Theistic evolution confronts a major problem.
This idea proposes that evolution occured and was 'used' by God as his creative mechanism.
It is yet to be explained how a long history of waste, futile genetic dead ends, the death of the weak or less adapted and the relentless march of chance either reflects and fetches praise of the God who is love, or represents the basically personal nature of the Christian 'first philosophy' to use Plantiga's term.
Evolution is impersonal, de-humanising, loveless, and requires waste, destruction and death on its march to oblivion. Nothing like what we read of the warm love in fellowship between God and creature in Genesis 1, and, implied in Proverbs 3:19, the exercise of God's wisdom in achieving his ends. Indeed, evolution reveals the very opposite: haphazard foolishness and dissipation.
27 October 2018
4 October 2018
Wright and Christ
NT Wright has recently been to a Biologos conference and inferred that if Christ is creator, then evolution makes sense. It seems that Wright looses the plot as to the ontology of the Bible: creation in Genesis does what he sees as important in the temple, it brings God and man to fellowship.
In creation this is only so if the creation's reference is tangibly real, otherwise it refers to some other thing that, if it is evolution, points away from God (e.g. Peter Singer's views on Darwin de-linking humanity and Christian tradition), but whatever it is, it is not what the Bible reports and therefore we cannot rely on the creation account to show God in fellowship with man, or man as God's image.
Therefore, there emerges pretty quickly an epistemological problem: which bits of Genesis 1-11 attach to what is real, and which do not; and how would we know.
In creation this is only so if the creation's reference is tangibly real, otherwise it refers to some other thing that, if it is evolution, points away from God (e.g. Peter Singer's views on Darwin de-linking humanity and Christian tradition), but whatever it is, it is not what the Bible reports and therefore we cannot rely on the creation account to show God in fellowship with man, or man as God's image.
Therefore, there emerges pretty quickly an epistemological problem: which bits of Genesis 1-11 attach to what is real, and which do not; and how would we know.
4 September 2018
23 August 2018
17 August 2018
Darwin's silly idea
In a recent episode of Tony Robinson's Britians Ancient Tracks: The North Downs Way, he came to Down House, Darwin's family home; and had this to say:
My last stop on the North Downs Way is at the house of someone who knew these downs intimately and drew a conclusion from them that turned religion on its head.Note the emphasised words. Robinson is an 'ordinary bloke'. Not a scientist, not an academic or an expert in the history of science and ideas. He's a 'simple' film maker, so what he says represents what the ordinary everyday understanding is; and here it is, of Darwinian evolution: it doesn't point to God for him or his typical viewer; it obliterates God, it certainly changes our understanding of us within the universe and our place in the world, because by Darwin's theory, basic reality is not personal, not about love and relationships, but about mute, meaningless, randomly interacting buffeting matter. Mindless, loveless and without hope, will or significance, because the only significance-givers: minded beings, are mere arrangements of matter in a cosmos that is basically matter. So nothing 'matters'!
Charles Darwin is one of the greatest thinkers in history. And his theories on nature made us re-examine our place in the world. In 1842 after his round-the-world trip on HMS Beagle, Darwin moved to Down House, just off the North Downs Way.
[narrative about his study decor]
And it was here that Charles Darwin wrote a book that transformed our understanding of us within the universe and that book was ‘The Origin of Species’. And he wrote it here. I think that’s really exciting. Darwin’s book ‘The Origin of Species’ marked a dramatic turning point in scientific thought, that life on earth was a process of evolution and not an act of God.
The rhetoric of theistic evolution falls flat for the ordinary person; evolution doesn't turn them to a creator, but inward to their own reference point: themselves and their 'feel good' scale of evaluation. A dead end!
14 August 2018
The risible madness of evo-pop
From Inspiring Leadership by Fleming and Delves (p. 60), Matt Nixon's chapter:
2. our brains didn't 'need' to be any particular size; evolution doesn't work on 'need' but on selectable chemical accidents.
3. for some people the 'potential' of the brain is unused; so most of the potential must be selectively neutral but, as a big energy user, will be selected out over time. Evolution does not and cannot anticipate possible future states, it is a 'looking backwards' mechanism.
4. how did the brains evolve to accomodate a 'need' for social processing which is only done by the brain? Something usually 'accommodates' what is previously there!
In short a bunch of question-begging teleological assertions, that import into materialist evolution some kind of perceptive force that 'guides' it to a sought future.
Completely incoherent nonsense, of course and the usual popular mumbo-jumbo mangling of an already improbable hypothesis.
We have not evolved nearly as far from the apes as we like to think we have. Indeed, one of the most intriguing quesitons about the human species is why our brains ever needed to get as big as they have. For some people that is a sign that we have not yet fully exploited the potential of our brains, but for others it is a sign that they mainly evolved the way they did to accommodate our tremendoues need for social processing (quoting Lieberman, 2018, Social, Why our Brains are Wired to Connect)1. the standard theory is that we evolved from 'ape-like' organisms, not apes per se.
2. our brains didn't 'need' to be any particular size; evolution doesn't work on 'need' but on selectable chemical accidents.
3. for some people the 'potential' of the brain is unused; so most of the potential must be selectively neutral but, as a big energy user, will be selected out over time. Evolution does not and cannot anticipate possible future states, it is a 'looking backwards' mechanism.
4. how did the brains evolve to accomodate a 'need' for social processing which is only done by the brain? Something usually 'accommodates' what is previously there!
In short a bunch of question-begging teleological assertions, that import into materialist evolution some kind of perceptive force that 'guides' it to a sought future.
Completely incoherent nonsense, of course and the usual popular mumbo-jumbo mangling of an already improbable hypothesis.
8 June 2018
Notes on paganism
Just for the record, some notes I wrote while waiting in a hosptial (I used a form headed "Integrated Notes for Nursing, Medical and Allied Health Staff"...so my notes throw that into a risible spin!)
Paganism and invented stories of creation.
Interpolation of factors between creator and creation = creator's information about creation has no meaning within that creation; it corresponds to no actual relational or intercausal set that is ontologically concordant with the parameters of the creation as accounted for in Gen 1.
Theistic evolution, etc. put an unknown (unstated in scripture) principle between God and his creation and set his account to non-correspondence with the world we are in, and in which terms it is itself set.
