How do Biologos explain Mark 10:6 when evolution claims we came from a primordial soup and then evolved gender after creation?

Faith & Science Conversation
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in answer to your comment, i will try to be as simple as i possibly can…although im struggling to find a simpler way of putting this so that the incredibly intelligent individuals here are able to grasp a fundamentally simple statement that is way below their level of intelligence…

  1. Chist spoke the words - falsifying Christie’s comment about biology…Christ is God…it wasnt a human who spoke the words and Christ (God) most definately does know all about Biology…he created the idea of Humans having sex with each other (and animals obviously)

  2. Christ uses historical evidences in order to answer the “trap” presented to him by the pharases.

  • Christ says, Moses wrote the comand about divource…therefore Christ is clearlly acknowledging the belief that Moses is a real person who existed and wrote things down

  • Christ says, He (God) made them (man and women) as male and female from the begining of Creation. Christ is acknowledging the Genesis Chapter 1 account…he is specifically stating that HUMAN FROM THE BEGINIING OF CREATION HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MALE AND FEMALE!

Now the argument put to me earlier…“oh that means humans were created first” is stupid and not even relevant. Christ is talking specifically about the creation of man and women here (because the context is marriage between man and women)…so he isnt referring to the first day of creation week…he is referring to the day of creation week in which Adam and Eve were made (Day 6). Prior to Day 6 in creation week, there is not mention of man and women. The cockup here from the earlier comment is that that individual thinks creation in the bible went for millions of years…if one is going to persist with that argument, then creation is still ongoing 4.54 billion years later…i find absolutely no biblical support for that given im yet to find a bible writer who has spoken of creation/origins in present tense. They all talk of creation /origins as a past event. (i know we have bible texts that talk about all creation groaning…that is obviously an existing creation…not an origins of new creation/s. The only new creation/origins i see in the bible is when the new heavens and new earth are created in Revelation 21 when sin is purged from existence.

What suprises me is that someone has not presented the argument that allows for beginning of creation + male and female = theistic evolutionary belief that we came from a primordial soup in a manner not diametically opposed to what Christ has stated in Mark 10. TEism must have a theologically supported answer to this

A TEist cannot be Christian without bible texts…in this case, texts that support their views with regards to Mark 10:6!

It really worries me when “Christians” have practically no biblical references for their belief. Surely individuals here must have something more than the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

Is that all your religion amounts to…the morality of a works based salvation?

How can an individual love the lord God with all their heart if they dont have a clue who and what God is or what God wants? Isnt that the point of the Old Testament? If we dont believe what God has told us in the old testament is real, then how can we believe God is real…we cant even see him, we cant test him scientifically, the incarnation was a miracle which cannot be tested in a lab…in that case, what is faith scientifically?

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I see what you are saying but it doesn’t resolve the issue that Christ (as you point out in point 1, God) says what Moses told us was wrong. If we had been in that original crowd should we have responded to Christ by saying “No you are wrong, the bible (Torah) clearly states this. Show me a verse that says we shouldn’t belive what Moses said”.

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We do not need to know anything more than He is God. God has not revealed everything about Himself. Our brains could not cope with it. it would be like trying to run the modern Windows system on Dos. They are incompatible.

I really do not see why you need every minutia of Scripture to be 100% accurate? Have you not got a brain? Must everything be spelled out in black & white? If you really knew your Scripture you would know that God does not speak plainly. it says so. He speaks in Parables amongst other things. It is not a case of All or Nothing! Scripture is a diverse collection of writing not one cohesive text from Genesis to Revelation. Stop trying to treat it all the same!

Wisdom calls you! Why don’t you respond?

Richard

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Correct. It doesn’t say “Moses wrote this treatise on the biological history of sexual reproduction”

Just as the Bible says that God knits us together in the womb. This in no way does away with our understanding of developmental biology. In the same way, God can make us male and female by using the natural processes of evolution, just as God can use the natural process of developmental biology to knit us together in the womb.

The context is that the Bible exists in this universe. If you want to claim that the Bible is true then any proper interpretation of the Bible must be consistent with the universe it exists in.

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The Bible doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in our universe, our reality. If you have to ignore that reality in order to hold to your interpretation of the Bible, what does that say?

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How do Biologos explain…?

He has been told many times that there is no such thing as a “BioLogos explanation” for most things and and yet he keeps ignoring this. I feel like this is typical of the lies and habitual distortion and deception we are constantly getting from creationists.

And then there is the lies about what these passages consist of. Nowhere in the passage does it say anything like what he claims. It is even abundantly clear that we are not meant to take this 100% literally. For God did not make Adam and Eve before everything else at the beginning. Nor is everything made male and female let alone all living things from the beginning. To be sure male and female has always been the homo sapiens norm, and we have no reason to see this passage as contradicting this. Furthermore Mark 10 says nothing about how God made them, so there is no reason to take this as being contrary to evolution either.

