No, sorry, from what I have read of the Church Fathers (not something I got from a YECist website), @LM77 is correct.
“none of the Church Fathers were Young Earth Creationist in the modern historical-grammatical hermetical sense.”
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Not from what I’ve seen. Are you aware of non-evangelical Protestant writers on this topic? For example, Dennis Bonnette’s Origin of the Human Species, now in it’s 3rd edition. He’s a Roman Catholic Christian, and accepts a “real historical Adam and Eve”. That’s what you’re looking for in terms of harmonization, is it not?
“evolution is riddled with theological problems.”
To be fair, “evolution” isn’t a properly theological topic. Right? If you think it is, it seems you’ve made a category error, unless you want to go the way of Teilhard de Chardin, or someone like that, Dowd/Barlow in our day.
“Theistic evolution is a very modern idea.”
Again, not really. And I don’t know what “very modern” might mean to you, who might be living with a pre-modern worldview. It may be that 1) you got bad information, or 2) you just didn’t find it back far enough.
Indeed, multiple Church Fathers write in a way that can be understood as “evolutionary philosophy” nowadays, of course, with theology, or more specifically, Christology as it’s source and guide. I’m not sure how you think some kind of post-modernist puritanism might erase this from the teachings of the Church Fathers.
Moses wasn’t a geologist and “flood geology” was concocted by a 7th Day Adventist, G.M. Price. This is the history of late modern/post-modern young earth creationism. It’s “barely biblical” at best, sorry DavidS.
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You could also frame the question, what does the fact that God created a good world with death and suffering as a part of it say about death and suffering. You are assuming a given that billions of years of animal death and suffering is evil. What if we have just imposed that evaluation on natural history?
We don’t know do we? If you take the Bible literally, there will be feasting, and traditional Jewish feasting involves meat. Nowhere in God’s purity laws for the Jews was the slaughter of animals for food prohibited, so it’s not “evil.” There are passages in the Bible where God takes delight in the carnivores he has created and they don’t imply that carnivores are uniquely “fallen” or perverted from their created form. There are passages that characterize suffering as a refining process that God wills for overarching good, so I don’t think suffering is evil either. (I live with chronic pain, so I have some questions for God, to be sure. But I think our bodies and our lives can be good and that we can experience God’s care in the midst of suffering pain, and that viewing all suffering as punishment for sin can lead to some harmful theological ideas.)
I think God created nature to be interdependent with life-sustaining cycles and those webs of interdependence that sustain new life involve death and health sometimes involves pain. I don’t think all life was intended to be immortal or that life that preys on other life is evil. Any speculation about how nature will “work” in the New Creation is speculation, but it looks to me that only humans are offered eternal life and promised an end to suffering, mourning, and pain.
Well, one idea explicated by Paul in that passage is that Christ is the first fruit of the resurrection and that the mortal must die in order to be raised immortal. Christ became incarnate in a mortal human body that aged, got tired, hungry, and felt pain. If he hadn’t been crucified, presumably his body would have died some other way, even if he was sinless.
My question is if Adam’s sin caused physical death for all humans, why didn’t Christ’s victory over death put an end to believers physically dying?
Maybe it says that making sin into something that is biologically passed on to descendants is a misguided idea?
Whether or not Adam and Eve represent real people who lived in history, I think the account of them in Genesis is meant to tell a universal story of human rebellion and faithlessness. The truth of the story is meant to be obvious to anyone who lives in the fallen world. Getting caught up in the mechanics of how a sin nature is passed to descendants seem to me to be missing the point of the narrative. The point is that sin has entered our world and all humans are corrupted by it and need a savior to reconcile them to God their creator. You don’t really need to have a working model of a sin nature transmission mechanism to see or experience the truth of that claim.
Everything we have to understand the atonement and salvation is a conceptual metaphor of some kind. Whether it is kinsmen redeemer, a ransom paid, a spotless lamb sacrificed for sin, an innocent replacement who takes punishment in place of a condemned criminal, a second Adam, a victory in a cosmic battle with the forces of evil, a legal justification, a washing and rebirth, exchanging rags for garments of righteousness, an adoption into God’s family, a grafting into the tree of Israel… all these images are not literal descriptions of the reality of our atonement and salvation. They are pictures from our embodied human experience that help us explain and understand an abstract spiritual reality that is beyond the capabilities of our embodied minds to fully grasp. All metaphors are inadequate to some degree and all will break down if they are treated like mathematical formulas and pushed beyond their intended points of comparison.
