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."
Hey Ben, did I nail it or not? LOL! :-D
Did the Hebrews think Yom was a twenty-four hour period?
evidences within the Bible for long days?
Other than Yom, there are clues in the Bible that indicate long days?
I think we should all dust off our old astrophysics text books and come up with all revamped theories.
Have you ever read ReMine's book, 'The Biotic Message'? It contains similar observations. It helped me see how the evolutionists constantly move the goalposts around depending on which claim is being addressed.
No, I haven’t read that book in particular but I have read similar books.
Can you reconcile Mohler and your relativity of time and location theory?
Unfortunately Bill, plant growth is the result of the information present in plant DNA and the order present in plant cellular structure using that energy. Without that, no order is 'transferred' from the sun to the earth.
And, the power source of the sun is assumed to be nuclear fusion. Not typically referred to as 'nuclear decay'.
"The Sun decays, and plants grow - all obediently within the laws of Thermodynamics."
Yes, it's that plant DNA and those cellular processes that you just assume have evolved that make all the difference. That is the fallacy of affirming the consequent, however. We don't see plants being spontaneously generated because of electromagnetic energy received from the sun. What we do see is that evolutionary believers start quoting facts that don't even support their beliefs without engaging in logical fallacy.
Genesis 1:1 says “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. The “world that then was” was destroyed. From Genesis 1:2 God is reforming the world. Look up the Gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.
But since every one of their hypothesis turned out to be bogus or impossible they decided to drop the “evolutionary origin of life” and pretend that they never taught it. Classic Liberalism. Deny the truth.
Exactly. What did they think Watson & Crick and Urey & Miller were trying to do? They started out with the protoplasm (”goo in a sack”) theory of the cell and tried to get from goo to something that processed biochemicals.
They wound up with more complications they could ever imagine.
Especially Watson and Crick. Imagine their surprise when they were looking for a ragtag bunch of molecules and found a veritable spiral Jacob’s Ladder! Hell, Francis Crick found the DNA double helix so awe-inspiringly non-random that he attributed its construction to aliens!
I would recommend it. I never read a ‘similar’ book. It was quite unusual in approach and degree of documentation. You can get it on Amazon for just a few bucks.
“Through experience we have found that these threads usually leads to endless exchanges that have no impact upon each other’s beliefs. If you are a young earth creation science believer wishing to argue your cause, your post will be read, but in most cases no response will be given.”
- paraphrasing Greg Neyman, geologist, M.A. Liberty University
I’ll take your word for it. Added to my homepage.
The 'background' radiation may be as simple as the temperature of a hydrogen cloud that is cosmologically 'local'. It is an assumption that it represents 'backgroung' radiation from the big bang.
This highlights a huge problem with philosophical naturalists. They are very poor at acknowledging alternative explanations, preferring to present the most commonly-accepted story as 'fact' until observations force the collapse of the theory and a new commonly-accepted story becomes a new 'fact', ad infinitum.
It's how science 'works', doncha know.
If you don’t have time for it, that’s fine.
But don’t take my word for it.
Search it out for yourself.
no. I doncha know.
that would be evil. Deception is evil. So Science is evil. Didn’t know.
That objection doesn't make sense. Order is either local or global. If evolution required global order to increase, that would be identical to saying that it required time to run backwards. Therefore, if evolution requires any kind of order to increase, it can only require local order to increase.
To speak concretely, the objection is to (e.g.) non-living matter organizing itself into living matter. That's a local increase in order, but is not ruled out by the 2nd Law because there is a net input of energy to the system; it's not closed.
Which is why the 2nd Law is still applicable unless proven that evolution only requires local order, and somehow increases general disorder in a system.
Everything that happens increases general disorder in a closed system. (If it doesn't, it doesn't happen. "Time passes" is another way of saying "the total disorder of the universe [or any other closed system] increases".)
The 2nd Law argument is a bad one, and shouldn't be used.
“If evolution required global order to increase, that would be identical to saying that it required time to run backwards.”
Which is why people are arguing that evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
It applies not only to the creation of living organisms but also to the increase in complexity observed in living organisms over time.
I happen to like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as an argument, because it’s easy enough to understand. It also raises the question, if evolutionary theory is in fact correct, how do they explain this?
That must have been quite a school! It had first editions of the whole panoply of evolutionary writers who apparently devised the theory of evolution an entire century before Darwin and Wallace. It’s a shame you never attempted to read some of them - of course, they were do doubt over your head...
The creation-evolution conflict in historical perspective
http://evolutionarychristianity.com/blog/general/ted-davis-the-creation-evolution-conflict-in-historical-perspective/
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