No one said that it is. I said that I think it fails, but not completely. To clarify, there is an intelligent element that cannot be accounted for in evolution. It “progresses” which is contrary to the general trend of decay, and it “builds” as in successive changes enhance future ones.
For instance, to fly a bird needs not only wings, but feathers, the right muscles, and bone structure, the right metabolism and ability to breathe under pressure. Even if you can prove these came along indeoendently they still need to be present at the finish. And there is no good reason for anything to fly, unless you understand
what flying is
up and down (gravity)
the advantage of an aerial view and attack point.
The knowledge that other things cannot fly.
And there are probably more.
ToE imposes the human knowledge and conceptualisations involved in living and “assumes” nature has that knowledge.
God does, Nature does not.
There are those who believe that there is a deep connection underpinning Nature, but that would have to be imbued, it could not “evolve” (It would involve a connection to continue from the first splitting nucleus, through to all successive creatures)
And all this ignores the basic genesis of life and the unbelievable structure and abilities of DNA. (let alone water)
IOW there are elements of creation that (Almost certainly) could not come from fluke or probability.
There is no good reason to doubt that the flood of Noah was a real historical event. But there is also no good reason to believe creation science claims about Noah’s flood. They dismiss the fact that Genesis 2 gives the location of the garden of Eden in terms of landmarks that can be seen post-flood.
But there are plenty of examples of animals that have rather simple “hearts”, such as the five “hearts” of a standard earthworm, which are expanded, muscular bits of blood vessels, enabling an extra push to the blood. Many other animals get by with just body movements sloshing the blood around enough, such as ribbon worms and tusk shells, and have no heart. Small animals don’t even need any circulatory system. It is quite easy for improved fluid pumping ability to develop gradually. If you’re not warm-blooded, you have much less urgent need of lots of oxygen and nutrients all the time, and a rather simple “heart” is adequate for less active animals. Earthworm hearts are not incomplete but they are very simple, questionable as to whether they count as hearts or not. There is no cliff edge. Imaginary cliffs are commonplace in claims of “irreducible” complexity.
Again, God is in control of the entire process, but it is following natural laws.
Humans are on the Chordata branch and earthworms are on the Annelida branch. We are both part of the Bilateria kind.
ToE claims natural processes just like all other scientific theories. Are you saying God is not a part of nature? If we find a natural explanation does that eliminate God?
No, I defend the right understanding of it, something you sorely lack.
I understand perfectly what you are getting at, and in every case you just cry, “It doesn’t work!” – which is a declaration that you can’t imagine it, since it computer simulations and in the analysis of millions of biologists it does work.
I understand the criticism perfectly – it consists of you yelling “It can’t work”.
This just shows that you have no grasp of how hearts developed. It’s like saying that there is no such thing as an incomplete eye, which is nonsense – you’re just drawing lines and claiming they can’t be crossed. It’s the fallacy of labeling; you think that because you can label something “heart” then it must have sprang from nowhere.
Odd that millions of biologists haven’t come across it.
By your reasoning crystals must be able to think in order to assemble themselves.
The only “understanding” involved is in your anthropomorphization of nature and your refusal to acknowledge the fact that a biological structure can start out serving one function but acquire another on along the way.
Not in the least – there is no “knowledge” required except what is in the DNA and cellular composition. Your failure to understand elementary biology and chemistry is not a failure of nature or evolution, it is a failure of your imagination and cognition.
You have yet to identify one; all your examples merely show that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Meteorology claims “self reliance”. Geology claims “self reliance”. Cosmology claims “self-reliance”.
Why aren’t you hollering about God being left out of those?
Internal evidence already says that. Chapter 1 vv 1,3 describe G*D creating time, space, matter, and light, all at once.
Creation discloses that Earth is a huge ball with a thin crust of continents, all surrounded by films of water, while in orbit around the nearest star. Yet Day Four places the entire visible universe beneath the forever supply of rain placed above the vault of the sky on Day Two. Day Three cannot have plucked the continents (and globe and seas) from beneath the films of water on the globe’s surface.
Genesis is akin to an “illustrated novel” - stage scenery as the backdrop for profound teachings about the G*D Who created the universe from nothing, His commands on homo sapiens, and His tender love for our companionship.
None of that is in Genesis. The account describes the world as existing under a solid dome with water above and below. There is nothing about a ball or continents or orbit.
It is impossible to understand Genesis if one insists on changing the meanings of the words by trying to stuff them with modern science.
