Theistic evolution

[Montalban]

One of the biggest problems I noticed when talking to supporters of theistic evolution is their assumption that ancient, nomadic people would have not understood the principles of evolution, that is why God reserved that amazing discovery for the more brighter audience, waited a few thousand years until finally the modern Western scientific society could properly understand EXACTLY how God did it.

In a way then, you believe in God revealing truth over a matter of time.
“For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed “perfect knowledge*…,”

Irenaeus - “Against Heresies” Book III.I.I

ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-60.htm#P7297_1937859

So to use an argument used against me, why would God deceive people by giving theologians false evidence about himself (and his role as Creator)?

And talking about science, isn’t science “knowing” or “to know”? So who’s knowledge are we talking about? Who determines what is possible to know and what not? Is it because the majority of scientists say so? Since when is the majority of any social class a measurement for anything?

Science can’t know anything in any absolute terms. However science can ‘know’ something that is still false. We know this by the many theories that were once known, and are now known to be false.

Take for example, you’re working in a lab, and you want to describe a newly discovered bacteria. You look into the microscope, you see the little bugs moving around in an ‘agitated’ manner. You publish your findings. Months later other labs around the world read your work. There is some doubt. Other scientists have samples of the bug. Each conducts their own observations under similar conditions, and lo! they agree with your description. Your paper then enters the main-stream of thought as a ‘truth’ concerning an aspect of this bug.

BUT WAIT… it’s not as simple as that. To observe the bacteria, you used a microscope. You used light shining up on a little mirror so you could see the bugs. The bugs may have reacted to the unwanted concentration of light. What you described as how they acted, was only how they acted while you were observing them!

(a paraphrasing of an example from “Chaos” by Gleick)

God has let us know that he is the creator. We, repeating the sin of pride of Adam seek through our own knowledge to know something else.

*-perfect knowledge is not about science, but about God. It is in tune with the Orthodox idea about God that, following the coming of the Holy Spirit, no new truths about God would emerge.

 

[cpayne]

Hey, wait a second. Unless I’m mistaken, Pedja’s on your side in this discussion.

 

[Montalban]

Hey, wait a second. Unless I’m mistaken, Pedja’s on your side in this discussion.

I don’t have to agree 100% with anyone. For instance, on another site, I argued against homosexuality. A guy also argued, but made outrageous claims about all pedophiles are homosexual. I didn’t agree and said so.

If you find this less than honest, let me know, and why you think so.

I don’t believe in ‘sides’, but discussion.

 

[Mirdath]

It’s a non-fictional story? Then what’s your objection?

Missed this. All I’ve been trying to say is that I don’t want to start a fight. My thoughts on the veracity of the bible are irrelevant to a discussion of its general themes. I haven’t been talking about the bible as history at all here, but as myth – and whether or not I believe in that myth doesn’t change a thing for the purpose of this discussion.

 

[Montalban]

Missed this. All I’ve been trying to say is that I don’t want to start a fight. My thoughts on the veracity of the bible are irrelevant to a discussion of its general themes. I haven’t been talking about the bible as history at all here, but as myth – and whether or not I believe in that myth doesn’t change a thing for the purpose of this discussion.

Are you saying it’s non-history, but myth; but not a story?

 

[pedja]

In a way then, you believe in God revealing truth over a matter of time.
“For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed “perfect knowledge*…,”

Irenaeus - “Against Heresies” Book III.I.I

ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-60.htm#P7297_1937859

So to use an argument used against me, why would God deceive people by giving theologians false evidence about himself (and his role as Creator)?

Science can’t know anything in any absolute terms. However science can ‘know’ something that is still false. We know this by the many theories that were once known, and are now known to be false.

Take for example, you’re working in a lab, and you want to describe a newly discovered bacteria. You look into the microscope, you see the little bugs moving around in an ‘agitated’ manner. You publish your findings. Months later other labs around the world read your work. There is some doubt. Other scientists have samples of the bug. Each conducts their own observations under similar conditions, and lo! they agree with your description. Your paper then enters the main-stream of thought as a ‘truth’ concerning an aspect of this bug.

BUT WAIT… it’s not as simple as that. To observe the bacteria, you used a microscope. You used light shining up on a little mirror so you could see the bugs. The bugs may have reacted to the unwanted concentration of light. What you described as how they acted, was only how they acted while you were observing them!

