This Old Chestnut

Am I a man or a monkey? Was I made like this or did i evolve from nothing? I believe I was created and that mankind is seperate from the animal kingdom. You may say that I am a creationist, however, I simply believe what the Bible tells me.

Two articles have caught my eye today, the first being in The Register and titled 'Creationists Want Your Children'. Basically the Royal Society are getting fed up of the fact that more and more people are denouncing evolution and believing in either biblical creation (i.e. Genesis 1, God created the earth in 6 days and had a break on the 7th) or intelligent design (a mostly American idea that essentially takes the religion out of creation in order to get it taught in American schools - legally nothing to do with religion can have any say in anything to do with the state ['separation of church and state']). If evolution is such a fool-proof theory, as the Royal Society claims it is, then why get in a little hissy fit over something so 'pointless' as creation or intelligent design? Or is it more along the lines that they've realised this 'theory' of evolution isn't all it cracked up to be and people want a bit more explanation. Such as, how did the first organisms actually come into existance from nothing? OK, so, with creationism there is an obvious element of faith that God created everything, from scratch, but the biblicl account also mentions a global flood - something that has been mentioned throughout many cultures even those that do not acknowledge the Bible. Little facts like this help to show the accuracy of the biblical record. So "creationism requires faith therefore it's not real science" - I've been told that before. However, belief in evolution requires even more faith: faith that the first organisms mytically appeared with no explanation, faith that the right kinds of genetic defects actually were beneficial to the organism and not harmful, faith that those mutations could actually be passed to the next generation... I actually think it's easier to believe that everything was created* as opposed to just randomly appearing by chance. Maybe that's the easy way out, but it makes sense to me.

* actually, more like every type was created - I'm not discounting the fact that species change over time - they just don't change into another species...

The second was on the BBC news site claiming that churches should back evolution. Ha! As if! I really can't see the church turning round and saying "actually, the bible is all wrong, evolution really did happen and Jesus was a monkey in a blue sash and a beard". Not likely. Apparently intelligent design is a threat to 'real scientific teaching' - well, I'm sorry but real scientific teaching should involve teaching all possible theories not just saying 'our theory is right, yours is wrong'; especially when the so-called 'theories' can't actually be proved (time travel hasn't been invented yet).

Like I said before, do the evolutionists see creation as a more powerful 'threat' to their precious little group than they initially thought? Seems to me like they're beginning to realise that we don't always take their word for it. When I was at uni many lecturers would often come out with unprovable and, frankly random, sayings like 'this of course proves evolution' when talking about the massively complex blood clotting factors - to me though it just proved that the whole lot was designed and created, I mean could all the inbetween states actually function correctly as a working system if it evolved gradually? Probably not...

Well, that was quite a long post for me! If you want to know more then take a look at Answers In Genesis or, for the biochemically minded, get a read of Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box"

See ya

MaFt