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Theistic Evolution Being Compatible With Christianity

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swordmaster

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"There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it...

Actually, there isn't. There is, however, gobs and gobs of assumptions taught to us AS codified facts of evolution, but they are unwarranted and, therefore, illegitimate. They are ONLY unverifiable assumptions, stacked upon unverifiable, speculations...stacked upon more unverifiable hypotheses. Nothing factual about them.
 
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swordmaster

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What about the seventh day, Rex Lex? Explain to me why it does not have an evening and a morning.


Because the word "ereb" for evening, meaning "dusk", also means in Hebrew prose as chaos. The word "boker" for morning, meaning "day break" or "the end of night," also Hebrew prose for "order."

Each of the six days gradually created order out of chaos, which is why the wording is always "there was evening and there was morning" and not "there was morning and there was evening," the exact opposite of what God was doing. There is not evening or morning on the seventh day because God had finished creating order out of the chaos of Him first commanding matter into existence.

Here's one for you...where did water come from? No where is Genesis is God ever mentioned as creating water...it just popped up out of no where. Creation scientists have verified (I spoke to the lead scientist myself at the culmination of a series of experiments) that when you suck matter out of a confined space, and then suddenly bombard that space with matter, condensation develops. When God spoke matter into existence ("Let there be light." and we all know that the base nature of matter is light energy), water formed throughout the cosmos as a direct result of the sudden bombardment of matter.

That is so cool!!!

Cheers!
 
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Mallon

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I understand very well how adaptation works -- I have a degree in palaeontology. And it doesn't work the way you say it does. That's why I'm asking you to provide some citations in support of your idea about how adaptation works. So far, it sounds like you're just making stuff up.
 
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Mallon

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Not even when God Himself quoted it as factual history? Be careful where that leads you, unless you are calling God a liar.
Where did God refer to the days of Genesis as historical?
God certainly cited the creation story, but that doesn't make the days of creation historical any more than my citing Jesus' parables makes them historical.
 
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Mallon

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It looks like you're responding to the quote in my tag line. It's from YEC Dr. Todd Wood. Here's the rest of the quote:

"Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

I say these things not because I'm crazy or because I've "converted" to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)

Creationist students, listen to me very carefully: There is evidence for evolution, and evolution is an extremely successful scientific theory. That doesn't make it ultimately true, and it doesn't mean that there could not possibly be viable alternatives. It is my own faith choice to reject evolution, because I believe the Bible reveals true information about the history of the earth that is fundamentally incompatible with evolution. I am motivated to understand God's creation from what I believe to be a biblical, creationist perspective. Evolution itself is not flawed or without evidence. Please don't be duped into thinking that somehow evolution itself is a failure. Please don't idolize your own ability to reason. Faith is enough. If God said it, that should settle it. Maybe that's not enough for your scoffing professor or your non-Christian friends, but it should be enough for you."

Todd's Blog: The truth about evolution

Todd Wood has a degree in microbiology. I would sooner accept what he has to say over someone who has no formal training in the subject and clearly doesn't understand what he's talking about. You're exactly the type of person Todd is addressing in the quote above.
 
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shernren

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Because whenever these two words are used for morning and evening, they always mean exactly that...morning and evening.

Because the word "ereb" for evening, meaning "dusk", also means in Hebrew prose as chaos. The word "boker" for morning, meaning "day break" or "the end of night," also Hebrew prose for "order."

So "morning" and "evening" always mean exactly that ... morning and evening. Except when they mean order and chaos. Right. Got you. Totally coherent there.

What exactly do you mean by "natural selection favours?" and how is that not "mystical" to assign cognative words to a mindless process?

No less "mystical" than it is to say that a body in uniform motion tends to remain in uniform motion unless acted on by an external resultant force; or that gravity pulls, or that air pressure pushes, or for that matter that
... sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” (Gen 4:7b, ESV)
Sin is not an entity with limbs that may crouch or a mind that may desire Cain, but the communicative intent is clear enough despite the implied anthropomorphism.

You know perfectly well what it means for natural selection to favor or not favor something, just as you know perfectly well what it means for sin to desire Cain, so please don't stoop to playing those word games you supposedly dislike.
 
