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.
No, sorry, “All the Church Fathers” did not believe “the world was created in six days, recently (in the last few thousand years)”. This is a modern misreading of the Church Fathers, typical of evangelical Protestant YECists.
To be clear, the Church Fathers did all believe that Adam and Eve were created in the last few thousand years, just as the Jews believe. They, as well as the Church today, teaches a real, historical Adam & Eve, and has traditionally taught this. So you’re not being asked to give this up, except by the most liberal and relativistic of BioLogos commentators.
You are aware that “young earth” and “young humans” differ, right? Iow, “young humans” on an “old earth” is also an option. Have you considered this yet, or perhaps dismissed it already?
I appreciate your concern about differing worldviews, but that concern will only take you so far. We do have to consider the evidence, and we have to consider it in ways that are constrained by rules and principles that have nothing whatsoever to do with “methodological naturalism.” They must be consistent with the basic rules and principles of mathematics and measurement, for starters. These principles work in exactly the same way regardless of your worldview. One plus one equals two whether you are Ken Ham or Richard Dawkins. The area of a circle is \pi r^2 whether you are the Dalai Lama or the Pope. And error bars work in exactly the same way whether you are Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
Now about these “unprovable assumptions” that you mention – I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but what you have been taught by the YEC organisations here is simply factually untrue. There are ways of testing historical assumptions that don’t require you to have gone back into the past to observe everything from end to end. One way is to cross-check different measurements, taken using different techniques, and to see which ones agree with each other and under which circumstances. Another way is to make testable predictions about what we would expect to see if the assumptions were violated, and to ask whether we actually saw them in reality.
More specifically, regarding the three assumptions of radiometric dating that you outlined:
That the initial conditions are known.
That there has been no contamination or leakage.
Most modern radiometric techniques do not make these assumptions. Instead, they use an approach called isochron dating that bypasses both of them. Isochron dating works by taking multiple samples of a rock formation consisting of two or more minerals, measuring the parent and daughter isotopes (e.g. 87Rb and 87Sr) along with a third, stable isotope of the daughter element (86Sr) and plotting them on a graph, for example:
The slope of the graph will give you the age of the sample, and its intercept on the y-axis will give you an indication of the original composition of the sample. This completely bypasses assumption 1. Furthermore, it contains a built-in test for assumption 2, because if there had been any contamination or leakage, the points would not lie on a straight line.
Furthermore, techniques that do make these assumptions only do so when they have a rock-solid theoretical and practical basis. The main technique is U-Pb dating of zircons. Zircon crystals (ZrSiO4) can accept uranium into their structure when they first form, but they strongly reject lead. This is because the lead atoms have the wrong size and the wrong chemical properties (a valency of 2 rather than 4) to fit into the crystal lattice. Furthermore, when contamination or leakage occurs, it will preferentially introduce uranium while expelling lead. This would result in the radiometric “clocks” being at least partially reset, meaning that the radiometric measurements were a lower limit. This does not help the YEC cause, which requires the measurements to be an upper limit.
That the rate of decay has been constant throughout time.
This is where YECs’ rejection of “uniformitarianism” degenerates into science fiction. The RATE project – a YEC study into the feasibility of accelerated nuclear decay as an explanation for radiometric results – itself concluded that the amount of decay they needed would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,000°C. They themselves admitted that no known thermodynamic process – neither conduction, nor convection, nor radiation – could account for where the heat went, and in the end they had to propose radical new laws of fantasy physics for which there is no evidence whatsoever, and which would have introduced even more problems than they solved into the bargain. For starters, it would have to have cooled rocks faster than water in order to stop the oceans from boiling over.
In any case, radioactive decay rates can be calculated from first principles, and changing them would require the fundamental constants of nature to have been different in the past. This would have had VERY far-reaching and dramatic effects. Nuclear decay rates have been measured under a wide variety of extreme conditions (hard vacuum, hundreds of atmospheres of pressure, strong electrical and magnetic fields, extremes of high and low temperature, and so on) and have been shown to be very strongly resistant to environmental factors. The only changes observed so far either involved conditions that are only found in particle accelerators, or else were too small (a fraction of 1%) to come anywhere close to reducing radiometric ages from billions to thousands.
