It'll seem that way if you don't understand evolution.How is it we get from one to the other? Seems to be a 180 and contradictory.
God and evolution aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. One of the biggest misconceptions about evolution is that it's purpose is to disprove the existence of God. But religion and God aren't the same thing, either. Science has caused religion to be cut back further and further, from the four corners of the flat Earth, to being the reason why lions eat people, lightning strikes and illness happens. Now we know that the Earth is roundish, lions are independent creatures that eat meat, lightning strikes are caused by electrical buildup in the clouds and that illnesses are caused by little organisms. But that's religion, not God. Not only does evolution not disprove the existence of God, it doesn't even try. Evolution only cares about what happened and how it happened. Evolution doesn't even address God one way or the other. Evolution is simply a sound scientific understanding of our origins. It doesn’t prove nor disprove a God claim.
Evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. It's really and truly unambiguous and irrefutable. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things. But that's got nothing whatsoever to do with God.
It's the details the detail the details of religious dogma that Christians are all wrapped up in. They want the Bible to be literal, except the parts they want to be metaphorical or allegorical. But it's that Genesis part that they cannot handle as a metaphor or an allegory. It MUST be literal. Well, except for that part about creating man in God's image. OK, so that's a metaphor, since it can't be literal. As soon as someone says, "In his image MEANS..." this or that, it's no longer literal, especially when you have to ask yourself who the heck literal God was talking to when he said everything he said, especially the part about "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness... ." Who? What? Our? Huh?
The creation of man in Genesis has always been read (interpreted, if you will) to mean that Adam was the first human God created. Why is that exactly? It doesn't state that anywhere. Not once. In fact, what it actually says is that God created humans on day 6 of the creation account in chapter 1, then it says God rested on day 7 at the beginning of chapter 2, then comes the story of Adam's creation. It's nothing more than assumption that says these are two depictions of the same event. If you read it literally.
Religion is used to fervently oppose science by those uneducated masses who understand neither their own religion or science. The extreme distrust of intellectualism by Christians, throughout the US in particular, is a major block in the advancement of society on a wide variety of fronts, and most often that distrust is manufactured as a form of religious views attacking scientific foundations and research. Evolution is fully compatible with religious beliefs, right up to the point where you try to discount one or the other, or worse, stupidly try to combine them. Science and religion are not an either/or zero-sum game. Science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each, and is an insult to both.
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