The Fall of Historical Adam, (Federal Head of man), impacts all of humanity to need Christ's Salvation

Faith & Science Conversation
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That’s the answer he gave. The differences between the human and chimp genomes demonstrate that they were produced by the observed natural processes that are producing mutations in the here and now. The bias towards transitions and CpG transitions in particular demonstrates that the same natural processes that are producing mutations in humans now are also responsible for the differences between the human and chimp genomes.

If you think this is wrong, then give us a specific explanation as to why we see those biases in transition substitutions that doesn’t use common descent.

Do you think humans and chimps, or humans and other primates, are in the same Biblical kind?

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Of course, why would you think that having a few dozen species persist in their present form would be contrary to evolutionary theory? How does it help explain why the thousands of other species found in the deeper rock no longer exist at all at the present time? How does it explain the thousands of species that are currently alive are not found in formations of that age? Even if you propose a 6000 year old earth, and a 5000 year reset, it does not have any explanatory power.

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What YECists have done with the Hebrew word מִין is essentially like when you go to see a movie that is “adapted from” a book you like and find that the movie bears little resemblance at all to the book.
Forcing that idea onto Creation ends up demanding a rate of evolution that is not biologically possible – I’m sure Steve can explain that to you.

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The image of the Earth from the NIV may suit your purposes but it is not what I understand from scripture.

I don’t know why you insist the initial one landmass was on a flat Earth. That is simply not defined.

6 Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
7 God made the expanse, and separated the waters that were below the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse; and it was so.
8 God called the expanse “heaven.” And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
9 Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land “earth,” and the gathering of the waters He called “seas”; and God saw that it was good.

There is nothing that precludes a sphere that was clearly known at a later point in time to Isaiah.
So again I ask,
" PLEASE , I would be grateful if you could you provide more information as to exactly where in the Bible the words, or words to the effect and meaning of “water backed up against the bronze-hard dome that God had put over the Earth-disk” are written."

Thanks,
God Bless,
jon

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The lie is that evolution does not need a Creator.

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You’re ignoring mine for starters. In fact, you explicitly said as much.

Of course, if you want to ignore me then that’s your prerogative, but do bear in mind that I’m not just talking to you; I’m talking to everyone else following this thread as well. It’s entirely up to them to assess what to make of both my responses and yours. But I don’t think that claiming that you’re not ignoring anyone after having explicitly said that you’re ignoring someone is going to go down well.

I think you need to make sure that you understand what the expression “hand waving” actually means before you start throwing it around in response to anything and everything that you don’t like, Jon.

Hand waving does not mean weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous evidence. Hand waving most certainly does not mean evidence that you want to think of as weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous when it can be shown quantitatively and empirically that it isn’t weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous. No, hand waving means something very specific: not doing your homework properly.

It means such things as:

  • Claiming to have evidence but not actually providing it.
  • Not citing your sources.
  • Not making sure that the sources you cite actually say what you claim that they say.
  • Claiming that something makes assumptions without saying what those assumptions are.
  • Not making sure that it really does make the assumptions that you are claiming that it makes.
  • Not doing the maths when addressing quantitative subjects.
  • Not taking any measurements when addressing quantitative subjects.
  • Using poorly defined, ambiguous, or incorrect terminology.
  • Tu quoque arguments (“both sides have the same problem”).
  • Only providing a high-level overview without addressing the specifics and details.
  • Saying that you “refute” someone’s response to you without providing any evidence to contradict them.
  • Claiming that something is untestable after having had it explained to you exactly how it can be tested.

It’s as simple as this, Jon. If you’re going to challenge a scientific theory, you need to say something of substance, provide evidence to back up your assertions, and expect your claims and evidence to be evaluated according to the rules and principles that govern how science is done. Because if you’re just flipping off critique that you don’t like as “hand-waving” and “just so stories” without substantiating your objections, that in itself is hand-waving.

