Christian Faith Requires the Acceptance of Evolution

[shernren]

Hmmm. Interesting. You are saying that tree rings are the product of a biological history and C12 is the product of a stellar history. And the stellar history forbids a young universe just as much as the biological history does.

Exactly.

How about the universe with nothing but energy and spacetime? How is that lying?

The original hydrogen, helium, and lithium results from the phase transition from energy to matter when the universe cools. Then, of course, the rest is a continuation of that history.

Well, not until we come up with some theory of quantum gravity that lets us get behind the Big Bang.

But suppose I grant you that. Are we really going to say that God is theologically forbidden from creating anything other than a brand new clean empty universe?

Would Jesus have been lying had He turned water into wine? (I ask it this way because, while I don't know where you stand on the veracity of the Gospel accounts, I would imagine that you at least can consider the possibility of them being true.) After all, the ethanol in the wine should have indicated a chemical history of fermentation, but it doesn't.

More generally, any miracle must involve an object being transformed into a physical state quite different from what we would have predicted by means of its known natural history. To raise a dead person, for example, I have to eradicate at least some trace of the effects of death from his or her body (not-breathing, decaying, nerves depolarizing, rigor mortis, etc.).

If we are to accuse God of lying every time an object finds itself in a physical state indicating a different history from what it has actually undergone, then could God perform any miracle at all without lying?

But He does tell us the universe's true age in His Creation. Shernren, here you are separating science from God. According to TE, that separation doesn't exist. Science is simply reading God's other book like we read scripture. Both books are from God.

The problem with creating the universe with a "false age" is that God is lying to us in His Creation. His Creation says 13.4 billion years but "appearance of age" says that is a lie.

But look, this age of 13.4 billion years is not a datum. It is an interpretation of the data.

(Before the creationists dance themselves silly, let me just reiterate that it is the single best interpretation of the data to date, and the most scientifically plausible one, and to toss it out one must toss out many other assumptions and interpretations that one wouldn't think twice about applying to everyday life, not to mention that those who toss it out often do so by slandering honest scientists and siding with steady state theorists, who often advocate alternative cosmologies that are predicated precisely on the idea that the universe must have a temporally eternal past so as to avoid the embarrassingly unscientific spectacle of a creation and thus a Creator.)

But an interpretation it still is. The age of the universe is not something we measure, it is a number in a model which we twiddle with so that the model matches our observations as best as we can tell. No real scientist would say that the universe is a Lambda-CDM expansion with t = 4 x 10^17 seconds, or even that it looks exactly like one. It is simply that this particular value of t happens to give the least discrepancy between model and observation.

And even if the universe did look exactly like our models, I doubt that God is so beholden to the mental models of His creations (awesome as those models may be - all praise to the Creator of rationality and the human brain) that these models must automatically be right. If God is pleased to make a universe that happens to fit the model of a Big Bang 13.4 billion years ago, and to have made it by some other process, natural or supernatural, that happens not to take exactly 13.4 billion years, who are we to judge Him a liar for it?

 

[createdtoworship]

Hmmm. Interesting. You are saying that tree rings are the product of a biological history and C12 is the product of a stellar history. And the stellar history forbids a young universe just as much as the biological history does.

How about the universe with nothing but energy and spacetime? How is that lying?

The original hydrogen, helium, and lithium results from the phase transition from energy to matter when the universe cools. Then, of course, the rest is a continuation of that history.

But He does tell us the universe's true age in His Creation. Shernren, here you are separating science from God. According to TE, that separation doesn't exist. Science is simply reading God's other book like we read scripture. Both books are from God.

The problem with creating the universe with a "false age" is that God is lying to us in His Creation. His Creation says 13.4 billion years but "appearance of age" says that is a lie.

here is a video on the Big Bang model of the universe (Biblical Creationism)

The Big Bang Theory and Christianity - Should Christians Believe This Theory ? 1 /2 - YouTube

Jason Lisle: An astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Lisle graduated summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University where he double-majored in physics and astronomy, and minored in mathematics. He did graduate work at the University of Colorado where he earned a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. While there, Dr Lisle used the SOHO spacecraft to investigate motions on the surface of the sun as well as solar magnetism and subsurface weather. His thesis was entitled “Probing the Dynamics of Solar Supergranulation and its Interaction with Magnetism.” Among other things, he discovered a previously unknown polar alignment of supergranules (solar convection cells), and discovered evidence of solar giant cells. He has also authored a number of papers in both secular and creation literature.

 

[Anthony Puccetti]

No, it doesn't. DNA is made of nucleotides. DNA is a long chain polymer of nucleotides. Nucleotides are phosphate, deoxyribose, and a base. Those compounds react easily to make a nucleotide. In fact, a nucleotide is how they react. Getting one nucleotide to react with another to have a 2 nucleotide DNA is also easy. From there to add nucleotides to get 3, then 4, then 5, then 6, then 7 etc. is also easy. All you really have to do is mix the nucleotides, warm the solution a bit, and they will react to give you a nucleic acid. If the nucleotides are those of deoxyribose, then the nucleic acid is DNA. Read a bit about the chemical reactions here:

Now, the DNA you get will not have any particular sequence of bases. The apparatus in a modern cell is as complex as it is to ensure that, when DNA is copied, the newly synthesized DNA chain will have the same sequence of bases as the original. All the "complexity" is to guarantee a particular base sequence. But just any old base sequence? Easier than making a pie.

This is not evidence that DNA evolved into existence. The fact that DNA is composed of molecules that react and bond does not account for the functional organization of DNA in living organisms,and it does not account for the life of organisms. DNA is useless apart from life,which is spirit.