Just because it deserves to be repeated …
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I have no reason to doubt that you and @sfmatheson are here with the best of intentions, but the constant snarky comments and threads about the atonement and challenges to Christianity in general do nothing to help your stated cause. Wittingly or unwittingly, both of you give credence to the YEC fear that acceptance of evolution is a “gateway drug” to full-blown atheism. Your approach is actually counterproductive.
Just my 2c
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Hi Caspar,
My position when it comes to how people interpret Scripture is pretty straightforward. If someone understands that we are all fallen creatures in need of salvation and that Jesus Christ is the only way in which one can be put right with God through faith, and if their faith is of the tested and unshakeable quality then I personally can’t see how their belief in billions of years and evolution is a salvation issue.
Personally speaking if I was not of the conviction that Genesis can be read as a straightforward literal account of the early history of Man to include other events such as the global flood in the time of Noah I wouldn’t have any basis for belief in the Fall and sin and the need for salvation and the ransom of Jesus Christ.
As I said to Joshua Swamidass in an earlier post I guess there’s no ‘one size fits all.’
But why is it that we Christians who know from Scripture that thanks to Adam who Fell we, who are fallen and corrupt, can’t seem to accept at face value what God has told us? Why are we so unbelieving and doubtful as to the plain meaning of the text as though God was setting before us a literature test puzzle which we needs must decode?
Is there a clue in the fact that we are fallen and corrupt? And how much is due to the “curiosity effect?”
What I mean is this. When you read Genesis you’re struck by how almost childlike in his innocence and purity is Adam.
From childlike innocence Adam was to progress into the condition of moral manhood which of necessity required maintaining his innocence in the face of temptation. Fast forward a few thousand years and the “last Adam,” namely, Jesus Christ who after fasting for 40 days was faced by a similar temptation involving food. “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Matthew 4:3
Where Jesus succeeded (in resisting temptation even when hungry) Adam, who had an abundance of food from which to choose, failed.
Did curiosity for the unknown get the better of Adam? Don’t we have within us this rather unhealthy desire to take even a peek at the dark side? Adam did more than take a peek and stepped out of the light and into the darkness. As his descendents we have inherited this loss of purity and innocence and we have this desire to taste that which is forbidden, do we not?
Caspar: “I believe the seventh day in Genesis 1 denotes the time after God completed the establishment of our inhabitable world from complete chaos…”
With our loss of innocence and purity have we like Adam lost our trust in God to the extent that we disbelieve when He says: “For in six days (yom) the Lord made the heavens and the earth…. but he rested on the seventh day.”
The word “For” (Hebrew ki, also having the sense “because”) at the beginning of this expression is a causal explanation, showing that the creation week is the very basis of the working week.
In these passages it’s explicit that the creation days were the same as those of the human work week. There is no point in even trying to understand the Bible if a word in the same passage and the same grammatical context can switch meanings, without any hint in the text itself.
There are plenty of hints in the text itself.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. … and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
We have three days of evening and morning and the land producing vegetation before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars. I’d say that’s a pretty big hint from the text itself that these are not “normal” days. But if you can’t see it …
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The Eastern Orthodox don’t seem to have any of the problems you predict that you would have. Millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians, for centuries, have been able to conclude one basic truth:
Humans are frail and corruptible … because they are flesh and mortal. They don’t argue that humans have Adam’s sin… they simply state that all men, like Adam, will sin … because they are made of mortal flesh. (Heck, even some Angels (not of mortal flesh, right?) sinned. So certainly humans have no way out of this one.
And that’s what Jesus is here for.
Yes, I too would enjoy reading results of archeological research into this time period in human history. [quote=“Swamidass, post:17, topic:35139”]
This is not science, of course, but it is similar in that it is very easy for everyone (including experts, but especially non-experts) to glibly dismiss real events in the past that do not suit our preconceptions or desired worldview. One of the greatest lessons science has to teach us is that we need to embrace the world as it is, not as we think it is. The same is here too.
[/quote]
Historical writings about real historical events can easily be embellished and made into legends depending on the biases of the writers. It takes real scientific discipline to research historical events and come up with facts about the historical event and its historical context. Books are still being written on the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy. New facts coming to light with new research that disprove many of what were considered facts prior. We need to follow the facts wherever they may take us.
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Jay Johnson: “But if you can’t see it.”
Frank: Evidently you neither saw it nor understood it.
