VoT... It seems to me that you are equating Science with a religion, and faith into less than a relationship with the Creator...
There are those who would substitute Science for religion and yes, they do try to use it to discredit God... But there are people who would substitute the Bible for a relationship with God as well... I am saying that Scientific Theory is abused when thus used, just as Scripture is abused.
But this isn't a case where scripture is being used, it's a case of scripture being ignored. Though we can debate the details of creation because Genesis is far from an exhaustive step by step account of creation, the agenda to deny that there is even a Creator is what drives the evolution movement.
Evolution is a theory. Some scientist would use it as their 'scripture'... It does not equal the theory of evolution as evil. The fact that it is a theory means that it is only a guess and should be understood as "Not Law" and not proven. People who teach it as a proven fact are usually ignorant as to what a theory actually is.
Christians who do battle with a theory are fighting a losing battle. The battle lies with those who abuse theory and try to teach it as law. A theory is not proven, and so time is wasted by trying to disprove it with anything other than tangible, material evidence, since a theory must be proven with physical evidence to become accepted as scientific law. In order to counter the destructive attitudes of those who abuse theory, then it would be more constructive to explain and educate people as to what Theory actually is.
And yet education is not lacking, at least not on my part. Evolution's embarrassing gaps are well known among the fundamentalist Christians, particularly the Precambrian explosion and the omission of millions of critical transitional forms. The fossil record openly defies the claims of evolution and would have caused the rigorously intellectually honest Charles Darwin to abandon his theory if he had known what we know today.
The Theory of evolution is not the dominant philosophical foundation of science,
Yes it is. Watch Ben Stein's documentary.
it is the dominant philosophical foundation of the atheistic community, but there is a simple argument that can shut down an atheist very quickly. Theory is not proven as law. There is no universal law of evolution accepted in the whole of the scientific community... It is only accepted as law in the Church of Atheism which just so happens to have a few prominent science personalities as members. You can't fight this battle with an 'Our word against yours' attitude.
The science that most people read about is flavored by media and agendas. Studies are funded by governments and corporations... By the time we learn about theories or advances, or set-backs in theories, it has passed through biased sources to get to us. But if you look at the original theory without those filters or additives, you get... "What if this happened this way?" It is a discussion that begs closer examination. Some people say, "Yes, I think I know what you are getting at..." and others say, "I don't think so."
You actually believe in a purist form of science where scientists set aside their biases and predispositions, never hold on to theories in spite of contradicting evidence, and have no agenda save a candid search for truth. I don't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for you. Dominant science certainly isn't governed by the piety you wish it had.
The actual Theory of evolution is not so rigid as you claim. It has been revisted time and again, and continues to be revisited today. Many proponents of evolution acknowledge the holes in the theory. Evolution has broken into different camps, such as the macro crowd, and the micro crowd... There are many things that are left unexplained by the theory. The scientific community acknowledges this and have come up with many other theories to look into... The Atheistic church ignores the holes and claims the theory is an accepted law.
I did state that the order of evolution was not so out of line with the order of the Bible... I didn't say that they lined up. Yet still, if we want to go so far, we can debate that. The original Genesis account puts the Heavens creation before the Earth... We can make the assumption that it means that God created space, including stars, angels, other planets, and the like, or we can make another assumption...
The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
In the Torah, Genesis 1:1 can just as correctly be literally interpreted as, "When in the beginning, God Created the earth and the sky" ... There were already things going on, but we might assume that God had a vision for what he wanted, and He had already gathered the materials in place for his work. Back to the cake analogy, when I am mixing a cake, even though it is not baked yet, I still consider it a cake.
Speaking of the Torah, Ben Stein is Jewish.
We go on to find out that the earth was without form... and the elements that were to be its make-up were not yet cohesive... Then God turns on the light... After God turns on the light, he then separates light from dark... I suppose the best way to do that is to cast a shadow. I love the pictures of Earth from space... You actually see the separation of night and day on the Earth... The separation of light and dark may be when all the elements that were to make the Earth, as we understand it, took solid form. Without the rotation of the planet, we do not have a distinction of night and day. Darkness and light are not separated in space, only with planetary rotation do we get this distinction. God defined this for us on the first day.
God then goes on to separate the water and land.... from the earth which is now in existence. He also defines the land and sea. This was the second day... (the word that is translated into 'good' is also the same word for 'functional' or 'adequate' in the Hebrew language)... The Bible goes on to put the order of all visible creation as plants on the third day, lower lifeforms on the fourth day (English uses the words fish and fowl, but the Hebrew word is literally translated as swarmers and fliers)... Then we have animals on the fifth day... Lastly we have man.
The scientific theory of evolution deals with the physical progression of why things might look as they do now. Humanity is above the animals in both evolution and Creationism... Creation states spiritually we are less than what we were when god first created us... The theory of evolution isn't concerned with our spiritual progress, because science is the study of the physical.
I think this demonstrated how evolution and the Bible can loosely line up... If we keep in mind that evolution is an unproven theory, but the Bible has the truth, we can just understand that we have more of the story than the guessers. Those who would abuse scientific theory are false even to science. True Science deals with trying to prove the physical , and is not meant to disprove the spiritual. There are groups of people who have been deceived by such abuses. Any movements to use science against God is false, even though many people have entered the scientific field thinking that it is what Science does.
You use the term "loosely" because you gloss over glaring contradictions and don't even broach on the subject of the origins of man, which evolution claims is not divine in nature, but rather a lucky product of a long line of genetic mutations beginning with micro-biotic forms in a primordial soup. The contrast couldn't be more conspicuous. The Genesis account stands in stark opposition to the claims of evolution on every level.
As Christians, we must remember that even the part of the Truth was used to tempt Jesus in the wilderness. If our adversaries can use the truth to deceive, they can surely use incomplete and/or wrong guesses. We must demonstrate the distinction between Science and Faith by showing that we do not have all the answers, and we are okay with that. If we had all the answers, it wouldn't be faith... Not having all the answers allows for others to have parts of the truth. When it comes to Science, we just need to step back and remember that theory is, by definition, unproven. Anytime anyone tells you otherwise, then can explain that they believe in something just as unproven by physical evidence as you believe.
You err again, overlooking history. You presume that Christianity has pitted itself against science when the precise opposite happened. The greatest scientific discoveries in the history of man have mostly been by Christians and it was Christians who authored the scientific method. It wasn't until the materialist age of the 19th century that science was repurposed to support materialism and confound belief in the divine.
The Bible gives us some ingredients for Creation, it does not give us the recipe. Science is seeking to find the recipe. Such as my cake, I can tell you I uses eggs, flour, sugar, and milk; but I haven't told you how much of each. I might leave out that I used some vanilla or almond extract. I probably won't tell you whether I used an electric mixer or a wooden spoon... I might leave out whether the cake baked in an aluminum pan or a glass one... The Bible gives us the important stuff, not every detail... If we can acknowledge that, and admit that others might have a little insight to the unimportant details, then maybe people would be more willing to listen to our testimonies as well. We must understand that even though many scientist have taken it upon themselves to misuse science, Science itself is not capable of disproving God and the Bible, as God is spiritual and the Bible is a spiritual book. God set into motion, the physical laws which science aims to explain.
Your now thrice touted cake baking analogy can be useful if you understand that the whole thrust of evolution is to defend the claim that the cake baked itself. If you don't understand that, your analogy falls apart faster than Ikea furniture.
