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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Where is this happening, Adam? Just look at all the above posts and tell me where you see this. Because everyone who looks can see the exact opposite! Everything that @Burrawang brings up is addressed - often multiple times, and it is he that handwaves rebuttals away or even just ignores them altogether. He apparently is ignoring @jammycakes entirely because he can’t stand having the truth exposed! This is what we see over and over again where creationists encounter actual knowledgeable professionals in the relevant fields. The former are forced to heavily rely on pasted talking points from Creationist web sites while the latter can and do directly expose the nonsense for what it is.

People can see it all, and judge for themselves right here. Are we truly being friends to Christians who’ve been led into falsehoods by trying to pretend those things aren’t falsehoods? The real prize to be had here in Biologos’ forums is truth. And we try to pursue that in all its forms - as seen in God’s very real creation, and as taught us also in God’s revelation in Christ. And while anybody can be honestly mistaken and misled about a lot of things, those who persist in it even after receiving correction from those who know better have then aligned themselves against truth. And if they can’t be trusted to accurately handle these ‘small things’, then how should they be trusted when they claim to correctly handle important spiritual questions? This last rhetorical question is being tragically answered as the world sees a body of evangelicals who have forsaken truth in favor of propping up their ideologies. And it shows as increasingy we are seeing more and more evangelicals willing to believe more and more ridiculous things - even buying into faked moon landing and flat earth nonsense. I’m witnessing these tends firsthand myself. The evangelical world is even now just beginning to pay the price for its abandonment of establishment expertise in the name of its false ideologies, which then can’t even rise to the standard of even being biblical, much less being Christian. And as one would expect, significant and growing cohorts of that movement are now abandoning even the pretense of any true adherence to Christ’s life and teachings.

One does not knowingly cast their lot with falsehood and then avoid paying the piper, @Burrawang. Nor would we be your friends if we simply abandoned you to all the falsehoods you’ve been fed and are repeating here. You can disparage others as simply seeking ‘gold stars’ among their own friends as much as you want (and yes - there is always danger in such seeking after the praise of men … and this happens on both sides, which is something you ought to consider); but in the end, the only ‘gold stars’ that count are how much one aligned themselves with truth and integrity vs. aligning themselves with falsehood and distortions. People here are willing to be called on things where they may be wrong - because they don’t want to be wrong! And that is what distinguishes them so mightily from the voices that you’ve thrown in with up to this point. Join us in our love for Truth, and examine these things for yourself!

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Untrue!
The questions that I bring up are MOST DEFINITELY NOT ADDRESSED adequately!
Two Case in point examples for starters:

1.) Where are are the trillions of expected intermediate forms that we would expect to see IF evolution was credible?

2.) Why are researchers all over the planet, finding more and more dinosaur bone, yes bone, not mineralised rock, but real bone that the dog could chew on, that has original tissue structures inside it such as blood cells, blood vessels, soft and stretchy tissues and proteins such as actin and keratin and of course short pieces of a few base pairs of DNA nucleotides still stuck onto the ribose sugar strands?
The bones are sometimes new finds in the field and more often are bones in public and private collections.

Well now, the above sentence is an unmitigated absolute falsehood for who knows what reason??

With regard to jammycakes see post 16, pasted below:

Well I certainly believe Gods word the Bible over the flawed beliefs and ideologies of man.
Ideologies such as evolution that for the vast majority of practicing scientists in fields relevant to evolution (probably 95% +) sets itself up as a Godless belief, that has made God unnecessary, denying the reality that God truly exists. I understand that Biologos Christians differ in that regard, but that doesn’t alter the folly of believing that evolution is real and is how God chose to create.

God is bigger and better than that, and having millions of years of death and suffering before Adam and Eve is plainly Nuts!
As far as I am concerned, evolution sits right alongside the faked moon landing and flat earth nonsense that are equally nuts!

Do Biologos believers really think that God looked at the millions of years of DEATH and pain and suffering and then said when He looked at what He had made that it was VERY GOOD?

