Theistic Evolution makes Judgment and Sin feel distant and less real

Jipsah

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Something I've been pondering lately. I'm now fairly confident that most Christians who believe in Evolution, do so because they have a problem with the idea of the supernatural in general.
I haven't found that to be the case. I can't speak for everyone, of course. but I believe in evolution because there is evidence for it. I have no problem with believing in the supernatural at all, but I see no reason to disbelieve in the natural, either. God is obvipously not restricted in His use of either.

They tend to reject accounts of miracles in the NT (unrelated to Evolution) just as readily as they reject a Genesis worldview of earth history.
Not at all. Out Lord wants water to become wine, it does, end of. He's God, He made it all. Do I believe that God had to follow the Bible when He created the universe? No, I don't. Restricting God is always a bad idea, even if it's done to sound reverent and pious.

But why? I think perhaps we have a hidden motivation to "de-realize" (make the Bible more unreal) because this in turn makes ideas of accountability and God's judgment more unreal. It makes SIN feel less real... Our personal lives, our desires and agendas, get a lot more flexible the more we push the Bible into the realm of symbolic unreal-ness...
Interseting idea. Seems baseless, to me, but interesting all the same. I can't really picture anyone saying "I think I;m going to disbelieve in a 6 day creation so I won't have to believe in sin. Do people's minds really work that way? If I wanted to disbelieve in sin, I would, without feeling the need to alter the universe so as to feel better about it.

going along with the secular world's creation story (Evolution) makes it a lot easier to maintain that lifestyle and reap the social benefits of being a "reasonable Christian" ... and not one of those kooks who actually believe all that problematic stuff in scripture about miracles and judgments and stuff.
Nah, I think you're beating a strawman there. Sin's sin, and it's bad stuff, plain as a pikestaff. The Six Day Creation story, much less so. No sun, no 24 hour "day", OK? And God wasn't bound by a schedule that was strictly used by His scribes to make people understand that God is the sole creator and that He went about His creation in an orderly fashion. The notion that "No, God had to do it this way" is silly. We can't understand how He accomplished the Creation at all, we can only see the results of what He did, and Genesis simply says "God did it all that." I'm not willing to wave a book at God say "But you can't have spent a million years working on that, it says right here you did it all in a week!" I reckon that He might remind me that I'm bound by time, but He isn't, and tell me to run along.

We assure ourselves that we are just following the "evidence" of Evolution that God left for us, when in reality we are just putting on the goggles of philosophical naturalism, where everything we look at *must* be attributed to a natural process.
Secuse me, but who do you reckon designed and installed those natural processes you seem so unimpressed by? Again, "But God, you can't have used the tools you designed and that we see operating in your universe day by day! It had to be by arcane gestures and theatrical thunderings, like real magic!" You know, I'm a pretty decent old engineer, but I;m not ready to take God to task about His methodology in His creation, or how long it took Him.

Genesis appears to not be technically accurate. So? It isn't a technical document. Designing a working universe isn't like making toast, and I think believing that God just kind of flung the universe together in less than a week shows a terrible lack of appreciation for what an incredible piece of work it is, and what unimaginable efort went into it.

The result is a weird contradictory blend of professing to believe in the Resurrection, while systematically cleansing all other supernatural accounts out of the Bible.
I don't see anyone doing that.
 
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Dale

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Moses wrote the Pentateuch because Jesus (God) said so in John 5:46-47. Moses could have had someone who wrote it down for him but it's still his writings.


The Torah was orally composed long before it was written down. You are reading something into the Gospel of John that isn't there. John tells us that Jesus said that Moses predicted the coming of Christ, the Messiah. The last chapter of Deuteronomy says that God buried Moses. Don't tell me that Moses wrote that. He wasn't around to write it or to compose the account.

As one minister explained it to be, in Biblical times you honored people by naming books after them. That was the culture. Today, we would consider signing someone else's name to a book to be a lie.
 
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Jipsah

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Okay, do you generally believe or disbelieve the supernatural biblical accounts like the Exodus/Red-Sea... Joshua/Conquest of Jericho... You know all that problematic stuff that "Science" says never happened.
Science has nothing to say on whether those things happened or not. No data is not data, and it's no more scientifically valid to say "it never happened" than "it must have happened." We take it on faith, science takes nothing on faith (or shouldn't.)

