An interesting chart from The Economist showing, by country, the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory. I wonder what the numbers would look like if those yellow bars were divided into atheistic and theistic evolution?
A while back I was reading a Christianity Today article titled The Evolution of Darwin and came across this story within the story:
The story is told in Adrian Desmond and James Moore's authoritative biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. When Darwin's daughter Annie died at age 10, Darwin came to hate the God he blamed for this. This was in 1851, eight years before Darwin released Origin of Species.This story reminded me of the many people that I have come across in my life that blame God for their misfortunes in life because of their fundamentalist belief that God causes everything that happens in the world.. good and bad.. sweet spring rain or Hurricane Katrina.
Around the time of Annie's death, Darwin also wrote that if Christianity were true, then it would follow that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and many of his closest family friends would be in hell. Darwin found this utterly unacceptable, given that these men were wise and kind and generous. Darwin's rejection of God was less an act of unbelief than a rebellion against the kind of God posited by Christianity. A God who would allow a young girl to die and good people to go to hell was not anyone whom Darwin wanted to worship.
I used to hold this simplistic and fundamentalist view.. the idea that God is a divine puppet-master and we are but His marionettes.. visions of a heavenly Vito Corleone pulling the strings behind the scenes. The end of such a view is one that paints God as a powerful being that causes both good and evil.
I have evolved (smile) and now believe that both suffering and torment (both before and after death) comes from within creation and not from the Creator (however He chose to create). I think that it is a flawed view of God that blames Him for the premature death of 10 year old girls and the idea that He sends good people to hell. But if you hold to this narrow and fundamentalist leaning view then it is a small wonder that you will try to explain creation apart from God.. fundamentalist evolutionism is just a derivative of fundamentalist atheism.
An interesting tidbit I learned about Greece: 97% consider themselves Christians, but only 81% believe there is a God. We've got theistic evolution in the US, but they've got atheistic Christianity of there!
ReplyDelete"over there"
ReplyDeleteFind it hard to believe that less than 50% of Americans don't believe in the theory of evolution (maybe, with the lack of science in many schools, people just don't know what it is). Personally, I find that scientific discovery only reinforces my faith.
ReplyDeleteAs for what God controls... all I know is that when you are playing poker, some days you get good cards and some days you get crummy cards... but whether or not you win at poker has nothing to do with the cards you're dealt... it's how you play them. The folks who lose money at poker play every hand the same way. You need to lay down early on the bad hands and go all in on the good ones.
I just know that with out-of-control drunk monkeys in the news here in New England, this picture frightens me.
ReplyDeleteOur Bible Study group is going through The Truth Project (a video series by Focus on the Family.) Totally fascinating and we just finished listening about Darwin and Evolution. Wonderful intelligent facts for the Creator.
ReplyDelete