But now you have piqued my curiosity....so I will have to.
My suggestion would be to take a look at "God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time" by Alan Padgett.
I'll check it out.
I didn't mean to imply it's a one-time-only opportunity. God is definitely persistent. But there are also persistent people - people who say no until the end. When one tries to take all of Scripture into consideration (including verses such as 1 Timothy 2:4), it seems to me that most predestination theories become rather ridiculous unless we allow that people can ultimately reject God.
Can a human compete with God in persistence? Anyway, that is why the word "willingly" is there. People can reject, even if they don't.
First, as I've said before, non-human death is a pre-Fall possibility. I don't see that it can be definitely settled, but it's possible things were dying. Dying, however, does not necessitate predation, disease, birth defects, accidental injuries and whatever else one might put on the list.
Are you sure about that? Has anything not died of one of these things? The only major one you did not name is famine. And even if all the others are avoided, a limited resource base will always, eventually, produce famine as population increases beyond sustainability.
Second, even if some of the things on the list are a misconception on my part (i.e. that even though I see them as evil God sees them as good for non-human life) I was including human life. If a lion's predatory instincts are misdirected toward a person and cause that person's death, I would hope we agree that the Bible denotes human death as an evil.
It is a question of what focus one takes. Even with a non-human population, it can't be said that the rabbit taken by the hawk or the antelope downed by the lion benefits from the predator-prey relationship. But if we change our focus, it becomes evident that predation does benefit the species by culling out the weak, the ill, the disabled, etc. One antelope experiences predation as evil, the herd experiences predation as salutary for its health and continued existence. We can neither say that the hurt experienced by the one prey animal cancels out the good experienced by the herd as a whole, nor that the good experienced by the herd as a whole cancels out the harm done to the individual. Both perceptions are valid in their own framework.
That still makes the Fall a historical event - a watershed separating things that happen now from a time when they didn't happen.
I don't see the Fall as a physically big event. Spiritually, of course, it is the event that defines human history and human destiny. But I don't see a biblical basis for such major changes as herbivores becoming carnivores or a revamping of the laws of physics
Third, I still see a bit of circular reasoning going on here, but it's subtle. You talk of how these things benefit the herd. But benefit them for what? The people I've talked to here at CF have tried to distance evolution from making moral judgements to the extent of saying that even survival is not a state that nature somehow desires (and they imply biologists are doing the same thing). That it's just a fact that those things which survive are those better adapted to survive.
Point taken. If science is value-neutral, I suppose that includes not giving a positive valuation to adaptation and survival. One could phrase it differently to try and avoid a valuation, but it's awkward. One would have to state it as a correlation comparing the characteristics of two similar populations with and without predators.
In fact an experiment of this sort was done with guppies in Trinidad (I think). A correlation was noted between the number, size and brightness of coloured spots on male guppies, and the presence of predators. More predators correlated with fewer and smaller spots and also with coloring that blended into the stream bottom. It was also found that if one transplanted one guppy population to a different area, that within a few generations, the predominant colouring changed to agree with the natural population of that environment. Guppies moved upstream became more colourful and those moved into predator infested areas became less colourful and more camouflaged.
Without asserting any purpose, certainly no conscious purpose, on the part of guppies or evolutionary mechanisms, it still seems the guppies find it "good" to attract a mate (hence coloured spots) and also "good" to avoid becoming dinner for a predator. At least they react biologically as if they did.
It started good, and the Fall has been a deterioration from that position.
Well, that's the common mantra, but is it what we actually observe or what scripture really teaches? I know I am challenging a teaching you have probably heard in at least a hundred sermons and have never thought to question. But our most basic problems, in science or in bible study, is to ferret out what notions we so take for granted that we don't even realize we have never examined them.
So, what deterioration? Have the stars grown less bright (and how do you know they have?). Has gravity weakened? Is salt less salty? Does grass no longer nourish cows or elephants? Are earthworms less effective in aerating and fertilizing the soil?
I don't see a works-based movement toward a goal. As such, all the things you mention are coping mechanisms intended to mitigate the consequences of the Fall. They are not something that was programmed into the original plan. If you see it differently, I'd be curious what Scripture you think supports that.
I'm curious what scripture spells out deleterious consequences to non-human creation related to the Fall. How do we know that what we see in nature was not the original plan? It seems to me that scripture is chock full of praise for creation and the divine wisdom it reveals.
What alternative (non-evolutionary) models have been tried?
Mostly models of design. Darwin was an avid reader of William Paley in his youth and very much impressed with his descriptions of design in nature. The predominant thinking of the early 19th century was "fixation of species" which proposed that each species was an independent creation designed for its particular habitat.
In geology (which relates, of course to fossils) the view until late in the 18th century was that they were remnants of animals lost to the global deluge of Noah's day.
At the time, these were not just "religious" ideas but taken seriously as scientific hypotheses as well.
And what phenomena do you speak of?
Well, let's continue with some that led Darwin to change his mind about fixity of species.
Galapagos turtles: Darwin was very surprised to learn that the turtles native to the Galapagos can be distinguished as those from each island have their own shell shape and pattern. He was even more surprised when an expert ornithologist told him all the birds he had collected there were finches--even the ones Darwin had thought were warblers and wrens.
