Theistic Evolution

[The Barbarian]

Here's a story a friend told me from his time in Asia;

A young man grows up in North Korea, where it's a crime to even talk about Jesus.   All his life, he was aware that something was missing, but he didn't know what.

One day, alone in a field, God touched him.    Not knowing Who it was, only realizing that this was his loving Maker, he fell to his knees and gave himself up to God.

Later, when he managed to escape to the south, he finally learned Who it was who had come to him in that field.   And he became a baptized Christian.

Now the question is, was he saved only when he found out about Jesus and was baptized, or was he saved when God touched him in North Korea?

 

[Starise]

On 8/23/2024 at 10:11 AM, The Barbarian said:

You were very misled about that.   We see it happening now, and it's very obvious.   It is especially obvious to a Christian.    If you accept that we all descended from Adam and Eve, there could have been at most 4 alleles for each gene locus.   But today there are dozens.   All the rest evolved.

We see human populations having evolved differences over the millenia.   One of the most recent and rapid examples is the EPAS1 mutation that exists in Tibetans that allows them to thrive at very high altitudes.

Another is the gene that continues lactase into adulthood.   There are lot of examples.  Would you like to see the evidence for some of them?

Scientists probably couldn't show you how nuclear fusion lines up with the Bible.    There are lots of things that are true that are not in the Bible.

Please don’t use terminologies layman can’t understand to make a point, because well, it doesn’t. 
The only things presented as examples of monkey men were later found to either be hoaxes or to have alternate explanation, ie Lucy.

Humans are still humans. They always have been. Apes are still apes. Always have been. I could do a dig of a 5000 year old city and make a skeleton from the scattered pieces with a pig jaw and parts from several different things to come up with a “ monkey man”. It’s like making a puzzle where you get to decide the pieces:)

Yes human populations with an emphasis on human have adapted to some things not all hereditary. Not a solid argument for TE.

 

 

[Starise]

On 8/23/2024 at 10:45 AM, The Barbarian said:

Which is like showing how nuclear fusion has "consistency" with the Bible.    Nothing in the Bible rules out evolution, which is to be expected, since we directly observe it happening.   Some modern interpretations of the Bible are not consistent with observed evolution.   But that's a different issue.

So what you’re telling me is you don’t have an explanation, and since we can’t see the fruition to the theory to the extent evolutionists want to push it, what do we have?

Modern interpretations? How many ways can we read a thing and make it work? Try doing that with anything else. 
 

So far as who is supposed to support evolution. That never bothered me. I am concerned with accuracy.

[The Barbarian]

52 minutes ago, Starise said:

So what you’re telling me is you don’t have an explanation

No.   Even if there's no support for fusion or evolution in the Bible, we see both of them going on in the universe.    The explanation is that God didn't see them as essential to His word to us.

53 minutes ago, Starise said:

and since we can’t see the fruition to the theory to the extent evolutionists want to push it,

How far do you think "evolutionists" (whoever they are) want to push it?

53 minutes ago, Starise said:

Modern interpretations?

Yes.   YE creationism was invented by the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 20th century.

54 minutes ago, Starise said:

How many ways can we read a thing and make it work?

How many different interpretations of Genesis have Christians made?   Countless numbers of them.

55 minutes ago, Starise said:

So far as who is supposed to support evolution.

It is notable that people who understand genetics and biology generally, tend to accept what they see in nature.  

56 minutes ago, Starise said:

I am concerned with accuracy.

It's why Christians who know about the evidence, tend to accept evolution.

 

[The Barbarian]

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Please don’t use terminologies layman can’t understand to make a point, because well, it doesn’t. 

If you don't know what alleles are, you probably shouldn't be telling people about the issue.   But alleles are just different versions of a gene.   I should have made that clear.  New alleles evolve in a population by mutation.   Many of them don't do much of anything different.   A few are harmful and tend to be removed from the population and a few are useful and tend to spread through the population.

 "Useful" and "harmful" are determined by the environment, so changes in environment generally mean more evolutionary change.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

The only things presented as examples of monkey men

That's a common misconception.   Humans could not have evolved from monkeys, which are too evolved in other directions to have produced even early hominids.   No such thing has been proposed by scientists.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

were later found to either be hoaxes or to have alternate explanation, ie Lucy.

