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Creationism

alehm

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lucaspa said:
There is lots of evidence falsifying a global flood. You just sea fossils on tops of mountains. How would clams and other bottom dwelling creatures get to the tops of mountains in a flood? They would settle to the bottom. Also, wouldn't horses, people, rabbits, deer, and other mobile animals run to the tops of mountains to get away from the flood waters?
This is a scientific assumption that I have been talking about. The assumption is the mountain was always a mountain and will always be a mountain. Mountains form around tetonic plates. There are tetonic plates all over the ocean floor, could it be possible that a mountain was at one time under the sea? Hawaii is nothing more than a mountain that sprung up from the ocean floor.

Also, wouldn't horses, people, rabbits, deer, and other mobile animals run to the tops of mountains to get away from the flood waters?Why aren't their fossils found on the tops of mountains? Where are they?
I hope you aren't proposing science has proved that dead animals don't float? If living animals drowned on the top of a mountain that once underwater gravity and a current wouldn't either move it down or that it wouldn't float away and deposit somewhere else? That it would have to stay in the exact spot it died and become fossilised. Talk about deciet.
After all, it took over 40 days for the whole world to be flooded.
I thought the bible said the earth was flooded for more than a year? Oh wait, that is for inbred christians who can't think to believe an actual number of days the earth was actually flooded.

There are several threads here that show the evidence that caused creationists to discard a global flood.
Yup and it proves God is really the greatest comedian ever. God asked Noak to spend 120 years of his life building a boat for a local flood instead of asking him to move somewhere where it wasn't going to flood.

I bet Noah was lauging really hard after spending 120 building that boat and looked out the window and saw dry land. I bet it became funnier each day as he was stuck on the Ark for over a year. I bet everytime he looked at the various birds on the Ark he just laughed and laughed and wouldn't let them out of the cage to go live with the other birds that were happily living in trees on dry land right outside.

Maybe a few times the Ark ran against dry land and Noah had to stick his head out the window and ask the other humans on the dry land to push him back out to water cuz it wasn't 40 days or 40 nights yet.:p
 
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alehm

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Vance said:
They were given all the plants to eat, but it does not say that this was to be their only diet. The statement is one of addition, not exclusion.
Ok, Vance. I can accept this translation. But if you could enlighten me some more
Genesis 1:29 "See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food"


God says the exact same thing to man. Then after the flood God says:

Genesis 9:3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.


This would seem to be a statement of exclusion then, no?



And death is not evil, sin is evil. If there was not yet sin (disobedience to a command of God) then it WAS good.
The bible calls death our "enemy" and says it will be the last enemy to die.
The creation of the new earth without sin says that the lion with lay with the lamb seeming to indicate a world where animals do not kill each other. Could it be that the original world without sin was the same?
 
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Vance

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Yes, you can read the post-flood verse as implying that ONLY plants were eaten before that time, and many do. But is it the only possible reading? Some OEC's who oppose evolution, but accept animal death before the Fall believe that Man was vegetarian up to this point, but it says nothing about animal diet before or after the Fall. Or, it could be simply saying you can eat meat and you can eat plants, never mentioning that they could NOT eat meat before. While this is not a plain reading, admittedly (since it raises the question of why God is mentioning it at all), we have seen that sometimes the plain reading is not the best. We must consider another very important piece of Biblical evidence when making this decision: Abel was a keeper of flocks. He even provided meat as a burnt offering. While it is *possible* that Abel was keeping flock solely for milk, this is even more of a stretch in my mind. You keep a animal or two for milk, not a flock.

This is, of course, attempting to stick with a literal translation. If you accept that the presentations are allegorical, symbolic or types, then these details become less of an issue.

As for your last point, it makes theological sense in a symetrical way, but it is not at all *necessary* for the original world without sin to be without death for the future world to be without death.

I believe that the death instituted at the Fall was spiritual death, meaning separation from God. This is evidenced by the following:

1. God promised that upon eating the fruit, Adam would surely die the same day. So, something HAD to have happened on that day, but we know it was not his *physical* death.

