Welcome, Sam. It sounds like you are passionate about God and His word. That is good! I look forward to reading what you have to say.
If you went to Calvin, you were not far from where I work (Fremont, MI, about an hour north).
Blessings. Randy
Thankyou for your response. I believe that Christ came to conquer both spiritual and physical death as signified by his death to bear our sins, and his resurrection which is the first fruits of that which is to come (1 Cor 15:22-23). So that (Romans 8:10-11):
âif Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.â
It is apparent from this text and many others that Christ, the second Adam, saves us from both physical and spiritual death. And thus that Adamâs fall was both physical and spiritual.
Really the onus is on you to prove otherwise. You are the ones claiming that my God brought death into this world, I believe that is blasphemy to put it mildly.
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Hi Randy thanks for the welcome and encouragement, I live about fifteen minutes north of Calvin.
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You will find that most people here do not believe it is possible to defend scientific conclusions using the Bible because Godâs revelation of himself and his mission in our world does not concern itself with teaching science. The real issue is whether anything science concludes is a contradiction to what God reveals about himself and humanity. We would say there is no contradiction and the Bible can be interpreted in ways that harmonize with scientific knowledge. There is only one reality, but science and theology speak to different facets of that reality and use different toolkits to acquire knowledge about reality. We donât have to deem a toolkit useless because it doesnât get at all facets of reality.
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Doesnât it strike you as rather strange that one half of your toolkit is missing in your arguments for theistic evolution?
Well letâs not skim over the questions. Iâll just do one at a time so itâs easier to focus on.
In genesis 3 it says that God told Adam on the day he ate of the fruit he would die. Did he die on that day?
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Yes, thatâs how every science denier starts when they want to invent their own alternative reality and attempt to weaponise the Bible in order to intimidate Christians into endorsing it. They quote mine the voice of the serpent and take the words âDid God really say?â out of context in order to accuse Christians who question them of questioning God Himself.
Genesis 3:1 is not a general prohibition on challenging what you are being told. The Bible tells us repeatedly that we are to test everything and not to believe every spirit because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 etc.) There is no end to the number of cults and heresies that you could introduce by attempting to shut down scrutiny in that way.
No they donât. Science is not about going into a lab thinking âNow how can I disprove the Word of God today?â It is about figuring out how things work using proven, testable, repeatable methods, such as measuring things. Nothing more, nothing less.
Once again, no they donât. Scientists are fully aware that things do not just âcontinue as they were from the beginning.â They are fully aware that disruptive things happen from time to time. Supernovae explode. Asteroids collide with planets. Humans cause climate change. And so on and so forth.
Yes, scientists discover facts that challenge our thinking from time to time. Such as, for example, the fact that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and not just six thousand, or the fact that humans and animals share a common ancestor, or the fact that critters were killing and eating each other for hundreds of millions of years before people came on the scene. But as Christians we have to be honest about these things. They are still facts, and they wonât cease to be facts just because you donât like them for whatever reason. They should send us back to our Bibles to careful and prayerful study to try to understand what to make of them. There may be some things that some scientists say that we may be able to challenge, but if youâre going to try to challenge them, you need to know what you are talking about and you need to make sure that your facts are straight when you do so. Just digging your heels in and throwing around accusations of âheresyâ will just make you sound like a teenager having a hissy fit because heâs been banned from his Xbox by his mother for failing his science GCSE.
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I believe I already replied to this. Adam lived after that day but he became subject to death.
No. If I got diagnosed with cancer, I wouldnât consult the Bible for a treatment plan. The arguments for evolution and the evidence that supports them use the tools appropriate to the questions asked and problems posed.
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Give me evidence from scripture that theistic evolution is not heresy. And really? Qoute mining? It looks like you did a bit of that yourself. Of course Gen 3:1 is not a general prohibition on challenging what you are being told. No one said or implied that it was.
So if Adam died that day, it must not have been physical death he was being threatened with right? Since he continued to live. So it must have meant something else died that day that was not physical. That tunes us into spirituality. Sin broke his relationship with God. He was spiritually dead now despite being physically alive for centuries.
