Why God used evolution if he could just create things ex-nihilo (just as creationists think)?
I don’t think evolution is a theological problem, but I don’t know why God used it instead of creating things “Out of nothing”.
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That’s an interesting question – I don’t know that we’ll ever get a true “why” answer to things that are beyond our understanding, but I don’t see that gradual processes are in any way contrary to how God works. The way that spiritual “sanctification” is often described could be similar. I would love it if I just magically displayed all the fruits of the spirit “ex-nihilo,” but alas, I do not.
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BTW correct English is either of these two:
Why did God use evolution?
Why God used evolution (more of a phrase to label the answer, than to ask a question)
Energy bridges the gap between action and thing. Thus we create particles from motion all the time in particle accelerators. So there nothing inconsistent with science for the action of God creating to alone be sufficient for producing material bodies – creation ex-nihilo.
Omnipotence means God can do anything He chooses. It does not mean God can accomplish anything by whatever means someone cares to dictate. Consider therefore logical coherence. It is not that God can only do things which are logically coherent. It is just a matter of what result you can expect. Logical coherence is the difference between dream and reality. Thus even a child can create all things he imagines without any logical coherence in his dreams. But is God no more than a child simply creating us in His dreams? Or is God a real creator making things which have their own existence outside the mind of God? Surely it is the latter, or why believe in God at all?
So it is a question of what is God creating? Is God simply a fantastic watchmaker like the Deists imagine, designing a world like a giant clockwork to operate according to His design? Not only does this idea not come from the Bible, inconsistent with the nature of life and God’s purpose for creating, but it doesn’t even agree with what we see in the world or the narrative in the Bible, where so much happens contrary to what God desires.
God’s purpose for creating??? God is perfect already. God has everything. God is everything. Why then create? Only one motivation remains: to give of His abundance to others. So God creates for relationships and thus He is portrayed in the Bible as a the great Shepherd not a Watchmaker. And this is consistent with the creation of life, because living things learn, make choices, grow, and develop. The creation of life frankly serves no purpose unless you want a relationship. What point would there be to make a hammer alive? Because you want an argument every time you need to pound in a nail? Wouldn’t that be silly? So the creation of life is a relationship and a process of development like farming, herding sheep, teaching, raising a child, or evolution.
Any more questions?
Oh, here is one… isn’t evolution kind of harsh? Yeah… kind of like the Bible isn’t it? It is harsh because life is harsh, and without that harshness there is no life.
There are different opinions. Often it’s hard for us to disconnect ourselves from previous mindsets of creationism.
One thing to consider is even the word creator itself.
This is genesis 14:19
https://biblehub.com/text/genesis/14-19.htm
It’s often translated as “ and he blessed Abram, saying, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth.“
But the word creator here is “qōnêh” and it’s uses fine times in the Bible. It also means “possessor” as in one who acquires. That’s the other 4 uses of it.
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/koneh_7069.htm
There are other words to consider though like here.
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1254.htm
But then outside of definitions you also have to consider the meaning. For example “so hungry I could eat a horse” does not actually mean you’re so hungry you’ll eat an entire horse. It’s hyperbole. It’s emotional. Metaphorical.
Take calling Jesus the light of the world. We don’t literally mean he’s a light. We means he’s helping to show us a way out of wickedness, hatred and sin.
One way to think of cresting something is to shape it. When I create a house, I shaped a bunch of material into a house. Many people did. So I think of creator as more implying shaper. God shaped the world and by the world I mean he helped guide humanity through the power of the spirit towards love and justice.
Then outside of theology we have science. God could have an undetectable influence over science. Something we can’t see or understand or detect. But there is simply no evidence of supernatural phenomena or influences in science. No reason to think supernatural selection played a role behind natural selection.
There is also open and process theology that don’t believe god is necessarily all powerful or all knowing. We see examples of it like in the tower of Babylon (Babel). It says God came down to look at what we were doing.
Does that literally mean god floated down from somewhere up in the sky or space to earth? Does that mean god has an actual body and have to move it to see what was going on? Does that mean god was not aware of what was happening until he came down closer.