Lucy isn't human.   She's a very early bipedal ape close to to the line that gave rise to the genus Homo.  

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Humans are still humans.

Quite a few species of them.   We are the only one left.  

1 hour ago, Starise said:

I could do a dig of a 5000 year old city and make a skeleton from the scattered pieces with a pig jaw and parts from several different things to come up with a “ monkey man”.

No, that wouldn't work.   If you had any idea of comparative anatomy, you'd know that no paleontologist would confuse that with a human jaw.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

It’s like making a puzzle where you get to decide the pieces:)

See above.   It makes a good story, until you look at the evidence.   Then the creationist stories fall apart.

1 hour ago, Starise said:

Yes human populations with an emphasis on human have adapted to some things not all hereditary.

We've evolved in a lot of different ways, all by genetic change.   No point in denial.   Look at the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals. 

There's only one human race left today.    But that wasn't always true.

 

[RV_Wizard]

8 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

Christians say it is.   And they get to decide. 

No.  Christ decides.“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

8 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

None of that is in the Creed.  

the holy catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins,

The church of Rome is not the only pathway to salvation.  The things I mentioned are all beliefs promoted by the Catholic church.  Infant baptism does nothing.  Baptism is an affirmation of your new life; buried in the likeness of His death, risen in the likeness of His resurrection.  The other practices of the church are simply rituals.  There is only ONE way to be forgiven.  That's through the blood of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of man.  No mortal man can forgive anything.  Only the Lord can do that.

8 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

And not everyone who has said "Lord, Lord" will be in the sheep; only those who did the will of the Father.

Do you believe you are doing the will of the Father by claiming that His word is not truth; that His days are not literal days; that He did NOT create man in His image; that sin and death did NOT come into the world through one man; that Adam was NOT created from dust and Eve from a rib; that the fourth commandment is based on a six day creation that didn't happen; that there was NOT a great flood which destroyed all but those on the ark; and anything else that gets in the way of your false teaching of evolution?  You have made all of these claims in contrast to God's word.  How is that doing His will?

Please explain.

[RV_Wizard]

2 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

YE creationism was invented by the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 20th century.

No.  Perhaps the term was coined there, but Adam knew He was created by God, so it's at least 57 centuries old.  You like to credit Henry Morris, who started a branch of study called "Creation Science," but certainly Moses believed the creation account when God revealed it to him.  Also, the Creator must have believed it when He carved the Fourth Commandment onto stone tablets.

Repeating a lie a thousand times will not make it truth.

[The Barbarian]

YE creationism was invented by the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 20th century.

53 minutes ago, RV_Wizard said:

No. 

Yes. 

Most Christians assume that young-earth creationism has always been a core tenet of American fundamentalist Christianity—but this linkage is more tenuous than is often presumed. The story of how American fundamentalists—and, by extension, many conservative evangelicals—came to associate young-earth creationism with biblical Christianity is one that all contemporary Christians should understand.

Published in response to the early twentieth century’s challenges to Scripture’s trustworthiness, The Fundamentals, a collection of 90 essays, addresses a wide range of issues relevant to core Christian doctrine, including creation and evolution (see part 1). Though the essayists present sharp critiques of Darwinian evolution, they do not promote young-earth creationism. Despite the belief that fundamentalist Christianity and young-earth creationism have always been intertwined, the connection wasn’t forged until the anti-evolution campaigns of the 1920s.

...

Though Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, founder of the interdenominational World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, and William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate, were the most formidable defenders of fundamental Christianity in the early twentieth century, they and many other fundamentalists of the time, were not young-earth creationists. Although somewhat ambivalent, Bryan conceded that the universe certainly could be millions of years old and that all life-forms, including humans, could have been created by God more than a few thousand years ago—a point that he admitted under cross-examination by Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes Trial in 1925. By far the most influential proponent of young-earth creationism in the 1920s and 1930s was George McCready Price, the acknowledged “father” of modern young-earth creationism.

