Evolution
Yes, God can work in whatever way He chooses. There are christians of different persuasions in many areas. God has revealed and continues to reveal Himself to all who are open to Him. He did not create us as robots to all think the same way, but gave us intelligence to grow in wisdom and faith. Our understanding will vary, but we continue to look to Him, the Author and Finisher of our faith.
The word of God is sufficient, but we will interpret it differently.Otherwise there would't be different denominations in the christian faith.
Differences make up the diversity of our talents. We all have different gifts and are meant to use what God has given us. We are one in Him, but with different skills and ways of expressing our thoughts, and we are all at different stages in our christian walk. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion now. How boring life would be if the fruit bowl was just full of bananas.
the Bible doesn't mention nuclear radiation. I don't think it does really not at all, not at all at all. However it is radioactive decay within the core of the earth within all the magma spewing around that keeps the planet as warm as it is today. If we just relied on incoming solar radiation the whole thing would have frozen over long ago. God reveals revelation the cultures that can accept it. The ancient Hebrew people had no idea about radiation, genes or anything else of such an intricate nature. God, in his wisdom revealed what the culture could accept and we see an increasing degree of Revelation with more sophisticated culture and an increasing understanding of God and Revelation of himself as the culture of the Hebrews increased.
Where a much more sophisticated culture in terms of our technology, what we've got to do is get the balance right.
I have no objection to God using evolution and at some point breathing his living spirit into a highly evolved ape and calling him Adam. I actually like the apes, I have sort of primal instincts myself, breeding, eating, sleeping, warmth, (come to think about it now that you mention it I am probably a fairly apelike grotty sort of person.... oh well there goes the next date).... but seriously God uses natural processes, let me correct that processes we called natural because he is a God who is consistent. IF God wasn't consistent we couldn't understand the universe, we couldn't understand each other and we could be held responsible through our sinful actions if we lived in a random universe. So therefore God created an understandable universe the trouble is with any knowledge it can be used for good or evil Darwin was a total twat.. he used the knowledge God had given him for evil rather than to saying a look at this this is how God achieved something.
dear Martin, some people like classical music some people don't, one of my sons won't eat eggs and the other one won't eat yoghurt, people are different and in some ways the different denominations reflect our personalities which God has given us, so so long as they stay within the umbrella of Christ crucified it merely reflects our different personalities.
PS, by the way Heather I like bananas..ha ha
If death and sin were in the world before the fall (which would be nessesary if rocks gradually turned into men) then Jesus died for nothing. Creation and evolution can't both be right. Death is the just penalty for sin that Jesus came to pay for. If death happened before sin, it destroys the basis for the atonement.
dear Jerry, it is a good point that you raised, I'm not sure at what point we say death entered the universe, maybe you can still have some degree of genetic change without death of the creatures, hence its survival necessarily of the fittest it's just who breeds the fastest?
Nonetheless I think the point I was trying to make was that the whole universe is in travail, it is under trial and is a universe that is based in one sense on decay. I guess the point I was trying to point out is that when it comes to environmental issues my emphasis is on saving people for return the not this planet for a little while as the whole universe is subject to decay.
God says he has made this universe in a consistent way so that he is understandable, I think that is the argument that is put together in Genesis, Romans and Hebrews. So I find it a little bit difficult when God would suddenly suspend his own natural order in bringing about creation. There are so many astrophysicists and particle physicists that have become Christians from studying the created order because they see no other way other than creation. They do however see creation as a process rather than a single event.
I think genetically, the closest creature on the planet to us is a chimpanzee that actually has a 99% DNA in common with us in fact it might be 99.5%
Hi All. The 99.5% 'DNA similarity' between chimps and humans quoted is a little out. As recently as 2002 that was pretty close to the figure being bandied about some scientists. Then the human genome project came out. The figure appears to be more like 95% similarity - but the statistic fails to explain just how much of a difference that is. There are some 40 million differences between human and chimp DNA (or more - I think, from memory the 40 mil figure was a 1.5% difference).
Lets say, for argument's sake, that humans and chimps had a common ancestor 10 million years ago, which is what is generally bandied about. I'm not going to argue the timeline, for the sake of the story. At one genetic point mutation, one DNA difference, spread throughout the entire human population on earth at the time (ie: everyone gets the 'new improved' gene). That would be 40 positive changes in DNA per year. But there is a cost of such 'beneficial' mutations - a huge quantity of negative mutations. The genetic burden of mutations required to achieve 40 'positive' mutation per year would kill the human race in a very short period of time, a couple of hundred years should about do it.
A more reasonable mutation rate is one positive change in DNA every 300 years (a rate put forward by J.B.S. Haldane, respected champion of evolution and a hero of Richard Dawkins). At this rate it would take 12,000 million years, a bit more than any one is prepared to bet on. Secular scientists are a little gob-smacked by this: the difference in Y chromosome alone is enormous, a difference more similar to that between chicken and human than human and ape.
The problem only gets larger: the DNA data doesn't confirm the hypothesised 'evolutionary trees' put together from fossils - it plays merry hell with them in fact. It turns out that there is no such thing as junk DNA either (again, just because we don't know what something does doesn't mean it does nothing). And even DNA, it turns out, isn't 100% of the instructions to make a human being.
Oh, and, just in case you are wondering (cos I would be by now), positive genetic mutations have never been observed. There are a couple that get bandied about: sickle cell anaemia is one of them. But that is caused by a loss of genetic information - like trying to build the space shuttle by taking bits of it away. Antibiotic resistant bacteria is the other - but it is the same deal - turns out they just cant eat the antibiotic properly because they have lost that ability, a negative mutation not a positive one, like if i couldn't digest carrots that wouldn't be evolutionary progress.
