American Majority Accepts Evolution as God-Guided! Is BioLogos part of this?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Pure what? The Bible is a mixture of many many different things. Pure isn’t a word I would have used for the Bible and I have no idea what you mean when you use this word. I gave you a rather long list of the ways in which I not only have trouble believing the Bible but in which I refuse to believe in the Bible that way.

That is for God ONLY to judge.

Erroneous and impure understanding of the Bible as shown in your rejection of some of my conditions demonstrably does more harm than good.

Scientists are people and we have no reason to believe any group of people more than any other group of people. We should believe the objective scientific results which are independent of what anyone believes. If it isn’t independent of what you believe then that is pseudo-science not science.

Definitely! The creationists not only twist the Bible to make it contradict science but then they indulge in pseudo-scientific rhetoric to prop up their distortions.

No. The faith of the scientists puts the unfaith of those abusing religion to such shame that I am sure the Holy Spirit helps them read the book of nature with a far greater purity. This is demonstrated by the fact that we not only see them coming to a greater consensus, but we also don’t see them using science to justify things like slavery, genocide and the abuse of women. You see… just because you throw the name “Holy Spirit” around doesn’t make this person of God your lapdog. The Holy Spirit can guide people to the truth as He chooses and not as you want to control Him.

Oh! That is an EXCELLENT question! I LOVE IT. I love that question! Science is a method for finding out the truth about the things of nature – how the universe works. But it isn’t so useful for people who instead of discovering the truth want to be the masters that dictate the truth. By this question you give away the whole game and tell us that you prefer religion because in religion you can make yourself the master of the truth and thus the master of “God.” I see that that in religion a LOT where they have a long list of things which God cannot do in order to enslave “God” to their theology, making this word “God” into nothing more than a tool of rhetoric for power and manipulation of other people. Religion can be a tool of rhetoric, but science is just a tool for finding out the truth. Science is only useful if you actually want to know the truth.

Science is the servant of the truth. But if people don’t want to know the truth but simply want to dictate what they have decided is the truth, then pseudo-science would be more to their taste. Pseudo-science is a tool of rhetoric which they can use to say whatever they want.

The problem with God’s spoken word is explained by Jesus in Matthew 13:10-13, that when people do not want to see, hear or understand the truth then they can use childish literalism to close their eyes, ears and minds.

How the religion mongers must hate it, that by creating the natural world God has given us a more direct line to the truth without the words of human languages which they can twist and turn like a pretzel to mean whatever they want them to mean.

Of course they prefer “supernatural truth,” because ANYBODY can claim that God or the Holy Ghost told them that what they say is the truth and since proof of such a thing is naturally impossible either way then they can get away with the most outrageous porkies.

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42

Phil, did you just out-Anabaptist the Anabaptist??
:slight_smile:

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43

I probably disagree with you on a lot of things, but let me just say this: I love your screenname. So original and humorous!

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Thanks for the plug, @Jay313. Since God’s Good Earth had its genesis here at BioLogos back in 2011, and since it’s relevant to the discussion, a brief apologia might not be out of place.

The book was written as a personal journey, but essentially on two principles: firstly the infallibility of Scripture, and secondly the provisionality of human knowledge. It became clear that the Church (generally) had become culturally conditioned about the fallenness of nature through the Humanist Renaissance, and subsequently that science (especially since Darwin) had adopted that same pessimistic conditioning in the whole concept of “nature red in tooth and claw.”

So I looked first at how most theologians free of that influence had had no concept of “natural evil” for 1500 years (for example, seeing animal death and predation as part of the goodness of God’s creation). Then I looked at what Scripture actually says if the cultural assumptions are removed. And finally I examined how the findings of science itself don’t actually endorse the fallenness of creation (I used evolutionary sources extensively in that section).

Amongst other things, I hope that clears the ground for thinking YECs, that is those who reach their position on the principle of Scriptural reliability, to see there’s another, better, way to see the natural world. That won’t convince the Fundamentalist (as I found when the book was posted for awhile on my blog, The Hump of the Camel) whose belief is based on a system of red lines rather than a principle of openness to Scripture. But not all YECs are Fundamentalists. Just as not all evolutionists are Deists.

But once natural creation as it is can be seen to be as good as when it was made, something like Genealogical Adam fits very easily. My next book, The Generations of Heaven and Earth, should be out around this time next year on the same Cascade imprint, and looks to place Genealological Adam within the framework of biblical theology. The underlying principles remain the same: the infallibility of Scripture, and the provisionality of human knowledge. But the result is to enable the story Scripture actually tells to fit quite comfortably with the findings of the modern historical sciences. Any remaining conflicts are seen to be where they belong - not in the evidence, but in worldview assumptions… which are, of course, highly culturally conditioned.

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@Ecerotops I am currently working on an essay project on the Bible and Ecological issues. It will tackle the idea of death before the fall and suggest that it absolutely did exist.

See Genesis 1:28:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer (kbs) it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The word kbs is used for taking of a land or object by force, for example the conquest of Canaan. The use of military language implies that animals were able to resist, implying that the original world was not a vegetarian utopia.