2. If the physical death was what came with sin and the Fall, then Jesus' sacrifice has failed billions of times since man still physically dies even when they have accepted this sacrificial gift.

No, I believe very strongly that what happened at the Fall was the institution of spiritual death, which can only be reversed by accepting Jesus' sacrifice. If we do, then we may still suffer physical death, but we will no longer be suffering spiritual death because we will not be separated for God, and we will enjoy this Spiritual *Life* forever.
 
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Mike Flynn

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alehm said:
This thread has been 3 pages of insults to YEC's with terms of inbreeding, not thinking, ignorant, ect with no defense against these generalizations. As soon as I state what I believe all the sudden the "wrongs" need to be corrected.
Well this is the place to discuss opinions....Not the place to make insults. Both sides should refrain from this, don't you think?

I never said you were wrong. I am trying to explain the theistic evolution point of view. If you think I am saying you are wrong when I do that...well, then...you are wrong. :)

alehm said:
That entrie passage you quoted wasn't my judgements. I was merely playing a role of someone who only comes to God on evidence not faith. Which obviously means they don't come to God without faith.

So you were not implying that theistic evolutionists come to God partially on some combination of evidence and faith? We all do that alehm, YECs included.




alehm said:
Not what I said or what I believe. I said " believing in evolution isn't going to jepordize ones salvation"


You also implied that theistic evolutionists don't merely have a different interpretation of scripture...they throw away whole sections of it if it doesn't suit them, correct? IOW, they practice a faith of convenience. I am saying this is false...and I don't appreciate the accusation.



alehm said:
It has caused many to leave God as well. Ever heard of the book Farewell to God? The author worked with Billy Graham in his early crusades with the youth did many wonderful things. Then began to reject a God because his metaphorical interpretation meant before sin entered the world by a mytholigical Adam that animals were already killing each other, that animals were being killed off by cancer and other ghastly diseases bringing millions of years of suffering and torment in a world God called "Very good".

All that proves is that the sinful nature distracts people from God on a regular basis...it does not prove that theistic evolution is false ideology. Literalism has its share of casualties as well alehm...does that falsify it?

Let me explain my interpretaion of the 'death' issue. The trouble is that people are intent to classify suffering and pain and death as 'bad'. I believe that these things are not bad by definition...and in fact can actually be good things spiritually. If suffering was simply 'bad' then how is it that so many people come to Christ through it. I have witnessed it myself. So when you become Christian, you are not free of pain and suffering...on the contrary, they can actually enrich your connection with God.

The Bible makes it clear that we can be free of death once we accept Christ and turn away from the sinful nature. If that's true, then why do Christians still die? IMO, Genesis is about spiritual death, not physical death, Our spritual 'self' was at one time eternal...the fall has changed that. The natural consequences of sin are moral decay, destruction, and spritual death. This theme is re-itterated over and over again....and I believe there is strong support for such an assertion biblically.


alehm said:
Genesis 1:30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
alehm said:
I don't know. Perhaps there is a total differenent interpretation that I can't fathom you could educate me on. Maybe God wanted them to be vegetarian but the animals disobeyed God and started eating each other? Maybe God didn't say that at all and it was inserted by man and therefore we should ignore it?
If you study ecology you will find that plants (or photosynthesizing organisms) form the basis of virtually all food chains. You don't have to change anything...you just have to interpret "I give every green plant for food" in light of ecology. When you think about it, its interesting that God has revealed the ultimate source of food for all non-producing organisms on the food chain in Genesis, don't you think? Sometimes the simplest interpretation is the correct one alehm.

Like I said, I do not ignore scriptures or insert my own words between God's. I simply interpret it differently than you. And for some reason, you seem to imply that this means I am rejecting some of God's theology. Let me know if you think there are other scriptures I am ignoring...I would be happy to discuss my interpretations with you.
 
