I found the article where Walton probably published his proposal for the first time (link here).
He seems to have the basic interpretation that the text in Genesis 1 is not polytheistic and therefore, any ‘fight between gods’ thinking does not work well in the context of Genesis 1. The King aspect is mentioned but not from the viewpoint of a victorious ruler. Rather, the King is pictured as a ruler without any comparable rivals. He does not have to win because there is no fight, He just dictates what happens (my interpretation of what Walton writes).
I agree that Walton seems too focused on the temple inauguration aspect but find it natural as he is presenting and defending his new proposal. What Walton claims and writes is rather a thesis than a balanced review.
It is really hard to recognize what is and what is not an intermediary form. Partly because most end up in dead ends and go extinct, and partly because everything is potentially an intermediate form. That glider or flying squirrel may further evolve to improve its flight, or may disappear. The fish isolated in a cave lost its sight and pigment and may eventually lose its eyes altogether, or may get covered by asphalt. (By the way, cave species are a good example for you. They came from normal outside species isolated in a different environment, and changed quite a bit, though a blind cave salamander is still a salamander. But might not be in a few million years. And think of how that cave had to be formed from limestone deposited in a shallow sea, then raised, then eroded into a cave by groundwater, before the salamander found its way there.
There’s also a classic written by Glenn Morton, a late and great member here at Biologos (@gbob).
For example, there are enough diatoms buried in the ground to cover the entire Earth in a 70 foot thick deposit. The crinoid deposits are also quite impressive and one of my favorites. There’s enough crinoids in just one deposit to cover the Earth to a depth of 1/4 inch.
Individual organisms don’t evolve, populations do. The fact that you would ask this question shows that you don’t really have a concept of what the evolutionary model describes. Offspring are always fundamentally the same as their parents, because they share their parent’s DNA. Natural selection works over many generations on the genetic diversity of a whole population’s gene pool. Individuals are born with DNA, if they are fit, they survive and reproduce, and pass their DNA to the next generation.
Here is an interesting article about how genes for small pelvises are not being selected out of the human population due to the availability of C-sections, which is affecting human evolution. I think it’s a good example of a small but measurable change at the popluation level due to removal of one form of selective pressure (necessity of vaginal delivery of offspring for survival).
No, “the bee” is now over 20,000 species in seven families, many of which no one would recognize as a bee except scientists who study bees – and the bee 100 million years ago wasn’t a bee. That means that for a given batch of bees there are 20,000 other batches of bees they can’t breed with – which is an indication that they are already changed into something else and we just have sloppy language when we talk about them.
Your claim is like saying that apes are still apes, that because humans are apes then we are the same as apes millions of years ago.
Don’t introduce science fiction into this.
But you’re not talking about evolution, you’re talking about a cartoon making fun of evolution. That tends to be evidence that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Living? No. Fossil? Yes, I have. the specimens of Ensis sp. cf. directus in the Waccamaw Formation are about a quarter of the way in shell form from older Ensis directus to modern Ensis leei. The Pelycidion in the lower Waccamaw Formation overlap in form with both P. matthewi from the Yowktown and Duplin and with the Pelycidion in the upper Waccamaw, and the ones in the upper Waccamaw also overlap with the recent Pelycidion megalomastoma.
I’d guess the proportion of species at that point is probably about 0.5% or less, but they are there (e.g. Lyellian definitions of Tertiary epochs).
Well of course you haven’t, but that’s not evolution; it’s shape shifting, which is science fiction.
A piece of advice for you here. If you’re going to try to challenge a scientific theory (evolution included) you need to make sure you’re challenging what the theory actually says in reality and not some kind of cartoon caricature of it. Objecting to a theory on the grounds that we don’t see something ridiculous that it doesn’t tell us we should expect to see is called a straw man argument, and it is at best cluelessness and at worst flat out lying.
I’d agree that there is no fight between gods in Genesis 1 even in the polemical material; the status of the Egyptian gods is not presented as them even being able to make a challenge to Yahweh, rather they are shown to be merely created things. So contrary to the common idea at the time that deities would fight for supremacy the point is that Yahweh doesn’t even need to fight. Rather than a contest, the relationship is presented as one where no contest is even possible.
But given that the Hebrew writer used the Egyptian creation story as his framework asserting no polytheism of any kind lacks foundation; the original audience would have recognized that the story on one level was about the Egyptian gods being put in their places, their claims on parts of Creation nullified. It’s not polytheism in the sense of deities having equal footing – as Dr. Heiser likes to say, there are many Elohim, but only one Elohim is Yahweh – but in the sense that these other entities qualify as elohim, i.e. they are heavenly, un-embodied beings.
He’s got a point there: in the ‘royal chronicle’ genre YHWH-Elohim is shown as master over disorder, but it’s not really a conquest; He “conquers” by command and thus orders His kingdom without a fight, or even a need for one.
This line caught my attention:
Material ontology had become so thoroughly accepted that no one was aware that ontology did not have to be material and had not always been so.
