3 Practical Reasons To Get Acquainted With This Issue:
- The New Atheism movement
- Conversations with friends, Urban barrier to faith (Framed: Science versus Faith)
- Integration with science, Discovery Channel
1) Young Earth Creationists – Ken Ham, Henry Morris, Duane Gish
About 10,000 years old earth, literal reading of Genesis, question the dating of fossils, reject macro evolution. http://www.answersingenesis.org/
2) Theistic Evolutionists - Alister McGrath, Francis Collins, Polkinghorne. God created the initial materials and set up the natural laws, then guided the whole evolution process. http://metanexus.net
3) Old-Earth, Progressive Creationists – Hugh Ross, Kenneth Samples. Accepts big bang cosmology, dating of fossil record, rejects evolution, holds that God progressively intervenes millions of times to create new species http://www.reasons.org/
4) Intelligent Design (ID) – Philip Johnson (reframe), Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Chapter 6 challenges macroevolution: the anthropic principle, DNA, irreducible complexity, design can be empirically detected. http://www.discovery.org/
Among other reasons, some Christians object to theistic evolution b'cos "God" becomes an unnecessary explanation:
Greg Koukl put it this way: Intelligent But Unnecessary First Cause? (Occam’s Razor)
"If I boil water till 100 degrees celcius at sea level, the water boils, churns and stirs. That's natural cause-and-effect. Now suppose I claim that there are invisible leprechauns who stir the water when the temperature reaches 100 degrees... Can you falsify my statement? No. But it's an unnecessary explanation."
Arguments For Evolution: (Not given much coverage in Total Truth). Fundamental to evolution is genetic variation upon which selective forces can act.
1) Bad Design in nature i.e. panda’s thumb, appendix, ‘tail bone’ (vestigial organ)
2) Fossil records – missing links? (See pic below)
3) Living things on earth share fundamentally similar basic anatomical structures development and chemical compositions. (common ancestor?)
4) Genetic changes over generations
5) Isolated places like Australia, Hawaii, NZ – species found in nowhere else
6) The nature of science (cannot invoke supernatural causes)
7) Multi-verses? Response to the anthropic principle
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