posted on Oct, 10 2007 @ 05:22 PM
Let me say something about miracles: They only happen once, they appear to defy scientific principles, and they cannot be explained or repeated.
Turning water to wine was a miracle.
Feeding 5000 people with a basket of bread and fish was a miracle.
Living in a whale for 3 days and getting vomited out was a miracle.
The Garden of Eden was a miracle.
THE BIBLE DOES NOT TALK ABOUT ANYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON OUTSIDE OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN.
If there was any instance of instantaneous creation, it would have happened in the isolation of the Garden of Eden. Nobody knows how long Adam and Eve
would have been kickin' in it in there. It doesn't say how long Adam was all alone before Eve. Who knows what occurred outside the Garden.
And further more, who cares?
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Looky here friends.
I'm holding up my Bible in one hand and my Physics for Scientists and Engineers textbook in the other for all to see.
Please look at the Physics textbook... THIS IS LIFE.
Please look at the Bible... THIS IS HOW YOU LIVE.
You cannot swap their roles.
As you may guess, I am religious. I put myself within the "Christian" category.
I also fully accept and embrace evolutionary theory.
In case you haven't figured it out by now, the Bible's creation story is not a play-by-play sequence of events. The story told in Genesis is
allegorical. In fact, the account in Genesis comes from two different creation stories that were cut-and-pasted together. On top of that, they were
handed down verbally over generations, and naturally many details were either completely lost or muddled in the process before they started writing it
down.
Does that mean that it's garbage? No sir. It simply just doesn't provide the exact means by which the world was created by God. But that's okay.
What we simply need to understand is that God created us... somehow... and we are here to do [insert your belief system here], and in return,
after we die we get to [insert your afterlife here].
A personal hero of mine: Henry Eyring, Sr., PhD. He had a doctorate in Physical Chemistry and received multiple awards for the development of
Transition State Theory. He was also a very religious man. In his book "Reflections of a Scientist" he states that he accepts evolution. Praphrasing
his words, if God did created us in a big poof, he's okay with it; if God created us through evolutionary process, that's fine, too.
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Here's something to chew on:
People claim that evolutionary theory is blasphemous because God would never turn monkeys into humans. However, the Bible says that we were created
from dirt. I consider a monkey a promotion.
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Here are some prior problems that people had with scientific theories:
Heliocentricity - The SUN is the center of the galaxy, NOT the earth. Bad news for early telescope-gazers. You got killed for saying that the earth
was not the center of the universe.
Elliptical orbits of the planets - Now that we had recovered from realizing the Sun was the center of the galaxy, we got some bozo coming along and
telling us that the planets did not travel in perfect spheres around the sun, but in more elliptical orbits.
I'm surprised that nobody is mad that the earth's rotation and its orbit around the sun do not perfectly synchronize - that is to say there are not
exactly 365 days in a year... it's just a little bit off. That's why we have leap year. I hope I just didn't piss off God by writing that!
Anyway, these earlier theories were fought against just as hard as people fight evolutionary theory today. And yet, 99.9999999% of the population
would laugh out loud (not lol) at you if you thought the earth was the center of the universe.
So, in a couple hundred years, 99.9999999% of the population will accept evolutionary theory and will not consider it a threat to their faith.
So relax: God created the world. Somehow. Who cares how?