More faith in the scientific method than God's revelation

@grog

I don’t think it is fair-minded of you to insist people answer your questions… but you just ignore whatever you want.

I’m going to hold your feet to the fire from now on if you answer 2 newer posts than mind BEFORE mine.

Okay? Hope that suits you… because I have just enough OCD that I’m going to follow that rule for you pretty closely.

P.S. @grog, It’s a super-busy season at work for me just now, and I don’t want to fire off quick replies because it takes emotional effort and no small amount of time to write the kind of measured, gracious replies that this discussion calls for. So long as this doesn’t spiral out of control to the point that Brad has to shut 'er down, I’ll reply to you another day or (ideally) next week. Until then, peace and blessings to you for your next few days of Advent.

I propose a discussion “reset” of sorts here. Long lists of accusations and questions accomplish nothing except frustrating everyone involved.

Keep your posts short and focused. Keep replies equally focused. Don’t ask people to answer 25 questions about their perspective that aren’t related to the immediate point(s) of discussion.

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Here is my re-stated question to @Grog… and it’s really just ONE question.

@Grog,

You are obviously a man of great faith. And so you no doubt have great confidence in the chronology of the Old Testament. So… most bible commentators place the time of the Great Flood somewhere in the middle of the first 10 dynasties of ancient Egypt.

And yet… Egypt’s history is not cut short. There is no interruption of its writings and carvings. There is no vast destruction in any of the 10 dynasties. And the Egyptian dynasties just keep rolling forward without interruption.

So… I assume you have to Reject all that Egyptian history… leaving a tangible and traceable record … involving hundreds and thousands of data points… you have to reject all this eyewitness testimony to the history of the Earth - - that was not affected by a global flood!

My question is: How do you justify a belief in a Global Flood when there doesn’t seem to be any trace of it in one of the grandest and closest civilizations which would have been completely wiped out by the flood.

Today’s science seems on different terms when it comes to evolution anyway. Since God is no longer allowed in the secular labratory, the law was pronounced first that we must have evolved billions of years ago from a seed planted by aliens because God who created kinds is not allowed, then millions and millions of dollars worth of research and testing is molded to conform to what has already been stated to be true. This, I believe is exactly what happened when It comes to this issue. If it were the other way around and for a long time it was cool to believe that God created kinds and then millions went into research to prove this, I believe wholeheartedly that this conversation would be polar opposite different even when the truth of how we came to be was the same in both scenarios.

The recent finding of soft tissue in dino fossils made some scientists squirm for a minute, but then they quickly concluded that this must therefore mean that the soft tissue can survive that long encased in rock for hundred of millions of years.

Finding a human skull 200 million years old will soon have some research molded to what is already believed about human kind as well. There are many others.

Some presuppose that God created kinds and others presuppose molecules to man evolution and then both fit the evidence to the supposition. When it comes to the idea of presupposing, isn’t that the reason Christians are Christians…they have faith (supposition) and faith comes from hearing the Word? rabbit trail.

God creating dna out of mud you say? I say hallelujia! This paradigm of God creating out of nothing is the principle that should grab the headlines of our hearts. You are not going to hear this from secular schools and more and more Christians are unfortunately following their lead. I just don’t see honest concrete scientific conclusions coming from any secular sources that truly demand that evolution from very very simple organisms planted on earth to evolve into brilliant complexity by the powers of energy to be true. I don’t see any logic whatsoever of a dino gaining useless feathers leading to flight by the power of the simple existence of energy. I don’t see how natural selection sees a half useful eye or a partially feathered arms to be tantamount for the amplified fitness of the individual animal more necessary for survival. I see a lot of attempts to make it seem true and rational but these attempts less science and more belief. I have chose to believe that God created kinds that then evolve within the the boundaries from which they were designed and He placed these into nature to be studied.