“I prefer the pre-modern worldview, whenever it is correct. I am a big believer in tradition.”
Well, the “pre-modern worldview” was not correct about Earth science. That shouldn’t surprise you.
Nothing wrong with being a traditionalist, protecting tradition. It seems you can keep “young human” and jettison “young earth”.
“I am aware of the development of modern creationism, but that is quite irrelevant.”
Really?! But that’s the ideology you’ve embraced, isn’t it? If so, as a creationist, the development of modern creationism would seem to be ENTIRELY relevant, since otherwise, you’d still be a “theistic evolutionist”, as you said.
By the way, which kind of “theistic evolutionist” were you? Can you say who were the top influences on you, while still a TEist, so it’s understood?
I applaud you, frankly, for remaining a theist, while at the same time deciding to openly reject “evolutionism”, after having accepted “evolutionary biology”. It’s a welcome voice here at BioLogos, afaic, given that anti-evolutionism here is 1) the official position of BioLogos, but 2) is almost entirely unaddressed anywhere else on the platform.
Here’s what BioLogos says officially:
“Evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discussion. Evolutionism is a kind of scientism, which holds that all of reality can in principle be explained by science.”
Hi Christy, thanks for sharing your perspective on these issues.
That’s assuming that “God created a good world with death and suffering” is a fact. It’s an interesting idea, to frame the question differently like you did. But I reject the alleged “fact” of primordial death and suffering, so I frame it the other way.
I am sorry to hear about your chronic pain, Christy. In my view, suffering is bad - not part of God’s original creation. But God still uses suffering for good purposes, to realize his will in a fallen world. And we are called to suffer with Christ. This is part of our life: “to take up our cross” and follow after him (whatever our individual “cross” might be, which is different for everyone). I also agree that seeing suffering as a direct punishment for sin is a harmful (and frankly, incorrect) theological idea.
Still, I don’t believe God takes delight in our suffering (or the suffering of animals). He wishes that we will use it for our edification, to emulate Christ, to mortify our passions, and turn to him. But God is working with a fallen world. I don’t believe God would have created a world with suffering and death from the beginning, because that would imply it is good. That would imply it is the way God wants things. That would imply it is the ideal, to which we will return. I reject that idea.
The mortal must die in order to be raised immortal, in our fallen world, where death is a reality. I don’t believe this would be the case in a world without the Fall (we wouldn’t die, so there would be no need for resurrection). In my opinion, it makes no sense that God would create a world full of death, say this is “very good,” and then become incarnate, die on a cross, and rise again all to save us from something he created in the beginning (death). It’s incoherent to me.
That’s a good question. I would appeal to the Scripture you quoted before: That Christ is the “first fruits” of the resurrection. He is the first born among the dead. By dying, rising, and ascending, he deified our mortal flesh and gives us immortality. When he returns again, this will be realized when all are raised and judged. He came as the Second Adam, to reverse the consequences of the First Adam’s sin (which includes physical death, but also “spiritual death,” separation from God, suffering, disease, etc.).
It might surprise you that I don’t believe in Original Sin, as understood by most Christians. I believe we all inherit a fallen nature from our first parents (which includes separation from God, propensity to sin, aging, disease, suffering, and ultimately death). I don’t believe we are responsible for Adam’s sin. Rather, Adam’s sin “infected” humanity with a disease. Sin is a disease, that only Christ (the Great Physician) can cure. Sin is not simply the breaking of a legal commandment. And guilt is not inherited.
I also believe there is profound symbolic, allegorical, and typological meaning in Genesis - a meaning that is far deeper and more profound that the literal meaning alone. I am not a Biblical literalist, and I think it’s unfortunate that many miss the theological truths of Scripture when they are wooden literalists. The problem is, we create a false dichotomy between “symbolic” meaning and “literal meaning.” I think Genesis has both. I believe Genesis speaks to deep theological truths, but also that it’s speaking of real history. There’s no need to separate the two. For example, I think the Tree of Life is a type of Christ’s cross. But I also believe it was a real tree in the Garden of Eden.
