I believe the argument is it demonstrates the appearance of randomness. And correct, no purpose can be inferred. I know some people like Dawkins are attempting to prove there is no teleology in biology, but they are criticized for bringing metaphysics into science. In fact they had to invent a whole new term, teleonomy, to describe the study of goal-directed processes in biology without implying teleological explanations.
I don’t think not A therefore A applies because if purpose is A, purposelessness is something else besides not A. It’s B.
The universe has purpose is a claim that has to be demonstrated. If you fail, what you can say is science does not support the claim that the universe has purpose, you can’t say you have proven the universe is purposeless.
The universe is purposeless is a positive claim that has to be demonstrated. If you fail, all you can say is science has failed to demonstrate the universe is purposeless, you can’t say you have proven the universe has purpose.
And purpose is a metaphysical idea, so how would you even prove it? All you can talk about is the appearance of design or the appearance of randomness.
Welcome to the forum, David. I have been away from the computer a few hours and find you have stimulated a lot of good conversation. While I disagree with your conclusions, you have good company with guys like Todd Wood, who are able to hold to an young earth view yet be kind and gracious in discussions. Your story is interesting in going from an old earth to young earth view, which is something we don’t hear about too much. It is interesting that you seem to have made that transition based on philosophical and theologic arguments, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Speaking of young earth science:
Certainly the last statement is absolutely true, as evolution is a modern idea, and would have been totally alien to the Church Fathers. While the first statement can be argued, I’ll leave that to others, in order to point out that the Church Fathers also believed in a Three-Tiered Universe, they believed that only men contributed to the makeup of offspring, they believed in geo-centrism and a number of other ancient ideas as to how the world is shaped and worked. God never corrected those errors in physical understanding, but communicated his truths through them. To ignore his teaching while trying to read an ancient concept of science as being factual, when that was never the intention, is wrong. While I tend to focus too much on what I just read, forgive me if I am a broken record, but there is a lot to learn about how to interpret early Genesis and also problematic verses relating to physical phenomena
in both the OT and NT in Lamoureux’s book the Bible and Ancient Science. He addresses literalism, genre, concords, eisegesis, ancient perspectives, divine accommodation and more that helps show how young earth creationism misses the mark when we look for meaning in the scripture.
Once you realize the Bible is not teaching YEC, nor is it teaching EC, nor OEC, you are free to read it for what it is, and can base your understanding of deep time, geology, astrophysics, and evolution on repeatable factual observations rather than a false proof texting of scripture. Of course, if those observations lead you to maintain a young earth view, you are free to do so, but not because scripture says it is so.
How so? It would be true to say that biologists don’t make use of teleology or “purpose” as part of an explanation of evolutionary mechanisms. But how is that a demonstration that no purpose exists at all? It would be like thinking that since I made no use whatsoever of my laptop computer to get our dishes washed just now … therefore laptops must not exist.
Or to put it another way … evolution, like gravity, or clouds, or a screwdriver as non-sentient objects won’t have any “will”, much less purpose. Shoot … we can’t even get everyone around here to agree that even human beings have so much as free will, so it should be a no-brainer that all these phenomena don’t have any inherent purpose to be found within them. That’s what we (and God) are around to provide.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
34
See, told you you were smarter. But like my namesake hero Martini, I bet a dime. Affirming the consequent and all that. Of course science cannot prove anything, but… I bet a dime. Purpose = God and neither science nor philosophy need go there at all. They have no work to do at all. They lack nothing in explanatory power. Dawkins doesn’t have to prove that there is no teleology in nature, teleonomy is a fine distinction. God as a metaphysical proposition dies Nietzschelianly instantly. Is stillborn. Is not even worth proposing, explains, adds nothing for infinitely more complexity.
I’m no where near as good at this as you, but the appearance of randomness is randomness. In that I’m better. Further the fact of order does not imply meaning, as you concur. I’m just not smart enough to make the case that actually makes itself; nature shows no want of meaning, of purpose, of God. Nothing in metaphysics, logic, rationality can touch that.
Faith can. Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus.
That’s always where I’m coming from.
And it needs to be said clearly by a better mind than I. When push comes to shove it’s the only apologetic there is. Him. Jesus.