Well a certain group has invested a lot of money into “baraminology.” It’s not been as fruitful as you imagine. See here for example:

Thoughts on Baraminology – Naturalis Historia

Maybe you haven’t quite figured in the incredible speed of evolution that would be required to fit this model. If evolution is really so unlikely even given lots of time, how is it easily imaginable in a few hundred years. Joel Duff has lots of articles on the science and math involved:

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I believe that human sinful tendency is to desire to push God away. I sense that as this nation has pushed God away, it is no longer appealing to include God in conversations about anything let alone how we came to exist. Evolution was a go to that thus appealing to the masses and does indeed appeal to the sinful flesh because it can easily escape the idea of a moral God exists who demands our allegiance.

I wish we could go back in time and change the dynamics of human thinking and education in this country all the while assuming that the true truth about how we came to be stayed constant.

In the case that educators and students alike found the concept that God created the kinds to be groovy and helpful and appealing to the superego… Doesn’t make sense but go with me here… I would love to now see conclusionary communications spoken by the majority of the educators from the millions of dollars of research on the topic. I am talking 100’s of millions in research and examination…I can almost guarantee that the conclusions would point to the appealing terms to that generation about God being Creator.

Okay, so it is strawman…but could this strawman be revealing our educators’ strawman arguments today?

Christian organizations in your country which reject evolution, have hundreds of millions of dollars which they could spend on this. But they have decided not to. Instead they spend it on on huge church buildings, TV programs asking people to send them more money, and great big wooden boats. They give a good impression of people who don’t want to spend money to discover what the facts really are. But even those organizations which reject evolution and have spent millions in their goal to find scientific evidence for their case and proselytize their beliefs, have made no scientific progress.

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Says who? References, please.

So … you write this excruciatingly off-point essay … and you STILL don’t answer my question? I’ll give you another chance. My question is right above the post I’m responding to… My Post #51 !

…and let’s not forget the far-and-away most numerous class of flying animal, insects! No feathers there…

And let’s give credit where it’s due. Last time around we spent a while debunking the idea of wing stubs as a transitional stage between reptiles and birds. It actually is progress in this discussion that that’s not coming up again, and that this time we’re talking insulating feathers instead.

Objection by objection, we’ll eventually manage to convince him that evolutionary scientists actually have brains and not just giddy hearts that get all twitterpated every time a Harvard professor looks their way.

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I think we all need to take a step back here and look at where Greg is coming from. It’s clear to me that he has a lot of very fundamental misconceptions about how science actually works that are very, very common in YECs.

For starters, YECs view evolution and the age of the earth as being based entirely on presupposition rather than evidence. They believe it’s motivated entirely by a desire to disprove God, and accordingly just throwing facts and evidence at them isn’t going to get anywhere. We need to address that specific misconception first. That’s why I always harp on about oil exploration – it refutes this particular misconception because the only thing that matters about evolutionary models to a petroleum geologist is that they should be able to tell you where the oil is. They have to be right, not ideologically convenient.

Their exposure to science also tends to be limited to what they read in the newspapers and the popular press – in other words, science journalism. This, as, we all know (and as they know as well), can be unreliable at best and flat-out lies at worst. As such, they very often view science itself – or at least, “historical science” – as a sub-discipline of journalism. As one of my YEC friends put it to me recently, “They science it all up a bit to make it sound convincing.” As such, they need to have it explained to them that science is based on strict rules and protocols to ensure stringent standards of quality control, and to be given an understanding of the role of such things as measurement, calculation of errors and confidence levels, and the necessity and role of peer review and replication of results. Unfortunately, unless they’ve worked in an environment that has stringent quality control requirements of its own, they may have a hard time appreciating this.

Finally, they’re almost certainly put off by the concept of “scientific scepticism.” This is a rather unfortunate term because to most Christians (myself included, admittedly) it sounds at first glance like “unbelief.” It needs to be explained to them that it isn’t about unbelief at all, but about quality control, and that in fact it is actually a Biblical principle. 1 John 4:1 – “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

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Just because you don’t see some things, though, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Have you ever heard of ‘eyespots?’ “Half useful eye” is a bit of a misnomer, but the very existence and widespread success of eyespots should be all the clue that’s needed to rebut the ‘what use is half an eye’ argument, yet it keeps getting repeated by people who have never actually looked up what science says about the evolution of the eye.