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pureone

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Gabrial said:
I fail to see how you can believe in Evolution and Creationism, other than that God started everything. But it states that in, creationism, God created the world in 7 days. Seeing that 7 days could most likely be interpreted as a long time, because of the bibles frequent use of the number 7, i still dont think that the two can be combined. In my opinion its either one or the other.
6 days, not seven. on the seventh he rested. Which according to literalism would mean that god was tired, or needed to recouperate from the strain of creation. An omnipotent omnicient Being was tired.
I'm not trying to disprove creation, but literal 6 day creationism, which has been done many times over. And mentioned many times over. Over.
 
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lucaspa

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alehm said:
This is a scientific assumption that I have been talking about.
It's not an assumption. It's a deduction from the statements of the original theory. Remember, the geography pre-Flood in the Bible is the same as the geography post-Flood. And Genesis 6-8 does say that the water covered the mountains, so there were mountains before the Flood.

The assumption is the mountain was always a mountain and will always be a mountain. Mountains form around tetonic plates. There are tetonic plates all over the ocean floor, could it be possible that a mountain was at one time under the sea? Hawaii is nothing more than a mountain that sprung up from the ocean floor.
Now you are changing the statements of the theory so that you can avoid the falsification. You are claiming that these particular mountains were formed during the year of the Flood. Specifically, you are claiming that they were ocean bottom thru the first part of the Flood and then were thrust up to their present height toward the end of the Flood. Right?

OK, that modified statement can also be tested:
1. We don't find the fossils of mobile mammals on any mountaintops, do we? What happened to the mountains mentioned in Genesis 6-8? Aren't they still there?
2. What independent tests do you have to determine that this mountain (Alps) was formed during the Flood?
3. How much crustal movement is needed to get these mountains? What type of earthquakes and tsumanis result from the crustal movements we see today? Could any craft survive such seas for these crustal movements? i.e. the Ark is drowned.
4. Why are the sediments at the tops of mountains rock? Sedimentary rock only forms from extensive pressure on the sediments. If these were the upper levels of the seafloor and were then thrust up to be the tops of mountains, there was never any pressure on them to transform the sediments to rock.

I could go on but you get the idea. However, the rate of seafloor spreading due to plate tectonics has been measured using flows at the mid-oceanic ridge. They show that plate tectonics did not move nearly fast enough to do what you need.

I hope you aren't proposing science has proved that dead animals don't float? If living animals drowned on the top of a mountain that once underwater gravity and a current wouldn't either move it down or that it wouldn't float away and deposit somewhere else?
No, dead animals sink. That's how you find the carcasses of fish today on the bottom of the ocean and not simply floating.

You have problems with Dinosaur National Park in Utah. These fossils of dinos are high up in mountains. And they were drowned in a Flood.

I thought the bible said the earth was flooded for more than a year?
It does.

Oh wait, that is for inbred christians who can't think to believe an actual number of days the earth was actually flooded.
You know, I haven't insulted you like this, have I? Then why are you trying to make insults where there aren't any? Are you hoping I'll respond in kind so you can ignore evidence and just point a finger at those "awful, insulting evolutionists"?


Yup and it proves God is really the greatest comedian ever. God asked Noak to spend 120 years of his life building a boat for a local flood instead of asking him to move somewhere where it wasn't going to flood.
:) The story isn't literal, remember? Therefore there is no need to try to make God look foolish by sticking with a literal interpretation. I'm not trying to make God look foolish, why are you?

If the Flood was local isn't God still making the point that He can punish the unrighteous and still protect the righteous? Isn't that point made better by saving Noah rather than having him move away?


I bet everytime he looked at the various birds on the Ark he just laughed and laughed and wouldn't let them out of the cage to go live with the other birds that were happily living in trees on dry land right outside.
Who says it really was a year? Who says Noah took every bird and not just the domesticated chickens (who don't fly very well)? It's not literal, remember? Also, if Noah's entire world was the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, of course he was going to wait until the waters there subsided. You forget the limited perspective of peoples past.

