Thursday, October 01, 2009

Honesty is a Beautiful Thing

It warmed my heart to read an honest statement about personal ideological claims from a Creationist! Thank you Todd. That is the sort of disclosure that actually gives me hope that there can be conversations, worthwhile conversations between people with different ideological stances towards the science and religion debates.

Let me be equally as honest. I believe that evolution is compelling. I also believe that the Bible is compelling. But I don't feel obligated to believe the Bible weighs in on the science of creation any more than it tells us how a light bulb works. My ideological stance is that the Bible tells us more about the way life should be and in Christ can be than it does about why it is the way it is. The Bible isn't a textbook on socio-cultural analysis any more than it is a physics textbook. That doesn't mean it doesn't have insights that are valuable in that area - but that isn't it's primary thrust. I believe that through the Bible I meet the God who gives me a future and a hope. I also believe that this same God is the creator of all that is. And I also believe that the marvels of evolution, creation and the universe all tell of God's glory. Convoluted as that all sounds, it is where I start in the discussion.

3 comments:

Cleireac said...

I'm curious, Frank. Does the author believe that evolution as a theoretical system is without inconsistencies? Because I believe that there are inconsistencies in any theory. If people who are anti-religion can point to the supposed inconsistencies in biblical texts, then cannot believers point to apparent inconsistencies in evolutionary theory?

I would have asked the author directly, but did not see anywhere to post comments.

One of Freedom said...

The lack of ability to comment was disheartening, I find that too often amongst strong fundamentalist stances - there is really little interest in dialogue, their blogs are merely soap boxes for their ideas. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not sure what his understanding of evolution is beyond what he has disclosed. What I think though is that he has disclosed far more about his ideological assumptions than most staunch creationists. That I applaud.

Jonathan Bartlett said...

Todd Wood is actually published in the secular literature on topics such as evolution and statistical comparisons of DNA sequences. He was part of the team that sequenced the genome of rice.

One paper he published on evolution is "Evolution of protein sequences and structures" in the Journal of Molecular Biology.