Posted on 01/15/2005 3:57:44 PM PST by Catholic54321
Was the world created exactly as it says in the book of Genesis, or is the theory of evolution a more accurate account? Not every faith that includes Genesis among its Scriptures feels compelled to debate the matter. For the vast majority of Jews, any discrepancy between science and faith was pretty much settled 1,100 years ago, said Rabbi Steve Vale of Congregation Ha-Makom (The Jewish Community of Solano County).
Saadia Gaon, a Babylonian rabbi who helped codify Rabbinic Judaism, resolved the conflict, Vale said.
"Saaida Gaon said that if there is scientific evidence of something and it contradicts what Torah (Scripture) says, the Torah can't be wrong and science can't be wrong. I'm wrong. I'm interpreting it wrong," the rabbi explained.
Genesis, for instance, says the world was created in seven days. "There's no compelling reason for us to say a day is 24 hours," Vale said. "There's no reason to say God could not create the world through evolution."
Nor do Jews necessarily hold that Genesis is the start of the story. "'In the beginning' really means, 'when God was beginning the world,' " Vale said. "The Bible starts the story with the beginning of life and human beings, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it was the beginning of God or his creation."
It is impossible to know whether the world evolved or was created as Genesis describes it, Vale said, but that's not the point of Scripture.
"For Jews, the Bible is a book about why we are here and how we're supposed to act, not how we're created. People are welcome to read that into it, but it's not for us," Vale said. "I'm more interested in how I'm supposed to act, how I'm supposed to treat people on the streeet, how am I supposed to connect to God through the acts in my life."
A similar philosophy guides Roman Catholic teaching.
"We say that the lessons of the Bible are lessons about God's relationship with the human race and our relationship with God - that all the stories are calculated, if you will, to elucidate something of the relationship between God and the universe and his people," said the Rev. Vincent O'Reilly of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Vacaville. "So the Bible tells us who made the world and what the responsibility of creation is to the one who created it, but we rely on science to teach us how the world developed."
In the Catholic church, science and faith collided in the 17th century, when astronomers Johannes Kepler and Galileo upended the church's teaching that the Earth was the center of the universe. In the intervening 400 years, Catholic theologians and scientists have come to a truce.
"All truth has to come from God," O'Reilly explained. "If science is telling us some truth about the development or evolution of the universe, then that's the truth as we know it today. Five hundred years from now, some scientist may come up with a slightly different version. But that won't change our position that a creator designed the universe and we're striving to understand how."
Besides, he added, how God created the world isn't the point of the creation story. "The story is ultimately that human beings are the highpoint of God's creation. And God has charged humans with responsibility for the rest of creation."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also doesn't spend a lot of time debating the fine points of evolution or creationism. Its official teaching lies between the two points.
"We believe that God created the world, but not necessarily in seven days," said Dayton Call, a spokeman for the church in Solano County. "When it comes to evolution, we don't believe human beings evolved. We believe we were descended from Adam and Eve. But that's as far as the church's position goes on the subject. If there's evolution involved as far as the creative process, we would not argue that there's not."
Orthodox Christians also steer clear of the creation vs. evolution debate, said the Rev. Silas Ruark of St. Timothy Orthodox Church (Antiochan) in Cordelia.
"Orthodoxy basically accepts the fact that there is very much we don't know about the beginning and the end," Ruark said. "We know that in the beginning God created. And we know that in the end he will bring it to a close. But to venture into a great deal of speculation about the how or even the when is for us to assume that we can understand the mind of God."
Most Orthodox Christians accept the Genesis account as being a "true revelation of God's creation and God's interaction with humankind," Ruark said. Orthodox Christianity also teaches that the world has "gone haywire" through the disobedience of humankind.
"But the exact hows of the creation, the hows of his incarnation and the hows of his second coming are known only to God," Ruark said.
Canis familiaris, the dog, speciated from Canis lupus, the wolf, but this was accelerated due to human involvement.
When you actually study biology, speciation is a little harder to define then you may think it is. It is not simply that there are significant physical differences: poodles and St. Bernards can still interbreed. There has to be enough chromosomal incompatibility that if two members of different species *do* mate, sexual meiosis does not occur, or, if it does, the offspring is sterile.
So what you are asking for is not a single instance, but thousands of instances repeated and accumulated over generations.
