The conflict of creationism and evolution. How can we know the truth?

Question

the demands of evolution and creation cannot be reconciled with each other because they represent two fundamentally different, mutually hostile, and mutually exclusive systems. They do not represent various aspects of the same truth, but rather two mutually opposing systems. They differ and diverge from each other right from the presuppositional level so that any attempt at reconciling them is a vain exercise. What's needed in such cases is to scrape the inferior set of presuppositions, so that the remaining better set of presuppositions provides the more authentic picture of reality.
Dr Johnson C Philips.

How then does one know for certain what the superior truth is?

Answer 1

Without endorsing Dr Phillips' perspective — more because I find it presumptuous and arrogant than because I think he is factually wrong — the way to evaluate a scientific claim is on the preponderance of evidence. The 'preponderance of evidence' scheme implies the following:

• The one makes the effort to incorporate all relevant observations as evidence for one's preferred theory
• That evidence is evaluated in terms of its overt, physical properties, not in terms of subjective assertions, or assertions about the subjective intents of others
• That the resulting theory presents a coherent and internally consistent story

As a rule, creationism in its political sense fails all three of these principles: it ignores massive amounts of observable evidence, it dismisses other observations as fabrications or lies promoted by scientists and secularists, and it glosses over glaring inconsistencies in its own theoretical presentation. Evolution is clearly superior as a scientific theory.

That being said, creationism is only problematic in its political sense: in the effort to press their theory as 'scientific' while avoiding the rigors of scientific observation and analysis. At the end of the day, evolution does not affect our daily lives, and one can function perfectly well in society — outside of a few careers in medicine, biology, and academia — without ever thinking about it at all (in exactly the way that one can walk to the grocery store without working out Newton's laws of motion). In that sense, a belief in creation in innocuous, and if it is an integral part of an overarching moral system, it may be superior for that purpose. Not everything needs to be evaluated on scientific grounds. The reason this issue has become so notorious is that evolution has become a symbol in some fundamentalist religious circles of the incursion of secular moral decadence, or of the rejection of religion and God — an impression magnified by some of evolution's more vile and aggressive proponents — and symbolic warfare is always irresolvable.

Most religious people are perfectly content to accept evolution as part of the 'Divine Plan,' and most secularists are willing to coexist with religious belief in that 'live and let live' sense. However, hard-liners on both ends of the spectrum do their best to maintain the polarization, for reasons I do not care to speculate on. See it for what it is: a political dogfight that is less about the bone in question than about establishing dominance.

Answer 2

How does one find Truth is the same as it's always been: seek with an earnest heart. Perhaps that is what you are doing now, so here is my answer from the universe.

Dr. Phillips is wrong. Just like Hegel suggested you can find a synthesis between two opposing viewpoints without compromising either. There is always another line between any set of data. So never get too complacent. Both science and religion have fallen into this trap: narcissism. They are in love with their own models. Yet their models obviously have not accounted for everything otherwise there'd be no conflict and the world would be at peace.

The following is from the Messianic prophesy of the Jews. You can marry the two with having multiple dimensions of Time. The physicist Richard Feynmann posited the existence of loops of time, energy, and particles (what I've called Feynmann Loops). With two dimensions of time you can reconcile of the conflicts between what happened with science after the discovery of the Americas (and a whole new race of humans) and their own history going back to the Jews and Ancient Egypt.

There is always a way to find the Truth. Remember that. Most people are simply fairly content without it, so it took us 5000 years to have the sophistication to understand GOD and the Universe itself. But yet, the Truth never changed...

Answer 3

One line of reasoning to assess the truth or falsity of a belief system is to look at what Jesus would call the fruit in an individual or society that holds that belief. In other words, if you want to know whether someone's thought processes are sound, take a look at the outworking of their thought in the life that they live.

Perhaps you might say that the evidence is circumstantial, perhaps not. But I would argue that the last century has witnessed, in formerly 'Christian' countries at least, a catastrophic decay in morality at all levels in society. I cannot help but correlate that decline with the replacement of belief in a loving Creator God with adherence to the doctrine of 'survival of the fittest' and the 'selfish gene'.

Surely when we see people living for themselves with scant regard for the impact of their actions on others, indeed trampling on others to get to the top, it seems just to be consistent with the idea that what matters is that you survive, regardless of whether or not anyone else does in the process.

In my opinion, such a struggle does not bring progress, but rather is the progenitor of the destruction of a race. We formerly Christian countries are not destined for greatness, but rather societal collapse, if things carry on the way they are.

To follow that line of reasoning then, to argue for evolution as a process that produces life and order is like arguing that a bomb explosion will produce beautiful art.

Only a great artist can bring forth beauty. Only an all-wise, all-powerful God could have created a world as stunningly beautiful as ours. And to say that He used evolution to do so is like saying that Rembrandt produced his work by throwing millions of paint buckets at the canvas in the hope that one day the result would be a masterpiece.