That is total nonsense, Richard. Do we lie down and deny what the Bible says about God and his sovereignty with respect to the weather? His sovereign providence with respect to evolution is exactly the same. Just because you cannot conceive how evolution actually works with respect to anatomical changes, “macro-evolution”, does not mean God stepped aside or that evolution “as taught” denies God any more that meteorology denies God. All you do is keep insisting that “Richard understands evolution” and no one else does. It does not matter a twit how long you’ve been doing it.
Please, Please, Please, tell me what part of the evolution, as it stands, cannot be true!!! Once again, you are making a very broad statement, and refusing to spell out the details of what you believe is true, and what you believe is false! Yet just a few posts back you did state that not all of evolution is false, not all is true.
Then there is the third kind of evolutionary teaching: That which might be true, or might be false, and it really doesn’t make any difference with respect to theology, or with respect to any aspect of our living at this time and place. What aspects of evolution fit this category?
I have no quarrel with anything written in scripture; I do believe that scripture was written by inspiration of God.
I do not believe that human interpretations of what scripture meant when it was originally written are all perfectly true.
I also do not believe that any human alive today has a perfect understanding of what scripture means, what specific message God intends, for that scripture to say to His people today.
I do know that what I believe is a proper interpretation of what scripture means, of what message is intended for me, as a PhD physicist, and many years of work as a systems engineer, with some level of knowledge about what modern science has found out about the universe that I believe God created, that, for me, good Christian theology and good science are not in conflict.
Richard, as you reply to this, please also note that I am not a biologist, so am not intimately familiar with all of the biological research related to evolution. I really do want to know what you think is so wrong about Evolution, something that almost seems (from the way you write about it) like you know it’s so obviously wrong that you don’t even have to spell out what you think is wrong.
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The weather has nothing to do with anything. It is art of the perfect creation that you deny God had anything to do with.
Omnisicenc means that God dod nothing, He just knew all about it. Creation was made. God saw it and claimed responsibity?
God caims to be responsibe for making nature as it is. Not just to watch it. Or to know it. He claims to have made it
Read Job 38
You are calling God a liar.
I don’t hae to understand how evolution works to know that it denies God did it.
Itis not about how evolution does or does not work. it about God deliberately creating rsther than just knowing about it.
I am talking abut Scripture, not anyproof of evolution.
Just read my version of Genesis above. That is what you are claiming.
Richard
That God only created a single cell. Evolution did all the rest.
Richard
You say that only because you are in denial. God is sovereign over the molecules in everything that has meteorological implications, including the butterfly in Beijing. Likewise he is sovereign over the molecules in DNA and the mutations therein.
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That is not what evolution claims.
That is theistic evolution.
You are claiming nontheistic evolution.
Richard
What does the science of meteorology claim about God? Oh, absolutely nothing.
Is this the only thing in evolutionary theory or research to which you object? If so, why all the fuss about so many other things not related to this particular minor, disputable, unprovable point?
I must also be claiming nontheistic meteorology, whatever that is.
Why do you keep harking on about meteorology. God does not control every raindrop or cloud. It is part of the perfection of creation that you are denying Him.
Richard
Because it is directly analogous to evolution with respect to God’s sovereignty.
Does he not know where every one is? Some are exempt from his sovereign providence?
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Richard, it seems from looking at the whole discussion over a couple of threads that you have taken a very specific interpretation, and have presumed that anyone using the term evolution is using it the way you interpret “evolution” (as distinct from theistic evolution) to mean. The discussion is “talking past each other” throughout, because the terms are being interpreted differently. I am quite sure that my own understanding of evolution would be more closely related to theistic evolution, but am not an expert on the specific meaning of those terms. I am also quite sure that my understanding of evolution is not exactly the same as yours. Please be very specific about what you find objectionable. Your comment in response to a different question, that you do not believe that God created only one single celled living thing, begins to clarify what points might really be at issue. Is there anything else that you believe is not true about what the biologists are calling evolutionary theory?
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From a scientific point of view, weather is just as random as mutations are. If weather can be part of this perfect creation, then so too can evolution.
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This is definitely worth mentioning.
Todd Wood is a YEC, through and through. However, he also understands the scientific evidence and feels like he should be honest about that evidence.
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It’s interesting that he must somehow get around the evidence for the antiquity of the earth and the universe and still say there is good evidence for evolution.
