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Asked by lucyb to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 14 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by astroaaron, tanith, thomr023, megnesium.
Question: evolution vs creation..... which one?
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Mark Basham answered on 12 Nov 2011:
Got to be Evolution for me, although its not really my field. As far as I’m concerned Evolution explains every bit of life on earth really well, and if the universe/world was created, the creator must worked hard to make it look like it came about by evolution.
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Jony Hudson answered on 12 Nov 2011:
That’s a good question 🙂 Now, I should say, I’m not an expert on evolution or biology at all, but this is what I think:
I don’t think it has to be one versus the other.
I think evolution is a scientific theory that has a lot of evidence to back it up. And I’d be really surprised if someone ever found evidence to prove it wrong, and I think most other scientists would too. It explains so much of how we are made, and where we came from in a wonderful, elegant way.
When people talk about creation they are usually talking about a description from a religious text about how things were made (often the Bible). A lot of people respect these religious texts a great deal, and I think it’s always important to show respect to other people and their views.
Now, a very small number of people say that evolution contradicts what’s in the Bible, and that both can’t be true. But actually, I think most religious people think that it’s possible to both believe evolution is true, and to hold religious beliefs and to believe what’s in the Bible. I think it’s a case of understanding that science and religion are taking different viewpoints on understanding the same, amazing, mindblowing question: how did we get to be here? This is a big question, and there can be more than one way of looking for answers.
So, in answer to the question, I’d say both! I don’t think it has to be “evolution vs. creation”, or indeed “science vs. religion”. I think the two can get along just fine so long as people are thoughtful and respectful to each other 🙂
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Ben Still answered on 14 Nov 2011:
Evolution has hard scientific evidence to back up the theory. Creation requires you to take things as they are written, with blind faith, which goes against they way I think naturally as a scientist. So evolution all the way.
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Katharine Schofield answered on 14 Nov 2011:
There’s overwhelming evidence to support the theory of evolution, in my view there’s no doubting that and it scares me a lot that there are people out there who do.
BUT it depends what you mean by creation… Do you mean creationism (the religious belief that everything was created pretty much as it now is)? Or could it mean the big bang (as in, the scientific theory that the universe started as an infinitely dense singularity and then rapidly expanded and cooled)? Some people believe that the creation story in Genesis is a literal truth, and therefore that the earth is less than 10000 years old. Now that’s pretty easy to debunk just by thinking about the geology of the earth. However, the big bang could be thought of as a creation, as a process which caused the universe to exist. What happened before the big bang? Is it even sensible to think about a ‘before’ if all of time and space were curled up in an infinitely small ball? There are so many huge questions, you start to move quite quickly from physics into philosophy. I don’t think that religious faith and scientific credibility are incompatible. It’s just important to keep an open mind.
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