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Harv stirs the pot and invites a counterpoint.
Harv wrote:
2) Natural selection spoken of by Jesus - as a type of earthly creation: The parable of the sower which Jesus shows as God using natural selection as his means to create his spiritual kingdom (Matt. 13):
"Behold, a sower went out to sow..."
8) God did not proclaim any use of Natural Selection "to create his spiritual kingdom."
8) the parable of the sower shows biological understanding, but its reference to Natural Selection seems to show that he is not adversely judging those who cannot yet understand.
8) William Jennings Bryan was more modern than this! Bryan was a Bible-preaching politician who opposed letting natural selection run wild in human affairs. As a politician, Bryan advocated forless cruelty for the working class.
Bryan is also portrayed as an anti-evolutionist by history for his role helping prosecute the high school evolution teacher in the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in 1925.
While Jane Goodall observed that primates are
also, like human beings, capable of either cruelty or loving kindness, we have strong evidence that human beings are a special case above nature, not by merit, but by a special
phenomenon of the caacity for "design thought" -- hence not by merit but by having a capacity responsibility have we gained additional authority OVER nature. Therefore we are not in natural selection. This is not intended as a theological point but an observation.
Bryan, a leading Christian in his time, may have been well aware of Natural Selection's consequences when misapplied in human affairs, as it already had been in the social philosophy of industrialists of the late 19th Century....and probably saw that in its teaching, raw Evolutionary Theory has not been reconciled with the even more scientifically valid reality of the need for more kindness and love -- a "better stewardship" of all the world -- in the continuing pageant of life. Humanists today sometimes agree we must agree Evolution is true but oppose its purposeless directions in human affairs.
Blaah Blahh Blaah..uh oh,
Mike |
