Not another evolution argument

[depthdeception]

It seems to me that many TEs, maybe not you, use cellular death as the reason why death of the complete body was before sin.

And rightly they (and I) should. Cellular death necessarily equates to the death of the whole organism. Now, by lengthing telomeres and other things related to longevity of cellular life, it is possible to extend the life of the whole organism. However, this extension is not infinte, nor does it preclude the possibility of accidental death.

The Bible speaks of the death of the body as a whole, not cellular death that is microscopic and is a scientific view point, not a Biblical one.

I realize that the bible does not speak of cellular death, nor should we suspect that it would. However, this goes back to my previous point that it is inappropriate to create theological suppositions that clearly contradict our understanding of life and death. Rather, we must revise what we believe the bible is meaning to say about these things.

 

[artybloke]

I never believed in creationism Even in my mercifully brief fundy days I never thought it was anything other than stupid.

 

[depthdeception]

I never believed in creationism Even in my mercifully brief fundy days I never thought it was anything other than stupid.

You had fundy days? Do tell!

 

[artybloke]

You had fundy days? Do tell!

The first church I ever went to was a fundamentalist Anglican church, with a Northern Irish vicar, and I flirted with a Pentecostal church. But I always thought too much for the people in them.

 

[depthdeception]

But I always thought too much for the people in them.

LoL!

 

[shernren]

Arguments aside, I think I've gone over my "sort-o-conversion" quite a few times on this forum. Basically I was a creationist for until I joined this forum. I jumped into the cr-evo debates, being a scientifically minded person, and I realised that so far my views of cr-evo debating had been very much influenced and dictated even by fundy Christian material. When I looked at the evidence as I could find online the science told a very different story. For a little while I tried being one of those anti-scientific YECs. You know, the "I believe God created the world 6000 years ago and then burned all traces of it being young so all the scientists are gosh-darned wrong" people. It is actually logically consistent to an extent. But I found that for me it simply didn't fit. Didn't make sense. I might as well be a full-fledged theistic evolutionist with the things I'm saying and defending, I thought, and that is precisely what happened.

And I'm still pretty fundy in many ways. Life begins at conception, pornography and loose Western living is bad, abortion is almost always a sin, embryonic stem cell research is a no-go, so is homosexual lifestyle and marriage. Which gives the lie to the oft-heard claim that theistic evolutionists are moral-less backsliding compromisers.

 

[Saucy]

My whole life, I believed evolution. I even argued with Christians about it because I didn't believe in God nor did I think creation could've happened. I always knew that evolution was science and science couldn't be wrong. Then, when I became a Christian a year and half ago, I started to read the bible. I had a major conflict in my own mind. If I was going to believe in God, then I had to give up what I thought I knew about evolution. I don't know how anyone can say they believe the bible, read the Genesis account on how God created man from His own image, then still accept evolution. It was a conflict in my own mind. So, I studied creationism and found how evolution is just a scientific theory, one in which has never been proven true. The only reason at all that scientists say the earth is billions of years old, is to be able to prove that evolution really happened. There's no proof about anything science has to say about evolution, but actually, tons of info supporting the opposite. This isn't an argument, but rather my story on what I believed and how I came to change my mind. God bless.

 

[ebia]

So, I studied creationism and found how evolution is just a scientific theory, one in which has never been proven true.

Sigh.

 

[Scholar in training]

My whole life, I believed evolution. I even argued with Christians about it because I didn't believe in God nor did I think creation could've happened. I always knew that evolution was science and science couldn't be wrong. Then, when I became a Christian a year and half ago, I started to read the bible. I had a major conflict in my own mind. If I was going to believe in God, then I had to give up what I thought I knew about evolution. I don't know how anyone can say they believe the bible, read the Genesis account on how God created man from His own image, then still accept evolution. It was a conflict in my own mind. So, I studied creationism and found how evolution is just a scientific theory, one in which has never been proven true.

Actually, that's not what the word theory means in a scientific context. See here.

 

[imind]

Sigh.

double sigh...

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

Interesting.

Someone in another thread said that, because the universe was expanding, that proved the Big Bang. Personally, I have another opinion:
The bible says that God stretches out the heavens (notice it's present tense) but I've got a way cooler explanation... If we know that God spoke the universe into being, and we know that sound is waves that constantly move, isn't it a cool thought to think that those words that first created the world are still travelling out in space and creating as they go along?!
Ok, ok... so it's not the most theologically correct idea but I still think it's pretty cool.

I guess these are some of the major questions I have:

1. God said that we were created in His image, yet you believe that we started as a single cell... how do you justify this?

I don't see how being descended from a single cell is any more of a problem than being physical bipedal mammals. Since God is not physical, the part of us that share's His image is not the physical part.

2. In the book of Daniel, Daniel reads the old scriptures and prophecies and sees that God has already fortold that the nation of Israel would be held captive for a certain amount of years and then freed. What's most striking about this passage is the fact that: when God says in the prophecies, "It will be so for x amount of days" Daniel takes it as literally meaning x amount of days.
Daniel interprets the scriptures as being literal... why don't we?

Thanks for your replies.

Different texts require different methods of interpretation. Comparing Daniel's statement with Genesis seems like saying Shakespeare uses a word one way in a specific scene of a play so Mark Twain must mean the same thing when he uses the word on a specific page of a book.

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

This has already been well answered by others, but for another interesting POV check out a book called The Phenomenon of Man written by a Jesuit priest and professional paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin.

I didn't get very far into the book, but what I did read could definitely be described as interesting.

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

When I was very young, I read Genesis literally. I also would tell you that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. At that time, I didn't bother thinking about how these things were in conflict. There was no incident to which I can point where I shifted to a non-literal reading of Genesis. I just know that by the end of high school, I was feeling sorry for my anatomy teacher when she had to choose her words carefully when addressing a question about evolution.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

My whole life, I believed evolution. I even argued with Christians about it because I didn't believe in God nor did I think creation could've happened. I always knew that evolution was science and science couldn't be wrong. Then, when I became a Christian a year and half ago, I started to read the bible. I had a major conflict in my own mind. If I was going to believe in God, then I had to give up what I thought I knew about evolution. I don't know how anyone can say they believe the bible, read the Genesis account on how God created man from His own image, then still accept evolution. It was a conflict in my own mind. So, I studied creationism and found how evolution is just a scientific theory, one in which has never been proven true. The only reason at all that scientists say the earth is billions of years old, is to be able to prove that evolution really happened. There's no proof about anything science has to say about evolution, but actually, tons of info supporting the opposite. This isn't an argument, but rather my story on what I believed and how I came to change my mind. God bless.

My whole life, I believed evolution

i guess i am just feeling old.
i've spend more than 21 years sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures. in science and philosophy departments i'd guess i've had 12 classes just on evolutionary theory. i left grad school over these issues before you were born and went to seminary to try to settle the issues.
here we are 25 years later and i'm still reading and studying.

i guess we just get dumber as we age and study. that's all i can figure after reading this.

.....

 

[shernren]

When I was very young, I read Genesis literally. I also would tell you that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. At that time, I didn't bother thinking about how these things were in conflict. There was no incident to which I can point where I shifted to a non-literal reading of Genesis. I just know that by the end of high school, I was feeling sorry for my anatomy teacher when she had to choose her words carefully when addressing a question about evolution.

Now if only we could all remain young always.

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

Now if only we could all remain young always.

[font=Arial, Geneva, Helvetica]When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.[/font]