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Morality is that which sustains life. | ||
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Evolution Journalists seem to think the pope repented when he made a statement supportive of evolution. Don't they know that the Catholic Church took a position supporting evolution shortly after Darwin proposed the concept? The popes say God created biological life through evolution. Conservatives have thrown everyone off the tracks claiming to represent God, the Bible and official religion in attacking evolution. Guess what. Conservatives don't speak for anyone but themselves, and they don't know what they are talking about. All realities evolve.All realities evolve including truth, knowledge, technology, institutions, religion, moral standards and biology. Is not science an evolution of knowledge? Is not the automobile following the steam engine an evolution of technology? Conservatives, at least in religious circles, are on a binge of attacking all types of evolution. They try to portray life as a static. As a static, human life is an end in itself where there are no responsibilities but to restore society to the purity of God's original creation. Material life has a purpose.If life has a purpose, and humans are supposed to be accomplishing something, then all of the requirements for constructivity are involved. Rationality must be applied to objective reality to get constructive results. The purpose of human life is supposed to be to overcome sin. It must be done in an indirect manner, because sin is too abstract and subconscious to be understood well. The basic procedure is to solve human problems. All elements of constructivity are required, and proper relationships between persons are established. So problem solving automatically overcomes sin without an abstract analysis being required. God forces people to solve problems.In order to force people to solve problems, God created material life with molecules which are extremely hard and stable. It takes a lot of work to get complex results with molecules. God forces people to solve problems by starting with simple conditions which have to be increased in complexity. The process of going from simple to complex is evolution. All types of evolution occur in human attempts to create more complex conditions of life. Reason is evolution of reality.To understand how and why evolution occurs, consider the reasoning process. Reason is creating relationships between realities. Whenever relationships are made, consistent relationships support each other, and inconsistent relationships contradict each other. So the former increase, and the later decrease. The increase in consistent relationships is the evolution of reality. Only the consistent relationships can cause realities to become large and complex. Inconsistent relationships cause realities to break up into small and conflicting pieces. Consistent relationships create a unified reality. Evolution is an increase in unified reality. God has the deck stacked through material conditions causing unified reality increase when realities interact. The primary factor causing that result was the use of molecules which stabilize realities. Once stabile realities exist, their interaction will increase unified reality. A lot of other factors are important in going from theoretical to actual. God must direct biological evolution to get the framework in place. Satan competes with God in biological evolution, but the framework has to be in place first. Satan then creates negative elements of evolution, such as insects and disease. All types of evolution result.Knowledge has to evolve, or there would be no purpose in education. Increased knowledge is an evolution of reality. Technology evolves, or there would be no difference between the cave men and the modern world. A complex piece of technology is a unified reality, or it won't work. In other words, the elements must have consistent relationships between them. Demonstrating the evolution of moral standards was one of the purposes of Genesis. Genesis attempts to show that there was no way to determine right-from-wrong until God created religion. Examples of extreme sin were described in Genesis, and there was no one to step in and say it was wrong. The Judeo-Christian line of religion was evolved in a stepwise manner, first informing Abraham, then creating simple laws through Moses, then creating some structure through temples and kings, then having Christ describe basic principles, and now having the modern world study the complexities. One of God's primary purposes in material life is to evolve truth—the most important being moral truth. Since sin cannot exist in the light of truth, the evolved truth becomes a shield against sin in the future. And the increasing truth also shows humans how to overcome sin and get saved. To create the evolution of moral truth, God allows good and evil to interact. Out of the interaction, truth evolves forward, just as it does during the reasoning process. Addendum. Look at the social impact that creationists have been having. They have the audacity of trying to impose creationism in the schools as equivalent to science. And they describe it on their websites as if it were scientifically superior to real science. Their science is total rubbish. But more basically, their standard of rationality is the problem. They cannot separate their subjective prejudices from objective reality. A large number of Christians have been buying into creationism along with the other conservative errors. They fall for the ploy of conservatives representing the Bible, official religion and a strict moral standard—in other words, orthodoxy. It's nothing but a sham. Their promotion of "moral absolutes" has been taking off as an indication of their success in promoting theological corruption. It doesn't justify a separate page, so I say a few words about it here. Absolutizing anything is a guaranteed corruption, because nothing is definable apart from its relationships to other realities. Conservatives slide into this subject by pretending that the objectivity of morality is the same as absolute morality. It isn't. Once they have the word "absolute" accepted, endless corruption follows. The first corruption is that the interpreters of the absolutes cannot be questioned, because questioning them is to question the absolute which they represent. Since it is an absolute, it is supposedly beyond question. So their corrupted view of things becomes unquestionable. Then they proceed to promote a dominating and personalized version of morality, where nihilism replaces rationality. If you get a chance to question the creationists, ask them why God buried dinosaur bones. They will say something to the effect that the dinosaurs were killed in the flood six thousand years ago. Then ask them why Noah didn't put the dinosaurs on the ark. If there are no errors in the Bible, why are they telling us Noah defied God? The best fossil evidence for evolution is with plants. Here's a reference for that: Thomas N. Taylor and Edith L. Taylor. The Biology and Evolution of Fossil Plants. 1993. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. |