Obama and McCain at Saddleback Church Tonight
Tonight at 7 pm ET, Barack Obama and John McCain will share a stage with Pastor Rick Warren in Orange County, California: McCain, Obama to face off with popular pastor. We’ll be liveblogging and comment swarming it, of course.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The political spotlight will shine on Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama on Saturday night when the two candidates are expected to face tough questions on personal values, presidential leadership and international affairs.
The Rev. Rick Warren, author of the best-seller “The Purpose-Driven Life,” will spend an hour interviewing each candidate at his 20,000-member Saddleback mega-church in Southern California.
On CNN’s “The Situation Room” earlier this week, Warren said he won’t play the role of a political pundit or ask “gotcha” questions, but rather tackle four areas of interest: the role of the presidency in government, leadership, the candidates’ worldviews and America’s role internationally.
In case you were wondering, the Saddleback Church promotes hardcore creationism, and I suspect Warren may raise the topic.
Is evolution part of God’s plan?
Question: Why is it not OK for evolution to be part of God’s plan? I don’t understand what the problem is: couldn’t God have used the process of evolution as the way that he created the earth?
Answer: When I was a new believer in Christ, I had some very strong feelings about the issue of evolution. Much as you have expressed, I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently. But they didn’t push me or argue with me, they simply challenged me to take some time to look into the facts and study the issues carefully. I’ll always appreciate them for that, because this was an issue that I had to really think through. Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution.
As we previously noted, neither McCain nor Obama are creationists.