If evolution “denies God did it”, those former atheist and agnostic university students would never have ended up Christians from studying evolution – but they did, because evolution is a sublime and elegant design that makes the command to "Bring forth!’ self-iterating as though the command echoes down the ages so that life brings forth from life.
Which unsurprisingly doesn’t even address the matter!
You can’t take a text that is speaking in poetic terms within an ancient worldview and thus in ways that the audience would understand and try to make it relevant to modern science – that’s bad theology, bad science, and for that matter bad literature-ology.
You keep making these false dichotomies. I do not think that the texts mean what you think they mean.
What part of “Bring forth!” are you claiming that contradicts?
Now you’ve got me giggling.
How about “nontheistic geology”?
Oh, wait – “nontheistic politics”? No, thaat actually can be nontheistic since politicians, including Christian ones, are very, very good at acting as though they were God.
Of course He does – He recreates them anew every moment, or at the very least sustains their existence every moment . . . and if He sustains them, then He controls them.
For someone entitled to preach, you really have a shallow grasp of the relationship between GOd and creation!
He also presumes that anyone who champions addressing the text of scripture in the original, meaning not just the language but the literary form(s) and worldview(s), is actually trying to impose nontheistic evolution. Some of us aren’t interested in evolution any more than in geology or astronomy, i.e. that one understands it before making claims about it and that one doesn’t misrepresent it.
If you took out the random element there would be nothing at all. Most of the arguments against evolution revolve around either probabilities or perceived impossible changes. Throw God into the mix and arguments about design and building become part of God’s intent.
Of course God is out of the question for science so we are back to whether evolution could achieve everything without Him. Science say yes, Theology says no.
O wow. That’s like saying that rainbows are a sign from God that he won’t flood the world again.
I am speachless.
What kind of a scientist are you? Or theologian for that matter?
Why on earth would God need to control the weather?
The perfection and self-regulation of the earth is one of the signs of God, underpinned by the principles of freedom and choice. If God controls whether I get wet or not He has a sick sense of humour, let alone the amount He costs me every time my stock gets soaked through.
I would love to hear you justification for God controlling the minutia of weather.
I suggest you go and study meteorology. Trying to second guess God would be an impossible task. (but might explain why they get it wrong)
Of course, you are trying to compare the patterns of weather formations with Nested Hierachy… Trying to explain the difference is beyond my pay grade.
I missed this.
You are talking theology and not science. And, to be honest I cannot see how your view of evolution can exist alongside what you have written here.
Does not necessarily refer to creation. (creating). Maintenance perhaps?
Genesis 1-2 might disagree.
I am sorry, but I can’t answer this because I have no idea where it comes from.
You seem to have a fixation with God as being some sort of control freak. I have always looked at Him in the opposite view. God lets us get on with things without interference unless we specifically include Him. Otherwise there would be no wars or pestilence. To put a tsunami in the hands of God is to make HIm a vicious killer. Likewise vulcanoes or other natural events. If there is a massive earthquake in San Fransisco, do we blame God, or the stupidity of man to build on a fault line?
So, if this is your view, why do you argue evolution as random?
I’m not sure it is the same. It might be helpful at this point to define providence. My definition comes from the answer to Q27 in the Heidelberg Catechism:
God’s providence is his almighty and ever-present power, whereby, as with his hand, he still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand. Lord’s Day 10, Q27, Answer
The Catechism affirms the Bible’s witness that God upholds, governs, and provides through natural processes like the weather. So God can be said to send the rain, because he governs the weather, by upholding the natural processes of our world that we study in meteorology. That does not mean that if a cyclone hits Malawi God made it go there, just that he sustains the laws that underpin the weather.
Or as Psalm 147:8 (NIV2011) puts it:
He covers the heavens with clouds; he prepares rain for the earth; he makes grass grow on the hills.
Believing that this verse is true does not require me to deny the accuracy of the weather forecast, nor the validity of meteorology as a science. Can science tell us how the weather forms? Yes. Does God have providential control over the weather to the extent we can say “God sends the rain”? Yes.