You can identify events that must have happened. You can possibly date them from subsequent evidence. But, you cannot watch them happen or be certain how they happened
As has been said here many times, the hand of god is (in general) invisible to science , and humanith in general. Any theory that tries to understand the past will always miss that. ToE works on the principle that there is no guidance or influence from an independent source (AKA God) as such, it is doomed to failure (IMHO)
But. as I keep repeating, that failure is relative. There is much in ToE that can be verified and it goes as far as human perception and scientific understanding can take it.
As I see it, you cannot look at evolution and not see where God must be. But I am a Christian who believes in God and that will always give me a bias.
Again, nothing in science indicates a magical world. There is no evidence of any kind other than people claiming without proof. It’s just all “take my word”.
Also, it seems that things like soul and spirit is a far more materialistic view than magical view. For example we see soul meaning living creature and it’s applied to both humans and animals. We see spirit referring to wind and breath as well. It seems ancient Jews believed that the wind was the breath of god and when you took a breath you became a soul and when you breathed out your last breath, your spirit went back into the wind and you were no longer a soul, but a corpse.
Hi Richard,
from my limited understanding of this world we live in, belief in evolution is not only doomed to failure, it is utterly pointless.
I realise that evolution is a sacred cow for many who use it as a paradigm through which they choose to see the world; some are Christians and many more are not.
The ones who are not Christians are very often agnostics or atheists and many of those are secular humanists and believe in a materialist philosophy through which they view the world.
The ones that are Christians must believe a suite of stories that act as explanations as to why the Bible is not inerrant, and consequently needs interpretation that enables ‘deep time’ and evolution to be slipped in to the very clear historical narrative.
Those explanatory stories, such as the one that has the Hebrew Scripture translated with a meaning considerably different to what all the translations I have checked, (now over 70 translations), are interestingly in the vital areas necessary to maintain belief in ‘deep time’ and evolution.
Our Creator God is hands on ALL the time, He is not distant, He did not set the creation in motion then retire, He IS holding all of creation in existence right now. Without His will for creation to exist nothing would exist.
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.2 Corinthians 11
Nature knows that a simple sort of heart works for earthworms because earthworms survive with such hearts. Evolution is survival of the fit enough. To give more detail on the relationship between earthworms and humans, the hearts are independent developments. Simple muscular chambers for pumping blood are found in chordates such as sea squirts. Larger size and higher activity levels require more pumping ability.
The addition of lungs to gills favored having additional chambers to enable lower blood pressure in the lungs (balancing against air pressure).
If you want to define the theory of evolution as atheistic, you can as long as you make it clear that you are doing so. But that does not justify claiming that everyone else’s references to evolution must be atheistic. Biological evolution is merely a pattern in how creation works. It is no more or less atheistic than gravity, no matter how often atheists and antievolutionists make illogical claims to the contrary.
That is correct, which is why most of the rest of your post is wrong. If the Bible is inerrant, then truthfulness is very important, not just “I’m not deliberately making up lies”, but “I have done due diligence in verifying what I say.” Many of the epistles specifically reiterate the importance of doing good work in what we do. Yet the scientific claims of young earth creationism and anti-evolution ID often contain willful lies and do not reflect a serious effort to do as good a job as possible. There is no effort to accurately represent other views. Rather than seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness first, they fall into the Machiavellian error of thinking that the end of promoting their position justifies the means of sloppy and dishonest work.
Although theological and philosophical considerations led many Christians from the early church through medieval times to think that the earth was probably ancient, a systematic effort to understand the geological evidence on the history of the earth only developed in the mid to late 1600’s. Most of the workers were Christian. By the 1770’s, it became unambiguously clear that the evidence from God’s creation indicated deep time. This was not seen as any problem for the Bible; it merely showed that theologically irrelevant pre-human time had been passed over in silence by Moses. Indeed, the geologic record was a problem for the fashionable deistic [and classical Greco-Roman] idea of an eternal earth like today’s, not for Christianity. The “Enlightenment” claims that developing science was by those who boldly challenged religious dogma are lies, repeated uncritically by young-earth advocates.
