Comments on: Must Christians be Creationists?

By: 101st post review at Terahertz

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:59:34 +0000

[…] atheism; my personal reasons for disbelief; several times on ethics and atheism; creationism keeps coming up, but that means there are many, many spoofs of it; it then leads that I need to emphasize […]

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By: James Bell

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:09:49 +0000

Also, I was planning on posting on this very issue on my blog (together with Stephen Thornhill), but I see you beat me to it. Maybe I still will.

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By: James Bell

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 22:08:10 +0000

I personally don’t believe in evolution, but if evolution were somehow found to be absolutely, authoritatively true, it wouldn’t shake my faith. So, no, Christians don’t need to believe in creation. Even the story of the Fall (Adam and Eve) could be metaphorical, though I don’t believe it to be so.
I find discussions about creation/evolution interesting, but they are not fundamental to my faith. Many, many Christians get caught up in a bunch of side issues (creation, homosexuality, etc) that are not fundamental to Christianity itself.
Adit’s right – the taking of the fruit was about giving us choice. He let us choose if we wanted to love and follow him, or if we wanted to live our own lives apart from him.

ps. About evolution – I don’t believe it’s been proven to be absolutely, authoritatively true – I think there are too many gaps still. But I admit that I don’t know a whole lot about why. I simply hear those things from other Christians. But, since it’s not fundamental to my faith, and belief in evolution, as far as I can tell, will not change my day-to-day life, I have not taken the time to investigate it further. If you can convince me otherwise, then I will look into it in more detail and see if I can validate what I have been told.

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By: Aditya

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:03:58 +0000

You’re being too skeptical. God wasn’t looking the other way, he deliberately gave them the choice; they chose to commit sin. That is the thinking around it (like I said in my comment on a previous post, the sin is eating the fruit from the Tree, but that is sinful only because God said so).

Think about how many people call themselves Christians. It’d be ridiculous to expect them to all believe the same thing! (Another problem I have with religion.) There are various kinds, numerous that accept a 6000-year-old Earth and numerous that believe evolution to simply be God’s method (the latter, unlike the usual morons, tend to take the Bible metaphorically). It all depends on one’s own understanding of the Bible, which I’m afraid to see is uncommon to see, as almost all people have Christianity come to them and have the beliefs forced upon them; no one has the chance to think for themselves. The stories in the Bible, I think, are wonderful metaphors; many of them (though certainly not all!) are things I would want my kids to learn, but not for the wrong reasons.

For me, the stories are like any other: I either agree or disagree (from an ethical perspective, that is). For Christians, they agree because those stories are the very source of their ethics. What varies is the level of interpretation they use.

If you want to see some Christian views that aren’t retarded, take a look at Dr. Lamoureux’s site:
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/

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