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Rex Lex

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What about the seventh day, Rex Lex? Explain to me why it does not have an evening and a morning.

It did. Why would you think that it didn't? How can you be so dishonest as to fail in making the connection between that very first Sabbath and the Sabbath that God gave to the Jews through Moses?

But I've just shown you how such a thing can exist: the Twelve Days of Christmas are literal but not actual. For that matter, the characters of Jesus' parables are literal but not actual.

No. The twelve days of Christmas are both literal and actual. You are in error. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_(song)


The rich man, Lazarus, and Abraham were all real people and that was not a parable. Jesus never told parable using proper names. Again, you are in error.

Very good. Did you know that many TEs here believe that Adam was a real, historical figure? Moreover, did you know that they also believe that Jesus was descended from him?

Good Christians do not believe in evolution nor in the idea that the world is millions or still less billions of yrs old. They believe God's Word.

Yeah, well why would God Almighty mislead countless millions of people for over 2,000 years to believe that their sins could be cleansed through the blood of bulls and goats?

Really? Have you never read "The just shall live by faith" or that "Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness." Guess where those passages are found? But even so, you avoided the heavier issue: why would God mislead people into believing a lie for over 3,000 yrs (i.e. from the time of Moses 1,440 B.C. to 1859 A.D.). You didn't answer it. You deflected it.

Your argument is not only weak but pitiful.

And why would God Almighty mislead countless millions of people for over 1,600 years to believe that your sins could be cleared by priests waving receipts?

He didn't mislead them. God never misleads anyone. It is just that He did not reveal the full doctrinal truth about the matter until after Christ came. Redemption was granted to those who obeyed Him in faith. Hebrews 11 makes that perfectly clear.


Evolution is a damnable lie. It has neither biblical support nor scientific support. It's only support is in the wrongful interpretation of the facts available by the use of tortured logic.
 
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Rex Lex

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Thanks, friend, but you need to correct your statement that God 'created order out of chaos' for that is an unbiblical doctrine. In fact, it is the basis of black magick. What God created in Genesis 1:1 was orderly, but not yet a completed creation. The rest was done to make his creation fully functional.

The 'created order out of disorder' is from the Latin 'ordo ab chao'.
Chaos magic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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Mallon

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Thanks, friend, but you need to correct your statement that God 'created order out of chaos' for that is an unbiblical doctrine.
How is it unbiblical? The Flood doesn't strike me as particularly orderly, nor does the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Isaiah 45:7 also tells us that God creates calamity.
 
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gluadys

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Exactly what, in your mind, does "differential reproductive success" mean?

It means that those organisms with allele A will:
a) have a higher rate of survival in various life hazards (predation, disease, etc.) than those without or
b) be more fertile, producing larger numbers of offspring than those without, or
c) both a) and b) acting together.

So, for example, if a disease hits the population and of those with allele A 50% die of it, while of those without 55% die, that is differential reproductive success. If both alleles were distributed evenly through a population of 200 thousand, the surviving population would consist of 50 thousand with allele A and 45 thousand without. The distribution of allele A has increased (and with it the resistance of the population to this disease.)

Or, if those with allele A normally produce an average of 12 offspring each breeding season while those without normally produce an average of 10, the proportion of the population with allele A will increase--especially if it also offers survival advantages as well.


You misunderstand what I said. I didn't say that genes came about as a response to environmental cues, I said that their expression comes about in response to environmental cues.

What you said is that genetic change came about in response to environmental cues.


The presence of pre-existing variational genes is the exact same thing as genetic change due to environmental cues...it is non-random because those changes are mediated by the organism's genome in direct response to those cues..


Naturally, I took "genetic change" to mean genetic change, not change in gene expression.

Thank you for clarifying that you actually meant a change in gene expression.


Genetic change is as real as changes in gene expression. There are all sorts of reasons why genes themselves change (apart from changes in how they are expressed.)

Whatever genes the creator originally made, they have changed over time, for apart from natural selection, genes normally change at a fairly steady rate. In addition there are normal changes to the regulatory sections of genes which affect the gene expression as well. This is not a matter of changing gene expression through environmental cues, but through mutations in the DNA sequence that regulates the functioning of the gene.



