• Question: Do you beleive in the making of the world because of the big bang and the monkeys evolving into humans or do you beleive in god making the world and humans or somone who you beleive in.

    Asked by ashton123 to Suzanne, Renata, Kapila, Joanna, Claire on 18 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by blacksonic1200, msteststudent, thefatunicorns123.
    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I am a Christian and I do believe in God but if science tells me that everything started with the big bang then to me that was the way God did it (I think the book of genesis in the bible is not meant to give us scientific facts but is rather a more philosophical approach to our existence). No one really knows what was before the big bang, it could be that there was nothing (and how can nothing exist?!) and it could be that there was an endless being that created us (and how can that be?!). Both options are hard to understand and accept and my faith just tells me to follow one of them. Faith is not scientifical but is not necessarily stupid either, and it does make me feel sad when some of my colleagues assume that.

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I think that faith and science can (and should) coexist together. Most major religions say that by studying the world you come closer to god and encourage their followers to seek knowledge …so it saddens me when I hear people who say that because they believe in God, they reject science (e.g. by saying that evolution is not true, because God did it)…thinking like that stops people opening their minds and understanding the true awesomeness of existence!

      With science you don’t need to ‘believe’ as you do with faith. Science answers questions using a scientific rational logic (i.e. you use hypotheses, and you test them and it’s by observations and experiments that you bit by bit gather the evidence you need to understand the world). So I know how the earth was created, how the planets move and how humans evolved from science. I also appreciate that there are major questions that scientists have not answered yet – like understanding exactly how life first gets going, or what happened before the big bang. Just because we don’t know the answer does not mean we immediately need to turn to a faith-based explanation to fill the gap.

      I think by understanding how the world works, you get a better picture of the awesomeness of what exists…and by understanding that you can think more about where you fit in the universe, and what is the point of living…religious teaching can help provide us with the tools to live together and be the best that we can be.

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Being a scientist isn’t about being certain you are right — in fact it is about always being open to the idea that you might be wrong. This is one of the big differences between science & religion, religions always have some things you aren’t supposed to question. But your job as a scientist is to try to get more and more certain about the things you believe by finding more and more evidence, or else to prove yourself wrong (that happens a lot!) Also, since you know you will never be certain, but you have to act, you learn to act even when you are uncertain.

      The best theory we have right now to explain all the evidence that astronomy has found is the big bang theory, and the best theory we have right now to explain all the evidence biology has found is the theory of evolution. For both of those theories, there is so much evidence that many people now consider them a fact. Even a pope (John Paul II) called evolution a fact as well as a theory, because there is so much evidence. By the way, no scientist thinks people evolved from monkeys. Most monkeys currently alive evolved more recently than when hominids split off from the apes. In other words, monkeys, apes and humans all evolved from animals that don’t exist any more, that we “outcompeted”. There are many ways to survive, just like there are many jobs you can have, and monkeys and humans evolved to use different ways to survive. I don’t know if this helps, but here is a picture showing our “family tree” http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/primate.html

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