I suspect that Wood feels the same way towards the age of the Earth/Universe as he does towards evolution. Yes, the evidence is solidly on the side of an old Earth, but he believes in a young Earth because he feels that is what the Bible requires of him. I believe Kurt Wise (studied under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard) has a similar outlook.
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Comoving distance for the CMB is 46.5 GLy, if I remember correctly.
They have a very shallow faith because it rests on the false position that the Bible must be 100% scientifically accurate – and 99% of YEC endeavors are devoted to shoring up this shallow faith by forcing science to fit an erroneous view of Genesis. I now from observation that they have a shallow faith because over and over and over again I watched YEC university students become atheists because just one simple fact contradicted the YEC view of Genesis!\
No, it isn’t – I don’t give a crap about evolution! What I care about is that YEC believers are so invested in making evolution false that they aren’t even doing theology any more, they’re just plugging their ears because it’s the only way to maintain their faith.
I keep pointing to the text and the fact that YEC indoctrination rejects the truth that the Creation accounts were written in an ancient language in ancient forms of literature in alien worldviews and instead acts as though Genesis was a friend’s great-grandfather’s journal of events he witnessed and reported on objectively, thus throwing away most of the message the writer intended.
But it is true that you are not qualified on the topic of evolution; you’ve shown repeatedly that you don’t understand it, and in fact you don’t understand why the nested hierarchy we observe is contrary to item by item design.
That’s what YEC advocates do when they espouse the notion that the opening of Genesis has to conform to the tenet of modern scientific materialism that says that in order to be true a source has to be 100% scientifically accurate – they cannot conceive that God is capable of presenting us with truth working from a different worldview than the modern one with its secular/sacred divide.
The “mechanics” of a text are the things that make it up: the language, the literary form, the worldview, all of which come together in the intent of the author. YEC, and so far you, ignore the mechanics of the text and replace that with a muddled understanding that de facto forces the Genesis accounts to fit science.
That’s what you insist on making it about. Its actually about the text and the fact that you treat it the same way YEC advocates do, just with a slight adjustment in perspective.
“Evolution works without God” – according to who, you? Do volcanoes work without God? Does artillery work without God? Do novas occur without God? Does the weather?
It only “works without God” if you exclude Him – so why do you exclude Him?
Oh – so if we can’t see God working, then your position is that He isn’t? I claim that everything that happens is God at work, and I don’t care if it’s evolution or nuclear reactors or plate tectonics; everything that happens is God at work because He creates the entire universe anew moment by moment, according to the rules and natural constants He started it all off with. Cell division is God at work, and your shoe soles protecting your feet from sharp gravel is God at work, and my fingers slipping on the keyboard so I have to back up and fix typos is God at work, because nothing happens that He does not do.
That you can conceive of something happening that God doesn’t carry out shows a flawed faith: when the scripture says that nothing has been made that has been made without Him, it isn’t talking a Deist far past, it’s talking about everything – shoe soles and anti-tank missiles and sunshine and frying eggs and lightning and Hollywood movies and runny noses and barking dogs and snarled traffic and quasars and everything else. So by definition, if evolution is true then God is doing it, mutation by mutation and meisos and meitosis and viral insertion and sudden use of transcripted RNA that didn’t leave the cell before and epigenetics and gene migration and everything else.
I don’t demand anything about evolution except that you get the science right. And I don’t replace YECism because it is neither science not theology; I insist on following the text, and there’s no room for YEC in the text of Genesis or Psalms or anywhere else because the entire premise rests on forcing the scriptures to adhere to a principle that originated with scientific materialism. The text is ancient literature, and if you want a “replacement” for YECism it’s to stop reading Genesis as though it’s a friend’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he witnessed and to start approaching it as the ancient literature it is along with all that that entails.
Except it can’t be “in conflict with the Bible” any more than plate subduction or the collision of galaxies or airplanes flying or GPS navigation units! Evolution can’t conflict with the Bible by definition (see above)! Once you actually grasp evolution it points to the glory of God even more than the beauty of the moon or the workings of stars – which is why thanks to studying evolution a number of former atheist and agnostic university students concluded that there must be a Designer. The heavens declare the glory of God but so does biology. So the question isn’t if “evolution works without God” (which is impossible), it’s if people will open their eyes and see the glory of God shining forth from that amazingly elegant system!
