Is there a denomination that accepts theistic evolution/old earth?

[Presbyterian Continuist]

Baloney. God could have done it all in a nanosecond. We don't believe that He did. Why? Because we have tons of empirical evidence that the universe God made has been around for a very long time as we reckon time. Young Earthers seem to believe that God is bound by time as we are. That's silly. God created time. He isn't bound by it.

Neither is God as envisioned by Young Earthers, who say that God cannot have created the universe over aeons of time as His temporal creatures (i.e., us) perceive time. You try and hang the same constraints on the Creator that apply to His creatures. That's nonsense.

The problem with your assertion is that neither you nor I were there to be eye witnesses of how it all took place, so all we can do is to guess about things that the Bible does not inform us.

Therefore, apart from sheer guesswork, we can come to no other conclusion than: "We don't know!"

 

[Jipsah]

The idea of 'macro-evolution' is a myth, propagated by those that want to discredit the biblical account, which is clear on how we got here. If you don't want to accept it, then you will have to deny the whole Scriptures.

More baloney. There is no reason at all to believe that God created the universe 6000 years ago (or whatever) because God is bound by the same temporal constraints that we are. He's not. The creation could be a snap of God's fingers and equate to a zillion years to us. The Bible is providing an overview of God's creation, with the emphasis being on the unarguable fact that God Did The Creating. Y;all want to turn the Bible into a scientific tome, which is certainly is not. The claim the if you don't believe that the Bible is an engineering text then you don't believe the Bible at all is simply bully people into accepting your spurious beliefs. In the words of the Prophet Mohammed, "Fat chance." God's truth is written in His in creation with His own hand. If your doctrine can't accept that, then your doctrine is for the birds.

You cannot cherry-pick some truths and reinterpret other passages (which are essential) to fit your worldview without forfeiting the gospel. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.

Translation - "If you don't believe what we think the Bible means, then you don't accept the Gospel." No, we accept the Gospel, we just don't accept your man-made doctrine.

 

[Jipsah]

If he says six days, why would you disregard that detail? It is clearly written right there.

Because we can see that God spent more time on it that that. Or are you of the opinion that "He made it look like it took a long time"? If so, then the universe may actually only be 6 days old (1000y=1d)

 

[Jipsah]

I don't know about any of that but here in their subforum I have seen debates and the majority onion is Creation not evolution.

More like "creation through evolution". God done it in any case, we're only quibbling about how long, from our viewpoint, it took Him to do it, which isn't really relevant in any case.

 

[charsan]

creation through evolution".

Not from the debates there I seen, it was creation as Genesis says.

 

[GodLovesCats]

If he says six days, why would you disregard that detail? It is clearly written right there.

What you are doing is disregarding the original language.

 

[Jonaitis]

What you are doing is disregarding the original language.

Am I, now? How about this passage? Read it carefully.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God...for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy" (Exodus 20:8, 11).

Why did God correlate our working six days, resting on the seventh, with creation? He sanctified the seventh day in Genesis, are you saying that it doesn't connect with this passage?

 

[Jamdoc]

Baloney. God could have done it all in a nanosecond. We don't believe that He did. Why? Because we have tons of empirical evidence that the universe God made has been around for a very long time as we reckon time. Young Earthers seem to believe that God is bound by time as we are. That's silly. God created time. He isn't bound by it.

Neither is God as envisioned by Young Earthers, who say that God cannot have created the universe over aeons of time as His temporal creatures (i.e., us) perceieve time. You try and hang the same constraints on the Creator that apply to His creatures. That's nonsense.

Too right. God could have spoken his word into our memory complete 100% in a language we could understand and with no need for interpretation, every single one of us. But he chose to have the book pieced together over centuries with inspired mortal men writing it down and needing to have it translated into languages we can understand and on top of it all there's so much symbolism. The beasts in Daniel and Revelations are not animals, they're not really lions with wings or bears or leopards, they're men. It's allegory, it has to be interpreted. Even the most literal of baptists do not believe that the world is going to worship a 7 headed Godzilla coming out of the ocean. Scripture often requires reading between the lines, understanding context, and carefully thinking about wording, meaning, and sometimes the point of view used is that of a primitive man that has very few ways to describe what he saw but when you read it from a perspective of thousands of years of technological and scientific advancements you re-read it and say "aha!" Such as Eve being created from Adam's rib, when you learn about stem cells and DNA and how the ribs are a bone that is responsible for a lot of hematopoeisis (production of blood cells) and stem cells, and it's a bone that can be removed without you know, collapsing a person's structure (one of the other really important bones for blood production is the pelvis, not an ideal bone to remove), Moses wouldn't have understood all of what was revealed there, but he wrote down what was revealed and now that we do understand some of it (not all of it but we understand more than thousands of years ago) it should be something that should be recognizable to us, and make sense to us. We're to trust God even if what He tells us doesn't make sense to us at the time, because we're ignorant in comparison, and only in our glorified bodies will we really understand everything He wants to tell us.
I've been reading Ezekiel and when he's describing the wheels in the sky I'm thinking "aha! Cherubim might use flying saucers". Ezekiel would't know what to call a flying saucer, but the description of a circular object stacked on top of a larger circular object (wheels in his description) with 4 burning lights coming out of the sides, and sound like rushing water or a crowd all yelling at once, you know really loud possibly engine sounds. Not a for sure there but a possibility and I don't see a scriptural reason why Angels wouldn't use spaceships. They wouldn't NEED them but it might be convenient for them or maybe they just like them I don't know. Could even be the "raining fire and brimstone" coming from those ships. I haven't seen scripture where it said it couldn't be.
But big point is, God can do anything, but has CHOSEN to do some things in certain ways for reasons only He knows.