I don’t think biological kinship matters to God. Hence the focus on adoption making people full heirs with Christ or the idea that Gentiles who are not descendants of Abraham are full heirs of the promise in Christ. The idea of heritage (which was so important to the Jews) is constantly challenged by Jesus in the gospels (especially Mark, which was written to highlight Gentile inclusion) and Paul.
I’m agnostic on Adam’s historicity. I don’t think it’s important to the narrative or Paul’s rhetoric one way or the other. I think it may be that Paul conceptualized Adam as historical. (I don’t think New Testament authors were omniscient or that their worldviews were “correct” in every respect. This isn’t a problem for my understanding of inspiration or authority of Scripture.) Minimally, he referenced him as a known literary figure who helped him make his rhetorical points.
But I always point out, if I make an allusion to Robin Hood to make a point about a new tax law and you believe what I say is true, it doesn’t 1) mean that Robin Hood is a historical figure, 2) mean that I believe Robin Hood is a historical figure not a fictional figure, or 3) establish what portion of the cultural canon we share about Robin Hood is objective fact and what is legend. You can make literary allusions historical figures from literature, to characters that are totally fictional, and to characters that are historical but mythologized to make rhetorical points and what is important is our shared understanding of who that character was and what they did in the story, not historical objective facts.
People try to make it out like Paul is making a logical argument and “Adam was a historical person” is a premise on which his conclusions “Jesus atoned for sin” stand, and I don’t think that is an accurate description of how and why he alludes to Adam. I don’t think any of his arguments fail if Adam is not historical because I think it is the metaphor that matters. It is the conceptual link between Adam as a failed image bearer and Christ as the faithful image bearer that matters, and all you need to make those conceptual links is familiarity with the Adam narrative.
On a separate note, I think the Adam and Eve story is our spiritual origins story. It is God entering the particular human history that we count ourselves a part of as Christians who share a spiritual heritage with Jews. Of course that history takes on a special significance because it culminates in Christ, who is unique in human history and the way for all humanity to be reconciled to God. But I don’t have a problem with the idea that God entered human history multiple times and related to other groups in other parts of the world at different times in history and those stories are lost to us. I don’t theologically need “the fall” to be located at a specific time in history with a specific person in order to accept the truth that humans everywhere ultimately rebel against God and all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. The mechanics of who is innocent before God and who is accountable for their sin and how Christ’s sacrifice applies to people throughout history are things we can only speculate about. I put the “when in evolutionary history are humans accountable for sin” question and the “how are people not related to Adam held accountable for sin” in the same category as “what happens to babies who die” and “what about people who never hear the gospel?” I believe God is a God of love and his justice is perfect and beyond my ability to work out and that there are answers to those questions that I can’t know at the moment.
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Soooooo, where does it get this purpose from? And what is it? I mean, OK, if God exists then eternal nature has a purpose, which is a faith position I share. Otherwise, as in raionally, it don’t.
Purpose comes from God. It’s a faith claim, not a scientific proposition. The objection is to the claim that evolutionary science demonstrates purposelessness as a fact. It is not a counter-claim that evolutionary science demonstrates purpose.
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Hmmmmm. You are wayyyy smarter than me Christy, than I ever was on a good day. So I’m obviously missing something obvious. Obviously. Evolutionary science demonstrates purposelessness as a fact. That’s a fact. No purpose can be inferred from evolution. And not for one moment was I inferring that you would claim otherwise. You are wayyyyy too smart for that. But if evolutionary science doesn’t demonstrate purpose, it therefore demonstrates purposelessness. Is that false logic on my part? The thing I’m missing? There’s something it demonstrates between them? What could that be?
We agree that God gives purpose.
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But not Gregory’s interpretation as a Ph.D. in biology who has studied evolution.
Has he studied gravitationism? Or electromagnetismism?
It is absolutely not a fact. Evolution demonstrates nothing about purpose. You are making a category error.
Between what categories?
Philosophy and science. “This is true.” And obvious.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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I think in this case, all we have demonstrated is that I did some work on a glossary…
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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.
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Quite a few misconceptions.
- 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.
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- 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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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.
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I beg to differ Christy, you wielded formal logic peerlessly.
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