So I was thinking about killing for food. (My mind wanders. ) In Peter’s vision in Acts 10, God shows Peter a bunch of animals and commands him to “kill and eat.” Peter objects on the grounds that those animals are impure to Jews, not that eating meat is wrong, and God tells him nothing God has made clean is impure. Now granted, the whole interpretation isn’t about eating any kind of meat, it’s about Gentile inclusion in the Body of Christ. But it seems strange to me to claim that (post-Resurrection, when sin and death is defeated by Christ) killing for food is part of some kind of old sinful order that must eventually be done away with for God’s kingdom to come fully in the Eschaton. God himself is telling apostles, “kill and eat.” If it’s not evil for morally aware humans to eat other living things, even less so for other creatures who aren’t morally accountable.
The Bible does not teach evolution. That’s true. But the Bible also does not teach very much science period and as surprising as it may be the Bible does not teach creationism. Just like the Bible does not actually teach that God battled a multiheaded fire breathing sea dragon like is psalms 74. Or take revelation. Does the Bible actually teach that a talking dragon with 10 horns, or two monsters from the breaking hell to earth and it also does not teach that a giant Babylonian vampire woman will drink the blood of the saints.
Even if we dismiss all science as to why those things can’t be true , we can see it from scripture. The literary style alerts us to what kind of genre we are reading. For psalms 74 we can easily tell it’s fiction. For revelation we can easily tell it’s symbolism and end time mythology. So for Genesis 1-11 the debate is what’s the literary style. Many say oh it’s actual literal history filled with literal science. But the reality is that it’s fiction. It’s mythology. Genesis 1-11 covers roughly 2,000 years.
But when you read historical narratives throughout the rest of scripture you don’t see this. The story of Moses covers less than 100 years and spans many books. The gospels , including acts, covers several decades with the majority focused on just the final few years of the life of Christ and spans several books. The only places we see thousands of years as narrative spanning a few chapters is in revelation and a few places in proverbs.
So the very first step is to realize that genesis is not teaching just straight literal history but ancient Mesopotamian , specifically Jewish, creation mythologies.
Since we can tell genesis is not literal history it allows us to honestly interpret it with a wider range of possible between the line stories. Some believe in a historical Adam and so don’t. I do. I just believe that his story was hyperbolically embellished for the sake of a good tale. But I believe we can gather some real thoughts from it and see the same patterns throughout the Bible.
So with that said, the idea of sin and death is not a problem. Adam and Eve was never immortal. Only God is truly immortal. All other beings must be sustained by God to be immortal and that includes the angels. Ever wonder why Adam and Eve would need a tree of life that grants immortal life if they were already Immortal? Or wonder why God would place a tree that grants immortal life to immortals in the garden? The only logical conclusion is that it’s because they are not immortal. They relied on the tree of life for eternal life , just like Christians rely on Christ for eternal life. It takes God to keep us alive forever.
Consider animals. Animals don’t sin. You never read of any animal committing a sin, with the exception of the snake, in the Bible. Yet they still die. God said if Adam even touched the tree he would die on that day.
So was God telling the truth? Did Adam and Eve die on the day they are of the true? Yet we know they did not fall over deceased. The Bible says that the “‘wages of sin is death”. Yet we all die. Even animals die that don’t sin. So that death caused by sin must be something other than pure physical death. It must a spiritual death. That’s being separated from God. On that that day, the man and the woman both sinned, and their relation died from what it was.
So if we know that the death caused by sin is a spiritual death, then we know it’s not about physical death. So that means that animals, including humans, could have experienced physical death without it being a spiritual death. So pre “fall”‘physical death was not a issue.
— - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
We can observe data on things. We don’t have to witnesses a murder scene to know what happened. We don’t have to recreate it literally to grasp it. We can look at the evidence. If you were find yourself in
Haddonfield and came across body after body of slaughtered remains and then seen a man slowly walking towards you with a large bloody kitchen knife wearing a mask you would know what happened. You would not doubt it. We can draw a accurate understanding of a homicide by going through the scientific steps to interpret that data.
When we look at the fossil record we see speciation of both plants and animals. We can see morphological development. Four legged primates and later on bipedal ones. We see spore producing plants and then considers and later on we see the flowering angiosperms. We can also see how the genetic testing shows speciation.
It’s also what we don’t see. We never see humans and dinosaurs together. In the oldest strata we don’t see mammals and humans. Then when we use multiple independent sources of dating the geological era.