 

[Jamdoc]

Not from the debates there I seen, it was creation as Genesis says.

Literally nobody here is ever talking about evolution in the way atheists talk about it, as something that happens on its own naturally. Everyone here is talking about it as a METHOD that GOD uses to create. It is all creation, it's just a "how" not a "who". We all say we're created by God but the how for us personally is through our parents having sex and conceiving. From haploid sperm and egg fusing together and completing a diploid new set of chromosomes within a stem cell that divides multitudes of times and begins to have specialized cells in development. Does any of that method make it not God's creation? Cause if biology means it's not creation, than none of us are created by God, only Adam, Eve, and Jesus.

 

[The Liturgist]

I don't know about any of that but here in their subforum I have seen debates and the majority onion is Creation not evolution.

I prefer my onions to be from vegetable minorities. Specifically red onions and garlic.

By the way, does anyone else love disassembling and reassembling the sliced red onions served with some meals, particularly bagels? Garlic also lends itself to this.

 

[solid_core]

No one said that the physical world was a good creation and the spiritual world was a bad creation.

Its implied by the vocabulary used.

 

[Shrewd Manager]

I can't be young earth, Genesis 1 seems like a "this is a gist of it but I'm not telling you specifics" overview of creation rather than a step by step instruction, allowing for what has been scientifically discovered about the nature of the universe and its age to hold true while still being God's very good creation. I see ongoing geological, cosmological, and biological processes that take very long times to do anything and it only makes absolute sense that those processes have been going on for a very long time, canyons are still being dug by rivers inch by inch, Niagra falls recedes its bank inch by inch over the years. There have been cataclysms such as global flood but there have also been slow processes that continue to go on every day, I have witnessed microevolution in laboratory settings. So there's only so much you can do believing in young earth creationism, and not just blind yourself to everything around you that says the universe is older than 6000 years. You either have to believe that Satan created the evidence (where in scripture has Satan ever been able to create anything?), or believe that God created things to appear older than they really are which seems like, deception. Why create things that would intentionally trick people? God doesn't lie or deceive!
So I can't be a young earth creationist, which puts me at odds with most pastors in most denominations of Christianity.
I believe in Old Earth. I still believe God created it, but I believe he did so using processes we still see at work today. I am not sure if I full blown believe in theistic macroevolution or progressive creationism (God creating things according to "kinds" in waves, which is more consistent with the fossil record, and microevolution being a tool within the genetic code that God created as a blueprint for all life). But microevolution I can't ignore at all. I can't just pretend that DNA just doesn't exist and we're all just scooped up dirt breathed upon by God. In Genesis 2 God even describes anesthesia and surgery to remove one of Adam's ribs (as a source of bone marrow and stem cells) to make Eve (Genesis 2:21-23). Which had always confused me as to why Genesis 2 didn't have God just speaking Eve into existence, but then I learned about stem cells present in bone marrow and the ribs are a flat bone which is one of your main sources of hematopoiesis, it suddenly made perfect sense, God GREW Eve from stem cells from Adam's bone marrow.
Is there any denominations that support old earth and either theistic evolution or progressive creationism?

Sure there's lots of churches where you can eat at the table of demons, leaning on your own understanding, deceiving yourself with bizarre interpretations of scripture to satisfy a lust to worship false idols and sorceries of Babylon. But is that the spirit of obedience?

 

[Biblewriter]

I don't see it that way because of things in genesis 1 I mentioned before, that it's inconsistent with "speaking things into existence" because several times it has the act of speaking separate from the act of creating. Which means the actual methods of creation have been obscured from us. Probably for our own good and protection. At the very least, 6 day creation can still be accomplished with God growing things to maturity using DNA, still modifying life from other life rather than magic, which still gives a purpose and reason for all life to have highly conserved genetic code. There is no purpose from that if He just spoke everything into existence, we could very easily all be on incompatible genetic codes that would prevent the development of chimeras. Unless you're saying you think it's impossible for God to grow creatures from DNA and stem cells in a day he can only poof them into existence with magic.