So, does "science" say that the sun stood still? No. From our perspective, we're moving and the sun is stationary, so to say that the sun stood still is wrong. So did the earth stand still in relation to the sun? Possibly, God obviously has the ability to alter the flow of time if He's so inclined, or to speed up the people's perceptions so that it appeared to them that the sun had stopped, or probably many other gotta-be-omnipotent-to-do-it things that looked to observers like the sun stopping. What comment can science have on such a thing? None at all. No data is no data, and science works on data. Red Sea? No data forthcoming there, either. We take it on faith, God did it. Science doesn't work on faith, it works on data. It can say "seems unlikely to have happened based on what we know", but they can't say "it didn't happen", because once again, no data is no data, and you don't know whatcha don't know.
 
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hedrick

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That is a very irrational and unfair reply to someone who is trying to explain to you on what to take as historical factual and what to conclude is just metaphorical or out of the understandings of the writer based on his time.
No, actually it's a perfect explanation of his point of view. He has faith in a concept of the Bible that permits no discussion about evidence, because it's not about evidence. If God directly breathed the Bible, then all discussion is at an end. No matter what scientists and historians find, we have God's word.

I see no reason either within the Bible nor outside it to believe such a thing, but it's a core belief for many Christians.

I should note that the NIV's use of "God-breathed" is a breathtakingly bad translation. As I've noted above, it's like claiming that "goodbye" is religious because it was originally "God be with ye." Words don't necessarily mean what their roots mean. The term is the ordinary Greek word for inspired, and can have a range of understanding. That range does include direct dictation such as the prophets. However in 1 Tim tells us his understanding right afterward: Scripture are useful for the purposes listed. There's no sign that the author of 1 Tim meant what the NIV would imply.
 
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Redwingfan9

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That is a very irrational and unfair reply to someone who is trying to explain to you on what to take as historical factual and what to conclude is just metaphorical or out of the understandings of the writer based on his time.

I believe scripture is God breathed, but I also know he never made the scriptures to be a revelation of all discovery. It's breathed for a purpose which is to tell us the connection between him and the creation, not about the science of the cosmos.
My reply was neither irrational or unfair. The entirety of Christian history before Darwin indicates that believers knew and understood the world to be created in six literal days. That only changed when some Christians wanted approval from the world and did so by abandoning scripture for scientific theories that are not only false but aren't even believed anymore.

Scripture is usually quite clear when it offers metaphors. Creation is no metaphor. if we are to deny creation, we're denying Adam and Eve and their actions which brought sin and death into the world.
 
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hedrick

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My reply was neither irrational or unfair. The entirety of Christian history before Darwin indicates that believers knew and understood the world to be created in six literal days. That only changed when some Christians wanted approval from the world and did so by abandoning scripture for scientific theories that are not only false but aren't even believed anymore.

Scripture is usually quite clear when it offers metaphors. Creation is no metaphor. if we are to deny creation, we're denying Adam and Eve and their actions which brought sin and death into the world.
Actually, until the 16th Cent non-literal interpretation of large parts of Scripture was common. Depending upon the person, that could include Genesis. Deciding what sense to give priority to often seems pretty arbitrary from our point of view. I certainly support the Reformers' commitment to the plain sense. But once you do that, all the passages that earlier Christians took allegorically because they weren't edifying if taken literally become an issue again.

This is a pretty typical personal attack. No, we're not interested in approval by "the world." Rather, a large part of the Church accepts that we should try to be objective in our use of evidence, not exempting our own beliefs from examination. I think your approach basically gives up any claim to objective truth. Truth becomes whatever a person has faith in.

Obviously no one can be perfectly objective. But we can certainly do better rejecting any challenge to traditional views on principle. This was a basic principle of the Reformation.
 
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The Barbarian

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No, we are just going by the facts. You have to remember that the Bible, while written under the inspiration of God none of the writers had any form of IQ boost when being led by the Holy Spirit, because the main point of the Bible was the relationship between God and man, spiritually.

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-57

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So in this creation information, where/when was Jupiter and the other plants made. You've left out answering the 1 questions which in regards to the time the planets where made and how a first day would work for a globe earth with each zone having it's own time of the day.

You have to factually back this up just based on what you said "divinely inspired" means.

The Bible doesn't say when the planets were made...I would assume on day 4. I also assume you know why I said day 4.
 
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The Barbarian

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ViaCrucis said:
Except of course the Bible says that the bread and wine are Christ's flesh and blood, it says it very explicitly. You just don't take it literally. I do.

-CryptoLutheran

No it doesn't.

Matthew 26:26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”

27 Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

You can deny His words all you like. But it won't change a thing.

 
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-57

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ViaCrucis said:
Except of course the Bible says that the bread and wine are Christ's flesh and blood, it says it very explicitly. You just don't take it literally. I do.

-CryptoLutheran



Matthew 26:26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”

27 Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

You can deny His words all you like. But it won't change a thing.

What was in the cup?