Both atheists and anti-evolutionists peddle the myth that evolution supports an atheistic position. But if the physical data did not support evolution, atheists would merely claim that spontaneous generation of new forms or some other description of the pattern was a natural law. Competent atheists existed before evolutionary biology was developed. Ecclesiastes particularly points out that, in reality, a mere focus on the physical data gets you a big question mark as far as any spiritually important question goes. We need a theological understanding, then we can rightly see all natural processes, including the evolution of new kinds of organisms through billions of years, as testimonies of God’s wisdom, power, and goodness. Of course, seeing aspects of creation that we find unpleasant as a part of God’s wisdom is not easy, but if we know God we can trust that He knows what He’s doing when we don’t.
of course I do make the distinction that not everyone who believes evolution is an atheist.
But the Truth is that Gravity is real, it can be measured, tested, utilised, whereas evolution is a myth that was dreamed up to explain the origin of the existence of the diversity of life on Earth WITHOUT God.
I appreciate there are many Churches that have sadly been beguiled by the philosophy of naturalism and as a consequence no longer believe a straightforward reading of the Bible and end up performing exegesis gymnastics to accommodate evolution.
No, David, there is nothing illogical about what I am saying.
All earthworms are not part of a communal consciousness. They are not connected to each other let alone the rest of nature.
There is no guiding intelligence in Nature
There is no diagnosis, or solutions in Nature
Concepts such as Adaption, which are pro-active do not exist in Nature.
Nature can only use what it already has. If a deviation can create something new, it is by chance and not design. it cannot be because the change is needed.
That is basic science.
If you want intelligence you will have to find / include God.
Dear David,
what utter nonsense.
I find it amazing that no doubt good honest Christian people that actually believe evolution is real resort to calling those who know that evolution is a FALSE TEACHING, as LIARS, without ever once stating what those lies are!
These reprehensible claims haves been made on this site over and over again, and I have politely asked for examples, but those requests are ignored and the attack continues.
David, I expect from what you have stated that you actually believe the Bible is inaccurate, that we are the end result of billions of years of pain, suffering and death, even when the Bible tells us ever so clearly that death entered the creation through the sin of Adam and Eve.
Yes, I know you will undoubtedly have a nice neat story to account for that, and all the other glaring inconsistencies, but please answer me this one thing:
Do you really believe that God would have had Noah and his sons build the enormous Ark by applying an almost unimaginable amount of hard manual work if the flood was only local?
They all, (i.e., Noah, his family and the animals), could have simply traveled the necessary distance to out of the flood zone.
God is a God of purpose, He is Love, He is Righteous, He is Just, and He had Noah construct the Ark as the Bible so plainly tells us, because it was necessary, because outside the Ark there was no land anywhere under heaven that was not flooded!
Please take a long hard look at the Replica Ark above and consider the enormous difficulty of building it from scratch without chainsaws, timber jinkers (log trucks), lumber yards, powered cranes, power tools such as drills, thicknessers, planers, circular saws, routers, or other powered machinery etc…
With regard to the reality of the flood of Noah being absolute over ALL the land on Earth under heaven, the translations all say the same thing, that God promises to never again cause a flood to destroy the Earth.
יא וַהֲקִמֹתִי אֶת-בְּרִיתִי אִתְּכֶם, וְלֹא-יִכָּרֵת כָּל-בָּשָׂר עוֹד מִמֵּי הַמַּבּוּל; וְלֹא-יִהְיֶה עוֹד מַבּוּל, לְשַׁחֵת הָאָרֶץ. 11 And I will establish My covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.’ Genesis 9:11 Torah
I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 The Contemporary Torah, JPS, 2006
BUTwe still observe local floods all over the world regularly today!
I expect, you like others on this site believe that the Flood of Noah was a LOCAL FLOOD,not a GLOBAL FLOOD.
So, I would be grateful if you could please explain to me the anomaly that exists here; i.e., on one hand we have **God promising He will NEVER again send a FLOOD to DESTROY ALL FLESH,**and on the other hand (if what you say is true and the Flood was only LOCAL), why we STILL OBSERVE LOCAL FLOODS regularly all over the Earth today?
Yes, I agree, of course God knows what He is doing, that is always a given.
The parts of the creation that are unpleasant are the result of sin entering the world through the events in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve as the Bible so clearly states in both Testaments.
The Bible also reliably tells us that the whole of creation groans and travails awaiting the restoration of the Heavens and Earth where there no longer will be sorrow or pain or death.
Hi Richard,
Yes, as world renowned Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once famously said,
“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.”
And that’s the likelihood of life arising and species evolving and diversifying by chance, essentially ZERO, Nought, Null, Nix, None, Ziltch, Nada, Diddly-Squat, NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER!
