Evolution: don't take it literally

In my previous blog post, quoting Darwin we have Darwin giving the game away: similar language is used today about evolution: I don't take it literally, of course, but literarily; because its not science, but a 'just suppose' fantasy.

Just time: enough of it and...can anything happen?

In his interesting paper “How not to reconcile evolution and creation” (2006) Alex Pruss helpfully (that is, I don’t have to look it up) provides a quote from Darwin on the eye’s (supposed) evolution. Its a completely farcical story, but will serve to allow me to make a point.
The quote:

We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

Richard Dawkin’s gross morphology stories don’t get much better than his level of fantasy (note the language: 'suppose', 'may we not believe', 'might'), I might add, but more to my point is Darwin’s reliance on vast time periods, as well as the number of creatures involved, to do this transformative magic, sans an actual mechanism.
Simply put; if the process is mindless, time is the necessary ingredient. Time is a marker then, of no designer. Pruss’ paper elaborates on this in terms of stochastic explanations.
So the lack of this time in the Bible’s creation account, conversely, is indicative of a designer. Darwin et al have to remove the designer, and the means they use, to hide their overall implausibility, is extended time, in the vain hope that time will allow stochastic processes to achieve what otherwise would need a designer.

Evolution vs? Christianity

Nicely put piece on Evolution vs Christianity, by an atheist or agnostic! Better put than I've heard most Sydney Anglicans able to say!

Mississippi

Mark Twain:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi  River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower  Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

And so with the puffery of evolution!

How dead is dead?

Every so often some theistic-evolutionist bright spark will attempt to contradict the Bible and tell us  no death before A&E's sin doesn't refer to animal death. This great big exegetical secret lets them off the hook and thus the supposed evidence of ancient death (pre-dating A&E) in the fossil record is not a problem for theistic-evolution. and let us in on the great big exegetical secret that this does not include animal death!

For most Anglicans that I've discussed this with, their thinking seems to be dominated by an excessively, and I think, misplaced forensic understanding of death.

They seem to hold who God is and what happens in his creation as being in two different thought worlds. If they are theistic evolutionists, this makes sense, because their theism is usually a conceptual bolt-on to their core world concept of naturalistic evolution.

Unwittingly, thought, they betray their misunderstanding of death, and fail to see it as a breach in both the fabric of the creation, and in God's relationship with his creation as a totality.

The creation per se is the representation of God's nature extended beyond himself. This has to be consistent with who God is (and that is love, if we are to follow the scriptures); God is also thoroughly alive and in relationship within the god-head.

For God, with such a nature to have the very opposite of relationship, life and love anywhere in the creation, would be to undo the representation of himself. He would demonstrate flaws a mile wide in a creation where basic anti-godness (death) was both the 'last enemy' and 'very good'.

It is simply incoherent to maintain death as some sort of inconvenience in the creation, affecting only animals, as though creation has multiple 'departments'. Some have death, others do not. But death in one department is death in all of the creation

And death is the negation, antithesis and reversal of God: it is maximally 'not-god'. It denies him, undoes creation and terminates relationship: love ceases to operate.

In Time

I drove a truck loaded with musical instruments and related hardware from our school's band camp back to the school today.

Our job in unloading the truck was simplified as we were told that the band leader would organise for everything to be put away properly the next day, by band members.

I idly thought to myself: we could just leave everything in the band room and let chance random events sort everything into its proper place.

Ah, but no! If we left it to random events, that is to the 'principle of evolution' it would be likely that we'd have to wait for an enormous amount of time to elapse before the instruments and equipment was in the correct place. Not helpful.

We would also have to rely on energy being converted to meaningful work; and the meaning would have to come from somewhere to achieve the organisation required; where, I wondered? Thus, not just energy: unstructured randomly directed energy is better known as an explosion; also not helpful; we would need structured energy, delivered to achieve an intention. From where?

What we'd have to rely upon is the directed, intelligent activity of people committed to the band's best interests (that is, intelligence motivated, at some level, by love) to achieve in a day what the universe, left to itself would not be able to achieve in a convenient, or even a practical time, or maybe any time at all.

This relates to a theme that I've heard discussed that one of the marks of the application of loving intelligence to the creation is that it proceeds rapidly: to wit, in 6 days. To extend the time to the meaningless durations stipulated in evolutionary writings merges purposeful intelligence with unpurposed randomness: hard to understand, then, how the event sequence of this type of creation bears the mark of a creator: of a loving intelligence.

What counts as a mark of intelligence is the time density of events along an outcome vector: events that in sequence lead to a specific time-space outcome, represented probably as a material change in the configuration of an element in an environment that achieves something meaningful (of course, all this needs greater definitional clarity); but that's the nub of it: the time density an event set along an outcome vector marks one event set as resulting from intelligence, and another set; with a very sparse density, as random; one tells of an author, the other of no author.