It’s going to astound millions and win you a Nobel that you figured that out by yourself.
You’ve heard of ‘natural selection’, I suspect, so to help you fit it to your idiosyncratic glossary, you might think of it as the evolution of ‘the Survival of the Fittest component’, if that would be acceptable to you.
Excrementum tauri.
Rubbish. Evolution doesn’t ask about Genesis or care – science cannot measure divine activity.
You keep insisting that science has to talk about God.
Why would you? It’s like to trying to put horseshoes on a kitten.
No, it doesn’t! Where you got this fantasy from I have no idea, but it’s tiresome since you make the same error over and over in thread after thread, demanding that science incorporate God – and then pretending you don’t want science to incorporate God.
Another statement that you don’t understand science in the least, that your thinking on the topic is muddled at best. You drop these non sequiturs and act as though you’ve actually said something.
How you’re regarded on this matter comes from the fact that you keep demanding that science has to take God into account yet you deny you want science to take God into account, that you regularly show that you don’t grasp how science works, that you have this notion that things an happen apart from God, and more.
And here’s some of the evidence:
That you even ask the questions here shows that you do not understand the theory of evolution.
And that you capitalize the term just makes that more clear.
Wow – I haven’t encountered an instance of “everything you just said is wrong” in a while but this sure qualifies! Just for highlights: biologists don’t talk about “perfecting” systems; genes don’t need to be dominant to persist; genes don’t have to be duplicated in both sexes “from the first instance”.
This is barely high school science you’re getting wrong – when I taught freshman science in student teaching those 9th-graders were expected to know this stuff from junior high.
I begin to wonder just how so many here keep managing to be patient with a level of science understanding that would have failed a 9th-grade review exam.
Actually that’s doubtful: you use imprecise language, contradict yourself, display an amazing lack of comprehension of the subject matter, and get so many things just plain wrong that no one here knows “perfectly well” what you mean!
This time I’m going to skip the Latin and go with the translation:
BULLSHIT.
Not a single one of my university science professors started with that “preconception”, and a fair number of them would not only have been delighted to find that it wasn’t true, a bunch of them got government grants every couple of years to be able to go try to prove it false! But every time they came back disappointed.
I really struggle here. I don’t know what to make of the apparent cruelty of randomness, death by earthquakes, floods, etc–yet, I yearn for God. I know there have been great attempts to combine God’s sovereignty and nature–but I don’t think any one of us will really know till Heaven.
Thanks.
The traditional response is
If you want to be free to live, you have to be free to die.
The moment God starts interfering, Where does He stop? How does He choose? Jonah claims that God loves all His creation. It would appear that to some Christians
"All are equal, but some are more equal than others
It is a shame that Animal farm was aimed at Communism.
Death and cruelty are not an easy subject. Fobbing it off with Adam and Eve is a get-out at best. It does not offer comfort or reparation.
Richard
Wow, good points. I can personallly tell Him lots of places I’d like Him to interfere–but that’s all a lot of questions remaining for eternity, I imagine.
Thanks.
I guess we all can.
In theory Christians are supposed to pray that “God’s will be done on earth” but usually it is more like a shopping list of what we want.
Richard
I had an argument with an atheist over this once. He maintained that any divine intervention in evolution would be obvious because it was non-random. I asked him if the first half-dozen integers in the Fibonacci series were found to appear within some mathematical sequence would that be evidence of intervention. He said no, so I pointed out that just because some useful mutation appeared in a genome then neither would it be evidence of intervention, and noted that those Fibonacci integers appear in the digits of pi and are not evidence of intervention but of order, so the only thing that a useful mutation could tell us is not where it came from but that it had order.
The only way to look for intervention would be to look for a species where for every environmental change a mutation occurred so that species could survive, appearing just at the right time to ensure survival, yet even that would not be definitive because any species that did not have a mutation that allowed them to survive an environmental change wouldn’t be around any more anyway.
The two roles are not in conflict because they are assertions regarding two different topics: origins on the one hand and relationship on the other, similar to the difference between an engineer designing a car and a chauffeur driving it.
I see no logical reason to connect God as Creator with “controller and dictator”. God could have been a ‘toy farm animal’ creator as some YECists imagine yet still “rejoicing instead in the ability of His creations to make their own choices”, and similarly could have used evolution while being a “controller and dictator” because there is no freedom to choose involved in evolution – no creature ever got to choose its mutations, or even to be born.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
False dichotomy. This is like saying that a painter was painting because he had a contract and wasn’t using brushes or other tools.
