Stunning victory of Creation

But we are talking about Genesis, not about Moses' words to the children of Israel at Sinai.

Luis

 

Scott,

My standard is simply that a theory be reconcilable to God's revealed truth in His Word without twisting and distorting the clear meanings of that Word. I simply have confidence that God has chosen to reveal the truth through special revelation rather than subjecting it to the wisdom of men... many of whom consciously ignore or reject him in their study of evidence.

OK - now that's a statement that does not need to be backed up!



I'll never fault someone for simply believing. But don't let the end justify the means in all debates about science or ancient near eastern studies.

There are many reasons (scientific as well as literary/critical) to say that Moses didn't INTEND to be literal. You don't have to buy any of them!

But you can't say they don't exist when they clearly do.

 

That is simply not true, since you are deciding to read it as historical account.

I think that statement borders blasfemy, You are implying tha God wants to deceive us and planted false evidence.

No, we say he did what he said he did, your side tries to fit God's work into your interpretation.

If you will reference some scripture, or some cultural. linguistic or literary evidence that even hints at the Genesis passages being historical, then I will consider your premise. Until then you're just spittin' in the wind trying to be taken seriously.

Blessings,

Luis

 

Jesus referred to a literal creation account.

Matt 19:4 -Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.


Jesus referred to a historical Noah and a historical flood.

Mt 24:37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Mt 24:38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
Lu 17:26 And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.


Peter refers to Noah and the Genesis flood as a literal account.

1Pe 3:20 Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.


Paul referred to a literal Adam.

Ro 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

1Co 15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

It is not just about Genesis 1-11. The whole Bible is at stake to the attack of literary devices which take away the meaning of the plain words of the text.

 

Even the most atheistic evolutionists believe that from the beginning of mankind we have always been male and female. Why would this quotation be considered against evolution?

Many of us accept the account of Noah as referring to a local flood that took in the KNOWN world of men; in the same way that Caesar taxed "all the world" These words of Jesus do not contradict that interpretation.

Same thing - nothing Peter said contradicts the idea of a local but population-wide flood.

Nothing in the theory of evolution precludes God setting aside the first Man and putting him in the garden of Eden.

But not the passages you've cited so far. Got any others?

 

Doesn't this verse mean imply that there was no long period of time before man was created:

It does not say "creation of man" but from the beginning "of creation."

And I am still waiting to hear an argument for why God didn't just say in Genesis that over a long period of time, the earth was created. I think Moses and those guys would have accepted that. We do agree God is the author here, right?

 

"God could have chosen whatever starting point He willed including making everything exactly the way it is now."

Agree. We should not put God in little boxes of our own creation. We cannot understand His ways.

"I am open to the idea that God recently created all living things in such a way that they would adapt and populate the world as He divinely ordained."

Closer. You are willing to admit that God could have allowed the present diversity of life to come about through adaptation. But you are still constructing a box into which you place God.

But it is still stunning that you do not seem to have problem with ALL artiodactyls possibly being one "kind." That is a lot of speciation! Once you allow for that much change, then you really do not have a basis to claim that such change falls under minor variations with a "kind." There is no wall preventing higher groups from coming about through the same purposes.

This leads into a couple of other subjects. The first is all the talk about interpretation. We are ALL interpreting things about which we cannot be fully certain. Now the question is which set of interpretations are correct. As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that the creation account IS literal and that God for some unknown reason made His creation just look like he used inflation and billions of years of geology and common descent to create. The second is that God really did use long periods to create and the the creation account is meant to convey truth through non-literal means.

Now my person al opinion is that the latter is the most reasonable. As someone pointed out above, it is close to heretical to suggest that God would deceptively create as some sort of test. It just does not seem to be in His nature. Second, we do see that God has used non-literal language in other parts of the Bible to convey truth. In addition, we do see other things in the OT told in a manner that would make sense to the people who received and wrote the OT but that we see differently today. Saying that the sun stood still for Joshua rather than the earth. Discussion about storehouses for the hail and snow and of windows that open in the heavens to cause rain, dividing the water above from the water below.

The second and completely different discussion gets back to the science. You did not seem to object to hard when I said that your view of the whale data sounds like you are open to all the artiodactyls being related. This IS what th data show. They can all be traced back to the same common ancestor. They all share genetics, even down to the same junk DNA. The whales have pseudogenes, development and atavisms consistent with ancestry among the other artiodactyls.

