Pastor Rejects Evolution Theory

St. Augustine hit it on the head clear back in the 5th century:

Creationism requires people to make claims about the universe that are demonstrably false, such as the Earth being 6,000 years old. We can even look up at the night sky and see light that left stars millions of years ago. What happens to peoples’ faith when they learn they have been given false information by creationists?

6 days, actually. :wink:

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Well, I count rest breaks as paid time.

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Except the 7th day continues to this day so it breaks the pattern of the “days” being literal 24 hour days. And then there is the little problem of creation before the first day so again the pattern is broken.

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If you were to create the earth and everything in it in just a few days then why would you create it riddled with evidence for billions of years of detailed history that had never happened?

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Not on the Sabbath.

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A day is but a billion years.

And God couldn’t create the earth and everything in it in just a few days; it wouldn’t be the earth. So He didn’t. He instantiates the prevenient laws of physics from eternity. If He can do anything, it’s that. And why would it take Him a few days anyway? Surely if He can do that (which He can’t of course), He could do it all, including the entire infinite multiverse that’s run for eternity, in an instant, with all the light cones in the right place within each universe for each point. If He lied 13.8 ga in to the universe, He must have had some agenda for stretching it out for 6 days. Artistry? What, do you think? So the story would be more credible to ancient Jews? If He’d have done it instantaneously He couldn’t have revealed that? He had to do it in six days with a day of rest making seven not being anything to do with the Sun and the Moon and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, so He could tell the story of what He did? He was constrained in how He made the universe (He wouldn’t have had to make the empirically undetectable but rationally inevitable natural multiverse) by our limited understanding. Or it would be a lie. Which is why He had to lie not to lie. Right?

The most serious mistake that creationists make, and it is a doozy, is confusing the written word of God, the Bible, with the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Second Person of the Trinity. John 1:1-3, 14. This clearly does mean that Darwinism is true, but also indicates that God is not limited to a 6 day creation. The Logos, the rational Word of God, is the Christian standard, not Genesis 1.

My impression is that the young-earth endorsement of Behe is part of a false dichotomy of good guys/bad guys with only two possible views. (The same approach characterizes the pop “scientific” atheism, much of politics, claiming historical figures for supporting one’s pet view, etc.) Anyone who says (or who I’ve heard that they say) something that sounds good must agree with me in everything; anyone who says something sounding bad is one of THEM.

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Evolution is not “just a theory”. It is a theory, but in science a theory is a well-tested and broadly applicable idea, equivalent to a law. Of course, there are areas where it can be improved. In principle, a better idea could come along that would replace the current theory of biological evolution. But to do so, its supporters would have to show that it provides a better description of biological patterns than the current evolutionary model does. Regrettably, current critics of evolution generally do not bother with testing their claims. Young-earth and ID arguments against evolution simply are not good.

We are not specifically told why God created the way He did. The fact that the evidence from God’s creation clearly points to a vast age for the earth and the universe, and a sequence of types of life, suggests that it takes at least 13.7 billion years across vast distances to provide enough of a display of God’s wisdom and creativity. There’s also a pattern in the Bible that the use of miracles is minimized; even when they do happen, it just covers the necessity. Water turned to wine still had to be carried and poured; the floating axe head had to be fastened back on better; leftovers from feeding the 5000 and 4000 were carefully saved; the gospel is spread through people preaching, even if the preacher required a supernatural nudge to get going.

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Try to remember that Genesis was written to allow its listeners to gain a worldview that allowed for a meaningful interaction with reality. Remember that most were listeners as they could neither read nor write, so the book had to serve the information in pictures accessible to the illiterate as well as to the intellectuals. Just a pity that modern intellectuals can be so illiterate not to understand the concept of the bible.

To talk to both those parties the bible uses poetic language to describe reality in a way that makes it accessible to everyone. It takes the willingness to love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul to read the text without hiccups and it was probably already clear to the writers of the scripture that people would come to exist that would be so materialistic in their thinking that they could not understand poetic language any more and insisted on the materialistic interpretation of the words, thus loosing its content. However they would have justified hope that there would always be some that would help those poor people to experience the message of selfless love encoded therein.