(a paraphrasing of an example from “Chaos” by Gleick)

God has let us know that he is the creator. We, repeating the sin of pride of Adam seek through our own knowledge to know something else.

*-perfect knowledge is not about science, but about God. It is in tune with the Orthodox idea about God that, following the coming of the Holy Spirit, no new truths about God would emerge.

Montalban,

I don’t think God is revealing truth over time, not in the context of creation vs. evolution. Maybe there are some other examples, I can’t think of any right now, but concerning the Genesis account I personally fail to see how this could represent poetry or even worse a myth. To me Genesis is a true, literally historical account of the origins.

Another thing is that I feel it is simply arrogant to state God left it for us to discover for **whatever **reasons (people back then wouldn’t understand it, or it wasn’t important etc.) In that context I agree with the idea proposed in your question that it would be illogical for God to deceive theologians with false evidence about himself.

God is very open about all of his plans and intentions, why would it be a problem in explaining to us that he created humans through evolution? The majority of the people today would not be able to write down 10 sentences about the mechanisms of evolution, natural selection, gene mutation, etc, either because they don’t care or they don’t understand it- but people today still believe it happened that way. In the same way it would be absurd to assume God didn’t want to confront the ancient nomadic people with the complexity of the evolutionary theory.

 

[Mirdath]

Are you saying it’s non-history, but myth; but not a story?

Myth is story. I specifically said I was not casting aspersions on its non-literal truth. That’s all; take off your boxing gloves already.

 

[cpayne]

Montalban,

I don’t think God is revealing truth over time, not in the context of creation vs. evolution. Maybe there are some other examples, I can’t think of any right now, but concerning the Genesis account I personally fail to see how this could represent poetry or even worse a myth. To me Genesis is a true, literally historical account of the origins.
.

Post # 40 on what constitutes history. Compare the opening two chapters of Genesis with the opening two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. The latter is history, the former is not. This is not a problem, as long as we understand that God can inspire non-literal writing just as surely as literal.

 

[pedja]

Love is not always servilely kind, and beauty is not always peaceful. But the world is a beautiful place, bloodied as it is, and I’d certainly have little problem believing a creator made it out of love if I had any specific beliefs on the matter.

You especially, as a Christian, should be no stranger to the idea of bloodshed sanctioned or even caused by a deity, from the angel with a fiery sword guarding Eden to the plagues of Egypt to the wars for Canaan to the Captivity to the Maccabbean campaign and on and on and on. It’s written all over your holy book – yet through it all, God’s principle motivation was love for his creation, was it not?

So Moses doesn’t mention that the things created on the fifth day were chowing down on the things created on the third day, and sometimes on each other. That doesn’t serve the point of the story. The point is not to accurately and exhaustively describe why goats have teeth like this and lions have teeth like that. It’s to show that ‘this is here and it is here because God made it, and God saw that it was good’.

We then basically both agree that God made everything, we just disagree on His method.

You assume rightly I am no stranger to the idea of bloodshed but Genesis tells us that the first blood was shed **after **Adam and Eve have sinned, not before. The world before that was a perfect world without sin and death. Only through a literal interpretation of Genesis I can understand how much God really loved the first created human beings, giving them dominion over the world (nature and animals) and the power to create life (reproduction). This is why it says in the Psalm 8 that God created man little bit lower then God. This is how much He loved us! This is also what assures me that God is going to restore the world one day and everything is going to be perfect like it was in the beginning.

The whole concept of Gods love is totally missing if evolution is true. How many millions of pre-humans had to painfully die until finally one day the first fully developed human being emerged! I cant see Gods love nowhere, just a long, brutal and wasteful process of development of human species not guided by God but by the blind forces of natural selection. It is then no wonder when Huxley says

”Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any known form of life, there was no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution…we can dismiss entirely all idea of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process” (Issues in Evolution, University of Chicago press).

This is the very essence of the evolutionary theory, it explains how things can happen not with but **without **God!

 

[pedja]

Post # 40 on what constitutes history. Compare the opening two chapters of Genesis with the opening two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. The latter is history, the former is not. This is not a problem, as long as we understand that God can inspire non-literal writing just as surely as literal.

Concerning history, did you came up with that definition?

Few weeks ago I was in the bone-lab, analyzing skeletons from a medieval cemetery. There were neither eyewitnesses who could testify that that person really existed nor how or when he died. Yet it is obvious that he lived and died. So isn’t he part of history?