The literal global flood interpretation is ridiculous. We don’t see evidence for a global flood. We see evidence of floods that occurred all over snd at different times. We see evidence of uplift , as land is raised up out of waters by moving plates. But we don’t see any evidence for a global flood happened in roughly a years time.
There is also science against it. The earth basically always mountains at least 5 miles above sea level. That means for the whole earth to be flooded it needs to be five miles worth of water across the entire globe. It can’t come from above. Even a few feet of solid water wrapping our atmosphere would cause super heating. If it was chucks of ice, it would block so much light earth would be dark and believe freezing even in the hottest places. That means the majority had to come from underground. But the first 5 miles of land is not 100% water. It’s not even 25% water. So the water would have to come from at least a good 20 miles deep and above. But the problem there is geothermal considerations. Geysers spit out hot water. By the time we hit around 7-10 miles deep the temperature is already over 300°f. So if a global event like the flood really happened no one would have drowned. They would have been blown apart as the earths surface erupted in steam and boiling water.
We also have to consider how many millions of species have existed. The ark could not hold that many even if it could survive the 300°f temperature.
There is a lot more to covered but it’s past the feeding hour for Mogwais and I’m tired.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
39
Mi, using reason against unreason never works. Positively or negatively. Against the bad or the good. Against counter-factual unreason, belief, ‘faith’ in denial of reason - YEC-ID - or belief, faith orthogonal to it. Wooden literalism and pareidolia or Jesus.
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
40
I beg to differ Christy, you wielded formal logic peerlessly.
I admit, I should not have used the word “hatred.” I am not an expert on Darwin, so I shouldn’t have made such a strong statement. It is clear, however, that he was not a Christian. He rejected the Bible, and he sought to explain the world apart from Divine Creation. Here’s a quote of his that I found just now: “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, and therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.” It goes without saying that these views are incompatible with Christianity. And another quote: “For myself I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation.” Darwin could not see God as Creator, because his philosophical presuppositions precluded him from it.
Science can and does assert itself against prevailing worldviews. I didn’t say otherwise. The prevailing worldview of Darwin’s time was Christian, but Darwin himself was not a Christian. Likewise, Charles Lyell lived in a time when most people were Christians. But Lyell wasn’t a Christian either. The views of the prevailing culture are not relevant when the founder of a theory does not hold the views of the prevailing culture. In Lyell’s words, he sought to “free the science [of geology] from Moses.” Even the Christian scientists operated (and continue to operate) under the constraint of methodological naturalism, which prohibited them from anything other than natural causes. If you interpret the past history of life using methodological naturalism, you will inevitably believe in some form of evolution.
You continue to conflate evolution (which is unobservable and unrepeatable) with things like geocentrism (which are observable). This is a crucial distinction. Observable phenomena in the present are not subject to the same problems of interpretation and worldview bias. Questions of origins are laden with philosophical / religious baggage.
Of course you are right in saying that “past events leave evidence too.” I don’t disagree whatsoever. When I say “the past history of life is unobservable,” I’m referring to the fact that we can only deal with evidence that’s left in the present. As you can see, this type of science (historical / origins science) is quite different from observational sciences like physics or chemistry, where we can observe repeated experiments in the lab and where worldview assumptions have little effect. We can’t jump in a time machine and watch those layers being laid down. Therefore, whatever conclusion we come to will be an inference to the best explanation. We will have to make a number of unprovable assumptions, and our assumptions will depend on our worldview. A secular scientist (Christian or otherwise) will assume methodological naturalism. That precludes six-day creation, a priori. Even if all the evidence pointed to six-day creation and a Global Flood, methodological naturalism would prevent scientists from concluding them as true. That is my point. You brought up a lot of evidence against the Genesis Flood in your last reply, but you’re missing my point entirely. I’m not here to debate the scientific evidence. I’m more interested in the philosophical debate going on. I can’t stress this strongly enough: Secular scientists could never demonstrate that creationists are correct - even if all the evidence favored it. The worldview comes first, and the evidence is secondary.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, so I try to avoid attributing nasty motives to people. My argument is not that Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, or today’s secular scientists are part of some grand conspiracy to thwart the Bible. Rather, I am arguing that this is just human nature. I think it’s a myth that scientists (or anyone else, for that matter) are objective observers. We all view the world through our own worldview. We see through colored glasses. We inevitably interpret the evidence based on our presuppositions. Most evolutionists are not Christians, so they interpret the world naturalistically. Even Christian scientists, while not naturalists, interpret the world according to methodological naturalism. This precludes six-day creation and a Global Flood. Even if all the evidence pointed to creationism, secular scientists would be unable to conclude them as true, because their presuppositions prevent it.
