Hey… good question! How do I make the distinction? If a man of faith cannot believe the testimony of nature … then how can I rely on his judgment about something much more complex and subtle - - the testimony of God?
However, once a man establishes his ability to rely on the testimony of nature, THEN I look to see if they can THEN comprehend God.
It’s a two-tiered, double-ranked system… which I think the YEC’s have turned on its head.
Yes George, and you can repeat that Biologos does not teach “atheistic” evolution. But that’s the whole problem, George. Evolution ( I guess I should at least say the TOE ) IS atheistic.
Why does a purely natural, purposeless process need God? This is the exact question that I - and many others - have come to, and will continue coming to. Evolution has no need of a Creator. Can you not see this?
What specific amendments would BioLogos make to the TOE as it is taught and on what basis would BioLogos make these amendments?
@deliberateresult… you literally don’t believe anything about BioLogos that BioLogos writes?
BioLogos bases these amendments on THE BIBLE… as interpreted in the context of the divine testimony of nature.
It would say that since we believe in God’s existence and his divine role in the fate of all the souls of humanity, BioLogos would conclude that based on the figurative meaning of Genesis that God shaped humanity “in His image” - - which can be meant in any number of valid ways.
BioLogos would say that while evolution could work in the absence of God, since we believe in God’s role, we do not expect that evolution WITHOUT GOD would produce the same kind of life forms that evolution WITH GOD has been able to produce.
Though I suppose there must be a small minority of BioLogos supporters who think God is infinitely patient and that rather than direct evolution, he simply waits and waits and waits until what he wants appears. I am not convinced there are many BioLogos supporters like this.
If that is what the evidence suggested, that would be fine. Evidence of intelligent agency does not imply knowledge of the exact process. So, sure, if there were good evidence to support “front loaded” evolution, that would be perfectly compatible with ID (but not with the TOE) Personally, if you are talking about universal common descent, I don’t think that’s the case. I think there is plenty of evidence against common descent.
Two things concerning Behe: 1. He is known first and foremost as one of the fathers of the ID movement. Behe has clearly separated himself from mainstream thought. 2. His works presents powerful evidence for the necessity of intelligent agency in the Creation and evolution of life, as well as evidence for very strict limitations of the mutation/selection mechanism.
It remains Eddie, that the TOE is taught in our classrooms as an unguided, natural process. As long as this is the case, it stands in clear contradiction to one essential truth about God,
A purposeless process cannot produce an intended result.
I will persevere, even though I think your rhetoric leaves much to be desired - this conversation began with the observation that the notion of evolution is multi-facetted with a great deal of debate within the scientific community. Your contribution, if I can call it that, has been to draw a distinction between one group of scientists (non-faith) and another (theistic based). You have failed to show anything of substance regarding the scientific distinction you seem to infer, and to add to your nonsense, you now cast yourself as the one who decides which of these scientists can pass a test you have concocted - that of reading some silly “book of nature” before they read the testimony of God - you even display vanity in proposing a two-tiered system for science (and my guess is) theology.
Just how silly do you want to become? Are you in the business of vetting scientists? Or are you again obsessed with YEC’s and perhaps placing them in 2(a) and atheists in a 2(b) tiered system?
Nature is studied by scientists, they do not look to it for testimony. I think this exchange is enough!
Joe,
Thank you for your response.
If a purposeless process cannot have an intended result, then evolution must not be a purposeless process. TOE is wrong in as far as it does not recognize this and does not provide a true explanation of evolution. God did not use Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to create. God used an accurate theory of evolution to create.
God used the natural processes of mutation, genetic reproduction, and ecology that God created for God’s evolutionary purposes, which is for life to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the evolving earth. Also as affirmed by the Anthropic Principle to create human beings,
Darwin does use Natural Selection as part of his theory. What is selection if not choice contingency?
@GJDS, you asked ME how do I decide, how do I make a distinction?
My first criteria, is that a person (scientist or not) has good command of the witness of nature… the witness of his very eyes! Wouldn’t I be nuts to start anywhere else?
And then, once we have found those people who accurately rely on nature’s testimony, THEN we look for those who are in touch enough with God to STILL SEE GOD, through a spiritual path.