Alehm, science started out accepting the Flood as true. From 1700-1831 Flood Geology was the accepted scientific theory. The geologists of the time, all Christians, most ministers, and all creationists, falsified the Flood.

"There is another way to be a Creationist. One might offer Creationism as a scientific theory: Life did not evolve over millions of years; rather all forms were created at one time by a particular Creator. Although pure versions of Creationism were no longer in vogue among scientists by the end of the eighteenth century, they had flourished earlier (in the writings of Thomas Bumet, William Whiston, and others). Moreover, variants of Creationism were supported by a number of eminent nineteenth-century scientists-William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, and Louis Agassiz, for example. These Creationists trusted that their theories would accord with the Bible, interpreted in what they saw as a correct way. However, that fact does not affect the scientific status of those theories. Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobservable particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended. The great scientific Creationists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered problem-solving strategies for many of the questions addressed by evolutionary theory. They struggled hard to explain the observed distribution of fossils. Sedgwick, Buckland, and others practiced genuine science. They stuck their necks out and volunteered information about the catastrophes that they invoked to explain biological and geological findings. Because their theories offered definite proposals, those theories were refutable. Indeed, the theories actually achieved refutation. In 1831, in his presidential address to the Geological Society, Adam Sedgwick publicly announced that his own variant of Creationism had been refuted:
Having, been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy ... I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.
We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of a former world entombed in these ancient deposits. In classing together distant unknown formations under one name; in simultaneous origin, and in determining their date, not by the organic remains we have discovered, but by those we expected, hypothetically hereafter to discover, in them; we have given one more example of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, and of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of unconnected truths. (Sedgwick, 1831, 313-314; all but the last sentence quoted in Gillispie 1951, 142-143) Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism pp125-126
 
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Michali

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Vance said:
They were given all the plants to eat, but it does not say that this was to be their only diet. The statement is one of addition, not exclusion.

And death is not evil, sin is evil. If there was not yet sin (disobedience to a command of God) then it WAS good.
Very good point Vance.

Death and "suffering" are nothing more than tools that shaped life into the forms that are existent today. Without these experiences, there wouldn't be consequences. There would be no reason to not go against God's judgement.

Suffering is only terrible if it is "important". To a being that sees a much larger picture of things, suffering is nothing more than what we make it to be. (A bad example--> If there is a program on a machine to print on a screen "I hate that" every time I took a breath, am I being cruel when I take a breath? No, its only printing the words on a screen, and I have to take a breath. Likewise, pain is only something our body tells itself to avoid a certain circumstance. Death sometimes has to happen. But thats ok, because it is meaningless in light of spiritual matters.)

Not only that, but plants are at the bottom of the food chain. When an animal (besides something like an earthworm) eats, it usually eats plants indirectly. Animals did eat plants for meat. And vice versa.
 
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lucaspa

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alehm said:

It has caused many to leave God as well. Ever heard of the book Farewell to God? The author worked with Billy Graham in his early crusades with the youth did many wonderful things. Then began to reject a God because his metaphorical interpretation meant before sin entered the world by a mytholigical Adam that animals were already killing each other, that animals were being killed off by cancer and other ghastly diseases bringing millions of years of suffering and torment in a world God called "Very good".


I submit that's a misunderstanding of evolution and the Bible. Isn't this person passing judgement on God and telling God what He has to consider "good" and what He doesn't? The idea that there was no death before Adam's sin is a man-made theory that is contradicted by the Bible. This person rejected God because his man-made theory was wrong.



Science is merely sticking to what hasn't been disproven, that doesn't make it make it true or actual history.

That's not quite accurate. If you fail to disprove an idea after much trying, it then becomes perverse not to consider it (provisionally) true. After all, isn't one of the apologetic arguments that atheists have failed to disprove that Jesus resurrected, therefore it is probable that he did? If you are able to disprove an idea or statement, then you are sure it is wrong. That's why we are sure creationism is wrong. We can disprove it.

However, one reason that science is tentative in its positive statements is that the idea might be disproven tomorrow. Tomorrow you might drop a rock that doesn't fall! However, until that happens you accept gravity as true and don't jump off the Empire State Building, do you?