I’m very sorry, I do not wish to offend anyone, but it appears that Biologos have a strange view of who God is and what He sees as good.
Death came after the fall of Adam in the garden after the seven x twenty four hour creation day week.
What must you believe to reconcile that error.
And most importantly of all, as Adam so lucidly pointed out earlier, the whole message of salvation through the atonement of Jesus for our sins, goes right back to the first Adam, where the very first death that occurred was to provide skins to cover Adam and Eves nakedness, after they had lost their innocence and evil had entered in.

Thus in truth I cannot place any credence in the false belief of evolution and its corollary ‘deep time’.

Have you considered that the falsehood lies solely in the belief in evolution.
Evolution is certainly not mentioned in Gods Word, it is a philosophy of sinful man that has corrupted many and lead masses of souls away from salvation.
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

Please look long and hard at the scriptures and weigh what is actually written over the philosophy of evolution and deep time.

Your brother in our Lord and Saviour,
jon

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Well - I’m glad that you at least do (still) regcognize the flat-earth nonsense as such! Not all of our brothers and sisters have been able to avoid going down those roads - which is a logical outcome when they silo themselves into their own ideologically ‘purified’ sources, locking everybody else out.

I meant what I said when I noted that we’ve now got the Piper to pay. One does not exorcise all the so-called demons of establishment expertise from their outlook without a host of other spirits far more wicked and deceitful than the original coming in to take advantage of their alleged ‘skepticism’ which turns out to be nothing more than a newfound gullibility of immense proportion.

One might be tempted to observe that when Mark Noll penned “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”, he hadn’t seen anything yet!

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It appears to me that not only is @Burrawang not replying to me, he isn’t even reading my posts. I suspect that he has probably used the “Ignore” feature of the Discourse software which actively hides someone’s posts from him. However, the only person that this will hide my posts from is himself. Everybody else, including anonymous visitors to the site who haven’t logged in, can still see them just fine.

Public Internet forums are not a private two-way conversation. When you reply to someone on a public Internet forum, you are not only addressing them; you are addressing everyone else who is following the discussion. This being the case, they will be able to read your responses (or lack of them) and judge for themselves what to make of them.

For what it’s worth, @Burrawang is ignoring me because he took offence at me pointing out that Andrew Snelling was not telling the truth, and explaining why he was not telling the truth. This after @Burrawang himself had accused the entire scientific community of lying. Since then, other participants on this thread have made exactly the same points as I have.

One of the rules of honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information is that before you claim that you would expect to see something, first make sure that you really would expect to see it. One of the hallmarks of dishonest science denial is that it sets unrealistic expectations. Claiming that ancient coals and diamonds should contain zero contamination is one example; claiming that we would expect to see trillions of different species if evolution were credible is another one.

If @Burrawang had actually read my posts, he would have seen that in post number 132 I said this:

This being the case, the only reason I can see why @Burrawang would think that his claims have not been addressed is that he hasn’t even bothered to read the posts that address them.

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I wasn’t twisting your words - it reads to me like you were making a connection. Given your clarification, I deleted my post. What you do with yours is up to you.

So far so good. There has been ongoing extinction and several mass extinctions over geological time; a succession of entire ecologies. The chicxulub boundary is just the most recent, glaring example. But you are deflecting the problem presented, which isn’t that there have been extinctions, but that hundreds of species have not gone extinct as predicted by Genetic Entropy, and are in fact thriving, despite undergoing tens of thousands of generations even under YEC timelines. This is a plain falsification.

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@Burrawang, I think that we might both enjoy reviewing the following:

What We Like About AiG - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum

Todd Wood, a young-earth creationist, and Darryl Falk, one of the past leaders of BioLogos, wrote a book together
The Fool and the Heretic - Todd Wood and Darrel Falk - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum

Thanks.

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At what point does that death become a problem? Is it cellular death, plant death, animal death, or human death? You’ve made it clear that you don’t locate the major difference between animals and humans, so where else do you place it? And isn’t it odd that you, who do not accept common descent, are lumping humans and animals together when it comes to the significance of their deaths?

