Does the theory of evolution and the Bible conflict with each other?

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60
5 votes
Apr 17, 2015

No, of course not. As with all cultures and religions, people tried to show how it all began. Genesis was such an attempt. It is not science. Many Christians accept evolution based on theories presented so far. It is taught in most Christian Universities as science, and the bible is taught in theology.

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-1
main reply
1 vote,
Apr 17, 2015

If by many you mean a very small(but vocal) minority then you are correct.

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100
1 vote,
Apr 17, 2015

You have it reversed. The Catholic Church, for example, has no problems with the Theory of Evolution. But then, they don't take the bible to true word for word. Catholics are not just a small minority. Obviously, most of the Christian Universities are Jesuit or other Catholic schools, but Southern Methodist University teaches evolution. Yale University has one of the finest Divinity schools in the nation, but it is also the home of the Peabody Museum which supports evolution. There are only a few Christian sects that take the bible to be the litteral truth.

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0
0 votes,
Apr 17, 2015

I completely misread your post. For some reason I translated it to be "many Christians deny evolution". My mistake.

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100
User voted No.
2 votes
Jun 7, 2015

You also have to keep in mind the book of Genesis was written during the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. It never says that the author was told by God to write that specific version of the origin of creation so I doubt that they have the same scientific understanding we do now. Even if God showed this particular person the secrets of how the universe formed do you really think they would be able to properly describe what they saw/were told? All of this is a moot point anyway once you consider that it is the creation story for ancient Hebrew mythology. The Bible isn't a scientific textbook, it's a collection of books telling the story of the people God has worked through throughout history so it can't really held accountable for it's scientific accuracy anyway.

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100
User voted Yes.
1 vote
Sep 15, 2016

In terms of the literal accounts: Yes. The order of living things emerging in Genesis is all wrong. The advice in the Bible for one to have goats breed while staring at something that matches the color pattern (striped or streaked or spotted) that one wants directly contradicts genetics. The idea of "kinds", even though it's not at all clear that that was intended to be some kind of robust terminology, is wrong. The sheer number of species for Adam to name and Noah to save on the Ark makes both stories preposterous. And evolutionary and biological theory make clear that behemoths, leviathans and pazuzus almost undoubtedly could not have existed. Camels were not domesticated by the time of many Biblical accounts, and snakes do not eat dirt. It's not just Genesis 1 and 2 that evolution discounts, but numerous other passages throughout the Bible.

Of course, evolution is actually one of the softer rebuttals to the creation account in the Bible. Both meteorology and astronomy teach us that the rain does not come from outer space and that there is no firmament. Modern cosmology has an array of models for the universe that do not need and in fact have no room for a God.

But even if we want to be more broad, the reality is that life was one of the few areas where the theist still had an upper hand over an atheistic or secular view. God helped answer a number of questions: the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, the origin of the universe, why objects in the heavens moved, the origins of weather. We now have the way that life emerged understood to a pretty high degree of accuracy, with only some (albeit important) details about the processes and the constraining factors; we have a tremendous understanding of how the brain operates and why it's possible for it to be the source of consciousness, and why (thanks to particle physics) nothing else could be; we have increasingly good cosmological models, as noted above; our meteorology is getting increasingly precise and granular, and there is no need for the weathermen to put a footnote to the effect that Thor's anger may cause unexpected lightning bolts; and we know that there is no need for an unmoved mover. It's not a coincidence that evolution and atheism have been so associated, even though they are logically independent positions. Immanuel Kant once said that there would never be a Newton for a blade of grass, and then Darwin came along and became exactly that.

Nor does the "It wasn't meant to be literally true" dodge work. Ancient peoples really believed their creation myths. Why offer an account of creation if you're going to just admit it doesn't work? Our ancestors were curious individuals who wanted to understand the workings of the cosmos, just like us. So they looked around and found clues as to how the world worked. The crust of the earth looks like a turtle shell: heck, maybe it is a turtle! The sky looks like a dome: it must actually be that! This wasn't dumb, or superstitious (though later superstitions did evolve). And we know from the ancient Greeks that, when they thought more deeply, they started thinking about the universe being fundamentally fire, or fundamentally water, or that the universe was made of indivisible small things called "atoms", or that the sun was the size of the Peloponnese, or that the moon reflects the sun's light. What's remarkable about how smart the Greeks were in this respect is that they mostly got there with logic and a few observations: The world must be round because you can see sails on the horizon before the ship; the universe must be made of small indivisible things because it's absurd to imagine the contrary and we can cut between objects showing that they are divisible; and so forth.

It's actually an insult to the curiosity and intelligence of the Hebrews to say that Genesis 1 was metaphorical. They were working off of the best of Babylonian astronomy, and had clearly updated their beliefs from Genesis 2. The idea of sacred history as immutable and fixed isn't exactly totally modern, but it's not really that deeply rooted in ancient thought either. These were living documents of evolving tradition. They were learning and growing. But they did literally believe, at one point, that the Earth was floating in water: wouldn't you think that if the only thing you had ever seen float was in water?

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75
4 votes
Apr 17, 2015

It only conflicts with a very specific interpretation of the Bible.