In fact, you need to make sure that you understand what it takes to challenge a scientific theory such as evolution. If you want to provide evidence against the theory, you must make sure that the evidence contradicts the core fundamentals of the theory, and not just one or two side details. You don’t demolish a house altogether by rearranging the furniture or even by replacing the windows. You also need to make sure that it contradicts the core fundamentals of what the theory actually says in reality, and not just what you would like to think that it says. You don’t demolish a house altogether by rearranging the furniture in a holodeck simulation on board the Starship Enterprise.

This is why your appeal to the supposed lack of transitional fossils falls short. The number of different species known from the fossil record is less than 5% of the total number of species known to be alive today. This being the case, it is simply not realistic to expect to see every transitional form in the fossil record, and the fact that we do not presents no threat to the theory of evolution whatsoever. The important thing to note is that the transitional fossils that we do discover turn up exactly where the theory of evolution predicts that we should find them. Tiktaalik roseae is the most famous example.

It is also why your appeal to the fact that some species do not appear to have evolved over long periods of time falls short. The theory of evolution tells us that species only change in response to selection pressure, and if a species is ideally suited to its environment and selection pressures are at a minimum then the fact that it only changes slowly if at all over time doesn’t tell us anything at all.

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It has nothing to do with my “purposes”, it’s the “cosmology” of Genesis 1. If you’re not aware of that then you haven’t actually studied Genesis. Anything else is reading into the text something from a modern worldview. The רָקִ֖יעַ was a solid item given that the root means something hammered out, i.e. of metal. BDB indicates that the רָקִ֖יעַ rested on a flat foundation. And thus we have a metal-hard dome resting on a flat foundation with the Earth inside, and the Earth is thus flat.

There’s nothing that precludes a tetrahedron, a cube, or an octahedron, either.
And nothing in Isaiah indicates that the Earth is a sphere – again, that’s reading something into the text that isn’t there.

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Absolutely!

Evolution points to a Designer.

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What one writer is posting is the exact kind of material that when I was in university drove people away from Christianity in droves.

The other writer is you.

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Gen 3:17 says, "but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

Is Genesis a literal (as understood in plain language), historical (accurate history in every inerrant detail) account, or is Gen 3:17 a deceitful lie? Neither ha’adam (the man) nor ha’issah (the woman) died within a 24-hr day. Or do you have a “spiritualized” reason why God didn’t immediately punish them with death?

After all, would’ve it have been much simpler and more merciful for God to carry out his promised death sentence on those two individuals and start over with a fresh pair of humans than it was to condemn billions of their descendants to hell because of a sin made by their remotest ancestors? It’s the trolley problem writ large, except God would have billions of “do-overs” until he found the right pair who didn’t “fall” into sin, and that would’ve solved the problem without the need of Jesus.

You connect sin with death. Evolution is a fact easily demonstrated. It also entailed the death of organisms that existed long before humans. The question is: Were any of those creatures capable of sin? During the millions of years before humanity appeared, did plants, single-celled organisms, fish, amphibians, birds, mammals, or even primates commit a single sin? Obviously not.

Sin isn’t connected to physical death. That’s a fantasy dreamt up by fevered minds.

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It’s been noted, but we don’t shut down threads if people seem to be having fun engaging with them and people are being civil and discussing faith and science. No one is being forced to keep responding and the thread will close automatically when people start ignoring it.

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My take on this is that prior to committing the rebellious sin against Gods direct command, Adam and Eve were in an innocent state and death was not a possibility for them. However after they rebelled against God, against righteousness , goodness, truth and justice, they were immediately no longer innocent before God and death became an immediate reality for them. They eventually did die whereas if they had not sinned they would not have died.

You think it would have been much simpler?
What you don’t know, nor do I for that matter, is what God knows of the future in His omniscience.
I suggest that God knew beforehand that Adam and Eve would sin, and I think that a distinct possibility exists that no matter who the people were, sooner or later they would sin, using their free choice to do so.
So although you may think it would have been easier for God to terminate Adam and Eve and start afresh, the outcome I believe would have been ostensibly the same.
No matter what scenario you may wish to hypothesize, God’s enduring and unfathomable LOVE for us all, even before we are born, and His plan for our redemption existed prior to the fall in the garden of Eden.
It may well be that the only way we can become blameless before our Holy and Righteous God is through the atoning redemption provided by Jesus dying in our place a substitutionary death on the cross.

