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If you disagree, why?

  • I agree

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  • I disagree

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    18

Job 33:6

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So one might say you have a financial interest in supporting the theory of evolution, irrespective of where the science may lead?

I too support the theory of biological evolution, though as a geologist. Is it for the money? No of course not. It is simply based on sound science.

The whole..."information" argument doesnt seem to add up.

you have your genetic code, AAA. Your code is duplicated, AAA AAA. Then your copy is mutated, AAA AAB. Ok, now we have our original set of DNA with all its properties, but with an additional gene that has a new function. But it wouldnt even need to be AAB, it could be any combination of amino acids.



Typically mutations are considered to be "nuetral" in that they do not help, nor harm an organism. But hypothetically, if you run every combination through millions of generations, you inevitably come out with a beneficial mutation.

Or, lets say you do get a harmful mutation, AAB mutates to AAC. Well, you might also have mutations that result in reversion of the prior mutation, so your AAC might mutate back to an AAB, thereby resulting in a beneficial mutation.

And all of this can be done on copied genes, in addition to pre existing genes. The key word being addition, ie adding information.
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Now, i study rocks and fossils, so this isnt my field to really judge the topic in depth. However, in principal, it appears to be simple, understandable and true.
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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Actually the theory of evolution has sustained every scientific challenge and has been proven over and over. But there are always those who deny that for non-scientific reasons.
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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There is a logical problem opposing the evidence for for evolution based on choosing the Bible over such evidence. And that is, the matter of evidence.

There is no reason to accept the Bible as worthwhile is because of evidence for it. It cannot stand on its own statements without external evidence to support it.

Therefore, external evidence must be valid as well, or else there is no reason to accept the Bible.

We might as well accept any writing that claims to be valid if we don't abide by evidence, and we aren't about to do that, are we?

Therefore, the evidence matters. But when we disregard evolution, we are disregarding a whole category of well established evidence. Disregarding evidence is the very opposite thing we need to be doing to stand up for the Bible.

The Bible is inerrant when properly interpreted, but any interpretation of it that rules out evolution is ruling out far to much evidence to be accepted, logically.
 
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NobleMouse

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Greetings Paul of Eugene OR and thank you for your comments, and time! I'll start off by asking: Where is your external evidence that you will be saved from hell and eternal separation from God by placing your full faith and trust in Jesus Christ? If you're trusting your salvation on the finished work of Christ with no external evidence to support this trust then by your own definition you have a logic problem. I do not say this to be snide or jeering, but to show that by contrast one cannot fully believe on all the promises and truths of the Bible by external evidence... if all that you have faith in is that which you have external evidence for then it is not faith that you have (By definition, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen - Hebrews 11:1).

Further, the Bible is not just "any writing", it is the word of God. Nothing is of higher authority, including the writings of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, et al. I agree it would be folly to accept just any writing that claims to be valid, but will say it is all the more foolish to accept the conjecture of man over the truth of God.

Nowhere in the Bible is the concept of evolution eluded or inferred upon, nowhere are millions/billions of years given or suggested... to the contrary, each was created according to their kind is plainly stated and we are given a timeline through the creation account, the lineages in Genesis 5, Chronicles, as well as numerous references and genealogies from the NT - the Bible is not vague or silent on this. Accepting the evolution dogma requires compromising (redefining) and/or simply ignoring many, many passages from the word of God.

If you have committed to accepting the interpretation of evidence as is taught in scientific academia over the word of God, you have every right to do so as God has given each of us free will. Likewise, each of us will have to give an account before God, and as it states in Hebrews 10:31, "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

Respectfully in Christ,
"Reepicheep"
 
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Hieronymus

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I too support the theory of biological evolution, though as a geologist. Is it for the money? No of course not. It is simply based on sound science.
No it is not.
But you woudn't know if you don't let people point out the huge holes and problems this naturalistic idea has.
 
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sfs

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But you woudn't know if you don't let people point out the huge holes and problems this naturalistic idea has.
I've been letting people point out the huge holes in evolution for several decades now, and somehow they've always failed to deliver.
 
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Job 33:6

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There are many things that scripture does not discuss. Countless earth like planets and stars, the vast diversity of life in earths past, scripture doesn't talk about things like DNA at all. And there is no statement in scripture stating the age of earth.

With that, no one should anticipate a complex discussion about biological evolution.
 