Pagan = a hidden mystery behind appearances: the creation account becomes an 'appearance' not negated by being recounted by another. [I think I knew what I meant when I jotted that down...]
The creation account tells us that there is no second order reality to which we need to refer to understand the reality it presents in concord with the one we experience, relate to and are contained by.
No platonic 'forms' or 'evolution' principle; e.g. creatures reproduce after their kind, not some other kind.
Paganism is the quest fo a hidden second order or inversely a primary locus of meaning that gives sense to the intercausal set of the real world. Creation account tells us there is not a hidden second order, but that the only players in this game are creator and creatures.
Paganism and invented stories of creation.
Interpolation of factors between creator and creation = creator's information about creation has no meaning within that creation; it corresponds to no actual relational or intercausal set that is ontologically concordant with the parameters of the creation as accounted for in Gen 1.
Theistic evolution, etc. put an unknown (unstated in scripture) principle between God and his creation and set his account to non-correspondence with the world we are in, and in which terms it is itself set.
Pagan = a hidden mystery behind appearances: the creation account becomes an 'appearance' not negated by being recounted by another. [I think I knew what I meant when I jotted that down...]
The creation account tells us that there is no second order reality to which we need to refer to understand the reality it presents in concord with the one we experience, relate to and are contained by.
No platonic 'forms' or 'evolution' principle; e.g. creatures reproduce after their kind, not some other kind.
Paganism is the quest fo a hidden second order or inversely a primary locus of meaning that gives sense to the intercausal set of the real world. Creation account tells us there is not a hidden second order, but that the only players in this game are creator and creatures.
1 June 2018
Music
Mark Pentecost of Anglicare runs a music program for Anglicare residents using acapella ensembles. He explained this on TV that it touches the deepest parts of the psyche, important for people with dementia, becuase it harks back to a time before there were musical instruments.
This refers possibly to a narrow slice of early history, because we read in Genesis 4:21 of "Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe."
There in the fourth generation of humanity two musical instruments were known! OK, so the previous three generations just hummed, but I wouldn't think that acapella has a greater musical connection with us than a brass band. Its just that most Anglicans have shelved the early history of God's creation and have absorbed and therefore defer to the world-starts-with-material game.
This refers possibly to a narrow slice of early history, because we read in Genesis 4:21 of "Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe."
There in the fourth generation of humanity two musical instruments were known! OK, so the previous three generations just hummed, but I wouldn't think that acapella has a greater musical connection with us than a brass band. Its just that most Anglicans have shelved the early history of God's creation and have absorbed and therefore defer to the world-starts-with-material game.
31 May 2018
The scent of the lion
While out for a walk my mind meandered to consider what an ideal dog repellant might be...maybe lion scent would do the trick. One sniff of a lion and dog is out of there! But then, why? Why does the dog have a view about its mortality that it wants to avoid death?
In fact, in a naturalist conception, why life? Why do genes impel themselves into the future with ostensible purpose? It seems impossible to avoid at least implying purposeful action at every point in the course of life.
But whence purpose? Purpose is teleological, it is about something that is not, materially. Nor could we propose with any confidence that life ‘just is’, because it then takes of on its path dense with purpose. The purpose that came from nowhere and has, itself, no...purpose.
Anyway, genes have no purpose; there is no place in them for a view of either the future or the past, they exist mutely in the present. They are not, as long chains even existent themselves as a ‘brute’ fact, or as (brute) conductors of information. They cannot be as their information content and its outcomes are contingent, not given, and as soon as the long double helix is cut off from its chemical home falls apart and ceases to be functional. Highly contingent from the get go.
Evolution has to imply the immaterial, it has to conjure an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ from the get-go, in a fundamentally incoherent, internally inconsistent move that makes the idea of evolution a risible concoction that cannot explain itself in its own terms.
Similarly non-credible is the oft mouthed claim that science is conducted on the basis of ‘methodological naturalism’. That is, for the day in day out work of the scientist no assumption needs to be made in regards to a Creator-God for the science to be done.
Hang on, though. Not quite. We here treat the path made by positivism: positivism cannot explain itself in its own terms, and so collapses in a smoking pile, as does methodological naturalism. As soon as naturalism is qualified, indeed as soon as it is uttered, it makes inevitable immaterial references that are outside its bounds.
What references?
To the subject as independent of the object and the object being a thing shared by all subjects, for starters. That the perception of the object is a real event and not merely a configuration in the brain (which would make any utterances about this mere reports on the brain’s configuration with no necessary or reliable connection with the object specifically, and the world outside the subject in general).
Naturalism itself is a particular idea about the world and the subject, it is not a ‘real’ thing. Thus, methodological naturalism is a cloak for metaphysical naturalism, which trades on the credit of Christian theology, specifically that brought by the doctrine of Creation (objective knowable external world and communicable reliability of subjects in their regard for the external world). And it, of course is not explained by naturalism (except in a reductive sense), but refers back to those non-material ideas for its get-go. If those ideas are just molecular configurations (also a non-material idea), then how do they give us any information (another non-material thing) about the real world (if there is such a thing)?
In fact, in a naturalist conception, why life? Why do genes impel themselves into the future with ostensible purpose? It seems impossible to avoid at least implying purposeful action at every point in the course of life.
But whence purpose? Purpose is teleological, it is about something that is not, materially. Nor could we propose with any confidence that life ‘just is’, because it then takes of on its path dense with purpose. The purpose that came from nowhere and has, itself, no...purpose.
Anyway, genes have no purpose; there is no place in them for a view of either the future or the past, they exist mutely in the present. They are not, as long chains even existent themselves as a ‘brute’ fact, or as (brute) conductors of information. They cannot be as their information content and its outcomes are contingent, not given, and as soon as the long double helix is cut off from its chemical home falls apart and ceases to be functional. Highly contingent from the get go.
Evolution has to imply the immaterial, it has to conjure an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ from the get-go, in a fundamentally incoherent, internally inconsistent move that makes the idea of evolution a risible concoction that cannot explain itself in its own terms.
Similarly non-credible is the oft mouthed claim that science is conducted on the basis of ‘methodological naturalism’. That is, for the day in day out work of the scientist no assumption needs to be made in regards to a Creator-God for the science to be done.
Hang on, though. Not quite. We here treat the path made by positivism: positivism cannot explain itself in its own terms, and so collapses in a smoking pile, as does methodological naturalism. As soon as naturalism is qualified, indeed as soon as it is uttered, it makes inevitable immaterial references that are outside its bounds.
