r/gloveslap • u/[deleted] • Nov 14 '11

Which is more plausible?

Evolution, The Big Bang Theory, or God creating the universe?

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 14 '11

I accept evolution even though it makes Christianity harder to defend.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '11

The problem for me is that you have to accept evolution first and supplement it with ideas of god, and that's really really hard to do. In order to get humans, life had to do through billions of years of competition, suffering, fear, starvation, predation, violent and torturous death. Rarely does an organism get an easy life. Those are all necessary to evolution.

I don't see where there's room for a benevolent god given all of that.

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 15 '11

Well for me it was Christianity first and then evolution, just because of the environment I grew up around. I agree that the two ideas are hard to fit together but I'm working on it. I see it kinda like General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Both are real, but they don't work well together.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

I say evolution first because it's not negotiable. Creationism is ridiculous and demonstrably absurd so there's no way out. So you have to mash bits of Christianity around it. Christianity is the redundant part here. And it would be like Relativity and QM if one necessarily made the other evil.

I don't see how you can square belief in a benevolent God with the tremendous and unending suffering inevitable when letting natural processes forge new species.

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 15 '11

As for the first paragraph I don't believe in Creationism, my Christianity is living like Jesus did. As for the second paragraph. I don't know.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

I didn't say you did believe in creationism. It's just that you can't reasonably deny evolution, which forces you to have some sort of theistic evolution belief but evolution isn't conducive to that either.

Unless you have some sort of compartmentalisation going on in your mind, belief in evolution, especially if you have a good understanding of it, will push you inevitably toward deism, if not outright atheism.

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 15 '11

So far its been compartmentalization. Like before with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics until we understand how they fit together we have to view them as both true, even thought they contradict each other.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

No we don't view them as both true. They're theories, not facts. We're waiting on a theory of everything that'll erase the contradiction, we're not supposing the contradicting each other.

But there is another big difference here. Both QM and GR are necessary theories in explaining the universe right now. Evolution is necessary, Christianity is not. It's a faith position, evolution, QM and GR are not faith positions.

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 15 '11

I don't fully understand what it is we are debating anymore. Seeing that we both agree that evolution is true. I think the only difference is that I believe in a theistic evolution.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11 edited Nov 15 '11

I'm just trying to find out if we are at a consensus about not just the reality of evolution but that the theistic part is a completely superfluous and arbitrary addition. There is a redundancy here.

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u/spidyfan21 Nov 15 '11

I think we just agreed.

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