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Sinhika t1_iye7mm8 wrote

Reply to comment by irkli in 'Mind control' by parasites influences wolf-pack dynamics in Yellowstone National Park | CNN by irkli

Mainstream (i.e., not far-right evangelicals) Christians do accept evolutionary theory. We just don't get press, because being boring and average doesn't make for click-bait headlines.

So, mainstream Christian acceptance of evolutionary theory would probably be classed as "intelligent design": God created the universe, God defined the Laws of Physics and set things in motion with the intent that they work out this way.

Mainstream God has a far longer view and is far more terrifyingly Other than evangelical's 4000-year-old toddler assembling a world exactly as it is now who throws temper fits if his creations don't follow the rules he supposedly wrote, even if he made his creations in such a way that they can't follow the rules perfectly.

Fortunately, in spite of being incomprehensibly Lovecraftian, Mainstream God loves ALL his children, and periodically sends prophets to explain things in comprehensible terms. Then a game of telephone ensues and we get garbage like evangelical anti-Christianity out of "Love your neighbor as yourself, that is the Second Commandment"

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professorDissociate t1_iyefvin wrote

I will never understand why god went through all the hard work of creating a universe that operates in such a manner. The means do not align with the end. Like if he cared so much for humans, why make it so that humans only occupy a tiny speckle within history. A single grain of sand within our entire solar system has more significance in terms of scale, than the existence of humans within all of time. It’s kind of like if we decided to build houses by waiting for natural flowing water to cut out cave systems for us (except that would still be much more efficient than spinning up an entire universe for humanity’s sake).

At what point is it safe to say this stuff just doesn’t make sense anymore?

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podkayne3000 t1_iyf1v0k wrote

One possibility: There is a G-d, or god equivalent, but our human understanding of G-d is based on our own wishful thinking, not on what G-d is actually like.

We may think of our Creator as being all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good, but maybe our Creator is really just an ordinary fallible bonehead in a universe that happens to be a trillion trillion times bigger than our universe. That fact that we want G-d to be perfect, and can conceive of G-d being perfect, does not actually mean that G-d is perfect.

Or, maybe G-d does exist and is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, but what we think of as life is simply an educational simulation. Maybe the anxiety and the terror are just part of the educational experience

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laforzadimente t1_iyejuvw wrote

I mean, this sounds more enlightened at face value, but does it even mesh with Biblical Christian lore? At what point is man created in God's image during his development? At what point is a homosapien ancestor considered an animal that doesn't need salvation vs a man that does? How do Adam and Eve and the birth of sin fit in with man developing gradually from other species? If it's just a fanciful allegory or one of the things that got lost in the game of telephone, then why take anything the book says seriously?

This meeting in the middle just seems like an admission that the older views aren't supported by evidence paired with an unwillingness to walk away completely. The things once attributed to be in the direct control of God have now been relegated to be what he's indirectly in control of. Seems to me God is just the ever-shrinking bubble of ignorance we slowly chip away at.

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TucuReborn t1_iyf0582 wrote

The way I've seen most describe it is a divine intent. That, instead of outright making mankind in a moment, the divine intent was for mankind to come to being through a selected path.

Kind of like when you build a character in an RPG. When you start out in a game, you may decide you want to be an archer. So you pick perks, talents, items, whatever that compliment becoming an archer. Over time, you may realize some of those choices were mistakes and redo them(a species dying out) or add in new things to help(Evolution or hybridizing). Eventually, though, you reach the end build and are now an archer.

So basically, God had a plan for humans to exist, and so set down a path for them to exist.

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laforzadimente t1_iyf7byt wrote

Yeah, I get the concept, like I said though, once you think about it for a bit it's an idea that doesn't mesh with other parts of the story, whether it's a modern interpretation of it or not.

If the creation days aren't days but are instead eons capable of letting evolution take place. Then creating plants eons before the sun makes no sense. If we came from aquatic life, but humans and land animals were created either days or eons after aquatic life, that doesn't make sense. If things were getting tweaked along the way and the ability to directly intervene exists or is needed then there's little point in waiting on the long process in the first place and indirectly defining the laws of physics to do their thing. It also raises questions about being all-knowing or all-powerful. And if the answers to these are based on problems with how the Genesis story is told, why trust the rest of the book?

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TucuReborn t1_iyfaq4p wrote

So lets take a moment to step back a bit.

A lot of modern Christians take the first few books as mostly being creation myth. As in it's a story made thousands of years ago to explain things, not hard and fast truth. Stories meant to inspire and make the world easy to understand.

Most Christians consider the parts afterwards to be more factually based, though even then it depends on the church and individual which parts and how much so.

The part to also remember, and in fact related to your last sentence, is that the books were written by differing authors sometimes hundreds of years apart. The bible is basically an anthology of related works from people who believed in the the same god(and to some degree, potentially intermarrying similar religions in the area). They all believed in the same god, and combined the literature into a single book. So, really, it's not one book. It's dozens, written by different authors for different purposes aimed at different people/cultures.

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irkli OP t1_iyehatv wrote

Thanks. I overgeneralized. Edited accordingly.

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