Innocence and Evolution: You Don't Have to Choose Between Christian Faith and Evolutionary Biology

I would not nor did Paul put defining the mechanism of creation on the same footing as the resurrection of Christ. By the way, God uses the natural processes he set up to achieve his will all the time. Who are we to limit God and say what he can and cannot do?

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I’m aware of the web site and Ken Ham’s organization “Answers in Genesis”, if that is what you’re referring to. If it is a particular TV series, then that is new to me - though I would guess it to be rooted in that same organization. Perhaps you could bring here any of the points you found most salient or enlightening? I confess that I don’t have much confidence that I’ll find it very compelling, given the general track records of AIG or ICR in how they typically have treated both scriptures and science. So they do have a substantial credibility deficit to overcome in these parts - there is that. But I realize that sometimes I get surprised too. Bring it here or link to specific things as you may wish. In any case, blessings on your day!

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The bible tells us “how” perfectly well!
And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

And human evolution contradicts what the bible said about the creation of man
" 7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."
You need to use the bible to examine man’s theories, not man’s theories to interpret God’s Holy Word!

And evolution doesn’t account for extremely incredible symbiotic relationships. I mean what would possess a bird to fly straight into a crocodile’s mouth and eat scraps off its teeth? And what about the cellulose-eating bacteria in the termite’s gut to help it digest wood. And lichen? A fungus and an alga living together? how does evolution accomplish that?

As in “God spoke” even though God does not have a mouth.

That’s the end point of evolution, not where it begins. This behaviour evolved, or changed over time to what you see today.

How about the ancestor to the termite could have eaten a bacteria that had evolved to eat cellulose and the combination was beneficial to both? That is generally how symbiotic relationships work.

God has a mouth, because we have a mouth, and we are created in the image of God!

One can’t be an atheist and Christian at the same time. Atheism is the belief that there is no God, which is certainly NOT where he wants us

So which set of plumbing does God have, male or female?

Are you really serious about this?

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Your question is irrelevant and irreverent.
If you made a clay person, specifically making it in your image, you would add a mouth, would you not? Unless God made a colossal blunder, which by his nature is impossible, then one should assume that He has a mouth.

Ah, the good old “yom with a number” argument again.

  1. Exceptions to the rule: Hosea 6:1-2; Zechariah 14:7. IIRC there are other examples as well.
  2. The way that “yom” is combined with a number (yom ehad, or “day one” — no definite article) in Genesis 1 is unique to Genesis 1. Elsewhere it’s always hayyom harison or hayyom hasseni — with the definite article.
  3. The context (large, grand scale events) of Genesis 1 is completely different from the context elsewhere (day to day dealings of human beings). See this excellent takedown by @Socratic.Fanatic a couple of years ago.
  4. There are some very good reasons to believe that this “rule” is a YEC fabrication. It is only ever cited by YECs, and even then only ever in the context of trying to attack the day-age, gap or framework interpretations of Genesis 1. It first appeared in YEC literature in the 1970s and was unheard-of before then.
  5. Outside of YEC circles, no Hebrew scholar acknowledges its validity.

See: also this paper by Rodney Whitefield .

No, it comes from 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4. “A day with the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.” And just to pre-empt the usual YEC objections to this verse:

  1. YECs insist that 2 Peter 3:8 comes from a passage that is nothing to do with creation. Yet they equally adamantly insist that 2 Peter 3:4-5 are all about creation. You can’t have it both ways.
  2. Insisting that “a thousand years are like a day” only gives you a Creation Week that’s 6,000 years long and not 4.5 billion demonstrates the same kind of absurdist wooden literal thinking as the mathematician who, when asked, “Can you tell me the time?” simply answered “Yes.” It also completely misses the point that these verses are making. The point is simply that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between God’s time and our time. It’s saying that a day with the Lord could be any length of time at all from our perspective.

I would advise caution with Answers in Genesis – especially with respect to their claims about evidence for the age of the earth. They are so dogmatic about literal 24 hour days and a young earth that basic principles of technical rigour, factual accuracy and even in some cases basic honesty go right out the window.

Here’s a review of their “ten best evidences for a young earth” that I wrote about a year ago that explains the problem:

On a completely different note, what is it about you young-earth creationists that you so often write it as “bible” (with a lower case “b”) rather than “Bible”? Besides being grammatically incorrect, it’s disrespectul to the Book that you claim to take more seriously than anyone else. The Oxford English Dictionary is clear about this one: using the word “bible” with a lower case “b” is an informal term for a “book regarded as authoritative in a particular sphere.” When referring to the Christian Scriptures specifically, you capitalise it as a proper noun.

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Yes, but figurative language often makes use of the regular, primary sense meanings of words. If you say, “my battle with cancer has been a rough road,” it is the primary sense of battle and road that our brains access to understand that we are talking about a struggle with a sickness over time, not a physical fight, or a journey. It is the meaning of the whole sentence that is figurative, not the individual words. There is no contradiction in affirming that the days in Genesis are normal days, but the passage as a whole has a figurative meaning. Just like when Jesus says the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, the meaning of shepherd is the normal meaning, a person who takes care of sheep, but the whole sentence is interpreted figuratively as Jesus caring for the people he loves.

Please recognize that the majority of people who participate on this site are not atheists, they are Bible-believing, Christ-confessing Christians who probably agree with you on many things. Assuming that accepting evolution = atheist all the time will make discussion difficult.

Actually it does. There is this phenomenon called co-evolution. Many times when creationists insist that evolution can’t explain something, what they really mean is they have never studied the topic and the information wasn’t provided in creationist propaganda. Evolution is actually a highly effective explanatory framework.