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NobleMouse

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Hello KomatiiteBIF and thank you for your thoughts on the topic! I will agree that scripture does not give us minuscule details like the "greater light" being made up of approx 70% hydrogen, 28% helium, and the rest being of various other elements. Have you not read Genesis 1:14-19? The Bible does discuss stars: their purpose ("...and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years..."), who created them ("...God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth..."),and when they were created ("...And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.")

The wonderful thing about science and how God created us is that we can observe and enjoy the intrepid discovery of His creation... giving us information like what type of atoms make up our sun; this is observational science. As I'm sure you know, historical science is taking what we know about the present to tell a story about the past. You see the human cell and the cell of an amoeba and the story you are told is that any similarities exist because undergirding evolution is the idea that we ultimately came from single-celled organisms and so all life will have some degree of common traits. That idea did not come from the Bible. In contrast, I see the human cell and the cell of an amoeba and what we know from God's word is that all things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3) - we have a common creator so we'd expect to see common qualities in all life.

As to scripture stating the age of the earth, again scripture is not vague nor silent on the matter of man being created on day 6, and we have lineages from Adam to Christ, and we know approximately when Christ lived relative to today. No where can evolution and billions of years be retrofitted into the Bible.

Twisting and manipulating scripture to mean something it does not is rooted in satan himself. I want to be real clear here that I'm not at all saying you are satanic, but rather the "lie of evolution" as per the title of this thread originates from the father of lies. How so? Lets go first to Matthew 4:1-11; how did satan try to tempt Jesus? He turned to scripture. Satan twisted and manipulated the meaning behind the words to tempt Jesus. How did Jesus respond? "It is written...." Now let's go to Genesis 3. Again, we see satan twisting and manipulating what God said to Adam and Eve by saying, "Did God really say...?"

Fast forward to today, we now have man being deceived yet again by the father of lies: "Does 'yom' in the context of the Genesis account really mean a 24-hr day?", "Is the lineage from Adam to Christ reliable and literal?", "Isn't Genesis really just poetic allegory?", "Doesn't 'in the beginning' just refer to the beginning of man, not the beginning of all life before man?", etc...

To all these lies as well as those widely accepted and propagated within secular historical science, I respond the same as Jesus, "It is written...". The Bible is clear as to not permit ideas like evolution and billions of years. Wrapping up here with historical science, nobody has observed evolution in seeing one kind become another kind, nobody has observed billions of years. These are just made up stories invented in the mind of man (in the absence of biblical doctrine) used to tell about a false past without a loving creator God.

Respectfully in Christ,
"Reepicheep"
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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It is not my point to dispute the message of the Bible. But it is my point to ask why people trust the Bible. It cannot be merely because the Bible says certain things about heaven and hell; other books say things. Don't you assert that the evidence favors the Bible? Things like credible consistency with history, fulfilled prophecy, the changed lives that embrace the biblical message?

Of course you do. But we must also regard the evidence for the age of the earth and the common descent of all life from an original form, dating back billions of years.

If we insist the Bible disagrees with that finding, then we are asserting that not all the evidence favors the Bible. Only those of us who interpret the Bible as being consistent with the older earth, evolution and so forth are able to say the Bible is consistent with the evidence.
 
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NobleMouse

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Thank you for the replies! I'll take it the intent of your comment was meant as "But it is my point to ask why people trust the Bible when it comes to the age of creation and the origin of life." To that my response is that it is apparent your view and my view of the Bible are not the same. I do not see the Bible as ideas about God written by men within the framework of their worldview as it would have been between ~1,400 BC and ~200 AD, but rather as the divinely inspired, infallible word of God.

2 Peter 1:20-21 tells us, "knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." Even Daniel indicated he did not always fully understand as God was working through him as seen in Daniel 12:8-9, "I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, “O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?” He said, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end." So as we can see, these are not just the words and ideas of man, but rather God's holy word given to us, and yes we can trust the Bible for all things. If not, God is a liar, which He is not.

But we must also regard the evidence for the age of the earth and the common descent of all life from an original form, dating back billions of years.
I'll apologize here if you've read earlier posts of mine here and I just come across as being redundant in my response. Evidence doesn't tell us the earth is billions of years old, it is the interpretation of the evidence. No fossil, rock, or comet comes with a tag with its age printed out. Those of us that hold to the age of the earth as indicated by the Bible don't look the other way when we see evidence (rock layers, other galaxies, variability of a given species, etc...), we interpret the evidence within the framework of what the Bible says is true. If I may turn the table here a little and ask you the question back: Why not trust the Bible and form our interpretations of evidence upon the word of God?