God answered my prayer the other day. It happened on the 10th of April 2007, here in the UK. It is 4 days gone now, it’s part of history. But I had no eyewitnesses. Is the answer to my prayer not a historical event?

God personally told Moses how he created everything. But Moses had no eyewitnesses and could not verify what God told him to write down. Has God lied to Moses?

 

[Mirdath]

We then basically both agree that God made everything, we just disagree on His method.

Well, minus the little detail that I’m agnostic, but I’m not arguing that here

You assume rightly I am no stranger to the idea of bloodshed but Genesis tells us that the first blood was shed **after **Adam and Eve have sinned, not before. The world before that was a perfect world without sin and death.

Not entirely true. In Genesis 2, we see that there is familiarity with the concept of death even before the Fall: ‘the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die’. How could that have meant anything to Adam unless he knew what death was?

Then, in the third chapter, Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden specifically so they will not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life as well and thus become immortal. So it’s impossible to argue that Eden was a place without death – it was only a place where no evil was known.

The whole concept of Gods love is totally missing if evolution is true. How many millions of pre-humans had to painfully die until finally one day the first fully developed human being emerged! I cant see Gods love nowhere, just a long, brutal and wasteful process of development of human species not guided by God but by the blind forces of natural selection.

Need it be so? The God of Abraham does not always take the easiest, least painful route – there are plenty of examples. The gift of free will in the first place; the Deluge; the repeated conquering of the Israelites by other tribes, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans; the torment of Job; and so on and so forth. To say that ‘this cannot be so!’ because God could have done it with less trouble is to neglect the entirety of God’s involvement with humanity in the bible.

Nor does the use of such a drawn-out process make the creator any less potentially loving. Think, if you will, of a child with a pet – oh, let’s say angelfish. First thing the kid does is put it in water – but he forgets that angelfish are saltwater creatures. Next try he feeds it with pellets too big for it to swallow. Third time he goes on vacation with his parents and forgets to feed the fish at all. And so on.

Is that child unloving of his fish? Not at all! It’s not nearly a perfect analogy, I’ll admit, but I hope it’ll show at least that love doesn’t or can’t always take the easy, painless route.

This is the very essence of the evolutionary theory, it explains how things can happen not with but **without **God!

In all honesty I’m with these guys, actually – but I’m just trying to help

 

[pedja]

Well, minus the little detail that I’m agnostic, but I’m not arguing that here

Not entirely true. In Genesis 2, we see that there is familiarity with the concept of death even before the Fall: ‘the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die’. How could that have meant anything to Adam unless he knew what death was?

Why would Adam not be able to imagine what death means? Then you could also argue that for the rest of his life he never knew what being created means, since he wasnt there to ever witness an act of creation.

I have never experienced immortality, yet I am able to understand what it means without ever seeing it.

It would also contradict 1. Corinthians 15:21,22: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”.

Then, in the third chapter, Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden specifically so they will not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life as well and thus become immortal. So it’s impossible to argue that Eden was a place without death – it was only a place where no evil was known.

It is also impossible to argue that the garden as well as the rest of the world was a place **with **death.

Need it be so? The God of Abraham does not always take the easiest, least painful route – there are plenty of examples. The gift of free will in the first place; the Deluge; the repeated conquering of the Israelites by other tribes, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans; the torment of Job; and so on and so forth. To say that ‘this cannot be so!’ because God could have done it with less trouble is to neglect the entirety of God’s involvement with humanity in the bible.

Nor does the use of such a drawn-out process make the creator any less potentially loving. Think, if you will, of a child with a pet – oh, let’s say angelfish. First thing the kid does is put it in water – but he forgets that angelfish are saltwater creatures. Next try he feeds it with pellets too big for it to swallow. Third time he goes on vacation with his parents and forgets to feed the fish at all. And so on.

Is that child unloving of his fish? Not at all! It’s not nearly a perfect analogy, I’ll admit, but I hope it’ll show at least that love doesn’t or can’t always take the easy, painless route.

Well, you are right there, it is not a perfect analogy although I understand what you mean. The problem is that God is not a careless child. He is perfect therefore He cannot ever forget his creation.

 

[Mirdath]

Why would Adam not be able to imagine what death means? Then you could also argue that for the rest of his life he never knew what being created means, since he wasnt there to ever witness an act of creation.

That’d be how Cain, Abel, Seth, et al came about

It would also contradict 1. Corinthians 15:21,22: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”.

