Ronald in post #44: << Genesis says God created man, plants and animals complete with no evolutionary process -- a finished product. A peacock was always a peacock, a rose, a rose and man always man. >>
I'm not at all sure that Genesis denies the possibility of an evolutionary process. Genesis simply says that God caused the seas and the Earth to bring forth living things. According to standard science, the seas and the earth did bring forth living things, just not exactly in the way that Creationists like to imagine it.
Living things have changed. Take flightless birds. The most obvious characteristic of birds is that they have wings but there are birds that cannot fly. Ostriches, emus, penguins and kiwis are flightless birds. Flightless birds less familiar to Americans include the rhea, large South American birds, and cassowaries, a large Australian bird. Some flightless birds are extinct, such as the dodo and the elephant bird. It is obvious that flightless birds are descended from birds that did fly.
Adapting to their environment, birds like the ostrich became too large to fly and so became walkers and runners. Others, like penguins, became more adapted to water than to land or air. Penguins became great swimmers but lost the ability to fly.
The days/nights in Genesis and in Torrance, Ca. btw total 24 hours. To see this any other way is a distortion of the literal words. God made light, he called the light day and the darkness night (isn't that what you call them?) On the third day, vegetation; on the 4th day, the sun, moon and stars. Again, how could vegetation survive millions of years without the sun? It's not rational. Then he created the animal kingdom on the 5th day - finished! On day 6, Man, finished and it was good. God didn't say, well it's a start, eventually they'll evolve and then it will be good. No, it was good and the Garden of Eden was Paradise, finished. The light from the stars was given to us instantly, it didn't take billions of years to get to us -- that's an assumption. These scientists don't factor God's supernatural power into the equation.
Micro-evolution exists and simply is change within one kind to adapt to it's changing environment or migration to another part of the world, cold or hot, wet or dry. These are built into the genetic codes as adaptive mechanisms. God designed life that way - to adapt. So you have a full range of possibilities, just not one kind changing into another.
It is very possible that these flightless birds flew at one time. What had to be different? Their weight and then size and power of their wings obviously. So they were smaller to begin with. If that bird started eating different fruit that put on weight, then over generations, flew less and less until they couldn't, their wings would be useless and then wing size smaller, etc. That's adapting, like a moth changing colors to camouflage itself if all of a sudden white trees died off in the
the forest that they were in. Wouldn't you say chameleons are adaptive - just quicker, within seconds, a protective mechanism designed into it. Humans have gotten lighter colored skin because they moved into northern climates further away from the equator, hair changed as well. Those who spread to hotter climates became darker with courser hair. The melanin in their skin has something to do with that. That's not a mutation, it was a built in adaptive mechanism. We
all came from two people. These changes only took dozens of generations, not tens of thousands of years.
Any fossils we have are not transitional forms, they are just extinct species, that may resemble animals today but they are their own kind. I would guess Mammoths, having hair, slightly different size and shape were just elephants we see today. Look close at an elephant, they have course hair, just not much of it. A saber-toothed tiger is a tiger, that needed larger fangs at the time, fighting larger prey. Dinosaurs were large lizards that lived for hundreds of years. Lizards don't stop growing. And the large predators and dinosaurs were obviously left behind - God did not order them into the Ark and passed them up - thank you very much. Their bones could only have been preserved as we see them, from an deluge that suddenly buried them in mud. If bones are left on the ground from animals that just natural die, those bones disintegrate into dust over hundreds and thousands of years. Be reasonable, do you think they could survive 160 million years of weathering with minerals, wind and water drainage passing over the bones and wearing them down, even if they were buried?
Darwin's theory did not consider God, it denied the Genesis account. It just doesn't harmonize in any way, because what it says is that we all evolved from a single cell originating from the water. Distorting a day into an epoch of time doesn't harmonize anything.
How Genesis would read if Theistic Evolution were true:
The first sentence would be fine, but the rest, much different. He wouldn't have used the word "day" or "night", but "ages" or 'epochs" of time instead.
Epoch #1: God created a highly condensed form of matter / forms of energy including light and caused it to explode into the surrounding space and the matter became separated and then organized into hundreds of billions of groups (vortexes of stars), each having hundreds of billions of stars with each having their own system of planets, etc.
Epoch #2: God separated the waters from the land on earth and in the heavens;
E3: He created a tiny cell in the water and breathed the life force into it and in time God made it more complex and larger leading to many different kinds of vegetation and higher forms that could think. The seas became filled with fish and in time these forms of life made their way onto land. More time passed as these selected sea/land creatures developed into land animals of various kinds populating the earth.
E4: Man appears ( 4 1/2 billion years after earth was formed and God's evolutionary process was almost finished and He named them Adam and Eve -(kind of primitive form but still, what the heck) God said it was all good!
... or something like.