What references?
To the subject as independent of the object and the object being a thing shared by all subjects, for starters. That the perception of the object is a real event and not merely a configuration in the brain (which would make any utterances about this mere reports on the brain’s configuration with no necessary or reliable connection with the object specifically, and the world outside the subject in general).
Naturalism itself is a particular idea about the world and the subject, it is not a ‘real’ thing. Thus, methodological naturalism is a cloak for metaphysical naturalism, which trades on the credit of Christian theology, specifically that brought by the doctrine of Creation (objective knowable external world and communicable reliability of subjects in their regard for the external world). And it, of course is not explained by naturalism (except in a reductive sense), but refers back to those non-material ideas for its get-go. If those ideas are just molecular configurations (also a non-material idea), then how do they give us any information (another non-material thing) about the real world (if there is such a thing)?
12 May 2018
Symbolic eh?
5. Read Genesis 3.7-24. In these verses we see the consequences of human sin in the breakdown of relationships between people and people and God. In this highly symbolic section we see a reality that is still with us today. What area of brokenness troubles you the most?As soon as a part of scripture is identified as symbolic, I get wary. To regard something as a symbol threatens its dereification. It makes it 'art' not 'life'. Art comments on life and relationship, it is replete with symbols and representations, but it is not, in itself real life; its a type of decorative communication about real life.
So when something in the Bible is declared to be symbolic, one first has to ask, symbolic of what? Of what concretely is it a symbol (and if we can't say, then its hard to declare it to be symbolic; maybe we should instead say that as modern Westerners we are just uncomfortable with it). Perhaps of 'a reality that is still with us today'. But if it is our reality, why would we need a symbol?
What the passage does is give to us the source of the current reality. Is the source a symbol of the source? How would we know? Has the current reality been always with us? In which case it doesn't need a source, but is inherent in the creation (as the problem only emerges when the face reading of Genesis 1-3 is denied, then the word 'creation' may be erroneous, and we should just say 'cosmos' or 'reality' as something that is unbound from God's creative acts that we've just denied).
And if it is a symbol, what is the connection with our non-symbolic experience of the world as a subject? Where does symbol stop and concrete start?
I doubt that there is an independent epistemic basis for the declaration when our topic is a type of 'first philosophy' topic; that is, about the start of it all, so perhaps we are all just symbols of something else, our relationships are symbols of something else, and our concrete experience of death, pain, suffering and frustration is not due to actual estrangement from God, but is a mere symbol of some other actual thing.
No, it just doesn't wash.
So what is so symbolic about the passage? I think it is just that we have trouble with a talking snake (maybe all animals talked pre-fall...and how would we know they didn't...or did), and an actual tree being a reminder of a covenant. And what a simple gracious reminder. Nothing complicated to do, just remember the God-man relationship by your action of not taking the fruit. A fruit! Nothing to interfere with an enjoyable life, and it self demonstrating the mercy, graciousness and love of God; actually!
8 May 2018
Letter on God using evolution
I recently read your 1997 article in JETS on theistic
evolution. I acknowledge that this was written some time ago, and that your
interests may have shifted over the intervening period, but, on the assumption
that you have maintained some connection with the thinking in this paper; I
would like to make some comments.
In a debate as complex and challenging as the one you have
addressed, it was refreshing that you distinguished between different usages of
the concept ‘evolution’. I also appreciated your canvassing of some of the more
obvious theological issues (I say ‘more obvious’ not to downplay them, as I
think much work remains to tease out the implications of the points that you
made).
The nub of the problem, is, as you identify, that theistic
evolution has more of evolution than ‘theism’, at least of the biblical
variety, and subsumes biblical considerations under materialist/surmised
mechanistic ones.
A couple of aspects of the attempt to blend the biblical
doctrine of creation and contemporary framing of the origins ‘story’, I think
go more deeply into how we understand God and his relation to us (which of
course the salient issue of the fall and its counter in God’s redemption
opens).
In brief, to assert evolution as basic to the formation of
life as we see it, makes a representation about both God and the cosmos that
differs from the representation that God himself makes in the Bible, at many
points. It says something about God which God doesn’t say!
At root, it makes God not an author in direct relationship
with his creation, contrary to what the Bible sets out, and the creation thus
as consistent with who God is, but an author who is hidden, or occulted by
intervening principles which in themselves not just obscure his hand, but
negate it entirely. Hard then, it is, to align evolution even if ‘theistic’
with God pointing to his being creator as the basis of worship, especially
throughout the prophets.
This voids the real dependence of the creation on the
creator and allows the deist view to run riot and invert the relationship of
creator and creature, to enclose the God within the creation; the failing of
all the ANE creation myths that I’ve read in that they all presuppose a cosmos
at some level.
In the creation account God sets out the marks of his
activity (and ReMine, for example would say that the marks remain patent) in
his close and immediate involvement with the components of the creation. They
are not independent and not the result of mechanism, but all the result of
intention, underscoring that person-hood (God’s) is ontologically basic,
whereas to push God into an occult role makes some equally occult principle as
basic, I think.
As a result, the cosmos is ‘de-godded’. God as an effective
and involved creator: which one who is love would be expected to be, is
removed, and a void is opened up that non-love, exemplified in materialism,
fills; but it is a faux filling, because the filling is beyond human/personal
engagement and is not relationally accessible (personal relationship, that is).
De-godding re-configures the cosmos, ‘reality’, in
ontological terms, and the core of reality being God’s wisdom at work through
love in relationship is gone, to be replaced by the echo of a plea for
significance that seems to be pre-supposed in almost every human activity, and
the rest of life before human consideration (that is, in the presence of man as
worshipping creature place over the creation to care for it).
De-godding also makes Adam’s naming the animals a
meaningless gesture. With God patent and involved in the creation as we
experience it (e.g. made the kinds of animals, not a pathway where chemicals
could become cells, could become animals…maybe) the naming is steward’s
response to his lord’s lovingly knowing his creation. Adam, therefore also now
knows it in terms that are congruent with his being the steward.
A de-godded cosmos is one where God is no longer able to
demonstrate his ‘god-ness’ to us for us to know him, but one where the focus of
our gaze ends at the creature, and that in its mute form: dirt and energy, and
tells us nothing about outselves. Redemption then drifts to myth instead of
re-connecting us with what really is.