I frankly think we are given reason to think he doesn’t even read the words of the Bible or try to understand what the text says. And all he knows is what he has been told this says which he will pointlessly repeat to us over and over again.

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Shorthand. “From the beginning of creation” does not mean, for instance, “as of Day One.” Perhaps nit-picky, but literal is as literal does.

Gender evolved at the single cell stage, when eukaryote life began to evolve each of two single cells exchanged half of their DNA such that each became a new cell. One cell splitting became two, i.e. normal reproduction as seen in all cells. At some point life began to operate as multiple cells; specific roles accumulated to specific locations and the body plan was hap-hazard

The Homeobox genes helped place bits of armor on the outside; this in turn developed special HOX genes that formulated a skeletal structure, specific bones in a tailored order, such as from skull to tail.

From there to male and female creatures with penis and vagina to mix sperm and egg was a long and complex journey, The designed-in mechanism of evolution, i.e. survival of the organism that did the best job of reproducing, is God’s finger acting at a distance - it is God’s intent. Else we wouldn’t be here.

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Biological sex with distinct male-female roles evolved many hundreds of million years ago. Evolution is a part of God’s perfect design.

Your point is good. Divorce is about beings that are a crude facsimile, i.e. an image. of God. Divorce is from sin, and sin is spiritual not physical.

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Yes, male and female predated Homo sapiens by very roughly a billion years.

First to come was eukaryote life. It sequesters its DNA within a nucleus and is diploid i.e. has two sets of DNA containing variations on the same set of genes.

Eukaryote life began when one prokaryote ‘ate’ (engulfed) another prokaryote. Nothing to see here, please move along. The result, this one time, was symbiosis between the eater and the eaten. The key element is that the biological engine of the eater requires a power molecule, while the power engine of the eaten excretes that same power molecule. Think of this as a hybrid car at the single cell stage.

That remarkable event took place 2 billion -ish years ago. This is only calculable by inferences drawn from know rates of change of carefully guarded DNA. The eaten form is what we now call a mitochondrion. Plural mitochondria, as in mitochondrial DNA.

From 2-ish billion years ago to the first fossilizable multi-cellular creature was more than a billion years. During this time the metabolic jump-start powered up a massive experiment in evolution - powerful eukaryotic cells were able to tolerate many mutated genes without fatal effect. Over time the eukaryotic cell became so blissfully complex that Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design (forgive me for polluting an otherwise fact-based discussion with those silly ideas) - the eukaryotic cell became so very very complex internally that they challenged people to imagine how they could have come about.

With over a billion years and a whole planet on which to work things out, the eukaryote genome became so complex that the DNA of every single multi-celled thing, including some single-celled biota such as yeast, has a significant portion of DNA in common with every other eukaryotic life form. Example: we and yeast share about 25% of our genes, the ones that provide the fabulous complexity of the inner workings of every eukaryotic cell.

And along the way, from single cells swapping one of their two copies of DNA with another single cell, we have the means for sex to evolve. Multi-cellular forms can become very complex. One of those complexities was to specialize into giver-of-DNA (male) and receiver-of-DNA (female.)

TL;DR Male and female were very common, and present in all multi-cellular life forms, perhaps at or before the time sponges became fossilizable, about 0.8 billion (800 million) years ago.

WHY GO TO SUCH LENGTHS HERE?

The answer is simple. Prior to the start of the age of science (roughly 250 years ago) no one had a quibble about the Logos who made all things that were made, according to the opening verses of the Gospel of John. As to whether he knowingly spoke fact or simplified vastly complex matters of material fact into terms that concisely carried theological truth, the conclusion is plain as a mud fence: Jesus spoke theology.

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Perhaps from the beginning of creation reflects intent to make them male and female. They were not made at the moment of creation but about 14 billion years later in the creation process. They did not come from some primordial soup but evolved over time to the modern day human.
The intent can be found in Ephesians 1: 4-7. To paraphrase, “Before the creation of the world (universe) God predestined that man (Humans) would be found holy and blameless in his sight through Jesus Christ our Lord”.
Remember evolution is a theory and it will have something right and somethings wrong. Somewhere in that theory is a truth and that truth is the path and process God used to get to man so he could be made holy and blameless.

Second thought is that creation meand from the beginning of the creation humans God made them male and female. The intent remains.

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I am thinking the soup would be the Oceans thus the parts would be moved away from each other.

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Wrong genre – it was written as ‘royal chronicle’ and as temple inauguration as well as heavy-duty polemic.

Genesis 2 may qualify as myth, though.

Different text – Jesus is citing the first Creation story, not the second one.

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Yes, that’s the point – it isn’t there to tell you how old the Earth is, which should be obvious since devout scholars over the centuries have concluded that the world is millions, billions, and even a trillion (!) years old, or that it is ancient beyond counting, or just that there is no way to tell.

