To the question: Should we have an Evolution Day to debate Creation vs. Evolution here are three well-informed comments:

* My concern about this sort of exercise is not the content of the debate but the side effects of the debating.

People looking on won’t see the importance of the matter in relation to their need to find out whether Christianity has answers to their life needs – which frankly I don’t see this debate as all that important either. But they will see Christians caught up in a matter that seems very important to the Christians but which may not be central to the seeker’s interests.

If I was interested in the “Calithumpian” religion and its followers seemed to be very caught up in some issue that caused much angst among the “Calithumpian” membership I doubt that I would look much deeper into their religion.

The Church, ideally, puts into practice Jesus’ prayer ‘that they all may be one’ that ‘the world may see (the oneness) and see the God behind this ‘oneness”.

I am not suggesting that we should avoid ANY debate – but the very public slanging matches that so easily develop from public Conferences of this sort seem to me to do very little to extend the ‘kingdom of love’ that Jesus wants to see established in the world.

There are much more important issues than this sort of thing. If one side wins the debate what will that achieve in the furtherance of sharing the Good News? Very little I think.

In my youth I spent a lot of time debating ‘evolution’ but after a while I realised that my desire to win a debating exercise motivated me perhaps more than anything else, and I concluded that if I won the debate it probably hadn’t brought me any closer in showing love to my opponents. In fact it was very likely to have had the opposite effect.

* From my perspective it’s not about debate but permission-giving. Speaking personally, if I had not been given permission to believe that Christianity could co-exist with scientific understanding (including an understanding of our origins), I would not now be a Christian, let alone a Minister.

Too many people are still being told on a repeated basis that they have to choose between Christianity and science. Two anecdotes: at the beginning of this year I started my Scripture classes with the opportunity for children to ask any question, which we would address in the weeks to come. The first hand up was a young girl (who had no church connection) who asked, “Are cavemen true or Adam and Eve?” She had no answer. On the other hand as I sat down to Christmas dinner with my nephews and nieces one of them commented that dinosaurs had never existed – they were just a made up story. He had an answer. It’s time we started giving people better answers.

* Many of the people I talk to around the university have problems with Christianity because they think being a Christian means believing in Creation rather than Evolution. One postgrad student was quite sure that being a Christian meant turning his brain off and he certainly had no intention of doing that!