My son and I went to see the BBC live production of Walking with Dinosaurs, which is admittedly a kids show, but Jon and I haven't lost all of our childlike wonder. It was a cool show.
Of course, while we were waiting for everything to begin we started talking about one of our pet peeves, that being the inability of many evangelical Christians to accept evolution as a true mechanism and the inability of fundamentalist Darwinians to consider the possibility that God and the Bible might have something to say about it all. So my brain was going while watching a full size T-Rex chase the announcer around the stage. (I said it was cool, didn't I). I've known that the Genesis story and the theory of evolution were not necessary exclusionary but I hadn't really put it together. At the end, it suddenly hit me.
Louis Leakey, late in his life, made one final fossil discovery in Africa and came out with a theory that caused no small controversy in scientific circles and was not widely published. Of course, since I thought his work was so awesome I always kept up with it. The theory was that man did not evolve from ape, but that ape and man evolved from a common ancestor. Now this statement put to an end the Creationist problem of being descended from apes and monkeys. I've known this for several decades.
But this is what hit me as I watched the show. The Bible says humans, as we know them, were the last step in creation and they were given dominion over the earth. We know from the fossil records that humanity is a very young species on this planet, essentially the last one to show up in the planet's history.
And if Dr. Leakey is right, and if Mr Darwin is right, the reason ape and man evolved separately was because they were in different environments, which required different attributes. If God placed man in a particular geographical location, then he created him to thrive in that environment. Apes evolved as they did because of their environment, where they were placed by a supreme intelligence.
The thing is, the Bible was never meant to be a science textbook, but just because it wasn't scientific doesn't mean it was wrong. There is always room for truth, we just have to find where the pieces fit.
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I agree with Professor Agazzi, who says: If you read Darwin's books, Darwin directly, You can see that he was never opposed to the idea of Creation. Never. He was always opposed to the idea of individual species being created by God or by Someone, Separately rather than being the result of a transformation. What happens nowadays? Unfortunately once again in the United States there is a minority of fundamentalist Evangelicals, Seeking to take the Bible word for word, as a discourse that tells us how the world was created. They call themselves creationists. Once again the term has been seized for another use. The term "creationists" does not mean in the slightest. That the book of Genesis should be taken as a true story about the Cosmos. But for them it does. They say yes, here is something that at the very least. Should be taught alongside the theory of evolution.. Once again a mistake has been made. And people say, Creationists are enemies of science and enemies of Evolution.
Regards,
Santiago Chiva
Granada, Spain
This week in USA Today was a poll on whether people believe in evolution or not. What I find very interesting is that it is almost an even split between people who do, people who dont, and people who just don't care. Seems to me that the people on the polar opposites of the debate and made the discussion so unattractive that there is little chance for substantive discussion.
We need to take out the inflammatory accusations that label people who disagree with us.
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