Did God not know for sure where Abraham stood between his love for Yahweh versus his son Isaac?
God delights in creation, according to Job, Psalms and other scripture. As Laura said, he grows us through a process. He grew Israel through a process. He is described as a gardener first in Genesis, and elsewhere in the Bible. It would be surprising if he did not create life on earth similarly.
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I don’t see any difference when it comes to evolution, rather than - for example - reproduction. Who questions the scientific study of reproduction, questioning why did God use reproduction, involving genetics, biochemistry, etc., instead of creating individuals out of nothing?
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Here are some thoughts which are not fully thought through, but maybe that is how all thoughts must begin. In space, there must be time for life to exist. We breathe in, time goes past, we breathe out. Time necessitates change - change from our state of inspiring and expiring. In one state the lungs are filled, then change as we expire. If life necessitates time and time necessitates change, progress in life requires change. Change requires adaptation, and therefore life requires that we be able to adapt to change. Evolution is written into the fabric of the universe to enable us to change. How is it that adaptation is written into the fabric of the universe? One answer is God.
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I/s there change in the life in Heaven?
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Both are a matter of creation out of nothing – it’s just a different starting point.
Why would God use evolution? Because it’s an astoundingly elegant system that brings forth abundance and diversity!
That is indeed a tricky word. Personally I think “Creator” is a stretch, though it does fit with a somewhat poetic use of the “acquire” aspect in Hebrew, e.g. a potter can be spoken of as “acquiring” a pot by making it.
That’s another tricky concept, and the entire incident revolves around “going up” and “coming down”, neither of which is meant literally but in an ANE mythological-theological context.
We debated that very issue in a Hebrew readings class!
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Your statement about what Creationists think is an oversimplification…in the sense of your oversimpliflication, creationists do not think that for starters.
Creationists believe
-
God created a world without sin, without pain and suffering and without death
That world, the world we know today, has been corrupted by sin. Pain suffering and death are the natural consequences of sin. Whether that means God changed it as punishment for disobedience or, its an unavoidable reaction to sin, is of no consequence…the fact is, its here and we see it everyday. -
God says in the bible that one day, sin and all of the corruption it has brought upon this earth will be wiped away…cleansed from existence.
The salvation of the “saints” (defined in Revelation 14.12) from the cleansing of sin from this world was only made possible by the sacrifice of Christ dying on the cross for the mistakes/bad choices of His own creation (mankind)…because of Adams transgression, we are all condemned to die permanently…none of us are deserving of salvation.
So as a creationist i see two reasons for evolution:
- a necessary byproduct of the introduction of sin into this world and a world trying to survive the scourge of sin
- A natural part of the statement by God in the opening Chapters of the book of Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply”…to go and populate the earth. God always intended that the earth would experience a growth in biodiversity…just that some examples of it are not what God originally intended to occur…and sin is to blame for that!
Anyone who genuinely believes that all biodiversity is of God and that he intended all of it to exist (or have existed), these individuals are ignoring very obvious biblical themes to the contrary about sin and its aims and the consequences.
After that you have no chance
Depends on you definnition of creationist.
If it is simplification, you have just stated it. If it is all inclusive of creationists then you are not giving a full picture.
Not all creationists trya and rectify the fall wth science or nature as is. If they did they maight think twice.
To insist that God did not include death in his creation is just plain ididotic.
To claim that the whole world is corrupt is just blinkered
(And if you rectify it with Romans 1 it would make God corrupt, as a reflecton of creation)
To claim that the whole human race is fallen is equallly ignroant of reality
Still faith is personal so who am I to deny yours…
Richard
I wouldn’t go as far as saying evolution is written into the fabric of the universe. The universe allows for all life on a planet to go extinct, as one example. It just so happens that evolution is an unavoidable consequence of imperfect replicators competing with one another for limited resources. When you have those conditions you will get adaptation on some level. It’s a sort of feedback system, analogous to a tube resonating at a specific sound frequency (e.g. blowing over the top of a bottle creates a note).