Why do you think that is what image means? Even pretty conservative groups teach that God is spirit and does not have a human-like body. What does it mean that God is spirit? | GotQuestions.org

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@Joshua_Groves Except this isn’t what being made in the image of God meant to the people at that time. The image wasn’t supposed to look like the god, who would even know what the god looked like. It stands in for the god. An idol in other words.

Thanks for your note. Well, there are times when all of us doubt; and to be honest, there are times we don’t know the answer to everything. God is by definition true. Yet, there are many in the world who do not know Him because of never hearing of him; others who can not understand because of lack of intelligence; and others who were exposed to suffering and other things that prevent them from believing. Sometimes, those who say honestly that they are looking for truth and God and can not find him, can not believe. If God is true, we must rely on Him to know our limitations (He made us, after all) and slowly, surely, eventually bring us around. It is better, I think, to be honest with God and our understanding than to “fudge it.” Since God allows so many people to go without knowing Him, I can only believe that He will treat them justly and kindly, as a father treat his children. I agree with Austin Fischer that it’s not doubt that separates us from God; it’s the belief that we can’t doubt–that God is not honest, just or true, and doesn’t relate to us or allow us to use the brains He gave us.

In contrast God does love us as a Father. He does welcome our questions. Does that make more sense of what I’m trying to say?__ Who wouldn’t love such a God? :slight_smile: Praise Him!

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2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4 are explaining how God is beyond time. You can’t take 2 Peter 3:8 out of context.
“8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
And also “evening and morning” sort of meant a literal day.
All of chapter 3 is dedicated to the end times, correlated with creation.
I thank you for pointing out my typo, and I meant no disrespect to the Bible.
It is disappointing that someone would argue with someone over so small a thing as capitalization. It often makes it harder to take someone seriously when they turn to such tactics. I am not pointing fingers as I am sure there are many young earth creationists that do the same thing. It is just important realize this and prevent useless arguments between Christians.

I honestly do not know what will happen to those people who haven’t heard the Good News or can literally not understand it, but if someone hears the Gospel and because of trails or any other reason don’t believe will not be saved. Just as many who profess themselves Christians but do not believe will not.

I am not referring to idol creation, I am using the clay person as a metaphor.

Regarding this , do you think it is any different in meaning to be formed from clay rather being made of dust? After it was brought up on another thread, I have been thinking about it and think perhaps it is, though perhaps is straining the metaphor to make too much of it.

You didn’t get my point. The person who wrote Genesis used “image” or the Hebrew equivalent, did not mean something that looks like something else. Which is what we think of. The concept of “image” meant something that could stand in for or represent God. The pagans carved idols not because the idols looked like their gods (notice the lower case g) but because the images could stand in for the gods they could not see. You are applying the modern meaning of image to an ancient text.

Sorry if I disappointed you there Joshua. Maybe I was a bit too harsh in the way I expressed myself.

However, there is an important point worth making here. There are times – especially when you are dealing with science and technology – when capitalisation is most certainly not a small thing. I work as a computer programmer with case-sensitive languages, and there are times when getting capitalisation wrong can cause your program to fail to compile – or even worse, introduce subtle bugs that can cause a lot of damage. For this reason, if you were careless about it on your CV when applying for a programming job, you would seriously damage your chances of even getting an interview. It indicates a lack of care and attention to detail.

This is what concerns me most about young-earth “creation science.” It doesn’t bother me how old you think the earth is, or who or what you think did or did not evolve from what, but it does concern me when I see claims of evidence for a young earth in which quality assurance and quality control go out the window. I’m sorry to have to say this, but the technical standards on display in YEC arguments are so bad that if you applied the same standards to any other area of science or technology, you would kill people.

But regarding writing “bible” rather than “Bible” – don’t take that one personally. The fact is that I’ve seen a lot of other YECs writing it that way, while at the same time I hardly see anyone else doing so. I wondered if perhaps there was some particular rationale for it that you might be able to shed some light on?

Well if 2 Peter 3 correlates the end times to creation, then how am I taking verse 8 out of context by using it to interpret Genesis 1?

The fact of the matter is that whether Genesis 1 intends us to think of the days of creation as literal 24-hour days Earth time or not, the Earth still bears overwhelming, insistent, and unambiguous evidence of 4.54 billion years of very detailed and self-consistent history. You may think that 2 Peter 3:8 isn’t a lot to go on, but at least in terms of reconciling Genesis 1 with the evidence that we see in nature, it gives us something. The only alternative is to believe that God created evidence for a history of 4.54 billion years of events that never happened. In support of that, the Bible gives us nothing.

I don’t have an answer, but I don’t view this as a unique, serious problem. That is probably because I affirm biblical inerrancy in the lost original autographs a la the Chicago statement. That said, I believe that God commanded ethnic cleansing of Joshua, I don’t have an answer for that. I also believe that God condemns some to eternal hell. The infinite aspect of just one instance of which dwarfs the integrated massive yet finite suffering of animals. I don’t have an answer for that either.

I don’t have an answer to any of this. If I did, I believe I’d have a Nobel Prize winning theodicy. I am just saying that, to me, the red-in-tooth-and-claw aspect of evolution is not a problem that is in a class by itself.

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So you think “image of God” refers to his physical appearance, rather than to his moral and conscious dimensions and features?

Oh, I hope not. I know people who were born without limbs… and they would be pretty disappointed that God let them be born without a full set of divine equipment!