The text to which I was referring which you clearly missed is taken from Exodus 20 8-11
The point being that the six days of creation and seventh day of rest in the creation account use the same language and grammar - and no-one could possibly imagine that YHWH meant the people of Israel were to work for 6 yoms of billions or millions of years and then rest for one billion or one million years.
No-one could possibly think that! Could they?
Ah, I did miss that. Guilty of skimming, as charged. Of course, all biblical exegetes know that if a word is used in one place to mean one thing, then that word must have the exact same meaning everywhere else that it appears. I’m being sarcastic, of course, because I hope you realize that doesn’t hold true in any language, even English. Usage and context are everything.
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Given that the Lord Jesus Christ used sarcasm and biting satire and that I personally love it I’ve zero obejction to your use of sarcasm - and especially not when it fails to rebut the central point I made,namely, that the Genesis account of creation and literal 24 hour days is directly related to the work week and the Sabbath day as recorded in Exodus 20.
God could have created the entire Universe in an instant in the “blink of an eye” or he could have taken billions of years as is presumably your belief.
IF you accept that God created the Earth specifically with humans in Mind and that He wanted a family relationship with us, given that he could have created in an instant or over billons, it doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination, for some people that is - those who trust God, that he took six days of 24 hours as he had recorded in his revelation to his human family.
Sorry, I didn’t feel the need to rebut that portion, because it is obvious that the author of Genesis has used the 7-day week as a literary device to frame God’s creative work. Meredith Kline capably discusses it in this article. You should read it. I actually think you would like it.
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Yes, the “creation controversy” in first millennium of the church was why God took so long to create, rather than doing it in an instant. I have no doubt that he could have done so, had he chosen. But that creates the whole problem of creation with apparent age, which makes even less sense. Regardless, God’s ultimate purpose in creation was not the creation of humans because he wanted a family. As Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest philosopher, demonstrated, God’s ultimate end in creation was his own glory.
The creation points and testifies the Glory of God - however God does not have a need to add to His infinite Glory - the ultimate end of creation is that all of the creation is reconciled to God, and those created in His image share in the ultimate end of creation. The need to comprehend and praise the Glory of God is within the human spirit.
Casper
The only thing I’d question in this (in a very helpful and positive thread), is what is actually signified by the term “natural” in your thinking?
It can’t mean “happening apart from God’s involvement” because you’ve excluded that. That’s where the video billiard analogy breaks down, because Babjanyan does metaphorically go for a deistic coffee once he’s set the table up and thrown the ball. Were it the case that he was divine and simply maintained the system in existence whilst the laws of momentum produced the result, he would still not be “involved” in the specific wonder of the trick shot. He’d be just as involved in that “sustaining” sense if the balls were all static or losing him an important game.
Bishop Butler (quoted by Asa Gray) defined “natural” as “predictable and orderly”, and yet evolutionary theory is neither predictable nor particularly orderly, so that can’t be what is meant by “natural”.
Then again, theologians as great as Augustine have defined “natural” as simply whatever God does. Therefore, he says in City of God (XXI.8), if God changes the usual naturally fixed (par excellence) course of the stars to create a portent, that is both his right and his glory - and perfectly natural. But scientifically speaking, it would be unintelligible by the known “laws of nature”, so that can’t be what you mean by “natural” either.
I return to the perennial question of “randomness”, both in the sense of random variation, and randomness with respect to fitness, and randomness in the environment itself. In any scientific sense, all those are just placeholders for “of unknown (natural) cause”. The net result is that our “natural causes” are in such cases (a) of no known, or in many cases even knowable, cause, (b) known by faith to involve God intimately anyway and (c) consist of the individual events that James Clerk Maxwell, introducing the world to statistical laws of science, called the (non-investigable) events that “the divine will enacts”.
C S Lewis, investigating the origin of the word “nature” itself, concludes that the only way to differentiate “natural” form “supernatural” is on an emotional, not any rational basis.
All of which leads me to wonder, in the context of a theistic account of origins, or of science in general, what weight the word “natural” actually carries.
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Hi Jon -
As always, you bring an interesting perspective. I would agree with you, Bishop Butler, and Gray;
However, with quantum physics, chaotic natural systems like weather, and biology, predictions are probabilisric rather than deterministic. Thus I respectfully disagree with the second half of your statement.
I am sure that Butler and Gray knew about Pascal’s math, but it wasn’t ubtil the next century that the range over which probabilistic predictions could be applied was extended from games into the very fabric of nature, i.e., elementary particles. Yet you would agree that the (probabilistic) laws of quantum mechanics should be classified as “natural,” would you not?