Do you look in the Bible to know where Jerusalem is? No – because the Bible doesn’t give geography lessons. Do you look in the Bible to find out what the force of the Hiphil Hebrew verb form is? No – because the Bible doesn’t give language lessons. Do you look in the Bible to find out what ancient form the Abrahamic covenant used? No – because the Bible doesn’t give cultural history lessons.

You learn all those things from outside the Bible. And just as those are learned from outside the Bible, the literary forms and debate forms and teaching forms of rabbis also must be learned outside the Bible.

So when examining how Jesus talked to the Pharisees, asking for biblical references is not an honest request because the text does not tell you if Jesus was referencing things as being historical or if He was accommodating His answer to His audience by using the current standard ways of saying things.
And it turns out that asking, “What did Moses command you?” was a standard form for referring to the contents of the Pentateuch in rabbinic discussion, which is what should be expected in the context of a question about what is “lawful” – which is itself a question that refers to the Law of Moses, not to current regulations in Palestine, and that is something we are confident of because “Is it lawful…?” was itself a standard rabbinic formula.

Indeed you use knowledge from outside the text when you claim that “Christ uses historical evidences” in that situation – you are assuming that you understand what Christ was doing without having to actually study so you would have some grasp of what was going on in the situation, and that your assumption that “historical evidences” were involved is correct,

So perhaps you should give biblical references that indicate that Christ intended His references as historical.

Day 6 has no mention of Adam and Eve. I’ll refer you to my point just above here – give biblical references that Day 6 has anything to do with Adam and Eve.

Why do you insist on mixing theology and science?

Without knowing about His character knowing that He is God isn’t worth much.

Most definitely!

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The alternative that Adam wants would be for Jesus to sit the Pharisees down and give them a lesson in twenty-first century science. That is ludicrous because it ignores all the centuries in between and assumes that science now is the ultimate state of science!

Jesus functioned as a rabbi and used the forms of rabbis at the time. Only if one expects Him to give lecture series on literary and textual and scientific matters does Adam’s approach make sense.

And evolution can’t tell us whether God directly introduced a half dozen, a dozen, or a million mutations specifically to get man!

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Genesis 1 is equally “myth” - the differences only suggest that two narratives had to be included. Version one shows “male and female” but does not name them. Version two shows Adam living alone, until God made Eve from part of his ribcage.

As in just about every ancient explanation of the world and how it came to be, the narrative has large gaps that make it impossible to reconcile the text with itself and with the world as it is today. This certainly includes the Judeo-Christian telling of that story.

The importance of Genesis is that it extols an all-powerful Source of the Universe who showed intention toward making a place for Children in His image.

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Soup is shorthand for an unknowable early chemistry, wherever there was water.

Day Three shows earth being lifted from the great deeps of the waters (seas). Creation includes Earth as a ball with a thin crust of continents surrounded by films of water we call oceans. The continents float on a layer of molten stuff; multiple times per billion years the continents collide, then break back apart. Oceans fill the gaps; breaking apart coincides with widening oceans which have mid-ocean ridges where new lava comes up as the continents’ motions stretch the seabed.

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Karl Barth refers to it as “saga.” Perhaps that has a less negative connotation to people than myth.
Karl Barth’s definition of ‘saga’:

“I am using saga in the sense of an intuitive and poetic picture of a pre-historical reality of history which is enacted once and for all within the confines of time and space. Legend and anecdote are to be regarded as a degenerate form of saga: legend as the depiction in saga form of a concrete individual personality; and anecdote as the sudden illumination in saga form either of a personality of this kind or of a concretely historical situation. If the concept of myth proves inadequate—as is still to be shown—it is obvious that the only concept to describe the biblical history of creation is that of saga.”
Karl Barth’s Definition of Saga | The PostBarthian

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Myth is a specific genre, and the first Creation account doesn’t fit it.

Except that the point of the first Creation account isn’t about how the world came to be, it’s about who God is.

What gaps? The first Creation account is ‘royal chronicle’, and as that genre it isn’t missing anything; it’s also temple inauguration, and it isn’t missing anything as that, either; nor is it missing anything as polemic.

It reconciles just fin with the world as it is today: YHWH-Elohim is still King of the realm He carved out for Himself, this world is still His temple which He built and filled, and we are still His images; also all other heavenly beings are still just creatures He made.

Problems only arise when it gets read like it was some sort of newspaper account.

Interesting, and an odd use of the term “saga”. Of course Barth wrote before we knew much about ANE literary forms!

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It immediately makes me think of the Nordic sagas which are a mix of history and legend. That seems quite apt.

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Indeed! Many have said they are our God. Certainly many emperors and tyrants, and I think the devil has said this (even asking Jesus to bow down and worship Him), to make it so the Bible refers to him as “god of this world.”

Our choice of which to worship is a choice of who we are and what we value. And so we had better look at their character before we decide which to believe and follow.