So, if science disagrees with our view of scripture, we should discard it? That's a dangerous view. It was the view purported those who disagreed with Columbus, Galileo, Compernicus, and more recently, Mendel. We would be living in a world of a flat earth, geocentricity, and a disregard for genetic traits.
I have never advocated that we should put away intelligence and assume that what we believe about the Bible is the only possibility. However, what is clear from the Bible is that Creation did not, in any wise, happen by or through evolution. The Bible is so clear on the way it happened.
The point I am trying to get accross is that the Bible is ultimate truth. If the Bible mentions something, then I would believe the Bible over men's theories. If you come accross an alternate theory that you believe is supported by the Bible, then you should responsibly check to see if the Bible corroborates that by other scripture. The Bible will always confirm itself - it will always confirm and uphold truth. As long as it 'jives' with the WHOLE of scripture, then there isn't a problem with it. Science is a naturallistic means for discovering truth. Because the Bible is a supernatural revelation of truth, they both seek to tell us the same thing. We can first and foremost believe the Bible, and we can accept any science that holds Biblical truth as truth.
God never intended our faith to be a blind faith.
Jhn 5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
2Ti 2:15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
God does not advocate turning off our intelligence to blindly accept the Bible. In fact, the Bible is written so that the simple could comprehend and the wise could understand. It has many hidden mysteries that very intelligent people can appriciate.
Moreover, as I had said before, it is relevant to us today wtih our current level of human knowlege and intelligence because there are prophecies in the Bible that have not happened yet. Therefore, we can safely assume that, because there are things in the Bible written for those in the furture, that God knew the knowledge level of the people to whom it would be relevant to when writing. So it is just as relevant today as when it was written, and since God doesn't change - it means the same today as when it was written. That means those who subscribe to the theory that God wrote Genesis as a fairy tale for those who didn't know as much as we do today are 'out to lunch'.
For example:
Rev 4:11 Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
Here is prophecies of OUR future. They reference the fact that God created ALL THINGS. Keep in mind, this was written for those in our future... therefore, it was written for those who understand as much as we do about our world. Yet it still confirms the very first chapter of the Genesis unequivocally.
What I see here by you is an attempt, to equate scientific fact with biblical truth. While your endeavour is sincere and honest, it must be understood that fact and truth are not interchangeable. We have a doctrunal requirement to accept the whole of the Bible as completely true. There's no doctrinal requirement to accept the whole of the Bible as completely factual. If that were the case, the Bible would be wrought with factual errors and contradictions.
This whole paragraph is equivelant to Satan saying to Eve "Hath God Said?". Did God really say that? Is that really the case? Are you sure he means what he said?
That line of reasoning serves to undermine scripture, biblical authority, and biblical truth all together. It serves to contradict God's word, as Satan eventually did when he told Eve - "thou shall surely NOT die". Questioning God's word as it was written always leads to contradicting God's word. Notice, I didn't say studying or praying for revelation. There is a distinct difference between accepting what the Bible says and trying to determine it's meaning, and rejecting a notion because it doesn't seem factual. One must approach the scripture with the idea that it is compeltely true, and completely factual. If the entire word of God is God inspired (as it claims to be) then we must accept that every part of it is from God - therefore, either God is a liar, or it is absolutely true and absolutely factual. To think otherwise to is 'take away' or remove portions of scripture that you may not agree with.
Rev 22:18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
Rev 22:19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book.
However, the general theory is supportable by ample scientific evidence, and as such, the concept should not be ignored.
Gen 3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree [was] good for food, and that it [was] pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make [one] wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Eve was also decived by the evidence before her. She, as does Old Earth Creation, made the mistake of looking at the evidence around her outside the framework of God's word. Clearly, had she believed God's word that it was sin and death, she would have seen the apple for what it was - and not as something that was 'good for food'. Taking a naturalistic look at the evidence (outside the famework of God's word) will result in mis-interpreting the evidence. In fact, there is 'ample evidence' to support the YEC view, and the YEC view upholds scripture as absolute and infallible as well as being scientifically viable.
I think the fact that a C/E thread will yield 200 or pore posts, while a "How can I witness to my neighbor" thread will yield 10 posts, tells me that our focus as a Christian cummunity is more definitely in the wrong place.
JohnV, I would assert that evolution is PRECISELY the reason that people are finding it harder to evangelize. Our society has moved from being 'more like the Jews' to being 'more like the greeks' according to 1Corinthians.
1Cr 1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;
Paul understood that it took completely different evangelism to preach to Greeks than it did to the Jews. To the Jews, you preach Jesus is the Christ, the messiah and they know who and what that is. To the Greeks, you first have to explain WHY someone needs to be saved before you explain the savior to them (Acts 17:17-32).
Paul explained God to the Greeks in the context of the story of creation. He undermined the humanistic theories and underscored Genesis and conferred the people's NEED for a savior.