Here is an example of a probabilistic prediction generated by evolutionary theoty: if Jon Garvey sequenced his own DNA and the DNA of hos parents, there is a 95% probability that the quantity of mutations found in Jon’s DNA would fall in the range {70 - 100}.
The fact that 0 mutations and 1000 mutations are essentially impossible in this scenario is strong evidence of predictability and orderliness, in my opinion.
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Chris,
you are spot on above in your description of nature of the quantum universe that we live in. But your last sentence slips back into a reality that is not true about the world. QM says that 0 mutations and 1000 mutations ARE possible in this scenario and are strong evidence of unpredictability and messiness.
Jay: Yes, the “creation controversy” in first millennium of the church was why God took so long to create, rather than doing it in an instant. I have no doubt that he could have done so, had he chosen. But that creates the whole problem of creation with apparent age, which makes even less sense. Regardless, God’s ultimate purpose in creation was not the creation of humans because he wanted a family. As Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest philosopher, demonstrated, God’s ultimate end in creation was his own glory.
Frank: “Apparent age” like beauty “is in the eye of the beholder.”
Certainly creatures such as butterflies, hummingbirds, bees and even chimps by the beauty of their form attest to the glory of God but what in the physical world could give more glory to God than humans made in His image who would worship, love trust, believe in what He says and obey Him?
Frank:
it fails to rebut the central point I made, namely, that the Genesis account of creation and literal 24 hour days is directly related to the work week and the Sabbath day as recorded in Exodus 20.
Jay: Sorry, I didn’t feel the need to rebut that portion, because it is obvious that the author of Genesis has used the 7-day week as a literary device to frame God’s creative work. Meredith Kline capably discusses it in this article. You should read it. I actually think you would like it.
Frank: As a former atheist and then a Christian who believed in an Old Earth I understand why to you it is “obvious” that the “apparent age” of the earth is billions of years and not thousands.
Generally speaking I think that most people – there were some exceptions to the rule – believed in an earth of only around 6,000 years old up until around the time of Lyell and Darwin.
Since that time evolutionary naturalism and with it the long ages, which is indispensible to Darwinism or the notion falls flat, has become part of the zeitgeist and not surprising when educationalists in schools, colleges etc teach one side only of the argument in the manner of one hand clapping and natural history programmes presented by, say, the very affable David Attenborough are constantly on our TV screens and even movies have the subtext of evolution and long ages.
Thanks for the link to a most interesting article by Meredith Kline and I confess that I hadn’t heard of him until today. Early in his article: ‘Because it had not Rained’ he reveals his hand and in the fourth paragraph makes it crystal clear that he is a believer in billions of years which is based on the concept of uniformitarianism. However, as a Christian who believes in a real historical Adam to justify his belief in long ages he attempts to reconcile his position by arguing against six literal creation days of 24 hours in Genesis 1, which to him is a “framework,” based on Genesis 2:5ff.
But Kline makes a huge mistake which completely undercuts his own argument right from the start:
“Kline called the ordinary providence argument "the most decisive argument against the traditional interpretation."9 According to Kline, Genesis 2:5–6 describes the earth on the third “day” of creation. He believed that the reason there were not any plants of the field or herbs of the field was because God had not caused it to rain yet. He saw this as evidence that God was not creating via miraculous means but through the same natural processes we observe today. He wrote:
"Embedded in Gen. 2:5 (ff). is the principle that the modus operandi of the divine providence was the same during the creation period as that of ordinary providence at the present time. It is not to be demonstrated that those who adopt the traditional approaches cannot successfully integrate this revelation with Genesis 1 as they interpret it. In contradiction to Gen. 2:5, the twenty-four-hour day theory must presuppose that God employed other than the ordinary secondary means in executing his works of providence. To take just one example, it was the work of the ‘third day’ that the waters should be gathered together into seas and that the dry land should appear and be covered with vegetation (Gen. 1:9-13). All this according to the theory in question transpired within twenty-four hours. But continents just emerged from under the sea do not become thirsty land as fast as that by the ordinary process of evaporation. And yet according to the principle revealed in Gen. 2:5 the process of evaporation at that time was the ordinary one.10
Once again, there are numerous problems with Kline’s argument. First, Genesis 2:5–6 does NOT refer to the third day, but to the SIXTH day just PRIOR to the creation of man. These verses use two specific Hebrew terms to refer to the “plant of the field” (siah hassadeh) and “herb of the field” (eseb hassadeh). These Hebrew terms are different than the ones used on the third day when God made the “grass,” the “herb that yields seed,” and the “tree that yields fruit” (Genesis 1:11-12). Ironically, Futato, who also promoted this view, describes the “plant of the field” as the wild shrubs of the steppe, which contain thorns and thistles, and the “herb of the field” as cultivated grain.11 It should be fairly obvious why the thorny plants and cultivated grains did not exist yet. Man had not been created yet to till the ground and he had not sinned yet bringing about the Curse on the earth of which thorny plants were one of the results (Genesis 3:18)." [my added emphasis]
For a fully thorough rigorous examination of Kline’s argument see:
https://answersingenesis.org/.../old.../whats-wrong-with-the-framework-hypothesis/
https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/.../critique-of-the-framework-interpretation-o
A Critique of the Framework Interpretation of Creation (2 of 2 …
https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/.../critique-of-the-framework-interpretation-o…
Patrick,
Assuming a Gaussian distribution, if the mean is 85 and standard deviation is 7.5, then a value of 1000 would be 130 standard deviations away from the mean.
