Sunday, August 28, 2005

The Bible and Natural Selection

I was listening to this song today (the song really has nothing to do with this post, other than the mention of Noah's Ark), and it made me think, "Hm, how can fundamentalists believe in the Bible and not in evolution?"

I mean, take the story of Noah's Ark. God got pissed at a bunch of sinners. At that point in time, everyone pretty much lived in the same place. So, he picked the least sinful of the sinners, Noah and Co., and told them to build a boat. Then they picked up a sample of all the animals present at the time (hopefully no dinosaurs, cause that would be one weird anachronism) and set out on a boat.

And then God let out the mother of all storms on their ass. And this killed all the greater "sinners," leaving behind only Noah, his family, and his possie of animals.

But God did some "selecting" in this case. One might say he "naturally" (since God can't really do something not natural) selected the best of the best of the humans, took them on a little trip, and killed everyone else.

That sounds like evolution to me. And God did it! Gasp!

Random thought that I figure I'd post. Mainly because it's one of the few original thoughts I've put up here so far. Everything else has mainly been me regurgitating things others have said. Not this one. I came up with all by myself!

Mabye this is one of those synchronities again: Noah's New Ark, Evolution, Katrina. The stars were just aligned. Go Karma!

Wow, I've started to reference myself. That's when you know you've hit rock bottom. :)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you're onto something there Dave... they never did think of that

Anonymous said...

Hi David - Interesting thought, but not an example of evolution as no new creatures resulted. It is however a demonstration of Natural Selection via Intelligent Design and Creationism. Thanks for this - Ian

Anonymous said...

David, I think that most bible believers and nonbelievers alike equate the term "evolution" with a change from prebiotic soup to living cell by random chance over billions of years. This process does seem to be at odds with the biblical assertion of creation by a willful act of God.

However, thoughtful believers acknowledge the point that you make: selection (Natural or otherwise) may expose inheritied genetic variation (inherited from previous generations or recently developed in meiotic mutation)through increasingly divergent subgroups of the original kind. This divergence, while called evolution, is a different animal than the random one I described earlier.
These thinking believers thus do believe in evolution, but not in the assertion that random chemical processes can result in the soup-to-species transformation sometimes implied by that term.

Paul