... and no, downlike feathers do not enable you to fly. Read the doscussion of protoarchaeopteryx to learn more about feathers' evolution: they did not first evolve soft like down. I only used the example of down to illustrate that feathers' complex structure retains heat. But the point is there once were feathered lizards that could not fly demonstrating both the existence of supposedly non-existant intermediate forms and answering what once was a favorite charge of creationists: that intermediate forms are often non-functional.
Actually, that is an interesting example you provide. Artificial intelligence has resulted in computers which attain abilities by means comparable to how evolution functions. Through a process of trial and error, and simply retaining what works best, computers have shown how extremely simple programs can result in fantastically complex mimicry of human speech, including syntax, vocabulary and tonation that can fool most people who aren't aware they are speaking to a computer.
But this goes back to one issue which I will readily acknowledge: Evolution explains how one life form becomes another life form, and even how complexity is added. It does not explain the earliest origin of simple life. The first cause of biology has not been linked to the first cause of physics.
There are two or three events in the creation of the human being which are not adequately explained by science: About 3 billion years ago, primordial soup yielded an organism. There exists nothing more than weak guesses as to how this happened.
And about 20,000 years ago, some primitive woman emerged so superior to those around her that of all the other woman, not one of their maternal lineages survived.
There is also the problem of consciousness: breaking human behavior down to biological cause and effect does not explain the phenomenon of why we experience consciousness. Nor is it necesarily possible to ever do so. Biology can explain the machine, but it cannot explain the ghost in the machine.
This is where science must not be confused with the nihilist coverage in the news media. Any scientist worth his salt knows of these problems. There are, you see, choices between nihilism and creationism.
There is a tempting argument that religion should be powerless in this way, but that notion would be calamitous to our society, which is built on religion having influence through democratic action to create the prevening grace of justice. For the sake of democracy, we cannot allow religion to become irrational, but the evidence against the 7000-year-old Earth is so preposterous, your literalism is fatal.
That is the most outstanding, cogent, concise, accurate assessment of the problem from all sides. Wow. I cannot think of enough adjectives to crib the perfection of that observation.
Just wow.
If you read the genesis account and take it at face value
it makes sense, you dont need to add anything or ignore anything its when dunderheads start adding and taking away
that people get lost!
I did find several examples where we lucked out and have been able to witness speciation due to a fortunate location of a mutation, resulting in "instant" or exceptionally rapid speciation:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
And therein lies the rub.
This has been the most informative, restrained, polite Evo/Crea thread I have seen in weeks but as long as moonbats are going to condemn half of Christians and 90% of Jews as "God Haters" for denying a literal interpretation creation we get no where.
Translation: Half the Christians don't really care about doctrine, don't really believe Scriptures, will eagerly latch-on to a philosophy of death and misery, and are really Deists at heart. (Jews deny the gospel, so deconstructing Genesis is par for the course)
And thanks for the hypocrisy by praising "restrained and polite" then procede straight to the insults. Since materialists must insert insults into a comment directed to wards people who actually believe the Bible, is it correct to assume that you are of that group of evolved beings that truly believe that your distant relatives can be found in cages at the zoo?
Afterall, it requires one to be "willfully ignorant" (2 Peter 3:5) about the matter. For instance, I don't know how many times it has been presented, but the Hebrew grammar can not be more explicit about a literal six day creation. There are words and phrases to denote long periods of time, yet these words are not found in the narrative, rather the word "day" is tied to a number (which always means literal "day"), and is associated to "evening and morning" (which always means literal "day"). If people wish to willfully ignore grammar, they also have to willfuly ignore the Ten Commandments which spells out six literal days which makes for the foundation of our hebdomodal cycles.
It has also been presented many times that scientifically the days could not be "long periods of time", particularly because the sun doesn't appear until "day" four, or the next "long period of time after plants. Even so, how would the water that covered the earth manage to not freeze up without a sun?
It has been presented countless times that anything other than a literal interpretation does great violence to the gospel message. It is certainly not possible that a person can be a Christian and not believe the gospel. For since death comes from sin, and sin by Adam, then it is not possible that death existed before Adam. To say that death preceded Adam is to deny the gospel. Those who deny the gospel cannot be Christians.
Furthermore, it has been presented countless times that to believe that one needs long periods of time before Adam in order to account for the "apperance of age", a person must willfully deny the global flood which completely changed the earth and the environment several thousand years ago. Since Jesus Christ refered to the global flood, to say that there was no global flood is to call Jesus Christ a liar. Those who gladly call Jesus Christ a liar are by definition God haters.
