Last Post on Creationism

This will be my last post on Creationism for a while. I hope I didn't bore everyone too much but it was fresh in my mind from the project I'm working on. Below, I give you the most open minded approach yet mentioned.

Theistic Evolutionists: That there is no necessity for conflict between science and religion is shown by the existence of theistic evolutionists. These people are creationists, and evolutionists. They believe that God set the universe in motion but that He works through natural processes that were encoded into the universe at the beginning. Natural selection and other evolutionary processes are examples. The majority of professional scientists in the United States who are believers in God would fall into this category.

However, there are subtypes even here. Many theistic evolutionists believe that God can and does occasionally intervene in the natural affairs of the world. This would allow for miracles, although they would be rare events. However, some theistic evolutionists are also “Deists.” Deists place great store on the ability to “reason” and do not believe that God intervenes in his creation. The universe was set to run in a particular way and God leaves it alone to do so. Thus, Deists would be unlikely to pray for God to directly intervene in their lives, as in to cure some illness, while non-Deist theistic evolutionists (say that three times fast) might well do so.

Surprisingly to some, theistic evolution, although not of the Deist subtype, is actually the officially sanctioned view of the Catholic Church and many mainstream Protestant religions, as well as of many Jewish people. With this viewpoint, there is no conflict between science and religion because no line is drawn in the sand. Churches reserve spiritual matters for themselves and leave physical explanations of the world to science. Science as it exists now simply cannot adequately investigate supernatural phenomena because they are—-by definition—-outside of nature. At the same time, science, with its slow but ultimately self-correcting approach, is the only method thus devised by human beings to uncover ultimate physical truths.