You suggest that perhaps a rich genome allowed an original artiodactyl "kind" to diversify. A big problem for you. In whales we see atavisms and psuedogenes of the land dwelling aspect. But, if your suggestion were true, then we would expect to find in the lad dwelling artiodactyls pseudogenes and atavisms of all those genes that were necessary to make the whales crop up occasionally. We just don't see deer with tail flukes or camels with a nostril on the top of the head. Such things would be profound evidence that you ideas are correct, but we do not see such. Instead, what we see is only consistent with common descent as envisioned by the mainstream.

"Nor have we seen a proof that any of the whale's ancestors acquired new genetic complexity that resulted in at becoming a new species."

Just discussed one. The evidence is clear that whales have a land dwelling ancestor. The other descendants of this ancestor do not show that they have a latent capacity to make any of the specialized whale traits. This shows that they developed these genes and abilities independently.

I'll also remind you of something unpleasant. Over the coming years, we will be genetically sequencing the genomes of much of earth's life. Right now we cannot point to the genes that make whales different. But that may not always be the case. You are hanging you hat on a brabch that is likely to be cut off in a couple of decades.

"I did. You simply didn't like it."

No, you simnply made a genral statement about genetically rich adaptable initial populations. You never tried any explanation of what this meant until now.

"That would depend on how many of the original types of animals went extinct before being taken on to the Ark."

Problems for you.

First, most young earthers realize that if the flood were global, then there would not be ebough room for all the species to fit so they say that only "kinds" were carried aboard and they later speciated.

They also say that the flood created essentially all of the fossils.

Do you see a problem here? I do. How could all those various species get drowned and fossilized in the flood if they did not speciate until afterwards?

You are running into a similar problem. You are allowing for some speciation pre-flood. But then you say that some then went extinct before the flood. If they are extinct beforethe flood, then no fossil for us to find! If they are alive up till the flood so we can get fossils, then you have to take two of all these species aboard. You are back to the problem that led to the "kinds" solution to the ark to begin with. This numerous diversified species take up too much room. They also require vary specific diets which greatly increase storage space for feed and complexity of care. Its a logical problem for you.

"You would have much more than if you accept evolution's idea that all life arose from a single celled organism of unknown origin that was genetically simple in the extreme."

Nope. I have the observed mechanism of duplication and mutation to generate new information. Did you know that the recent human geneome project had to reduce by thousands its initial estimate of the number of human genes because there were so many duplications? Did you know that many diverse families of genes can be traced to repeated duplication events?

"Which I theorize is a result of reinforcement of an "off" or "on" by breeding, non-catastrophic mutation (downward in nature), and environment, ie. disease that attacked a population with only those with specific "on"s and "off"s being preserved."

Sorry, but all those genes would still be there. Not what we see.

"No it wouldn't. In fact, the remaining existence of variability is an indicator that more, not less, should have been present in the past."

Nope. You cannot have any more variability than what you had at the bottleneck since you do not allow for for new, beneficial mutations. Your bottleneck happens with two individuals. No way around it.

"If what happened is completely different from what He said happened then truly how can we know what is real about us?"

God can convey truth non-literally. He does so in other parts of the Bible. You limit God.

"Then you turn around and propose that He did exactly that in Genesis... except it isn't potential information, it is actual.
"

God can convey truth non-literally. He does so in other parts of the Bible. You limit God.

 

I am also still curious about the retroviral gene claims I made on the last page. This post

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/3/2693/4.html#000050

concluding with this statement.

and

 

Hey, don't try to lay that guilt trip on me!!!!!!!! You (OEC's, Evolutionists etc.) are the ones using that argument to try to legitimize your belief that God did His work some way other than what He said!!!!


To repeat myself just for clarity:

 

Well, yes, I would not expect a world of only 6 to 10 thousand years existance to contain 200,000 annual layers of ice laid down at Antarctica. I would not expect stars that were created only 6 to 10 thousand years ago to be visible at a distance of 10 billion light years. I would not expect uranium deposists to have 4 billion years of radioactive decay residue built up in them. Therefore I interpret Genesis 1 as being not literally meant.

