Creation and The Gospel

Hello and welcome! Maybe I am a good one to speak to that, since I have been all three. In my youth (a long time ago :slightly_smiling_face:), I was a YEC, automatically equating biological evolution with atheism, thinking that was necessitated to believe in it.

After some scientific training in nuclear physics, I began to discount the variable radioactive nuclide decay rates necessary to support YECism’s distain for the various clocks God has engineered into his creation for us to discover and learn how to use.

Even as a youngster, I had problems with YEC explanations for how light came to be before the creation of the sun (they seemed forced and out of context). And to justify the admittedly enormous expanse of the universe, we have to have the speed of light itself be variable.

This seems to refute that, in my book:

This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth… Jeremiah 33:25

Already leaning toward the understanding of the antiquity of the universe, I became an OEC and endorsing RTB (Reasons to Believe) almost four decades ago, when, in God’s providence in a unique circumstance, I caught an interview of Hugh Ross (before RTB was founded) on the radio at a time when I would normally been at work, unable to listen. I instantly became an OEC (I still have an affinity for his cosmological sequence explanation of Genesis 1). Also having an engineering background, the Intelligent Design* movement was attractive to me.

Upon learning of neutral drift about two years ago, and the neutral theory of evolution, and that it can and in fact does produce complexity, and that complex information can be transmitted without intelligent agency (think of a cloud and the information about it available from its shadow), I began to be able to see that God used evolution to create biological complexity.

So to answer your question…

In a word, no. It has not ever and does not mine. I don’t have a strong opinion about original sin, but we all need salvation, whatever way you take it. (Anyone who thinks children are implicitly innocent has never seen an angry one-week-old baby with its face all scrunched up and red, waving its fists in a fit and kicking. :woozy_face:)
 


*I also think there is a theological reason that Intelligent Design cannot be proven: if it were, then you have proven the existence of a Designer, and God does not want his existence to be scientifically proven (not that there isn’t plenty of evidence pointing to him). I think our intuition is correct, that there is design executed in creation through God’s providence – I therefore believe in lowercase ‘id’.

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