Finally, if Genesis 1 doesn’t convey information about the
cosmos, in terms that make sense in the cosmos, and correspond to what they
claim to describe: that is the events set out as occurring in space and time,
and predicated on the same categorical arrangement that we would meaningfully
apply; then they tell us nothing, and cannot, by telling us something other
than what happened, what in fact happened in summative terms (contrary to the
well worn irrationality that the creation account doesn’t tell us what God did,
but that he is creator). Well, he is only ‘creator’ on account of him telling
us what he did. If we deny that, we deny that he is creator; which is where
theistic-evolution must leave us.
7 May 2018
The tree of life
I recently watched a re-run of Attenborough's Tree of Life documentary. A paean to evolution.
It provided a great summary of doctrinaire evolutionary boosting, which I had expected. In so doing it provided a wonderful succession of conflation of fact and presumption, misinformation, intellectual slight of hand and fallacious logic, which was a bonus.
If I was to run a Saturday seminar for high school students (now there's an idea), clips from this video would be part of it!
I'll summarise.
Early on we are given the estimate of the number of species: just to dazzle. The range is from a few million to many times that: so large as to indicate it is pure guesswork and so not worth mentioning. This sets the scene for the staggering complexity and variety of life being claimed as unavoidably the result of evolution.
Next we are rightly introduced to biblical belief, with a reading from Genesis 1; well, lampooning really. DA fails to express any wonder at the identification of broad ecological and coupled zoological categories that the account contains, the orderly progression of the creation of ecological divisions, and the continuity of those categories with what is evident to us today. Pretty remarkable for a book by 'ignorant ancients'.
We are treated to a pop history of Darwin's adventures completely cut off from the intellectual history of the time he lived in and the atmosphere pregnant with evolutionary ideas (including early description of 'natural selection' by Edward Blyth, a creationist). He also fails to mention the tendentiousness of the 'long age/slow process' project of the time to unseat Moses' credibility.
A whole lot of non-evidence of evolution is presented in commission of the fallacy of 'affirming the consequent' (of the form: 'when it rains puddles of water form...oh look, there's a puddle of water, it has rained' neglecting other causes for puddles of water) on the question begging presumption of evolution occuring being the proof of evolution having occured (and still occuring presumably).
DA makes much of Darwin destroying the idea of 'fixity of the the species' erronously conflating 'species' with the genesian 'kinds', failing to unlink the two ideas, falling for the Aristotelian influenced idea of fixed species! Not biblical at all. He didn't bother pointing out that bibilical 'kinds' are broad observational categories, not narrow genetic ones and one could well extend from this that the concept of 'kind' was not concordant with rigid fixed species...whatever 'species' might mean in reality. Thus from the biblical data we need not be surprised by the proliferation of sub-types of creatures within broad 'kinds'. So DA deceitfully plays the straw man game.
Next stop is genetics: the discovery of the double helix, and the evidence this provides for genetic continuity between 'species'. This comes as no surprise given the looseness of 'kind' and that everything in a biosphere should have similar biology to exist in said biosphere. No surprise here either.
We get the full bottle on Natural Selection as 'survival of the fittest'. I know that's its epigraph, but survival of the fittest is not required...only survival of the least unfit in any particular ecological setting at any particular time. But reality doesn't sound as good as propaganda, even in biology and it is not explained how this is the 'engine' of evolution instead of what we observe: resistance to degenerative change.
Close to the end we are taken through Darwins 'fear' of the eye as an evolved thing. DA glibly explains that there are all sorts of organs that sense light...so one could have evolved into the other. No shred of evidence is offered for the vast functional differences, and the coordinated development of interlocking systems and sub-systems required for vision to occur, let alone the meaning of vision for organisms.
Lastly of my summary, we sweat with Darwin over his long and painstaking work with species studies...no critique of Darwin's un-self-critical question begging mission here either, nor of the obvious critique that he was describing a plausable analysis of speciation within kinds....of which we see evidence, but driving this beyond evidence to a total materialist history of biology.
DA ends with Paley's watch...but fails again to deal with the true implications of the analogy, particularly for evolution which remains a set of footnotes that attempt to save a Victorian era gross morphology fiction as making any contribution to anything, concocted in complete ignorance of the vast complexity of even the 'simplest' life forms.
My conclusion: the film is a great discussion starter for a seminar on biblical creation.
It provided a great summary of doctrinaire evolutionary boosting, which I had expected. In so doing it provided a wonderful succession of conflation of fact and presumption, misinformation, intellectual slight of hand and fallacious logic, which was a bonus.
If I was to run a Saturday seminar for high school students (now there's an idea), clips from this video would be part of it!
I'll summarise.
Early on we are given the estimate of the number of species: just to dazzle. The range is from a few million to many times that: so large as to indicate it is pure guesswork and so not worth mentioning. This sets the scene for the staggering complexity and variety of life being claimed as unavoidably the result of evolution.
Next we are rightly introduced to biblical belief, with a reading from Genesis 1; well, lampooning really. DA fails to express any wonder at the identification of broad ecological and coupled zoological categories that the account contains, the orderly progression of the creation of ecological divisions, and the continuity of those categories with what is evident to us today. Pretty remarkable for a book by 'ignorant ancients'.
We are treated to a pop history of Darwin's adventures completely cut off from the intellectual history of the time he lived in and the atmosphere pregnant with evolutionary ideas (including early description of 'natural selection' by Edward Blyth, a creationist). He also fails to mention the tendentiousness of the 'long age/slow process' project of the time to unseat Moses' credibility.
A whole lot of non-evidence of evolution is presented in commission of the fallacy of 'affirming the consequent' (of the form: 'when it rains puddles of water form...oh look, there's a puddle of water, it has rained' neglecting other causes for puddles of water) on the question begging presumption of evolution occuring being the proof of evolution having occured (and still occuring presumably).
DA makes much of Darwin destroying the idea of 'fixity of the the species' erronously conflating 'species' with the genesian 'kinds', failing to unlink the two ideas, falling for the Aristotelian influenced idea of fixed species! Not biblical at all. He didn't bother pointing out that bibilical 'kinds' are broad observational categories, not narrow genetic ones and one could well extend from this that the concept of 'kind' was not concordant with rigid fixed species...whatever 'species' might mean in reality. Thus from the biblical data we need not be surprised by the proliferation of sub-types of creatures within broad 'kinds'. So DA deceitfully plays the straw man game.
