Why does creation/evolution matter?

[Resha Caner]

When the Bible doesn't address something speculation is all we have.

True, but speculation is an extremely poor reason for discarding theology.

 

[Dirk1540]

True, but speculation is an extremely poor reason for discarding theology.

Well, speculation as far as scripture goes yes, but not pure speculation if you're using God's general revelation as a tool to smooth out theological rough edges. So this wouldn't be a a problem if you don't hold to sola scriptura.

 

[hedrick]

But even if you believe that homo sapiens were formed off to the side from the dirt, evolution still shows us that no death is an impossibility. So even an old Earth creationist must still except non-human death before humans came around, right?

It seems that only YEC can only cling to no pre-human death. I don't think we can hold our breath at scientific evidence, scientific evidence should help us with our theology, we're using the evidence of God's universe to aid us in honing our theology understanding.

Yes. That's why I said that I didn't think attempts to preserve traditional theology with evolution would work.

A discussion on the Biologos site (Evolution, Sin, and Death) responds to the issues I raised in the following ways:
* physical death obviously existed before the Fall, but without the fall it would have been a peaceful transition to eternal life. This is Calvin's approach.
* sin can't be considered to exist before God gave commands.

This is the closest you can come to traditional theology. However they acknowledge that Paul seems to have said that physical death was a consequence of sin. The idea that sin doesn't exist without the Law has a certain Pauline feel, but I don't think the second answer is fully consistent with traditional theology. They quote Augustine's concept that we are incapable of even reacting to God without grace. While that's consistent with evolution in the sense that evolution shows us as being imperfect from the beginning, I don't think Augustine would have been happy with the idea that this state resulted from our evolutionary development rather than from a Fall. I also think an acceptance that learning from errors is essential to our nature somewhat changes the nature of how we characterize sin, something that the article (and other treatments that try to harmonize evolution with as much tradition as possible) doesn't quite face.

The idea that sin didn't exist before God gave commands is interesting, but traditional theology says that the Fall actually changed our nature, so that the temptation to sin results from the Fall. It's not that we had that temptation all along but God hadn't revealed it to be sin.

 

[Dirk1540]

Yes. That's why I said that I didn't think attempts to preserve traditional theology with evolution would work.

A discussion on the Biologos site (Evolution, Sin, and Death) responds to the issues I raised in the following ways:
* physical death obviously existed before the Fall, but without the fall it would have been a peaceful transition to eternal life. This is Calvin's approach.
* sin can't be considered to exist before God gave commands.

This is the closest you can come to traditional theology. However they acknowledge that Paul seems to have said that physical death was a consequence of sin. The idea that sin doesn't exist without the Law has a certain Pauline feel, but I don't think the second answer is fully consistent with traditional theology. They quote Augustine's concept that we are incapable of even reacting to God without grace. While that's consistent with evolution in the sense that evolution shows us as being imperfect from the beginning, I don't think Augustine would have been happy with the idea that this state resulted from our evolutionary development rather than from a Fall. I also think an acceptance that learning from errors is essential to our nature somewhat changes the nature of how we characterize sin, something that the article (and other treatments that try to harmonize evolution with as much tradition as possible) doesn't quite face.

Ok thanks for the link! Well, a peaceful transition for non-humans from life to death doesn't bother me. Very low life forms killing each other off, such as microorganisms doesn't bother me, even insects. What always bothered me (theology aside, just my personal observations my whole life) is a planet where a predator/prey system of murder is the foundation of the food chain for higher life forms.

Once Adam & Eve caused God to curse the ground it didn't matter anymore, especially after the Earth received Abel's murderous blood, after that a predator/prey world would be easy to makes sense out of. I'm not good with the science, I wonder if it's possible that the higher life form systems of predator/prey eating ONLY existing after Adam could be supported by the fossil record?? I didn't click your link yet.

I also now think that God enlightened many homo sapiens simultaneously, but that Adam is singled out as a sort of original Abraham story. Especially due to Cain fearing for his own life.

Oh and I've heard a good grammar based argument for a local Noah flood from Michael Heiser as well. I didn't cling to it because I wanted it to be true he did make good points.

Heiser even personally did not commit to a side in the video, he just gave the arguments for the local flood.

 

[hedrick]

Ok thanks for the link! Well, a peaceful transition for non-humans from life to death doesn't bother me. Very low life forms killing each other off, such as microorganisms doesn't bother me, even insects. What always bothered me (theology aside, just my personal observations my whole life) is a planet where a predator/prey system of murder is the foundation of the food chain for higher life forms.