Then you didn't understand what I said, or you didn't understand what the papers state. They both support what I said they do.

Since you have clarified that you actually meant changes in gene expression, not changes in genes, yes they do.



And I didn't say that they were. Genes are not altered by their environment, their expression is either turned "on" or "off" by the cues they receive from their environment.

You didn't specify that earlier. I would not have misunderstood if you had been clearer.



The genotype is what is inherited. How it will be expressed will depend on environmental cues. As you say, if both parent and child are raised in the same environment, the genotype will be expressed similarly giving similar phenotypes. And if they are not, we may expect the phenotype to be different, although the genotype is still the same.

This is not an evolutionary change though. As you say, if the grandchildren are brought back to the same environment as the grandparents, they will express the genotype as their grandparents did, and not as their parents did.

When genes themselves are changed, that is a permanent, inheritable change and the pre-requisite for evolutionary change.



No, evolutionary change states that a single celled organism can, over eons of time, give way to an elephant.

Actually, no it doesn't. For nearly two billion years all life on earth was prokaryotic. Many, many new species of prokaryotes were produced and there is huge diversity among prokaryotes. If that had continued, without eukaryotes or complex organisms arising, that would satisfy the theory of evolution.

The theory does not say that more complex cells or organisms must come about because evolution is an ongoing process. But it does say they may.

And since we clearly do have a planet filled with more complex cells and organisms than prokaryotes, then we can say that historically, evolution did produce these forms of life. But history is contingent on many factors. It didn't have to turn out the way it did. A planet with diverse prokaryotes and no elephants would still be a planet on which life is evolving.


What you describe here is genetic inheritance.

When the gene inherited by the parent is changed before it passes to the child, that is a heritable genetic change. Some genetic change happens in pretty much every cell division. Humans, on average, have about 100 differences in their genome from what their parents had.




There is no such thing as "microevolution" except in the mind of the evolutionist. This is another word game played to give "macroevolution" the feel and smell of reality.

Funny, I have always associated those terms with the denial of evolution. So many say they agree microevolution happens, but are doubtful about macroevolution.

To scientists, it is all evolution. "micro" and "macro" simply designate scale, not a different process.



You said "genetic change" without explanation. Again, I am happy to have the clarification.

I am somewhat confused by "variational alleles that have been stored within the genome unexpressed until they are needed."

Now it sounds to me as if you are confusing Mendel's discovery of dominant and recessive genes with gene expression keyed to environmental cues.

Do you realize there can be only two alleles in a genome? And if they are both the same, they will be expressed, whether or not they are needed?


What exactly do you mean by "natural selection favours?" and how is that not "mystical" to assign cognative words to a mindless process?

Same as differential reproductive success. See above.
 
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theFijian

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Good Christians do not believe in evolution nor in the idea that the world is millions or still less billions of yrs old. They believe God's Word.
Thanks for the lolz! Just what my monday morning needed!
 
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lucaspa

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Good Christians do not believe in evolution nor in the idea that the world is millions or still less billions of yrs old. They believe God's Word.

How did you decide this about "good" Christians? Do you realize that most Christians accept evolution? That those that do/have accepted evolution include some of the most notable Christians in the last 150 years?

BTW, according to the Bible, what is the "Word"?


But even so, you avoided the heavier issue: why would God mislead people into believing a lie for over 3,000 yrs (i.e. from the time of Moses 1,440 B.C. to 1859 A.D.).

God didn't mislead. The people of the time knew that Genesis 1 was not to be taken literally. They had the Enuma Elish and realized that Genesis 1 is structured to destroy the Babylonian gods. It succeeded very well at that task. So well that we today are no longer familiar with the Enuma Elish and we aren't reading the text correctly.

God didn't mislead people. People mislead themselves. But at that Christians were correcting themselves. See the first quote in my signature. Christians realized that they needed to change their interpretation when faced with evidence from God in His Creation. The quote was in response to finding out the earth is very old and there was no world-wide flood.

Christians also abandoned creationism for evolution because evolution rescues God from problems that creationism makes for Him. Christians were easy to persuade that God created by evolution.