Genesis 1:30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food."

That's out-of-context. In Genesis 1:29 God had just given humans herbs and fruit to eat. So he was saying herbs and fruit (domesticated plants) were for humans but the other plants were for animals and birds. It is not saying all animals were vegetarian.

See what I said about theistic evolutionists not throwing any verses out? You threw our or ignored the previous verse, which shows your interpretation to be incorrect.

Now, what other verses do you think theistic evolutionists throw out?
 
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Mike Flynn

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alehm said:
The bible calls death our "enemy" and says it will be the last enemy to die.The creation of the new earth without sin says that the lion with lay with the lamb seeming to indicate a world where animals do not kill each other. Could it be that the original world without sin was the same?
Our real enemy is spirtual death, not physical death. When Jesus said to the criminal on the cross next to him that he would be saved that day, did he mean physically? Jesus indicates that real life has very little to do with physical life. In fact, the physical life is a powerful distraction from what really counts: our spiritual selves. Its a big part of what keeps us from recognizing the importance of connecting with God. Physical death is nothing...real death is when you lose your eternal soul to sin.

Again, if you take the lion and the lamb as literal then your interpretation is acceptable. But what about this?

The lion and the lamb represent predator and prey...enemies by nature. The lions character makes him seek out the weak and the innocent...and destroy them. By contrast, the lamb is peaceful, harmless, but filled with fear on the approach of the lion. They are diametrically opposite in character. But in the end, the meek will lay down with frerocious in peace.

IOW, there will be no enemies, no powerful and strong gobbling up the weak and harmless...old enemies will reconcile their differences and they will be like one an the same entity; equals before God. What is a lion if it no longer consumes a lamb? It is no longer a lion. What is a lamb if it no longer fears a lion? It is no longer a lamb. They now have equal status before God. I believe that this is a metaphor that illustrates some very profound theology.

However, I fail to see the theological relevance if it means simply that lions will no longer eat lambs, but rather plants instead. Thats fine, but what difference does that make to you and me?
 
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Michali

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pureone said:
*off thead- michali, I dig the spirit-blown look of your avatar:)*
Thanks. I typed in "Jesus a Freind" on a search using Google a clicked the first link. I was looking for another picture, but I really liked this one. The one I was looking for depicted Jesus laughing and walking with a lonely man down a street. Sometimes we forget the freind that sticks closer than a brother when he is right beside us talking to us.
 
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Michali

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Mike Flynn said:
IOW, there will be no enemies, no powerful and strong gobbling up the weak and harmless...old enemies will reconcile their differences and they will be like one an the same entity; equals before God. What is a lion if it no longer consumes a lamb? It is no longer a lion. What is a lamb if it no longer fears a lion? It is no longer a lamb. They now have equal status before God. I believe that this is a metaphor that illustrates some very profound theology.

However, I fail to see the theological relevance if it means simply that lions will no longer eat lambs, but rather plants instead. Thats fine, but what difference does that make to you and me?
I thought everyone took this statement metaphorically. It even feels that way when you read it. Likewise, children aren't going to be sticking their hands in viper nests. Its only a metaphor of fearless peace.
 
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D

Drotar

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Jet Black said:
where did you ge that nugget of information?

Want to add it to your signature? :) :p


It was in a conference. Here's a link:

http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Pier/1766/hovindlies/G.html

Hovind: "Maybe you work with computers in your line of work. Imagine this, take those forty Grand Canyons full of books, and condense them into software, and when you are done the software must fit into two tablespoons. Ah, God did it, and it reproduces itself! Do you know what the odds are of that happening by random chance? The odds are 1 x 10119,000. That is a big number, since there are only 1041 electrons in the known universe.

May I repeat that he said that there are "one-thousand and forty-one" electrons in the known universe.

That's "one-thousand and forty-one".

Man, I'm the stupidest guy amongst us but even I KNEW there was something wrong with that.
 
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