Isn’t that YOUR criterion as well, GJDS?
You can attempt to brow-beat me if you like … but really… you come in a distant 2nd or 3rd when it comes to trying to shame me - - especially when you attempt to shame me into being a Young Earth Creationist!!!
That maybe the “God he has come to believe in” is not the God that exists.
They will be taught that the theory of evolution is not compatible with a literal interpretation of Genesis 1.
That they will be taught that the theory of evolution is a fact is not incompatible with the Bible. That is the problem. That people are people implicitly and explicitly taught that the theory of evolution is incompatible with the Bible before they get to college.
That’s what happened to me.
And to use this as an “argument against God” is to use a scientific statement to make a metaphysical statement.
Well, if you believe God is the author and creator of nature, and He created and sustains it for a purpose, then you have no problem with evolution as a mechanism through which God works. You just accept that God is big enough to do it that way.
Evolution has no need of a Creator if evolution can create itself. Evolution cannot and did not create itself, so it did have a Creator as do we all, even if you think that your life is a purposeless process.
I pretty much agree with everything in your post, George. However, I would suggest that you refine the way you phrase the relationship between God and evolution. The statement “God is part of Evolution” (with a capital ‘E’, no less) sounds rather pantheistic, which I don’t think you intended.
Hi Joe,
Atheistic philosophers have been claiming for centuries that science rules out the need for God. They based their claims on the sensational advances of astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc. long before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species.
This is why several folks in the discussion have been trying to point you toward a broader view of the relationship between science and theology. The theological questions that the theory of evolution raises are not fundamentally different, in my opinion, from the theological questions posed by predicting weather or understanding quantum physics, to offer just two other scientific disciplines.
If you can accept a providential role for God in a world whose weather and physics can be described by mathematical models, then I think you can get to the point where you accept a providential role for God in the process of evolution.
Does my comment help you to see the direction we’re urging you to try to take?
While we may accept God’s providence on all matters (after all that is our faith), we need to be skeptical of any notion, be it scientific or otherwise, that seeks to negate God’s providential role - this distinction is especially acute when we discuss actual speculations on how evolution works. It is difficult to argue that weather works specifically in a way that removes God’s providence - in this case people arrive at their own belief. With TOE it is put forward as intrinsically negating God’s providence - if we argue against this, we must also argue against the form of TOE presented to the world. If we do this, evolutionists challenge people to come up with an alternate theory to account for life and bio-species (that would at least NOT remove God, even if it does not argue for a specific role for God).
This point is often overlooked by EC/TEs.
I would start by explaining that the TOE is not mutually exclusive of the claims of God or of the narrative in Genesis 1, 2 or the story of Noah.
It is not necessary to “prove” the existence of God. It is enough to prove that God can exist. Once this is done, those people who choose to seek God will find him.
Just because the TOE does not need God, that does not mean that God cannot exist if macro evolution brought about the species that we see today. Active Guidance is not disproved if directionless TOE can be proven to be workable. Ice cream does not need chocolate sauce. Proving that ice cream can exist without chocolate sauce does not preclude there being chocolate sauce on my Sundae. I would talk about sprinkles, but I don’t want to get too metaphysical here.
True, if the Christian is allowed to believe that the TOE may be directionless, he may choose to abandon his faith. That is his choice. That is just fine. It is God’s will that he have that choice. We know this from Genesis 2. God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to choose whether or not they would have the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. There was no fence around the trees in the garden. The serpent was allowed to enter the garden and tempt Eve and Adam. When Adam and Eve chose to know the difference between evil and good, they choose to be culpable for their actions. Given that choice, each of us would choose the same. Once we are culpable for our actions and able to make moral choices, we by necessity need to live in a world where moral choices are possible. We by necessity need to live in a world where wrong choices can be made. We by necessity need to live in a world where there are challenges to be overcome through perserverance (a series of right choices). We require the freedom to choose to follow God or not. We require the freedom to believe in God or not. This is all part of God’s plan, as revealed in his book. Specifically in Book 1, chapter 2. The story of the Garden of Eden is not the story of creation. The story of Eden is the story of a garden, where God proved to us that we are responsible for the challenges and unfairness of life, and that God is just and good and fair by providing us with just such a world. This is true even when the most unbearable seeming things happen to people undeserving of such fate, and it is by adopting an eternal perspective and faith in God’s perfect outcome that we gain the ability to weather those tragedies.
