bleechers said:
If you accept evolution is any way, you accept the following:
1. God prefers the "survival of the fittest" over the weak, blind and lame.
"fittest" is relative. What God command is compassion and care of the weak, blind, and lame. He does not comand that they survive or that they have kids. God commands our
ethical attitude towards other people
2. Death is a good thing.
Why is death a bad thing?
3. Jesus was not the perfect man, He was only an inferior version of an ever-changing gene pool.
Jesus was conceived by miracle. However, by
creationism this statement is true because Mary was a fallen human, degraded from the "perfect" Adam and Eve.
4. God used mutations in the genetic code, leading to deformities and inferior species to somehow effect a change in evolutionary advancement (although no such "positive mutations" have ever been documented or observed).
Mutations conferring new traits and characteristics have indeed been observed. One of the most famous is one giving a population of bacteria the ability to digest nylon. Others are in humans, 2 give immunity to HIV, 1 gives stronger bones and resistance to osteoporosis, another eliminates vascular disease, and one permits complex speech. The assumption you are operating from here is that mutations are universally "bad". But the reality is quite different. Only 2.6 per
thousand mutations are actually harmful.
5. "The first Adam" is a misnomer which casts aspersions of the concept of "the last Adam".
This is the key that concerns you. Paul was trying to explain Jesus to Gentiles in relation to Jewish theology. You don't need Jesus to be the "last Adam" for him to be Savior. Jesus died for
your sins, not Adam's.
6. Cain didn't murder his brother, he merely decreased the surplus population during a time of competetive consumption. The fittest survived.
Excuse me, but there was no "surplus population" at the time or competitive consumption. There was more than enough resources for all. You need to read your Bible closer; Cain killed Abel over jealousy, not competitive consumption. Also, murder is an ethical issue, not a scientific one.
7. Evolution is extremely inefficient (if possible at all). Taking the curse of sin out of the equation (which is necessary before Adam), you have God creating a sloppy world full of death and horrible mutations.
Darwinian (natural) selection is the
only way to get design. Even if it takes place in the mind of God, it is an inefficient process as God (or humans) throw up ideas, test them mentally, and discard most of them. So, having Darwinian selection work in nature is a way for God to get designs. Most mutations are not horrible. That is your mistaken assumption. After all, the mutation rate is over 1 per individual.
You have at least one mutation. Is it "horrible"?
8. Death before sin? That destroys the entire reasoning of the Book of Romans and touches directly on the death burial and resurrection of Christ!
Paul is clearly talking about
spiritual death, not physical. Just as Genesis 2 is talking about spiritual death. Read Genesis 2:18. If Adam's death was supposed to be physical, then God lied, because Adam lived 950 years after eating the fruit, instead of dying "in
the day" he ate. However, notice that Adam and Eve
immediately hid from God. They were spiritually dead "in the day".
9. Jesus "conquered death"? But why? In evolution, death is not onlt necessary for the "strong" to survive, it is a "good" thing because it eliminates the "weak"!
Again,
spiritual death,
symbolized by physical resurrection. Remember, after we die we go to God, right? So why do you think death is a bad thing? You are working with a strawman version of natural selection. Individuals with the best designs do better in the competition for scarce resouces. The competition is metaphorical, not literal. Death happens in nature because more are born than the environment can support. Part of God's "be fruitful and multiply". By your reasoning, God should have restricted procreation in plants and animals so that there would not be the situation of more individuals than can survive. Natural selection
preserves the best designs among the individuals. It is a method of
preservation, not "elimination".
It's funny (odd) how those who are supposedly the most compassionate among us, believe in a theory whose primary tenet is based on the idea that the strong must eliminate the weak;
The paradox is solved because natural selection doesn't say this.
Also, we don't commit the naturalistic fallacy like you are doing. What you are saying is that what is is also what ought to be in human behavior. That was the failing of Social Darwinists. What happens in nature does not translate to how humans should interact with one another.
Kellogg properly taught in his textbook (with David Starr Jordan) that Darwinism cannot provide moral answers:
"Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravitation justifies the shooting of a bird."
Stephen Jay Gould in the essay "William Jennings Bryan's last campaign" in Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991, pp. 429-430.