Hello "Fish and Bread"
Could you please give me some biblical evidence for your position that the bible should not be trusted when it speaks concerning the history of creation and planet earth?
My background is in the Catholic and Episcopalian traditions, both of which recognize the role of tradition and reason, along with scripture, in the Christian faith.
So, I want to present to you, first, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who lived from 331-396 AD, who said this:
"It is possible to collect thousands [of] citations from the rest of the prophets, to show the necessity of an insight into the sense of the words. If such an interpretation is rejected, as some prefer, the result seems similar to me to what would happen if someone were to serve unprocessed grain as food at a meal for men, not grinding the ears, not winnowing the chaff from the grains, not thrashing the wheat on the threshing floor, nor preparing bread in the usual manner for use as food. Just as unprocessed grain is food for beasts, so someone might say the divinely inspired words unprocessed by winnowing insight are food for the irrational, rather than for the rational. This is true not only of the Old Testament, but of much of the gospel teaching."
There was also St. Augustine of Hippo, who's works were foundational in western theology, who said this:
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
"Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
"The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
"If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
"Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
Certainly, I could cite a lot more more modern thinkers as well.
Also, let's reason for a moment here. Jesus is God, right? In the New Testament, he is shown frequently speaking in parables, or stories that are not literally true, to demonstrate moral truths about God and the human condition. Who is to say that the same God when inspiring the writers of the Old Testament wasn't doing the same in places? In fact, when we read things like two different stories of creation back to back in the same book of Genesis, one almost has to imagine that the people who assembled that book understood that they were providing two contradictory accounts, and didn't care, because they didn't intend for it to be read in a literal way, but rather as a holy book that showed mystical truths to those who read it, rather then as a dry recitation of facts.
If God is the creator of the universe and we discover facts about the universe, which are clearly evident to scientists, then in fact we are learning about God through them, and to just dismiss that is to dismiss God, in a sense.
Also, I made a few points regarding scientific facts, and also posted a pretty cool video on the subject. If you do consider yourself to be educated on the issue of science, please do go ahead and address those points i made (and especially watch the video I posted).
I don't have time to watch the video right now, but I will comment on some of what you wrote more directly, since you asked.
Mutations, which are supposedly the force which drives evolution, are actually copying mistakes. That is, mutations degrade the quality of preexisting information. For example, as an illustration, think about making a hand written copy of The Holy Bible, and when you are making the copy you accidentally misspell one of the word (or maybe you write one of the words twice instead of just once). Would this mistake ever result in additional, coherent, meaningful books of the bible? Absolutely not. All it would do is degrade the quality of the preexisting information. And that is what mutations are, and that is what they do. They are mistakes that degrade information quality, and they can only work on preexisting information.
You're thinking on too small of a scale time wise. Humans have been able to produce dogs from wolves through selective breeding. I'm looking across the room at a golden retriever- the first golden retrievers were the product of a directed breeding program in 19th century Scotland. So, we can see that when shaped and directed towards a goal, something like evolution happens.
Now, of course, evolution does not have that same direction towards a goal. But it doesn't happen overnight either. It takes millions of years for speciation to happen. There are plenty of these failed mutations you talk about, but, sometimes, one happens to be a good survival trait, and gets passed on, or ambient conditions change and something that was before a neutral trait that few in a species possessed becomes the thing that allows them to live on and reproduce and then suddenly the whole species or most of it has that trait. Over time, these sorts of changes and mutations build up, and we get different types of animals.
Again, looking at dog related things just in my own living room. My golden retriever receives a monthly flea and tick preventative. When this particular product hit the market, it was tremendously effective. It killed almost all fleas and ticks in almost all parts of the country. Only a very small sliver of fleas and ticks were immune to it's effects. The last few years, though, in some parts of the country, veterinarians have stopped recommending it because their patients have suddenly reported that it no longer works at all in those locations. How could that be?
Well, remember where I said only a small sliver of fleas were naturally immune to? As more and more pet owners used this popular flea and tick preventative, the fleas who were killed by it had trouble finding dogs to live and reproduce on. The thin sliver that were immune, though, suddenly want to town and reproduced in droves. Suddenly, most fleas in some areas are immune to this formerly deadly flea and tick preventative. He's five years old, I've had him since he was a little puppy, and had him on this medicine almost the whole time- and he only finally got, for the first time, what looked to me like fleas (to be honest, they could have been ants or something, they were small insects of some sort, I don't know much about insects), the other day. I had to give him a flea and tick bath with a separate shampoo that uses different things to kill fleas (Happily, he is now bug free).
Now, if changes like that can happen that quickly in the scale of time, what can happen in a 100 million years? How about 500 million years? Nothing is impossible with God.
Also, there is a tremendous fossil record that shows gradual changes in species. Do you think these are all fake? That millions of scientists of every generation are in on some massive plot to hide the truth? These fossils are real, and these scientists seek the truth, whereever it leads. Some are even people of religious faith. They almost universally agree that evolution is historical fact.
Next, "evolution" is quite literally 'dead in the water' without the impossible process of abiogenesis occurring. abiogenesis is the necessary first step of evolution, and it requires that a dead soup of particles suddenly, spontaneously, randomly COME ALIVE, look around, and decide to start replicating itself.. and not only that, but produce the machinery and blueprints for doing so. This is just pure absurdity.
Well, you know, one thing that seems increasingly possible is that bacteria from other words came crashing into earth's primordial ooze and that they are the basis for all the life that is here today. However, be that as it may, just think of the galaxy with it's uncountable social systems and planets, then think of an infinite or nearly infinite universe, then think of all the other universes that quantum physics say likely exist. Now, out of all of that, is it impossible that a bunch of proteins might somewhere once come together to form a single primitive cell? I think it is. Things don't have to be probable to happen. We're about to talk about it because we're on the planet that hit the jackpot. So to us it might seem like this amazing coincidence, but, actually, on all the planets where it didn't happen, there is no one to talk about it, so it makes sense that where we are present to talk about it, that's where it happened.
Remember, too, that God created the universe with a plan. His plan was for life to come to earth this way. Are you saying he couldn't create those conditions where something like that could happen?
