Why can't Evolution co-exist with Christianity
A topic of debate for a long time has been whether or not Evolution can co-exist with Christianity. The topic has been addressed on many other websites all over the web on numerous occasions. The stance I personally go with after studying a vast array of different forms of understandings within the Science community is www.creationontheweb.org . First it would be good to define our terms. The definition of Evolution is changes that have occurred over time allow increases of information content to produce a hierarchical structure of animal and plant life forms. What does Christianity say about how the animal kingdom was created? First of all, in Genesis 1:11, it states that - 11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." In regards to the term "according to their various kinds" this infers that God created plants to have a certain form in the beginning, not that they evolved by genetic means over time. Genesis 1:12 states - "The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good." Initially there were no changes that occurred over time to produce life, it was created so from the outset. The same can be applied to animals. Genesis 1:21 states "So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good." From the initial outset, animals were created the way they were supposed to be. What happened to the animals? They would now become different kinds according to God, as its stated in Genesis 1:24 - And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. Thus, right here there is a problem from the Evolution and Christian mixture. What have people done to try to mix the two together? First we have the framework hypothesis. This states that Genesis is poetic and figurative. HOWEVER, this is not in line with the way that Genesis was written. According to http://creation.com/is-genesis-poetry-figurative-a-theological-argument-polemic-and-thus-not-history there are only two verses in Genesis that state anything poetic. In their own words - "The Hebrew verb forms of Genesis 1 have a particular feature that fits exactly what the Hebrews used for recording history or a series of past events. That is, only the first verb in a sequence of events is perfect (qatal), while the verbs that continue the narrative are imperfects (vayyiqtols).4 In Genesis 1, the first verb, bara (create), is perfect, while the subsequent verbs are imperfect.5 A proper translation in English recognises this Hebrew form and translates all the verbs as perfect (or past) tense. Genesis 1–11 also has several other hallmarks of historical narrative, such as ‘accusative particles’ that mark the objects of verbs. These are not translated into English (e.g. Hebrew ‘et’ in Genesis 1:1). Terms are often carefully defined. Also, parallelisms, a feature of Hebrew poetry (e.g. in many Psalms), are almost absent in Genesis.6" Thus, being that the book of Genesis does not follow a fictional prose of writing from the ancient time period, it would necessarily follow that Genesis is to be taken literally, thus nullifying the framework hypothesis. Another argument made can be utilized by both Evolutionists and Creation Scientists. This is called the Gap theory, the theory that over the course of Genesis 1:1 and 2, there was a lapse of billions of years. Creation comments on this again - Exodus 20:11 says, ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is …’ This is the definitive verse outside Genesis concerning the time frame of creation. It states categorically that God created everything in six days. There is just no allowance for a gap. 6 " http://creation.com/from-the-beginning-of-the-creation This reiiteration found in Exodus 20:11 states that there was 6 days needed, no more than that. Thus there was no creative process over the course of billions of years. Also, to refute another gappist argument - "The Hebrew words bara (‘create out of nothing’) and asah (‘make’) are used in the Bible. Genesis 1:1 uses bara and Exodus 20:11 uses asah. This is used by Gappists to claim that Exodus 20:11 means a recreating and forming of a destroyed world. But Genesis 1:26 uses bara and asah interchangeably. Asah in Nehemiah 9:6 is also used to mean creation out of nothing. "You alone are the LORD. You made (asah) the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you." http://creation.com/from-the-beginning-of-the-creation Finally the words tohu and bohu from Hebrew meaning "without form" and "void" respectfully. Gappists argue that this indicates a judgmental destruction by God of the world and a recreation. However, it only tells us that the earth was unformed and unfilled in Hebrew. Out of context is taken Jeremiah 4:23, which is a prophecy sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Thus the Gap Theory is incorrect. Another way to try to piece everything together is through Progressive Creationism and Theistic Evolution. A major problem with Theistic Evolution and Progressive Creaitonism is Mark 10:6, where Yeshua states - "'at the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female'" Also the Greek word apo means "at the beginning", another problem for both of these positions. Also, animal sacrifice, as we talked about in another article, is immoral according to these two views. Moses writes in God's Decalogue "thou shalt not murder." Yet, if God tells us to sacrifice our own kinds, we are committing murder. Thus, what we have on our hands is a self defeating God, an illogical God if Natural Selection is used as a creative force to create humans. If we kill other members of the animal kingdom, we have God creating a world that is forced to kill each other from the get go. Sin becomes meaningless as God's will is to provide penal substition of animals to help forgive us of our sins before Yeshua, as is willed and provided a guideline in Leviticus 17. Thus in the end, Theistic Evolution, or Progressive Creationism become self refuting concepts from the Christian, Muslim or Jewish perspective. And Monotheism is the only possible God scenario. Polytheism is self refuting, because if God creates other gods....then God creates God and God = another god which means that God is not God, but must be God by very nature. Thus we have a contradiction through the principle of Identity. So Theistic Evolution and Progressive Creationism are purely contradictory ideas both Scientifically and Philosophically. In the end Evolution is purely secular Science. It proposes that we can know everything about the past through experiment, but thats absurd because on can not put the past into a test tube. It is important that we as true Christians stand up against this ideology, and follow Science the way the one True God wants us to follow it; through God's doing, intellectual honesty and the Scientific method.
