Exactly as predicted by evolutionary theory. That is the whole point of the nested hierarchy. Canines will continue to be canines. Carnivora will continue to be carnivora. Mammals will continue to be mammals. Tetrapods will continue to be tetrapods. Vertebrates will continue to be vertebrates.
That is because there are people who just adore, and therefore select for traits of weak, unfit dogs.
Hey Adam, your reflection that you use to place yourself on the moral high ground is extremely bad logic. You presume that your error, if any, is only in respect to mistaken historical intrpretation, and you assign theological aspects to anyone who believes TE if there is any error there. How about those of us who are probably TE, and also believe that the bible is the inspired word of God? What if our error is only that we interpret the bible differently? And on the YEC side: There are documented cases of beings (including the devil himself) misinterpreting the bible in serious ways. How about those who use the bible to judge others? Are they also on the moral high ground, because of what they believe about the bible?
This is something i don’t understand. If mammals evolved from fish, why can’t a non-dog evolve from a dog (for example)?
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Pure breeds are created by repeated in-breeding which leads to the desired characteristics but also accumulates a lot of genetic defects. So it isn’t a good example of how evolution works or why it can’t work.
Fish to mammal required vast amounts of time. There is nothing in evolution that says dogs can’t evolve into something else. It just requires vast amounts of time.
I think the Bible was written to be understandable to the original audience. Even now, deep time is hard to comprehend, and to ancient man, the only thing in their experience was what happened in the generations they experienced or had oral history of. To speak of animals remaining in their species was true for their experience and perspective, as it is today from our personal experience if we had no evidence of deep time.
That is absurd! By that reason any determination to protect people from criminals is to be equated with aggression. I reject this utterly.
The declaration of war only brought the UK into the conflict. The war had already started with the German invasion of Poland. Your claim is equivalent to treating Poland as a nonentity and the people living there as nonexistent. It is offensive.
Otherwise… what you say is reasonable. …knotty issues? sure. …complex political landscape? OK. Was I oversimplifying? Of course.
I have long been aware of the writings to which you refer. I also know there are problems with this. It is just a little too easy for Christians to believe such denials. Besides… Christians can be disdainful of Christianity. Christians can use Christianity for political ends. Christians have often sounded more like Deists or mystics…
I am opposed to this because the word “Christianity” refers to a religion. Muslims and other religions would claim they are the ones who follow Jesus.
More comedy. (Irony is a big part of humor. ; - ) At least you are correct about the antiquity of the earth.
Which just shows that YEC fails to grasp the underlying themes of the opening chapters of Genesis: when you understand the broader culture in which the opening piece was written (and it matters little whether you think Moses was the editor or someone during the Babylonian Exile) the existence of light without a source is no difficulty at all! For ancient near eastern creation stories, if there were gods, there was light; the innovation in the Genesis version is the announcement that God created the light – it wasn’t self-existent.
Yeah, they went off the rails right there because they are treating all of “the books of Moses” as a single literary genre. It gets really tiresome to read stuff from supposed scholars who apparently can’t even be bothered to actually study their material.
They would do well to read Origen’s tract on the meaning of the term “word of god” (I use all lowercase because the moment I did differently I would be defaulting to just one meaning of the term), which begins with The Word [Who is] God" (taking “of” more as an ablative) and proceeding by a half dozen intermediate meanings to “talk about the divine”. Using “the Word of God” to denote scripture, however satisfying that may be to someone trying to support an argument is at best, given Origen’s tight analysis, highly confusing since even within the bounds of the scriptures the term/phrase has more than one meaning: it can be (a) words recorded as coming directly from God; (b) words from prophets expounding on (a); (c) words affirming both (a) and (b); (d) words someone is affirming about God but that do no come from either (a) or (b); (e) words about things God has done; (f) words that are just narration; (g) words from foes of God and His people – and thus if I’m remembering this correctly there are seven distinct meanings of “word of god” just within the sacred writings themselves! [which is why I try to confine myself to speaking of “the scriptures” – while keeping in mind that for the early church that term had have multiple meanings since there were scriptures suitable to be read in church {what we call the canon}, scriptures to be read only for those suitably educated to be able to handle them, etc]
If the environment changes little, there is no selective pressure for major change to something that is working well. So called living fossils are not evidence against evolution, they just represent adaptations that continue to serve well in their niche. Descendants of fish that live in the water, while exhibiting many changes on close inspection, still generally look much like ancestral fish. Sharks, for instance, go way back. Natural selection does not serve some goal of greater complexity, it only favors those traits that match well with a given environment.
