream concept of a literal understanding of Genesis. The church fathers acknowledged God as the creator, but not the exact mechanism by which He did it. They found it more important in the why and who, not how.
Indeed, Augustine warned of a literal understanding of Genesis.
This way of thinking also reveals a strange method of reading the Bible.
If we assume that Genesis 1 is literally true, whether days as our days, or days as a long period of time, it is clear that
'the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind' before the man was created.

But in Genesis 2, 'every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew', the man was created from dust- before the plants!
If we are taking Genesis as a pure history book, then there is a contradiction in the first two chapters, and it is a logical conclusion to throw it out as worthless, as many do, sadly.
In any case, I find it strange that people still attempt to reconcile (by ignoring) the contradiction and piece together the exact timing and age of the earth using nothing but the Bible.
But as I read the Bible as a whole, I find there are often seeming contradictions that highlight something that should be considered more deeply, and beyond their face value is a wealth of truth and I think the same applies here.
Dig deeper....I don't think we have to believe that Adam shared the garden of Eden with T-Rex.

Secondly, the ultra-Darwinists...taking the evolution thing to maxed out levels and saying that it ultimately leads to atheism. Using the memes philosophy, they say that there is no absolute truth, and the ideas in religion about God etc are just stories being perpetuated by people passing them on. But they shoot themselves in the foot by saying that the Memes philosophy is the truth. The memes thing could also be just be a lie.....on its own definition, it's no more likely to be true, real or good than religion or existence itself.
I'm an 18 year old trying to pass the first year of a science degree, I'm not a philosopher, but even I can see that that's ridiculous, and as a theory, it self-negates.

So, we end up at a point where evolution as a process does not take away from biblical truth, but at the same time, science is to do with facts in the known realm. It isn't its place to make a claim on any other domain.(And clearly, when it attempts to branch out into another area by itself, namely philosophy, its ideas are self-negating and go against its own self-governing philosophy of objectivity)
I don't think it's an irrational or heretical step to suggest that God, in His wisdom, could use evolution as His mechanism of creation? The Bible wants to show us that the why- the getting to the point of man being able to have relationship with Him (the who) is more important than the how. I don't think it takes away from our intricacy or the intimacy He is desiring.
Maybe these two things that seem to be at war are two ways of saying the same thing?

Also, it's also important to remember that science grows. Evolution, of course, is a theory. Theories can be disproved, but in this case, I think it is more likely that it will be shown that it isn't the be all and end all.
When Newton had his apple moment, within his lifetime they thought they'd more or less got physics pinned down. Then Einstein and relativity happened and now the physicists are looking for a theory that unifies both. The picture is much bigger than ever seemed possible.
The same may be true of evolution. I'm not trying to make excuses for it, or plugging the gaps with my God-thing, it just seems more scientific to not pin everything on one theory and not give it room to be bigger. Because there are some things that seem irreducibly complex that evolution as we know it just can't seem to account for.
Whether science does or doesn't find a natural mechanism that explains the development of some crazy biochemical systems that I shan't bore you with, I'll highlight again, I'm not using God as a gap-filler.
I believe He is running the whole show, and regardless of where science ends up, it's not its place to attempt to refute that He's not.

In conclusion, I think it's possible to read the Bible, believe it to be God-breathed truth, and be in relationship with Him AND be comfortable in lectures about evolution, because the former is far more important, the second is neither as clashing nor important as it seems.

In my mind, there is no doubt that He is powerful enough to have created the universe as literally described in either of those chapters in Genesis. I just don't think it's imperative to believe that He did. I think that the idea that my faith and the things I learn in my lectures oppose each other is a misconception.

The most critical thing is that here and now we need Him, no matter how we got here.
There has been too much unnecessary fighting over this.
And whilst some on both sides of the fence may disagree, I would much rather have good discussion about how these arguments are poorly constructed than attempts to provoke and fight because of a commitment to one of the 'camps'.

I hope that people won't take this post to be an attempt at preachiness, because it's not meant to be. It's just an explanation of how I got to where I am on this thing that seems to be bothering a lot of people lately. I'd hope that maybe someone will read this, see as I did that it's not one or the other, and that that would promote more thinking.


Just keep remembering the bigger picture and live deeply.

Drawing it all together, I find that the bigger picture itself is a beautiful paradox...zooming our perspective out, apparent complexities lead back to simple truth and revelations of the bigger picture, both in this case, and life in general.
Stereophonics said that 'you gotta go there to come back'
Perhaps they weren't far off.


Finally, apologies that I didn't get onto the whole 'what love looks like' thing. (that will be a short, easy post, eh?)
I've been reading some top stuff in Timothy too that I wanted to get to, but am shattered now, we'll get to that next time.

Bedtime.
Peace out and big love, peoples.