I may be out of step with those who frequent this site, but I am a firm believer that God’s Word should be accepted even if man’s science contradicts what God’s Word says.
Why? Because it is God’s Word. God told us that in the last days man would not endure sound doctrine. He warns us of this. And we know that the reason for this will be because we have an enemy that seeks to cause as muct pain to God as he possibly can. And what better way, in fact, there is no other way, than to cause as many of God’s children to be lost for all eternity.
For God’s people to embrace evolution in spite of the fact that God has told us that His Word was sound, to accept evolution over what Christ Himself has said in the New Testament, to dismiss God’s Word, in favor of a teaching that is known to be spread by men who actually hate God and who use the teaching of evolution purposely to try and cause youth to reject God’s Word, is placing satan as your god.
There are Christian scientists who have given good reason why we should reject the speculation of evolution.
These are not second hand scientists. But, have graduated from many of the same schools that the atheists who support evolution have graduated from.
They are well known and accepted scientists in their fields. And they join the hands of many atheist scientists who also reject evolution, because they do not believe the evidence that supposedly supports evolution actually does.
That would be a most curious alliance indeed! Sort of like finding a pre-cambrian rabbit fossile or a dinosaur fossile above the K-T boundary.
And if you can supply the name of any non-believing scientist who accepts young-earth creationism, we would be most curious to hear about him or her!
But I suspect what this really comes down to is that you have been told of mainstream scientists who take issue with certain mechanisms or details in the whole evolutionary synthesis. And yes - any fields of science will remain active areas of inquiry and disputes around their frontier edges. But that is not the same as claiming that a scientist has rejected the entire theory whole cloth.
Christy, science is data that is interpreted by human who are flawed. Just as we need to be careful with some who give us their interpretation of the Bible. We are to compare Scripture with Scripture, and not just accept what someone else says about God’s Word.
We are told this in Isaih 8:20 “20 To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them”
God says He created in 6 days. All through the Bible this is the same being taught.
And there are scientists who also support what the Bible says, about God’s Creation, even though they are not Christians.
Those supposed vestigial legs of the whale have been exposed to be a sham. Scientists now understand that they are very important to the whale to be able to procreate.
“Hips don’t lie: Whale pelvic bones are not vestigial but instead evolved to help the marine mammals maneuver better during sex”
Source: Promiscuous Whales Make Good Use of Their Pelvises | Science| Smithsonian Magazine
Please notice the source of this quote. It’s not from a Creation website.
But there are scientists who have admitted “falsifying” parts of fossils, but they were not trying to fool anyone. It was just that they felt those parts should be as they thought, even though what they thought was not actually shown to be part of the fossils.
We have every reason why we should completely accept God’s Word as sound.
Please read my post again. I didn’t say the atheists accept God. I said, they join those who believe in God, in rejecting the theory of evolution.
First, this quote is from an evolutionist." Evolutionist Michael Ruse admitted as much when he stated:
[E]volution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically.3"
Source: Atheism needs evolution
So, there are evolutionists who even as atheists recognize the impossibility of providing actual evidence to support bacteria to man evolution.
Here is a site of scientists, who have stated publically that they reject evolution.
https://dissentfromdarwin.org/scientists/
And there are even evolutionists who remain evolutionists but who are also declaring that the evidence does not tell the story they have been told.
Here are some quotes from an circular article that is not from Christians.
"Do we need a new theory of evolution?
“A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology
by Stephen Buranyi (Stephen Buranyi | The Guardian)
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading…There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”
In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article (Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? | Nature) in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently…“The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.”
Source: Do we need a new theory of evolution? | Evolution | The Guardian
Please let me know if you have any questions.
So what makes you think you have the correct interpretation since you are a flawed human?
We are being careful with your interpretation of the Bible. So isn’t that a good thing?
They are usually totally encased within the whale’s body. And whales can be born with atavistic legs.
Have you ever visited a natural history museum and looked at whale fossils?
Why are you posting stuff about what scientists say, anyway? I thought they were flawed? Are they only flawed when they don’t agree with you?
I know … and was not implying that any atheists are accepting God (a definitional impossibility in any case). So please re-read my response carefully in your own turn - and I will reword it to be more clear.
It seems you are under the impression that people (like Michael Ruse) have “rejected evolution”. I’m no authority on specific people like Ruse, but I should be very surprised to learn that this characterization of their position was at all accurate. In many cases it turns out that they questioned some aspect of of the theory or even challenged some popular misconception about it (as in when Ruse wrote to correct a public misconception that evolution must be ‘progressive’.) Whenever somebody of note challenges a particular part of a theory, this is not the same as challenging the entire theory, any more than my disagreement with a mathematician over the results in a particular problem would be the same as me wanting to call all mathematics into quesiton.
Too many creationists have become confused about what all evolution is (and is not), and then are in danger of becoming false witnesses about what someone else thinks. I’m sure you want to guard against that since the Bible has a few things to say about truthfulness.
Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy and accepts evolution. Although he is agnostic, he believes that evolution and faith are compatible (That was Darwin’s belief as well.).
There’s something you need to understand here, Gerald. The fact that scientists are flawed human beings is not a free pass to reject anything and everything about science that you don’t like. Especially not when it is some of the most mature and well-established theories at the very foundations of the entire disciplines of biology and the earth sciences that you are talking about.
