Theological Problems with God-guided Evolution

[Guest]

1 hour ago, AandW_Rootbeer said:

I never claimed I was part of the YE crowd.

1. Toss what in, like a 6 Day Creation means 6 literal days explained in Exodus?

9Six days may you work and perform all your labor,

10but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your God; you shall perform no labor, neither you, your son, your daughter, your manservant, your maidservant, your beast, nor your stranger who is in your cities.

11For [in] six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.

There was evening and morning the first day.  So what is the significance of evening coming first in the day?  Is a day 12 hours or 24 hours?  Are we sure we know what a day is?

1 hour ago, AandW_Rootbeer said:

2. Moses did include Genetics but on the surface level with a list of every tribe of man ending in ites, like Moabites, Hittites, the Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, Sumerians, Cushites, etc.   There is a distinction these people are not the same as the Hebrew Peoples.

3. Sun to rule the Day and Moon to rule the Night is an easy deduction of rotation.

Well, Moses does say that the Nephilim survived Noah's Flood.

(Genesis 6:1)  Now it came about, when mankind began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them,

(Genesis 6:2)  that the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

(Genesis 6:3)  Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not remain with man forever, because he is also flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.”

(Genesis 6:4)  The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of mankind, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who <i>were</i> of old, men of renown.  [NASB-2020]

1 hour ago, AandW_Rootbeer said:

You are so consumed with the deception of Evolution, you're willing to destroy God's Written Account for it!

In the Reconstruction of the land, God fashioned plants, animals and humans from the existing materials already on the land.  His breath made us what we are.  I believe you are correct that God did this in six days plus one day of rest as a guide for mankind.  But I understand how Theistic Evolutionists, Day - Age Theorists, Gap Theorists, can read those same scriptures and interpret them differently.  I have vacillated back and forth on the length of Reconstruction.  I can't be dogmatic about it but I'm leaning toward 24 hour days.  But Genesis 1:1-1:2 still means an Old Earth Creation.

[one.opinion]

4 hours ago, AandW_Rootbeer said:

However, under the neutral theory, the whole process is governed by chance, whereas under the selection theory, selection plays a major role and only selectively advantageous mutants can fix in the population.

If what I believe is true, and God used the process of evolution in His creative purpose, there is no reason to believe that what we see today is a product of chance. In fact, it would be quite the opposite. God creating from His position outside time could have laid out all of the astronomically large number of necessary mutations in a single act. What may look random from our perspective could be very intentional from His.

[Sparks]

8 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

Evolutionary theory is indifferent to how life began.

Well, it's become that way because it's such a wimpy theory that cannot make a case about the origins of life, but it once tried to explain how the universe, the Earth, and life began.  Of course it cannot explain the genesis matter, energy or life because, well you know, it is a wimpy, lame and dumb theory that is still just a theory.

8 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

Darwin, for example, thought that God just created the first living things.

Yeah, that's because God did create the first living things and he did so in days, not trillions of years. 

Darwin was trained as a pastor.  He was not trained as a scientist, at all.  He, wisely, was waiting for the evidence for his theory and died waiting for it, but lately people like yourself claim it's all true only without the observation.  

Earnest Haekle was a real scientist, but he is the fraud who tried to speed the evidence along, and was debunked as liar in the 1860s (fake embryo drawings), and then you have the Miller Urey Experiment in the 1950's which produced 82% tar, and 13% carboxylic acid (both toxic to life), and 2% amino acids, which entirely fails in nature, but which is taught today as truth.   So, all lies and no truth. 

[Sparks]

4 hours ago, one.opinion said:

If what I believe is true, and God used the process of evolution in His creative purpose, there is no reason to believe that what we see today is a product of chance. In fact, it would be quite the opposite. God creating from His position outside time could have laid out all of the astronomically large number of necessary mutations in a single act. What may look random from our perspective could be very intentional from His.

You have to ignore what the Bible says God did to believe this bunk.  Why think that God is so cruel, inept and inefficient with his creations as to let them evolve, anyway?  Incidentally, you never answer the question that if Adam brought death into the world, according to the Bible, then how could man evolve from primordial soup, and all those deaths for trillions of years, lead up to Adam's eventual creation?

