I believe in God because of Evolution.
I can be a joyful person of faith only because of Charles Darwin and his scientific theory.
Creationism in any of its guises is not only bad science, but it is even more, dismally bad theology - strange and spooky superstition. Let me explain.
I can be a joyful person of faith only because of Charles Darwin and his scientific theory.
Creationism in any of its guises is not only bad science, but it is even more, dismally bad theology - strange and spooky superstition. Let me explain.
These rocks are fossilised corals called Zaphrentis (scientifically Homalophyllum ungula). I picked up these rocks from the ground at the Louisville Theological Seminary in Spring 2000 when I lived and worked there for the PCUSA Denominational Headquarters. Devonian Limestone is full of these common corals and contains many more spectacular fossils.
Now, Creationists claim (in one way or another) that God created all the sedimentary rocks by inserting into them these fossils and other ossified remains, with a clear intention to form an illusion of evolution. In order to preserve their literalistic understanding of the Bible these fundamentalists unwittingly created and started to worship a divine monster known in theology and philosophy as Deus Deceptor - The God Deceiver. According creationists, God created and maintains a complex illusion only to deceive curious humans and to test the blind faith of fundamentalist followers. I can hardly imagine a theology which could be more wrong. I do not believe and do not want to believe in the Evil Demon (Which is an alternative name for Deus Deceptor).
In our series of Sundays dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi's Seven Blunders of the World, this time we concentrate on Education without Character. Come this Sunday to embrace Education WITH Character, come to celebrate Evolution, come to celebrate a happy and curious faith, come to worship a God who is not a malevolent, insecure, capricious deceiver, but a loving, caring, mature parent, who desires to be our partner on the path of liberty.
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And for those who read this far:
The problem of creationism does not consist only in fossil records. Fundamentalist creationism has a similar problem with paleo-magnetic geological records which are important for understanding the continental drift and plate tectonics. Rocks in different parts of the world would have to be created with intentionally shifted magnetic polarization to give the illusion of moving continents.
In a similar way all radioactive isotope decay datings of rocks would have to be intentionally staged but also fiendishly synchronised and matched in their deception - different isotopes would have to be intentionally and deceptively mixed and titrated in different rock formations to create an illusion of geological ages.
Astrophysics would create even bigger problems - beams of light (streams of photons) would have to be created as already in flight to compensate for more than 13 billion light years of flight, not to mention deceptively mimicking gravitational lenses etc.
It would be almost impossible to match the fundamentalist’s five thousand-year-old universe with the observed physical world even for an omnipotent and omniscient deity. In the end it would be easier to do away with all the material world as one great illusion created by a deceptive deity and declare it just a feverish illusion.
And as mentioned earlier, Deus Deceptor - the God Deceiver is a known philosophical entity. The best known is probably the famous Cartesian thought experiment which allowed René Descartes to arrive at even more famous “Cogito ergo Sum” (I think therefore I exist) and thus overcome radical doubt and establish Cartesian realism.
Interestingly, uptight and dim-witted by their religious zelotry Dutch Calvinists of the early XVII century did not recognise Rene Descartes’ line of logical argument as a thought experiment and accused him of blasphemy for venerating the Evil Demon. (It would be like accusing Erwin Schrödinger for killing cats!)
Their modern heirs, similarly vicious and uptight fundamentalists, switched sides. Now they themselves assume and worship Deus Deceptor to preserve any semblance of infallibility of their King James Bibles. What an amusing and fair historical irony!
It would be almost impossible to match the fundamentalist’s five thousand-year-old universe with the observed physical world even for an omnipotent and omniscient deity. In the end it would be easier to do away with all the material world as one great illusion created by a deceptive deity and declare it just a feverish illusion.
And as mentioned earlier, Deus Deceptor - the God Deceiver is a known philosophical entity. The best known is probably the famous Cartesian thought experiment which allowed René Descartes to arrive at even more famous “Cogito ergo Sum” (I think therefore I exist) and thus overcome radical doubt and establish Cartesian realism.
Interestingly, uptight and dim-witted by their religious zelotry Dutch Calvinists of the early XVII century did not recognise Rene Descartes’ line of logical argument as a thought experiment and accused him of blasphemy for venerating the Evil Demon. (It would be like accusing Erwin Schrödinger for killing cats!)
Their modern heirs, similarly vicious and uptight fundamentalists, switched sides. Now they themselves assume and worship Deus Deceptor to preserve any semblance of infallibility of their King James Bibles. What an amusing and fair historical irony!
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