This is an article about a poll that was conducted in 2006.




I'd be interested to learn what UM members think. There are three statements. Please indicate which one you most agree with.

• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.
• Man evolved with the guidance of God through millions of years.

I think that "but God had no part in this process." should be taken off question #2 as the theory as far as I know makes no reference to "God" what so ever.

No species is the finished article except when it becomes extinct.

Homo sapiens is changing into something else even as is every other species at a different pace.

On a philosophical note I think evolution is the act of creation. We are in that act of creation now. If you feel the need for a creator why does the creator have to be removed to the far distant past?

I have to agree with you my dear, and I also have to wonder what god it is that is being refered to. The christian god?

While I am not a Evolutionist, I find that particular theory to be much more believable than Creationism. The first problem with Creationism is, which Creation story do you accept as THE story. Every religion since the beginning of rational thought has a creation story, formulated by primitive savages to explain the (to them) unknowable. Even if you go with the creation story of the Abrahamic religions, you still have immense problems, foremost of which is fraud. Fraud is simply lying through action instead of word and God being the perfect entity, is by his very nature honest and incapable of lying. For a young earth Creationist theory to be true (and that is what you would have to accept under Biblical literalism), God would have had to accelerate the visibility of light from far-distant stars and galaxies and make other sweeping adjustments to reality, such as planting fossils of myriad extinct protozoa, animals, plants and primate species. This would constitute fraud on a scale of ridiculous proportions by an entity incapable of lying – sorry that makes absolutely no sense. Other problems are that highly advanced (for the period) literate societies existed at that time, societies that inscribed their correspondence on material that water would not damage. These societies have no records of a flood (which is part of the Creation sequence) and have no gaps in their history that would indicate the collapse of these cultures.
Evolution does not answer all the problems currently, but in around a century of existence it has made good progress on the problem, showing that the Creator did not “snap his fingers” or “blink” creation into existence, but instead used the natural laws that he put in place to form his “Creation”. The Creator is a loving entity, with love for all of his Creation, the myriad of stars, planets, galaxies, universes and their denizens; not a simple “king-sized” authoritarian blood-thirsty Bronze Age despot, restricted to one small insignificant mud ball, peopled by a race of hairless, incessantly chattering primates, spinning around a very average star in a very average stellar group in a very average galaxy! When I took biology in college (1960 – Yale), photosynthesis could not be explained, yet in 1997 when I took biology for my third degree, not only could they explain photosynthesis, but they could take the process down to the molecular and even atomic levels! That much progress in 37 years! As for evolution, all I can say is, watch this space….every day a new bit of data comes to light, yet Creationism is still stuck in the Bronze Age with no chance of advancing to the 21st century - Mako