Are Evolution and Christianity Completely Incompatible?

[Whateverist]

I don't see a way to get human evolution into the Bible.

Hardly surprising.  I don't believe any mention at all of evolution is made in the bible.


However, if you subscribe to a literal reading of the bible, you will think Genesis rules out evolution.


But if you read the bible allegorically, then there is no reason whatsoever to reject evolution.


Your choice of course, just as it is my choice not to read the bible at all.

[Regina]

No, not unless you're a Christian who views creationism as a purely symbolic story, like I did when I claimed to be Catholic.

I was never a creationist thanks

[Whateverist]

And here we are bashing those poor catholic priests just because they are doing it wrong!

We have a winner!

[Anomalocaris]

I do not see how they could be compatible.

Christianity is only incompatible with evolution if you're doing it wrong, you know, literally.

Christians are only Christians because they are doing it wrong.

[paulpablo]

The bible says god created man in a few days, if it's talking in poetic language as a book of poetry then people should treat it as a book of poetry and not make a big deal of it, if it's saying god literally made earth and then man came along a few days later then it's wrong and still shouldn't be taken seriously.
The same reasons why dinosaurs and the bible are incompatible.
The only thing Christianity is compatible with is other ancient myth stories, it's half painful, half funny to see people going over thousand year old books to desperately try and see if maybe some translation or some interpretation works so the words can be compatible with modern science.

[Dystopia]

Christianity is only incompatible with evolution if you're doing it wrong, you know, literally.

Christians are only Christians because they are doing it wrong.

Genius

[loganonekenobi]

At risk of sounding like a total fool my idea is that the God of the bible was an alien. I know the idea is not novel but to me it makes sense. Even today most people think of gods and angles coming down from the heavens and actually look up ward (space) and of course the whole thing about destroying cities with celestial fire turning any who see it to salt.... it has some metaphor to advanced tech. It would be easy to convince primitive man they were gods with such tech.

That may be what happened. So here you are the alien gods of the newly civilized man. Men have barely come out of the caves. How are you going to explain 13 billion years of creation or 3.5 billion years of complex evolution to such people.

If this/these deity/dieties did then the writers (moses, abraham) probably either couldn't understand the concept of evolution or such a time scale or they figured no one would believe them so they wrote the deities words as they could understand them or sell them to the people.

Just a strange but possible explantion of why evolution and Christianity might co-exist.

[ignoramus]

That's been one of my pet theories too.
It explains a lot of things, but in the end, I just want to know how or who made the aliens.

[Pyrrho]

...


But if you read the bible allegorically, then there is no reason whatsoever to reject evolution.

...

But what then, is the garden of eden?  What does the garden of eden represent?  What of original sin?  How can the allegory make any sense at all if evolution is true?  And how could evolution be compatible with a good, omnipotent, omniscient god?  Evolution is brutal and nasty, and any being that chose that method to make something either is incapable of something better (so not omnipotent) or just does not mind a lot of suffering (so not good at all).

It seems to me that the only way one could suppose that evolution is compatible with the Bible, even just taking the Bible as metaphorically true, is to not pay attention to any of the details or think it through.

What I have noticed is people saying "metaphor" and "allegory" and then simply ignoring what the stories say altogether.  You can see that in this thread:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-34389.html

When a story is an allegory, the story still says whatever it says, and one must make sense of it somehow, or it fails as an allegory.

[Excited Penguin]

...


But if you read the bible allegorically, then there is no reason whatsoever to reject evolution.

...

But what then, is the garden of eden?  What does the garden of eden represent?  What of original sin?  How can the allegory make any sense at all if evolution is true?  And how could evolution be compatible with a good, omnipotent, omniscient god?  Evolution is brutal and nasty, and any being that chose that method to make something either is incapable of something better (so not omnipotent) or just does not mind a lot of suffering (so not good at all).

It seems to me that the only way one could suppose that evolution is compatible with the Bible, even just taking the Bible as metaphorically true, is to not pay attention to any of the details or think it through.

What I have noticed is people saying "metaphor" and "allegory" and then simply ignoring what the stories say altogether.  You can see that in this thread:

https://atheistforums.org/thread-34389.html

When a story is an allegory, the story still says whatever it says, and one must make sense of it somehow, or it fails as an allegory.

Let me be the Keanu Reeves to your Al Pacino for a second.

God could be both good and all powerful[these qualities would be irrelevant though] but would want to give nature a chance of making itself work, instead of just manipulating it into whatever form he wants it to take. Besides, that would be impossible to do, since he couldn't want anything in particular, given how he would be the only thing in existence before Creation. He could only ever know himself and nothing else. Therefore God is, in fact, the universe itself. We are God. That, or he found a way to create something out of nothing, in other words, something independent of and wholly different from but at the same time caused by him.

At least that's the only thing that would make sense from a theistic/deistic/apatheistic/pantheistic/atheistic POV. But then God would be, at the same time, irrelevant and redundant, by definition, since he would have divorced himself form existence at the single point called the Big Bang. The Big Bang was, in fact, God. This is what all the fuss is actually about. This is why people have this religious need. We, as people devout to science, on the other hand, see the Big Bang from another perspective, and this is why theists are ridiculous to us. We are moths that are too close to the flames to understand what they might look like from afar. But the butterflies carry on bathing themselves in the sun, prefferring the distant approach to our close one. There need evolve a new group of  Lepidoptera, a sort of crossover between atheists and theists - apatheists. Atheists who are pantheistically theistic.