This whole debate is my pet favorite. There are many valid arguments for both sides, but unfortunatly there are also inumerable arguments that are made that are quite wrong, I think because people from either side try to delve into the other's realm (theologists and scientists) without actualy understanding the other's realm when they try to pull apart the other's arguments. This can lead to alot of misinformation the spreads down to us lay people and so we can end up making arguments based on false information.
My own background is that I am a commited Christian and belive that God created the world and everything in it. I have also studyed a Batchelor of Science majoring in Biology and accept the scientific way of explaining how life has come into be. I am currently studying a Certificate in Theology.
First off let me say that all I'm about to say isn't to try and force anyone into accepting my way of thinking, I think when it comes to matters of faith that it is that, a matter of faith and thus I can't say that what you belive is wrong (assuming there is a biblical basis for it). Personaly I admire the faith of someone who belives that the world was made in six days, when, for me there is alot of evidence that shows that this isn't the case.
In this post I'll talk about what I belive and why and then I'll add another post to address posts made by others to hopefully address so miss information or to open you to another way of thinking..
So what I belive: I belive that we can hold both the biblical and scientific view points together in harmony with eachother to help us understand the world we live in and how we ("man") were made in the image of God to have a relationship with him. I belive that the Universe came into being through what is described as the big bang and that from some material left over from a dead start, our solar system was formed. The Earth formed from some of this debree bubt was largly molten and unable to support life. As the Earth cooled, An atmosphere formed, and also great oceans formed. During this time the atmosphere was not as we know it and would be unable to support us. Through chance some chemicals formed together in an cell like stucture with an ability to recreate itself. And so the first single cell organisms came into being. Over time some of the species of single cellurlar orgnisms found it be benificial to work together and so we have the begining of multi cellular organisms. Over time all sorts of sea life evolved including fish, "sharks", all sorts of shelled life etc. During this time the atmosphere was transformed from photosynthetic life in the sea and so life started to move onto land. After this we have the dinosaurs etc. The the die out of dinosaurs and the rise of the mamals, which were originaly tiny rat like things. From these all sorts of mamals evolved, including the primates. From these came the ancestors of the "great apes" and then the line of which we and chimpansees share a common ansestor. Finaly the homo sapians evolved, or us.
All of this evolution requires millions of chance mutations that happen to be be benifical for the organisim in its enviroment. Along with all these mutations are the facts about our planet. The distance we are away from our sun and the strength of energy coming from the sun is perfectly balanced so we are able to stay warm enough for water to be a liquid and for enough energy to reach us to support life. There is the right amount of gravity to support an atmosphere, but not too much that it would crush everything. Every attibute seems to be "tailor made" to support life.
The more I find out about the complexity of life and how it interacts, the amount of complex systems in our bodys and in our cells and in our DNA, and about our Universe and how everything seems "just right" the more I find myself thinking that there has to be some being that did all of this, because its all too complex for it all to be aranged the way it is, just by chance.
The Bible describes how God created the universe and the Earth and all life and Us perfectly, which is born out in my obersevations of everything. From there the Bible then goes to describe how we are designed to be in relationship with Him and how He tries to go about restoring the relationship that was broken by Adam and Eve in the garden.
To sum up my belifs: Basicly I follow how science describes how everything came into being, but that it was God that started it all in motion, and it was God who had his hand in how life evolved and "guided" all the chance mutations to create us.
Ok, the 'vestigial organs' argument - essentially and argument from scientific ignorance/arrogance (not implying that any here believing it or repeating it are 'dumb' or 'arrogant'). Just because we do not know the use of something does not mean that it has no use. There used to be around 180 parts of the human body considered to be evolutionary left-overs, but the list gets smaller by the minute as we find out more about how the body works.
Wisdom teeth: Crowding (rare in Africans and Asians, more common in Europeans) tends to happen whether or not wisdom teeth have been removed, it is not because we have 'evolved' smaller jaws than apes. There appears to be a link to diet - specifically the western processed foods diet, effectively our teeth and jaws are underused and this causes difficulties that humans usually did not have in times BC (and now, in the non-western world). A very Euro-centric argument.
'Tail' bone (coccyx): Anchors the anus. Very, very useful. Important for our upright posture (not a stooped like monkeys posture).
Appendix: Helps to protect the small intestine from microbes/bacteria in the large intestine, in much the same way that tonsils function to help fight throat infections. Removing either will not kill you, the body has a lot of built-in back-ups. One might equally argue that people's left eyes should be removed, because we can function without them, or that most of the stomach is vestigial, because we are less prone to obesity without it. In terms of postulated evolutionary pathways, the appendix is actually an distinct draw-back to the evolutionary cause, it doesn't show up in the 'ancestors' it should for the tale to be true, the spread is mosaic rather than linear (ie: randomly spread throughout the animal world rather than in an evolutionary line).
Flight/fight response: Actually, in my case it is more the 'freeze' response, or sometimes the 'just keep swimming' response (aka Dory in Finding Nemo). So we tend to run away from scary things. That could just as easily be an argument for special creation: 'look how well God provided for us, he built us to run away from things that might hurt us, and, gosh, he was even good enough to do the same for rabbits'. Lol.
Certain aspects of life are indeed undeniable. Whether they support evolution or special creation is a matter of interpretation, and interpretation is done by people, and all people have pre-conceived ideas (known as 'faith-positions') whether they are scientists or not.
God can indeed work in whatever way he chooses. The issue is one of how has he told us he did it.
I have a good many Christian friends who believe that God used evolution, but all of them have first been convinced that evolution is true, most commonly without ever having been exposed to rational debate for the other side of the argument.