Next stop is genetics: the discovery of the double helix, and the evidence this provides for genetic continuity between 'species'. This comes as no surprise given the looseness of 'kind' and that everything in a biosphere should have similar biology to exist in said biosphere. No surprise here either.
We get the full bottle on Natural Selection as 'survival of the fittest'. I know that's its epigraph, but survival of the fittest is not required...only survival of the least unfit in any particular ecological setting at any particular time. But reality doesn't sound as good as propaganda, even in biology and it is not explained how this is the 'engine' of evolution instead of what we observe: resistance to degenerative change.
Close to the end we are taken through Darwins 'fear' of the eye as an evolved thing. DA glibly explains that there are all sorts of organs that sense light...so one could have evolved into the other. No shred of evidence is offered for the vast functional differences, and the coordinated development of interlocking systems and sub-systems required for vision to occur, let alone the meaning of vision for organisms.
Lastly of my summary, we sweat with Darwin over his long and painstaking work with species studies...no critique of Darwin's un-self-critical question begging mission here either, nor of the obvious critique that he was describing a plausable analysis of speciation within kinds....of which we see evidence, but driving this beyond evidence to a total materialist history of biology.
DA ends with Paley's watch...but fails again to deal with the true implications of the analogy, particularly for evolution which remains a set of footnotes that attempt to save a Victorian era gross morphology fiction as making any contribution to anything, concocted in complete ignorance of the vast complexity of even the 'simplest' life forms.
My conclusion: the film is a great discussion starter for a seminar on biblical creation.
23 April 2018
Transcendence
God is transcendent. We know from Isaiah 55:9, or we might think that we do!
This must be read in the light of Gen 1:2, 27, Gen 2:15-17 and Gen 3:8-11.
There is an intimacy here: communication, fellowship (reinforced in God's creating in our time setting), love. God is of course above as as per Isaiah, but he is also with us. The creation tells us that he is with us with an intensity and closeness that goes beyond mere pagan transcendence.
This must be read in the light of Gen 1:2, 27, Gen 2:15-17 and Gen 3:8-11.
There is an intimacy here: communication, fellowship (reinforced in God's creating in our time setting), love. God is of course above as as per Isaiah, but he is also with us. The creation tells us that he is with us with an intensity and closeness that goes beyond mere pagan transcendence.
Fish
In an episode of Rick Stein in Asia, he commented on his love of fish that we came from fish...obviously one doesn't go to a cook for information on origins, and I note that he's gone even deeper into mythological past to get to fish, rather than stop at the shared precusor to modern apes and humanity!
Yes, man came after fish, and indeed, man was made from dust...but that's only half the truth.
Satan's deception is always subtle. As his 'temptations' of Yeshua, he distorts rather than outrageously fabricate.
Thus we go from Adam made from dust and enlived by God (Gen 1:27, with the method God used explained in Gen 2:7) in the Bible, to moderns disregarding God's word, indeed, the method he used to create man, saying that sure, we are made of the dust of the ground, but not with any intention, purpose, design or intelligent objective, rather it was the meandering of chemical accidents that led to us. Presumably the same random accidents led to ideas...which can be no more reliable on that basis than any other random accident.
Yes, man came after fish, and indeed, man was made from dust...but that's only half the truth.
Satan's deception is always subtle. As his 'temptations' of Yeshua, he distorts rather than outrageously fabricate.
Thus we go from Adam made from dust and enlived by God (Gen 1:27, with the method God used explained in Gen 2:7) in the Bible, to moderns disregarding God's word, indeed, the method he used to create man, saying that sure, we are made of the dust of the ground, but not with any intention, purpose, design or intelligent objective, rather it was the meandering of chemical accidents that led to us. Presumably the same random accidents led to ideas...which can be no more reliable on that basis than any other random accident.
21 April 2018
20 April 2018
How many species are there?
In
How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm
Published: August 23, 2011
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127
From the abstract:
How many pre-historic species are there? Wikipedia has a few pages of them. Nothing, compared to the current estimate, so it would appear that we know nothing about them as well!
How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm
Published: August 23, 2011
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127
From the abstract:
[The] approach was validated against well-known taxa, and when applied to all domains of life, it predicts ∼8.7 million (±1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species globally, of which ∼2.2 million (±0.18 million SE) are marine. In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description.Thus, between 7.4 and 10 million species! We've catalogued 1.2m. So, we know next to nothing about species!
How many pre-historic species are there? Wikipedia has a few pages of them. Nothing, compared to the current estimate, so it would appear that we know nothing about them as well!
Natural Selection = a spin of the wheel.
You've heard Natural Selection described as 'the survival of the fittest'? Of course! But it ain't so.
The fittest! The fittest, the very bestest fit of all the fits there could be? How do you measure that? It is completely unparameterised and given the variability of ecological communities and their change over time, is unparameterisable. The fitest is the most fit possible in all relevant circumstances. Not even the second most fit which is one 'fitette' less fit than the most fit gets a guernsey.
Rubbish.
The roulette wheel of natural selection means at worst survival of the luckiest (but even that contains an implicit teleology and is a hindsight evaluation), and at best, the survival of the least unfit at the time and place in the conditions that prevail on the day.
In the end, all one can say is that what survives is that which has survived. It is a meaningless 'go nowhere' concept.
It only means that the characteristics that only and expressely benefit bare survival are important...so fruit could be slightly less delicious to an animal, and it would probably have insufficient selectability to be selected out; this might or might not relate to survival fitness, but we find that fruit is just so delicious! And so on. For everything. What about human thought, art, technology? Not essentail for bare survival, so comparatively not selected for: all are the mere result of the least best fit surviving. Its like public works: the least costly gets the job with the lowest tender.
The fittest! The fittest, the very bestest fit of all the fits there could be? How do you measure that? It is completely unparameterised and given the variability of ecological communities and their change over time, is unparameterisable. The fitest is the most fit possible in all relevant circumstances. Not even the second most fit which is one 'fitette' less fit than the most fit gets a guernsey.
Rubbish.
The roulette wheel of natural selection means at worst survival of the luckiest (but even that contains an implicit teleology and is a hindsight evaluation), and at best, the survival of the least unfit at the time and place in the conditions that prevail on the day.
