Evolution / Creation - HIV

Tonight the Greenroom (a Christian talkback radio show) was quite interesting. Frank was discussing creation/evolution and how people came to their point of view and he was discussing the rise of HIV in NZ. Now what was interesting to me was how people rationalized the problems. I quite like Frank because he quickly tends to weed out the people who haven’t really thought enough about the problem by asking some brutal questions that often stop people in their tracks. Nice. Anyways, heres some of the interesting reasoning influenced by my bias :)

HIV is declining in Africa, and increasing in NZ, In Africa they preach ABC which stands for Abstinence, B (can't remember, but basically being faithful to one person), and Condoms. Here in NZ the message seems to Condoms, One person, and maybe abstinence....perhaps there’s some kind of link between these two things? Or perhaps comparing the statistics of NZ and Africa is completely flawed? In NZ the rise in HIV is mainly in Gay males meeting online…Perhaps there’s a rise in Gay males getting HIV in Africa that’s completely dwarfed by a huge amount of heterosexuals not getting HIV? Also, I’d like to know what the reason is for HIV reducing in Africa, is it ABC? Or is it Education? Or Condoms? Or something else? While we are on the subject, its also quite interesting that its actually a lot harder for heterosexuals to get HIV through conventional sex. Also men are 50,000 times less likely than women to get HIV from conventional sex. Not that that means a lot, but it was an interesting thing I read about a while back in “Time”? (I think).

Evolution / Creation – This topic seems to always get a great response! Mainly it was 6 day creation vs Evolution. Some odd stuff came up….

“If you believe in evolution you can’t be a Christian because god designed everything for a purpose”. Yet everything that evolved has features designed for a particular purpose!

“We can’t of evolved from monkeys because they would of evolved too and wouldn’t be around any more, something else would be around”. The monkeys we have today are also evolved from previous monkey / ape like creatures. There aren’t many animals that haven’t evolved over the last million or so years. Crocodiles and sharks I think have mainly stayed constant.


“6 days…..well day could be mean 10000 years because elsewhere in the bible it says a day is like 10000 years”. The universe is probably around 14-15 billion years old.

“day in the creation story could mean an indefinite amount of time”. Possibly, but still, the order of creation doesn’t seem to match science.

“its just a theory….”. Mainstream scientific theories tend to have a huge mass of scientific data, huge amounts of research, experiments, etc. Generally they are a theory because no one can disprove the theory (yet cannot be proved as a law). Anyone can have a theory, but for it to become mainstream a lot of people are going to try and shoot it down. Those that don’t get shot down tend to get accepted as the best description we have about the way something works. To say its “just a theory” is dangerous ground, to be fair you should really have a competing theory that’s just as robust.

“everything cant just be random, there must be a god that has created all this”. This is a common way to answer questions we can’t answer. All this does is shift the question to “why is there a god?” did he randomly come about? Which of course…..”no no, gods always existed” so if your happy with that reasoning we can also reason…..so therefore whatever created the universe could of existed forever…..and in a “forever” or “infinite” the chance of anything happening is very likely. God is a good blurry thing…..because we can define him as unknowable, but in all reality I think the cause of this universe is probably unknowable whether there’s a god or not.

“I studied biology……in high school, and I think evolution is wrong”. I think a *little* more study is needed.

“I read something about guy X who said evolution can’t be because of Y”. Find out the other side of the story. Often there are many subtleties that you probably don’t appreciate and its relatively easy for smart people to come up with a convincing case that’s completely incorrect. Scrutiny by many many people is needed.

“The great flood flooded the world and mixed up all the sediment and the geology is now all false”. Nice. So this would mean that everywhere in the world we can detect the flood. We an explain what happened to all that water. And because of the nuclear energies god used some how all the carbon dating got a bit munted.

What worries me is all these Christians reasoning about creation in all kinds of odd ways and stating evolution didn’t happen. What happens when the evidence is so overwhelming for evolution (which I think it is now). Are they willing to give up their faith cause they got it wrong so are probably wrong about everything to do with god? Or they are happy being wrong and god letting them get it wrong? Also trying to introduce people to a faith where some loud mouths advocate something that’s wrong? Its not like Christianity needs the creation story of genesis, I think perhaps there are stronger messages. I think perhaps its more symbolic. Either way….My suggestion is that anyone who is really interested in all this should really read all about evolution, really get to grips with why people believe in. Perhaps then it will be easier to reconcile science and Faith. Remember, some of the worlds great scientists were men of Faith.