The MAIN "evidence" for evolution is genetic similarity. But, as a lifelong designer, similarity can just as easily be argued as proof of having been designed by the same mind. For it is often possible to identify who designed something new, just by examining its details.

I well remember once standing in the hall of a mid sized business in Ohio, looking with another man at a picture in a magazine, when a third man looked over our shoulders and said, "That looks like something Morris would design." We both laughed, and then the man with me said, "You didn't know?" And he said, "Know what?" Then we showed him that it was an article about something I had designed. He recognized the designer, just from seeing the thing that had been designed.

 

[Jamdoc]

The MAIN "evidence" for evolution is genetic similarity. But, as a lifelong designer, similarity can just as easily be argued as proof of having been designed by the same mind. For it is often possible to identify who designed something new, just by examining its details.

I well remember once standing in the hall of a mid sized business in Ohio, looking with another man at a picture in a magazine, when a third man looked over our shoulders and said, "That looks like something Morris would design." We both laughed, and then the man with me said, "You didn't know?" And he said, "Know what?" Then we showed him that it was an article about something I had designed. He recognized the designer, just from seeing the thing that had been designed.

The difference is, a signature on a painting or other marks of a maker of some device or piece of art can't be used to do evil. All life having code from the same origin can be used for cloning, it can be used for chimeras and chybrids, genetically modified organisms up into creating brand new life.
God would be allowing us to create our own designer lifeforms (even though you claim He did not use such processes to create life, we sure could, chimeras have already been done, genetically modified strains of plants have already been done, and in China they have already crossed the threshold of genetically modified human beings. Creating completely new lifeforms is not that far away)
I'd say if used for the wrong reasons, genetic engineering is more dangerous than atomic bombs. More dangerous to us physically, environmentally, and spiritually than just about any other technology out there.
What glorifies God if man imitates him creating life? It's a dangerous "signature" to leave on your work.

 

[BobRyan]

Some of the details of the creation story in Genesis can not be confirmed.

you mean we have no video and we have no way to reproduce it?

It described a six day creation

Agreed - that is a detail from the Word of God that does not fit the doctrine on origins we find in evolutionism. Clearly they differ.

when geological records indicate many millions of years

"Records indicate" is code for guesswork ... not observation of the planet being created.

The written record in Genesis states specifically - 7 days. The legal code in Ex 20:11 states explicitly 7 days.... vs ... guess work.

records indicate many millions of years of creation occurred.

Evolutionism is not about "millions of years of creation" it is about billions of years of evolution.

The story was told as if God rested on the seventh day. Jesus said God works seven days a week.

The Word of God says that it is the "account" of creation not "the story of creation" see Gen 2:4

4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. NASB

4 This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, NKJV

Then there was a talking snake in the Garden of Eden. There was an apple so toxic
it caused the downfall of mankind.

And there is the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ and His bodily ascension into heaven, and in the future the rapture, resurrection of the saints, lake of fire, second coming... and on and on.

It is freely agreed that supernatural events do not fit atheism or evolutionism. No question about it. That is a given. No argument there.

Am not sure mankind ever lived so long without dying.

I doubt that there is a single atheist on the planet that agrees with it either. So I am not saying "nobody guesses different" when it comes to reading the Bible. Plenty of people in all contexts do that.

No question about it.

BTW -- the bible did not say "toxic" or "poisonous" as we often point out to even our atheist friends.
And the Bible does say that Adam and Eve lived for more than 900 years after eating that apple so just how that fits "toxic" is yet to be clarified.

The book described a tree of life in a garden that people can not locate,

Indeed a lot of things that are recorded as existing 6000 years ago are 'hard to find' -- and of course a world wide flood would have made them "even harder to find".

However Rev 2 and 22 both predict a return to that tree of life. What is more

Having studied Biblical archaeology, I know parts of the books of Kings are factual.

There are many atheists today that will admit that some parts of the Bible record historic facts that even an atheist would admit to. I don't question that -- you might not question it either.

I do not believe that man is the most intelligent being in the universe.

The Bible says that angels and God are also in the universe and are more intelligent than man. At the very "least" we have that and have had it long before evolutionists came up with alien life ideas.

 

[BobRyan]

Baloney. God could have done it all in a nanosecond. We don't believe that He did. Why? .

Because the Bible says that is not how He did it - and the Bible is the Word of God

"How" as in the timeline not 'How' as in infinite God breaks down his creative power into tiny insert-in-a-lab-experiment segments. (Obviously)

 

[JohnAshton]

Thank you, Jipsah. God is a God of common sense.

