CREATION? EVOLUTION?

HOW ABOUT CREVOLUTION!

CREVOLUTION – The timeline continuum of the belief in creation combined with the science of evolution. Bringing science and faith together. (Yup I made that up.)

I start out most of my blog post by providing some of my background in relation to the topic I am writing about. I tell about my background, experience or relationship with someone I know. I do this not to prove I am right or know more than someone else, but to show where my thought process comes from.

I was born and raised a Catholic. Went to private Catholic school grades K-8, a private high school grades 9-12 and a college that did have a Catholic base. Jen and I both read the Upper Room daily devotional each day. My parents were devout Catholics. We did all the Catholic things. Went to church on Sunday, helped clean and set up the church, and participated in fund raising events; Sunday Brunch, pasta dinners, and roast pork sandwich nights. We even had deer and wild mushroom dinners periodically with the parish priest and family friends at someone’s private home. I also did my tour of working bingo on Friday nights as a young teenager (where the older women certainly let you know you were young and attractive).

In grade school we had a May Procession, First Holy Communion, Confirmation and the dreaded visit to confession (where most of the time you made shit up). If I told the truth about what I did I’m sure the church would shake and small amounts of rubble would have fallen to the floor. So I lied, which made going to confession very redundant. Lie, go to confession and lie while in confession, go back to confession because I lied and so on……. I was a choir boy & altar boy (yes we ate the host and drank the wine while putting it away after mass). Sometimes taking a pocket full of host with us to eat on the walk home. Hey they tasted good. That meant stealing something, causing me to go to confession, and the whole cycle would start all over again.     

My mother-in-law is a retired Methodist minister. I mentioned her in a previous post and how my family responded to that. I was married in the Methodist church, not because I didn’t want a Catholic service, but because my wife was Methodist and my mother-in-law could preside over the service. I did want a Catholic priest to participate in the service. So, I called on one of my high school mentors, Fr. Antonucci. Well first I asked Brother Corso (Ice Hockey Moderator). What I didn’t realize was that he could not participate in a marriage because he was not fully ordained. I called Fr. Antonucci. When I ask Antonucci to join in my marriage ceremony, he asked me if I had been practicing my religion. Was I going to church and all that other shit.

I had prepped myself for this conversation by talking with my soon to be mother-in-law. I ask her “What is the major difference between the Methodist and Catholic religions?” She proceeded to tell me transubstantiation “the conversion of the substance of the eucharistic elements into the body & blood of Christ at consecration. Only the appearance of bread and wine remain.” – Christian Theology.

I was telling Antonucci I was going to church on Sunday (Methodist service), still believed in life after death, still treated others as I wanted to be treated and so on. But he still kept going back to wondering if I was practicing my religion. I wanted to say yes, I play hockey as much as possible to get better at what I do, that is my religion, but I thought better. Antonucci says he has to check with the bishop to see if it is ok for him to participate. I say “Father the only difference between the 2 religions is transubstantiation, am I right?” There was silence. I say “you know what father, you have done a lot for me in school and I appreciate your guidance, but I got this. Thanks.” And I hung up the phone. The Catholic church just lost another one.

That experience changed my entire outlook on religion. I still live with a spiritual base. A belief in some higher power, greater spirit (spirits). I just think differently about it. I was having a conversation with my brother-in-law awhile back, when the conversation of religion & the Bible came up. Joe reminded me that the Bible is someone’s interpretation of what happened. We either believe or don’t believe it happened. As I was reading for this blog, I came across this from The Message//Remix, The Bible in Contemporary Language by Eugene H. Peterson – his comment about the Bible; “but in reality, it was originally written in the language of fisherman, shopkeepers, and other regular people.”