If you look at the story of the fall from the position of a parent you should recognise the classical case of puberty, e.g. the rejection of the authority over the self by the parent at the time of reaching sexual functionality (maturity might be a bit of a stretch here) and to claim ones own views of right and wrong. The problem of sin and mortality in the separation of the self from the eternal life in God, and the arrival of evil as a consequence of the self related moral judgement. Those who claim that God created evil and suffering just do not comprehend that evil and suffering is the logical consequence of our own determination of morality. To God our death is nothing evil as it brings us back to him, so to him it is not the end - and to us it is only if we have not experienced Jesus to be alive in us and how we are alive in Jesus.
So you see how widely the interpretations of the bible can vary. There are those who consider God to be Santa’s big brother who has fulfilled a wish of theirs upon prayer and thank him for that and there are those who claim intellectual superiority to religious people who demand that God ought to fulfil wishes upon prayer, and that his failure to regrow legs on amputees or to heal cardiac patients in prayer trials proves that God does not exist. They accuse those who thank God for lucky coincidences of wish fulfilment and consider them intellectually incompetent for not recognising that. The intellectual incompetence is not the failure not to recognise coincidences as such if one is not trained to understand the concept, but the demand that God ought to fulfil our wishes, e.g. the failure to recognise that prayer ought to change us to do Gods will and not to make him do our will.

Once you can free those afraid of accepting evolution because they think it is a process that disproves the existence of God in favour of a random unguided process from that misguided fear you may open channels of communication. If survival fitness is that what guides evolution it is clearly not a random unguided process, thus nothing that goes anywhere to disprove the existence of a guiding force that leads to the development of those highly complex lifeforms called humans as a consequence of this feedback. If evolution had a helping hand in form of in form of additional information input is still not clear, but either way as a concept it is highly compatible with the description in Genesis of a sequence / stages of progression. However even a child can understand that concept described in Genesis as they can create mudpie objects. As an academic insisting on the interpretation of the God making mudpie humans is a bit of a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy.

Another way to help your pastor is to look at evolution on the side of the meaning of the word, the slow unfolding of a plan. Just help him by giving him the assurance that it is anything but a prove for the non-existence of God. That it is only for those who suffer religiophobia and would like to interpret it that way by calling it a random and uncontrolled process because they fear that there is an authority exerting control. It is a problem of puberty having to reject that authority for the sake of justifying ones own authority.

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What I noticed about miracles in the Bible is that when they occur, they do so because God is trying to get people’s attention. Typically, the more spectacular the miracle, the more important the message.

“All Christians agree that all Christians agree on the major points of the faith and disagree only on the minor points; unfortunately, which points are major and which are minor is itself a point of disagreement.”

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What do you mean by “evolution theory”?

Does the fossil record reveal changes and an increase in diversity of life over time? Yes.

Does the evidence demonstrate that the history of life on earth is a contiguous process of gradual biological evolution? Not even close.

I believe we are all talking about the overwhelming consensus amongst biologists describing how natural processes such as common ancestry, natural selection, mutation, and neutral drift are responsible for the biodiversity we see today.

Do fossil species fall into a nested hierarchy of shared and lineage specific adaptations? Yes.

Do modern species also fall into this same nested hierarchy of morphological features? Yes.

Do DNA comparisons also fall into a nested hierarchy that correlates with the nested hierarchy based on morphological features? Yes.

Do these, and other observations, evidence the theory of evolution? Absolutely.

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If the “overwhelming consensus” is that those processes are responsible for the history of life on earth, it seems to me that that consensus is a house built on sand. How, for example, can one test if said processes are responsible for the evolution of a new phylum? I can’t imagine how such a test could be performed, in which case, we have a theory that cannot be tested, which is not science, but pseudo-science.

If, by that, you mean “always the same rate shift from simpler to more complex” then no, Lamarckian evolution does not fit the evidence. If, on the other hand, you mean “continuously changing in some way, whether noticeable or not, but never obvious what that way is without looking”, then yes.

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