In the end, all one can say is that what survives is that which has survived. It is a meaningless 'go nowhere' concept.
It only means that the characteristics that only and expressely benefit bare survival are important...so fruit could be slightly less delicious to an animal, and it would probably have insufficient selectability to be selected out; this might or might not relate to survival fitness, but we find that fruit is just so delicious! And so on. For everything. What about human thought, art, technology? Not essentail for bare survival, so comparatively not selected for: all are the mere result of the least best fit surviving. Its like public works: the least costly gets the job with the lowest tender.
17 April 2018
13 April 2018
Genesis vs myth
When you are challenged, usually by an evolution booster (whom you can refer to Mary Midgley's book Evolution as Religion), that the Genesis account is merely another ancient 'creation myth'. Here's fuel for your reply.
It is nothing like myth (read Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return), rather:
If you want the three big ones, for an easy rebuttal:
It is nothing like myth (read Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return), rather:
- it is personal and personally involved in the creation sequence
- it is ex nihilio and makes no implict assumption that a cosmos 'just is'.
- it has specific timing and place that is continuous with our real world experience
- it uses concrete defined time units, the ones we live by and dominate our lives
- it uses real-world categories for the results of the creative words
- its creation episodes are ecologially patent
- it communicates in terms that make sense in the real world
- it identifies the critical difference between man and animals: rationality.
If you want the three big ones, for an easy rebuttal:
- it is personal: God has a clear identity, will and purpose
- it is particular: no vague generalities or symbols
- it is real: its set here and then, continuous with our world-experience here and now.
12 April 2018
God and David Attenborough
David Attenborough's work is uniformly wonderful. The photography and locations amazing and the portrayal of the creation sometimes almost brings welling tears of joy and the greatness of God.
But DA himself doesn't see cause to glorify God, in whom I doubt he believes, rather his words are an almost constant paean to Evolution!
I wonder at this when Christians in the typical reflexive fit of ill-considered (usually) opining, regard evolution as God's method of creation. DA certainly doesn't see it this way, indeed his belief in evolution bolsters his denial of God. Evolution never points to God. Always away, always displacing him as creator, which is his chief office in our world.
I was reflecting on these thoughts as I read Isaiah 42:8, today:
But DA himself doesn't see cause to glorify God, in whom I doubt he believes, rather his words are an almost constant paean to Evolution!
I wonder at this when Christians in the typical reflexive fit of ill-considered (usually) opining, regard evolution as God's method of creation. DA certainly doesn't see it this way, indeed his belief in evolution bolsters his denial of God. Evolution never points to God. Always away, always displacing him as creator, which is his chief office in our world.
I was reflecting on these thoughts as I read Isaiah 42:8, today:
I am the Lord, that is my name;And then read vss 5-7 preceeding: God once again lays down his trump card: creator and lover of his creation.
I will not give my glory to another,
Nor my praise to graven images.
Thus says God the Lord,
Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread out the earth and its offspring,
Who gives breath to the people on it
And spirit to those who walk in it,
6 “I am the Lord, I have called You in righteousness,
I will also hold You by the hand and watch over You,
And I will appoint You as a covenant to the people,
As a light to the nations,
7 To open blind eyes,
To bring out prisoners from the dungeon
And those who dwell in darkness from the prison.
5 April 2018
1 April 2018
28 March 2018
Time as agent
It's even hit TV documentaries:
Michael Portillo in his Irish railway series, in commenting on the Irish v British troubles in the early 20th c. commented on Q. Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland:
To be accurate: the beauty of time passing is that the actors change, circumstances change, peoples' perceptions and motivations change and what was impossible in the past becomes, because of these social and political changes, possible.
Michael Portillo in his Irish railway series, in commenting on the Irish v British troubles in the early 20th c. commented on Q. Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland:
The beauty of time passing is that the makes the impossible possible.Now, where have I heard that error before?
To be accurate: the beauty of time passing is that the actors change, circumstances change, peoples' perceptions and motivations change and what was impossible in the past becomes, because of these social and political changes, possible.
25 March 2018
Genesis a science text?
In a post on science in Genesis, there is a link to Eric Snow's article on www.rae.org:
“Christianity a Cause of Modern Science?: The Duhem-Jaki and Merton
Theses Explained”. In this is a fascinating quote from a 14th century
scholar, John Buridan.
The remarkable thing here is that, as I read it, Buridan [Perhaps the most influential Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy] starts his reflections on the created world with God’s revelation: he therefore uses Genesis 1 directly as a ‘scientific’ textbook. By this Buridan made the great break away from paganism and opened the path to the development of modern ‘natural’ sciences. Note, the Bible is directly used to illuminate this break and make the created world intellectually available for rational examination!
““The first key steps in totally discarding Aristotle's physics were done by…the medieval Christian Catholic [Jean/John] Buridan, [who] in a crucial passage, anticipated the idea of inertia...through his discussion of impetus. Notice the reference to God not directly making the laws of nature operate:
Also, since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move the celestial bodies, it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without His having to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby He concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; 'for thus on the seventh day He rested for all work . . .' [Gen. 2:2] And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was not inclination of the celestial bodies for movements.
Also note this additional statement as a nascent form of the idea of inertia:
But because of the resistance which results from the weight of the [waterwheel of the] mill, the impetus would continually diminish until the mill ceased to turn. And perhaps, if the mill should last forever without any diminution or change, and there were no other resistance to corrupt the impetus, the mill would move forever because of its perpetual impetus.
While these passages are only halting steps on a long road to repealing Aristotle's physics, they do show a move to break out of his conceptions of how moving bodies move. These men show that the Church never uncritically accepted the Greek classics as many in the Islamic world had done earlier. True, it tied itself and lent its authority to the Greek classics excessively, which set the stage for its eventual disaster resulting from it using force that made Galileo recant his belief that the earth moved. With the later discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Kepler, Torricelli, Boyle, Newton, and others, Europe's science took a vast qualitative leap, but we should not overlook its origins and these men's predecessors in the Middle Ages.””
The remarkable thing here is that, as I read it, Buridan [Perhaps the most influential Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy] starts his reflections on the created world with God’s revelation: he therefore uses Genesis 1 directly as a ‘scientific’ textbook. By this Buridan made the great break away from paganism and opened the path to the development of modern ‘natural’ sciences. Note, the Bible is directly used to illuminate this break and make the created world intellectually available for rational examination!