I’ve always wondered why there was a push/pull over the birth of the world, planets, and matter, between creation theory & evolution. The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe there is a blending of both. Why not? I believe you can put a timeline together that follows from the Big Bank theory thru evolution, through the stories of the Bible. Remember the comment that the Bible is someone’s interpretation of what happened. If no one was around when God created the earth, stars, light & Adam & Eve, then who wrote the Book of Genesis? I know, you can say the same thing about the Big Bang. No one was around to see it. That is correct, but there is scientific evidence that it did happen. Think about these things;

• The Big Bang dates back 13.8 million years ago. The theory offers that in the beginning there was an infinitely dense tiny ball of water (matter). Then it all went bang, giving rise to atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies.
• Evidence of human lineage to the great apes in Africa dates back sometime between 6 & 7 million years ago.
• Evidence of tool making dates back to about 3.3 million years ago.
• The age of oldest remains of the genius homo is younger dating back to some 2.8 – 2.75 million years ago in Ethiopia.
• A collection of shell fragments, a complete jaw bone and stone tools is about 315,000 years old.
• Julius Caesar rained in 48-44 BC
• Egyptian history dates to 4300 BC (BCE).
• The Book of Genesis states that Adam lived a total of 930 years Others in the book lived 130 plus years. Really! No one has lived that long to date.
• The Book of Genesis says Eve is the mother of all living. That is possible since Eve is believed to be the first woman, and the first to give birth.
• The date of Jesus’s birth is not in the gospel or any historical source. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Most biblical scholars accept a date of between 6 BC and 4 BC, the year Herod died.

In my opinion the difference between those who believe in Creation and those who believe in Evolution is the book of Genesis. A story, that someone decided to tell, to generate a belief in the stories that followed. I think you can remove Genesis and some other books from the Bible and still believe in the stories. Some stories of the Bible can be correlated back to a specific time in history. I believe there is a different beginning to those stories.  As mentioned earlier, I believe you can put a timeline together that follows from the Big Bank thru evolution, through the stories of the Bible. Why can’t it be both? Follow my thought process.

There is no description of God in the bible. We don’t know if God is a he, she or thing (some energy). God is each individual’s belief in some higher power or spirit. As stated in some biblical references God is the cumulative energy of the universe. If God is the cumulative energy of the universe, and God is the creator of heaven, earth and all matter, then maybe God created the Big Bang, thus producing all planets, stars and matter. God is the energy that created the universe and is the universe. The great unknown. Once God created the universe, the science of evolution began. I’m not going to go through each phase of evolution. But you can say that based on evolution Adam & Ave were products of evolution. There is scientific proof of the development of atoms into animals and then into humans. Even scientist named the first human remains Adam. And if Eve was the first female, that still makes her the mother of all living (as stated in the Bible).

The other thing I found is that there are no dates in the Bible. Maybe there are and I just didn’t look hard enough. It seems like the Bible was living one calendar and evolution was living another. Do I believe a man named Jesus walked the earth and walked among men, was executed during the reign of Tiberius, by the authority of Pontius Pilot, the Roman governor of Judea Province, yes, it is possible. People were hung as a form of execution back in that time. Again, a time that can be correlated to a date in time. Now there are stories from the Bible that I can’t believe. Some I have had discussions over with my mother-in-law. I find it hard to believe in the immaculate conception. Sorry I think Joseph and Mary slept together and yes Jesus was the product of that event. Not believing in the immaculate conception does not bring any less worth to Jesus’s value to the human race and his effect on a society as a prophet. Was there a flood, and Noah built an ark and saved the human race. I don’t think so. In 2020 the Institute of Creation Research acknowledged that, despite many expeditions, Noah’s Ark had not been found. Many of the supposed findings and methods used in the search are regarded as pseudoscience and pseudoarcheology by geologist and archeologist (Wikipedia – Searches for Noah’s Ark). Maybe there was a flood after the ice age, a lot of things died, but somethings survived and through evolution the human race emerged. I do believe that there are some representations in the Bible that can be correlated to the calendar. It would take several years and a team of people to paste that timeline together. 

You can be spiritual, you can believe in a God, you can believe in a savior named Jesus, you can believe in evolution and you can believe in the stories. You can believe in both!