Creationism and Theology

Hammster said:

Why would say that He’s fooling?

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Well He is not trying to fool or deceive anyone. They are just fooling themselves. IMHO

As the scripture says,He has Not revealed everything about everything. Mysteries abound.

Didaskalos said:

Well He is not trying to fool or deceive anyone. They are just fooling themselves. IMHO

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Why would you say that? Does scripture state that things must be the way you perceive them? In other words, why you you consider it deception?

Resha Caner said:

In short the answer would be: evolution is based on individual organisms, not species.

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As far as I know (and I'm not a biologist) what you say is correct. But I believe most would say that evolution is based on populations that interbreed. Certainly boundaries are fluid. But individuals don't evolve. Characteristics that persist are positive to the population but not necessarily to every individual.

Resha Caner said:

I would say evolution creates theological problems. Of course TEs disagree. So, I'm curious ... do TEs think creationism creates theological problems? If so, what?

Disclaimer: I'm rarely in agreement with the typical YEC, so these issues may not apply specifically to me, but we can talk through that as the discussion unfolds.

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I believe there was actually a first man and woman in Eden and that Noah and Abraham actually existed.

Yet I am also aware that Genesis was assembled into a written text by the Jews after the Exodus event. Hence we find the creation narrative occurred over a number of days and even has a seventh day. This is a legal text written by Jews under the law.

What is more obvious from the Genesis text is the generations are listed, showing that the Jews are the legitimate descendants of Abraham.

This Genesis text is a legal document justifying the claim of Israel as the chosen nation.

Of course this does not mean a young earth rather, that Genesis is simply a stretched history of Israel.

Truth exists within Genesis but the text reflects the Jewish authorship.

Resha Caner said:

I would say evolution creates theological problems. Of course TEs disagree. So, I'm curious ... do TEs think creationism creates theological problems? If so, what?

Disclaimer: I'm rarely in agreement with the typical YEC, so these issues may not apply specifically to me, but we can talk through that as the discussion unfolds.

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Yes it does create a problem . Evolution is not included in "after their own kind". There is no room for the theory that all species are related and morph into other kinds. In fact,DNA is so minute that it would be impossible to break down that theory leaving some to wonder why Darwinism is still held. Evolution only leaves room for one to hypothesize a relation between species through time and natural selection while creationism already has the answer.

FireDragon76 said:

Of course, liberal and Neo-Orthodox Protestants have never understood original sin in an historical sense. And it is possible to understand Jesus death in other ways, other than satisfaction for human sins to an angry God.

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Yes, I understand.

Monk Brendan said:

Whether it was by evolution or direct creation, there were still a first male and first female Homo sapiens, right?

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Its hard to imagine that evolution would produce just two individuals of a new species... It would have to be a larger group.

myst33 said:

Its hard to imagine that evolution would produce just two individuals of a new species... It would have to be a larger group.

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Did i say there were just two?

But there still would be a FIRST two.

Monk Brendan said:

Did i say there were just two?

But there still would be a FIRST two.

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Its practically impossible for a natural evolutionary process to produce just (FIRST) two individuals of a new species.

How do you imagine that? A pair of homo erectus had suddenly two homo sapiens children?

myst33 said:

Its practically impossible for a natural evolutionary process to produce just (FIRST) two individuals of a new species.

How do you imagine that? A pair of homo erectus had suddenly two homo sapiens children?

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Or maybe there were two pair, right?

Monk Brendan said:

Or maybe there were two pair, right?

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Two pairs of homo erectus having the same mutated babies in the same time and in the same place, one male and one female...?

myst33 said:

Two pairs of homo erectus having the same mutated babies in the same time and in the same place, one male and one female...?

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Why not?

Monk Brendan said:

Why not?

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It would be a miracle

Resha Caner said:

I would say evolution creates theological problems. Of course TEs disagree. So, I'm curious ... do TEs think creationism creates theological problems? If so, what?

Disclaimer: I'm rarely in agreement with the typical YEC, so these issues may not apply specifically to me, but we can talk through that as the discussion unfolds.

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I'm agnostic to what happen during creation except that I believe God did it, I, however, don't think the early Genesis accounts tell us literal accounts. But I think a problem of YECs is when they begin to reconcile the accounts with science, begin to fill in the blanks in the text, or ignore all conflicts in the text. This can create nuanced ways of how we approach God when we use the stuff we make up to reconcile the text.