““The first key steps in totally discarding Aristotle's physics were done by…the medieval Christian Catholic [Jean/John] Buridan, [who] in a crucial passage, anticipated the idea of inertia...through his discussion of impetus. Notice the reference to God not directly making the laws of nature operate:
Also, since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move the celestial bodies, it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without His having to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby He concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; 'for thus on the seventh day He rested for all work . . .' [Gen. 2:2] And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was not inclination of the celestial bodies for movements.
Also note this additional statement as a nascent form of the idea of inertia:
But because of the resistance which results from the weight of the [waterwheel of the] mill, the impetus would continually diminish until the mill ceased to turn. And perhaps, if the mill should last forever without any diminution or change, and there were no other resistance to corrupt the impetus, the mill would move forever because of its perpetual impetus.
While these passages are only halting steps on a long road to repealing Aristotle's physics, they do show a move to break out of his conceptions of how moving bodies move. These men show that the Church never uncritically accepted the Greek classics as many in the Islamic world had done earlier. True, it tied itself and lent its authority to the Greek classics excessively, which set the stage for its eventual disaster resulting from it using force that made Galileo recant his belief that the earth moved. With the later discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Kepler, Torricelli, Boyle, Newton, and others, Europe's science took a vast qualitative leap, but we should not overlook its origins and these men's predecessors in the Middle Ages.””
13 March 2018
Are we pagans or what?
One of the challenges faced by attempts to regard both evolution and the biblical creation account in Genesis 1-2 as explanatory as to origins, and thus, the nature of the world and its ontological basis, is that the heart of the creation account is removed.
It was encapsulated in a sermon I recently heard where the speaker claimed that the cosmos 'just is' while endorsing its creation by God.
So, it is not 'just is', but created! One cannot have it both ways or Paganism is given a toe in the door.
Above all else the creation account in Genesis is personal. It starts with the personal as being basic to all that is (both Genesis 1 and Colossians 1 treat this) and emphasises this in the G1 account firstly, in God's real personal agency in creating by speaking and it having immediate effect: no long, nebulous, impersonal processes (the hallmarks of paganism with its determinedly impersonal or a-personal framing).
Secondly the personal is demonstrated in God working in our 'time-space'; thus the reason for the delimination of effort by days. This represents the first move of fellowship between creator and his image-bearer creature: that we share agency in discrete time. God knows what our work is like, and we reflect his in our work. This is the first move of fellowship, and enshrines our image-bearer-ness in the very good creation, not in the disaster that followed in the degredation of creation, which we now suffer from.
Other origin proposals are diffuse, nebulous, as I've said above, and fundamentally de-personalised. The personal in itself, and in our possible connection with it, is lost in their unlocatable and ill defined event that occures in a discontiguity with our experience of the Creation. The door is opened by taking such a framing to Genesis to deism: the remote God. God in Genesis 1 is the highly involved, engaged one in concrete relationship with the very concrete cosmos and its events in time and space.
And there's the clue. It is strikingly odd that our experience of the creation would not be the terms in which creation is explicable to us. In G1 it is very much this. The tangibility of our lives in contiguous objectively causal time-space is the very tangibilty of the creation and the terms in which it is communicated to us. Thus we don't live in a pagan or an idealist (paganism converted to the complicated words of philosophy) denominated world/cosmos/existence. Rather we live in a personal, concrete, discrete things happen in explainable time type of cosmos, denominated in direct connection between actor and event, in time and space locations that are communicable and that establish the event existentially.
It was encapsulated in a sermon I recently heard where the speaker claimed that the cosmos 'just is' while endorsing its creation by God.
So, it is not 'just is', but created! One cannot have it both ways or Paganism is given a toe in the door.
Above all else the creation account in Genesis is personal. It starts with the personal as being basic to all that is (both Genesis 1 and Colossians 1 treat this) and emphasises this in the G1 account firstly, in God's real personal agency in creating by speaking and it having immediate effect: no long, nebulous, impersonal processes (the hallmarks of paganism with its determinedly impersonal or a-personal framing).
Secondly the personal is demonstrated in God working in our 'time-space'; thus the reason for the delimination of effort by days. This represents the first move of fellowship between creator and his image-bearer creature: that we share agency in discrete time. God knows what our work is like, and we reflect his in our work. This is the first move of fellowship, and enshrines our image-bearer-ness in the very good creation, not in the disaster that followed in the degredation of creation, which we now suffer from.
Other origin proposals are diffuse, nebulous, as I've said above, and fundamentally de-personalised. The personal in itself, and in our possible connection with it, is lost in their unlocatable and ill defined event that occures in a discontiguity with our experience of the Creation. The door is opened by taking such a framing to Genesis to deism: the remote God. God in Genesis 1 is the highly involved, engaged one in concrete relationship with the very concrete cosmos and its events in time and space.
And there's the clue. It is strikingly odd that our experience of the creation would not be the terms in which creation is explicable to us. In G1 it is very much this. The tangibility of our lives in contiguous objectively causal time-space is the very tangibilty of the creation and the terms in which it is communicated to us. Thus we don't live in a pagan or an idealist (paganism converted to the complicated words of philosophy) denominated world/cosmos/existence. Rather we live in a personal, concrete, discrete things happen in explainable time type of cosmos, denominated in direct connection between actor and event, in time and space locations that are communicable and that establish the event existentially.
7 February 2018
20 January 2018
Where are we?
Comment on a creation web article about theologians who de-reify Genesis 1 etc.:
If theologians want to cut God's creating out of real communicable history, then where do we go to find the framing of relationship between God and humanity that occurs in real history? If the creation account in Genesis doesn't tell us what did happen in space and time, and therefore what really is, we have to ask then, what is 'really' there? What tells us how reality works? Plato, Aristotle, Darwin? If these people define what really is; then reality is other than the scriptures tell us and we have a faith not planted in this world that we experience, but some other world that we don't know...the world of platonic fantasy, of nature red in tooth and claw?