It is not I that connects sin with death, doesn’t the scripture state “The wages of sin is death”.
You state that "evolution is a fact easily demonstrated."
I suggest to you that it appears to me likely you are conflating two entirely different things here.
Natural Selection is real but it ALWAYS only selects from what already exists.
Evolution in the molecules to man meaning of the term is about the ever upward progression of more complex, (more evolved) organisms from simpler ones over eons of time.
Thus to validate belief in evolution you need to demonstrate how simple organisms have written the encyclopaedic volumes of NEW information required in their DNA that codes for novel structures, processes and designs that didn’t exist prior in the gene pool.

Misunderstanding its role and conflating natural selection as evolution in action is the usual practice of evolutionists I have encountered in the past. Are you any different?
Of course natural selection is basically nothing more than differential reproduction in a diverse population of individuals within a specie from already existing diversity in the genome.

I apologise but the whole premise of your argument here is complete nonsense.
The millions of years is a uniformitarian belief construct that has no basis in empirical reality. The millions of years of Earth history is a myth. A popular myth granted, but a myth nonetheless.
Evolution is a falsified religious dogma that is NOT supported by real empirical evidence.
Sure plenty of equivocation by desperate evolutionists intent on maintaining their belief is practiced, but that sure is NOT proof of evolution.

God Bless,
jon

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And there I was thinking that I was responding to Paraleptopecten’s post about his claim that Living Fossils are rare:

God Bless,
jon

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Because surely, isn’t evolution about adaptation to best suit environmental conditions and corresponding genetic changes that come about in a population!

In the imagined hundreds of millions of years that you assume have transpired, there would have been an enormous range of different environmental conditions due to many causes ranging from volcanism, plate tectonics, theorised meteorite impacts, climatic changes, disease and pestilence etc.during which it is again assumed that the diversity of life blossomed into the huge number of new individual specie populations that theoretically evolved to fill the assumed niches within the prevailing environmental conditions.

YET in all that time and during all that variation of environmental factors, individual specimens of many dozens of organisms that are unquestionably living today are also found in sedimentary strata that is alleged to be hundreds of millions of years old with virtually NO CHANGE IN ALL THAT TIME???

Well that just sounds like another case of accommodating inconvenient facts with the usual just so story.

A theory that is meant to explain the extraordinary changes from the proverbial primordial soup first cell to the enormous array of individual species on one hand, yet on the other hand also accommodates absolutely no change (i.e., ostensibly zero change) at all in the same period of hundreds of millions of years is basically a theory that accommodates anything and as such is totally UNFALSIFIABLE and therefore IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC THEORY BY DEFINITION.

Evolution is nothing more than religious dogma, a philosophical position yes, but a scientific theory categorically NOT.

God Bless,
jon

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NOTE: As of right now I have not heard back from John Baumgardner, but when he replies tomy email, I will be sure to post the information here.

God Bless,
jon

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Of course the reply from John Baumgardner is in relation to the post:

[quote=“Burrawang, post:58, topic:52799, full:true”]

God Bless,
jon

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God leaves us to ponder the best way to reconcile our flawed understanding of simple texts with the vast and overpowering reality of Creation. Let me suggest this:

  • Creation is so perfect that life from nonlife IS built into the design. Biochemists have been studying this topic for decades, and continue to tear away veil after veil to find that perfection in the chemistry and physics of the Early Earth environment.
  • Evolution ditto; just bear with me on this.
  • As our species acquired what we allege to be intelligence, it also acquired a sense of morality. Being evolved across 3.5+ Billion years, every single ancestor BAR NONE managed to survive and reproduce. The ones that didn’t reproduce contributed nothing to the DNA pool.
  • Bred shaped formed and super-tuned to survive and reproduce, we sin.
  • Since awareness of sin is key, becoming aware of sinfulness came first, and soul death ensued.