If each species is independently designed to fit into its own habitat, why so many different species in what is the same habitat of volcanic oceanic islands all experiencing much the same climate conditions?
Other questions about island geography also occurred to Darwin. What are no mammals, other than bats, endogenous to islands far removed from land? Most mammals on such islands depended on humans to take them there. Reptiles are also few and far between. But birds are usually plentiful. If species were specially created for their habitat, there seems no reason for islands to be so discriminating in their assortment of species. We know if mammals are taken to islands, they can thrive there, often to the detriment of native species. So why were none designed and created for them in the first place?
Another fact about animal and plant species in island groups is that despite the internal differentiation, they are still clearly more like the life on the nearest continent than anywhere else. The finches of the Galapagos are diverse, yet all clearly more like finches from the west coast of South America than those of Asia or Africa. By contrast, species endogenous to the Cape Verde islands are more like those of Africa than anywhere else.
Darwin could make no sense of these observations if each species is separately created in its current home and designed specifically for that habitat. To him, it seemed much more likely that the inhabitants of islands migrated there. Similarly, the hypothesis that the Galapagos finches had diversified after their arrival makes more sense than that they diversified in South America and that there were a dozen or more different migrations with each settling on one island. But a migration scenario implies that species are not designed for there specific habitat, but become modified to fit into the habitat they migrate to. Species are not fixed in form, but changeable. They are not pre-designed for their habitat, but modified and adapted to it.
Fossil sloths: Another observation that led Darwin to change his views were the fossils of South America. He observed the fossils there were more like the living species of South America than of any other place. Yet they were not the same as the living species. Just as the finches of the Galapagos looked like modified descendants of Ecuadorian finches, living sloths of South America looked like modified descendants of fossil sloths of South America.
The young-earth creationist model has made a determined effort to maintain the idea that the fossils were all laid down simultaneously during a global flood about 4,000 years ago. But this simply does not fit the details of how fossils are distributed through geological strata. What we actually see is a faunal succession of sets of animals that in many cases do not overlap with each other--as first documented by William Smith in England in 1831.
So there are some models and some phenomena.
I asked the questions above because my take on the point of disagreement is that there is no alternative.
Both Bock and Granta ("Transformation Series as an Ideographic Character Concept") seem to say that biologists would not arrive at the same conclusions without evolutionary assumptions (or, as Bock puts it, the "historical narrative"). I had found another paper rejecting Brower because they claimed there is no alternative, but I seem to have lost that reference.
Well, I don't think it is evolutionary assumptions, but evolutionary conclusions. Like I suggested, it is not pragmatic today to construct models sans evolution, because no other models have been found which provide an accurate guide to observed phenomena. Just as an astronomer today would not think of using a geocentric model of the cosmos. We know that model does not provide a suitable basis for understanding the world of Hubble's galaxies. There is no point in going back to weaker models of reality as we attempt to improve our models of reality.
This statement intriques me. If cladistics can be done apart from evolution, how does that reinforce evolution? To me it seems to reinforce that evolution is not necessary.
Again, I'm getting at the question: What alternatives have been seriously considered?
Well, let's start with the obvious fact that life-forms can be categorized. With or without an evolutionary understanding, people have always placed organisms into groups usually based on morphological similarities and differences. And it has also been obvious that the living world is to some extent at least, classifiable into groups within groups. We have large groups like plants, animals, fungi and within those still large but slightly smaller groups like mosses, molluscs and yeasts. Among molluscs we have a much smaller group like clams, but that can be subdivided into still smaller groups of particular clam species. And similarly with all others.
During most of the history of biology, the way groups were classified has been largely subjective, based on whatever criteria seemed appropriate to individual researchers. And usually only a small number of characteristics were taken into account, because until the advent of large computers there was no technological means to use more.
Cladistics has emerged as a way of organizing large masses of data to compare hundreds of characteristics at a time across many taxa in such a way as to provide a rigourous and objective means of deciding which taxa belong in which grouping. In and of itself, it does not need to assume that the grouped taxa have an evolutionary relationship. It just says A is more like B than it is like X. So, A is best grouped with B, not with X.
Now, where we get an evolutionary connection is when we look at the picture that emerges of cladistically defined taxa, and especially taxa within taxa. When we start putting in connecting lines joining taxa to those most like them, then joining that group to another group most like it, and so on, we consistently get one sort of connecting pattern: a branching tree-like pattern. In short we get a phylogenetic tree.
And the only known process that consistently produces such a biological pattern is descent with modification from common ancestors.
It is the theory of evolution which predicts this pattern. But it also emerges from an analytical process which does not presume any particular cause for the groupings it produces. So the agreement between a pattern predicted on a theoretical basis, but also found without a theoretical basis is taken as evidence that that theory is sound.
That is the thinking in all of science. I happen to be reading just now Six Easy Pieces, which is a selection of the Feynman Lectures on Physics for Undergraduates. Although he is speaking of theoretical physics rather than biological evolution, Feynman makes this same point about prediction, evidence and theory.
"How do we
know there are atoms? ... we make the
hypothesis that there are atoms, and one after the other results come out the way we predict, as they ought to if things
are made of atoms." p. 19 Emphasis in original.
We can say exactly the same about evolution and UCA.