Then we have people who are A.D.D. or something and skip over genealogies because they think that they are boring. In doing so, they jump over important doctrine and evidence for a young earth. These same people wish to say that Genesis 1-11 is pure fiction, but two of the four gospels trace Jesus Christ's lineage all the way to Adam which includes a couple thousand years and several generations of "fictional" men. I undestand that materialists are quite eager to discover that their ancestors were lizards and bugs, so it is particularly odd that materialists, who would believe a "scientist" if they said that a distant ancestor was a goat or a dung beetle, would somehow not believe a faithfully recorded geneaology of real human flesh and bone. This takes true willfull ignorance to be at ease with this.
Therefore, my justification in identifying those who deny the six day creation deny the flood and claim that Jesus Christ's lineage included worms and bugs as God haters is justified. What is your justification for calling me a "moonbat"? Is it because insults are your only way to defend the undefendable?
Uh, that was in 1985. That's downright silly to cite a 20-year old source to say that no evidence for something has been found. The first Oort object was found in 2003. However, much evidence had been collected previously.
This is an admission that materialists can't keep the story straight. When the Oort cloud was first imagined, it was a panic defense move to counter Young Earth apologists who pointed out that the existance of comets defies the evolutionary theory in both primoridal origins and the 4.3 billion years. Comets can't live even a tiny fraction that long. So Jan Oort totally made up the idea that there was a cosmic deep freeze. Like all materialists, Oort made sure that this imagined comet storage locker was too far away to be observed or measured so that the fiction can be maintained in the traditional evolutionists manner - the Joseph Goebbels technique. The problem is, that when other scientists began to track the courses of short period comets, they found that the Oort cloud fantasy didn't work so well and thus they ran to the Kuiper Belt (an equally unobservable fiction) and made all kinds of unsubstantiated statements and claims all in the name of [pseudo]"science".
Now the liar says "the first Oort object was found in 2003". All comets were supposed to be Oort objects, so one allegedly didn't have to wait until 2003 to observe one. But if one did have to wait until 2003, then what were all of those objects (aka 'comets') if not Oort objects? This isn't science, this is lunacy.
The liar then tried to defend why feathers are somehow a beneficial mutation on a cold blooded creature by slinging a pointless insult. No explanation of the much bigger question in how a cold blooded creature becomes a warm blooded creature, but that the cold blooded creature with feathers "out survived".
The liar, who chastened me for using "outdated" (aka proven wrong) evolutionist derived material then shows hypocrisy by using outdated, proven wrong evolutionist derived material in order to maintain the lie...
Caudipteryx are two genera, discovered in 1998, which possessed feathers...
Except evolutionary ornithologists Larry Martin and Allan Feduccia consider them flightless birds similar to ostriches based on the evidence that these so-called "feathers" are nothing more than frayed collagen fibres beneath the skin while a UConn feather expert that these critters lacked the organization found in feathers. I guess "science" can't make up its mind. (also these two northern china fossils are dated to be twenty million years younger than Archaeopteryx - a true bird. How can the alleged transitional be that much younger - only the evolutionist can know)
Your choice, believe the infallible Scripures or continue to follow the daily lies of the materialists?
Because my salvation is not dependent on your narrow, personal interpretation of Genesis. It is dependent on my belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, God's son, who died for my sins and rose again to defeat death an make me worthy.
The fact that I accept this and love Jesus & the father for it put the lie to your hyperbolic, inaccurate, "moonbat" ravings that I and other who believe this hate God.
As far as insults go, I would examine the mote in your own eye first yeah of the judgmental "anyone who does not be;ieve exactly what I do hates God". Ever wonder why there are about 1000 branches of the Baptist/Evangelical church? Baptist congregations disintegrate at over the most niggling differences, but your qualified to tell me I hate God.
I find it hard to participate with all the name calling and keeping in mind 'Love thy neighbor'. There is a nice article and thread on Jesus Christ's teaching and God's law which shows that he stressed the internal sense over persecuting those who do not believe a narrow interpretation of the literal sense of the Word. Some here may do well to review the thread and reconsider how they approach these topics - at present they appear as so many Pharisees.
I agree totally with you that we are factionalized and our adversary seems well organized in comparison.
First of all, it isn't my "personal interpretation" The charge of "narrow interpretation" is called "orthodoxy" and has been held faithfully by believers for thousands of years. Materialism is a late comer, and if you cared to explore the origins of syncretizing the death cult of atheistic materialism into corrupting the ageless Word, then you would discover that there is no basis in fact to support your "personal interpretation". FUrthermore your opinions are in contradiction to the prophets and the apostles who refered to Genesis 1-11 as true history not some insipid uninterpretable poetry.
