Theism > theistic evolutionism > deism > atheism.
That's how it went with me, at least.
If evolution is true, there was no Fall, nor a common ancestor that had the same way of thinking about morals as us, from which all of us could have inherited Sin.
Of course, you don't mention that when you give them arguments for evolution, or they would ignore every argument and keep with creationism.

To answer the title of the thread, no.

Evolution is only evidence of Christianity like it is evidence for Thor or Apollo or Vishnu. We didn't evolve to test the claims we make, we evolved like every other species and the only thing important is getting to the point of reproduction.

Evolution produces dipshits who manage to reproduce as much as produces smart people and even smart people who make absurd claims.

In the video Craig claims that since "And the evening and the morning were the second day" can be interpreted as meaning billions of years, Christians have two theories, namely ID and evolution to choose from, and they pick ID in their unbiased view (since genesis can also be interpreted to mean evolution). On the other hand, we atheists want to deny god, I mean the IDer, and thus we are biased towards evolution.
Since the unbiased people (the religious ones) choose ID over evolution, the former must be true.
Obviously.

The reverse is true -

Christianity, and other religions, are evidence for a form of evolution, namely evolution of 'memes', or cultural evolution, ie evolution of relatively coherent sets of ideas. This was originally a suggestion from Richard Dawkins, as a way to help understand how ideas that seemed to be not beneficial to the species could emerge and develop.

IOW, these ideas only need to be able to appeal to some aspect of our mental life to be copied, ie 'reproduce'. Such copying is prone to small errors, misinterpretation, etc, and those that are most appealing to something in our psychology will be more successful, independently of whether they are good for us as individuals or a society.

...that dude in the video.....well......nice try buddy..keep crackin...

" So, I think among educated Christians, its always been know that Genesis, is open to a very wide range of different interpretations, that are quite consistent with different theories of evolutionary biology."

"As a biblical Christian, I'm completely open to follow the evidence to where it leads, and I think that's one of the advantages to being a Christian, is that you can follow the evidence to where it leads, by constrast, the naturalist....for him, evolution is the only game in town.....so in that sense, his mind is all made up in advance...

But, as a theist, I can follow the evidence where it leads." : William Lane Craig

God, being all knowing, and perfect and in total control......hmm.  Evolution play no part in proving Christianity because it was obviously written by people who had no concept of a micro organism, gravity, A ROUND EARTH.  If the Bible was truly the "word of God"  then surely he would have liked to mention all of the fascinating things we can go see at the Natural History Museum.  Why only take credit for mankind?  If that is true, I hope he loves us more than he loved the dinosaurs....I don't see many of those around anymore....Guess they weren't cool enough, it's probably hard to have a decent conversation with a 50 ton reptile anyways.  There are simply too many inconsistencies and contradictions due to ignorance in the bible, certainly not the product of a perfect, all knowing supernatural God.  There must be a reason that the Bible omits every other life form that we have discoverd via the fossil record.  Oh yah, thats right, it was written by people that didn't know about such things.  It's a pity that so many people fall into these archaic beliefs. 

 

I feel bad in a way for all of the other human beings on the other continents that went to hell because they couldn't catch a plane to the middle east a few thousand years ago so that they could "hear the good news".  I'm sure they were quite content with worshipping the sun, or thor, or allah, or zeus, or something else ridiculous....

Evolution would certainly prove christianity to be right, but God must have been really busy at the time and forgot to tell the guys writing to include even the smallest shred of evidence about what he was doing the first few million years that this planet came to be.  Not to mention our place in the Galaxy or let alone the Universe and the billions of years it took us to reach this point.  k, now im just ranting. sorry...you guys get the point. 

that dude in the video.....well......nice try buddy..keep crackin...