Let me ask you this...if someone ate the bread...then spit it up...would it be "flesh" or bread?
 
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Cis.jd

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The Bible doesn't say when the planets were made...I would assume on day 4. I also assume you know why I said day 4.

I don't care about what you assume. That is all it is in the end, an assumption of yours. So all the planets are of the same age, so it took Earth 7 days, while the rest only 4? Fact is Moses probably did not even know the planets existed at the same time, he likely did not know the continents such as Asia or the Americas which is why he did not take in consideration that "the first day" could only be true if specified to a specific region of the globe.

These things we take in factor and do not make up random assumptions of inserting things that are not stated, therefore in order to understand the truth of the scriptures we acknowledge the logical points that reveal what is true and that certain parts in scripture are written in metaphor to teach things and most of these teachings are based off what the knowledge and cultural views of the writer during that time.
 
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Cis.jd

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My reply was neither irrational or unfair. The entirety of Christian history before Darwin indicates that believers knew and understood the world to be created in six literal days. That only changed when some Christians wanted approval from the world and did so by abandoning scripture for scientific theories that are not only false but aren't even believed anymore.

Scripture is usually quite clear when it offers metaphors. Creation is no metaphor. if we are to deny creation, we're denying Adam and Eve and their actions which brought sin and death into the world.

It was complete unfair to dismiss or belittle ones beliefs because they are trying to look at it in an educational perspective and considering facts that have proven scientifically true.

We are not abandoning scripture we are just recognizing the facts. How are you going to convince others Christianity is true when you deny or don't consider things that are proven to be true?

Theistic evolution isn't denying Creation it's just recognizing God as a greater designer that we slowly started to see and discover.
 
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Cis.jd

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Scripture is usually quite clear when it offers metaphors. Creation is no metaphor. if we are to deny creation, we're denying Adam and Eve and their actions which brought sin and death into the world.

Yes, and we see it quite clearly in Genesis with things like "forbidden fruit" or "the first day" that when taken literally is already showing God to be not just petty but almost like a comicbook character.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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The Bible doesn't say when the planets were made...I would assume on day 4. I also assume you know why I said day 4.

Thank you for being honest and admitting that you merely "assume" this point that you've placed into your own sense of doctrinal orthodoxy, brother -57.
 
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-57

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I don't care about what you assume. That is all it is in the end, an assumption of yours. So all the planets are of the same age, so it took Earth 7 days, while the rest only 4? Fact is Moses probably did not even know the planets existed at the same time, he likely did not know the continents such as Asia or the Americas which is why he did not take in consideration that "the first day" could only be true if specified to a specific region of the globe.

These things we take in factor and do not make up random assumptions of inserting things that are not stated, therefore in order to understand the truth of the scriptures we acknowledge the logical points that reveal what is true and that certain parts in scripture are written in metaphor to teach things and most of these teachings are based off what the knowledge and cultural views of the writer during that time.

How long did it take for the water to turn to wine?

Is it harder to create a planet inside of one day?
 
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-57

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Yes, and we see it quite clearly in Genesis with things like "forbidden fruit" or "the first day" that when taken literally is already showing God to be not just petty but almost like a comicbook character.

Because God said He made man from the dust then women from his rib....it's comic book?

Seriously????
 
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-57

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Thank you for being honest and admitting that you merely "assume" this point that you've placed into your own sense of doctrinal orthodoxy, brother -57.
There are a lot of things the bible is silent on...and all we can do is look at other scripture...connect the dots...and speculate or make assumptions.

The sun, moon and stars were placed in the sky on day 4...why would I not assume the planets were also made on day 4?
 
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2PhiloVoid

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There are a lot of things the bible is silent on...and all we can do is look at other scripture...connect the dots...and speculate or make assumptions.

The sun, moon and stars were placed in the sky on day 4...why would I not assume the planets were also made on day 4?

So, in your estimation, it's okay to make inferences and hold some assumptions from the Bible even though the biblical writers didn't qualify some certain details --- like the exactitudes of 'Creation? Am I understanding correctly?
 
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-57

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So, in your estimation, it's okay to make inferences and hold some assumptions from the Bible even though the biblical writers didn't qualify some certain details --- like the exactitudes of 'Creation? Am I understanding correctly?

Some inferences are based upon logical conclusions.

Others...not so much.

The inference of evolutionism as Gods means of creating mankind...isn't biblically based. Rather it is based upon controversial ever changing science. So, it appears to me it's okay for you to make inferences and hold some assumptions from the Bible even though the biblical writers didn't qualify some certain details.

But what actually happens is the details are swapped out...removed from the bible...such as the details of forming man from the dust then women from his rib. Evolution is substituted.
 
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