That describes the young-earth error nicely: they have never even examined their ontology because they fail to imagine that there can be any that isn’t material – and thus they fall into relying on scientific materialism, not recognizing that they are doing so, and not realizing that their tho9ught rests on a foundation that is inherently contrary to scripture.
The precreation state is not absent of matter but absent of function.
Walton makes this statement but then goes on to essentially hold that the precreation state actually was absent of matter, when it;s not that matter is absent, it’s that matter isn’t the focus.
the age of the material earth would have no relationship to these six days, for the material cosmos could have been in existence for endless ages before this creation of functions
That’s a much clearer statement than what I’m accustomed to hearing from him! It fits well with the thinking of those scholars who found in Genesis 1 a universe of unimaginable age and an Earth whose age was beyond counting: when looking at the material side of things in the Creation story they have to be subsumed under the theme of ordering functions.
This is from a footnote but I regard it as critical:
The function of time is not just based, as we are inclined to think, on the physical mechanics of time—it requires the presence of someone for whom time functions. That is, time cannot really achieve its function until people are put in place, because all of the cosmos is set up around them.
This also fits with ancient scholars who counted the days as real but considered them to be “divine days” since only Yahweh was present to define time.
It occurs to me that in this light we may misunderstand Yahweh’s omnipresence: perhaps He is not present in material things but in the processes.
According to evolutionary scientists, life evolved to fish at 530 million years ago. Then went from fish to amphibians 370 million years ago. Then went from amphibian to reptiles 310 million years ago. Then went from reptile to dinosaur 220 million years ago and to mammals 200 million years ago Then went from dinosaur to bird 150 million years ago. So, basically it only takes 50-100 million years for major life forms to evolve according to scientists. And we are talking about multitudes of each group, not just one. This is theory as it cannot be proved. If true, evolution must be quite the powerhouse; never stopping as it is based on random mutation.
So, for those current living species, whose ancestors have been around for 50 million years or more, I would think we should be seeing alot of evolution in front of our eyes. Instead, it appears the best that anyone can come up with are small changes, but the creature doesn’t eventually morph into something else, which would be required if macro evolution were true.
I think evolution occurs, and may occur alot more rapidly than many think. But I just don’t think the evidence is there for morphing into something else (cat to a dog, or fish to amphibian, etc). And, ultimate proof should be right in front of our eyes in current living creatures; not wild guesses at which fossil might have evolved into the next fossil.
I’m no scientist so I may not be understanding what you said. However, it appears you are saying in the first sentence that there is a 25% change in shell from Ensis Directus to Ensis Leei.
But, I read that these are two names for the same thing; razor clam. I also found the following online Ensis has successfully invaded the Wadden Sea and adjacent offshore regions of the North Sea (Gollasch et al., 2015), as indicated by its remarkably high biomass and abundance (Tulp et al., 2010; Dannheim and Rumohr, 2012; Dekker and Beukema, 2012; Breine et al., 2018). Specimen in the Wadden Sea grow significantly shorter than in its native range (Von Cosel, 2009).
So, appears that these razor clams change in size some. My question would be, isn’t it still a razor clam? Is it 25%/50%/75% changed into something else besides a razor clam?
While both are jackknife clams (a subset of razor clams) and very similar ones even within that, Ensis leei grows larger as a maximum size than E. directus, has a notably higher curvature to the shell, the horizontal growth lines are strongly curved (weakly curved in E. directus), the horizontally-oriented hinge teeth and ligament are longer than in E. directus, and the anterior pallial scar is tilted anteriorly, rather than being straight dorso-ventral (Van Urk, 1971). Typical Ensis directus is from about 4-3.0 MYA; typical Ensis leei is alive today, and the specimens of intermediate age are intermediate in form. Specifically, the ones from about 2.3 MYA are something like 25-30% of the way from E. directus to E. leei in the aforementioned characters; and the ones from about 1.9 MYA are something like 40% of the way along in the change.
Those ancestors died hundreds of millions of years ago. They weren’t immortal. They lived, possibly reproduced, and then died.
We can come up with the large changes. They are seen in the differences between the genomes of living species. We also have the transitional fossils.
They are there in living creatures. The evidence is all over their genomes as well as the mixture of characteristics that they have. For example, the platypus has features from both reptiles and mammals. We have the lungfish which has both a lung and gills. In general, we see the nested hierarchy, the branching tree of life, that we would expect to see if life has shared ancestry. The nested hierarchy is the big piece of evidence that really convinced the scientific community.
What wild guesses? The theory of evolution predicts that there was, at one time, species that had a mixture of features between lobe finned fish and amphibians. We found the fossils predicted by the theory.
The English language has changed quite a bit over the last 1,000 years. How would you determine if the English language is 50% changed into something else?
“it has changed some, but still a razor clam.” You are accepting that one species can evolve into another, which some young-earth and some ID advocates deny. Make certain that you are being consistent in what you are claiming, not just throwing out any excuse that seems convenient at the moment.