So, your goal is well intentioned, but it is not God’s will. It is not God’s will that you create a formula using ID that will make it impossible for someone to reject belief in God. it is God’s will that we have the freedom to reject him or not. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue confess, but not right now.
Contained within the Bible, there is the truth of the universe. Unfortunately, we are sometimes not able to interpret correctly what we are reading in the Bible, and therefore we make mistakes. This is not because the Bible is fallible, this is because we are fallible. The traditional interpretation of the first two books of Genesis is incorrect. Again, this is not because the Bible is fallible, this is because we are people and we are fallible.
A riddle. The bat flew through the air. What is the bat made of? Hmmmm. The bat could be a furry rodent that flies. The bat could also be a baseball bat and made of wood. There is no way to know without context.
In English, the word “bat” can have more than one meaning. In Hebrew, there were many different meanings for each noun. Ancient Hebrew was noun poor. There are three words that we are concerned with when reading Genesis 1 and 2 and the story of Noah. Erets could mean the world, or it could mean “land”. Yom could mean a day or it could mean a long period of time. Har could mean mountain, or it could mean hill or an irrigation dike.
The word Yom cannot mean “day” all the way through Genesis 1, because we do not see the sun until day 4. The word Erets cannot mean the word “world” in both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because Genesis 2 is clearly the story of the creation of a Garden and not the story of the creation of the planet. Genesis 1 is the story of the creation of the planet. The word Har cannot mean mountain in the story of Noah when it describes the mountains being covered in water because the evidence of a global flood is provably false. There were lots of little floods and lots of slow continental drift. The word Erets cannot mean world in the flood story because there was a local flood, not a global one.
Genesis 1 does not tell us the method by which God created the earth. Genesis 1 tells the order of major epoch’s and milestones in the creation of the planet and orders them by the order in which these processes began.
Here is my interpretation of Genesis 1
The smoking gun for evolution in the Bible is that Genesis 1 puts plants before the creation of the sun, moon and stars. If we interpret the creation of the sun moon and stars to be the visibility of the sun, moon and stars through the clearing atmosphere after the “great oxidation event” then that means that the Bible is claiming that the creation of plants was set in motion before the great oxidation event. The great oxidation event was caused by the respiration of photosynthetic cyanobacteria. some of these same bacteria became chloroplasts when they took up residence in host cells and this led eventually to the evolutionary development of plants. Evolution is completely compatible with the Bible. In Genesis 1 God announces that he is going to create something and then the next verse or two state that God created. The verses do not explain how God created, they just say that he did.
You can go all through the Bible and not find anything that specifically contradicts that God used evolution as the process to create mankind. God made Adam out of dust and breathed life into him, but Adam is a special case made through special creation to prove God’s point about the culpability of humanity for our actions.
more biblical support for old earth
Here is a link to the the first in a series of posts where I go passage by passage and explain that the verses traditionally cited to support YEC do not actually support YEC. Similarly, these passages do not contradict the Active Guidance that God used to lead the development of life on earth. Therefore the TOE and the Bible are not mutually exclusive if one allows for Active Guidance. It is true that one is left with the option of disbelieving that God directed the process, but it is God’s will that people have that choice to make. Going against that is going against God and therefore wrong. You have to allow people the freedom to make that choice. Interestingly YEC takes that choice away from people by demanding that people believe in something that is demonstrably neither true not biblical.
explanation of scripture
The bible does not contradict the TOE as long as one allows for Active Guidance. People have the freedom to disbelieve in Active Guidance if they choose. It is God’s will that people have that choice. Do not contradict God’s will.
Well said!
Macro evolution could be WITHOUT GOD … or part of God’s intentions!
its not an argument. It is a statement of fact. Now here’s a fact of logic: a purposeless process cannot produce an intended result.
Do you see the problem yet?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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