A friend at university claimed he’d found that over the course of history from the first cell to modern humans God would only have needed to tweak evolution just seven times – though that didn’t include events external to the genome such as asteroid impacts and ice ages.
Or, in accord with what’s known about the phrase “in the image of”, because we have the capacity to be God’s representatives to all the rest of Creation (note that this is similar to the Old Testament idea that the people of God are a holy priesthood, a concept Peter picks up and applies to the new people of God, the church).
You make so many false statements I wonder if I’m wearing out this theological term, but once again I have to say excrementum tauri. Of course I can’t tell if you’re being deliberately deceptive or are just very badly informed, so I’m assuming the latter – that you are so far removed from actual science that you just aren’t aware that the statement above is totally removed from reality.
I took a number of advanced ecology courses, and unless something has drastically changed to make these “radically different understandings” come about in the last thirty years, this is just wrong: there was no real conflict back then, and if I’ve kept up at all with advances there is even less now.
Easy: they’re based on the same science and are not in conflict.
Besides, evolution is the study of the root systems and ecology is the study of the overall system, so even though ecology relies on evolutionary biology they are very different subjects. A fair analogy would be obstetrics and playground sociology – they both address the matter of children but do so from totally different perspectives.
That’s like saying that in understanding some subject – I’ll go with calculus – it’s not necessary to give students anything more than lists of problems/exercises and the answers. That’s not even true from the perspective of evaluating tests; the methodology is what’s important, and getting the correct result is only useful in that it may indicate proper application of methodology.
There’s that false dichotomy again. Species only survive ecological changes if they already have a mutation that allows for dealing with it – and science teaches both.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
That’s a false dichotomy as well. The brilliance of the Incarnation is that the Absolute became absolutely Relational, the great I AM became human.
And that God-human became broken!
Natural Selection as taught by Darwin and evolutionists is Survival of the Fittest.
Darwin’s understanding of Natural Selection is Survival = Selecti0n,and Selection = Survival. Thus Selection = Survival = Selection.
Please let me know if you see something wrong with this concept. Karl Popper pointed this out before I did.
Well I certainly don’t think God is causing these things. The question I think is whether God can see any good reason to intervene to prevent them. How do the burdens of hopelessness and sadness coming from natural disasters compare to that of the growing evil and complacency in human behavior without them? In which is the misery of His children greater? And remember, I don’t think God will intervene to the degree where the laws of nature are themselves altered, because this will pull the rug out from under our life and free will.
And as I’ve observed with tree frogs, they may not even have the conception that they are jumping from one tree to another; in their view, the world is made up of “branch space” and “no branch space”, where branches from two trees close enough to jump between them are just part of “branch space”.
When visiting a friend at UW (Seattle) we stopped one afternoon among trees on campus to watch the squirrels. It was evident that they actually assessed some leaps before making them, running out on a branch and coming to a sudden stop, looking across the gap at the next tree, sometimes trying running out that same branch, other times trying a different branch a bit higher up, and then either trying the jump or sometimes running down to the ground, looking all around, then making a dash to the target tree – but sometimes jumping and not reaching the intended branch and frantically grabbing one lower down.
I write that in order to point out that mutations that would make it easier to jump farther would be of obvious benefit, and if mutations actually happen then evolution is a conclusion as obvious as taking the freeway exit closest to your street destination.
Ditto that. It was fun hearing about the efforts of my oceanography / ocean biology professors to find species that plainly didn’t come from a common ancestor, and the similar efforts of my botany professors, so I’d love to hear it if there are some real issues found since then.
Well, we’ve already that the second one above is wrong, and from my university days I know the first one above is wrong, and the third isn’t science and so is useless.
That leaves:
The first is silly, since “foresight” isn’t a part of evolution, and the second is making a claim evolution doesn’t.
But you just had to add:
And yes, we do know why: there are no scientific methods or instruments for detecting divine activity. But we also know that you want science to mix God in despite that, which shows (again) that you don’t understand science.
There is one. I’ve stated it. You rejected the idea that God is in control.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
I dearly want to be here when that happens!