Also, I think it’s important to emphasize that creationists don’t believe in the fixity of species. No creationist would deny that species change over time. Darwin got a lot of things right. His mistake, in my opinion, was in his extrapolations. The debate is over universal common ancestry. Often, scientists find evidence for speciation / adaptation (like in the Galapagos Finches, for example), and then claim this is evidence that all creatures descended from a universal common ancestor - which is an unwarranted extrapolation, based on their prior belief in evolution.
I admit that I shouldn’t have said they “hated Christianity.” Indeed, that was over simplistic. What I should have said is that Darwin wasn’t a Christian, and he sought to explain the world naturalistically, without appeal to God as Creator. This is true of Lyell also. It is the methodology of modern science. I also agree that “There are similarities in body plans between species and it appears fossils with less complex life forms are near the bottom” is a fact. My point is, these scientific facts don’t speak for themselves. Creationists have their own explanations for these facts. Creationists explain homology by appeal to common design (rather than common descent) and the fossil record by appeal to Flood sediment successively burying different creatures / environments (rather than slow sedimentation). I admit, this is an interpretation of the evidence, which is based on philosophical / religious presuppositions. But so is the evolutionary explanation. When secular scientists explain these facts by citing evolution and long ages, that is a philosophical statement - based on assumptions, not observation and experiment.
The age of the Earth is not an objective measurement. Recall what I said about radiometric dating. Scientists don’t dig up rocks and fossils with birth certificates attached to them. Rather, they measure the ratio of radioactive isotopes, and calculate the age based on that ratio - assuming a constant decay rate, assuming knowledge of the initial conditions, and assuming no contamination / leakage. Notice how there are no less than 3 unprovable assumptions the scientist has to make before he can calculate the age. You might think these assumptions are warranted, and that’s fine. But the point is, nobody was there to observe the rocks and fossils forming. Therefore, we can only make an inference to the best explanation. An inference is different from proof, and one’s inferences about the past will largely depend on their philosophical / religious presuppositions.
Yes, creationists have a worldview bias. I freely admit that creationists try to “fit data to [our] pre-established ideas.” But here’s the point: Secular scientists do the same thing. They also have pre-established ideas. Namely, they operate using methodological naturalism - which means they cannot appeal to any causes that aren’t natural. They can’t appeal to God, or to miracles. This is fine when dealing with everyday, observable phenomena. But when it comes to origins, it means they must conclude that somehow, one way or another, nature created itself. This is the essence of evolution. Even if all the evidence pointed to supernatural creation in six days, scientists would be utterly unable to conclude it as true.
Yes, we know the rates of decay in the present. This is an observable fact. My point is, nobody can demonstrate that decay rates weren’t faster (or slower) in the remote past. Constant rates of decay is one assumption we have to make in order to do radiometric dating. But there are two other assumptions that I mentioned: The initial conditions and the rock being a closed system. I will explain both in detail:
Initial Condition: Let’s say we want to perform potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating on a rock sample. Scientists usually assume there was no “daughter” element in the original rock. In this case, that means the original rock had some of the “parent” element (potassium, K), but no “daughter” element (argon, Ar). Therefore, any Ar in today’s rock must be the result of decay from K. But what if the original rock had some Ar? The scientist would get a false age - longer than the true age, since he assumed all Ar was the result of decay from K. The scientist wasn’t there to measure the composition of the original rock after it formed, so he is left to assume the initial condition. If his assumption is wrong, so too will his conclusion be wrong.
Closed System: Scientists generally assume that their samples are a closed system. In other words, there was no contamination of additional “parent” and “daughter” elements after the rock formed. Also, that there was no “leakage,” or loss of “parent” and “daughter” elements after formation. Let’s say we want to measure the age of a rock sample using the K-Ar method. We assume a closed system, but what if there was additional Ar added to the rock sometime in the remote past, after the rock had already formed? Then we would get a false age - again, older than the true age. Once again, false assumptions will lead to false conclusions.