Nor is flight the only purpose of feathers (warmth, camouflage and mating displays come to mind off the top of my head) and neither is partial flight useless, or there would be no flying fish or flying squirrels.

I may never understand the argument that complexity cannot grow naturally or organically. Truly complex systems, it seems to me, all go through a process of evolution that starts simple. Nobody sits down and invents a computer from scratch; you build on generations of previous computers, and technological innovation, that have all been tested for workability at each stage.

I’m by no means Christian, though I want to understand where others are coming from. But are you sure that your interpretation of ‘according to kind’ was meant to bear the weight you are putting on it? It seems to me perfectly reasonable as a description of evolution: each generation comes from the one before it. Mice do not give birth to giraffes. But that is not to rule out slow and subtle changes with profound potential for kinds to grow into different branches of animal.

Food for thought—which I have failed to keep to a bite-size portion, my apologies, mods!

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@grog

So, you have given God the name of “Energy” ? That’s a little odd… You do understand that many BioLogos supporters think God planned Evolution, yes?

Sorry but you finally got to me.this is rooted in Galileo, the famous saying what we all now agree is true. Sun,moon earth. Was fought fiercely by the inquisition, the church intelligencia for, say, 300 years. All that time people studying, thinking had to either reject the church teaching authority or stop studying. So what did we learn? The churches sided with ignorance for centuries, lost respect. I suggest consider how to accommodate evolution. It is written in stone, in plate tectonics. We have volcanoes and earthquakes that we no longer attribute to the wrath of god. Don’t fight the fact, find good and evil outside the apple story. Because we urgently need a moral revival

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Four paragraphs is a rhetorical nibble (relatively) around here. Carry on.

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Hi Lynn: You seem like a very nice person and gracious in your comment here in response to a relatively heated discussion between folks of various viewpoints of creation vs. evolution, yet greatfully remaining in a faith and life perspective called Christianity. I will tell you that in this time of year many call “Christmas” I have such a spirit of thankfulness towards who I know to be Creator and Designer of this universe who sent His Son to be born, live a life of modesty and servanthood and to ultimately die in our place.

I know of a person who came to know this God whom I serve who was raised in a very different system of thought. Upon choosing to serve the God of the Christian Bible which caused him to have to give up fellowship with almost his entire family who resided in a different country, as he packed his things before his mom and some aunts at this location, he turned to them and asked them very kindly, “Do you think that a worldview that has at its crux a perspective that if a man sacrifices himself on behalf of this particular god that in response he gets a herem of female virgins in heaven sound like it is from God or something that a man (with an appetite) made up.” He said in response to him, where it would be disrespectful and even dangerous for his mom and aunts to respond verbally with any type of affirmation, instead the culmination of difficulty in these women’s lives engrained in such a worldview combined with ideas of judgement and hate trumping love caused them to look into his face and offer to him a half smile that, to him, seemed to be their affirmation of his wisdom to go towards faith in God who does not call us to judge, hate or destroy, but to love, affirm and encourage people in life and towards closer association to the very God who loves us and describes Himself in His Word.

Many good hearted people who believe in this Great God of love and not hate desire to appeal to the conscious of those who are searching for meaning and for God and yet have been through much indoctrination from science teachers in high school and into college who suggest that it is absolutely unscientific to consider the idea of God. However sometimes this appeal is made by sort of agreeing to the secular terms of evolution that does its best to disallow God from almost the entire terms of development of complex life by simply re labeling these same evolutionary principles that have no grounding in the Christian text with Christian semantics. I respectfully don’t agree because if God is God, then the foundation upon which the entire body of thought which science tries to explain could be completely obliterated by how God chose to begin life on earth and this is impossible to determine with confidence in science as we know it. For this, we need to think long and hard about what we believe.

As a sophomore in college I was a chemistry major and took a biology elective that honed in on the structure of the human brain. It was one of the most fascinating classes that I have ever taken! The prof was a brilliant scientist who was even a consultant to NASA at the time (he bragged often about this) and for whatever reason chose to devote a lot of time towards literally demeaning the idea of God in the classroom all the while pronouncing the validity of evolution. As a naïve Christian student with half the smarts of this professor,I became disoriented as I would hear Dr. Parker proclaim how incredibly complex the human brain is on one hand, then belittling God on the other. I honestly began to see him as rather unprofessional and pitifully insecure with such bantering.

