one.opinion

The obvious contradiction in terms reveals your unwillingness to consider other viewpoints.

Not in the slightest. God is the Creator of all physical reality. He could have created everything instantly. However, the evidence He left us strongly suggests that He did not. My appreciation of His power is not diminished in the least when I observe the incredible intricacy of His creation.

And I’m rejecting it... again...

I didn’t claim it was. I said that God created it. Yes, but do you believe the Holy Spirit resides in some physical location, or interacts with us on a level that is not physical?

Agreed on the “sixth sense”. But our ability to be in fellowship with God indicates a true part of our “selves” that goes beyond the physical realm. This aspect, and not our biology, is what makes us unique and the “image of God”.

Do you have a spiritual relationship with God? John 4:23-24 New International Version (NIV) 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

Does the Bible say Adam was created perfect? I agree with this part. I agree with this, but this is a straw man. So why couldn’t the “image of God” refer to the addition of a spiritual component? This would be a miraculous case of divine intervention and special creation of the first humans.

Why would one assume that “His image” is physical, rather than spiritual?

Yeah... not looking forward to more of this :-(

As sad as it is, there are many that believe this.

This is a great example of a coronavirus response done right! I hope it remains that way and wish the US could learn from this example and examples from other countries like South Korea.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion. However, I will be bold enough to challenge false assertions and assumptions that are so frequently made by those that dismiss the evidence God has left in His creation as “fairy tale”.

This is not accurate. The existence of fossils does support flooding, but is nowhere close to proof of a global flood. This is a conspiracy theory. It is just too much of a stretch to claim that the existence of fossils proves a global flood when localized floods happen routinely and can also lead to fossil formation.

In all fairness, you should admit this a complete reversal from your statement just a few posts ago: "He can then go high up in the Andes and discover the same fossils there and conclude that the only way they they can get there is if they were washed there through a rise in the water level to that height." You are tacitly admitting your error, but should be forthright that you are changing your position.

Here is a link to some of the major mudslides in recent history. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/famous-mudslides-in-history.html How would roughly 30,000 people die in the 1999 Vargas mudslide in Venezuela if all they needed to do was migrate to higher ground? Natural disasters can easily produce the events needed for fossilization. If you really can't (or won't concede) a simple point like this, then we are both wasting our time trying to discuss anything science-related.

Absolutely! That's why I believe context is very important to passages such as Romans 5. When taken out of context, they seem to show that Adam's sin did indeed bring physical death as a consequence. But when we look at the larger context, it appears clear that the passage speaks of spiritual death. That is clearly an extension of what the passage actually says. The Bible never states anywhere that carnivory is due to the Fall. It is possible, but the Bible clearly does not teach this. We did, indeed, but it is more consistent with the full context of passages like Romans 5 to accept that the entry of death was a spiritual one, and not a physical one. True, Scripture does not support the conclusion that death occurred before the Fall (neither does the Bible discuss biochemistry). However, I do not believe it states that death did NOT occur before the Fall, either. There simply isn't sufficient Biblical support to for a conclusion that completely contradicts natural events. Consider an ecosystem in which nothing ever died. The whole planet would have been covered by mats of microorganisms thousands of years ago. God's curse upon mankind included more toil in food gathering and more difficult childbirth. It would seem like an obvious thing to include that things were going to start dying due to Adam's sin, but there is no mention of this.

Let's come to conclusions about our different views of topics before pushing them aside and moving on to something else. Do you agree or disagree that multiple major floods could have occurred that would explain fossils as you've described? Do you agree or disagree that fossils at mountaintops do not mean that the actual fossilization process took place at elevations near 30,000 feet? Do you agree or disagree that modern large animals should be in the fossil record with dinosaurs if they all perished in the same flood?

Sure, a flood would be a very good explanation for such fossils. But to be evidence of Noah's flood, all of the evidence around each of these fossil finds would have to point to the exact same flood. Massive floods are not uncommon events, and it would be nearly impossible to state (even ignoring radiometric dating of the surrounding rock sediments) that they all came from the same flood. If the fossils were formed at the top of the Andes, an animal would have to float up to the top of a mountain, and then be rapidly buried in sediment. This would not be physically possible. This would require massive amounts of sediments to float to the top of the water level, and then somehow come crashing down. Even YEC scientists acknowledge that the fossils were formed before the mountains (https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/fossil-record/high-dry-sea-creatures/). Virtually all trained geologists would agree that mountains rise over very long periods of time, instead of quite suddenly, as Dr. Snelling states, but they all agree that fossils were not deposited at the top of peaks nearly 30,000 feet high. If this were the case, we would expect large modern animals (elephants, hippos, giraffes, etc) to be buried alongside dinosaurs. However, this mixing of large modern animals with dinosaurs has never been observed. The clear conclusion as that the dinosaurs were fossilized long before the modern animals we now see on the planet. Since civilizations arose along major rivers that flooded annually, it is no surprise that flood stories are rather common. Multiple cultures with flood myths is not strong evidence for a single, global flood. No, evolutionary theory is based on evidence, not dream. Evolution, in it simplest state, is the heritable change in populations over time. We can observe this happen directly. What can be observed directly now can be extrapolated backward through the analysis of the fossil record and the genetic record. I generally think of religion as an active worship of something or someone that is greatly revered. There is no such entity or figure for evolution, it is simply a theory that works very well with massive amount of accumulated information - through the process of inductive reasoning.

I guess that all depends on how you define "religion" and "science". I do know quite a bit about science, but only an amateur at studying religion. But I haven't seen any scientific evidence disputing evolution in quite some time, and I'm not sure what I'm missing from my analysis of Romans 5 that I believe best interprets the passage discussing death in a spiritual sense, rather than physical.

Romans 5? I'm trying to remember who made what Biblical reference. I'm just making sure that your final argument is "biology is complicated, so evolution could not have happened." If you want to rest your case on that, that's fine with me.

If it does, then it should be a reasonable request to ask that you provide evidence from the Bible. Oh, I certainly know it is complex, I've been teaching the subject to college students for over 20 years, but "complex" isn't enough to claim evolution is false. I'd be quite happy to discuss the details of the science with you, but I'll leave that decision to you.

How do you know this? Whatever is leading you to this conclusion, it is not the Bible.

God is not hesitant to require death. If you review his instructions to the Israelites as they begin to enter the Promised Land, that is quite clear. God never exhibits any difficulty with animal death, either. Psalm 104:21 - The young lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. We can agree that God's nature did not change due to the Fall. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

If the death punishment is a spiritual one (which I argue is most consistent with Romans 5), then there is no reason why physical death could not be sanctified.

“Kind” is a rather ambiguous term with no way to precisely define it. There is certainly no Biblical reason to assume that kinds cannot change over time.