In the Bible, death is an enemy but it’s also a tool. Both 1 Corinthians and Revelation picture God using death to destroy other nonhuman enemies before finally putting death to death. And of course, our redemption comes by way of Jesus’ death – and resurrection! First Peter 1:18–20 claims that Jesus was God’s chosen lamb before the creation of the world. Jesus wasn’t plan B, and neither was dying as a sacrificial lamb.

This shows a lot of growth from Peter. Earlier, he had thought Jesus was Nuts for using suffering and death as the way to accomplish his mission:

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:21–23)

No, “Let us make humanity in our image” isn’t talking about apes. But reading Psalm 8 that seems to reflect on what it means to bear God’s image, I don’t think we should see ourselves as so obviously superior to all other life:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands…

To me, that reads as though bearing the image of God is an undeserved gift, not something our clearly superior natural bodies deserve. It reads as though God raised us above the other creatures, not that God recognized we were innately above them. It doesn’t teach evolution or common descent, but it fits quite well within that framework.

Surely you do believe that God created something like an ape, and also the ostrich and the hawk. Even though an ostrich deals cruelly with her young and lets her eggs get trampled and killed, since God didn’t make ostriches smart (Job 39:13–18). Even though a hawk’s young suck up blood (vv. 26–30).

God takes credit for making all creatures, not just the smart ones, not just the herbivores. And God provides food for all creatures. Even if that food is “prey,” it’s a good thing from God’s hand (Psalm 104:14–28). God gives all creatures breath, and God takes it away (vv. 29–30). The world we know, not an imagined version that only contains wise and cuddly immortal animals, is what God takes credit for creating.

Restored back to God, yes. But creation looks forward to more than restoration – it longs for re-creation (not waterskiing). It longs for God’s image bearers to be perfected, looking like Jesus, so that creation is set free – not to be as it once was, but to be as God always planned for creation to become. The grand story isn’t cyclical where we simply go back to the beginning. The end will be better than the beginning!

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Jon, let’s put this in context of something else you’ve said:

You accept that evolution can diversify creatures so that one pair of cats produces all species of big and small cats, one pair of dogs produces all canids, one pair of horses produces all equines. Given this, where are all the intermediate forms we would expect if this were true? Where can we see the finely graded fossil transition of a fox becoming a wolf (or great dane becoming a chihuahua) or a bobcat becoming a tiger?

Or, looking at the claimed human lineage, I assume there is one place within that messy assortment of fossils that you feel is a chasm that cannot be crossed. But what of all the other transitions? Where is the sequence showing Homo floresiensis becoming Homo sapiens (or vice versa) or Neandertal becoming either a normal human or a chimp, depending on which you accept?

The reality is that we don’t have a perfectly finely graded set of fossils of every set of creatures to exist, and others have already provided some of the obvious reasons why we shouldn’t expect to have that. And also, even if two creatures share common descent, it doesn’t mean there should be a direct transition between them, no more than we should expect a direct transition between great danes and chihuahuas. That’s why the fossil evidence is more helpful for showing certain transitional forms (such as the reptilian jaw to the mammalian ear, or nostrils and forearms on a walking land mammal becoming a whale’s blowhole and pectoral fins) than in preserving an exact sequence of descent.

If one sees enough evidence to accept natural selection (and drift, etc.) producing all the big and small cats from a common ancestor, then evidence is no barrier to seeing the common ancestry of much wider groups. The fossil gaps between the kinds are often smaller than some gaps within the kinds.

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Every species is an intermediate form because every species is still evolving.

One main way we see this and can verify it is by looking at the superimposed geological layers containing the fossil record .

We don’t see humans before the earliest primates. We don’t see the ea primates before the earliest mammals. We don’see the earliest mammals before the earliest therapsids. We don’t see the earliest therapsids before the earliest synapsids. We don’t see the earliest syanpsods before the earliest tetrapods and we don’t see those before the earliest bony lung fish which we don’t see before the earliest cartilaginous fish.

That’s also why when we look at anatomy and genetics we notice this trend.