I will never forget this for as long as I live what happened next…Dr. Parker in one particular class was explaining the part of the brain that was in charge of protecting the body in the case that a person began to twist their ankle. He said that as one loses control and the ankle is bent into a contorted position, the brain immediately sends a signal to the thigh muscle to relax it in order to save the ankle from further injury which a stiff leg would inevitably do. It was like a human shock absorber of sorts. Then to my surprise, within a couple of days after this teaching while playing a pretty intense game of basketball, I did this exact thing where as I came down onto the ankle sideways and my leg immediately let loose which caused by body to embarrassingly fall onto the court floor in a heap. I was sparred from bad injury.

Within a week of this event, I hobbled on this swollen ankle to this same class and somehow mustered up enough courage to approach this professor Parker. I said something like, “Dr… Parker: Your class is awesome. I just experienced the brain sending a signal to my thigh muscle in order to ward off further injury to my ankle and the illumination about the complexity of the brain came to life in this experience. But Dr. Parker, I am really contorted by the fact that on one hand you relay pretty terrific detail on the brain yet at the same time vocalize to this class of young folks that God cannot exist and evolution must be the only explanation. I went on to tell him that I was a Christian and that I believed that the idea of God is the only rational explanation for complexity and for this, every time you put down the idea of God as Creator and Designer, you bring confusion and insult to some of those in your class.” Dr. Parker replied very nicely and needless to say, from that day on, our science class never regressed into indoctrination into the belief system called atheism that seems to be to be the foundation upon which naturalistic evolution is based upon.

Sorry too for the length here yet again in this post… Christmas is a time of year of celebration. It is full of life, lights, trees, family, wrapping paper. For some not so much and sometimes bitterness. Whatever the case may be experientially should never dispose of what should make the front page news of our minds. It is the dogma that the God who created and designed the universe, in response to mankind turning their back on Him still chose to love us by sending His Son to die in our place. If the truth that God LITERALLY exists, that He created, that He designed, that He loves us enough to die in our place does not take ones breath away with awe and thankfulness that necessarily drowns the noise of the lights, trees, wrapping paper or the pain and lonliness for some the same, I encourage you to simply get on your knees and by faith thank Him for the true gift found in His Son! That is Christianity. He is real and He loves me and He loves YOU! I mean this statement not just in a frivolous greeting type of way like we say “God bless you” after a sneeze type of thing. No, God Himself who exists and designed us really loves the world. All nations, all people. He loves you! When we hear “Merry Christmas” at the next Christmas party, may we remember the literal God who made those stars and all those galaxies in heaven by a snap of His fingers is the God who cares for us in the details of our very lives. in this light, His Christmas blessings to you Lynn and everyone in earshot of this message. Greg

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In reading through this series of blogs and others in this forum, we seem to always get hung up on two issues:

  1. The time it took to create the world we live in.
  2. The means of creating species and us as man.

Under item 1, lets be clear that the bible and science declares it took time for creation - it did NOT happen instantly. The bible says 6 days, and science says 14.5 Billion Years. How can both be true? Answer: Time is relative per Einstein’s theory of relativity and also in the bible, “To God a 1000 years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years.” The 6 days is God’s time and since we only existed in the mind of God prior to Adam, it is our time as well. To Adam had existing on the earth (that didn’t exist either) it would have been observed as 14.5 Billion years.

For Item 2, I would like to use a simple comparison to man made buildings. If one were to look at a series of buildings made by the same builder, and one was a single story, another a two story, and perhaps a third was a multi-story building all made of similar materials but different in their height, an evolutionist might theorize than this is an example of evolutionary processes and theorize that highest structure evolved from the lower one. Of course this is ridiculous. But perhaps so is evolutionary theory in that it assumes since one species has one genetic structure, and another seems similar but more complex than the other that the more complex evolved from it. Indeed all genetic theory is based on this principle. I would think God is smiling and saying that to create a mouse you need one genetic code, and to create an ape another. How ridiculous it is to assume that one came from the other.