But then came along Fundamentalists in 1900-1915 who elevated scripture above God. They were more concerned with "His Word" than with God. And they mislead themselves and others.

Evolution is a damnable lie. It has neither biblical support nor scientific support.

Oooh. You should be more careful about committing false witness. If evolution is a lie, then it means God lied to us. I refuse to accept God as a liar. What's more, there is immense scientific support. Go to PubMed and enter "evolution" as your search term. Over 300,000 articles with scientific support for evolution.
 
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lucaspa

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Exactly what, in your mind, does "differential reproductive success" mean?

Let me reinforce Gluadys here. Natural selection is a two step process:
1. Variation
2. Selection.

Every individual varies. We know this. You and I are not alike. There are more individuals born every generation than the environment can support. Thus, at some point during life, there is a competition among individuals for scarce resources. It can be water in a desert, space on a forest floor, the ability to travel to find food, etc. Individuals will not do the same in the competition. Some will do better; some not so good. Those that do better will, on the average, have more children than those that don't do well. Some that don't do well will die without any children. Because of inheritance, those that do well will have children like themselves that will have the traits to do well in the competition. That preservation of good traits is natural selection.


That doesn't work. The problem is that genes that are not expressed accumulate mutations and lose functionality. This has been shown with a repressed developmental pathway in flies. The pathway is suppressed by heat shock protein 90 -- HSP 90. When flies are put under heat stress, the HSP 90 is used to keep the flies alive and no longer represses those genes. The offspring of flies cued into expresssion are malformed and not viable.
2. E Pennisi, Heat shock protein mutes genetic changes. Science282: 1796, Dec. 4, 1998.

I'm afraid real scientific data shows the idea to be wrong. This idea that God put future genetic variations into the genome from the day they were created but they were not expressed until a new environment won't work. The genes cannot keep their functionality.

Genes are not altered by their environment, their expression is either turned "on" or "off" by the cues they receive from their environment.

Define "environment". If you mean "environment outside the organism", then only a small percentage of genes respond to the environment. Some genes -- housekeeping genes -- are not even influenced by changes inside the cell. Other genes are turned on or off by homeostatic mechanism or by signals from adjacent tissues during development, but that "environment" is not outside the organism.

Whether or not the direct offspring's phenotype is the same as the parent, the exact compliment of the genotype remains the same.

I'm afraid not. Mutations change the genotype. I do not have the same genotype as my parents. Neither do you.

What's more, recombination changes the genotype to some extent, also. Your father may be AA and your mother aa, but you would be Aa. A different genotype.

No, evolutionary change states that a single celled organism can, over eons of time, give way to an elephant.

That's not exactly what it says. Instead, evolution states that there is "descent with modification" over the course of generations. Populations change and diverge. Elephants and humans both descended from a single celled organism, but that single celled organism no longer exists.

There is no such thing as "microevolution" except in the mind of the evolutionist. This is another word game played to give "macroevolution" the feel and smell of reality.

Changes in the frequency of alleles in a population -- microevolution -- have been repeatedly documented. In fact, the replacement of one allele with another in populations has also been repeatedly observed. In fact, such observations are increasing now that it is so easy and cheap to sequence DNA.

I'm surprised you said this, because nearly all creationists admit to "microevolution". Instead, they try to make some sort of wall to prevent macroevolution.

What exactly do you mean by "natural selection favours?" and how is that not "mystical" to assign cognative words to a mindless process?

It's verbal shorthand, not mysticism. Natural selection can easily be measured. Have you ever heard of Hardy-Weinberg? It derives from Mendelian genetics. It basically says that in a "large" population where there is free interbreeding, that the proportion of alleles in the population remains constant from generation to generation. Hardy-Weinberg has been repeatedly tested and shown to be true.

So, a way to test natural selection is to measure the progeny actually produced and compare that to the progeny predicted by Hardy-Weinberg. From that we get a measure of "fitness". Fitness is the ratio of the progeny actually produced to the progeny expected from Mendelian inheritance. Fitness is therefore always relative (Understanding Evolution, pp. 153-154.) We can also get a selection coefficient that measures the selective advantage, or disadvantage. S = 1.0 - fitness.

