Evolution

Had an argument with a friend of mine the other day about evolution. My friend is a protestant (and I hesitate to use the word fundamentalist but....) who believes in the literal translation of the bible so therefore believes that Evolution is a lie and somehow an affront to God. 

We argued for a while, me trying to present him with sceintific evidence and him insisting that the evidence was incomplete therefore untrue. He is willing to concede that the earth is 4 billion years old but says that everything was created spontaneously and in its current form and no "new" life forms have appeared on earth since it was all created.

The words micro and macro evolution were bandied about but at the end of the day I had not changed his position on it.

Needless to say I felt like a failure, I spent my trip home obsessing over clever arguments and better examples I could have given him. Until something simple occurred to me.

The premise of his argument is fundamentally flawed. And that premise is that the bible is meant to be a factual book at all. 

Let's all be serious for a minute, the bible (especially the old testament) can't be factual. Noah's ark? it defies common sense. As a catholic, I was taught that the bible isn't LITERALLY true but contains wisdom all the same. For the so called "bible-based" churches that is pure heresy. 

So I propose the question..what is the bible FOR? For what purpose did God give us this book? 

I am sure that if God himself wrote that book for us, it was to give us moral guidance, not to be our Science Textbook. For science he gave us 5 senses and a rational brain. 

Let's say a person reads the bible everyday of their lives and gained not a single shred of morality or conscience from it but did get an unwavering faith that the earth is 6000 years old and fossils were put underground to test our faith. Would you say he has used the bible for its desired purpose or has he wasted a lot of time?

On the other hand, if a person reads the bible everyday of his life and disbelieves every story in there, thinks the whole thing is Israeli Mythology with no more truth than the stories of Hercules or Luanda-Magere. BUT he examines the stories and finds that they contain deeper meaning as to how one should be a good person, how to treat your fellow man and the nature of good and evil. He internalizes these lessons and (still disbelieving the facts) uses them to better himself.

Who has used the bible for its TRUE purpose?

The bible is a moral guide, FULLSTOP. It doesn't have to be factual to be a source of wisdom. Does the fact that the prodigal son was not real take anything away from the moral significance of the story? NOPE. If every word in the bible was a lie it would STILL be a good book to extract moral wisdom from. This is not to say that some of the figures in the bible did not really exist, there's independent verification about people like Solomon, David and so forth. It just doesn't NEED to be true to do its job.

 So if you spend your time poring through its pages trying to calculate the age of the earth or the resting place of Noah's ark YOU ARE MISSING THE ENTIRE POINT! 

Furthermore it is IMMORAL and downright BLASHEMOUS to claim that the bible is factually true. Why do I say this? Because the greatest gift God gave us is the human brain, and to REFUSE to use it when contemplating God is to spit into the eye of the creator. If you want to find out about God's creation, don't read some Jewish book, go out and LOOK at what He did.

Secondly there is no greater reason for the rise of Atheism in the world than the literal interpretation of the bible. Ask any atheist why he's not a Christian and they will start with genesis. This teaching of fundamentalists drives away many more than it saves and its utterly pointless to morality. The worst part of this is that Atheists use this as an excuse to dismiss everything about the bible including the sound moral lessons therein.

The main reason this angers me is that the ridiculous posturing of fundamentalist Christians makes the rest of us look bad. Stop belittling our faith with your idiotic nonsense!

For me, evolution does nothing to reduce my faith, in fact it strengthens it. To look at the incredibly intricate system God put into motion billions of years ago so that Man may exist ....Its fills me with Awe.

There is no doubt in my mind that God created the universe, maybe not as stated in Genesis but SOMETHING got everything started right? I call that God and I am very thankful to Him.

The study of the universe we live in, is the greatest homage a human can pay to the creator. I believe that eventually science will give us all the answers and they will point to God Himself.

So.....take that, Andrew.