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No reason for why God left his church, including the writers of Scripture, in the dark about relativistic gravity for thousands of years and then revealed the truth to them in the 20th century through work of a non-practicing Jew named Albert Einstein.
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Ecclesiastes 3:18-21:
I also said to myself, âAs for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?â
Note in particular the words âGod tests them.â This tells me that God-ordained evolution is not only a fact; it is a test of our humility. If the idea that you are related to the animals offends you, it is not because you think it is unbiblical, but because you are proud. In fact, this was the number one reason why it was controversial in Darwinâs day â it offended the sensibilities of the Victorian-era upper class who were suddenly being told by science that they werenât as important as they liked to think they were. On the other hand, many prominent Christians of that era, who understood humility, didnât have a problem with it.
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Also Sam I wanted to say Iâm glad you joined. I hope you stick around. I understand it may be emotionally triggering for you. You may get mad and invest several hours all at once riding this emotional high built on stress. Then when it burns out youâll feel like youâve wasted hours and got no where. Itâs normal for everyone when passionate about something.
So whatâs beneficial for me in similar situations is to ignore the ambush. Itâs not intentional, but itâs happening anyways. Itâs just you trying to debate a handful of people. Itâs exhaustive. Youâll wear yourself out and be bitter. Happens to me when I join YECist forums.
Solomon says â sometimes we answer a fool and sometimes we donâtâ. That goes for everyone everywhere. I donât think it meant I ignore someone but rather know when to back away for a day. Donât ruin your day trying to convince us. I canât imagine youâll convince anyone they are wrong. But what we can do is test what each one knows until something seems like maybe it needs to be studied out a bit more. Im sure you have some other YECist friends. Maybe you can bring them in as well. Then itâs not just you. It can be a less challenging discussion and at the end instead of their being winners and losers it can be viewed as everyone learned something or at the very least be more tolerant of others.
But itâs a two way street. When you call someone heretic or deceived you can expect it to irritate them. Even if itâs indirectly such as saying â evolutionary creationism is heresy â implies ECists are heretics. Likewise, and I struggle with it as well, when I say young earth creationism is stupid I am implying I view yecist ad stupid. Which would irritate you.
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AIG isnât as noble as YECs would like to believe.
When Ego and Creation Science Meet: A History of the Answers in Genesis Split
This rather echoes the point:
Evolution is a scientific theory. Science doesnât concern itself with God, so there isnât any theology in it that could be heretical. âTheistic evolutionâ is not a different scientific theory that explains how God is involved (Again, science is not equipped to study or explain God.) Itâs just short-hand for acknowledging that a person can believe God is the sovereign creator of all that is and that evolution is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life on earth. No one here is going to try to explain scientifically how God creates with evolution. When we say we accept evolution, we mean we accept the things science has measured and observed as facts. When we say we believe God created the heavens and the earth and the Bible is Godâs true revelation to humanity and the Holy Spirit enlightens our hearts and leads us into all truth, those are faith claims that science cannot speak to.
Heresy is something contrary to Christian faith claims about God, humanity, salvation, redemption, eschatology, etc. What faith claim of orthodox Christian doctrine do you believe my acceptance of scientific facts entails I reject? I believe in the Trinity, the atonement, the inspiration of Scripture, the historical death and resurrection of Christ, the now but not yet Kingdom of God, the sinfulness of humanity and the need for a Savior.
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I think itâs better to express it as science doesnât concern itself with opposing God.
This was the biggest problem that I had with evolutionary creation when I was first trying to get to grips with the subject. For many Christians, âscience doesnât concern itself with Godâ is a bug, not a feature, and statements such as that could even end up giving ammunition to science deniers in the Church who want to portray science as something âsecularâ that is not to be trusted.
That is why I tend to avoid appealing to methodological naturalism, and why I am careful to stress the point that even if you allow for the possibility of miracles, the only way youâll get 4.5 billion years of evidence into six thousand is by either lying about it or calling God a fraudster. Likewise with attempting to read independent human ancestry into the fact that humans and apes share 200,000 endogenous retroviruses in identical places in our respective genomes.
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Maybe so, but itâs true. Science simply doesnât try to study or explain God.
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The Bible says that the earth doesnât move. But secular scientists say it does. What do you believe?
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