Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[jimwalton]

It doesn't make it harder to defend it. I think of it this way: God is eternal, and therefore anything created is not God and is less than God. God, as God, is not vulnerable to sin, but any created thing, apparently even the angels, are vulnerable to sin, just because they're not God. God is not responsible for evil. He had no choice but to create created beings; it's not possible for Him to create uncreated beings. It's not possible for Him to created beings that are God. So they were vulnerable.

Suppose I were to create a crystal glass goblet that was perfect, I mean (for the sake of argument) absolutely perfect. But the nature of glass is that it's breakable; there's no way around that if it's glass. Suppose someone drops my perfect goblet. Am I responsible for the fact that it broke? No, I created it perfect; it's the nature of glass to break if someone drops it and there's no way around that.

When God created humans, they were not God. They were susceptible to evil, and so God dealt with that. He explained to them what evil was, He offered them a way around it (you can eat from any tree but this one), and He warned them of the consequences of disobedience. They had a recipe for success but, being not-God, they chose otherwise. This is not God's fault. It's why from before creation God had a plan of redemption for them. He knew they were not capable of being gods. They were not even capable of being godlike without His help. So He offered them His help, He designed repentance into the system, and He met them in relationship all as strategies to rescue them from their sin.

[Super Flood]

> God, as God, is not vulnerable to sin, but any created thing, apparently even the angels, are vulnerable to sin, just because they're not God.

But the angels don’t inevitably sin, do they? How come Adam and Eve’s rebellion affected all humans but Satan’s didn’t affect all angels? (Though I suppose you could argue that the Bible is silent on whether it did or not.)

> He explained to them what evil was, He offered them a way around it (you can eat from any tree but this one), and He warned them of the consequences of disobedience. They had a recipe for success but, being not-God, they chose otherwise. This is not God's fault.

Why did he put that tree there and let the serpent in? It’s kind of like if the glassmaker put the goblet on the highest shelf and then let someone in who he knew was going to knock it over. If I had ordered the goblet, I’d blame the glassmaker for its destruction and ask him for my money back.

[jimwalton]

> But the angels don’t inevitably sin, do they?

We don't know anything about their situation, but we are told that a bunch of them did sin (Jude 6).

> How come Adam and Eve’s rebellion affected all humans but Satan’s didn’t affect all angels?

Great question. I'm glad to see you're thinking. Angels are a different kind of being and they are under different rules, so to speak. We know that some angels sinned and they will be judged for it, and that other angels didn't and they still serve God. There is no hint that salvation is offered to the angels. It may be because they are in the presence of God and are not in the same situation we are (where we don't see God). We're not told anything about it except a few bits and pieces. Our concern, frankly, is us.

> Why did he put that tree there and let the serpent in?

Free will always finds a way to exercise itself. Just as we don't know how to imagine a world without time, we have no concept of a world (or even a day) without choices. The tree was a real tree, but symbolic of our ability to choose. (Just as North Korea is a real country, but is symbolic of a rogue nation; we often use it in our speech to symbolize leaders and systems that have gone off the rails.)

God let the serpent in because free will has to be free. There's no free will if God protects them from ever having to make the hard choices. But God did protect them: He explained to them they could eat of any tree except one, and He warned them what would happen should they choose incorrectly. And He continued to fellowship with them in relationship and reveal Himself to them. But the choice they had to make had to be their choice to make.

> It’s kind of like if the glassmaker put the goblet on the highest shelf and then let someone in who he knew was going to knock it over. If I had ordered the goblet, I’d blame the glassmaker for its destruction and ask him for my money back.

It's more like he put the glass on the highest shelf and told them it was dangerous to climb the shelves, it would only be to their harm if they broke the glass, and they'd be better to leave it alone, but they climbed anyway. Remember, the serpent didn't break the glass, the people did.

So if you bought a new set of china and your teenager dropped a whole stack and broke them, you would blame the manufacturer and demand a refund? Remind me not to let you into my store—you'll blame me for breakage that's your fault!

[Nebulator]

> If evolution is true, according to the way I see it, when humanity evolved to a point where we were genuinely human (the genetic blending of Neaderthal and Denisovans evolving into homo sapiens)

That is not what happened. Neanderthals and Denisovans were absorbed into SOME homo sapien DNA. Neanderthal and den. are not homo sapiens but were closely related ancestors with a common ancestor.

There are billions of people in the world with no Neanderthal DNA.

> Genesis picks up the story when the evolutionary chain is just human, nothing else.

Homosapiens were around for much longer than the past 6,000 years. Homo Sapiens already populated the Americas 30,000 yearsish before the stories of Genesis.

[jimwalton]

>Neanderthals and Denisovans were absorbed into SOME homo sapien DNA.

Correct. As we migrated out of sub-Saharan Africa, homo sapiens interbred with other hominid populations (Denisovans and Neanderthals, who share a common ancestry different fro SSA tree). There is also a good probability of a 4th genetic line.