The probability of an event occurring at a distance of 130 standard deviations is so infinitesimal that it can be regarded as 0. Just for fun, I entered the parameters at Normal Probability Calculator Online - MathCracker.com and here’s what I got:
"The following information has been provided:
μ=85, σ=7.5
We need to compute Pr(X≥1000). The corresponding z-value needed to be computed is:
Z = \frac{X - \mu}{\sigma}
X−μ = 7.5
(1000−85)/7.5 =122 = Z
Therefore, we get that
\Pr(X \geq 1000) = \Pr\left(Z \ge \frac{ 1000 - 85}{ 7.5}\right) = \Pr(Z \ge 122) Pr(X≥1000)=Pr(Z≥ 7.5
1000−85
)=Pr(Z≥122)
= 1 - 1 = 0=1−1=0
The following is obtained graphically:
Chris
Do you have clear evidence that quantum events significantly affect the outcomes of “nature” above the macro scale? Do you have evidence that chaotic systems are ontologically, rather than merely epistemologically, probabilistic? If you did, it would raise even more starkly the question of how God could be arranging outcomes and being involved along the way whilst all the causes are “natural” in the sense of “underdetermined” (the true meaning of “natural” we have still not settled).
Quantum events also raise another problem if they are ontologically only probabilistic, because then they cannot themselves, by definition, have the natural causes (having no causes) which, on your model, are behind all the outcomes in God’s world. They cannot even have natural causes in Augustine’s sense of “God’s decisions”, because he has (apparently) divested decision-making to a statistical process producing only approximate outcomes.
God is, at most, loading the dice and throwing them, which raises big problems with the idea of his governing the details even of the bases of the human genetic code in anything we understand as a natural series starting at the Big Bang. But as I suggested at the start, the scientific evidence that quantum indeterminacy is significant at the macro scale of evolution is slim, and the evidence for chaotic systems being ontologically indeterminate is not only slim, but cannot be determined because unlike God we have limited knowledge. That’s what makes for the need for statistical laws in the first place.
Jon’s DNA code has only a 95% probability of anything because I, unlike God, do not know the exact causes that went into making it. To the omniscient Creator, it’s 100% what it is - and it’s his view we’re canvassing here. Chance can never be a true material efficient cause, but only ever a metric of human ignorance. This post relates and expands.
It’s indeed true that statistical laws (including the precision of quantum mechanics) are good evidence for the fundamental order of the cosmos over against Epicureanism. But they are not, in any way at all, evidence for fundamental (ontological or created) indeterminacy in any part of nature. And we’re still left with no very clear idea of what “natural” causes might be that distinguishes them from any activity of God up to and including special creation.
Chris,
I am truly amazed how fast you did these calculations and the graph. When I was going for my PhD, I had to calculate and graph the Probability of a Bit Error in a fiber optic system running at 10 gigabit a sec. I got a bit error rate of 10^-28 which said one error per big bang (14 billion years). It literally took me days to calculate and graph with circa 1970’s mainframe computers.
Yes, 130 standard deviations from the mean is an exceeding rare event. If such an event really did occur, I would re-evaluate my assumption of a Gaussian distribution. I would look to see if there was a physical reason the event HAD to occur, i.e. Prob=1
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