 

mr O.

mrOriginal wrote:

I find it incredibly hard to communicate effectively on a forum in the realm of "Sarcasm" .  Please give me a chance to amend the statement you cited so that it will make more sense.  I was, in a sarcastic manner, trying to shed light on the fact that if God had truly spoken to those men who wrote the bible, then why wouldn't he at least tell them about the fossil record, and the many life forms that have existed on this planet long before we humans came along.  If, God, being perfect, he would know all, past, present and future, so leaving the writers of the bible ignorant to the types of things that would potentially discredit its divinty would be a mistake.....So, in a sense, it's obvious that the bible is not built on any form of greater intelligence. 

Now that we can study in detail the origins of life on this planet, unlike the men of the biblical era, it is safe for me to say, that Evolution would certainly prove the creation method had God really spoken to them, because he would have known that in the future, we would hold the knowledge we do now.  I would ask you to read the first sentance of that passage sarcastically to yourself, then see the "but" directly after it. At the time I laughed because I thought it was funny, but  I also have a wierd sense of humor.

To answer your question, Christianity in no way proves Evolution, and vice versa.  It's an oil and water thing.  Even if you foolishly mix them, they still separate on their own....

LMAO!! There is all sorts of things god didn't tell man about.  Events and discoveries have occured that "god" knew NOTHING about but only science had to discover.

Plus WHY would this mythical Arab god Jesus give worms the ability to regenerate their entire bodies but not give humans the ability to regenerate their limbs? He prefers worms to people??

Brian37 wrote:

JesusNEVERexisted wrote:

LMAO!! There is all sorts of things god didn't tell man about.  Events and discoveries have occured that "god" knew NOTHING about but only science had to discover.

Plus WHY would this mythical Arab god Jesus give worms the ability to regenerate their entire bodies but not give humans the ability to regenerate their limbs? He prefers worms to people??

He also prefers bacteria and cockroaches which existed long before humans and outnumber humans.

Not to mention he gave ants the ability to pick up 20 times their weight, and our spines have trouble simply dealing with gravity...

I've never smelled a rat, so I have no point of reference...

TGBaker wrote:

Evolution is antithetical to the Christian Theistic god simply because it shows that the Christology ( study of what Christ means )rests upon a mistake: the fall of man and original sin. No fall because of evolution (upward through time) means no original sin which means no sacrifice of a messiah is needed.  God created a perfect human (Adam and Eve) they disobeyed and the results were hereditary sin. Evolution starts with simple speciation to more complex forms selected by their natural environment, genetic drift and sexual reproduction where genetic information is uniquely combined.  A god of evolution would be a god that started replicating molecules and watched what happen ( deism). Deism= not-Christian theism. Natural selection of replicating molecules is more plausible than causal deism thus not-deism.  Pantheism views the universe as god. So possibly Einstein. God=natural law.  God then becomes simply a metaphorical term for origins.  God=not-god.  The cloud was a marshmallow of fluff. Cloud=not-marshmallow.  Poetics is not actual definition.  Poetics is symbolic expression of comparison connoting attribution to obtain properties of denotation. emotively.

 

The way I've heard it God just poofed the soul into humans at some point, which is what made them humans and gave them their free will.

 

No, it doesn't make sense to me either, but that's the argument.  Nice and unfalsifiable.

mellestad wrote:

TGBaker wrote:

Evolution is antithetical to the Christian Theistic god simply because it shows that the Christology ( study of what Christ means )rests upon a mistake: the fall of man and original sin. No fall because of evolution (upward through time) means no original sin which means no sacrifice of a messiah is needed.  God created a perfect human (Adam and Eve) they disobeyed and the results were hereditary sin. Evolution starts with simple speciation to more complex forms selected by their natural environment, genetic drift and sexual reproduction where genetic information is uniquely combined.  A god of evolution would be a god that started replicating molecules and watched what happen ( deism). Deism= not-Christian theism. Natural selection of replicating molecules is more plausible than causal deism thus not-deism.  Pantheism views the universe as god. So possibly Einstein. God=natural law.  God then becomes simply a metaphorical term for origins.  God=not-god.  The cloud was a marshmallow of fluff. Cloud=not-marshmallow.  Poetics is not actual definition.  Poetics is symbolic expression of comparison connoting attribution to obtain properties of denotation. emotively.

