Creation

I have never posted on this topic before.

Creation vs. Evolution? If it is as simple as that, then I come down on the side of creation. After all, I am a Catholic, and Catholics believe in a perfect Creator God outside the Universe who created all things, and who willed that at the end it be comedy rather than a tragedy.

I am no biologist. I remember looking at some cells under a microscope in biology at Ardrossan Academy in 1977.

I am a historian. I do know that it is impossible to be a good historian in methodological terms, whatever one believes, if one constantly assumes that God intervenes in history. This does not mean that God does not intervene in history, but that bad history writing results if the writer is willing to use divine intervention as as "cause." If such assumptions were allowed in academic history any writer could interpret any event as evidence/counter-evidence of God's will.

In the same way, as far as I see it, no biologist can allow any notion of divine intervention into the methodology of science. Evolutionary theory (always open to amendment, like all successful scientific theories) cannot allow any notion of divine intervention without fatally undermining the approach.

But, just as I do not object to a suggestion that, in some actual cases, God may have intervened in history, I do not object to the suggestion that God may have directed evolution. I would not pretend in any way to understand such intervention (why should God have intervened to save France in the fifteenth century but not intervene in Darfur? Why is God so wasteful when it comes to living species?).

I do assert that neither historians nor biologists ought invoke God. God-talk makes for bad history and bad biology. That does not mean God-talk makes for bad morality.

Although, as we have seen, God-talk does not necessarily make for good-living either.