You’re only reading that on one level. The sense in that passage is not merely one of physical death but of spiritual; Paul is talking about original sin and the Christ’s sacrifice to reopen the gates of heaven – eternal life.

It is also impossible to argue that the garden as well as the rest of the world was a place **with **death.

Then we’re left in the territory of the Creationists who now explain the teeth of Tyrannosaurus Rex by saying they were made to open coconuts.

There is nothing wrong or evil about death: it’s how we were made, with an expiration date (by the way, if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend the movie Blade Runner, which is quite a deep treatment of this and related issues). And there’s nothing evil about natural predation. After all, the sacrifice God accepted was not Cain’s plants, but Abel’s lamb.

 

[pedja]

So is it then possible that Adam could have known and understood what it meant when God said “you are surely doomed to die” even without ever witnessing death?

 

[Mirdath]

So is it then possible that Adam could have known and understood what it meant when God said “you are surely doomed to die” even without ever witnessing death?

I wouldn’t think so.

But keep in mind that I’m not taking the first couple chapters of Genesis literally. I don’t believe there was a tree of knowledge or one of life, I don’t believe Eve was really created from a rib, and so on. It’s a mythical explanation for how things came to be, and as far as I can tell has as much actual historical merit as Kipling’s Just-So Stories. But just as Kipling got his point across to his daughter, so too does Genesis, and neither do it by recounting hard facts. A story does not have to be factual to be true.

 

[cpayne]

Concerning history, did you came up with that definition?

Few weeks ago I was in the bone-lab, analyzing skeletons from a medieval cemetery. There were neither eyewitnesses who could testify that that person really existed nor how or when he died. Yet it is obvious that he lived and died. So isn’t he part of history?

God answered my prayer the other day. It happened on the 10th of April 2007, here in the UK. It is 4 days gone now, it’s part of history. But I had no eyewitnesses. Is the answer to my prayer not a historical event?

God personally told Moses how he created everything. But Moses had no eyewitnesses and could not verify what God told him to write down. Has God lied to Moses?

Did I come up with the definition? No; they are standard questions used in many Christian apologetics works.

Bones from medieval cemeteries: Part of history, since you have observable historical consequences (artifacts, in other words) there in front of you.

Praying in the U.K.: (hey! I’ll be over in about a month–I’ll be praying there, too)–you are giving the account, you are an eyewitness, I assume the answered prayer had some observable consequences. It is part of history that you prayed and received an answer. Some might argue over the mechanism of the answer, but I’d accept your testimony.

What God told Moses to write down concerns the beginnings of the human race and its current sinful condition. It doesn’t satisfy any requirements of history, which is why it’s found in the Bible and not in history texts. To say “It isn’t history” is not equivalent to saying “God lied to Moses.” Or, to put it another way: When Jesus told His listeners, “A sower went out to sow etc.,” was He lying? If He wasn’t lying, when did the events happen historically? What was the name of the sower? Where is he buried? Where was he born?

Of course, Jesus wasn’t lying, because it wasn’t history. Kreeft and Tacelli, in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (5-star recommendation from me), differentiate between “literal history” (Gospels, Acts) and “non-literal history” (Creation). It’s history because the human race really was created, really did fall into sinfulness, and so on. It’s non-literal because it satisfies no tests for literal history.

I think one of our biggest arguments (I think most of Mirdath’s comments would fit in here, too) is that when you hear “literal history” you think “true story,” and when you hear “non-literal history” you think “false story.” I think “true story” in both cases, just like I think of Jesus’ parables as being true, but not historical in nature. Keep in mind the standard Catholic definition of “literal” means “AS INTENDED BY THE AUTHOR.” If the Author does not intend something as history, it’s a misreading of the Bible to read it as history. (And, in case your next question is, “How can you tell what’s intended as history and what’s not?” I would refer you back to Post # 40.)

 

[Montalban]

Montalban,

I don’t think God is revealing truth over time, not in the context of creation vs. evolution. Maybe there are some other examples, I can’t think of any right now, but concerning the Genesis account I personally fail to see how this could represent poetry or even worse a myth. To me Genesis is a true, literally historical account of the origins.

We were taught (by God) that He is the creator. Evolution (as a materialistic explanation goes, has NO ROOM for God - because every aspect of it is explained through materialistic/naturalistic means).

Another thing is that I feel it is simply arrogant to state God left it for us to discover for **whatever **reasons (people back then wouldn’t understand it, or it wasn’t important etc.) In that context I agree with the idea proposed in your question that it would be illogical for God to deceive theologians with false evidence about himself.

