Posted on 01/16/2011 4:09:10 PM PST by balch3
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- A Southern Baptist seminary president and evolution opponent has turned sights on "theistic evolution," the idea that evolutionary forces are somehow guided by God. Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote an article in the Winter 2011 issue of the seminary magazine labeling attempts by Christians to accommodate Darwinism "a biblical and theological disaster."
Mohler said being able to find middle ground between a young-earth creationism that believes God created the world in six 24-hour days and naturalism that regards evolution the product of random chance "would resolve a great cultural and intellectual conflict."
The problem, however, is that it is not evolutionary theory that gives way, but rather the Bible and Christian theology.
Mohler said acceptance of evolutionary theory requires reading the first two chapters of Genesis as a literary rendering and not historical fact, but it doesn't end there. It also requires rethinking the claim that sin and death entered the human race through the Fall of Adam. That in turn, Mohler contended, raises questions about New Testament passages like First Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."
"The New Testament clearly establishes the Gospel of Jesus Christ upon the foundation of the Bible's account of creation," Mohler wrote. "If there was no historical Adam and no historical Fall, the Gospel is no longer understood in biblical terms."
Mohler said that after trying to reconcile their reading of Genesis with science, proponents of theistic evolution are now publicly rejecting biblical inerrancy, the doctrine that the Bible is totally free from error.
"We now face the undeniable truth that the most basic and fundamental questions of biblical authority and Gospel integrity are at stake," Mohler concluded. "Are you ready for this debate?"
In a separate article in the same issue, Gregory Wills, professor of church history at Southern Seminary, said attempts to affirm both creation and evolution in the 19th and 20th century produced Christian liberalism, which attracted large numbers of Americans, including the clerical and academic leadership of most denominations.
After establishing the concept that Genesis is true from a religious but not a historical standpoint, Wills said, liberalism went on to apply naturalistic criteria to accounts of miracles and prophecy as well. The result, he says, was a Bible "with little functional authority."
"Liberalism in America began with the rejection of the Bible's creation account," Wills wrote. "It culminated with a broad rejection of the beliefs of historic Christianity. Yet many Christians today wish to repeat the experiment. We should not expect different results."
Mohler, who in the last year became involved in public debate about evolution with the BioLogos Foundation, a conservative evangelical group that promotes integrating faith and science, has long maintained the most natural reading of the Bible is that God created the world in six 24-hour days just a few thousand years ago.
Writing in Time magazine in 2005, Mohler rejected the idea of human "descent."
"Evangelicals must absolutely affirm the special creation of humans in God's image, with no physical evolution from any nonhuman species," he wrote. "Just as important, the Bible clearly teaches that God is involved in every aspect and moment in the life of His creation and the universe. That rules out the image of a kind of divine watchmaker."
Darwinists don’t know their own history. Sad panda is sad. :(
My dear FRiend, your cartoon shows what evolutionists do. They can’t stand the notion of God creating the earth in six days and all very good. They are determined to find an alternate version of creation. They come up with the conclusion of evolution and then make up or misapply facts to support it.
“So we have observations of monkeys becoming people?”
Ah yes. And gobs of evolutionary links.
Also, we’ve observed life coming from non-life.
And beneficial mutations.
(SARC)
>>They can’t stand the notion of God creating the earth in six days and all very good.<<
But it says in Genesis 1:2 that the earth was without form and void. If that was the first thing He did it doesn’t sound like that was very good.
If A stawman is the best you have then I guess you have to go with it...nice try better luck next time.
You are incorrect the Evolutionary theory does not address the origin of life.
It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life ~ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1909), 519-520
But nice straw man…good try!
Kind of hard to get past the fact that speciation has never been observed and so is not established as factual.
And I don’t know why a pastor would want to bend his beliefs merely so they will fit an antiquated proposition which is defied by the fossil record.
Strawman?
So say I buy the existance of an unobserved ‘common ancestor’ between all the different races of apes and men.
Can you tell me the identity of said ‘common ancestor’? It’s taxonomy?
The scientific theory of evolution has shown that modern humans and “monkeys” share a common ancestor...Doesn’t the 9th commandment say something about bearing false witness?
No, misotheists have claimed that their interpretation of the evidence allows a statistical probability that "monkeys" and modern humans share a common ancestor. To say otherwise makes you guilty of "bearing false witness".
First year history of science class. Ought to be required reading for everyone.
We read the original Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. History of Science is a fascinating discipline, and I ended up switching over. I loved examining the process by how scientists made the discoveries that they did.
That other scientists and scientists in general are unaware of this process shows their lack of understanding of the scientific method.
Lamarckian descent is interesting to say the least.
Lifc cannot come from non-life is drawn from the First Law of Thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with entropy and thus things go from order to disorder.
I realize that - I’m sorry I guess I did not state it clearly. What I am trying to commmunicate it that evolution has many unanswered questions including where the human mind originated (with all its complexities) and where the soul/spirit of man came from. In creation those origins are anwered.
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.Link
Good try but your straw man will not work here.
The First Law of Thermodynamics refers to the fact that energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, but transformed from one form to another - at least until nuclear physics came along and showed that mass can be converted to actually create energy. It tells next to nothing, if not nothing, about whether life can come from non-life or not.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, for application, requires the condition that the there exist a containment of energy within the system. The Earth, however, receives trillions of megajoules of energy from the Sun and other sources, and hence, the application of the Second Law requires careful consideration of this fact. Things can go from disorder to order, within a system (the Earth) when energy is input into the system.
[They also realize that things move from order to disorder not the other way around.]
Except in instances where one system gains order at the expense of another.
The relationship between the Earth’s Biosphere and the Sun, for example.
The question of where the soul/sprit of man came from is a religious question which is the reason that creationist attempt to answer the question, it is not a question that science can answer since it deals with the supernatural…so it is still a straw man and not a vaild argument.
"Except in instances where one system gains order at the expense of another. The relationship between the Earth’s Biosphere and the Sun, for example."
What order does the earth's biosphere gain at what cost in order from the Sun?
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