• Question: Do you belive in the theory of evolution or do you belive God or a bit of both?

    Asked by bfill2 to Andrew, Beth, Bruce, Lindy, Lizzie on 18 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Beth Mortimer

      Beth Mortimer answered on 18 Jun 2012:


      I fully believe in the theory of evolution. The evidence for it through experimental work, as well as long term observation is practially indisputable. I don’t think that believing in evolution means you can’t believe in God. There is only a small minority of people that think that evolution goes against the bible (as God created the world in 7 days). Some people also believe that God may have designed evolution.

    • Photo: Bruce Alexander

      Bruce Alexander answered on 18 Jun 2012:


      I get a little twitchy when people talk about “belief” in science. For me, “belief” is something you have in an idea that you can neither disprove, nor prove. You just *have* to believe it. The existence of God or Gods or gods (depending on your religion, or lack of it) is something that is very difficult to deign an experiment to test. This means you either have to believe it or you don’t.

      By and large, science is about knowing about facts. There are exceptions to this, but let’s not go too deeply into the philosophy and quantum mechanics. The idea is to construct a theory based on the facts that you think you know and test it using experiments designed to push the theory a little. This is how Darwin came up with the theory of evolution – he took a lot of observations and figured that there might be something that is responsible for subtle changes in species over time. The theory of evolution has worked well in explaining so many things up until now although there are exceptions as with many theories (It has been said that there are no excpetions, only incomplete theories…)

      Based on these descriptions, there is nothing to stop people believing in a God (or god or gods, etc) and understanfding a particular scientific theory to be valid and correct. Some of the best scientists are religious (some of the best scientists are also athiests…there is no known correlation between faith and science!).

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