New Genes | A Science Explainer with Dennis Venema

[T_aquaticus]

@adamjedgar

As a Christian I am not following the logic behind the idea that an intelligent God designs a primitive being (mankind) with a brain far too small to be useful for reasoning that separates us from animals, and then voila suddenly we start to evolve of our own accord into what we are today.

There was no sudden start, there was evolution throughout.

The basic logic is that God would create the universe with laws that would produce what he wanted without having to constantly create new things along the way. As Darwin put it:

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers … I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.”

— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

In the same way, God created physical laws that creates rainclouds. He doesn’t need to create each and every raincloud because his laws are incapable of creating them.

@adamjedgar

In all honesty, it strongly suggests to me that anyone subscribing to the above theory also believes that man will elevate himself to perfection…“Self Transcendance” which is completely antibiblical.

I don’t see why they would believe that. God created nature with laws that would produce what he wanted, so if he doesn’t want something that is antibiblical then those laws would not produce them.