Long series of if - then - thus. Sorry I couldn’t compress it to be shorter.
Creation is of God. Intelligence is an achievement that endows us with the shadow of God’s image. We are now capable of reading the wisdom of the night skies (David, Psalm 19, first four verses) and it declares that the universe began at a starting instant we mislabel as the Big Bang.
But look carefully at the first chapter of Genesis

  • verses 1 and 3 state that, all at once (Day One) God created time, space, matter, and light. THAT is the science and history, the factual part, of Genesis.
  • verse 2, nestled between these two brawny arms of fact, grandfathers in the then-current cosmology, namely that the universe began as vast water, that Earth was something pulled up from beneath, that a firmament covered the universe and that the rest of the visible universe (sun, moon, stars) crossed within the bounds of that firmament while a forever supply of rainwater sat above the firmament.
  • we see these things in Days Two, Three, and Four.
  • yet Creation divulges that Planet Earth is a ball of iron nearly a thousand miles deep, coated by greater than one thousand miles thickness of lava, with a thin crispy crust of continents washed by films of water called oceans.
  • even more directly counter to Day Four, Planet Earth orbits the nearest star, and the moon orbits earth.
    – and the rest of those tiny flickering lights (planets don’t flicker) are also stars, but so far awy that instead of daylight all they can do is twinkle in the vast distance.

God’s Creation challenges our best minds to understand its myriad secrets; the beauty and perfection they find there brings many to know that the uncaused first cause that generated the Big Bang was sentient, thus God.

Genesis is theology. Its bounty is the life lessons we can draw from it. But since its overt factuality resides only in verses 1 and 3, drawing detailed inferences (such as the above discussion of whether sin came first or death) Soul death came after sin.

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I think this is something that we all need to learn. When it becomes abundantly clear that someone is not paying a shred of attention to what he is being told, when he is repeating the same fallacies and falsehoods over and over again despite having been repeatedly told not just that they are fallacies and falsehoods but why they are fallacies and falsehoods, there comes a point at which the best course of action is maybe to just go from Proverbs 26:5 mode to Proverbs 26:4 mode, and let the badness of his arguments speak for itself.

Discussions such as these remind me of the school playground. If children find that you have something that pulls your trigger, they will pull it at every opportunity they can get in order to secure a satisfying reaction. The only correct response in such a situation is to restrain yourself and refuse to deliver the reaction they are after.

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There has been tons of changes. You may just not be very familiar with morphological divergence within not only the different kingdoms but even within genera and families. Even within just humans, which there is thought to have been roughly 21 species depending on how you clump or split them, we all had unique characteristics and it seems many had very unique lifestyles. Neanderthals for example may have even underwent a form of hibernation.

When we look at things like ferns. We see tons of diversity. We see thin aquatic almost algae like ferns to climbing ferns that are vines, to the bulbous adder tongue ferns that almost seem to have basal leaves and we see tree ferns that are huge.

For each clade of animals, we can look back through history by observing the fossil record and modern genetic sequencing to reveal just how much mutating has been occurring.

Again, look at angiosperms. Even if ignore the development of plants from green algae into club mosses and ferns into gymnosperms and then finally angiosperms and just start with flowering plants we see a ridiculous amount of differences. We have so many flowers out there. We have flowers that are so tiny you have to use a magnifying glass to see it clearly to some that are just huge. We see their leaves going from pitchers, to bells, to traps to dozens of other types.

Even looking at just one species like the oaks. There are 21 species in my county. Good chance you have plant blindness and most oaks just look like oaks, or maybe even just looks like a tree. But they have distinct acorns with very different cap sizes and shapes and their leaves are all unique. Their growing conditions are very different. Some are evergreen and some are deciduous. Even their tannin compositions widely change.

