Keep in mind I was brought up around speakers like Kent Hovind, and other Answers in Genesis-like influences. They brought up arguments like in the Psalms it says “God speaks and it is done” and/or phraseology like that used in Genesis “And God separated the light from the darkness: and it was so”. The implication being that, if it took millions or billions of years, God must have been speaking “realllllly slowly”.
The problem with this analysis is that even in their strictly literal-chronological view of Genesis nothing in Genesis truly happens “instantaneously” ---- unless perhaps God snaps his fingers, waits for 24 hours, then snaps his fingers again?
I don’t see Genesis as referring to instanteous creation, either, but I was just letting you know that’s the way I thought for a long time.
I’m not really a Calvinist, so I don’t believe that everything in the universe is necessarily pre-determined. Part of the reason I think like this is when I consider the lineage of Jesus. When God speaks to Adam and Eve in the garden, in Genesis 3:15, He speaks of a the messianic prophecy: the future birth of a person that will conquer evil once and for all. This prophecy wasn’t fulfilled until at least 4,000 years later.
When you read the stories leading up to the birth of Jesus, you can see a vast multitude of divine interventions.
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God chooses Noah and tells him to build an ark for 100 years.
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God chooses Abraham and tells him that his seed will bless many nations. But God has to intervene and “open up/make alive” Sarah’s womb to do so.
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The problem of infertility reoccurs in Jacob.
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Judah, through clever means, is tricked into having sex.
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The children of Israel now have to work for 400 years in hard bondage (Is that messiah gonna get here yet?)
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Through divine intervention God saves the Israelites from starvation by raining down bread, crows, turning rocks into water etc.
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God sets up a line of Kings through Saul. And then through David — but first he has to kill a giant with nothing but a sling and some stones, while survive numerous murder attempts by his rival Saul.
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After an extreme falling-away of the Israelites, God send the Babylonians to attack them and throw them into exile. And then later the Romans take over.
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Finally the messiah is being born! But still there’s trouble… God has to send numerous angels to Mary and Joseph so that they may escape the viciousness of King Herod.
It seems to me that God used divine intervention, in a plethora of ways, to get the desired result. Was his ways “inefficient” or “slow”…? Well that’s not really for us lowly humans to cast judgement on… As it says in the book of Isaiah “My thoughts are not your thoughts nor are My ways your ways, saith The Lord, and as the heaven is higher than the earth so are My ways higher than your ways.”
It makes me wonder if God uses these tactics to keep the sanctity of human free-will in check.
Like you, I have problems with a mode of evolution that is strictly purposeless, and “random”… But random is kind of a hard term to define. One could say rolling a dice is random. But if you stick to Newtonian principles there’s nothing “random” about it given you know the exact amount of force, motion, inertia, energy etc., being involved.
-Tim