Don’t worry, it’s not your fault that some people don’t take the time to read and understand posts before replying to them.
It was clear to me that you were talking about the evolution of a system that relies on the day/night cycle continuing to exist, and hence predicts (via timekeeping) the onset of day/night prior to dawn/dusk.
Seeing as it was not your post I reacted to there must be another reason why you are being so persistent. You seem to keep changing your mind what to attack
Fortunately we now have a clarification
IOW it was all about a Universal Consciousness (AKA God)
No can of worms, just an intellectual bully flexing his brain cells and missing the mark.
Forgive the diversion.
Richard
I wonder why people struggle to see evolution as a divine process. After all it has all the hallmarks of an intelligently designed process, setting up a programmable system for the propagation of life with a feedback system that responds to change and is controlled by selection for supporting creation, e.g. will be eliminated if going selfish instead of benefiting the system. I guess people struggle as they see physical death as a problem with their understanding of a loving God whilst for God physical death is not a problem, nor is it for Christians who do not want to be eternally selfish.
I think there are morality issues with the way Evolution is presented, but morality is not part of the scientific vision.
For me Theistic Evolution addresses those issues and introduces extra guidelines and parameters that will allow for the quirky and the underdog. If you disallow death and predation as being immoral and add in the balance between might , crafty and solitary you can see a more Godly regime that encourages both diversity and individualism without it degrading into self centred or selfish goals. Creation is morally neutral rather than being good or evil.
Richard
Yes, it seems to be a regular occurrence around here, and not anything you said. A reader can bring their own unopened can of worms into the discussion, look for anything that they can use as a can opener and then get others to eat it.
Yes, absolutely… and that’s exactly why the sequence in Genesis matches up so beautifully with deep-time planetary history. The environment is always set up before the biological response catches up. Just like how the Tree of Knowledge was in the Garden before anyone ate from it, the light cycle was there before there was a reactive response.
Exactly… and more importantly, just because they could have reacted to a basic light/dark cycle back in Days 1 to 3, it doesn’t mean they actually did use it to track seasons.
What observation about evolution would count against your claim that it is an intelligently designed process serving the good of creation?
That was one joy of our informal university intelligent design (before the YECs hijacked the term) club: most of those who had been atheist or agnostic who became Christians did so from studying evolution.
thanks. The question is why animals can not commit sin by predation. After all, they have not eaten from the tree of the realisation of good and evil, and animals do not suffer death the way we do since becoming self aware and having derived the mental “ought” but live in the “is”. whilst they have a flight reflex and a survival instinct they can find their peace with death easier than those who are “self”
Just try to understand the text a bit better. There is no forbidden tree of knowledge as God would want us to know how things work. The tree in EDEN is the tree of “realisation of good and evil” which you can as well look at as realisation with regards to experiencing it and thus suffering for it or as realisation in terms of making it become real.
To think that God would not want humanity to gain knowledge is a sad reflection of ones way of looking at God. And if you are a loving father yourself, would you not also want to spare them from the realisation of good and evil but accept what you tell them to be good and bad?
try me
But Days 1 to 3 are plenty long enough for them to have evolved the use.
I seem to remember being told that changing a post after it had been answered was deceptive and dishonest.
Strange that my quotes of you no longer match the posts in question and I was notified of them being changed.
All duly noted.
See you around.
Richard
Bill, you are completely right that a basic light/dark cycle would still be running in the background, and a microbe obviously doesn’t need to look at the stars to know when its metabolic battery is charging.
But here is the catch: a thick methane and volcanic sulfur haze doesn’t just make the sky look blurry. It completely scrambles the spectral quality of the light hitting the ground.
Advanced eukaryotic seasonal timekeeping (like the CONSTANS system in algae or the blue-light receptors in fungi) doesn’t just measure overall brightness. These organisms calculate day length and seasonal thresholds by reading the changing ratios of distinct wavelengths (like blue light or the ratio of red to far-red light) that occur specifically at dawn and dusk.
Under that thick, unmixed atmospheric sandwich of Days 1 to 3, those distinct, clean wavelengths were heavily absorbed and scattered by the high-altitude fog. The high-fidelity data stream required for advanced seasonal tracking simply wasn’t hitting the surface.
So while primitive microbes could absolutely run their basic daily metabolic cycles using whatever scattered light made it through the fog, the specific wavelength data wasn’t available yet. It wasn’t until Day 4, when the skies permanently cleared and the lights finally hit the ground as direct, clear beams, that those precise wavelengths became available as true environmental signs (otot)—providing the exact selective pressure and clean data complex life needed to turn on its advanced genetic radar.
You are spot on about the Hebrew definition there! In ancient Hebrew thought, knowledge (da’at) is never just abstract facts. It is always deeply experiential. By eating from the tree, they didn’t learn a textbook definition of evil; they entered into a personal realization and experience of it.
No, I actually would not want to spare my children from the realization of good and evil. Falling is a necessary part of growing up. As a father, I wouldn’t want to keep them in a bubble forever, but I would absolutely want to be right there to pick them back up when they do fall.
That is exactly what God did. Immediately after they fell, the text says they heard the sound of Him walking in the cool of the day, coming to find them. That is the picture of a perfectly loving Father. He didn’t abandon them to their mistake; He came down to meet them right inside their new reality.
And that experiential meaning is exactly why the parallel with the light cycle holds up so beautifully. The physical reality of the planet’s light cycle was already running in the background for billions of years, long before any organism ever “realized” or experienced it through advanced sensory tracking. Just like how the tree was physically present in the Garden before anyone ate from it, the light cycle was a built-in feature of the Earth long before Day 4 eukaryotes evolved the specific genetic networks to finally “open their eyes” and actively decode those wavelengths as functional data.
I really appreciate you pushing on that theological point. It doesn’t weaken the parallel at all—it actually grounds it perfectly in the true Hebrew meaning of the text and the heart of the Father!
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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