I was recently made aware of the scary fact that nearly 50% of Americans believe a God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years (see http://www.gallup.com/poll/
Let us COMPLETELY set all scientific understanding aside and deal in faith alone. First, I would like to address the group that seems to think man was created by God sometime in the past 10,000 years. Of those who believe this way most of them believe it because to them the Bible is literal truth. If you fall into this group you are saying that the Bible is 100% the word of God, written by God through man, historically accepted as Moses (although recent evidence suggests it was a collection of oral stories). Yet doesn't that mean that ultimately MAN wrote the Bible? Does that not leave room for flaws, especially if Genesis is simply a collection of oral stories?
Assume you were the person whom God tasked to write the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the so-called "primeval history". If God had come to you in 1000 BC and said "OK, lets get into the details of how the world was created. You see, according to the physical laws I set forth, all matter, everything you see started as a tiny point of infinite density and infinite mass. Then there was a great BANG..." God would have completely overwhelmed whomever he was talking to. Even if he could have spoken it to someone intelligent enough to understand it, he would know no one else in the world would believe it. So perhaps he needed to dumb it down. People in 1000 BC simply didn't know as much as people living today. To believe that God would attempt to explain the origins of our universe or even life on earth in the way it truly occurred would be lunacy. Surely even the most ardent Bible thumper would agree to that.
EVEN SO, assuming the above argument can't steer you away from a 100% biblical truth stance, look at it another way. By demanding that the Bible is 100% true and that the universe, the Earth and man were all created in seven 24 hour days, you are inherently placing limits on the all-mighty God you claim is all-powerful! You are demanding that you, YOU - a simple human being - can completely understand God and how the universe and everything in it was created. This takes A LOT of gall! You claim your God is all-powerful, omniscient and can do anything. Yet you demand that there's no way your God could have used evolution to create man. You demand that there's no way the earth could be billions of years old. Simply because some human being wrote Genesis thousands of years ago? This is - at best - a laughable position to hold. At worst it is a sin punishable by eternal damnation. But I'm not here to damn anyone - I will never claim to know what an all-powerful, omniscient God could only know.
Further, believing that Genesis is a 100% accurate account of the origin of the universe implies your God is a liar. What I am getting at is you would need to believe that God provided the Genesis explanation, then went on to completely try to confuse human beings trying to find out about their origins by (among many other things):
1. Intentionally laying out the universe such that it appears to be billions of years old even though it's only a few thousand
2. Creating fake fossils of billions of creatures and making them appear to have lived millions of years in the past even though they lived a few thousand years ago, if at all.
3. Knowing in advance how we would try to date objects and then intentionally creating the objects such that we COULD NOT accurately date them, in fact making them look far older than they are.
To me, a God who would intentionally mislead us only to punish us for using our intelligence - that he created in us no less - is a sociopathic God, and certainly not a God that I would deem worthy of worship.
This - of course - is not to say that macro-evolution or even the "Big Bang" is fact. They are theories that best describe the current scientific view of how nature works. As science moves forward in the next 100 years new concepts may be uncovered that will reshape our thinking on how everything came to be. And ultimately this is the difference between Evolution and Creationism. Evolution being a scientific concept has hypothesis and testable theories. Science provides us a logical way to attempt to determine how we came to be without relying on faith. Creationism or Intelligent Design has no testable hypothesis and therefore can never lead us to a greater understanding of the world or the universe. What I see intelligent design authorities doing is trying to explain how the earth could have been created only 10,000 years ago or why we couldn't have possibly evolved from an ape-like ancestor.
Which is why, all my life, I have never understood the disconnect between scientific evolution and intelligent design. Why can't they co-exist? Why do intelligent design advocates insist on limiting their omnipresent and omniscient God to having created Man in a certain way? Why is it such a huge step for them to believe that perhaps God simply set things in motion to see how they might play out?
Moving on, I'd like to address those who believe that God had a hand in guiding evolution on this planet intentionally to create humans. This is the other large group of people in the survey cited above. If you believe this way I assume you have at least moved forward enough to not believe in a literal translation of the Bible. I'd like to challenge you to move a bit further.
Why would an omniscient, omnipresent God care - specifically - about what goes on in this miniscule solar system in this average galaxy in this average galactic cluster in this average corner of the universe? Let me explain something to you. Any given individual is miniscule in relation to the universe. The observable universe is about 46 billion LIGHT YEARS across. It contains 80 BILLION galaxies comprising about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (30 Billion Trillion or 30 sextillion) stars. Based on this size it is reasonable to assume that God did not create the universe solely for us. I cannot in good faith believe that this God cares about my life in particular. I think any God who could have created the universe would be more interested in setting it in motion and watching what happens as opposed to guiding a specific process on any specific planet. My God would simply lay out a set of laws and flip a switch, much like what I do when I write a piece of software. Except my God would be the ultimate programmer so to speak. I simply cannot grasp why it is so necessary that the Christian God - the ruler of a universe that's enormous beyond anything we can fathom - must be so completely wrapped up in the day to day lives of human beings on planet Earth. It makes no sense to me.
When you bring the fourth dimension - time - into the equation, it makes your life in this universe all the more minuscule. Not only are we unimaginably small on a physical scale, but also on a time scale. To any all powerful, omniscient God who "always is and always was", our physical existence is seemingly nothing. Why should this God care about the 20 minutes (or whatever) you spend praying to him each day? Or even the fact that you want this God to help your uncle beat cancer or your grandmother to recover from her stroke. It's ridiculous.
Further, assuming your God does exist, why should he care whether or not you - specifically - worship him? Why would he punish you mercilessly simply because you say he doesn't exist, or that you put your faith in a different God? It simply makes no sense. Again, we get back to a sociopathic God. A God who's so wrapped up in himself that he's willing to make insignificant humans suffer. And for what? Simply because they used the brains that he provided them to come to the conclusion that he doesn't exist. My God would "save" an atheist who lived a good life before he would save a murderer who repented. I refuse to worship any God who would do otherwise, even if said God appeared before me and asked me to.
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