My timeline of the universe

[icarus4586]

      6010 years ago, in 4004 BC, the universe was created. Six days later, the first human was created. His name was Adam. A couple days after that, he underwent the first surgery, when God took one of his ribs and made a woman out of it

Comments

[icarus4586]

I should probably note that the problem I've been having is not chiefly a struggle with evolution. I was taught for the longest time that evolution and the Bible were incompatible, and so when I came to see that there was in fact loads of evidence for evolution, that threw me for a bit of a loop, but I got over it. The problem for me was that evolution is often set up as a poster child for a much bigger belief-system called naturalism.
The fact is that from cosmology to physics to biology, the universe all fits together like a gargantuan Swiss watch. This might reinforce your belief in God, or it might cause you to realize that our present understanding of the laws that govern this Watch is somewhat close to being good enough to rule out God's intervention in it. Theoretically, all we'd need is some really* fast computers and the ability to "measure" the universe - that is, to be able to quantify every aspect of it. Because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, it's not even theoretically possible to exactly measure every aspect of the universe, so God's presence can never be entirely ruled out. But it's close calls like that which have worried me.
The proximity of a number of Christians who reject evolution outright, because they've been told that it contradicts the Bible, has not helped me either. It's not a good reason to stop believing, but it didn't help. We'll leave it at that for now.

*These computers would have to be impossibly big and impossibly fast in order to simulate the universe at even "life speed."

[icarus4586]

Evolution itself doesn't contradict the Bible, per se. Obviously naturalism does, but the evolutionary process does not. There is no direct evidence for evolution in the Bible however, and like you mention evolution is often presented as "Ha! You see? Everything wasn't created as is! God clearly doesn't exist as presented in the Bible, which means the Bible is wrong, which means there is no God!" which is pretty bogus logic even if evolution did happen. People make evolution about religion when it's a scientific principle and not a theological one which is why it generally gets rejected outright by most Christians.

I guess what I'd like to point out is that from a faith perspective it makes exactly zero difference if evolution happened or not because last I checked evolution and the evidence for or against it is kinda irrelevant to the stuff Jesus was talking about, y'know?

- Aaron