Similarly, does science tells us how life evolved on Earth? Yes. Does God have providential control and oversight over evolution to the extent that we can say God created all life on earth? Yes.
That’s what I think Dale and others have been getting at with their comparison between the weather and evolution. Hope that helps.
That might be theistic politics, specifically autotheistic (or, more commonly, egotistic), but most don’t go for replicating Commodus on that point to that extent.
I can accept God’s providence in the weather. The rules are set in motion by God and as such are under His control. (He does not have to keep adjusting or intruding) But the same does not apply to evolution
Evolution is as much under God’s control as the lottery. The odd millionaire may see it as providential but the millions who plough money in without reward would not. Evolution is cruel. It builds on death. It is amoral at best and the results are random. That is not providential in anyones’ book.
Not completely. it ignores God and therefore is not providential. Obviously the mechanism works and has been part of it, but there has to be some sort of controlling factor other than random chance. If you are going to put God in He has to be more than a bystander. Whether it is parameters or something more intrusive I do not know (or care) but evololution as it stands is not providential and it is not of God. (Not the God I worship anyway)
Which is why I argue against it. But no one seems to understand this. They just accuse me of dabbling in things I do not understand! (let’s not go there again)
That’s entirely false. The randomness of mutations was an open question until the 1950’s, and the theory was doing just fine. Darwin himself never said that mutations have to be random in order for his theory to work. All his theory required was descent with modification. If that modification was non-random then that would have been fine.
The reason that biologists concluded that mutations were random with respect to fitness is that is what the experiments showed them, experiments such as the Luria-Delbruck fluctuation assay and the Lederbergs’ plate replica experiment. This is no different than experiments establishing the random movement of particles as part of Brownian motion or the randomness of nuclear decay in quantum mechanics.
The probability arguments are baseless as nearly all of them commit the Sharpshooter fallacy. The perceived impossible changes are just that, someone’s subjective opinions with no evidence to back them. That’s not science.
That’s false. What science has found is that known and observable natural processes are capable of producing what we see. This is how all of science is done. Science makes zero claims about what God does or doesn’t do.
Do you also reject the Germ Theory of Disease because it is cruel, killing millions of people each year?
You claim weather is providential, but how many lives are either ended or ruined by weather? Shouldn’t you also reject the natural explanations for weather?
Perhaps, but those who come from more confessional traditions don’t see providence this way. God could magic away the rubbish as soon as we put it in the bin, but he doesn’t. In his providence, he has provided refuse collection service, recycling plants… and more recently, the knowledge and will to find more sustainable alternatives. For Reformed and Confessional Christians, God is not kicking back and watching that unfold, the Holy Spirit is actively involved in that. God is working out his will through the people who collect the bins.
In the same way, folks like @Dale and I, believe that God isn’t just passively overseeing the processes of evolution, but that the Holy Spirit is active in them.
I’ve got no problem believing that God’s providence might be at work through the lottery.
The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, without painful toil for it.~ Proverbs 10:22 (NIV2011)
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD. ~Proverbs 16:33 (NIV2011)
God’s providence is his almighty and ever-present power, whereby… riches and poverty… come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand. HC, Lord’s Day 10, Q27, Answer
So does the weather, germ theory, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics relativity, gravity, quantum mechanics, and about a thousand other areas of science and human knowledge, right? But that doesn’t mean that God cannot or might not be providentially at work through them.
Environmental pressures and genetics are controlling factors (of a sort) within evolution. I’m a theology first and foremost, but my understanding is that evolution is not wholly random since evolution selects some traits over others on the basis of fitness.
I agree. God is not a bystander in evolution, he is the sustainer and governer of its processes. The Holy Spirit is intimately at work in and through it as he is in all natural processes from the birth of stars to decay of trees.
If I may be so bold, that could be because you come across as a bit scorched earth. Let Richard be true, and every man a liar. If you know what I mean.
