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

Faith & Science Conversation
, ,
201

Dear Ron,

            I apologise if this is a problem for you.

The reality is that evolution itself is a well and truly falsified theory that just doesn’t qualify as real empirical science. It simply doesn’t!

The things that can be tested in the lab in the here and now, as far as I am concerned do not show even the slightest hint of evidence for molecules to man evolution.

Natural selection within a created Biblical kind yes, no problem whatsoever, that is happening all the time, but the blatant equivocation to use natural selection that does occur as proof of evolution is really too much.

If evolution was a real mechanism then we would be able to show very quickly where increased complexity and types of change has occurred such that we can see in the undoubtedly billions of trillions of intermediates between stages such as the change from dinosaur to birds or from primate to human.

But all we have are a bunch of frauds most of which have been exposed and a mere handful of disputed candidates for intermediate forms, let alone any evidentially backed explanation of how the irreducibly complex structures such as new organs, limbs, senses and control systems etc… came about through slow and gradual evolution.

I’m sorry but the evidence is truly stacked up high against the whole evolution edifice.
The theory is a mess, is an understatement and the fact that it has proven itself time and again to be utterly unfalsifiable precludes it from being called science, even though there are plenty of people around the world who are taking home tidy salaries each year whilst they conduct ‘research’ that supports evolution.

The sad irony of all this is not lost on me, but I do tire of the bashing of Christian Creation apologists, by other Christians when in many parts of the world over the past few decades and right now, our Christian brothers and sisters are being slaughtered en masse by religious zealots whose only desire is to murder as many Christians as they can, and they’re proud of it!
They must be watching this website forum and laughing their heads off at the inane idiocy that is transpiring.

I wish you well,
God Bless,
jon

202

Ladies and gentlemen, imagine, for a moment, that you are the head of HR at a biotech company looking to recruit a population geneticist. You are presented with two candidates, both of whom have been given an initial phone screen.

One candidate is an experienced population geneticist working for a world renowned research institute founded by two top universities. He has published in top scientific journals on the subject, and in both his CV and his phone screen, he clearly described the projects that he has been working on right up to the present day. A quick background check confirms that his claims about his skills and experience are correct.

The other candidate claims to have worked in an unrelated scientific field back in the 1970s. His CV gives no indication of the level of seniority that he achieved in that role, and for all you know he could have been a lab technician, an accountant, a secretary, or a janitor. He could have been a senior researcher, but although he claims to understand how the scientific method works, in support of this claim he makes a number of statements that are inconsistent with even a rudimentary understanding of some very basic principles of school-level science, such as the nature of measurement and how sources of error are accounted for. Neither his CV nor his phone screen contain sufficient information for you to conduct any meaningful background checks.

Which candidate do you call in for an interview?

This reminds me of a post on the old Internet Monk blog.

1 Like
204

as usual…you guys go to great lengths in not addressing the real dilemma here. You run all around it…

It is your side who claim that YEC scientists arent really scientists, and/or that they seek only evidence to support their views…and that is exactly what i have responded to with a lot of very significant evidence where naturalism has attempted to distort the truth.

The examples i provided were significant because they were broadcast worldwide as “proof” and a number of them went on for many decades before being exposed as lies.

These examples were often used as a basis for further evolutionary claims…building blocks whose foundation was fraudulent. So your apparent thousands of supporting claims is founded upon these fraudulent premises and therein lies the huge problem faced.

The point is, reasonable doubt is all that is required in the defense of the creation account and that is because, the bible also has a significant historical narrative that backs up the YEC claims whereas secular evolutionism does not have that narrative dating back at least to the time of king david and there is historical evidence for the bible back further.

The point is, its the internal consistency of the bible which is also supported by the evidence that YEC find that tells me YEC is most likely the correct world view. Add to that the fact that YEC is founded upon Gods own revelation…evolution is most definately not founded on God and most modern scientists its seems argue there is no room for God in evolution.

It is very difficult to read “let us make man in our own image” , and God “formed man out of the dust of the earth and breathed the breath of life into his (mans) nostrils”…and conclude that God had an ape in mind!

An ape does not have the capacity to intellectually think like we do…its absurd and devoid of intelligence to attempt to reconcile evolution with Christianity with God creating something like an ape! How anyone can possibly twist Genesis into reading that way is a woeful manipulation of scripture.

