Religion Vs. Evolution

(Author's Note: This is another post that was originally on my tumblr. This will be the last of such posts. Enjoy!)

This is just a theme that I’ve been thinking of lately, trying to get back into science, one of my passions, which I’ve been neglecting as of late. The following is not meant to offend anyone, just state my view, and hopefully help others who are confused or interested in discussing the topic. Religion and Evolution have been at odds since the theory began. Religion states that the world has been created by intelligent design; science states that it was created by a “big bang,” but who is really right in this scenario? In whom do we place our collective trust? I am a Messianic Jew, some might call me a Christian, but the basic belief is the same, I believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, which some may say skews my scientific beliefs. The old adage states that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. I propose that I’ll take my slice of cake and stuff my face with it. In my opinion, science, namely Evolution, and Religion, namely Christianity and Judaism (the two with which I am familiar) can go together, and indeed work better together than separate.“Then God said, ‘Let the Earth produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that crawl, and the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds.’” For some reason unbeknownst to me, it seems to be assumed that every creature on Earth looks today like it did at the creation. Why is this? In my mind, it limits God to think this, and as Christians the last thing that we should do is limit God, to place human restrictions on a vast and superior being. Why, if God knows the future and all strands of time and space, could God not have made “the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds” evolutionarily; already set up along the lines of adaptation and survival and extinction? There is a chaos to evolution, to “natural selection” that confuses us, but what if that evolutionary confusion is actually the master at work, behind the scenes, what if that chaos is actually guided evolution? To me, that is exactly what it is, guided evolution, a series of adaptations along the predestined course of a genus.“Then God said, ‘Let the water swarm with living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’” This passage is from the bible, Genesis, and it states that life began in the oceans, just as the theory of evolution does. Who are we to state that this creation took place in one 24 hour day? It could have just as easily taken place over thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. In the bible (find verse) it states that God sees time differently than us, a second to us can pass as a hundred years to him, and a hundred years to us may pass like a second to him.  According to evolution life began in the ocean, just as in the bible, another reason why religion and evolution mesh together.Religion, or some theologians, states that the earth is around 5000 years old, while science states that it is billions of years old. The writer Don Goldstein in his book "I Have A Friend Who's Jewish, Do You?" uses modern mathematics to prove both theories correct, dividing the 15 Billion year age of the Earth against the rate of expansion and using Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, he proves that the Earth is both 15 Billion years old, and was also made in 6 days. It is very interesting and is, I feel, a step towards the reconciliation of science and religion, however, this is getting off of the topic.  The problem with us, as humans, is that we see things in a very short time frame, days, months, years, decades, centuries, but we do not see things in the long run, millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, millions, billions of years; these ideas are so far out there, on the edge of our imagining that we can talk about them, but not actually grasp the concept of true geological time; which means that we cannot truly understand evolutionary time either, not without years of training, which in most cases strips away religion and replaces it with the church of science.  The original evolutionary theory was change over time, not macro-evolution, genus jumping evolutions that allow a bee to become an octopus, or an ape to become a human. My final argument for my case is that people are always going to be opinionated, whether they believe in God, a Christian God or otherwise, or not. To me it is clear, an all-knowing God would not doom animals to evolutionary stagnation, as he would not doom us to evolutionary stagnation, in an ever-changing world, where the lack of evolution (adaptation) means an almost certain death.With the scientific community coming even closer towards finding the "God" particle, it seems that that could be a very interesting way for God to be viewed through our eyes, at least in one aspect, as a particle. This explains the Big Bang in a better sense towards both religion and science, as well as evolution.