In summary, the Bible and science do fit together and God wants us to think. We just need to start with the bible first, and seek an answer for scientific observation that is consistent with the bible. Then we can find the truth as God and indeed God wants us to do so as it builds faith in him for all people.

Correcting typo in last sentence:
Then we can find the truth and indeed God wants us to do so as it builds faith in him for all people.

I agree Mr. Burke: Jesus sermon on the mount discusses the very real tie of worry about one’s financial well being and the tendency to fake religiousity on the part of the religious leaders that thereby affect their followers. Jesus teaching here is absolutely brilliant! Religion and religiousity comes in many forms…all the major world religion players but includes atheism, agnosticism and naturalistic science as these are indeed belief systems the same whether they might like it or not. Atheism by the way takes the most faith.

And to be brutally frank-there are a lot of organizations out there who start with good intentions and base themselves on an idea and get a following, money flow, employees that find any competing ideas as a threat to their personal well being. Just human nature. I run a business. I know a thing about this very type of thing in myself. This is exactly why Jesus teaching about worry in this sermon on the mount so fitting while He at the same time discusses acting religious for an audience and paycheck in the case of the pharisees.

For all of this, I choose to remain outside of getting a paycheck from any Christian para church organization as this can cause for tainting truth. (churches with good accountability from godly elders is best) I appreciate Christian organizations but there needs to be caution and for this I want to explore God’s Word without pressure to conform to an organizations view just for the sake of livelihood in the form of a paycheck from that organization. If I were a betting man, I would place my bet that the differences of viewpoints on the topic at hand have more to do with blame on this side issue of how organizations are formed around issues than the disagreements over the issues themselves. I could never prove this, but a hunch. Think about it…secular universities have a theory, research dollars flow, then feel obligated to stick to their guns. Same with AIG. Same with Biologos. (sorry) The argument gets heated because the idea that I could be wrong can affect my livelihood and what those leaders think and feel translates into their following. ugh. I cannot wait for heaven God!

For groups like AIG I applaud them for their high view of Scripture as I do. However God is more complex than what a billion Bibles say. Yes the ark a bit a crazy. Their donors wanted the ark and would never have put $ towards research. Must take our hats off for them going against the grain for so long. I know a number of staff members and really really solid Christians who are in line with my thinking about holiness and humbleness before a mighty God who saves us despite us and at great cost. So I offer AIG and groups similar my respect.

For the theistic evolution groups. I respect Tim Keller. I have given a number of his books to friends. When it comes to theistic evolution, if they are to appeal to naturalistic evolutionist models by adopting most principles and just plastering some new semantics upon those, then consider going all the way with the basic premise of this camp too and not just suggest that God has intermingled Himself in the paradigm prescribed …might consider a different direction all together that does indeed incorporate Bible with science.

The rocks just do not show definitive proof that God absolutely did not place kinds of plants and animals on this earth specifically fashioned and designed to evolve and adjust in order to survive. God playing these into nature where He chooses to let nature have its course and where He might interject here and there seems to me the most reasonable.

When it comes to these discussions about evolution and creationism, I really wonder if we took away the monetary pressures that inevitably exist in all of the camps if we’d find an easier pathway for unity upon the truth of the matter. We might find it easier to really sit down to discuss all elements of the ideas and pray and process with sincerity and perhaps find more unity on a more common ground.

I have seen God do some pretty amazing things. And I am not selling anything and say this without blushing or for profit like many do on the church channel (I do love you guys but your marketing materials in the guise of making disciples makes Christianity look bad) I believe that He did introduce the world with life that was of fully functioning plants and animals that had the ability to adjust and evolve. And there just has been enough confusing evidence out there in our dating processes to warrant a closer look on how we are coming up with billions of years. etc. human skull fossils dating old, old fossils with blood cells and soft tissue, known young ages of rocks dating millions of years old etc. We should take a closer look. I bet that long term we are going to see results that have a closer resemblance to plain principles out of early Genesis than some may believe today.