So the problem i have as a bible believing christian is that individuals who base their scientific belief on those who do not see that there is room in science for God, those individuals are choosing to believe the ramblings of atheists (like Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawins, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Nye).

I see a conflict of interests in Christians following the lead of such individuals and that is theologically untennable in my view.

The idea that people apparently lose sight of Christianity because they are not following these men is absolute nonsense.

The bible tells us why people leave the church…its because they lack faith. This comes about as a result of unbelief. However, its not unbelief because of what science says, its unbelief in the gospel…that Christ (God incarnate), came down and lived among us, died on the cross to pay the wages of sin is death, so that we may be redeemed and restored back to God and the state of the earth before the fall of Adam and Eve. That is the entire point of the bible!

Hebrews 3 16For who were the ones who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? 17And with whom was God angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18And to whom did He swear that they would never enter His rest? Was it not to those who disobeyed? 19So we see that it was because of their unbelief that they were unable to enter.

The day that faith means proven by science is the day all religion is porkies and pigs begin to fly!

205

Yes YECist are real scientists, they just are really bad ones who don’t follow the scientific method. They are really ignorant and arrogant or either liars when it comes to the vast majority of science. They are a bit of a cult really. Out of roughly 8,000,000 scientists globally they make up a few thousand. I think under 1%. Maybe even closer to 0.1%. Not really sure how insignificant of a number they make up. They are universally rejected by the scientific community regardless if it’s in America, Europe, Africa, Asia or wherever. The only people that really are sucked into their silliness is the uneducated. That’s why it’s so important to teach science to our kids. To make sure they get real textbooks and learn it in school. It’s why even though many pastors are YECist who are kind well meaning people, you have to teach your kids that they have a very shallow outdated despite being modern reading of the scriptures. They can be very loving, but they also run a risk of making up people whose bad understanding of theology and conspiracy theorist approach to the scientific community and their consensus can result in weaponizing the Bible to push their very toxic pro theocracy that attacks freedom, love and happiness. It does not really grow in communities because it’s convincing, but because two come together and pop out 5+ kids who never get a solid understanding of the world or learn how to understand basic high school education. Often not even basic middle school education.

A lot of stuff yall say is heavily debated it not actually heavily debated. 99.9% will land on a similar consensus and 0.1% disagree and some of yall seem to listen exclusively to them.

1 Like
206

How in the world can you even begin to construe such a ridiculous statement.

What I was attempting to communicate was that we all need to take a step back and get some perspective on this issue, me included. Origins is an important issue and that is why so many people are passionate about what they believe which is why I will trust the Bible every time to mean what it so plainly states.
But that aside there are many Christians around the globe who themselves and their entire families are in shocking situations including matters of life and death just because they are followers of our Lord Jesus.

The way you seem to twist peoples words appears to be disingenuous and bordering on plain dishonest, just to score some imaginary gold star point with your forum peers in Biologos.
I sincerely hope you see what you are doing here for what it truly is.

God Bless,
jon

207

Hallelujah!
Well stated Adam and of course as with the rest of this post, absolutely correct.

God Bless,
jon

208

1 Corinthians 2
6Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; 7but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; 8the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;

209

The whole of creation has only been around for about 60 of my own mothers lifetime, she lived to 101.
Six thousand years is a long time on one hand, but it is also very brief when compared to the secular ‘deep time’ paradigm.
I suggest that it is highly likely that many species probably have gone extinct but because they weren’t documented we will probably never know. There probably are bacteria going extinct in the wild because of their much faster generational times, who knows? Just because you don’t have a bacterial specie name in front of you in a peer reviewed paper most definitely does not mean that it isn’t happening. It is arrogant to think otherwise.

How do you know we won’t find that well documented species of whatever form of life won’t go extinct this century?
After all there are any number of species listed as vulnerable, endangered etc, often because of habitat loss, but how do you know that compounding numbers of mutations on their genomes over the past six thousand years aren’t also contributing to their decline?

God Bless,
jon

210

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!

3 Likes
211

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

212

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!

1 Like
213

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.

3 Likes
214

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.

1 Like
215

@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.

216

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!

217

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.

3 Likes
218

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.

4 Likes
219

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

220

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.

3 Likes
221

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.

3 Likes