Jesus Christ is the 2nd Adam, which means that there is 1st Adam. The whole concept of sin nature begins with the Fall. Since you reject the Fall, then you must deny the doctrine of Original Sin. Denying the doctrine of Original Sin means that you deny the doctrine of Subsitution. To deny the doctrine of Substitution, you have no mechanism to be redeemed. If you have no redemption, then you are damned.
Basically you have a religion where you reject all of the doctrines and live off the warm fuzzies of emotionalism. I don't get it. How can you be ashamed of the gospel, call Jesus Christ a liar, and assume that you are saved?
Do I sound peeved? I hope so. The major doctrines of Scripture are presented in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The whole foundation of Christianity begins right there. When someone comes up and says that Genesis 1-11 is bogus, is a metaphor (of what, we all wonder), is fiction, or something that can mean anything to anybody (the opposite of "narrow interpretation") then it shows a remarkable arrogance and indifference to the revelation of the Almighty. The Apostle Peter also was peeved, and declared scoffers who prefer "broad interpretations" as "willfully ignorant". I stand in good company.
"Persecution"? - Playing the victim card? Attack the integrity of the Scripture then play victim when challenged for it?
Translation: Doctrine is whatever anyone wants it to be. According to this vaccuous statement, St. Paul didn't follow Christ because he was a stickler about doctrine - instead he should have known that truth is according to our own personal "internal sense". (Jeremiah 17:9) What did you do rip out Matthew 5 from your loose leaf Bible?
I find it ironic that those who are comfortable with profound error, gnosticism and the Gospel of Whatever would claim to take the moral high ground by rebuking those who vigorously defend the Word of God against all scoffers.
Other than that, have a nice day!
Jusus Christ is God. Adam is the Most Ancient Church. Flip foward to Genesis 12 - Abram represents the Lord in his nativity and boyhood.
As stated elsewhere on this thread, Genisis 1-11 is pre-history in style. The internal meaning is for US - OUR repentance, reformation and the states of the Most Ancient (Adam) and Ancient (Noah) Churches on earth.
Genesis 1-11 was past down as a true fable by word of mouth and it has infinite hidden meaning in Heaven.
Argument through distraction. How nice. For your information, there is a reason why true Baptists exist as independant groups - study their objections and observed pitfalls towards creating conventions and assemblies. THere are plenty of bogus baptists euphemistically called "Southern Baptists" that really follow semi-pelagian doctrines that bear little resemblance to traditional orthodoxy. (But that is another rant). So when you point to "1000 branches" that is because of design, not because of infighting. Regardless, many gather because of personality differences (high church, charismata, banjos & bely dancers, etc.).
Now of those "1000 baptist" churches, I don't think that one will find many who reject the gospel like you have. It is highly hypocritical of you to condemn Scipture and reject the major doctrines of Christianity and then act outraged because there are more than one baptist assemblies in town. Jesus Christ said that if you deny Him on earth, He will deny you on the Last Day. Since you deny His words and His gospel, exactly why do you expect Him to make an exception for you? And is it love when you call Him a liar? - and then vigorously defend yourself by insulting and criticising others who are trying to show you the error in your thinking?
Instead of acting so outraged and lashing out, try to defend the undefendable by showing exactly why no one should believe the Bible and still be a Christian.
For example, explain why you feel that God's word must comply to the wild speculations of avowed God haters (ie Chuck Darwin, Carl PSagan)
Yes. I'm sure if the Messiah showed up on freerepublic, you would crucify Him ;-) Jesus taught to be LIKE Him... FOLLOW Him... Love thy NEIGHBOR... Unless you are rendering the Hebrew of the OT, it may be wise to temper your argument.
The point of my post was to read the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5) and then read and comment on Genesis 1.
Informed creationists have long pointed out that the biblical model of earth history would not only allow for the possibility of one species splitting into several (without the addition of new information, thus not ‘evolution’ as commonly understood), but would actually require that it must have happened much faster than evolutionists would expect.
My desire for examples of speciation was as it relates to evolution, not devolution or splitting. These examples demonstrate changes in existing code that did not lead to new biological systems (More frequent blue screens of death, not less frequent). Great Danes don't mate with Chihuahua. Most of your examples would call them different species.
Observe from your article:
(Test for speciation: sterile offspring and lack of interbreeding affinity.)
(Test for speciation in this case is by morphology and lack of natural interbreeding. These fish have complex mating rituals and different coloration. While it might be possible that different species are inter-fertile, they cannot be convinced to mate.)