Oh no – someone else who’s bad at science. Ecology doesn’t “guide evolution”, and “climate change” is not ecology.
Please go back and take a high school biology course! “Survival of the fittest” is what is observed, and the only places where it might not apply is when humans interfere.
That is Deism, pure and simple.
Why do you insist on denying that God is in control???
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
The Hebrew word in context means “the known world”; that may be the world the people at the time of the flood knew, or it may mean the world the writer knew, though usually it means what the people in an account knew, not the writer.
You do know that YECism is a recent deviation held by a minority of Christians, right?
Don’t expect any part of the scriptures to be whatever literary type they look like from reading them in modern English, and don’t count on translations being able to convey the meaning of the original words. In this case there is some interesting literary overlap: the word for “serpent” at root means “shining one”, which in ancient near eastern terms meant a heavenly being. In this case, we have “the shining one”, which seems like a reference to Lucifer since it means “light bearer”, so we’re not talking about any ordinary snake! It could have been outside the ordinary because it wasn’t a serpent at all, just the Shining One (Lucifer) taking the form of a serpent, or because it was a serpent and Lucifer took it over and used it like an avatar.
Two different topics. The Roman Catholic view, which was what got referenced, is essentially magic, that Jesus just sort of somehow emerged from Mary’s womb without leaving any of the usual physical traces and thus she was “ever-virgin”, totally physically intact despite having given birth [I think of it as “divine tunneling”, Jesus getting from inside the womb to out in the world without bothering to transit the route in between].
Every single time there’s something you don’t know! In fact when you don’t know, “I don’t know” is not just “a rational answer”, it is the only rational answer (unless maybe terrorists are saying they’ll feed your family to sharks unless you say something other than "I don’t know).
One is a process while the other is a condition/state, so it’s not quite the tautology it might appear.
Deism (Wiki)
Deism is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator
So I think not
Try again.
It is not that He can’t, only that He doesn’t.
The Bible is the start of faith, not a criterion for it. Denying experience is not healthy. Setting the Bible against experience is foolhardy.
If you want to believe that God deliberately kills people then so be it. But that is not the Christian belief
But you do not have to believe just me
Billy Graham
Or this article
The sovereignty of God
The general belief is that God has allowed the Devil free reign.
Deleted by author
That does not mean that everything is controlled by the Devil either, only that God is not in control of the minutia. Chance still exists.
Richard
They are:
How can God be sovereign over storms if he is not in control of air molecules.
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33
Despite all the noise made by YEC, there is a quite longstanding discussion over whether the flood was global or regional. By roughly 1830, it became clear that geology indicated that the flood was regional. Modern YEC insistence on a global flood reflects the belief that it can be used to explain away geology, not sound exegesis. Ancient Hebrew had a rather limited vocabulary with extensive reliance on context to distinguish meanings, so the same word is “earth” and “land”; likewise, “hill” and “mountain” are the same word. Certainly, the fact that Genesis 2 describes the location of Eden in terms of more modern landscape features shows that the wildly destructive flood of modern young-earth imagination is not true to the Bible.
Impossibilities are exceptions to the normal, though it is an understatement. Indeed, rising from the dead is, to the best of our scientific knowledge, impossible. But that is the point in the account. It does not say that sometimes people rise from the dead. Rather, the Bible takes resurrection as specific examples of God acting in a way that is contrary to the “natural” way that things happen. Martha knew what comes out of an opened grave - bad smells, not people brought back to life. Of course, if you reject the possibility that such could happen, then you will not believe that it did. But the Bible agrees that resurrection is impossible except by a special action of God; scientific data agrees with that in finding that dead people stay dead.
Genesis 1-3 is full of symbolism. But symbolism can also be in historical events. The account is brief, with few details.
Again, birth and conception are two separate events (though of course one following from the other), muddled in popular terminology. No “natural” examples of virgin conception are reported for mammals, though many other species have the capacity.
First of all as I have been saying “Survival of the Fittest” has not been observed and no one has given me one example of one even though there has been 164 years of observation since the publication of the Origin in 1859 because no such example exist.
Second, we have been acting on the promise that Survival of the Fittest is the consensus understanding among scientists as to how natural selection works. A quick search of the internet proved that this is not true.
ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY
Natural selection is the process through which species adapt to their environments. It is the engine that drives evolution. Emphasis added. from the National Geographic website…
“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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