Does Evolution Need God?

Faith & Science Conversation
82

Steve, I much appreciate this post of yours. We go back a ways, and I have always respected and admired your acumen and willingness to engage, even when some of our interactions (usually on other fora) became just a bit heated. It’s good to see you here, where I have just returned after too long an absence.

Yes, I agree with all of that, including the last line. And I think that’s OK. Nothing is easy about this entire subject, and I believe we need to acknowledge and respect the difficulty we have in making progress and learning what it is we really believe. I have a book coming out soon that details my own decades-long path to faith. To sum it all up, I owe my belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior to the mercy and grace of the Holy Spirit. All the rest are details. Peace.

3 Likes
83

Whoa, Sy, you have already forgotten the first rule of Fight Club?

I drift in and out. The @moderators deserve some peace every now and then. They tried to bribe me with a Chick-Fil-A gift card.

I think one of my main challenges lately is whether and how to believe someone when they say what they believe. I’m not at all sure how many Christians believe what they say they believe. Complicated machines, us humans.

5 Likes
84

I feel much the same way. Just as I suspect that nearly all flat-earthers are have tongues firmly in cheek, I wonder if YECers are 90 percent holding to it on Sunday as a social marker, but live life with no real conflict when they look at the Grand Canyon or see a Hubble photo of galaxies 12 billion light years distant. And truth is that the irrational part of religious belief is a strain at times, I think, for even the most pious.

6 Likes
85

I was miffed that the additional Hobby Lobby gift package didn’t push you over. I knew that I should have included a free year’s subscription to the daily doctrinal bulletin of my East Prussian Anabaptist Order of the Right Hand - something that you couldn’t say ‘no’ to so easily anyway. Bulk Chick Tracts - the extended witness bundle? Creation Club membership? You’ve got a weakness somewhere and we’re gonna find it.

3 Likes
86

I always hated that film.

87

Amateur. Just give him a haggis. :wink:

On a more serious note, sometimes I think there’s a fine line between believing something and wanting to believe something, or even believing that you should believe it.

2 Likes
88

Me too, and I haven’t even seen it. :laughing:

89

Why so you suggest that there is a problem with the English? The Jews and the Greeks are clear that the phrase at the beginning of the Bible was about the Beginning. The phrase in the Hebrew can be translated, “When God began to create” if you don’t like the use the word beginning there, but when did God begin to create? In the Beginning.

In terms of the Greek in the LXX and John 1:1 the word “arche” as I said refers to Origins or the Beginning. It is not a generic word for a beginning. Your attempt to find a way to make “In the Beginning” say something that it does not as if this would disprove the Big Bang assumes that the Bible is the Word of God.

Earlier you referred to Kuhn’s book on Scientific Revolutions as justification that the Big Bang might be a failed model. I really wonder now if you have read that book. It does not say what you say it said. Einstein’s gravity has replaced Newton’s and nothing you nor others have suggested come4s even close to displacing this. Questions are not evidence.

We don’t know all the answers, which is why we need to go with the best that we have, while keeping an open mind about the future. The fact that the Big Bang agrees with Christian theology is a plus, not a minus as some people think.

90

I guess I agree, but the grammatical English translation nearly turns the first word into a proper noun. Is that really the intention of the author?

So, we have these options for how to take the first sentence:

  1. A summary statement of the creation. (von Rad)
  2. Pre-creation - Creation of heaven and earth up to it being formless and void.
  3. Starting the story from an advanced stage: “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,/ when the earth was . . .” (alternative from Fox 1983)
  4. Treating verse 2 as a parenthetical statement “When God began to create . . . , God said, Let there be light . . .” (alternative from Kidner 1967)

Options 1 and 2 are all-in on “In The Beginning…” Options 3 and 4 are not. Options 2 or 3 have made the most sense to me. A Big Bang cosmology has to have options 1 or 4.

Good point. I’ve encountered that before. Several of the commentators (von Rad for instance) are adamant that neither of the two visions of creation are poetic. I don’t agree, but then my Hebrew is limited to what I’ve gleaned from concordances.

1 Like
91

“In the beginning” works fine for me because it’s a literary origin story, it doesn’t have to grammatically concord with the scientific origin of the space-time continuum. When I let go of the concordist interpretive tendencies I grew up with, it opened up all sorts of options. Like seeing “the deep” as chaos and the Creation week as a literary device that sets up domains and functionaries in the domains.

2 Likes
92

This question made me wonder, the books of the Bible used to be called by their first few words, right? That’s why Genesis is named Genesis, it’s literally an older translation of “In the beginning.” So would it be possible to read the New Testament as saying, Have you not read in Genesis…?

2 Likes
93

Huh. I don’t know.

1 Like
94

Since I often capitalize the Beginning making it a proper noun, let me address this. A regular noun like father becomes a capitalized proper noun when it refers to only once specific entity, as when I call my dad, Father. It is clear that the Bible is talking about the Creation and it is clear that there is only one Cfreation and only one specific Beginning.

The Beginning is the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang is the beginning of the universe. According to the Big Bang the Beginning of the universe took place in less than a second. According to Genesis the begging of the universe took place in less than a day.

