By Christianity I mean traditonal Christianity, not the New Age stuff, which can mesh with most anything.
Here's traditional Christianity in a nutshell: The Fall followed by the Passion.
In the thread entitled "Is Evolution a Radical Idea," I outlined it in brief, as follows:
The Fall is an explanation of human suffering. Not only did man fall but nature fell too into what we see today. Before the Fall there were no diseases, birth defects, etc. So the Fall is necessary to justify God's ways to man.
Man came late in the evolutionary process. For billions of years before that, life forms battled each other on a killing field in the pre-Fall world. This was so because life was set up in such way that the only way creatures could survive was by feeding off other life forms. What manner of God would produce such a system? A cruel God, not the God of Christianity. One might counter that our morality is subjective, so our moral judgment against God is no evidence of cruelty. But if our moral judgments are subjective, then the concept of sin is meaningless. Hence, evolution and Christianity (of the traditional sort) do not mix.
I will add a note on "subjective morals." Subjectivity is not to be confused with circumstantiality. People seem to think in order for a rule to be objective, it must be simple, stateable in 25 words or less. There is no reason why it should be simple. It might be very complex but nonetheless objective. Subjective morality means that different people could arrive at different conclusions about a moral incident, and they would both be "right"--or neither would be wrong. Circumstantiality is not the same thing. This means that one considers a moral incident on a case-by-case basis due to complexity, but nonetheless there is a quite definite answer. In other words, the Ten Commandments could have a lot of fine print attached and still be objective.
Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.
Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.