Yes, the theologians all say God did it. I think Augustine questioned if it weren’t an event in an ‘instant’, but he still didn’t deny creation.

God is very open about all of his plans and intentions, why would it be a problem in explaining to us that he created humans through evolution?

Because there’s no room for God in evolution. Evolutionists might say you’re entitled to believe in God, per se, but each aspect of evolution came about sans Dieu.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

colliric:

Genesis, when read in the correct manner of understanding, which is the Old Earth Thestic evolution position, is in complete harmony with what we know about Evolution and what we presume to know about the so called “Big Bang”, which itself remains theory. It’s the “earth is flat” theory of space, provable(as you say) only because we haven’t left our little corner of the universe and gone to where we think this “bang” originated.

I am not following you. Can you clarify? I don’t think we need to go to the Big Bang Restaurant in order to infer curved space.

colliric:

Until we leave our own galaxy and discover the entire universe, we will never truly know how it was created by God(which could have certainly been through the Big Bang), just like how we didn’t know the earth was round until we actually went the entire way around it.

We don’t need to go there when light has already gone there for us and now gives us information as to what ‘there’ essentially is. We knew the earth was round long before we circumnavigated because folks could see ships rising into view at the horizon.

More importantly, observation is only one polarity of scientific investigation. Theory is the other. One can calculate what is there. Hebrews 11:1 refers to this polarity: “Faith is the evidence of things unseen; the proof of things hoped for.” Both observation and theory are subsets of faith. We take things on faith.

 

[colliric]

I am not following you. Can you clarify? I don’t think we need to go to the Big Bang Restaurant in order to infer curved space.

Yes we do, otherwise how do we know that the big bang occurred as we think it did? We need to go and see, just to make sure it is what we think it is. Remember we do live in 1 of many, many galaxies of stars… How do we know the same thing is universal in other galaxies with other star systems? how do we find out? we go and explore, just like how all scientific research really is done, by going to take a look, just ask Columbus… He went to take a look just to make sure the earth was round as the theory suggested.

We don’t need to go there when light has already gone there for us and now gives us information as to what ‘there’ essentially is. We knew the earth was round long before we circumnavigated because folks could see ships rising into view at the horizon.

More importantly, observation is only one polarity of scientific investigation. Theory is the other. One can calculate what is there. Hebrews 11:1 refers to this polarity: “Faith is the evidence of things unseen; the proof of things hoped for.” Both observation and theory are subsets of faith. We take things on faith.

No we didn’t, some people thought it was round, others thought it was flat. It was debated for several millenia since the Greeks put forth, really, both theories. Then Columbus set out to prove he was right in believing it was round, he said “If I get to India, it must be round”, then went to have a look.

More recently lets talk about the theories of the Moon, before we went there people actually thought it could have been a world like our own, before Mr Armstong put his foot on it and found out it was just a cold lump of rock, it was widely thought, get this, that there was life on the small thing, specifically moon “Buffalo”. We needed to go there and see for ourselves before that theory was inevitably chucked.

Religious Faith is essentially diffrent to such faith in things unprooven. Religious faith is faith in something one believes to have already been proven through evidence. Therefore it is diffrent to simply faith in a scientific theory to be true.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Mirdath:

Not entirely true. In Genesis 2, we see that there is familiarity with the concept of death even before the Fall: ‘the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die’. How could that have meant anything to Adam unless he knew what death was?

Adam did not know what death was. Before the Fall. Or after the Fall. The history of the Law is the history of God teaching us about death as the wages of sin.

Note what God does as he is exiling A & E. He wraps them in the skins of animals. We know that folks were vegetarians from the account after the showing of the rainbow to Noah; at that time, God permits humans to eat the flesh of beasts.

So A & E had no notion of what death meant; Even wrapping them in the bloody skins of sacrificed animals did not teach them. When Cain killed his brother, he thought he was making an offering pleasing to God. Like Abel, am I my brother’s keeper, he says. In confronting the mysterious loss of his brother (to death), Cain went mad and does not hear what God is telling him at all.

Mirdath:

Then, in the third chapter, Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden specifically so they will not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life as well and thus become immortal. So it’s impossible to argue that Eden was a place without death – it was only a place where no evil was known.

The wages of sin (evil) are death. If Eden had no sin (evil) then there could be no experience or understanding of death.