If theologians want to cut God's creating out of real communicable history, then where do we go to find the framing of relationship between God and humanity that occurs in real history? If the creation account in Genesis doesn't tell us what did happen in space and time, and therefore what really is, we have to ask then, what is 'really' there? What tells us how reality works? Plato, Aristotle, Darwin? If these people define what really is; then reality is other than the scriptures tell us and we have a faith not planted in this world that we experience, but some other world that we don't know...the world of platonic fantasy, of nature red in tooth and claw?
19 January 2018
17 January 2018
Walking the dog
While my nephew and I were walking my dog, I noticed a small statue in a neigbour's front garden. A
piece of paper with "Penelope" written on it along with an apple and other fruit were lying in front of the statue, which was decorated with feathers where the head would have been.
A woman and childwere in the garden and the woman noticed me looking at the scene.
She came over, asking, 'lovely, isn't it?" I asked what it was. She told me that it was 'Maisy's offering to peace'. I asked about the statue. She said that it was an Indian god [it looked like a headless Buddha to me] that would bring peace.
I replied, nicely, that it wasn't a god, it was a piece of shaped stone. She smiled, and said, we like to say it’s a god because it’s a nice story, and peace is something I want to teach Maisy.
A story and a piece of stone can bring peace, really?
If we regard Genesis 1 as just another story, we are at the level of the latter day heathen who think that a made up story about a piece of stone can have some real connection with actual lived lives. But it can't. It's a fantasy.
Despite all the fuss about 'genre', asserted 'compatibility with science', which I first heard from a friend in year 4 of primary school, and symbolism displacing realism, if this is all Genesis 1 is, just a story, then we make God no more than a piece of stone: an invention in our minds and not related to us in the real world where we grow apples and limes.
We back ourselves into a corner where a story about God's action in some 'story world', becomes the basis for our worship of God here in the real world. But, there can be no real connection, if it is merely a story.
A woman and childwere in the garden and the woman noticed me looking at the scene.
She came over, asking, 'lovely, isn't it?" I asked what it was. She told me that it was 'Maisy's offering to peace'. I asked about the statue. She said that it was an Indian god [it looked like a headless Buddha to me] that would bring peace.
I replied, nicely, that it wasn't a god, it was a piece of shaped stone. She smiled, and said, we like to say it’s a god because it’s a nice story, and peace is something I want to teach Maisy.
A story and a piece of stone can bring peace, really?
If we regard Genesis 1 as just another story, we are at the level of the latter day heathen who think that a made up story about a piece of stone can have some real connection with actual lived lives. But it can't. It's a fantasy.
Despite all the fuss about 'genre', asserted 'compatibility with science', which I first heard from a friend in year 4 of primary school, and symbolism displacing realism, if this is all Genesis 1 is, just a story, then we make God no more than a piece of stone: an invention in our minds and not related to us in the real world where we grow apples and limes.
We back ourselves into a corner where a story about God's action in some 'story world', becomes the basis for our worship of God here in the real world. But, there can be no real connection, if it is merely a story.
15 January 2018
Broughton Knox on origins
The doctrine of God the Creator is vivid throughout the pages of Scripture. The gods of the nations are not creator gods and, as the interesting little Aramaic insertion in Jeremiah puts it, the gods that did not create the world will perish, as indeed they have (Jeremiah 10:11). In our own times idolatry, which was a universal substitute for the Creator God, has been replaced by the widely held theory of evolution. Both the ancients and the heathen today deified and worshipped the creature as the creator, modelling images of man, or birds or animals or reptiles and worshipping these, so for Western secular people the modern theory of evolution deifies nature and acknowledges it as creator of all we see around us. All the beauty and intricacy and all the marvellous arrangements of the natural world are supposed to have been evolved by a thoughtless, purposeless mechanical operation of nature, and in this way the God who made the world is as effectively shutout of the minds of those who are enjoying the blessings of his creation as he was by the false religious of idolatry. Just as the idolaters could not see the foolishness, indeed the stupidity, of worshipping gods of wood and stone, which have no life nor purpose nor mind, so modern believers in the theory of evolution cannot see the foolishness of that theory, which not only lacks evidence to support it, but also runs counter to such evidence of origins as is available.(Knox, The Everlasting God, p. 32, MatthiasMedia 2009)
Creation implies purpose. In contrast, impersonal evolution is purposeless—things happening by accident without plan. But creation is a personal activity of an almighty, supreme God. Personal action implies purpose, and this in turn implies assessment. The doctrine of judgement is closely related to that of creation. The Scripture are full of the truth of the judgement of God. One of the oldest passages of the Old Testament, the song of Deborah, proclaims how turning away from the true God brought inevitable judgement: “New gods were chosen; then war was in the gates” (Judges 5:8).
(Knox, The Everlasting God, p. 36, MatthiasMedia 2009)
Knox was principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia 1959-85. The book these quotes come from is based on a series of lectures he gave at Moore College in 1979.
14 January 2018
7 January 2018
Could God have used Evolution? #2
Evolution supposes, no, relies upon onward and upward: progress, because it was produced by the late Victorian idea of 'progress' (along with its late Victorian gross morphology phantasies).
Now, what does the Bible tell us about 'progress' in the created world (or 'nature' as materialists call it)?
Or, in the Amplified version:
The TE has to explain how this is possible in the unitary world that God created...even a Deist has to explain how all we see is falling apart, but on a longer time scale, it is not.
Now, what does the Bible tell us about 'progress' in the created world (or 'nature' as materialists call it)?
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, [a]in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. 23 And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. 24 For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees?[Romans 8:20-24]
Or, in the Amplified version:
For the creation was subjected to frustration and futility, not willingly [because of some intentional fault on its part], but by the will of Him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will also be freed from its bondage to decay [and gain entrance] into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been moaning together as in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only this, but we too, who have the first fruits of the Spirit [a joyful indication of the blessings to come], even we groan inwardly, as we wait eagerly for [the sign of] our adoption as sons—the redemption and transformation of our body [at the resurrection]. 24 For in this hope we were saved [by faith]. But hope [the object of] which is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he already sees?From the fall, the creation has been going down hill: falling apart, collapsing, decaying, deteriorating...evolution would claim that it is going the other way.
The TE has to explain how this is possible in the unitary world that God created...even a Deist has to explain how all we see is falling apart, but on a longer time scale, it is not.
1 January 2018
God could have used evolution!
No! The creation was finished and declared by its author to be 'very good'. Evolution is not finished and never will be (in terms of the hypothetical construction that it is).
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