Cheers![/quote]
 
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Rex Lex

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You are deceived. The Christian world did not believe in evolution or the so-called long ages of time before the 1800's. Calvin, Luther, Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke, etc. all believed in the six day creation as taught in Genesis and Exodus.

"...in six days the Lord God created the heavens and the earth.". It was on that basis and the seventh day Sabbath of the Lord that the literal, 24 hr Sabbath of the Hebrews was established. This teaching of the six day creation is as ancient as the texts I alluded to & you have been fooled into believing otherwise.
 
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Mallon

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You are deceived. The Christian world did not believe in evolution or the so-called long ages of time before the 1800's. Calvin, Luther, Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke, etc. all believed in the six day creation as taught in Genesis and Exodus.
What else did they believe the Bible taught?
 
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lucaspa

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You are deceived. The Christian world did not believe in evolution or the so-called long ages of time before the 1800's. Calvin, Luther, Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke, etc. all believed in the six day creation as taught in Genesis and Exodus.

It's like you didn't read anything I said. The people of the time knew Genesis 1 was not literal. Genesis 1 was written approximately 500 BC. So I am talking about 500 BC, not Calvin, Luther, etc. By the time you get to Calvin, Luther, etc., people had forgotten the Enuma Elish and were no longer reading Genesis 1 the way it was intended. They had mislead themselves.

Previously, Christians had not read Genesis 1 litearlly. In 400 AD Augustine did not advocate a literal 6 day creation.

In Calvin's Commentaries on Genesis, he also doesn't take a literal Genesis 1.

Francis Bacon warned in the early 1600s against taking Genesis literally:
"For nothing is so mischievous as the apotheosis of error; and it is a very plague of the understanding for vanity to become the object of veneration. Yet in this vanity some of the moderns have with extreme levity indulged so far as to attempt to found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings, seeking for the dead among the living; which also makes the inhibition and repression of it the more important, because from this unwholesome mixture of things human and divine there arises not only a fantastic philosophy [science] but also a heretical religion. Very meet it is therefore that we be sober-minded, and give to faith that only which is faith's." Francis Bacon. Novum Organum LXV, 1620 Francis Bacon: Novum Organum (1620)

So Bacon already recognized that creationism was heresy almost 400 years ago.

By 1800 Christians were realizing that the earth was very old. By 1831 a world-wide flood was falsified and people realized that they could not interpret Genesis 1 the way they had been in the recent past. Thus the first quote in my signature.

By the late 1800s, Christians had accepted evolution.
"The scientific evidence in favour of evolution, as a theory is infinitely more Christian than the theory of 'special creation'. For it implies the immanence of God in nature, and the omnipresence of His creative power. Those who oppose the doctrine of evolution in defence of a 'continued intervention' of God, seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence." AL Moore, Science and Faith, 1889, pg 184.

"The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents him as an occasional visitor. Science has pushed the deist's God further and further away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out all together, Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. ... Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere." AL Moore, Lex Mundi, 12th edition, 1891, pg 73.

"...in six days the Lord God created the heavens and the earth.". It was on that basis and the seventh day Sabbath of the Lord that the literal, 24 hr Sabbath of the Hebrews was established.

Actually you have it backwards. Exodus came first. Exodus and the 10 Commandments happened before the Genesis creation stories were written. Originally, there was no Exodus 20:11. The corresponding 10 Commandments in Deuteronomy don't have it.

Genesis 1 was constructed for a 6 day creation and a day of rest to provide a (unnecessary) justification for the sabbath. Then the redactor who put the Torah together inserted Exodus 20:11. You can see this is in the Hebrew because 20:11 interupts the rhythm of the text (remember, the Pentateuch is meant to be sung).

Now, Genesis 2:4 has the creation of the heavens and the earth that took 4 days takes place in a single day. This is very explicit in the Hebrew. So you have 2 creation stories and they contradict. That's a neon sign that they were never meant to be taken literally.

Since you didn't answer the question the first time, let me put it to you again: in scripture, what is the "Word"?
 
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