Animal death has to be part of God’s good plan, for without it, ecosystems cannot function. In Scotland, for example, since the last wolves were killed off, nothing is there to stop overgrazing by Red Deer, which prevents the great Caledonian forest from growing back, which would provide the UK’s last remaining habitat for red squirrels, Pine Martens and Wild Cats.

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A good reminder for all of us.

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Hello, Ecerotops - and welcome to the forum (in case you haven’t been properly welcomed yet - but if so, I’ll add my own here). @AMWolfe enjoys the humor of your screen name. I guess I’m a bit slower and still chewing on that – a play on the word ‘triceratops’ perhaps?

Just to let you know - the easiest way to include quotes in your response is to highlight the part you want to quote in another person’s post, and then click the grey "quote box that pops up. This will add the quote into any post you’ve already started, or will even start a reply post for you if you haven’t opened one yet. You can also edit your own posts after the fact by clicking the little pencil icon at the bottom of any of your own posts. Just ask or even private message any of us if you have questions.

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A world with multiplication and no death is quite a fantasy. I suppose the idea was to use animals for food by restricting ourselves to dairy products as an addition to a diet of fruits and grain. God would no doubt have been moving excess population to other planets long ago, or do we imagine God simply expanding the surface of the earth – that would certainly have thrown the Copernican model into considerable chaos.

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Have to admit I am slow on the uptake to regarding the name. I google that Ceratops (meaning “horn face”) is a dubious genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur" but not sure what the Eceratops is about. I need a hint from our more learned or more witty forumites.
Hum. e meaning lacking? a dinosaur lacking a horn in their face? Am I close?

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I was wondering about that too. I couldn’t figure it out either.

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Is anything really supernatural? Assuming miracles do happen, they would be just as natural as the sky being blue, or the earth’s orbit.

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Wasn’t sure where this came from. Looking back in the thread I only found the response to Ecerotops and he was the one to use the term not me. So his usage was with in reference to the apprehension of truth by means of revelation as opposed to scientific inquiry. If you are claiming there is no difference between these things then I could not disagree more!

I certainly don’t see where the discussion of miracles came into this. I have made my position on that topic clear numerous times, that if miracles are defined as a violation of the laws of nature then I do not believe in them. Instead I define miracles as unexpected events which God has hand in bringing them about.

I wasn’t a fan of the word “supernatural” either for pretty much the same reason - preferring the distinction between physical and spiritual. The problem I encountered was that the word “physical” has more than one definition, sometimes meaning bodily and other times meaning natural. Thus we have a word in 1 Cor 15 is translated as both “physical” and “natural” to say that we are sown a physical/natural body and raised a spiritual body. This is what suggests the uses of the word “supernatural” to aid in this contrast. The point is that physical things are part of a particular mathematical space-time structure of natural law deriving their existence and nature from components governed by these mathematical laws, and spiritual things are not a part of that structure and have their existence from an innate nature pretty much as a law unto themselves. There is no implication of what is natural or un-natural in this for all do indeed have the same origin in God and is according to His design, but there is a difference between physical (natural) and non-physical (or spiritual).

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@Reggie_O_Donoghue

I can understand wondering about what only SEEMS to be a miracle and what is one.

But the average Biblicist is not going to seriously wonder if there are “SUPER-natural” events in addition to just “Natural” events. Biblicists know there are such events!

The Christian alchemists of old would invoke the angels in order to get “inside information” on the natural world.

But if an Angel were to tell one of those alchemists that no human could do something, I don’t think there would be skepticism. The idea that God could help Moses divide the Red Sea, or “stop the sun” during a battle, was not based on some belief that nature was infinitely flexible. It was based more on the idea that divinities had powers over and above nature.

In polytheistic systems, gods tended to have special powers… but not UNLIMITED powers. Each deity had its realm.

When discussions turned towards one, all powerful God … conversations would start to include “all the realms of divine power” also being combined.

Mithraism was an interesting transitional example. It appears that Mithraism was a new religion (using an old god’s name, Mithra) designed to explain something NEW in the Cosmos!: the precession of the Zodiac.

The God Saturn was in charge of moving Saturn, and Jupiter was in charge of moving Jupiter. But then a Greek discovered that there was now something even bigger that moved too!: The Zodiac itself!

“The great demarcation point in the history of the astrological ages is around 127 BC when the Greek astronomer-astrologer Hipparchus from observation discovered that the great immovable sphere of fixed stars was not fixed but slowly moving eastwards due to what is now known as precession of the equinoxes. It is possible that some other astronomers before Hipparchus had also noticed the phenomenon, but it is Hipparchus who is credited with this discovery.”

“This discovery by Hipparchus is not entirely unexpected as Hipparchus is considered to have been the greatest observational astronomer in his time and up until Tycho Brahe in the 16th century AD. What is highly contentious in modern times is the claim by many that observation of the effects of precession of the equinoxes was known well before the time of Hipparchus and his contemporaries in Greece or even Mesopotamia. The academic answer is no – precession of the equinoxes was unknown in earlier times.”