The text is the text and we cannot responsibly use something like the historical grammatical method to interpret the stuff going around it to establish the context because we don't know that information. When the text was written (post-exodus) this would place the flood about 1000 years removed and the creation account about 2500 years removed. So we cannot "guess" what is not mentioned in the text and the text must be taken simply as is.

If it is interpreted literally nothing can be added or guessed in between the words and even with conflicts they must be taken exactly as is without explanation. For example in Gen 1 light is created before the sun. I have heard people say a lot of explanations like the light was Christ/God or that the sun was there but it just wasn't at its full strength but none of this can be supported in the text so all we can accept in a literal vacuum is that God spoke light and the sun was created on the 4th day and nothing else. So even in a literal view in practice, the account should be understood like a non-literal account since in non-literal accounts the only details that exist are what the account tells us and all other details are unimportant and out of scope of the text.

For example, where did dinosaurs come from? Maybe the 4th day? maybe the 5th or 6th. I have heard many examples and many favour the gap theory but none of this is supported in the text. in the text, there is no mention of dinosaurs or 1,000,0000 year gaps so it is irresponsible to suggest this, we must either say the text cannot support dinosaurs or that dinosaurs are inclusive in day 6th. all conflicts and questions this presents cannot be responsibly answered and must be left alone, so, in practice, this is exactly how a non-literal account is understood. in non-literal accounts there are many holes, but no one cares because the holes are not the important parts of the account, instead the details given and the goal they point to are the only important details and this is exactly how the early Genesis accounts read.

Resha Caner said:

Yeah. It always seems to me the "God buried dinosaur bones to test us" line is given out of fear.

However, this does somewhat relate to my biggest struggle in this debate. I think there is a reasonable creationist answer to the data.

I also think it's fascinating that, scientists who are exceptionally rigorous in the particulars, think sweeping extrapolations are acceptable on bigger scales, e.g. Sagan's "billions and billions" or Tyson's pontificating about God. It's their own version of "God buried dinosaur bones".

But that's a digression. As I was saying, my struggle is that I want to be able to relate to evolutionists. The problem, though, is their refusal to move beyond the mechanistic. IMO it's an implicit claim that humans can comprehend everything. But the problem is that if I meet their mechanistic demand, I've conceded the argument from the get-go. That's not a theological problem, but it is a problem.

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I don't know that you can throw all evolutionists into the same basket like that, Resha. Even if two evolutionists are atheist, for instance, this is no guarantee that they both hold to the same views on what constitutes proper scientific praxis; and then you add in someone like myself to the mix, along with maybe one or two other approaches to how we understand and apply our respective views on the Nature of Science as an embedded part of the overall field of Philosophy of Science, and you have a menagerie classification rather than a clear and distinct categorization.

We might want to be careful in differentiating who means what when they say "what" about evolution.

Resha Caner said:

I don't buy that argument. Ancient people weren't naive children. In some ways they understood the natural world better than a city-dwelling 21st century person. Evolution is a very ancient concept, which, like many ancient concepts, didn't get a scientific footing until recently.

Had God wanted to express evolution to Moses, he could have simply said something like, "And on the 6th day the fish crawled out of the water and God made it a beast of the land." Not too hard.

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That might to be to assume too much conceptual similarity between the ancient Hebraic/Mesopotamian mind and the modern scientifically literal Western mind. It might also be a little to easy going in trying to find similarities between, say, someone like Lucretius on the one hand and Darwin on the other. I don't think we should Con-Fuse them together like that, and I mean this in the most semantically nuanced sense of the term "confused" one can think of.

While the Bible has a fascinating array of such things, it's risky to take that line of thought too far - to make the existence of cultural symbols the sole explanation for their presence in the Bible. For example, each plague of Egypt attacked a specific Egyptian god, showing God's power was greater than the supposed Egyptian deities. That doesn't serve as proof the plagues never happened.

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... well, this is why I differentiate the 'level' of historical representation that is expressed in the essentially 1st person account of the Exodus with the 3rd person account of the Creation, or the Flood, or the Tower of Babel, etc.

I, therefore, kind of expect the Exodus account to be telling me something just a little bit more concrete, however still representational it is, than does the Garden of Eden narrative. Besides, Rabbinically speaking, in the Jewish mindset, the cardinal event is often seen to be the Exodus, not the Creation.