Humans look more like chimps than we do spider monkeys. We are also more genetically similar. We look more like spider moneys than we do dogs. We look more like dogs than we do fence post lizards. We look more like lizards than we do fish. We are also more genetically similar to each of those we look more like.

Additionally we don’t even see humans in the same geological layer as morganucodon. We don’t see them in the same geological layers as Petrolacosaurus.

We see this with plants too.

The oldest angiosperms don’t precede the oldest gymnosperms.

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But that proves nothing. You cannot draw concrete conclusions from what isn’t there. IOW you cannot claim links that are not visible, just because of a timeline. The interim could be a creation. I am not saying it is, but TOE just assumes the progressions.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not supporting the rubbish theories, but Evolution does have more holes in it than is admitted.

Just because there were primates before humans does not mean that God could not have created humans at a later date. Or, deliberately caused the transformation.

It is the usual all-or-nothing arguments. All Evolution or All creation. BioLogos is supposed to be promoting God’s involvement, but all the arguments are pure TOE (minus God) or all Creation (No evolution)

Richard

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Sure. Similarly, just because 50% of Joe’s DNA matches that of young Susie, it doesn’t mean that Joe is Susie’s father. God could have transformed her DNA to look like his. But that’s not normally how we think about the world working.

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I’m with you on that one, Richard. It’s a false dichotomy.

For what it’s worth, that’s why I always talk about young earthism and not as young earth creationism. It’s my way of counterbalancing the tendency of some people to refer to young earthism as just “creationism” or even worse as “Biblical creationism.” We need to break the equivocation of creation with science denial and pseudoscience.

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Thanks Marshall for your well considered responses.

No I don’t, I accept that Natural Selection can select from existing information that God in His omniscience designed into the genome but that is most definitely not evolution.

Your words, “You (I) accept that evolution can diversify creatures” and that is the problem right there.
Whether you realise it or not, it is the equivocation of using the term ‘Natural Selection’ as a surrogate for ‘Evolution’. The terms are NOT interchangeable in the microbes to humans evolution sense.
Natural Selection is just that it is selection from already existing information.
whereas,
Evolution claims to explain the ascent and diversification of life on Earth that logically of necessity requires unimaginably enormous quantities of highly complex novel information that specifies for the uphill increasingly irreducibly complex changes that evolution claims have occurred.

A dog is still a dog and a cat is still a cat,sure there is great variation built into the genetics, but a veterinarian can work on any cat or any dog using the same biological knowledge. Sure things might get a bit tight in some of the smaller varieties, for example Chihuahua’s but they are ALL Canis lupus familiaris without exception. Where there is broader change such that a cat has variation that our taxonomic conventions put as different species,such as domestic cat and tiger and lion etc. they are still all cats,and as such I expect they likely all fall within the same Biblical kind that Noah took on the Ark. Of course there may be some examples that are in a separate Biblical kind, we just don’t have enough information from scripture to know for certain where the precise kind boundaries are, but if a horse can produce a Zorse and Lion can produce a Liger and all domestic dog breeds can theoretically interbreed even if the logistical practicality (due to size variations) is at times difficult, Artificial Insemination allows it to occur. But the type of change that is required by evolution is NOT demonstrated here.
Again Natural Selection is NOT Evolution, it is a component of evolution theory just as it a component of Creation but the two terms are most definitely NOT interchangeable.

There is no sequence because those examples are either fully human with pathology or dwarfism or they are not human and represent and extinct specie of primate.
Regarding “The Hobbit”. Homo floresiensis.
“That new, much older date range for H. floresiensis makes it ‘impossible to argue that it is a pathologically-dwarfed modern human,’ says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who was not involved in the study. ‘In my opinion, this paper drives the final nail in the coffin’ of that hypothesis.” [Reference: Gramling, C., The ‘hobbit’ was a separate species of human, new dating reveals, 30 Mar 2016, science.org/content/article/hobbit-was-separate-species-human-new-dating-reveals, This article gives a concise summary of the redating, and the reason for doing so.]