Radiometric dating is similar to using a sand hourglass. If you see an hourglass on the table, and I ask you to calculate when it was flipped over, you could make a good guess. Suppose the sand is falling at a rate of 10 mm/hour, and there’s 30 mm of sand at the bottom. You would reasonably conclude the hourglass was flipped over 3 hours ago. This is a reasonable inference. But not so fast. That’s assuming the sand-fall was 10 mm/hour the entire time, that’s assuming all the sand started off in the top half of the hourglass, and it’s assuming there was no addition or removal of sand. While you were gone, suppose I added more sand to the bottom-half of the hourglass. Or suppose the hourglass started with some sand at the bottom. Or suppose the rate of sand-fall is faster at the start. This would affect the calculated “date.”
I agree that the Bible isn’t a science textbook. I think that’s a strawman of the creationist position. Nobody really believes the Bible is a science textbook. Having said that, I believe the Bible makes certain claims that intersect with science. For example, you may disagree with me but I am convinced that the Scriptures teach there was no death before the Fall of man. If this is indeed what the Scriptures teach, then evolutionary biology conflicts with the Bible. As a result, I conclude that evolution is incompatible with the Bible. Trying to accomodate the traditional interpretation of Genesis with evolution is a modern project. BioLogos exists only because there are serious theological difficulties in reinterpreting Genesis from how it was originally understood by virtually all Christians. There are no Christian organizations that try to “accomodate” the Bible to germ theory or modern ideas of reproduction, because the Bible doesn’t speak about these subjects and they are thoroughly uncontroversial.
That is an interesting article. Thank you for sharing. I suppose this is off topic, but actually there are many Christians today who encourage women to cover their heads (in church). I am an Orthodox Christian, and many women do cover their heads. In more conservative Orthodox circles, all of them do.
Evolution has direct worldview implications. And these are incompatible with traditional Christian theology, in my opinion. The other scientific theories you mentioned, such as Newtonian physics and Copernicanism, do not have direct bearing on the Christian faith. Therefore, I don’t care whether the Church Fathers accepted those modern scientific theories. As far as I can tell, they were all six-day creationists who believed in a Global Flood. If they were alive today, I believe they would reject evolutionary biology - not out of ignorance, but because it contradicts their theology.
This is an excellent point. It is fair to say they weren’t like Ken Ham, and other modern creation “scientists.” What I meant to say is this: All the Church Fathers believed the Earth was created in six days, that it was created recently (in the last few thousand years), and that there was a Global Flood. This is what I meant by “creationist,” and it is undeniable that they believed this.
I agree that they were more concerned with the theological truths espoused in Genesis. I completely agree. But they also didn’t divorce the literal truth from the symbolic truth. Nowadays we have a tendency of thinking something is either literally true, or it is symbolically true (it cannot be both). They didn’t think this way. In my opinion, it is dangerous to over-allegorize Genesis (thinking everything, or almost everything, is an allegory), and it is also dangerous to think everything is literal (sacrificing the allegorical / symbolic / typological significance of things). Unfortunately, creationists are often guilty of the latter. But theistic evolutionists are often guilty of the former. I reject the false dichotomy.
For example, I believe the Tree of Life is symbolic of Christ’s cross. But I also believe there was a literal Tree of Life, in a literal Garden of Eden. I believe Adam is representative / symbolic of all men, but I also believe he was a real (literal) man who existed in history. I could go on and on. We don’t need to create a false dichotomy.
Okay, but are you saying you experience no cognitive dissonance between this conviction and the observable fact that things have been dying for millions of years before humans existed? It’s one thing to say, “I’m convinced the Bible says X,” and another to insist against all available evidence that “X is reality.” For me it is far easier to adjust my understanding of what the Bible is really intending to teach than it is to either deny the reality of what I know to be facts about the world or accept the Bible intends to teach errors.
AND because how it was understood by virtually all Christians conflicts with reality.
They are uncontroversial because no one has gone on an ideological campaign against the science to create controversy, but the Bible does indeed speak all the time as if human reproduction worked like plants. It was the prevailing conceptual metaphor for reproduction of the time.
Please refer to my reply to @LM77. What I mean by “creationist” is someone who believes the world was created in six days, recently (in the last few thousand years), and in the Global Flood of Genesis. All the Church Fathers believed this. I have also read a fair amount of the Church Fathers to know this is the case.
They were not modern creation scientists, that is true. They were not like Ken Ham. They certainly saw the text as expressing symbolic, typological, and allegorical truths. But I don’t think they divorced the symbolic meaning from the literal. There doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between the two. I also reject a strict literalism.
