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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

... one can accept evolution and maintain their religious beliefs. They are not mutually exclusive.

To me its like saying I'm both Christian and Muslim. Sure, one can decide to be whatever weird thing he/she likes, but its bizarre and does not make any sense.

Or am I mistaken?

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I grew up as a Christian and was taught evolution at Christian schools. If you believe in the literal truth of the Bible then clearly you cannot believe in evolution. But most Christians, at least most with any sense, do not believe that. For example, you can be a Christian without literally believing the story of Adam and Eve.

If you don't believe literally in Adam and Eve, it implies not literally believing in Original Sin, the inheritance of the guilt and Jesus dying on a cross for it. The whole thing falls apart, doesn't it?

The Catholic Church accepts both, so I think you might be mistaken. They believe its divinely inspired, but that doesn't really change the science. Now, some of the American Protestant churches are a different story.

I always wonder how Genesis 1:26 would work without evolution and genetics?

Take a lesson from evolution: adapt or die. Religions evolve just as animals, etc.

In that there are a lot of people who claim, in one sense or another, to be both Christian and Muslim, and it's not particularly weirder than any other faith claim?

There's a belief termed "theistic evolution" where one holds that God created the initial conditions of the universe and let it proceed organically from there.

Naturally, this requires discounting the Genesis account of creation, among other things. It also starts to border closer to deism, which is at odds with conventional Abrahamic interpretations of a heavily interventionist God.

Stephen Jay Gould dubbed this "Non-Overlapping Magisteria". As is the case with religion, it's possible to compartmentalize and select everything into a syncretic faith. Whether it is "bizarre" or "nonsensical" is of no relevance.

If you want a more 'fun' take on it, look at the Futurama episode A Clockwork Origin. The professor litterally 'seeds' a planet and it evolves following the basic evolutionary process of earth.

Compartmentalizing for this really only needs to happen if you are in the group where the Bible/whatever is word for word acurate. If you think it's a guide book and 7 days really isn't seven Earth days but some description of time passing, God "guiding" evolution still makes sense.

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