 

[His student]

No, I do not believe that the physical world was a good creation and the spiritual world was a bad creation. Everything is a good creation.

His student said: ↑
No one said that the physical world was a good creation and the spiritual world was a bad creation.

Its implied by the vocabulary used.

Here is what I said.
His student, said: "In Genesis one God pronounced the physical creation good.
Obviously there was a spirit world that came before that from which Satan came to tempt the man in the garden. Do you not believe that?"
What I said did not "imply" that God created the spirit world bad. Everything God creates is good even Lucifer.

But Satan came from the spirit world (see Job chapter one for a glimpse of it and it's inhabitants).

He came into God's altogether good physical creation and tempted Adam in the garden.

You simply read what I said and heard it wrong. That's an honest mistake. But when I corrected you - you doubled down rather than re reading my original post to see what I actually said.

Since I have supplied here in this post all you need to understand your mistake - we really don't need to labor the point. Nor do you need to admit your mistake. It's no big deal at this stage (unless of course you choose for some reason to "triple down" on your mistake).

 

[Neogaia777]

I can't be young earth, Genesis 1 seems like a "this is a gist of it but I'm not telling you specifics" overview of creation rather than a step by step instruction, allowing for what has been scientifically discovered about the nature of the universe and its age to hold true while still being God's very good creation. I see ongoing geological, cosmological, and biological processes that take very long times to do anything and it only makes absolute sense that those processes have been going on for a very long time, canyons are still being dug by rivers inch by inch, Niagra falls recedes its bank inch by inch over the years. There have been cataclysms such as global flood but there have also been slow processes that continue to go on every day, I have witnessed microevolution in laboratory settings. So there's only so much you can do believing in young earth creationism, and not just blind yourself to everything around you that says the universe is older than 6000 years. You either have to believe that Satan created the evidence (where in scripture has Satan ever been able to create anything?), or believe that God created things to appear older than they really are which seems like, deception. Why create things that would intentionally trick people? God doesn't lie or deceive!
So I can't be a young earth creationist, which puts me at odds with most pastors in most denominations of Christianity.
I believe in Old Earth. I still believe God created it, but I believe he did so using processes we still see at work today. I am not sure if I full blown believe in theistic macroevolution or progressive creationism (God creating things according to "kinds" in waves, which is more consistent with the fossil record, and microevolution being a tool within the genetic code that God created as a blueprint for all life). But microevolution I can't ignore at all. I can't just pretend that DNA just doesn't exist and we're all just scooped up dirt breathed upon by God. In Genesis 2 God even describes anesthesia and surgery to remove one of Adam's ribs (as a source of bone marrow and stem cells) to make Eve (Genesis 2:21-23). Which had always confused me as to why Genesis 2 didn't have God just speaking Eve into existence, but then I learned about stem cells present in bone marrow and the ribs are a flat bone which is one of your main sources of hematopoiesis, it suddenly made perfect sense, God GREW Eve from stem cells from Adam's bone marrow.
Is there any denominations that support old earth and either theistic evolution or progressive creationism?

I don't know about any particular denomination, but you might want to check out my post in this thread here:

Genesis and Creation, Days are long "ages" ect...?

God Bless!

 

[His student]

Because we can see that God spent more time on it that that. Or are you of the opinion that "He made it look like it took a long time"? If so, then the universe may actually only be 6 days old (1000y=1d)

Yes - He did "make it look like it took a long time". The universe was created fully functioning and mature.

Exactly as was Adam created fully functioning and mature. I can pretty much be sure that Adam was not created as a baby without pubic hair and fully functioning organs - which is what God "must have done" according to those who think God would be "trying to fool us" if He created thing fully mature.

However - having said that - God apparently has no aversion to "fooling" those who are wise in their own eyes and choose to twist scripture to compromise with the teaching of the world rather than conforming their thinking to what God says in His Word.

"No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval." 1 Corinthians 11:19

This is a test of sorts and it appears that some here are failing that test.

We all say we're created by God but the how for us personally is through our parents having sex and conceiving. From haploid sperm and egg fusing together and completing a diploid new set of chromosomes within a stem cell that divides multitudes of times and begins to have specialized cells in development. Does any of that method make it not God's creation? Cause if biology means it's not creation, than none of us are created by God, only Adam, Eve, and Jesus.

Of course it doesn't.

But the Bible clearly says that the first man and woman were created in a different manner - a manner that leaves no room for evolution in that creation.

God wrote Genesis in such a way that there can be no room for believing in evolution when it comes to mankind.

Frankly - if someone wants to argue about the creation of the galaxies or about the evolution of dinosaurs or kangaroos - I could care less.

But when it pertains to mankind - that's where the rubber meets the road on this subject.