It is very difficult to reconcile a traditional view of Adam and Eve with evolution. I define the traditional view as being: Adam and Eve supernaturally created, as the first parents of the entire human race. I am not familiar with Bonnette’s work, but I will look into it, thank you for the recommendation. From what I’ve seen, all theistic evolutionists negate at least one aspect of the traditional view.
I don’t believe in NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria). I think science and theology are different disciplines, but sometimes they intersect. In the case of evolution, I see lots of theological implications. This is not true of all scientific theories. The theory of gravity, for example, has no theological implications that I can see.
I prefer the pre-modern worldview, whenever it is correct. I am a big believer in tradition. The Church Fathers were not creation scientists (like Ken Ham). But they did believe in recent creation, six-day creation, and a Global Flood. That is what I mean by “creationist.” I am aware that Moses wasn’t a geologist, and I know the Bible isn’t a science textbook. But I believe the Bible makes certain claims that intersect with science (again, I reject NOMA). I also despise 7th Day Adventism. I am aware of the development of modern creationism, but that is quite irrelevant. While G.M. Price was wrong on a lot of things, I don’t believe he was wrong on recent creation. A blind squirrel can find a nut every once in a while.
It is observable in the progression of fossils in rock strata.
It is observable in comparative embryology.
It is observable in comparative DNA.
It is observable in predictable nested hierarchies of traits between related species.
It is observable in comparative anatomy
It is observable in real time in simple organisms such as bacteria.
It is observable in real time in speciation, such as with stickleback fish.
At one point Big Bang theory (proposed by a Catholic priest) was resisted because it implied the universe had a beginning, which some scientists did not want to accept on philosophical grounds. It was too close to acknowledging a moment of creation for them. But, the evidence won out, steady state theory was overturned, and now it is the prevailing model that the universe had a beginning, no matter how that complicates some people’s worldviews.
Agree. But you are asking us to accept that 99% of scientists around the entire world, starting from vastly different worldviews and life experiences, over the course of a century are either all cooperating together to intentionally repress the truth and advance an idea that has no scientific merit, or are all so dumb and incompetent that they have grossly misinterpreted literally millions of data points, yet still all come to the same wrong conclusion. This is conspiratorial thinking, and it is frankly deluded.
Yes, it is. I don’t believe that you understand how the measurement works, because you haven’t been listening to scientists, you have been listening to people peddling creationist nonsense. That’s unfortunate, but don’t think for a minute that people with actual expertise in geology or astrophysics find any merit in creationist arguments about the reliability of the measurements. They are selling a total sham.
Maybe so. But this hypothetical is just a rhetorical game to take attention away from the fact that it is not the case that ANY actual existing evidence in the real world points to YEC. NONE! I would like to deal with the actual evidence we have, not the hypothetical evidence that doesn’t exist that secular scientists wouldn’t be able to handle. The fact that people can imagine scenarios where decay rates are different and the established inviable laws of nature are violated by God and fundamental constants that hold our universe together can be inconstant, just shows people have flexible imaginations. It’s not proof that the existing models that use real math and real physics are flawed.
I’ll let actual geologists handle your misconceptions of the reliability of radiometric dating.
Nonsense. Are you saying that about Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, or just evangelical Protestants? BioLogos aims at evangelical Protestants, where the “conflict with reality” on this topic is far and away the greatest.
I was quoting David whose “virtually all Christians” were creationists. BioLogos does not exist simply as an apologetic for theistic evolutionists who have Genesis problems, as he claims. It exists also to help Christians understand and come to terms with scientific realities that creationists reject.
) In Peter’s vision in Acts 10, God shows Peter a bunch of animals and commands him to “kill and eat.” Peter objects on the grounds that those animals are impure to Jews, not that eating meat is wrong, and God tells him nothing God has made clean is impure. Now granted, the whole interpretation isn’t about eating any kind of meat, it’s about Gentile inclusion in the Body of Christ. But it seems strange to me to claim that (post-Resurrection, when sin and death is defeated by Christ) killing for food is part of some kind of old sinful order that must eventually be done away with for God’s kingdom to come fully in the Eschaton. God himself is telling apostles, “kill and eat.” If it’s not evil for morally aware humans to eat other living things, even less so for other creatures who aren’t morally accountable.