It depends on their deductions from the evidence. If they deduce that man is evolved from some lower life form, then they are wrong. Any Christian would have to come to that conclustion. The whole premise of Christianity is based upon the fact that because God created man, that Man has a duty to God. If man is evolved and is not a special creation, then sin is illusory and Christianity is pointless. Why did Christ die? Did Christ die so that rocks can be forgiven for sinning against God?
Or when science identifies homo habilis or homo neaderthalensis or other fossils that they believe traces man's evolution, what are those?
Those are dry bones. IIRC Neandrathal Man was a Man with some vitamin deficiencies. Homo Habilis was not. There is no evidence that man evolved from Homo Habilis. None. It is an extrapolation based on a presumption that man was not created and that the only "natural" explanation for the existence of man is that he must have evolved from an amoeba.
Were they created in the Garden of Eden as well?
Who? Neandrthals? Nobody was in the Garden but Adam and Eve
If so, what happened to them?
They died.
I'm talking about the entire spectrum of the fossil record. What are we looking at there?
Show me where evolution can explain the development of complex organs and eyesight and flight? The only thing the fossil recod contains is basically the development of BONES and SHELLS. Nothing in the fossil record suggests how the stuff inside the shells and outside the bones managed to keep those bones and shells alive and make those bones and shells see and hear and walk and fly and think and build and recreate. Quite frankly the only explanation is supernatural. There is no natural explanation for life or for its utter complexity. But anyone who takes that position is automatically considered a kook.
Well I guess that makes me a kook.
Marlowe is right. If there is no sin in the Garden of Eden, then there is no transmitted sin, and there is no need for a savior to save us from those sins. That makes Jesus Christ unnecessary at best and a madman at worst.
An earlier comment says that there is variation within a kind and not the change of one kind to another. I don’t think this is contradicted in any fossil record that I know of. At what point do the bones of a primate belong to an extinct species and at what point do they belong to one within the ‘human kind?’
Alamo-girl has the neat idea that the Garden of Eden was in both the heavenly and the earthly dimension. This is based on the Tree of Life being in the Garden and also appearing in the heavenly in New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation. Time didn’t really begin for Adam and Eve until their expulsion from the Garden. Some 900+ years later Adam died.
My addition to that, in reference to ‘human kind’, is that humans did not begin until that point. Those without the spirit, even the dead carnal spirit, are not “man.”
But doesn't the Bible repudiate any possibility of macro-evolution at all? Chapter 2 of Genesis tells us the God brought all animals to Adam to be named. Later Noah loaded them all onto the Ark. That would seem to mean that animals were animals, in the form they are now in. So what's with all the fossils? And what about the clear evolutionary progression that science has mapped for many species? Are they all wrong?
There is no evidence that man evolved from Homo Habilis. None.
But there is evidence that they existed. So if not early forms of man then what were they?
Who? Neandrthals? Nobody was in the Garden but Adam and Eve.
Adam, Eve, and all the animals that God created, including the snake. Why were Neanderthals and Habilis banned from the garden?
Show me where evolution can explain the development of complex organs and eyesight and flight?
You deny macro-evolution period, in all forms, and in all context. Evolution of any kind contradicts the Bible and the whole creationist story. All I'm asking is that if man and animals were created as is, as they are now, then what's with the fossil record for a whole host of creatures? Are the all wrong, every single one of them?
Well I guess that makes me a kook.
Your words, not mine.
Well I guess that makes me a kook too P-Marlowe!
Non-Sequitur wrote:
...science can look at fossil records and trace the evolutionary development of a horse, for example. Or a bear, or finches or moths, etc., etc. Are they all wrong?There's nothing in Non-Sequitur's statement that supports macroevolution theory on the basis of the fossil record. All his examples are of microevolution, or evolution within species. Basically that's all the fossil record shows.
Macroevolution theory posits a gradualist development in which a species that existed before gradually turned into another, and that every present species emerged in this way. All have descended from some common ancester.
The only problem with this is, the fossil record doesn't support this expectation. What it shows, remarkably, is stasis, the very opposite of evolution: the tendency of species to remain unchanged, even over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Stephen J. Gould put it this way:
Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome... brings terrible distress.... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, it's not evolution so you can't talk about it.Or how about this, from the eminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson:
It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution.Even Richard Dawkins seems to acknowledge this. In an evidently unguarded moment, he allowed that
...[T]he Cambrian strata of rocks ... are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.It's surprising to me how many working paleontologists are not Darwinists.
In closing, I wholly agree with you, P-Marlowe: "There is no natural explanation for life or for its utter complexity."
Thank you ever so much for your excellent essay/post!