In the end Evolution is purely secular Science. It proposes that we can know everything about the past through experiment, but thats absurd because on can not put the past into a test tube.
ReplyDeleteScientists can learn about the past by studying fossils. For example they can see with their own eyes that the brain size of human ancestors gradually increased over millions of years.
Another example is fossils of whale ancestors who had legs, feet, and even toes, showing that whales developed from land animals.
Many times more important than the fossil record is what molecular biologists can see with their own eyes when they compare DNA sequences of different living species. For example when they compare DNA sequences of modern human apes and modern chimpanzee apes, they can see in extreme detail how these two species evolved after they split from their common ancestor about six million years ago.
Your complaint about scientists not being able to study the past in a test tube is ridiculous, and it shows you know absolutely nothing about evolutionary biology.
http://darwin-killed-god.blogspot.com/
Dr. Jonathan Sarfati refutes all of this, and I would direct my readers to this as well...in his book "The Greatest Hoax on Earth."
ReplyDeleteI'd also appreciate you in the future e-mailing me. hamashiachagape@yahoo.com. Do not post anymore messages on here.
ReplyDeleteI'll provide a general overview on my knowledge of the Science of Creation. As this gentleman said about millions of years, and my post was about whether Evolution could be compromised with the Bible....the Bible declares that it was created in 6 days (the word ohm means a literal 24 hour period in the context of Genesis 1). The rabbis have dated the calendar based on the Bible to around 5770 B.C. My studies have shown that the Paleolithic age that is being promoted by Evolutionists based off of faulty research and fossils that are manipulated to fit the evidence in museums, which Creation Scientists are hardly impressed with show that there is not a shred of evidence that this time period existed. Not to mention, the evidence from www.creationontheweb.org clearly demonstrates in many aspects how Evolution is an embarassment to Science. See also - http://www.trueorigin.org/biologymyth.asp. According to Biologist Dr. Jerry Bergman, we do not need Evolution for Biology to work. Oh by the way, dinosaurs have been discovered with red blood cells in them. Thats not consistent with your model either. And the big blow is DNA theory. There is not a single example of increase of information content in DNA which leads to added functions. There should be plenty of these discovered by now if Evolution were true. But they are nonexistent. Further, you are guilty of equivocating the term Evolution with Natural Selection, Variatian, Speciation and Adaptation. But these are all Science. They were discovered by a Creation Scientist, Edward Blythe, not Charles Darwin. Beyond that, Evolution is nothing new. Neither is billion of years, which comes from the Bhagavad Gitas. See here on the refutation of whale evolution - http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-chapter-5-whale-evolution See here on the origins of Evolution - The Greeks
ReplyDeleteAs I read the works of the Greek philosophers, who lived between about 600–100BC, I was amazed to discover primitive evolutionary theory and vast ages long before Darwin and modern assumptions. The fragments of Anaximander (c. 610–546 BC) taught that ‘humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish.’1 There was Democritus (c.460–370BC) who taught that primitive people began to speak with ‘confused’ and ‘unintelligible’ sounds but ‘gradually they articulated words.’2 Epicurus (341–270BC) taught that there was no need of a God or gods, for the Universe came about by a chance movement of atoms.3
After them, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (AD23–79) said, ‘ … we are so subject to chance that Chance herself takes the place of God; she proves that God is uncertain.’4
Concerning the great ages of the Universe, Plato and many Greek philosophers held to the view that this present Universe came about millions of years ago. Lactantius, writing in the fourth century AD, said:
‘Plato and many others of the philosophers, since they were ignorant of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed … ’.5 (An ‘age’ here is 1,000 years.)
Egyptians, Babylonians and Hindus
The Greeks borrowed some of these ideas from the Babylonians, Egyptians and Hindus, whose philosophies extended back centuries before. For example, one Hindu belief was that Brahman (the Universe) spontaneously evolved by itself like a seed, which expanded and formed all that exists about 4.3 billion years ago.6 These Hindus believed in an eternal Universe that had cycles of rebirth, destruction and dormancy, known as ‘kalpas’, rather like oscilla ting big bang theories. We also read in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita that the god Krishna says, ‘I am the source from which all creatures evolve.’7
http://creation.com/evolution-ancient-pagan-idea
We good now?
Shall we be impressed with hellenism? The very concept that I've been throwing out of Christianity and Judaism through the writings of my website? I think not.
ReplyDeleteOne more point, you'd be surprised to hear how many Scientists disagree with your first quote. Somehow, a vast quantity of them do not believe that Christian viewpoints can be compromised with Evolution. Furthermore, many view the Catholics who undertake the viewpoints of Evolution as "useful idiots."
ReplyDeleteIt would be easier for me to read if you have more paragraphs. I find reading on the computer screen difficult enough without proper usage of paragraphs. Perhaps I'm getting old.
ReplyDeleteHa, no you're not getting old :). Dena, I appreciate this comment, tho I do encourage my readers to e-mail me comments at hamashiachagape@yahoo.com. Feel free to e-mail me anytime. I just do not want clutter (and I rarely have time to go back and review previous articles that i write on. I've set up a second website jesusmyjewishmessiah.blogspot.com to accomodate those who wish to post freely) I will try to be more mindful of this in the future. I tend to write down relevant information. Once I turn this into a regular website, and make that transition, paragraphs will certainly be included more often.
ReplyDeleteShema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad,
hamashiachagape