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67
3 votes
Apr 17, 2015

No, I would say the Bible denies evolution. Humans deny things, nature doesn't.

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67
3 votes
Apr 17, 2015

The theory of evolution and the bible are parallel to one another. The bible as many books is open for interpretation and as the Catholic church said, there is nothing in the bible saying evolution isn't a process of god. (The Catholic church believes in evolution)

The problem is the creationist who believe the bible as literal and think the fossil record was left by Satan to confuse humans. Evolution can work with religion but it's a science not a religion. It draws its conclusion from the observable world and it is the best indicator to account to how life develops in the universe.

The theory of evolution was never meant to disprove religion in fact just like most sciences it was started to prove how rational and how mechanical the universe is but unfortunately for Darwin it just showed how chaotic and unpredictable the universe really is.

A lot of religious people don't realize that every science started 300-400 years ago were for the most parts human trying to figure and prove the existence of God by showing just how orderly our universe is but what they often found is that the universe is a chaotic and random place.

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50
2 votes
Apr 17, 2015

The only people who would think their is a conflict are on the extremes of the argument either way. The vast majority of Christians see absolutely no conflict, and in truth their is none. The only way their could possibly be a conflict is a literal reading of the bible which everyone will tell you is very inappropriate for a religious text. But lets not take my word on it...lets ask the experts:

catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution

Pope Pius XII declared that "the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—[but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36).

TL;DR: Christians don't care how your physical body was formed, and evolution is a perfectly fine way for humans to be formed. What they really care about is your soul which came from God, and science doesn't care about your soul.

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30
10 votes
Apr 17, 2015

Who voted 'no' in there? The bible says that god sent humans to earth, which were Adam and Eva, and not that they were monkeys before and evolved. So it denies the Bible.

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100
main reply
2 votes,
Apr 17, 2015

the Theory of evolution sez nothing about the existence of the Bible. However Darwin was a deeply Christian man so he believed in the existence of the Bible and that the Bible had evolved.

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0
0 votes,
Apr 17, 2015

But it denies the things that stand in the bible, indirectly.

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100
main reply
1 vote,
Apr 17, 2015

That depends on whether you consider the Bible a living text or absolute law.

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100
1 vote,
Apr 17, 2015

Or, just one of many attempts by ancient people to explain things they didn't understand.

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100
main reply
1 vote,
Apr 17, 2015

If you look at the Bible as solely a historical document, then sure, evolution and the Bible don't mix.

But it's not meant to be read that way. The point of Genesis isn't "Here's these historical facts," in the same way that the story about Mr. Rogers getting his car stolen, only to have it returned by regretful thieves, isn't a literal truth. The purpose of Genesis is to tell us truth, not facts, and they can be different things.

For example, the phrase, "Bob would give you the shirt off his back," doesn't mean Bob's going to walk around shirtless anytime someone asks for it, but it's still "true" in that it tells us the true character of Bob.

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0
User voted Yes.
0 votes,
Sep 15, 2016

That whole "It's not literal" thing doesn't just contradict those who insist otherwise but the very clear anthropology and religion work that shows that, yes, the Jews really did believe that story. Genesis 1 is not a dumb account, actually: it was based on the best of Babylonian astronomy. There was a point in time where people really did believe that there was a firmament and that the world was in water: it actually explains rains and the seeming barrier of the sky and all sorts of things. We can even see this in Josephus, whose history of the world begins with Biblical creation and who includes Hercules in his myths. While people did think of sacred and natural history as being somewhat distinct, they didn't perfectly keep them compartmentalized.

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-1
User voted Yes.
1 vote
Apr 20, 2015

The Bible is clear on the matter, God Created all things from nothing, that is what it says, and I'm no religions nut and i take great offense at being considered in league with crazy cultists because i do take the Bible literally and truly believe in God, nobody has disproven the existence of God, they just can't prove his existence and absence of proof IS NOT proof of absence, I'm not some branch davidian, suicide cult lunatic, i just have a firm belief in the Judeo-Christian Faith and i expect people to accept and respect that, and not to belittle me and/or my people and/or my Faith which is not a part of who i am, it's ALL of who i am, and to deny one part of the Bible is to deny the whole Bible! that is my belief, now I've said my peace, may He bless you with peace and prosperity and may His Holy Name be Praised Amen!

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0
User voted No.
0 votes
Jan 1, 2016

When I read Origin of the Species I quickly understood that the title was a misnomer. He should have called it Survival of the Species. Evolution is his concept of adaptation to environmental changes for the sole purpose of continuation. Unfortunately, the Luciferian crowd was quick to seize on the anti God potential of this misnomer.

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0
User voted No.
0 votes
Feb 24, 2016

Divine evolution: God didn't make man perfect on his first try. He made a functional being and then after many tweaks over a few thousand years, here we are!

The same could be said about Earth. Every star is a failed attempt at making a stable ecosystem.

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0
User voted Yes.
0 votes
Sep 15, 2016

I don't think you can believe everything in the bible and also believe in evolution. Most people take the bible with a grain of salt, though, and have found a way to believe in both.

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