Does it bother anyone else that YEC’s come on here to try and challenge our beliefs? Insisting their interpretation of Genesis is the ONLY interpretation and if you don’t view it literally then you’re wrong? It seems like some of them have no desire to actually hear what we have to say, just to prove us wrong.
It gets tiring.
Then there’s organizations like AIG who know nothing about Evolution and continue to spread confusion to honest seekers. Lying even though God says don’t lie.
God is for truth. Evolution is scientifically sound, therefore I believe God made everything through the process of Evolution. It’s not that hard.
I am mainly venting. Anyone else feel the same way?
Emily, it is one of the missions of BioLogos to provide a forum for discussion of origins related topics and one of the invited demographics is young earth creationists. They are welcome to come here and present and defend their views. If those types of threads are threatening, or exhausting, or bothersome to you, just avoid them.
People start where they start and it doesn’t do any good to assume that because someone believes something strongly now, they will never change their mind. Our goal is to provide a welcoming atmosphere to anyone who wants to discuss these things. People who can’t follow our dialogue guidelines and are just here to preach at people will eventually be weeded out.
Many months ago, when the pace of posting had been at a lull, I had proposed reaching out to a dozen or so YEC seminaries (or even a liberal arts evangelical college)… where 12 or so volunteer theological students could be a regular participant explaining his denomination’s views on various “planks” of Evolutionary theory. Every year, we could recruit a new batch.
This proposal wasn’t particularly popular… but within a week or so… the pace picked up and hasn’t slackened that much since that original slow period.
This is an Open Forum, but we are pretty obviously aligned with one perspective, and most people here subscribe to that perspective. Thus, when people from other perspectives come here, they are most likely looking for an argument. This is just the reality. Our main task is to demonstrate patience and graciousness with these folks. It is unlikely that many of them will change their mind (internet arguments rarely produce this effect).
Think of it this way: If a barbecue enthusiast walks into a PETA meeting, he’s probably not there to chat and make friends.
More than 13,000 Christian clergy agree with you. You may want to check out the The Clergy Letter Project where you can find this statement:
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris.
Was God telling the truth when he wrote this? … “But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female” (Mark 10:6).
Theistic evolutionists claim humans didn’t exist until BILLIONS OF YEARS AFTER creation.
Coming from Christian clergy, I find this line of thought very disturbing. At the very least, it is virtually saying that a theory that can never be tested is a fact.
The theory that all life on earth has evolved from unicellular organisms “has stood up to rigorous scrutiny”? How? It’s untestable!
The theory that all life on earth evolved from unicellular organisms is not only untestable, it is utterly useless to applied science, so how can it be something that “much of human knowledge and achievement rests” upon?
@T_aquaticus is not Christian clergy. He isn’t even a Christian. There are lots of different people who participate here. It seems you think we all think the same way. Maybe you should ask more questions instead of telling people what you know they think.
Isn’t this required to be interpreted somewhat figuratively since, according to the literal Genesis account, mankind was not created on day 6, rather than day 1? Day 6 is not “the beginning of creation”. Would it not be more reasonable to interpret this passage from Mark as an ordination of the marriage covenant, since that’s what Jesus is actually addressing?
And young-earth creationists claim that humans didn’t exist until FIVE FULL DAYS AFTER the beginning of creation.
Houston, we still have a problem.
The fact is, time passed, in both YEC & EC scenarios, between “the beginning of creation” and when humans were created “male and female.” Not sure you have an advantage here.
You are suggesting that theistic evolutionists are wrong about the Bible’s quote: “from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female”… because that would mean humans existed too early.
Obviously, the solution to this problem is not to dismiss Cosmology, Geology and Evolution … but to dismiss the sentence that “from the beginning of Creation” !
Technically, according to evolution, the concepts of ‘male and female’ predate the existence of humans by about a billion years.
But that is still long after the beginning of the universe, or what we would think of as the beginning of the universe, anyway. The beginning of the Bible covers a vast amount of time. Only later in the Bible does it go into more details about smaller periods of time, until the entire New Testament is written about a period of less than a hundred years! Can you imagine if that many pages were written about the first hundred years of creation? Why do you suppose there’s such a dramatic difference in historical detail?
Does “truth” mean different things to different people?
The theory of evolution can be tested. Here are 29+ tests for the theory:
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent[quote=“Thomas_Bell, post:10, topic:36550”]
The theory that all life on earth evolved from unicellular organisms is not only untestable, it is utterly useless to applied science, so how can it be something that “much of human knowledge and achievement rests” upon?
[/quote]
You can apply evolutionary principles to predict protein function using an algorithm called SIFTER:
You can also use the theory to explain tons of observations in biology, such as the divergence of exons and introns, the distribution of characteristics in species, the order of fossils in the geologic record, and much more.
Genesis was not meant to be read literally. The contradictions in the first two verses illustrate this. As well as the the fields of Cosmology, Geology, etc. And the fact that after the earth was first formed, it couldn’t sustain any life at all. So Adam and Eve, if they existed, would have come much later. The EC position doesn’t rule out the possibility of Adam and Eve being real people. Some Theistic Evolutionists believe they were real people; I am open to that possibility.
I think this has been explained here by multiple people, but the point of Genesis was the WHY God created all things. Not the how. I believe the message it wasn’t meant to convey-humans are cut off from God through our sinfulness and Jesus’s sacrifice is the only way to be reconciled with Him. So yes, I do believe the Bible, although some would discount that because it’s not the “correct” interpretation they think I should hold.
And the Bible was never meant to be a science book, so it shouldn’t be forced into a role it wasn’t supposed to be in.
The “problem” lies with holding a literal interpretation.
That wasn’t clear when he quoted you.