I understand why it bothers you. I think the problem of evil and suffering is the biggest challenge to theism. Frankly, I don't think even traditional theology entirely deals with it, but evolution makes it more challenging.

 

[Papias]

I wonder if it's possible that the higher life form systems of predator/prey eating ONLY existing after Adam could be supported by the fossil record??

No, the fossils show very clear predation going all the way back. Same for disease and parasites. Also, predation or death at least, is needed to make a good, functioning world - did you read about the mantisplosion? Put that in the search line for christian forums to see what I mean.

Papias

 

[Dirk1540]

No, the fossils show very clear predation going all the way back. Same for disease and parasites. Also, predation or death at least, is needed to make a good, functioning world - did you read about the mantisplosion? Put that in the search line for christian forums to see what I mean.

I don't know what I was thinking when I asked that, humans are very recent. So it seems that the biggest problem that you run into by far with theistic evolution is a world food chain based on a predictor/prey relationship, and a world with disease, followed by "And God saw that it was good." No I didn't read about mantisplosion I'll check it out.

 

[Speedwell]

I don't know what I was thinking when I asked that, humans are very recent. So it seems that the biggest problem that you run into by far with theistic evolution is a world food chain based on a predictor/prey relationship, and a world with disease, followed by "And God saw that it was good."

So why should God's idea as to what is "good" be the same as yours?

 

[Dirk1540]

So why should God's idea as to what is "good" be the same as yours?

God's word teaches us good from bad. Isn't Heaven the ultimate 'Good' world? It says the lion will lie down with the lamb. I don't think the answer lies here if you are a theistic evolutionists (at least I'm trying to get a grip on it myself).

I think it comes down to a few things, first if you are not bothered by a God enlightened cousin of chimpanzees then should you be bothered by enlightened Neanderthal Man? Or whichever pre-Homo sapiens may have been enlightened? For a long time I've suspected that there's no reason that our Bible can't be Bible #100 (or fill in the blank number). Why would the Bible care to teach us about specific revelation details that took place in 4,000,000 BC? There could have existed a prior form of Bible back then.

Homo Sapiens could not breath and survive millions of years ago. Is it possible that a God enlightened species millions of years ago that could survive back then resulted in the ground being cursed?

Again I'm still on the fence about all of this. But I'm not comfortable using my reasoning to decipher one agle of what God teaches (what good & bad is), then abandoning my understanding of that same concept on a separate puzzle because it doesn't fit in that situation. I'm not claiming however that there aren't times where it's true that you simply can't comprehend the mind of God. But my problem here is that God tells me one day the lion will lie down with the lamb, God tells me that the lion laying down with the lamb is good.

 

[Resha Caner]

I'm not comfortable using my reasoning to decipher one agle of what God teaches (what good & bad is), then abandoning my understanding of that same concept on a separate puzzle because it doesn't fit in that situation.

Understandable.

 

[Papias]

So it seems that the biggest problem that you run into by far ..... No I didn't read about mantisplosion I'll check it out.

Let's start there. Here is the mantisplosion:

A world without death doesn't work. For instance, consider the mantisplosion:

A praying mantis lays hundreds of eggs per season. If all of those live (because there is no death), then from 1 mantis pair in year 1, you'll have:

Year: Number of Mantids:
1 2
2 200
3 20000
4 2000000
5 2E+08
6 2E+10
7 2E+12
8 2E+14
9 2E+16
10 2E+18
11 2E+20
12 2E+22
13 2E+24
14 2E+26
15 2E+28
16 2E+30
17 2E+32
18 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (just to show what kind of numbers we have)
19 2E+36
20 2E+38

So that means that by around year 12, mantids cover the earth to the depth of 1 mile, and by year 16, the writhing mass of mantids engulfs the moon, expanding at an ever increasing speed to engulf the sun the next year and the whole solar system (including the Kuiper belt) the year after that. The mantisplosion! Things go even faster for many other insect species, because the reproduce faster.

Silly? Of course it is. Things get silly when one misinterprets scripture.
And so on. Any working creation will need tons of death. In our own growth in the womb, programmed cell death happens often - such as when the cells between our fingers die, allowing us to have separate fingers. Without physical death, we'd all be round balls of flesh.

Papias​

Now, with that in mind, let's look at the issues:

So it seems that the biggest problem that you run into by far with theistic evolution is a world food chain based on a predictor/prey relationship, ..... followed by "And God saw that it was good.".

As we saw above, by simple reality, any finite world with children requires death. So which world is better, a word with both children and death, or a world with neither children nor death? I don't know about you, but I think a world with children is a more good world than one without children - regardless of the undeniable fact that children=death.