Maybe you should reread (or read for the first time?!) Maggie’s account. In effect, she won five independent lotteries, in the same order that she bought the tickets, and… she was the only one who bought a ticket in each. That is statistically next to impossible. Also reread (or read for the first time?!) Proverbs 16:33. Note the word every.
I think that one odd, out-of-context citation is not justification enough for that.
All evidence points to the existence of luck. if you are going to take luck out of evolution you are changing it to God controlled. That is not the current viewpoint, or what is taught. IOW you are cheating the system.
(And your criticisms of me are false. At least I am honest about what random means)
You have not answered the claim that sitting on the sidelines is not providence. (Providence comes from the word provide. If all God did is provide a random system He did not provide any structure or guidance he created one cell)
“Need”? I’ll take that in an existential sense: because if He stopped recreating it from moment to moment it would stop happening – in fact the air and all its contents would cease to exist.
No, because He controls the weather in accordance with His faithfulness, i.e. managing it according to the rules He began with – in other words He sends the rain on the just and the unjust.
This is a constant theme especially in the Psalms, that if it rains it is because God sends the rains, and indeed that if an animal gets its food it is because God provided that food. We are given a repeated proposition that if anything at all happens it is because God makes it happen.
He controls it all because the moment He let go of control of anything that thing would stop happening.
Two terms of it in university. And our class forecasts got things right about four, maybe five times as often as professional meteorologists (who had to work alone).
But there’s no “second guessing God” unless you hold that God controls the weather.
Not that this is even relevant because my point was that science does not drive theology, and the moment someone uses it that way they’re not doing theology any more. Theology is driven by the Person of Christ and His identity, and then by the text.
No, I’m saying – and I’ll quote myself in case you didn’t get it – that “Some of us aren’t interested in evolution any more than in geology or astronomy, i.e. that one understands it before making claims about it and that one doesn’t misrepresent it”. My point is that by all the evidence here, you don’t get it.
Of course I’m talking theology; as I said, my only interest in science is that people actually understand it before making claims.
My view of evolution is that if it is true then it is nothing more than a description of how God has done things.
There’s no difference – God didn’t set up the universe as some sort of machine that has its own existence; the moment He stopped paying attention to the least detail is the moment that whatever that detail involved would cease to exist. Deism is false because it severs the universe from the “I AM” reality.
It comes from all over the Old Testament, notably the Psalms and Job: rain happens because God sends it, food is found because God provides it, etc. It comes especially from the “I AM” name of God which is a declaration that only He has existence in Himself; everything else is totally dependent on Him moment by moment, new not just every morning but every nanosecond.
That’s exactly what the scriptures tell us, though: “I create calamity”, the Lord tells us, letting us know that if any calamity happens, He did it.
Yes.
I dont, no matter how much you try to put those words in my mouth.
Randomness is the rule that God uses to re-create the ‘progress’ of mutations from instant to instant, but that does not make evolution random. Please, go actually study evolution so you can stop making claims that just aren’t true. Oh – and start paying attention to what people here write so you can stop making false assertions about what has been said.
That’s one of the gems of the Heidelberg Catechism – good call.
I’d forgotten the last part there; I’ll have to remember to include it from now on.
You don’t see that you just contradicted yourself by doing some very bad theology?
Because according to the writer of Proverbs, God is absolutely in control of the lottery!
And nothing happens that is not in His control – so how you can keep claiming that there are things He doesn’t control is baffling. Either He is God or He is not – a theme from Elijah’s challenge to the prophets of Baal.
No, nature is cruel and builds on death; evolution is irrelevant to that. Lions were never herbivores, nor were bears. Plus apparently God differs in opinion, at least if we can take the Psalmist’s word for it that God provides food for lions and bears; He certainly isn’t feeding them apples.
Of course it “ignores God” – or do you have a laboratory or even a field test for the divine? or some scientific instrument that can tell if perhaps an anger is nearby?
You plainly don’t understand science if you think it should take God into account: science is about what humans can measure with their senses and whatever tools they can design. If scientists started claiming to be measuring God, I’d say we’d have another Tower of Babel situation happening!