As for the rest of your comments, I sympathize with a lot of what you say because I once held those ideas (or very similar ideas) when I was a theistic evolutionist. Ultimately, I just disagree with the theology. You’ve clearly thought this out though, and you’re an intelligent, thoughtful person. Thanks for sharing. I respect your views, although I disagree.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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David, thanks for your continued replies and thoughtful discussion about all of this. Since your last reply to me, others have filled in with much (and better) response than I probably could have given. Now that I’m here again, I’ll try to catch up, and at least respond to this.
I’m glad you are not threatened by seeing deeper theological truths in scriptures than what flat “wooden” readings sometimes allow for.
A quote of yours, with my own emphasis added at the end…
Except if the latter becomes something of a “millstone” of untruth for countless believers? You may be able to wield your own worldview to ignore plain measurements and inconvenient realities, but what about countless other Christians that are unwilling to close their eyes and ears to reality along with you? Reality has this way of persisting right on through our worldviews - even when virtually the entire world is united in a worldview (such as that the earth doesn’t move). That was such a persistent (and seemingly obvious) one that it took centuries of science to take it down even after Copernicus proposed a different way to understand the cosmos. [And no - I’m not comparing your views to geocentrism; this is only to show that even very strongly, widely held worldview did not prevail when it had reality against it.]
So - for those many Christians who cannot along with you ignore literal mountains of evidence, do you wish for them to see your understanding of scriptures as the only faithful way?
Yes. I do assume that the scientific facts we know about the world are reliable. I cannot cognitively bring myself to “believe” in some other reality because of a traditional Bible interpretation. Faith in my book is pledging allegiance to Christ and putting your hope in God’s promises fulfilled in him. It isn’t willing yourself to mentally assent to an alternative reality.
This feels to me like imposing a human understanding of goodness on the world and expecting God to fit in a box of our own creation. I think we need to start with the world that exists and then try to reconcile who God claims he is with realities we observe. Some of that reconciliation might involve us realizing we don’t get to tell God what is good or how he has to create things to fit our ideas of goodness. Human ideals may indeed conflict with “how God wants it” and I am open to that.
That is just speculation though, not what the Bible teaches. Even in a very literal reading of the Genesis story, Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden so that they would not have access to the Tree of Life. That implies that their physical bodies were not created immortal and became mortal because of sin, but that they lost their access to immortality through the eternal life that God provided. Eternal life has always been portrayed as a gift.
But again, reality doesn’t bow to our comprehension. I cannot deny reality just because aspects of it are hard to reconcile with my theology. Everyone’s theology bumps up against with the problem of evil. In the YEC scenario God created a perfect world and then radically altered and recreated it bad as a punishment. “Sin” doesn’t magically change herbivores into carnivores or create tectonic plates that allow for natural disasters and mutate DNA. The world doesn’t just “fall” into an entirely different creation. Sin does not have power to uncreate and recreate. This is also theologically problematic.
I resonate with the Orthodox understanding of the fall. David Bentley Hart has convincingly argued against the Augustinian view that it was based on a translation error in the Vulgate.
It seems like mostly you disagree with my acceptance of science and view of scientific reality. I don’t think we are theologically that far apart in our view of God, humanity, and redemption. The issue is accepting/harmonizing facts of natural history. I don’t feel compelled to get you to change your mind. If your mind can bend that way, it is theologically “easier” to just reject the scientific facts. By all means follow your conscience.
Yes, the Orthodox view of divine creation and “the fall” makes much more sense than what many evangelical Protestants have accepted over the past 100 or so years in the USA.
Long ages or short ages, we see a fossil record but what is the evidence to say that any of the life forms evolved into others. There isn’t. It is assumed that if there is more primitive life earlier on and more complex life later that one had to evolve into the other.