 

The way I've heard it God just poofed the soul into humans at some point, which is what made them humans and gave them their free will.

 

No, it doesn't make sense to me either, but that's the argument.  Nice and unfalsifiable.

I claim that it is falsifiable :

1) There is a possible world of only well-being (p). 

2) A capable limitless good being (x) knowing of this world (p) would actualize (necessarily) it over  possible worlds with evil and suffering (q).

3)x necessarily would not allow  q

4)p--> not q

5) It is possible that god is x

6)q --> not p

7) Our world=q therefore not p

8)not p

9)not p--->not x

10)not x

11)god= not x

 Our world entails there is no capable limitless good being. If there is a god he is not that being.

 

mellestad wrote:

TGBaker wrote:

mellestad wrote:

TGBaker wrote:

Evolution is antithetical to the Christian Theistic god simply because it shows that the Christology ( study of what Christ means )rests upon a mistake: the fall of man and original sin. No fall because of evolution (upward through time) means no original sin which means no sacrifice of a messiah is needed.  God created a perfect human (Adam and Eve) they disobeyed and the results were hereditary sin. Evolution starts with simple speciation to more complex forms selected by their natural environment, genetic drift and sexual reproduction where genetic information is uniquely combined.  A god of evolution would be a god that started replicating molecules and watched what happen ( deism). Deism= not-Christian theism. Natural selection of replicating molecules is more plausible than causal deism thus not-deism.  Pantheism views the universe as god. So possibly Einstein. God=natural law.  God then becomes simply a metaphorical term for origins.  God=not-god.  The cloud was a marshmallow of fluff. Cloud=not-marshmallow.  Poetics is not actual definition.  Poetics is symbolic expression of comparison connoting attribution to obtain properties of denotation. emotively.

 

The way I've heard it God just poofed the soul into humans at some point, which is what made them humans and gave them their free will.

 

No, it doesn't make sense to me either, but that's the argument.  Nice and unfalsifiable.

I claim that it is falsifiable :

1) There is a possible world of only well-being (p). 

2) A capable limitless good being (x) knowing of this world (p) would actualize (necessarily) it over  possible worlds with evil and suffering (q).

3)x necessarily would not allow  q

4)p--> not q

5) It is possible that god is x

6)q --> not p

7) Our world=q therefore not p

8)not p

9)not p--->not x

10)not x

11)god= not x

 Our world entails there is no capable limitless good being. If there is a god he is not that being.

 

Then the argument just gets into fallible human perceptions of good though, or the necessity of free will.

 

I realize you can follow them around on both of those issues, but it isn't fruitful to do so, they don't care about logic unless they can use it to support their dualism.

 

I'm in the middle of a debate about free will on that Catholic forum right now, it just circles and circles.  It comes down to an assumption from intuition, there isn't anything past that.

 

redneF wrote:

I ain't lettin' anybody off the hook that E-Z buddy!

According to 'whom' is it serious bidness?

Of course it is wrong.  According to God, and it says so in the Bible, which we know it's true because it says so in the Bible.  Obviously.

Come on, look at him, he looks like he stepped off the stage at a Lady Ga-Ga concert and people don't even crack a smile.

mellestad wrote:

Hmm.  If you ever get anyone to take up in opposition, I'll be interested to see what they say.

 

The attempt is to disprove the premise that there is a possible world of perfect well being. This usually states that god gave man freewill so he could only actualize the least evil world that has freewill. That is a card trick because they want you to change to their premise. You simply respond that within their premise god entails a perfect world already [(H) Heaven)as well as a possible perfect world [(K) the Kingdom Come in their eschatology).  That is why many theologians turned to process theology or panentheism where god is not omniscient or all powerful but the ground of being.   There are also pantheistic as opposed to panentheistic models which identify god as the universe with the logical conditions (or mental)in some sense divine. You find dualisms and monisms in all the aforementioned. But you can still defeat their freewill defense if you want to walk through their door.