After all, God didn’t make individual living creatures, He commanded the earth and sea to “Bring forth!”, and so far humans haven’t come up with any way that could have happened except for evolution.
Yeah, I think I’ll go with one of Martin Luther’s pithy theological comments: excrementum tauri.
It’s not a claim: if evolution is true (and the weight of the evidence is beyond merely immense), then God doesn’t just “use” evolution, He’s actively doing evolution.
No one is “promoting” nested hierarchy – it’s not necessary because every single bit of evidence we have points to a nested hierarchy.
Oh, good grief – take an upper-level university course on the history of science and throw in another one on history and philosophy of science. You’ll find that biologists proposed all sorts of organizing principles, i.e. other interpretations of the data, but the data has always fallen into the pattern we call a nested hierarchy.
And I had at least one biology professor who would have loved to find an exception to the nested hierarchy; it would have made him famous if it was valid, and likely led to a Nobel prize.
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But the faith grew for centuries among universal cultural assumptions that were contrary to it – so if today the lack of supporting universal cultural assumption is a problem, then we are doing something wrong at the foundations.
But the Apostle John informs us that rational thought should be highly valued, even “valued ultimately”, when he tells us that the eternally-begotten Son is λόγος, a concept that is rational to the core to the point that if the Son was not λόγος then there is no reason to think that the universe would be rational.
So the problem with denominations that rely on YEC is that they have the wrong λόγος: it isn’t that rationality weakens faith, it’s that the wrong rationality ruins faith. Usually, in my experience, what passes for “rationality” is an unrecognized humanism and not actually rationality at all – and that problem is the result of the radical reformation that threw out means of grace and tried to make everything reasonable (and in so doing ended up denying that some very plain statements in the New Testament mean what the words and grammar say).
I’d say that makes God deceptive, which is an attribute of Allah not YHWH.
My older brother the mathematician once noted that God can know the precise state of everything in this universe because He observes it from outside this universe (in his words, from an n-dimensional universe that is in one-to-one correspondence with every point in this universe), and so the constraints imposed by the Heisenberg principle does not (necessarily) apply. If I grasped his point correctly, the inherent uncertainty that prevents us from knowing both velocity and location fails if/when that velocity and location are observed from at least four additional dimensions, one for each of the dimensions in our universe that is required to define position and velocity.
Just a point that same older brother made about infinities: something can be infinite without its descriptors also being infinite, so human knowledge of God could theoretically cover all the descriptors of God (e.g. God is Love, God is Truth, etc.). The catch is that a descriptor can be similar to a simple mathematical function where the value of the function heads for infinity: we can easily state the descriptor, but we will never grasp its depth.
Interestingly this observation was made in connection with the last of the Narnia books where “Further up and further in!” was a story-level way of pointing to Aslan’s realm getting larger as you got farther into the circle, not smaller as one would suppose – none of us, while my sister was reading the stories aloud to us at Jesus Northwest one summer, would have suggested that Lewis’ geometry was off, but my brother took pains to note that Aslan just used a different geometry.
Heh – and I would say that we can unequivocally state that evolution is God’s working, because anything that science learns about the world is God’s working: it is impossible for it to be anything else!
Time for that theological term of Luther’s again: excrementum tauri.
Nothing in scripture tells us how living creatures came to be except, “Bring forth!”, a command to the earth and the sea to generate living things from themselves.
It’s only “highly insulting” because you insist that you out of everyone here has a pipeline to God that allows you to set aside the incredible amounts of evidence as to how God did things on this earth when it comes to living creatures – and you do so contrary to the actual text and the meaning the original audience would have understood.
So you seem to think that you are allowed to misrepresent what everyone else believes while plainly not even grasping the basic subject matter, yet when someone else points out that you might actually be able to learn something you call it insult!
Hypocrisy, maybe?
“My Father is working till now.”
God never finished creating; that’s a view that slides into Deism. God continually recreates the universe every moment, each iteration following the previous in accordance with the rules and constants He began with. Never is the universe existence apart from His creation of it! YHWH-Elohim alone is “I AM”, the non-contingent; all else is renewed every instant or it would cease to exist.
False dichotomy. I’ll leave it up to others to figure out which of Aristotle’s four ‘causes’ are pertinent here.
You make the weirdest statements! If there is no God then we are not here, nor is evolution.
Again, excrementum tauri.
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I just realized I’ve been revisiting posts I already read…
oh, well; thoroughness never hurt!
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