In Reply to: Creation vs. evolution posted by Farmer on August 21, 2004 at 05:41:23:
I'm not an atheist, so I can't explain it to you.
What I can say is this: My understanding of evolutionary theory, physics, and the social sciences has given me a very different worldview than the worldview held by the people in the first century who wrote about their experience of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Evolutionary theory doesn't say anything about the existence or nonexistence of God. It only explains biological processes and natural laws, such as natural selection. What it says (among other things), is that if you look at the lifecycle of the higher vertebrates (of which we are one), the basic purpose is to eat and avoid being eaten (survival of the species). Human beings may be more than just very smart apes, but we are still animals subject to the natural laws that govern animal behavior. And we can explain a WHOLE lot of human behavior in terms of the struggle to survive.
There is no way to prove human beings are anything more than very smart apes with an extremely successful set of survival strategies, including faith in God. We can believe we have an immortal soul and participate in the divinity of Christ for any number of sound, rational reasons that may insure our suvival as a species. We can also believe that a supernatural God will deliver us from this vale of tears--the ugliness and brutality of this eat-or-be-eaten existence--and our belief in the Apocalypse may give some of us a competitive advantage in the struggle to survive.
In every instance where a person says, such-and-such happened due to God's supernatural intervention, science can provide a perfectly mundane explanation for cause and effect. Even with miraculous healings that come through prayer, it can be argued that the electromagnetic energy of "mind over matter" has effected the healing rather than a supernatural Being. But I would argue that it is easier to just accept some things as being a matter of divine grace, and doing so we may increase our odds of survival.
Some of the most advanced theories in mathematics & physics suggest that even chance has a regularity & order like everything else we observe in nature. So chance is not really the random event it appears to be, and we see through the glass darkly. Something these theoretical models of chance have showed me is that there are probably multiple realities, each containing a measure of truth depending on my perspective and basic assumptions.
Point is, I do not think science can be used to argue against the existence of some type of a Creator. What it has done is make me rethink my ideas about the nature of a Creator. I would say human beings are just limited in the amount of truth we can hold onto at any given time. Isn't that rather like seeing through a glass darkly?