Today you see the Creationists Orchard, not Darwin's tree of life.  This is observed today that all animals came from their own kind; that a dog came from a pair of dogs, not primordial soup.  It's such a dumb theory that a dog crawled out of the primordial soup, but died off because he could not find his mate who had not evolved yet. 

I will ask you the question, why is it so difficult to believe that God did exactly what he said he did?  If you are going to say that Darwinian Evolution is what we see today, you had better re-examine that stupid theory that we do not see today.

[The Barbarian]

Evolutionary theory is indifferent to how life began.

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

Well, it's become that way

No, it was never about the origin of life.   Darwin just thought God created the first living things.    Because many YE creationists realize that they can't refute evolution, they try to make it about other things, hoping that might work out better.   

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

but it once tried to explain how the universe, the Earth, and life began.

Nope.   Someone's abused your trust in them.   From the beginning, it was about the way living populations changed, and nothing else.   Would you like me to show you, again?

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

it is a wimpy, lame and dumb theory that is still just a theory.

Well, let's ask a YE creationist who actually knows what the theory is:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

I say these things not because I'm crazy or because I've "converted" to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution.

Dr. Todd Wood

https://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2009/09/truth-about-evolution.html

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

Yeah, that's because God did create the first living things and he did so in days, not trillions of years. 

That's your addition to scripture.   As you saw, the text itself shows that the "yom" of Genesis are not literal days.

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

Darwin was trained as a pastor.  He was not trained as a scientist, at all. 

No, you're wrong about that, too.   In England, many priests were trained in biology.   Darwin was so well respected that he was elected a member of the Royal Society, the most important scientific society in England.   And not just for his theory of evolution.   He also discovered the origin of Pacific atolls, and correctly classified cirripeds as arthropods, a major discovery in taxonomy.   

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

Earnest Haekle was a real scientist, but he is the fraud who tried to speed the evidence along, and was debunked as liar in the 1860s (fake embryo drawings),

YE creationists are infuriated that modern biology textbooks use photographs of embryos, showing the same things.   It's really amusing when they discover that Haeckel's hypothesis is now mentioned only as a cautionary tale.   The reason mammalian embryos appear to be first fish, then amphibians, then reptiles, then mammals, is not that embryos recapitulate the development of phyla, but because evolution builds new things on old platforms.    If that puzzles you, we can talk about it.  Would you like to learn about it?

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

It's such a dumb theory that a dog crawled out of the primordial soup,

But here we find YE creationists still peddling it, long after scientists have repeatedly debunked that strawman.

1 hour ago, Sparks said:

and then you have the Miller Urey Experiment

You've gotten confused again.   That's not what evolution is about.   Try to stay focused.

 

[Sparks]

5 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

You've gotten confused again.   That's not what evolution is about.   Try to stay focused.

You should take your own advice here.

[The Barbarian]

4 hours ago, one.opinion said:

If what I believe is true, and God used the process of evolution in His creative purpose, there is no reason to believe that what we see today is a product of chance. In fact, it would be quite the opposite. God creating from His position outside time could have laid out all of the astronomically large number of necessary mutations in a single act. What may look random from our perspective could be very intentional from His.

For a Christian, it's really not a problem, anyway:

'The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency'

St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1)

God is the Creator, and can use necessity or chance in his purposes.

 

[The Barbarian]

Just now, Sparks said:

You should take your own advice here.

Remember, you learned that evolution is not about the origin of life?    Try to keep that in mind, and you'll do better.

 

[Sparks]

1 minute ago, The Barbarian said:

For a Christian, it's really not a problem, anyway:

'The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency'

St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1)

God is the Creator, and can use necessity or chance in his purposes.

It's a huge problem to ignore what God said he did.

[The Barbarian]

3 minutes ago, Sparks said:

It's a huge problem to ignore what God said he did.

I don't think you're intentionally ignoring what He said.    You've just got a new interpretation of it.   Fortunately, He doesn't care if you approve of the way He did it.