There is however stark scientific evidence that stands against evolution. Look at protein production in the body. From one gene many different proteins can be made. It all depends on post transcriptional and post translational modifications, which can be very complex. How can that happen without intelligence at work. Transcription and Translation Overview - YouTube
and following these steps the protein is only complete after folding takes place and it is taken to the location where it is to be used.
All this has evolved from random changes, which were “naturally selected”. A gene can be anything from around 100 to 2.3 million base pairs in length. How many random mutations to get to a viable gene that gives rise to protein so as to be useful and “naturally selected”?
And not to mention that there is a huge amount of non-protein coding genes in the DNA, more than there is genes. And at least some of that has been seen to contain regulatory genes and promotor genes etc. All this by blind evolution?
The only answer is Goddunnit. And not only is the evidence for creation stark, the evidence that God sustains the creation is also there too. Intelligence comes from God. We affect things as co-creators but the life forms are sustained by God.
Thanks for that reference. Hart’s article “Traditio Deformis” does really open the eyes to how deep the pedigree of this misunderstanding of Romans is. I don’t think I had ever read Hart before (to my recent recollections anyway), so I owe you and @DavidS a debt of gratitude for your fruitful exchanges.
This is the real crux of the problem. Because the whole issue with the scientific evidence is completely misunderstood. It is not about proof. It is about what is reasonable to believe. One can suppose that the universe was created this morning with all our memories and the evidence as they are and there is no way to prove this is not the case. You just have to be willing to disregard all of what our memories and the evidence says. Evolution is no different.
So like I said the real issue here is the so called incompatibility with the Christian faith and that is biggest lie you are being sold. I would not be a Christian if it were not for evolution. I cannot believe in the demonic god of the creationists – I would not and I will not. It is indistinguishable from the god of this world and I will oppose that monster with everything that I am. For one thing, it is frankly NOT the God of Jesus and the Bible but the god of the Deists – the watchmaker god who makes nothing but machines because like the god of this world, power and control is all that he cares about.
I believe in the God who chose love and freedom over power and control and that is why He created the self-organizing process of life. It is question of whether you want tools to use made for an end or you want a relationship with children who are end in themselves. Because life serves no purpose whatsoever when all you want is tools. And that is why the Bible describes God as a shepherd rather than a watchmaker because He is not a designer of machines but a someone seeking a relationship of love with beings who have a life of their own making their own choices.
If it is a choice between science and Christianity then Christianity is going to win hands down. No doubt about it. Science is just an activity, but Christianity is life itself. But… there is big problem here… science may be far far less important but it is solid ground – the evidence only gives one answer. But Christianity on the other hand is a very wide spectrum (the majority of which accepts evolution). And I think the real danger here of closing yourself off from God and making a version of Christianity built on such a growing pyramid of lies that it becomes a thing of terrible evil. It should be very clear from history that people are quite capable of turning Christianity to something very evil indeed.
The evidence is overwhelming. All the data God sending us from the Earth and sky agrees on a picture of the development of the universe over 13.8 billion years with life developming on the Earth over the last 4.5 billion years. The only question is whether you care enough about what God is telling us or you are so attached to certain rhetorical notions that you are going to close your eyes and ears and refuse to see and listen (Matthew 13)
This is total nonsense since the philosophy of naturalism came after Charles Darwin not before. It largely came about because of the collapse of materialism from the discovery that matter is not the fundamental building block of the physical universe – that would be energy.
LOL The Bible doesn’t even agree with this notion of a global flood. Nowhere in the Bible is the earth described as globe or planet. It is always described as a table… which is the shape you get if you only take a small portion of the planet.
I would. It is called lying for Jesus. But this isn’t really good thing at all. That would be replacing Jesus with the father of lies.
carry on to believe in a God that is dead. God has created a process to share his life as he is life.
like this as you got it : “have a life of their own”
I like your separation of global from world wide, considering the scientific viewpoint prevailing at the time. To some people the world still ends at the tip of their nose or toe