> Homosapiens were around for much longer than the past 6,000 years. Homo Sapiens already populated the Americas 30,000 yearsish before the stories of Genesis.

Of course they were around much longer than the past 6000 years. You must not have read carefully what I said, or you jumped to an incorrect conclusion. Hominins are widespread 700,000 years ago. Homo sapiens have been around for about 100,000 years. That would mean homo sapiens populated the Earth about 94,000 years before the stories of Genesis. I have no problem with that.

What would you like to discuss?

[Nebulator]

> God gives each a body the way He chose to do it, with the form He chose to give it.

That's not how evolution works. It isn't a choice by God. Animals look the way they do because of natural selection, not because God chose for them to look that way.

[jimwalton]

How do you know this? What evidence do you have in what part God played and what part He didn't, and how involved He was in the course evolution took?

Genetics is an interesting field. In one sense natural selection is random, and in another sense it is not random at all. Mutations take place mostly on particular parts of the genome, and even though the far majority of mutations are neutral or deleterious, the ones that are beneficial seem to have a special ability to bring about favorable change. It's almost as if the system is gamed for improvement, despite the second law of thermodynamics and the vast proportion of deleterious mutations.

What I'm certain you can't conclude is that you know or have evidence of what part God plays in all this. You seem certain that it's "not because God chose for them to look that way," but that is clearly an opinion and not science.

You said "That's not how evolution works," and yet it is. Evolution is a change in the frequency and nature of alleles in a population over time. I see such amazing variation, beauty, and complexity that I conclude it took an intelligent, guiding artist/scientist to bring about the fantastic variety, complexity, balance, and vibrancy of life we see now; you see the same thing and conclude that natural selection is a wonderful thing. You're entitled to your conclusion, as I am to mine. But don't pretend that yours is proven to be true, because it's not. Science has no comment on the involvement of God in natural selection.

Natural selection, by all measures, seems rigged, just like the casinos at Las Vegas. Beneficial mutations, though rare, are non-randomly favored by natural selection. In essence, natural selection sifts through the pile of mutations, retains favorable ones and throws the rest in the dustbin. At the heart of it, selection is just math.

But why should the universe and nature be so describable by math?? Why are we able to represent nature so elegantly using mathematical equations? John Polkinghorne writes, "The universe might have been an orderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us. … There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without."

Alister McGrath writes, "So why is the universe so intelligible to us? How can we account for its rational transparency? Why is there such a deep-seated congruence between the rationality present in our minds and the rationality we observe in the world? Why is it that the abstract structures of pure mathematics, which are supposed to be a free creation of the human mind, provide such important clues to understanding the world? The great mathematician Eugene Wigner once famously asked: 'Why is mathematics to unreasonably effective in understanding the physical world?' His question needs to be answered, but science cannot answer it. In fact, science depends precisely upon this 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics. It uses it as a tool—without being able to offer a theoretical account of why it is so reliable in this way."

My conclusion is God's involvement. As I examine the evidence, a designer who is intelligent is inferring the most reasonable conclusion. You see it otherwise, and to that perspective you are entitled. But you can't tell me with certainty that God is not involved. The truth is: you can't know that.

[Nebulator]

> How do you know this? What evidence do you have in what part God played and what part He didn't, and how involved He was in the course evolution took?

Because every discovery we have made has always been the case of natural selection. That's like asking "did you take into consideration that the Sun God Rah morphed into a species and changed the DNA to get passed on?" It can't be tested so why propose it?

> the ones that are beneficial seem to have a special ability to bring about favorable change.

that's redundant.

> It's almost as if the system is gamed for improvement, despite the second law of thermodynamics and the vast proportion of deleterious mutations.

Improvement is relative. The system randomly mutates, the mutations are random not in a manner to game the system but because that is how reproduction works. Sometimes it is an outside influence whereby say the climate changes and a certain food source becomes scarce and the individual species which were able to digest another food group better survived while the others died off. It isn't an improvement it is just change. The second law of thermodynamics does not prevent this. There is constant energy to be consumed via the sun or from the earth.

> You seem certain that it's "not because God chose for them to look that way," but that is clearly an opinion and not science.

It is science. Invoking God means not science. There has never been any discovery made through testing (science) that has shown "God".

> I see such amazing variation, beauty, and complexity that I conclude it took an intelligent,

Your perception of beauty has no barring on truth. That is not a scientific process.

> you see the same thing and conclude that natural selection is a wonderful thing.

I see the evidence and just read the evidence. Me finding it interesting has no barring on whether or not it is true.

> But don't pretend that yours is proven to be true, because it's not. Science has no comment on the involvement of God in natural selection.

science indicates that natural selection occurs and doesn't invoke any supernatural into it. There is no evidence that points to God having any process in this, so why give it any thought?

> Why are we able to represent nature so elegantly using mathematical equations?

That's what humans use to understand it.