Scientists are fully aware that they are flawed human beings. But one of the hallmarks of good science is that they attempt to identify, quantify and compensate for those flaws. That is why measurements come with error bars, and it is also why they have protocols such as double-blind studies – these are techniques used to compensate for and minimise the effects of their fallibility.
You need to understand that while the Bible leaves a lot of things wide open to interpretation on the age of the earth and evolution, it is totally unequivocal in its demands for honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information. Any interpretation of Genesis 1, or any attempt to challenge the scientific consensus on the age of the earth or evolution, must meet those demands: to fail to do so is not trying to fit science to Scripture; it is lying.
This means for example that if you are going to appeal to flaws of scientists or scientific methods, your appeal must be proportionate. It is one thing to point out a handful of individual examples of scientific fraud. But if you want to make a case that deep geological time and biological evolution are a sham, you would need to somehow establish that millions of scientists worldwide had been somehow colluding and coordinating with each other to fabricate and falsify evidence on an industrial scale for nearly two centuries at a total cost of trillions of dollars. That is a completely different matter altogether. In fact, if it really were happening then it would be the mother of all conspiracies. To present just a handful of isolated examples of fraud, real or imagined, as evidence for such a conspiracy is to blow these things completely out of proportion.
In any case, for a geologist to be unable to tell the difference between thousands of years of history and billions of years of history would require a level of incompetence far, far beyond just being “humans who are flawed.” It is like being unable to tell the difference between six thousand years and three days. It is like being unable to tell the difference between the size of your living room and the distance from London to New York. It is like being unable to tell the difference between the cost of a can of Diet Coke and the cost of a four bedroom house. Humans who are flawed have managed to land probes on other satellites throughout the Solar System, to create self-driving cars, and to build communications networks that can put you in touch with your loved ones on a completely different continent in real time by video. To claim that humans who are flawed can produce achievements such as that despite their flaws, but can not tell the difference between thousands and billions, is a claim so extraordinary as to be patently ridiculous.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Particularly as Gerald is misinterpreting everything he links.
And if you’re not sufficiently aware of your flaws as a human being and the resulting flaws in your research, another scientist will be more than happy to point them out. We’re flawed that way.
Yes! Thanks for digging it up. When BioLogos first started, the forum was hosted by Beliefnet. The discussion is gone, but I recall that the unbelieving community came in droves and slammed Michael Ruse for that article! Unreasonable Atheists, like unreasonable creationists, are mostly found in the US.
Better to ask scientists about these topics before blindly following apologetics videos for kids. The geology in this video is atrocious by the way. Lots of misinformation. As if the authors of the video are completely unaware of basic concepts of superposition, or maybe they just don’t want their audience to actually understand the subject to begin with.
At 56:40 for example, they completely leave out the reality that western states consists of mesozoic strata at grade, hence why dinosaurs are out west. The video makes it sound like geologists think that dinosaurs randomly just got blown over there from Mexico by an asteroid (laughs a bit then realizes that misinformation isn’t particularly funny*). Also, the mesozoic isn’t covered by layers of ash and mud, it’s covered by the k-t boundary which consists of iridium, a mineral common in asteroids. This iridium layer residing superpositionally equivalent (of equal depth in the earth essentially) to the crater of the yucitan. But the video of course doesn’t actually say any of this, maybe because they don’t want their audience to actually understand the material.
I could spend an hour ripping the rest of the video to shreds, but it would be easier just to recommend studying the theory of plate tectonics and if you have questions about geology, feel free to ask scientists and people who study the material, as opposed to people who aren’t scientists who simply studied apologetics and concordist ways of interpreting scripture.
But “what God’s word says” is usually shorthand for “my interpretation of what God’s word means.” When science contradicts our understanding of the Bible, we shouldn’t always assume we are understanding the science wrong, we should also ask if it’s possible we are understanding the Bible wrong. Maybe what we think what God’s word says is not really what God’s word means. That is not “dismissing God’s word,” it’s revisiting an interpretation to determine if it’s really the best interpretation. I don’t hate God’s word. I accept evolution based on evidence. My opinion of the Bible doesn’t really have anything to do with my ability to understand and evaluate scientific evidence, and the vast majority of scientists are not ever thinking about the Bible when they publish their observations. There is no vast conspiracy among Bible-hating scientists to discredit God’s word. That is a fantasy.
Yeah, like three of them. There are hundreds of thousands of Christian scientists who think evolutionary theory is good science. Consensus matters.
You are asking me to accept what young earth creation scientists (“someone else”) says about God’s word. I am asking you to accept what Bible scholars say about God’s word and what scientists say about science. I actually know quite a bit about biblical exegesis, biblical languages, hermeneutics, and culture. I am not at all impressed with the ways creation scientists approach the biblical text. It defies everything we know about language, culture, and meaning-making.
Name one young earth creationist scientist who arrived at his or her conclusions based on science not the Bible.
This is misinformation. Plus, vestigial doesn’t mean “useless,” it means no longer used for the same function the structure was used for in an ancestor species. Legs in whale ancestors were used for locomotion on land. That is not what the structure is used for in whales.
This is clickbait. Extended evolutionary synthesis has been around for a while and isn’t even trying to replace the evolutionary model with something else. It is simply suggesting that mechanisms other than natural selection should get more attention and research because natural selection is not the only driver of evolutionary change. They are not saying “therefore young earth creationism is probably correct.” These scientist don’t help your case at all.