Ever looked at all the types of fungi? Even just the mushrooming ones comes in all kinds of shapes, colors and textures. Just boletus mushrooms alone. Even overlooking the very few gill ones, the porous ones are all pretty unique even though to the vast majority of people they look the same. But the veining on the stalk of one may be reddish and bluish on another. One stalk may be thick and the other thin, one solid and one hollow. They may have rounded or angular pores. Maybe they have net veining or false net veining. The chemical composition can be the difference between tasting delicious to tasting like vomit and one may be a choice edible and the other leaves you throwing up. Genetics can show us how closely related this one is to thst one and even sometimes genetics show us one does not even belong in the same genus anymore.

We can also see morphology created by the environment to the point completely different families converge. Sea snakes and eels are sometime confused for one another. Dolphins and sharks look a lot alike on the outside but their insides are very different. The bones of a dolphin looks very different from the cartilaginous skeletons of sharks. When we look at dolphins we see they are tetrapods meaning four legged even though they no longer have legs. We can see how they are related to elephants. Whales and dolphins are both Cetacea but look a lot like fish.

So the idea that there is limited differences and life looks the same going back is ridiculous. Just look at modern mollusks.

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Hi Joel,

       thanks for your considered post, I found it interesting and although I see some things quite differently to some of the points you have suggested, I certainly agree that God's Creation challenges us all to comprehend the basic facts let alone the deeper mechanics.

It is correct I believe that all of Creation has been designed, fine tuned in fact by God for the purpose of supporting life in abundance and primarily for us, i.e., mankind created in God’s image.
Some of the fine-tuning of the universal constants and the solar system include:
The electromagnetic coupling constant binds electrons to protons in atoms. If it was smaller, fewer electrons could be held. If it was larger, electrons would be held too tightly to bond with other atoms.

  • Ratio of electron to proton mass (1:1836). Again, if this was larger or smaller, molecules could not form.*
  • Carbon and oxygen nuclei have finely tuned energy levels.*
  • Electromagnetic and gravitational forces are finely tuned, so the right kind of star can be stable.*
  • Our sun is the right colour. If it was redder or bluer, photosynthetic response would be weaker.*
  • Our sun is also the right mass. If it was larger, its brightness would change too quickly and there would be too much high energy radiation. If it was smaller, the range of planetary distances able to support life would be too narrow; the right distance would be so close to the star that tidal forces would disrupt the planet’s rotational period. UV radiation would also be inadequate for photosynthesis.*
  • The earth’s distance from the sun is crucial for a stable water cycle. Too far away, and most water would freeze; too close and most water would boil.*
  • The earth’s gravity, axial tilt, rotation period, magnetic field, crust thickness, oxygen/nitrogen ratio, carbon dioxide, water vapour and ozone levels are just right.*

Former atheist Sir Fred Hoyle states, ‘commonsense interpretation of the facts is that a super-intelligence has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces in nature.’
The above text from: The universe is finely tuned for life

But perhaps the most, no it is the most important aspect of this whole discussion is bringing others to know our Lord and accept salvation.
I certainly get it that there many people here on this forum site who are Christians and who am I to judge, I can’t even turn one hair black or white, so whilst my beliefs about Creation differ considerably, the most important thing is to ensure that others come to know the Lord.

And this is where I do worry about people being saved.or lost depending on what they hear from people professing to be Christians.
I have heard it said that people who believe in evolution think that denying evolution and ‘deep time’ will turn people away from the gospel. And undoubtedly there would of course be some truth in that, but I fear that
a far, far, far greater number will dismiss the gospel because they wrongly believe that evolution and ‘science’ in general has done away with God,i.e., they think it has been proven that God does not exist.
A lot of this is due to the evolution story being at odds with the Creation account in Genesis.
Hence they think the Bible is untrustworthy and consequently distrust the entirety of the scriptures and the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour.
It is my understanding that the creation account that is consistent with the Biblical text in Genesis is more acceptable to the majority than the compromising evolutionary story.

God Bless,
jon