Nope. Believe them both. Disagree with oyu on interpretation, however.
You don't seem to be able to provide any scripture to confirm evolution, however. Since the whole of scripture confirms and supports the account of creation as written in Genesis, and science can also confirm this, I would give the YEC view the distinction of agreeing FIRST and FOREMOST with scripture, but then also with science. Evlution, while it agrees with a naturalistic interpretation of the physical evidence, it does NOT agree with any credible/confirmable interpretation of scripture.
Still going down the slander route I see. Bummer.
2Cr 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
It's not slander when it's true. Evolution is Evil, and it's author is the Father of Humanism (aka 'prince of the earth'), Satan.
Well saying that I disagree with you does not make God a liar.
It has nothing to do with disagreeing with me - I presented you many scriptures supporting YEC, which you claim are a fairy tale meant to patronize us because our puny brains can't understand evolution. You, sir, have called God the liar, not me. I am simply parroting scripture.
there are major errors in this.
Dr. Andrew McIntosh, a man with a PhD in cumbustion theory (read "an expert on coal and oil") speaks at seminars with Answers in Genesis. He supports AiG's article on the fomation of coal.
Fine, then show me the young earth better interpretation for the issues I have raised. I have a bunch of fossil record stuff in just the last few days.
I have shown you how your (more specifically, the evolutionist scientists you rely on) interpretation of the evidence from a humanist, non-biblical perspective have mis-interpreted the evidence because they did so outside the framework of God's word. Just as Eve mis-interpreted the apple as good to eat, so too has evolutionary scientists took a humanistic look at the world's evidence, having been lied to and fooled into thinking the Word of God isn't true. As you have also been fooled. Once I succeed in convincing you that the Bible is true and can be trusted and believed fully, I will be more than happy to share the interpretation of the evidence from the Biblical perspective. However, I am happy to see that you conceed that I did a fine job at explaining it before.
This is not a physical thing and if you mis that, you miss the whole point of being in the image of God.
It is not entirely spiritual, as you suggest either. For in creating a being that is in the image of God, He created a spiritual being encased in a physical universe with a physical body. Therefore, because we are both physical and spiritual, we can assume that both portions of our creation mirror our creator.
Oh boy, another entropy entry. Maybe YOU can tell us what entropy prevents from happening in evolution because Bob sure is unwilling to do so.
A summery for this (as it relates to biology) would be to state that all biological life is experiencing a directional change from high information low specificity to low information high specificity. In that transformation, there has been some loss. For biology to be an open system, there would need to be a mechanism for injecting new DNA into the genome. This mechanism does in fact exist, however not in all circumstances. We assert that mutation is not sufficient for injecting new DNA, and in the case where sufficient differences of DNA do not occur, those are closed biological systems where loss in transformation take place. The only time biology is an open system is when there is an available external gene pool that can be introduced via breeding. However, for the most part, biology functions as closed system increasing in entropy due to loss and mutational effects (the 'transformation' I spoke of is mutational loss). For example, if every letter in the alphabet represented all the possible varieties of biological entities and information, then we can say that at creation, twenty-six letters A-Z were present. Through time and mutation, we have lost several letters so that not all 26 are represented, and some varieties of creatures who represented multimple letters within their genepool have separated and condensed to representing one letter only. The letters that are completely lost we call 'extinctions'. This is information that is forever lost and can no longer be re-introduced to the population's gene pool.
An example of this would be -
at creation, God creates a Dog Kind. This dog kind is the ancestor to all modern dogs, wolves, coyotees, etc. That dog contained all the information present for each specific dog kind. Where ever isolation of external gene pools exist, a closed system is present, and speciation takes place (natural selection of survivable traits). In some cases, the species becomes so extended from the original that it can no longer mate with the original of the kind. In these cases, the re-introduction of ancestral DNA becomes more impossible, thereby reaffirming the closed nature of the system. Over time, through breeding isolation, the number of specific species increases while the ammount of total information and possilities decreases. Some possible information in species are lost when their carriers go extinct. Some information is lost when mutation destroys a populations genes for some specific trait or characteristic.
We can see through Mendel's work and through Punnett's work how genetic traits are passed, and how, through isolation of specific offspring, we can go from more information, more generalized, to less information more specific.
For example lets say you to take a dog you know to be a MUTT - a dog containing several 'species' information in it's genes. If you continually breed the offspring that most closely represents a spcific purebred dog with other 'purebred' dogs, within 7 generations it is surmised that you will have only purebred offspring.
In fact, dog owners and horse owners use this process to 'cleanse' the bloodlines of their champions. In horses, for example, it is coveted to get 2 champion horses to breed with one another.
This is the view of Thermodymics and entropy as it relates to biology that YEC see. That there is an overall degradation of the genomes from the master created kinds which are fully informative and unspeciated to being less informative and more speciated.
Here it is again. My apologies to those who already read it the first time:
