Again, I get a posting topic from Jen at BlagHag. Maybe I should put her on my payroll or something? (OK… if I *HAD* a payroll.)
She blogged about how Indiana is one of 5 states where evolution is directly mentioned in state curricula for school. Not shockingly, California is one of them — we had UNITS on evolution in my two high school Bio classes.
My freshman Bio teacher Mr. Bowen was fanatical about it — he’d apparently grown up in a fundamentalist family and had students in the past who tried to undermine him with material from the Institute for Creation Research. AP Bio was along the lines of “we’re presenting this as a viable theory” and it was treated as an “if evolution occurred, this is how it happened thing” — faith wasn’t brought up and it was pretty chill. It’s also the part of Biology I liked best and the unit I did the best in as far as work and my exams.
It’s also one of those things that causes me to scratch my head because it isn’t mutually exclusive to Christianity for me. Maybe it’s because evolution does make sense — Genesis would jive with the punctuated equilibrium theory — or maybe because I’ve got the attitude that “the clock is evidence of the clockmaker”.
I do have an issue with it, which is mainly, with evolution, you have death before sin. If sin is the result of death (which is what the Bible says), then how can there be death of creatures before man sinned? If that were the case, death would just *be* and there would be no need for Christ’s atonement to overcome it.
Not a big deal to me either. I used to be real fundie about creationism. Now I don’t think it really matters. That is to say it’s clear to me there is a creator either way. And if God did use an evolutionary process…that is amazing! Life is still life…and it is miraculous either way!