The theistic evolution vs creationism isn't really this issue here, as the death=children fact is still there in both theistic evolution and creationism too. With creationism, you still have to have death, so you have death either way. After all, imagine the creationist idea of everything poofing into existence. Then, after that, if anything reproduces, you are back to the mantisplosion, and death is needed, even in creationism. Sometimes it seems that creationists don't seem to understand that the world is not infinitely large. I can't wrap my head around how someone could think that our finite planet is infinitely large and growing every day. Or they think that God created a world that couldn't possible function for more than a little while. Really? That God is so short-sighted and incompetent that he couldn't see beyond his nose, that children = death? I don't buy it.

Predation? That's already there with creationism too. Plants are alive, and every plant that is eaten by Adam and Eve in the literalist view of creationism dies. Their life is still sustained by a constant stream of death. That's how life works. One could say that they were vegetarians - but our whole digestive system is obviously constructed to include a lot of meat, and of course, even vegetarians live by killing living things. So it looks like even from a creationist vegetarian view, death is present.

... and a world with disease, followed by "And God saw that it was good."

It's not the theistic evolution idea that is putting disease into the picture. What's putting disease into the picture is the evidence from the real world - the fossil record, diseases around us, thousands of virus carcasses in the DNA of every living thing (check them out, they are called "endogenous retroviruses" or ERVs) etc. Creationists have to explain why there was disease for millions of years as much as anyone else, and pretending reality doesn't exist isn't an explanation.

Now that a long history with disease is in the picture, each side has to explain that reality. In the case of theistic evolution, theistic evolution explains that God is not a micromanager. God sets up evolution, and with some tweaks and guidance, it proceeds. God need not micromanage every part and step, so it makes sense that disease will evolve, just as evolution fills in any available ecological niche. That's why theistic evolution keeps God from being directly responsible for every little detail of the natural world. From a creationist view, on the other hand, unless one is going to pretend diseases don't and didn't exist, then the creationist has to directly blame God for creating them.

Of those two, I think that theistic evolution does a much better job explaining disease without directly blaming God for it.

What do you think?

In Christ-

-Papias

 

[Job 33:6]

I just wanted to share a fossil,
Sidneyia - Wikipedia

Im sure there are more, this is one I had just recently read about. This link doesnt display the best photos for it, but some burgess shale fossils actually have smaller clams and trilobites inside their stomachs.

So, literally from the beginning of complex life (as viewed through the fossil succession), living organisms hunted one another. That was 500-600 million years ago.

 

[Tayla]

So if He poofed things into existence, or used complex biological processes, should not matter.

It matters because: (1) creationism is provably false, (2) all the world knows this, and (3) they ridicule Christianity and the gospel as a result.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Yes. That's why I said that I didn't think attempts to preserve traditional theology with evolution would work.

A discussion on the Biologos site (Evolution, Sin, and Death) responds to the issues I raised in the following ways:
* physical death obviously existed before the Fall, but without the fall it would have been a peaceful transition to eternal life. This is Calvin's approach.
* sin can't be considered to exist before God gave commands.

This is the closest you can come to traditional theology. However they acknowledge that Paul seems to have said that physical death was a consequence of sin. The idea that sin doesn't exist without the Law has a certain Pauline feel, but I don't think the second answer is fully consistent with traditional theology. They quote Augustine's concept that we are incapable of even reacting to God without grace. While that's consistent with evolution in the sense that evolution shows us as being imperfect from the beginning, I don't think Augustine would have been happy with the idea that this state resulted from our evolutionary development rather than from a Fall. I also think an acceptance that learning from errors is essential to our nature somewhat changes the nature of how we characterize sin, something that the article (and other treatments that try to harmonize evolution with as much tradition as possible) doesn't quite face.

The idea that sin didn't exist before God gave commands is interesting, but traditional theology says that the Fall actually changed our nature, so that the temptation to sin results from the Fall. It's not that we had that temptation all along but God hadn't revealed it to be sin.

There is a belief that Satan was been messing around with God's creation here on Earth back at the time of Pangea when the dinosaurs began to devour one another.

A study of ghost ranch new mexico was used for establishing Continental Drift that they now call Plate Tectonics. They find dinosaur remains from Pangea all though the Rocky Mountains from New Mexico to Wyoming. Even they built a whole building out of dino bones in Wyoming. Clearly the worlds oldest building The World’s Oldest Building: The Fossil Cabin at Como Bluff | WyoHistory.org