As for Neandertal, it is clear that they were all fully human and descendants of Noah’s family on the Ark, they are a variation of humanity within a geographically isolated community from the original variability within the genome that God originally created, that has given rise to all variations in humanity, things such as skin colour, hair colour, height, etc.but at the end of the day all one human family, every man woman and child on this planet is family as far as I am concerned, distant family perhaps in many cases going back up to four and a half thousand years but family none the less.

There are hundreds of millions of fossils from all over the world now that weren’t discovered in Darwin’s time, he had but a tiny fraction to look at and so can be excused, but your claim wears very thin because we do have a very large collection globally of fossils and therefore the plain and simple reason why “we don’t have a perfectly finely graded set of fossils of every set of creatures” is that evolution didn’t happen!

As I said previously, the difference between us is not about the evidence per se, it is about the framework through which the evidence is viewed.,
I’ll stick with the Bible as I know God can be trusted to mean what He says and say what He means.

God Bless,
jon

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Given that humans and chimpanzees are genetically closer than foxes are to dogs, and rodents such as mice are to rats, by your reasoning humans and chimpanzees should just be different varieties of the ape kind? They were selected from already existing information. After all an ape is still an ape.

No. The evidence is clearly in support of an ancient earth and evolution. You have a predetermined conclusion and reality has no bearing on that.

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From the article:

(Emphasis mine.)

What this shows is that geologically complex settings can be difficult to date accurately, requiring detailed and extensive surveys rather than just one or two samples. Young earthists take this as evidence that geologically much simpler settings must also be impossible to date at all. This is like arguing that just because the Antikythera Mechanism can’t tell you the time in 2024, that somehow a brand new atomic clock can’t tell you the time in 2024 either.

Yet it only takes a quick Google search to find multiple pictures of a whole series of hominid skulls, showing a clear progression of increasing brain sizes all the way from chimp-like up to modern day human. People who claim that there is no sequence and who believe that they are all either fully human or fully ape need to explain exactly how to identify which is which.

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Not even Nathaniel Jeanson, with his fantastical chronology of mitochondrial and Y chromosome haplogroups, was able to account for Neanderthal DNA as descended from Noah’s family.

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I’ve read what you’ve written here. You posted nothing that indicated any knowledge of population genetics, ignored pop gen subjects when I wrote about them, and dealt with the field only by cutting and pasting material from people whom I know don’t have expertise in the subject and who have made clear errors.

But I often make mistakes and I’m always happy to be corrected. Do you mean that you do have first-hand knowledge of population genetics? What pop gen studies have you done? Where are they published? (My publications can be found here).

Keep in mind that you opened this exchange with this: “The false belief of evolution was initially established through ignorance, deception and people wishing to be seen as intelligent intellectuals up to date with the latest science.” I’m not sure that you’re in a position to complain here.

The purpose you intended was to argue that a genome could not tolerate lots of random changes – because an encyclopedia couldn’t. But an encyclopedia isn’t anything like a genome in that very aspect. As an analogy, it’s misleading about how robust the genome is to change, how wide a range of differences lead to similar outcomes, and how easily it is to generate new function through random changes. Since the analogy fails to give us any reason to think that genomes can’t handle lots of mutations, what reasons can you provide?

That’s a restatement of your claim, not a reason to think the claim is correct.

Please stop saying this. Mutations don’t change the entropy of genomes. I’m both a geneticist and a physicist, and I prefer not to have both fields trashed in the same sentence.

Your problem is that a Biblical worldview does not substitute for a knowledge of genetics. Do you know what happens to mutations that cause genetic diseases? Are you familiar with mutation-selection balance?

As I keep pointing out, I’ve provided the first piece of evidence leading to my conclusions, and as I also pointing out, you just keep ignoring it.

It means that I know when claims about my field are simply wrong. You have made a number of such claims.

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It shows that evolution is by far the best theory out there to answer the question. I mean if you think it has a lot of wholes wait until you hear about young earth creationism.

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Do you think God causes it to rain? Or is it all or nothing meteorology vs supernatural? If you think God is involved, with what parts?

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What aspect of the below is inadequate, precisely?

And again, which aspect of the below is inadequate?

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