A Line in the Sand
MICHAEL RUSE
Category: EVOLUTION | DIFFERENCE
PURCHASE THIS CLIP: Individual Clip
No matter what our beliefs are concerning evolution (or anything else for that matter), there is a point in dialogue when we say enough is enough. For Michael, that point is when Christians “unreasonably interfere with people’s personal lives”. I used to travel with a public speaker that spoke to college students about pornography. The day before each presentation I’d walk around campus with a camera and ask students “what do you think about porn?” I did about a thousand of these interviews and the most common response was “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody and it stays out of children’s reach, it’s OK with me.” That was their line in the sand in regards to pornography.
DISCUSSION QUESTION:
Is there a point where you tend to draw a line in the sand for issues like these?
Strikes me as more than a bit disingenuous. For example – on one hand he acknowledges ideas have consequences, yet asserts the validity of his perspectives while denying not just plausibility but opportunity to contrary positions. The logical consequences of evolution and atheism are quite clear and profound, as are those of a Risen Savior. At the end of the day, the two positions are irreconcilably different.
He’s concerned about religion effecting people’s personal lives. How could it not? A God that fails to reach in and address individual needs, shame, and sin is an irrelevant deity.
Most of the fallacies on both sides of this debate come from focusing on a timeline of creation. The approach of cosmology and evolution is to trace the timeline back to a beginning — for cosmologists it might be the Big Bang. For evolutionists, it’s the primordial ooze in which amino acids first formed. The only room for God in this approach is creation of that beginning, then He steps aside and lets it unfold according to its own natural patterns. Religionists typically have God kneading the clay of creation while it’s spinning on the wheel as a continuing process. Yet God transcends the material world, so we get bogged down trying to explain creation in terms of time and matter. I see God more as a novelist or playwright whose characters have autonomy written into their being. A good writer doesn’t necessarily start at what we see as the beginning — he may start with a single character and situation, then the story flows backward and forward from there, forming a whole that makes perfect sense from beginning to end.
I am a Chistian and I do nothave a problem with evolution or the Big Bang. I can care less if we (humans) come from monkeys or fish. God is the Creator and that’s what matter to me.