Creation-Evolution Posts and Reading Recommendations

I’ve been posting a good deal about evolution since the Florida science standards have been rewritten and it’s time for comments. Early next year we’ll be dealing with a vote. Generally people think the new standards are good, but as is not uncommon, a different standard is applied to evolution than to other scientific theories.

The issue is often framed either as faith vs. evolution, i.e. all who accept evolution are atheists, and atheists are bad, so we should reject evolution. As a subset the issue is framed as Christianity vs. evolution. Every aspect of that framing is wrong. Evolution is a well-supported scientific theory. It’s unfortunate that one can smear a theory by associating it with a certain category of people, but in the case of atheists that seems to work. It’s wrong, but there it is. But one of the advantages to science is that its results can be replicated, and they look the same to a Hindu, a Christian, or an atheist. One’s religious beliefs don’t change the information. Thus who it is that produces the information is not the issue.

To back up some of my current writing, I’d like to point to some of my past post, taking on the religious issue first. There is not just one creationism. Even Christians subscribe to a number of different posts. In my review of What Is Creation Science? I commented on the attempt by the authors to separate the flood geology, the age of the earth, and what they call the “fact” of creation. This is an astounding claim. How can one make predictions about the fossil record without any timeline? How can one make predictions about it without regard to a universal flood? If such a flood happened, then it would certainly leave evidence. This situation is only made more complex by views such as old earth creationism, ruin and restoration creationism, and some minimal forms of ID that claim that perhaps God either tweaked the creation just a little bit here and there, or perhaps only created the first life-form with front-loading.

I wrote a series of posts early in the days of this blog outlining these various views and also relating them to basic Christian doctrines. The major posts in that series were:

• Young Earth and the Bible
• The Bible and Old Earth
• Ruin and Restoration Creationism
• The Bible and Theistic Evolution
• Creation, Evolution, and Genesis 1-11
• Reading on Creation and Evolution

For those interested in the religious aspects in particular, combine this with my series on my Participatory Bible Study blog. That series actually starts with Genesis 3, but it references my pre-blog (though updated) essay, Genesis Creation Stories – Form, Structure, and Relationship, and then continues with Genesis 3.

You can get the whole series using this link, or by clicking on “Genesis” in the tag cloud in the right sidebar (at Participatory Bible Study).

To the list of suggested readings, I would now have to add at least John Haught’s book God After Darwin, and Richard Colling’s book Random Designer, which I’m reading right now.