An anthropologist and a Christian
Th two seem like oxymorons, as an anthropologists I study evolution but as a Christian I believe God created man, how can I believe both?
The simple answer is science. Science is ably questions, asking a question, creating an experiment to test and to draw all conclusion and if the answer is unclear then to doubt,l.
The problem is that Science is being mistaken for religion. As scientists we are told that science has proven that there is no need for God. “The science is settled” is a common phrase but hundreds of years ago people said the same thing about a universe where the sun revolves around the earth. The point of science is to doubt and ask questions but more and more scientists are telling us to make an exception in the case of God.
As a college student I asked questions. If none of our so called ancestors are directly related to us then why do we say we are descendants of them? If evolution explains how all life came to being how can you explain the Precambrian explosion where we jumped from simple invertebrates to complex organisms without ANY explanation for a slow stream of natural selection? If the universe was created in an instant flash of light how do explain the similarities to Genesis? How can a universe create itself from nothing when science says that is impossible?
For each question I received one response.
No one knows.
If no one can come up with a scientific explanation then how can we disprove God? We cannot. Nor can we definitively prove God but as Chrisgians that is not ur duty. There can be no faith without doubt and that is the whole point. It’s free will, we choose to believe.
More often then not non believers exist either because of anger or to justify living a life without consequences, but a life without consequences has no meaning.
I’m an anthropologist. I believe in God, his Son, and the Holy Spirit. I cannot prove he exists. But you cannot prove he does not, I choose to have faith, I choose to live a life with meaning.
You have the same choice.
I pray you follow God.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and I’m an Atheist. You probably didn’t expect (such) a reply, but I hope you don’t take this as offence, because that’s not my intention at all. I respect other people’s belief and I think that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.
Science can’t and will never be able to tell whether there’s a god I fully agree with you about that. The existence or non-existence of god is a hypothesis that is not falsifiable, and therefore it can’t be assessed with science (the same is true for the Flying spaghetti monster, but that’s a different topic).
If you want to be a scientist (in your case anthropologist) and to believe in god, then this is your right and your decision, as you say, and I fully respect you for that.
What I have a problem with is, when you try to argue “scientifically” that there is no proof for the non-existence of god and that’s why you should doubt…because as I said earlier, you can’t test a non falsifiable hypothesis with science - ergo the question is not scientific. Even if your arguments would all be correct (see below), that would still not mean that believing in God is a scientifically valid alternative to the theory of evolution. I think this simple misunderstanding is one of the main causes for the misunderstanding betweens theists and atheists.
Furthermore, I don’t know what teachers you had at college, but believe me, the cambrian (it’s referred to as cambrian and not precambrian) explosion is not at all a mystery and does fit very well within the framework of evolution under natural selection (it only started a debate within the evolutionary biologist community about the punctuated equilibrium theory, but explaining that would go too far here, everyone interested can look it up). It’s an example for an adaptive radiation, where the diversification rate is higher than at other times. It also didn’t happen in an instant, or a few hundreds or even thousand years, instead “the Cambrian explosion” was a process over 70 to 80 millions of years. So there was never a “jumping” from simple organisms to complex organisms. There are many theories about what might have caused this “rapid” radiation; Climate change has been suggested as a driver, just to mention one. Focusing on one of your other points: many people struggle with the concept of one species descending from another. This often happens, because what people usually don’t realise is, that the concept of distinct species is human made. In nature everything is a continuum. When we look at the origin of humans I can recommend you a good youtube video, explaining this in more detail and much better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdWLhXi24Mo In the end, we’ll be never able to say where a new species starts and where the old ended because that’s not how it works. Gradual changes of certain populations can lead to a point where we, based on one of our concepts of what a species is (there’s several ones in biology) do no longer consider them one species, but two distinct species.
I’m not an physicist, so i don’t feel knowledgeable enough to say something about the origin of the universe.
I hope I didn’t offend you with my post, because that was never my intention. I just would love if people in this whole debate about religion versus science would stop using scientific arguments to argue int he favour of religion (or against it), because these are two completely different topics that can’t be mixed.
