re: A light topic for the day...Do you believe in evolution?

I guess you could call me a Christian Evolutionist, but I will admit that I do not have a science background.

With that said, I think a distinction must be made between abiogenesis (the idea that life was created from non-living matter billions of years ago) and evolution (species evolve to adapt to environmental circumstances). So, in a nutshell, abiogenesis explores what happened before life was formed and evolution explores what has happened after the formation of life.

The Bible could possibly support the idea of abiogenesis. In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7, "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." If dust is "non-living" and our modern-day concept of time is different then God's time; this could give us Christians a way to believe that abiogenesis does not conflict with biblical teachings.

The way I view evolution is to look at giraffes. Let us look at this hypothetical scenario: 100,000 years ago, one-hundred giraffes were living within 10 square miles on the plains of Africa. Day after day, the giraffes would eat from the leaves of the trees, but there are only a finite number of trees within this 10 square mile area. The giraffes would start at the lowest branch on the tree and work their way up the tree after all the leaves from the lower branches were consumed. After a while only giraffes with necks that were long enough to reach the lowest branches containing leaves could eat. The giraffes with shorter necks who couldn't reach the leaves would die from starvation. Because dead giraffes do not reproduce, their (shorter neck)genes are not passed on to further generations of giraffes. At the same time, the giraffes with longer necks are reproducing and having offspring who have the genes of their longer necked parents. The cycle then continues with only the giraffes having necks long enough to reach the lowest leaves survive and reproduce offspring with this genetically superior makeup.

Furthermore, in my mind, the reason this evolutionary process with giraffes has been as slow as it has been is because of the ability of giraffes to migrate to find other sources of food. This means that some of the shorter necked giraffes do survive and reproduce (but not with the same speed as their longer necked counterparts) which slows down the evolutionary process.

TL;DR: Must distinguish between Abiogenesis and Evolution. As a Christian, I can reconcile abiogenesis through scripture (Genesis 2:7), but I am still highly skeptical of its validity. Evolution shouldn't be a controversial topic and doesn't necessarily conflict with biblical teachings. The lengthening of a giraffe's neck over time is a good example of evolution as utility.