“Differences in beliefs about origins reflect a diversity of attitudes toward reality in general. For atheists the universe is governed by impersonal forces of attraction and repulsion. There exists neither supernatural planner nor supernatural implementer. Rather, forces of nature, chance and the passage of time bring about worlds such as ours, provided all necessary conditions for life exist.
In contrast [we as Christians] attribute everything in the universe to an original cause, the will and ability of the creator as described in the Bible. [This] world is filled with evidences (sic) of superb design and grand purposes.”
From Javor, G. “The Scientific Case for Creation” in Westacott and Ashton, The Big Argument, Strand Publishing, Sydney 2005.
…God is the one who sits on the throne and rules over His creation. This information makes a tremendous difference in the way that people view their place in the universe.
“You’ve likely also understood that the creation-evolution debate is more than just an argument over scientific “facts”. Evolution is a pervasive worldview with far-reaching tentacles into virtually every aspect of our culture. At its very basic level it claims there is no Creator and that all living things (including human beings) have come about through blind chance random processes over millions of years. Our brain and even our very thought processes have also evolved; we can, therefore, choose what is right and wrong in our own eyes…The demeaning of human life can be traced back to an evolutionary worldview.”
This quote is from a creation ministry newsletter a friend handed to me.
It doesn’t go far enough for me. The choice of views about origins leads not just to moral outcomes (and I am a little wary of anything that reduces Christian faith to mere moralising, when all our righteousness is as filthy rags, to quote Paul, but beliefs do tend to produce moral outcomes) but to two opposed views of the world. For the Christian, life, love and relationship, in short God, comes before the world. For the materialist, life, love and relationship, indeed, the very idea of belief, come from within the world and are a consequence of material. They are therefore on a par with choice of shoe colour in basic significance.
I don’t think that theistic evolution really grapples with the divergence, at a basic level, between the two different views it pretends that it can bridge. I also don’t think that modern evangelism has properly analysed western culture to make meaningful contact with it; rather, it avoids the structure of modern western ‘religious’ belief and pretends that it shares the very Christian world view that it in fact rejects out of hand.
Just after I'd written this I heard about the mistreatment of children in Irish RC run institutions: I wonder what their beliefs really were!!