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Sorry – I am a creationist, and I don’t see the above the YEC way where nature didn’t operate like nature does now; now, death – according to the Psalmist – is a good thing because dying of one organism brings life to others.
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A world without death, but with reproduction, would be a world with unlimited numbers of individuals. How soon would the sheer mass of even single-celled individuals exceed the mass of the planet Earth? How fast would the space taken up be expanding faster than the speed of light? Or just how unpleasant would it be to live along with living things taking up every space?
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When he says he is a creationist, he means evolutionary creationist.
A world without death is a world without animals and very few plants, for all of these require death in many of their physical function. The lack of death is actually a pathology and cause for diseases like cancer, where things which are supposed to die don’t do what they are supposed to do.
And God said “do not eat of the tree in the midst of the garden for on the day you eat of it you will wiffletot.” No wonder Adam and Eve disobeyed. They simply had no idea what God was talking about. What could God expect using a word like that which refers to something that does not exist and never happens?
As usual these type of creationists choose to believe in a complete fantasy and invoke magic to explain a transformation from their magical fantasy world to the world we observe were death is such a central part of how everything works.
If that is what this book is actually saying then it belongs on a shelf with “Alice and Wonderland” which like a deranged dream is full of meaningless words.
All animals (are there any exceptions?) are dependent on consuming the bodies of other living things - death. In a world without death, the animal body would be radically different. A difference greater than the difference between a starfish and an eagle or an octopus. It asks for some explanation about how and why and where and when such a change would take place without leaving any trace. Like where are the fossils of those great numbers of different animals?
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Mayflies will synchronize their maturity at once. One day, large numbers of them will reach maturity and mate. The females will lay their eggs. And all of the adult mayflies will die in one (or maybe two) days. They cannot survive, for they cannot eat. These dead mayflies create road hazard, and snowplows may be brought out the clear them away.
But think, why if they didn’t die? And what if the eggs that they laid also all survived? They would be a plague, not just an occasional road hazard. They would not make a Garden of Eden a wonderful place.
Has anyone reallu take on the task of describing a world of life without death? The more I think about it, it just presents more difficulties and impossibilities and unpleasantries and contradictions. Over the long time of the Garden of Eden study, has there been anyone who has bothered to work out the details, seriously?
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Reproduction without death is an example that has been used in basic ecology courses.
The mulltiplication is in good living conditions exponential, so you could fill the earth with any reproducing creature in a relatively short time. With humans or elephants, it would take longer than with mice or bacteria but the endpoint is always the same: a thick layer of living individuals covering and suffocating everything else. That layer would form of a huge amount of suffering animals because there would not be food or individual space left. There would hardly even be oxygen to breath as all plants would be covered by the layer of living creatures and their waste.
The fastest creatures to fill the earth would be micro-organisms. In good environmental conditions, bacteria can reproduce (divide) at crudely 20min intervals. As the environmental conditions deteriorate, the interval between divisions becomes longer but fairly rapid multiplication anyhow.
In mice and voles, a female can give birth to a litter of 4-10 young every third week. In optimal conditions, the female young of some species may become fertile before they leave the nest, at the age of 2-3 weeks, because of the hormones they get from the mother during the lactation. If a wandering male finds the nest, the female young may become pregnant before it has left the nest and, because of the hormones and nutrition received from the mother, may get a large litter of young at the age of 5-6 weeks. You can calculate what would happen when all females give birth to several female offspring every third week and the female cubs would start to give births at the age of 6-8 weeks. Exponential growth.
As with the bacteria, the reproduction would slow when the conditions deteriorate but the multiplication would still be relatively fast.
With humans and elephants, the interval between births would be longer but otherwise, it would follow the same basic pattern.
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In one ecology course we had to work out how long it would take for the anopheles mosquito to use up all the Earth’s mass if they kept reproducing with no death. I don’t recall the results except that it was a source of humor.
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I don’t know, but according to an Ancient Near Eastern culture, would mosquitoes count as animal life? But mice do get mention in the Bible.