Hi Jeanie

Given that the Pope has declared evolution to be more than a theory given that it is supported by such a mountain of evidence I suspect that there are more believers in evolution who also believe we have souls than you may realize. In fact most christians sects accept evolution yet I suspect they all also believe in souls. That someone accepts evolution tells you nothing about whether someone believes in souls. That I have declared myself an agnostic and an atheist tells you where is stand on this question but no my acceptance of evolution.

Logically I don’t think it limits god to suggest that he may have used evolution as one of his creation tools though it does logically limit him to suggest that he could not have. I never said that god did use evolution; I don’t believe that is true, but for an all powerful being he must logically have been capable of doing so. Of course he must also be capable of creating the whole lot yesterday with everything, including our memories, already in place. Logically he must be capable of doing that to be all powerful.

What we observe in the wild, in the lab and in the fossil record goes well beyond adaptation to suite a niche. Did you know that you would not recognise any of the creatures who lived during the Cambrian? Not one. There were no species alive then which is sill alive today, not one. There were no people alive then so we can’t use recorded history of any kind to tell us what happened.

Recorded history can be a very useful source of information but it suffers from a number of problems that physical evidence does no. People misunderstand, misrepresent, forget, lie, and just plain get it wrong. Physical evidence is incapable of doing these things. The other major problem with recorded history is that it needs someone to do the recording so it is useless once you step into a realm without people. Obviously many things happen when people aren’t watching even today but this problem becomes absolute when you examine the history of this planet before humans arose. What does human recorded history have to say about the Cambrian for instance? There were no people around at that time so we have no choice but ot look to other sources of information if we want to know what happened back then. IN fact the vast majority, well over 99.999% of the earths history happened before there was any such thing as human recorded history. Do we just ignore that time?

There certainly many ways to interpret the bible, most chrstians have no problem with the idea that science has the correct view of the history of the earth despite the fact that this view directly and unequivocally contradicts the plain words of genesis. I cited the bible in an earlier post to show you just how wrong it is, can you explain what the bible means and how that can be reconciled with the evidence we get from science that shows genesis to be so very clearly and profoundly wrong on so many details? Or do you simply write off the findings of science in favour of the words of the bible?

All the best Jeanie

Russell