Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True?

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buffalo said:
God guided isn’t evolution at all.
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Since you oppose evolution, you do not get to say what it is. That would be a straw man argument.

It it true that some atheists claim evolution supports their view. But there are also biologists who believe evolution is true and are also Christians. So obviously evolution does not preclude God’s role in creation.
 
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buffalo said:
Once again - did God know what Adam would look like?
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In answer to your question I can only think of Jesus Christ.

If it sounds an absurd response, that would be as a reflection of the question itself. It is the best question, but also the worst. It’s not very good by virtue of it’s demanding a yes or no answer, where truly neither is correct. It’s great in that for every yes response, there is also a negative, thereby causing the question to open up the meanings contained in its words.

Let’s begin with Adam, as an ontological and temporal reality, as the first individual person from whom we all spring, as one humanity, a fundamental choice we have made to turn from God. Adam born of the Father, becomes a son, through the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son, brought into the Trinity through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Adam may be thought of as the potential for Jesus Christ, actualized through his love of God, in time.

The next issue has to do with what we truly look like and ties in to the nature of knowledge. What we look like can only be known through love, where we begin to see the world and we ourselves through the eyes of God’s infinite compassion. Narrowing things down to what that means physically, I don’t think we can say to what extent the immediate perceptual experiences of one another coincide with the known objective reality of what we are - unimaginably immense to the microcosm, and shrinking to nothing within the entirety of universal space and time. We don’t seem to be getting any closer to what we look like; the more we learn from science the more questions arise. In Adam we see all humanity, now broken and facing death as a result of an original sin, but destined to be whole again, reunited in love, in and through Jesus Christ.

Another issue with the question has to do with its use of the past tense as to what God does. He is One and eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving. He sees Adam, the original person, as he exists in the entirety of his existence. When He walked with Adam in the garden, God reached into time to guide and warn him of the dangers of disobedience to the one rule, which is love. God saw Adam, the interaction between them and the ultimate outcome: Jesus Christ.

Colossians - 1:15-21 “And He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

God knows Himself.
 
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buffalo said:
Once again - did God know what Adam would look like?
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Genesis 2:7 - 7 “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

I think it’s pretty clear the dust did not whirl itself into the form of a man, as the collection of dust in itself is not a living being.
 
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If it is guided it is purposeful. The more guidance, the less chance is involved.
 
Sure, most everyone would agree God being omniscient knew what Adam would look like.

The next question is where the rubber meets the road.

Did Adam look as God planned?
 
buffalo said:
If it is guided it is purposeful. The more guidance, the less chance is involved.
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The confusion here is over the difference between the philosophical meaning of “chance” and the scientific meaning of “chance.” In philosophy, chance implies no one - not even God - could have predicted the outcome, much less guided it. In science, chance means that we as scientific observers could not have predicted the outcome. And therefore, for the purposes of modeling the world, we might as well assume an event is random, even if, to some intelligence beyond our physical world knows the outcome. That is the case with evolution.

A good analogy is pseudo-random numbers used in encryption. To the person without the decryption key, pseudo-random numbers may just as well be treated as truly random numbers, even though to someone with the decryption key, they are clearly designed with a pattern. God has not given us his own personal decryption key for the operation of the physical world. He has given us access to some of that knowledge, but not all of it. Therefore there are processes that we, as limited humans, model as random. One day, when we are with God in heaven, He may share more of His mind with us. But for now, the best we can do is to model the physical world according to the observations we make. And if those observations appear random, we are justified in calling them random.
 
buffalo said:
Signature in the Cell is a good read. http://www.signatureinthecell.com/
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“Stephen C. Meyer (born 1958) is an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. He helped found the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the Discovery Institute (DI), which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement.[1][2][3] Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is currently a Senior Fellow of the DI and Director of its Center for Science and Culture (CSC).[4]” - Wikipedia.
 
Ad hominem attack? Debate his arguments. Read the book first. It is simply amazing what is in the cell and how it works.

Whose signature do you suppose he found?
 
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buffalo said:
Ad hominem attack? Debate his arguments. Read the book first. It is simply amazing what is in the cell and how it works.

Whose signature do you suppose he found?
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I don’t know what his arguments are, and I’m not going to buy his book to find out. If he wants to come here on CAF and post his views I would be glad to debate him.

In the meantime I can cite a number of very good reads that explain why evolution is the most consistent theory that fits the observations. If I posted the titles would you go out and buy them and read them like you are expecting others to do with your suggestion?
 
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Absolutely. Been there done that and I read the literature, too.

So you criticize his book without even knowing what it is about?
 
edwest211 said:
all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).
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Everything that exists has as part of its nature a particular “will”. Things behave in accordance to what they are. This applies to atoms and molecules, one-celled creatures, plants, animals and we ourselves. Complex forms exhibit a behaviour which utilizes, but is of a higher order of complexity than the parts of which they are constituted. This is the case with atoms, and with molecules, whose shape directs their relationships with other molecules and atoms. Observing living things, this behaviour takes on yet another level of complexity. Plants develop, grow and reproduce. Animals do the same and also exhibit the capacity to perceive the environment in which they look for food, avoid danger and find a mate. All this is instinctive to the nature of that new whole. We who exist in eternity, the unmoving here and now, can know and choose. This enables us to love and thereby grow to know God.

In the heart of the sun, Hydrogen atoms coalesce, producing enormous heat and the star dust of which we are made. The tetrahedral structure of Carbon allows for the existence of organic molecules, whose shape in turn determines their properties. On earth, life springs forth utilizing organic chemical processes in the individual creature’s relationships as a participant in the world. As happens on the sun, on earth there exists a hierarchy of complexity in the environment. The processes that occur in the sun happen because the final dust exists. There is a structure to what happens over time that is defined by its beginning and end. On earth there is an additional structure to how things proceed. It determines the existence of life from what was Hydrogen at the centre of the sun.

Freud trying to develop a scientific theory of the mind postulated the existence of two opposing instincts present in the universe - Eros and Thanatos. The former brought things together as we clearly observe in nature, while the latter would represent entropy, the tendency towards disorder. If the universe is a closed system, its entropy does not decrease, and any order that occurs, will spontaneously evolve towards a state with maximum entropy. Reason dictates that, as we find there to be a natural order to the formation of atoms from simple protons, the order we find on earth has something guiding it, some life principle.

Everything comes together when we recognize God to be the Life Force, He who through HIs word brought the entire universe into existence and into life, and through whose Holy Spirit we are able to know Him. Sin as the appropriation of what belongs to God - our hearts and will, leads us to attach ourselves to what is transient and illusory, We thereby bring death into our lives, clutching to what is ever-changing, and understanding its loss as entropy. Surrendering ourselves to God, to Love, as individuals we unite with all creation in one eternal Beatific Vision. All is subject to this final cause, His Divine will.
 
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Its not an accident that nature produces what it does. While there is some randomness involved there are also some deterministic elements involved also.
 
IWantGod said:
Its not an accident that nature produces what it does. While there is some randomness involved there are also some deterministic elements involved also.
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Nature produces the same things over, and over and over again… there is no randomness. It’s God’s perfect ecosystem, put in place by him, for the benefit of us.
 
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