> "So why is the universe so intelligible to us? How can we account for its rational transparency?

it wasn't like that until we made discoveries. Before the scientific method we knew so little, nothing was transparent and the majority of natural occurances were transcribed to the supernatural.

> But you can't tell me with certainty that God is not involved. The truth is: you can't know that.

I can know what the evidence points to. But you're right, I can also not prove that the world didn't just start 20 seconds ago with everything put in place, all the memories etc. for every human with everything falling in to place for it to be perceived to be much older than it is. All we can go by is what is in front of us and keep on trucking to answer questions that we have that have yet to be answered.

[jimwalton]

> Because every discovery we have made has always been the case of natural selection.

Of course it's all by natural selection. What I'm claiming is that God uses natural systems and processes.

>> the ones that are beneficial seem to have a special ability to bring about favorable change.

> that's redundant.

My point is the "special ability." Mutations that are beneficial are by far in the minority and yet seem to have a special power to bring about change that advances the organism in terms of survival and adaptation.

> Improvement is relative. The system randomly mutates, the mutations are random not in a manner to game the system but because that is how reproduction works.

Of course improvement is relative. All natural selection and mutation takes place in a context.

But the mutations are not totally random. Alleles generally take place only at certain points along the genome, and those mutations have a particular power to adapt the organism against the far majority of deleterious mutations. Even though most mutations are deleterious, the genome manages to eliminate them so that the organism can move forward. H. Allen Orr writes that the distribution of beneficial fitness effects at a gene is exponential, and those alleles that improve fitness tend to increase in frequency by natural selection.

But I don't know why we're talking about this as if we disagree. I believe in evolution and subscribe to it.

> It is science. Invoking God means not science.

You're right that invoking God means not science, but excluding Him isn't science either. As soon as you bring up the subject of God, you are no longer doing science (which pertains to the natural world), but rather theology or philosophy. We can neither include nor exclude God on the basis of science, because "God" is not within the realm of scientific comment.

> Your perception of beauty has no barring (sic) on truth. That is not a scientific process.

Correct. But in your comment you are ignoring that I also mentioned variation and complexity, which are scientific processes. It's special pleading to choose only the piece you want to discredit my statement while ignoring the other pertinent points of my assertion.

> I see the evidence and just read the evidence. Me finding it interesting has no barring (sic) on whether or not it is true.

This is disingenuous. You see the evidence, read the evidence, and draw a conclusion. Again, special pleading. I also see the evidence, read the evidence, and draw a conclusion. You seem to be trying to paint yourself as more noble because you only read the evidence, but this is false. You also continue past that point.

> science indicates that natural selection occurs and doesn't invoke any supernatural into it.

Correct, because to invoke anything supernatural is no longer doing science. But neither can science speak to the unreality of the supernatural. Frankly, the supernatural is not in science's wheelhouse. It must remain mute about it.

> There is no evidence that points to God having any process in this, so why give it any thought?

These is evidence that points to God, for sure. The fine tuning of multiple dozens of cosmological constants points to something more than pure luck or chance as a result of an explosion (the Big Bang).

> That's what humans use to understand it.

There's more to it than that. It's not just how we understand it, it seems built into the system as a necessary element of its functional nature.

> it wasn't like that until we made discoveries.

It was always like that, even before we discerned it. It's not like the universe changed once we figured out math.

> All we can go by is what is in front of us and keep on trucking to answer questions that we have that have yet to be answered.

I agree with this.

> I can know what the evidence points to.

So can I. That the universe had a beginning points to a causal mechanism outside of nature. That the universe has so many elements of fine tuning points to an intelligent, purposeful source. That the universe has order instead of disorder (given its beginning) points to an ordering power. That life seems gamed for improvement against so many odds points to a guiding intelligence.

Science is insufficient to explain what caused the Big Bang. It is insufficient to explain abiogenesis. It is insufficient to explain order rather than chaos. It is insufficient to explain how informational data (DNA) arose out of amino acids. It is insufficient to explain consciousness. The fact is that theology is sufficient to explain all of these, and can explain them quite well. That's what the evidence points to.

[Papparazzi]

> No. If evolution is true, according to the way I see it, when humanity evolved to a point where we were genuinely human (the genetic blending of Neaderthal and Denisovans evolving into homo sapiens), at that point Genesis 2.15 picks up the story, and two of the genuine humans are taken from among the rest of the population and placed in the Garden. The father was not an animal, but was homo sapien just like the son. Genesis picks up the story when the evolutionary chain is just human, nothing else.

I don't think you understand how evolution works. Imagine you lined up all your direct male ancestors back to back for the last 10 million years. You're human but the last creature in this queue won't be. At some point in this queue, God decided where the dividing line between human and animal was. If he pointed to a specific individual within this progression and said: 'here is the first human', it would look completely arbitrary because both father and son would be the same species and so there would be no reason to expect any difference these two in terms of free-will, language, a conscience, rational thought etc