George McCready Price

Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist¹ and a self-described “geologist,” had nothing beyond an elementary school-level education in the sciences. However, historian Ronald Numbers points out that Price “considered it a virtue that he had never been infected with the disease of ‘universityitis.’”

After laboring in relative obscurity for 15 years, Price’s New Light on the Doctrine of Creation (1917) finally brought him recognition beyond the narrow parameters of Seventh-Day Adventism, and in 1923, he published his magnum opus, a 700-page textbook entitled The New Geology. As in his other works, Price critiques uniformitarian geology and offered as an alternative his new catastrophism theory, contending that the Genesis flood was the central geological event in Earth history. Coming as Price’s ideas did in the midst of the contentious controversies over Darwinism and secularism, many fundamentalists found him to be a useful ally whether they totally accepted his overarching theme or not. With the 1929 publication of Back to Creationism by Harold Clark (a protégé of Price’s), young-earth creationism was repackaged as the new “science of creationism.”

...

Young-earth creationism continued to meet stiff resistance from most educated Christians and virtually all believing scientists from the 1920s into the 1960s.⁸ Yet as time went on more fundamentalist pastors and evangelists accepted many if not all of its major tenets. Then in 1961, with the publication of The Genesis Flood by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, young-earth “scientific creationism” became a mainstream doctrine for most fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals in much the same way that many considered dispensational eschatology a core tenet of the faith.⁹ In 1963, Morris founded the Creation Research Society, the first significant young-earth research institute to provide an alternative “scientific” explanation for their understanding of the age of the earth. Over the next several decades, other similar organizations cropped up both in the United States and abroad. 

https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/how-young-earth-creationism-became-a-core-tenet-of-american-fundamentalism-part-2

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

but certainly Moses believed the creation account when God revealed it to him.

He just didn't believe in the SDA re-interpretation, that was spread to fundamentalists by SDA missionary George McCready Price.

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Also, the Creator must have believed it when He carved the Fourth Commandment onto stone tablets.

But notice, He didn't include those modern revisions, either.

 

[The Barbarian]

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Christians say it is.   And they get to decide. 

 

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

No. 

Yes.  Christians get to define who they are.     The Apostle's Creed is what they chose to represent their beliefs.   

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

the holy catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins,

Notice the small c.    "Catholic" in terms of all Christians, Roman Catholic or not, are part of the Body of Christ.

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

There is only ONE way to be forgiven.  That's through the blood of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of man. 

If you're willing to accept that much, why not accept all of it?   What about the Apostle's Creed do you find objectionable?

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Do you believe you are doing the will of the Father by claiming that His word is not truth

If you think you have to misrepresent what I say, that's not a good reflection on you.  You know as well as everyone else here that I have not claimed that God's word is not truth.    I'm pointing out that your interpretation of His word is not truth.   You are clearly angry and have let your spite take control.   I forgive you, but try to do better.

You are not God.   You don't get to tell Christians how to interpret God's word.    Calm yourself and try to do better.

 

 

Edited August 25, 2024 by The Barbarian

[RV_Wizard]

45 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

Most Christians assume that young-earth creationism has always been a core tenet of American fundamentalist Christianity—

This may be a shock to you, but America is only 248 years old.  Genesis was written 26 centuries ago.  I may remind that that you have already learned this.

In its first 16 centuries the church held to a young earth. Earth was several thousand years old, was created quickly in six 24-hour days, and was later submerged under a worldwide flood.  source  Were there skeptics?  Yep.  Still are.  That doesn't change the FACT that virtually NOBODY contested the six day creation until about the 17th century.

53 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

He just didn't believe in the SDA re-interpretation, that was spread to fundamentalists by SDA missionary George McCready Price.

Your statement has no basis in reality.  Do you really think you're going to convince ANYONE they the author of Genesis didn't believe it was literally true?  You keep spewing this lie that people believed Genesis was untrue up until the 20th century and that somehow belief in the Bible as written is a new interpretation.  Learn this.  For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.  These words were carved by GOD onto a stone tablet.  The seventh day is holy; not the seventh year or century.  We believe in the six day creation because GOD CONFIRMED IT!!  What part of the fourth commandment do you think is a modern revision??