 

When the Lord completed the work of creation how mature was the earth? Was it 6 days old? I say the Bible teaches yes. If on the 7th day you drilled into the earth you would find a mature earth. If you cut a tree in half you would have a mature tree full of rings. All that Paul of Eugene says cause him to not take Genesis 1 literally, was there at the time of creation, because in the same way Adam was created as a complete (mature) man, so the earth was created complete, perfect with the maturity all ready existent. That is part of the miracle of God's creative power. I have no problem with age claims---God created it complete and mature.

Bro Tony

 

Did age mean a necessity of creating humans and apes with the same retroviral inserts at the same places in their DNA complete with a pattern of mutations in such inserts that follow the pattern of the fossils that show history?

Did this maturity require that the rocks that make up the earth be sorted according to very specific ratios of radioactive elements?

Did this maturity require light from billions of light years away redording events of billions of years of history?

Did this maturity require that the only radiactive isotopes on this planet either have a half-life oof more than 70 million years (given a 4.5 billion year old earth shorter half lives would have completely decayed away while longer would still be present. If the earth is a different age then this is a very odd coincidence!) or are naturally produced by other radioactive decays?

Would a mature creation require putting all those transitional fossil series in the ground in the correct temporal order?

 

I have never understood this fascination with some that a "mature" creation could explain things.

First off, it is obvious to concede that there would of necessity be a certain level of maturity in a literal six day creation. The ground would need to be fertile, the plants and animals would need to be a variety of "ages," the man would have to be an adult (or at least not an infant), the sun would need to be stable, and so on. But many of the things cited as evidence of an old earth have absolutely nothing to do with maturity or functionality. All those inserts of viral DNA in your genome, for instance. This adds nothing to the functionality of the human body but does indicate a long period of time for all those inserts to be incorporated.

Second, it is a perplexing admission that a "mature" creation should appear to have been shaped by billions of years of change. What a strange concept. A normal, functioning universe would take billions of years to form. Our universe shows signs of having taken billions of years to form. And therefore it is young? It is an admission that all the evidence is against you yet you still deny it.

Very perplexing.

 

There is much we do not know. But even what we do know is incompatible with your position. Even just the shared retroviral inserts between man and the other apes goes against your position. There is little interpretation needed. They are observed. They are in your genome. YOu carry them around with you. They are viral. And you have essentially all the same ones in the same locations in your genome as all the other apes.

 

That is what you are hanging your hope on? You recognize that everything we see today is against your position, but you are hoping that in a few hundred years you will be justified?

There is an enormous wealth of resources out there. An enormous amount of data that has been collected and published. Start cranking out the problems wit hthe current interpretations and give the interpretations that better fit the data.

I'll give you another example of something known that is incompatible with your view. The WMAP data has fairly conclusively shown the age of the universe to be 13.7 (+/- 0.2) billion years old. It just does not fit why God would write int othe cosmic microwave background a false age. It has nothing to do with making the earth fit for humans! (The WMAP data has also verified many other predictions from inflation, such as the distribution of baryons, dark matter and dark energy.)

 

Hey, don't try to lay that guilt trip on me!!!!!!!! You (OEC's, Evolutionists etc.) are the ones using that argument to try to legitimize your belief that God did His work some way other than what He said!!!!</font>[/QUOTE]I am not trying to lay guilt on you, I am just commenting on what you wrote. And we believe he did his work as he said.

Blessings,

Luis

 

UT, Do us a favor for just a moment and assume a direct creator. Don't assume the "appearance of age" but rather an omnipotent, omniscient, intelligent, willful Creator.

Now, if He were going to create the world, what reason would He have for not creating it just as He needed it to be (ie. fully mature)? What reason would He have for using an allegory that doesn't even accurately parallel what actually happened (assuming evolution true)?

Can you give me a reason why you have more difficulty believing that God spoke everything in existence exactly as it needed to be to accomplish His will than believing that Christ literally died and arose? I am not asking for the standard "appearance of age else deceptive God response" but rather why you find one of these propositions less possible than the other.

Naturally speaking, resurrection is impossible... heaven and hell are impossible... prayer is impossible... Spirit guidance is ridiculous...etc. but no more nor less so than the idea that God created by a simple act of divine will.