Again, it's not the evidence that doesn't favor the Bible, it is the misinterpretation of the evidence that doesn't favor the Bible. Observational science doesn't tell us billions of years and evolution, it is inventing stories in the absence of the truth of God's word that does. All OEC's have demonstrated is that they can redefine what they want the Bible to mean (even though it says over and over to the contrary) so that it lines up with assumptions about the past, presented falsely as fact, without any observation whatsoever.

Case in point, you'll notice how I'm not really presenting any arguments by my own cunning/cleverness (as I'm not particularly either of those : ), I'm simply quoting scripture (you'll see them highlighted throughout each of my posts) - the word of God will defend itself and so I stand upon it to also defend my position. In the arguments I'm reading and receiving back in support of evolution and billions of years you'll also see there are no references to scripture... that's because scripture does not support evolution or billions of years. Further, evidence itself is agnostic - it does not favor a particular worldview. Our worldview is what tells the story of that which we did not observe. So, I ask the question again: Why would I, as part of God's creation, interpret evidence of creation any other way than to base my interpretation from the word of the creator Himself?

Humbly in Christ -
"Reepicheep"
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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Reasoning exactly like yours above caused Gallileo to be imprisoned and threatened with torture for accepting evidence that the cause of day and night is the rotation of the earth rather than the movement of the sun across our sky. It was invalid then and is invalid now. We can in truth know nothing at all about our existence and our world and what we should do except by evidence, and to say the evidence is only a matter of interpretation, and therefore may be dismissed, is to seriously misunderstand the evidence. Indeed, such objections can be raised against scripture as well; your spiritual dependance on scripture is only because you have made a decision to accept it and why should you do that? One might rhetorically ask, why should anyone believe the Bible is the Word of God to be literally interpreted as you suggest? If you wish to disregard evidence, then you are left with no reason for your position; if you wish to accept evidence, you must logically accept the compelling evidence for evolution, because that evidence is real.
 
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mark kennedy

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Should Evolution Be Taken Seriously By Christians?
My Opinion Is No! What Say You?​
No, evolution is a natural phenomenon, Darwinism is a very different thing then adaptive evolution. Darwinism is based on an assumption of purely naturalistic causes going all the way back to and including the Big Bang. It's obviously materialistic atheism, adaptive evolution is another matter entirely different thing and we do well not to confuse the two.
 
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mark kennedy

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Galileo had the second telescope ever invented, most astronomers believed the sun revolved around the earth. He wasn't arguing anything biblical, or against anything biblical, he argued for the principles of motion and a heliocentric model of cosmology. He argued at the inquisition that the Bible tells us how to get to heaven, not how the heavens work, he was right. It's a false dilemma to equivocate that with the doctrine of creation, if God didn't create life in the first place, how are we to take the promise of eternal life seriously?
 
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mark kennedy

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The Genesis account doesn't say anything about the original creation except that it was in the beginning. The age of the earth is irrelevant to the doctrine of creation. Genesis teaches that God created life in general and man in particular about six thousand years ago and that is a simple fact.

There is no contradiction between the Bible and science, at least none that I've ever seen.
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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Uh . . . there's not really any such thing as "Darwinism" in science, there's just the study of biological evolution and of course there is also another field of study, cosmology, which mostly ignores biological evolution as just a minor part of the history of a minor planet . . . Darwin has a major place in the history of science, but we don't study his works as if they were holy scripture. Evolution would have arisen as a science without Darwin . . . Wallace after all came up with the idea around the same time.

And it is true that science keeps to the material things of the universe, because after all, there is simply no way to study non-material things based on objective material evidence. That doesn't mean any one scientist is an atheist, and many scientists would resent you telling them they must be atheists; you should stop saying things like that. Some of them are atheists, of course.
 
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mark kennedy

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I'm not saying that scientists are atheists, science is an exploration of natural phenomenon. When they get into the subject of origins they are no longer in the comfortable haunts of their discipline. Darwin is responsible for a naturalistic assumption that is far beyond the reach of science, he even admitted he had no interest or abilities along the lines of metaphysics. Darwinism is a naturalistic view of nature that will not allow the inference of God as cause of anything in nature, it's an aberration of science, not a product.

Evolution is a living theory, it starts after life exists, it's really just about how it changes over time. The actual origin of life isn't a subject the scientist should bother himself with, that is better left to philosophers and clerics. Darwinism isn't science, it has contributed nothing empirical and certainly nothing in the way of a law of science. I've studied the fossils and comparative genomics, Darwinism is supposition not science, pure and simple.

Grace and peace,
Mark
 
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Gregory Thompson

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The common story of evolution where animals come out of the sea and walk on land reads like a prophetic discourse. Perhaps the persistence of this teaching on a physical level is a spiritual sign?
 
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One Of The Elect

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I was addressing the Theory of evolution introduced by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace "Darwin's origin of Species" He elaborated upon 19th century Jean - Baptist Lamark's work. I simply do not agree with them they are the first to introduced into science their theories( legitimately) concerning this. And based on their work the biology and origin of species has been built upon. I am simply saying- there are so many contradictions in science it is difficult to pin down clear proof of the first introduced theory.

And still to this day they have not proven that DNA of any species is self added forming , greater and all together new species from lesser. The fossil record is simply not their. And considering the long duration science says from the time of the first specie to now their is just not enough fossil evidence to convince me. You do not have to agree. I will not expound upon what I wrote. I am addressing the fundamentals, the elementary principles of the belief. God Bless.
 
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mark kennedy

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Pay close attention because this is about as fundamental as it gets:

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique,' and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres.' In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, preface)
Darwin attributed this philosophy of zoology to Lamarck. What Lamarck was insisting on is that all species, including man, are descended from other species and not the result of miracles. Now Malthus had observed that there is a tendency of living things to reproduce beyond the ability of resources to sustain them, the result is a struggle for existence. What Darwin popularized were the naturalistic assumptions, that's really all there is to it.


Just a couple of things here, first DNA always comes from the parents and they are loaded with molecular mechanisms that make proteins, there are housekeeping and repair genes and a vast array of functions and systems. They are not self organizing, DNA follows a specific series of highly detailed functions, the idea that they simply organized at random is contrary to everything science has discovered about how it works.

Now as far as the fossil record it is very clear, but the fossil record has been misrepresented. My focus has been human evolution, I focused mostly on hominid fossils and comparative DNA. This is what I found regarding the fossil record.

Perhaps the longest running demonstration was easily the Piltdown fraud. The Piltdown Hoax was the flagship transitional of Darwinism for nearly half a century and it was a hoax. A skull taken from a mass grave site used during the Black Plague matched up with an orangutan jawbone. Even Louis Leakey, the famous paleontologist, had said that jaw didn’t belong with that skull so people knew, long before it was exposed, that Piltdown was contrived.

Leakey mentions the Piltdown skull in his book 'Adam's Ancestors':

'If the lower jaw really belongs to the same individual as the skull, then the Piltdown man is unique in all humanity. . . It is tempting to argue that the skull, on the one hand, and the jaw, on the other, do not belong to the same creature. Indeed a number of anatomists maintain that the skull and jaw cannot belong to the same individual and they see in the jaw and canine tooth evidence of a contemporary anthropoid ape.'​

He referred to the whole affair as an enigma: In By the Evidence he says 'I admit . . . that I was foolish enough never to dream, even for a moment, that the true explanation lay in a deliberate forgery.' (Leakey and Piltdown)​

The problem was that there was nothing to replace it as a transitional from ape to man. Concurrent with the prominence of the Piltdown fossil Raymond Dart had reported on the skull of an ape that had filled with lime creating an endocast or a model of what the brain would have looked like. Everyone considered it a chimpanzee child since it’s cranial capacity was just over 400cc but with the demise of Piltdown, a new icon was needed in the Darwinian theater of the mind. Raymond Dart suggests to Louis Leakey that a small brained human ancestor might have been responsible for some of the supposed tools the Leaky family was finding in Africa. The myth of the stone age ape man was born.

Every time a chimpanzee fossil is dug up in Africa it's automatically one of our ancestors. There are two chimpanzee fossils I know of for sure that are being passed off as our ancestors. Darwinian evolution is a fraud and a myth.

Grace and peace,
Mark
 
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