On the other hand, offspring of fish that adapted to tidal, and then terrestrial, environments, were faced with a very novel set of selective pressures and possibilities. This led to the accumulation of adaptive traits and morphological change.
Barring some unforeseeable revamping of Earth’s environment, there is unlikely to present a niche to dogs which results in some huge change into tentacle beasts or some vastly different creature. Over the course of a few million years, it is likely that some canine populations would be recognized as species distinct from any today, but their heritage would still be apparent.
Which just shows that YEC fails to grasp the underlying themes of the opening chapters of Genesis: when you understand the broader culture in which the opening piece was written (and it matters little whether you think Moses was the editor or someone during the Babylonian Exile) the existence of light without a source is no difficulty at all! For ancient near eastern creation stories, if there were gods, there was light; the innovation in the Genesis version is the announcement that God created the light – it wasn’t self-existent.
Except they demonstrably aren’t talking about the same Jesus.
Nor the same God. We’ve had that discussion here before!
Thanks for the summary of the article, rather than posting the book!
In a smaller nutshell, what I think I’ve learned from reading Adam’s posts for a while and this OP is that he finds as mutually exclusive a literal reading of the Bible with all that that entails (particularly regarding doctrines of the mechanics of salvation), and all forms of consensus science that attempt to understand nature by studying nature itself.
As I understand his posts, Adam, as a YEC, believes this impasse forces him to choose to accept one half of the dichotomy and reject the other.
In choosing a literal understanding of the Bible and rejecting all forms of consensus science, yet wanting to have scientific support for a literal reading of the Bible, Adam is forced to rely on descriptions of the natural world that are based not on observation but on what a particular literal reading of the Bible would dictate those observations conclude.
In developing observations of the natural world in order to reach a prescribed conclusion, Adam is left with inadequate explanations of fairly straight-forward features and functions of the natural world, which then require the development of further unobservable explanations. This next level of explanation, while intended to preserve support for a literal reading of the Bible, require the development of physically impossible events and thus require the invocation of the miraculous bending of the physical constants of nature made by God in the first place.
Which brings us back to the original assertion that Creation was a miraculous event, thus not needing all sorts of unobservable explanations that use scientific-sounding jargon.
I understand the feel for the need to be dogmatic. However, dogmatism doesn’t prove the dogma true, no matter how loudly it’s proclaimed or how often.
I understand the feel that there is incompatibility between traditional Christian doctrine and the plain and mutually-supporting facts of scientific discovery; the ever-frustrating question (at least for some of us) of how both these two things can be true, or the increasing challenge of understanding what is true of Christianity in light of greater insight into how nature works and has been working for a very, very long time.
Dogmatism will not solve the problem, though. And if a philosophical answer is involved, it requires a truthful, reasonable assessment of information, not fictious grasping.
Dogmatism over this matter will also not prove who is and is not in the Kingdom. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and being his faith-filled follower is not a matter of faith in the age or origin of the
universe.
I get to feeling lost sometimes because I don’t even see why the science is a question when the text itself is ignored. SDA doctrine rests on a translation, which thanks to Augustine we know is a bad way to do theology, and if you go back to the original text and try to read it from the worldview of the original audience none of this hashing back-and-forth is even necessary and indeed is counterproductive because YEC is itself a waste of time resting on an artificial foundation that just can’t be found in the text itself.
If we were to transport back in time and ask the original audience how old the Earth was, they wouldn’t understand the question; it was obviously of divine age since God made it, and what did that matter to us – after all, humans aren’t gods! If they gave any numbers at all they would have been symbolic because the importance of Creation has nothing to do with how long it took, it had to do with the establishment of levels of sacred space: the whole world as God’s Temple, a special land as temple-within-Temple, and a special Garden within that temple-within-Temple where God and His select ones could “walk together”. If you told them it took seventy thousand times seventy thousand years, they wouldn’t have multiplied to get a number, they would have considered for a moment and then nodded at the obvious message of those numbers!
I’ll step up for science when someone is making a hash of it, but my concern is that the dogmatism of YEC is built on a blindness essential to maintaining the position, a blindness based on a thorough failure to understand what the text is talking about. By trying to make that ancient literature “speak” modern science the actual message is inevitably lost in the trash.
How much better for the church if all the effort that has been wasted on YEC thinking had been put into expounding the message the text had for the original audience!
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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