And so … in Anatolia, a priesthood was established, along the lines of a Greek mystery school, in recognition and worship of the God (which must exist!) that was so powerful and so transcendent that He could move the Entire Zodiac!

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In my experience American Protestants seem to have a higher degree of biblical fundamentalism and rejection of things like evolution than churches in the UK. Also Catholic Papal and Vatican statments and writers appear to be more open to evolution than in some previous generations. There is still a tendancy among the conservative parts of the churches to see any adaption to science as being a betrayal of biblical revelation and “truth”. Maybe I am more suprised that the numbers accepting evolution have gone up.

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@Mervin_Bitikofer,

Oh, I understand the risks… but I think it’s worth taking the risk. It forces us to use more clarity:

  1. Behe has a video interview (only a few years old) where he proposes his hypothetical “Billiard Ball Shot” by God… where he essentially says there is nothing to see in God’s design that makes it obvious that God has designed all living creatures.

But please don’t ask me to reconcile his comments there with his current book. I don’t get what he’s doing. And I suppose I am not alone.

  1. I and others like me reject any thought that Science can distinguish between “designed” and “not designed”. We only point out that by definition, if God makes something by special creation, he absolutely MUST define all the genes…or the creature isn’t going to draw more than a few breaths before collapsing in a fallen heap.

  2. Evolution, requiring millions of human years, is certainly giving God even MORE time to precisely define each creature’s genetic load.

I agree with you completely that "… it is a fools’ errand to go scientifically searching for demarcation separating God’s involvement from his alleged “non-involvement”.

There is no demarcation. He’s involved 100%, all the time.

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@Jay313

Sorry it took me so long to get back to your posting here… I had lost track of it… but I was determined to find it and confer!

As we can see, the LIVE quote and your “exposed” quote are the same. I’m not sure why
taking the skin off the quote made things any easier for me, but I won’t quibble over that.

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But I think I will quibble over your use of the term megalomania as applied to me, or my new haunts.

There are precious few people that I know who have been willing to say “God was guiding it every step along the way.”, especially with Eddie roaming the halls.

@Mervin_Bitikofer says he is a 100%. And back in 2017, you wrote this partial phrase. I hope you don’t actually think I was supposed to notice a phrase, buried in a sentence, buried in a paragraph, buried in a posting, to which I was not given any special notice or alert.

I am cheered by your position; I don’t believe I had any reason to think you held it. But now that we all know that you do…

Maybe you can explain why you, or why you AND @Mervin_Bitikofer, rarely speak up when Atheist Evolutionists are debating Creationists, to point out the obvious:

Why are you trying to defend Evolution as though there is no God involved, when you are a 100%er who believes God is not only involved, but one hundred percent involved?

It would delight me to understand your hesitance to make that call!

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Well, Jay will speak for himself, I’m sure. As for me, it’s true I’m not often out in the “internet wilds” these days searching out militant atheists (or creationists) to pick fights with. And most of the atheists around here are not busy trying to pit science against faith; they are usually very civil and knowledgeable contributors. So what is there (on the science side) to debate about? I would explain evolution about the same way I explain gravity or meteorology - without feeling like I need to add in any “God-talk” to help it make mechanical sense. My religious convictions are to provide a context for it all, to help it make theological sense - not to aid in scientific explanation.

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I said that a couple of weeks ago.

I refer you back to your previous statement. If you don’t follow everything I say, unless I happen to give you special notice, then how do you know how often I speak up?

I don’t have the time or the inclination to involve myself in every discussion. Your complaint basically comes down to the fact that I don’t beat the drum the way you want me to beat it. Sorry. We’re just different in that regard.

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Yep… I see that now. The thread was started in 2017… and your posting was quite recent.

So… that would certainly explain my surprise in seeing it.

So… now we are going to quibble about how well I follow you… it’s not really the point.

My experience at BioLogos is that I was mostly poked fun for thinking God would fire cosmic rays into human gonads.

And it was almost JUST ME when I would ask a pro-Evolutionist to stop arguing like God doesn’t get involved. I was pretty much the only one I noticed ever making such a point.

And so … it felt pretty lonely out here on the BioLogos boards … trying to remind the pro-Evolutionists that they really aren’t doing anyone any favors trying to convince a Creationist that Evolution can work without God.

My complaint was that as far as I could tell… NOBODY does.

Then you said I was a meglomaniac … because you were a One Hundred Percenter TOO!

Okay… by Gosh… that is GREAT news. And it is great news that @Mervin_Bitikofer is to.

This is GOOD NEWS to hear. Because I really didn’t think there was anyone else in on the party.

Let’s not forget @Christy, who says she is too.

So does that mean my Cosmic Ray comments are in good standing? They really weren’t about ONLY COSMIC RAYS … there’s LOTS of ways for God to engage evolution and make the next mutation - - one way or another.

So, it sounds like I don’t have to make a list of all the causes…

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And you somehow equated this speculation with the basic affirmation “God guides evolution”?!?

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