Everyone understands it perfectly, which is why they say you don’t understand evolution, and you really don’t understand science because you keep getting them wrong. Your approach is like that of a tribal shaman who mixes some real knowledge with fakery, which makes a mess of real knowledge while giving some indirect credit to the fakery.
And from my perspective you don’t understand the scriptures because you can’t seem to grasp that whatever is, happens from God because He is the one who – on a minimalist version of providence – sustains the universe as a whole and in all its parts moment by moment. And yes, that means He sustains the rain when it falls on you, and He sustains the wolf as it brings down a deer, and He sustains the lava as it wipes out neighborhoods, and He sustains the sunshine as it feeds crops, and He sustains the serial killer as he contemplates his next victim, and He sustains the beetle as it strives to cross a highway, and yes, He sustains rainbows in the clouds – if it exists, He sustains it, so if evolution is correct, then He is sustaining that.
That’s one of the big problems people in these threads have with you: you apparently think that God is not in control!
That reminds me of one of my physics professors: he compiled the results of all the lab exercises done by his students (plus those of other professors) and hoped to find something that showed some never-before-seen non-randomness. That in turn reminds me of a pair of my botany professors (and a third I never had classes from) who every other year managed a trip to a “sky island” somewhere in the world not just knowing they would find new species but hoping they’d find something that didn’t fit common descent. And my oceanography professor was involved about every other year in deep-sea research along oceanic spreading ridges in hopes of finding organisms that plainly didn’t share a common ancestor with the rest of the creatures on the planet. Every expedition they almost always came back with a set of never-before-known species, but every expedition they came back with no evidence of anything outside of common descent, and always they came back with nothing showing non-randomness in mutations.
Having known these professors, it utterly baffles me that anyone would think that there’s a conspiracy of some sort to crush anything contrary to the current theory of evolution; hoping for something contrary to accepted parameters was one of their driving energies!
It had nothing to do with earthmoving, it has to do with what words mean. Apparently, according to you, God is not sovereign over ‘luck’, whatever that is.
That just proves that you either do not read, or do not understand what I write. I have never suggested that science should take God into account.
There goes freedom of choice then. Ah well.
I am sorry, but i do not like the God you appear to worship. Just as well I do not see Him that way…
There is a fundamental difference in the way we view God. I have seen all the arguments for there being no such thing as chance. And you have the nerve to accuse YECs of misusing scripture!
Just because God knows does not mean that He made it happen. He knows everyy hair on your head. Does He make them fall out?
If chance means devoid of influence then there will always be gravity, or air pressure or something acting on an object. But whether that means God is controlling where every single leaf falls is another claim entirely. Do you think He does?
If you flip a coin there are pressures on that coin and the shape or imperfections will affect its flight. How much pressure you put on it will also affect how many times it can turn before landing. I guess you could probably develop the perfect toss that would always end up as you want it. Does that mean every toss is dictated not random?
The lottery. You think the outcome is fixed by God? Why would he? The deal of cards, the landing of a roulette wheel. All preordained?
Ecclesiastes 3. To everything a season… all controlled by God so humanity has no influence? So much for global warming! God is in control? Tell that to Putin. Tell that to those who died in the Holocaust. Tell that to the mother mourning the loss of her child. What kind of God are you worshipping?
Are you a Calvinist? Predestination to the nth degree?
I think you might have difficulty counseling the bereaved. That disease, that cancer, all deliberate. What a wonderful, loving God.
I do not think you fully understand the ramifications of your beliefs, just as you do not understand the ramifications of evolution. I can tell you one thing. If I preached what you are telling me, I would not stay a preacher for very long.
I think I now understand how you think.
I can also see how you justify evolutionary theory, You do not exclude God.so my criticisms are not valid. God is the controller of random. Without the vagaries of chance evolution works just fine. But I think you might have difficulties convincing your fellow scientists that there is no such thing as chance.