Before the Big Bang there was nothing, no matter, no energy, no space, no time. Before the Beginning of Creation there was nothing, so matter, no energy, no space, no time.

At the Beginning of the Big Bang there was the Singularity, which was a speck of mass. There was still no energy, no space, no time, no form. At the very Beginning when God began to create there was mass, but no space, no time, no form. There was darkness, chaos, and absence of form.

Then in the Big Bang matter and antimatter came together and a vast amount of energy was produced and the tine universe expanded at a phenomenal rate, so there became matter, energy, time, and space. The God said, “Let there be Light/Energy” and there was Light/Energy. And so there became matter, energy, time, space, form.

1 Like
95

Well, which “In the beginning…”? As far as I know, none of these options were considered with a concordist view in mind. I agree the account should be looked at on its own terms, suspending modern knowledge if need be. I see the the deep as chaos, parallelism of days 1 to 3 with 4 to 6, etc., but I also see the two accounts of creation don’t require me to suspend modern knowledge if they are taken as observations of a vision.

Conversely, if taken as a wholly created text by the priestly class (as does von Rad), it is hard to regard it as ‘true’ in any age. The dissonance between the two accounts of creation alone scuttles that.

96

Roger, I get it. The Big Bang gives us an answer to the oxymoronic question: “At what time did time begin?” Answer: in the beginning, 13.8 bya. I understand how you are seeing this in the text and technically, it is fine.

I’m looking at the creation account as a vision and asking how this was observed by an ancient Hebrew. Where is this Hebrew standing to observe the Big Bang? What is the darkness (evening and morning) at the end of Day 1? I think I’ve shown the text doesn’t have to have the Big Bang to make sense.

If you look back through our posts, I’ve laid out sound internal and external reasons why the Big Bang cosmology is not yet mature enough to embrace with both arms. I’m not sure 13.8 bya is going to stand the test of time. I’m not even sure there will be a number. The black energy/cosmological constant problem is pretty serious and might blow that up.

A divine day ala Psalm 90 I would think. That is 6000 years if you ignore the similes. Much more if you don’t.

98

I am sorry but you don’t get it. You seem to be trivializing a very important theological, scientific, philosophy fact, which is that the universe has a Beginning. Believe it or not, humans only widely accepted this fact over the last 50 or so years with the evidence of the Big Bang. If you read Thomas Kuhn’s book you would understand this.

The 13.8 billion years are not the important thing. The fact that the universe was created out of nothing is. While theology basically accepted the Beginning on the basis of Gen 1, philosophy traditionally has maintained that the universe was eternal. Science had no evidence that the universe is not eternal, until the discovery of background radiation confirmed the existence of the Big Bang.

Even so some scientists came up with the Steady State view of the universe, while others tried to show that the Big Bang was the beginning of time and space. If the universe has no Beginning then Matter must be eternal, and must be uncreated.

Genesis 1 is not based on a vision. Gen 1 is based on the fact that God is One and Eternal, while the universe is Many and bound by time. Gen 1:1 is an event based on the character of God and reality. That science through the Big Bang backs this up encourages me to think that we live on one reality, not many

The text doe not require the Big Bang in the sense that the Hebrews did not understand the universe as well as we do now. The text requires the Big Bang today because this is the only way that the text makes sense of all that we know, even if there are some issues remaining. .

1 Like
101

I think it would be better for us to ask whether or not God needed evolution. What was the need for Darwin and those like him to propose a theory of how the universe including you and me came about after we were already Biblically informed? Was God’s word insufficient?

Earl

1 Like
102

Earl, I think that this would be an entirely different question. Jonathan @J.E.S is presuming evolution in his question and then asking, of those who already agree that it occurred, if they believe that God’s intervention was needed along the way in order to result in the outcomes seen today.

Your question is good and fair, but distinct.

Darwin did not, of course, propose a theory as to how the universe came about. We were Biblically informed, however, that God created. God’s word was not insufficient to articulate the important spiritual truths, but it was obviously insufficient to articulate many things of science. God’s word was silent on plate tectonics, magnetism, gravity, space/time, atomic and sub-atomic particles, aviation, space flight, bacteria, viruses, and thousands of other topics. The Bible is not at fault because of this lack any more than a hammer is at fault for not being a good fly-swatter.

103

2 Mya proto-human intelligence started increasing extraordinarily quickly, coinciding with the appearance of stone tools and fire

Cp. Prometheus and the Watchers, which mythical memories attribute fire and advanced knowledge & metallurgy to other worldly powers intervening into human history to transmit those knowledges to humanity

The exceptional growth of human technology, from stone tools and fire 2Mya through to present day could be construed as evidence of heavenly intervention into human history and cultivation of humanity for tool use and technology

42234_2018_14_Fig2_HTML.png785×382

104

According to the Curiosity Stream documentary Breakthrough – Homo Naledi, those ancient humans, evidencing some ancient Australopithicene anatomical features similar to other fossils >2Myr old, also evidences some more modern features as well as modern behaviors (burial of deceased deep in caves)

Not impossibly, about 2Mya early humans began to

  • make stone tools
  • wield fire
  • participated in rituals

Note that the ritual burials preserved bones & even soft tissue much as have Jewish ossuaries

1 Like