(Test for speciation in this case is based on morphology. It is unlikely that forced breeding experiments have been performed with the parent stock.)
I know, I know, you can't show me examples of new systems. Those take to much magic time to be observed.
Psa 1:1 Blessed [is] the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
If you keep your eyes on the science over the next few years, you will begin to notice how Creationist scientists are taking the raw data and coming up with an entirely new model for our existence. Based on Science. There is a growing number of scientists coming out of the closet who have a desire to put in the hands of a revised educational establishment, a systematic alternative view of the data. As these think tanks organize, the school boards and parents of America will use capitalism to shut down the socialistic oriented education establishment. Dark Ages, Pseudo-science, think again.
The momentum has shifted, and is unstoppable. Homeschooling and the eventual implementation of vouchers is changing the landscape of our scientific horizons.
What you did was not use "proven wrong" material (in reference to Sagan). You took a very old admission that something hadn't been found YET, and presented it as if it were evidence that STILL nothing had been found.
coldblooded survival.As for how a cold-blooded creature evolves into a warm-blooded creature, it's quite simple: Warm-bloodedness is simply the result of having a septum in the ventricle of the heart, preventing oxygenated (pulmonary) blood from mixing with deoxygenated (systemic) blood. There are various reptiles living today showing intermediate phases of a cardic septum, including crocodiles. Unfortunately, cardiac septums do not usuall fossilize, since they are neither of a durable material like bone, nor near the surface to leave an imprint). So palentologists have to infer warm-bloodedness by secondary adaptations, such as capillary distribution, which do occasionally imprint.
Warm-bloodedness is an evolutionary advantage in temperate climates, where considerable temperature swings occur. In very moist climates (where moisture modifies temperature swings) or tropical climates, warm-bloodedness is not an advantage. Hence, it should not be surprising that cold-blooded creatures thrive to this day in aquatic, swampy and tropical environments. Nor should it, therefore, be surprising that a cold-blooded organism should survive after a similar organism has evolved warm-bloodedness is a different climate.
feathers? Neither Martin or Fiduccia would consider their work as posing any troubles to evolutionary science, but rather they did demonstrate how they, evolutionary scientists, don't bury inconvenient evidence. But the article I linked to does respond, quite adequately, to the issues raised by Martin and Fiduccia. As for the feathers lacking modern feathers structures, what you have just cited is precisely the existence of intermediate forms which you claim do not exist. The feathers served the purpose of a non-flying dinosaur. Only when some branch of that family tree started to fly would the modern aerodynamic structure become advantageous.
>>Your choice, believe the infallible Scripures or continue to follow the daily lies of the materialists? <<
A false and destructive dichotomy if ever there was one.
Rather, early fish had lobed fins. Some of these fish evolved to have the ray fins that are most common. Some evolved into having legs. Some lobe-finned fish still exist, and some fish, like catfish, still use lobed fins to try to more effectively cross land.
None of this is easy to view as evolutionary progress. The most evolutionary biologists would call "progress" is simply noting that one descendent species is more different from an ancestor than a different species. But who is to say that an elephant is more progressed than a flounder?
There are two problem points where perhaps you wouldn't consider it mere splitting: at some point simple single-cellular organisms developed cellular systems, and at another point, these complex, single-celled organisms not only became multicellular (colonial), but a multicellular organism began to show cellular differentiation. That is, a colony of cells began to rely on specialized cells to reproduce, creating cells that were capable of starting a while new colony. At this point, colonies of single-celled organisms became multicellular organisms.
The second case isn't hard to figure. While it's true we haven'to bserved it happening, there are innumerable intermediate organisms.
The first one is a tougher case: Biologists call their solution, the endosymbiotic hypothesis. Two species of simple cells lived symbiotically so regularly, they became dependent on having each other as symbionts. Once that happened, an offspiring of the "outer" cell would not survive if it did not also have an offspiring of the "inner" cell within it. Given such a strong evolutionary force, it's not hard to imagine that the outer cell began to regulate the reproduction of the inner cell.
But how did the outer cell come to genetically control the inner cell (organelle)? We've seen that viruses and viroids transfer the location of genetic material. In fact, we've seen speciation occur on this basis. All that had to happen was that a virus transfer genetic material from outside a nucleus to inside it.
What if that never happened? Well, hold on to your hat: It so happens that that process never did happen in the instance of out mitochondria. Mitochondria are the organelles reponsible for turning carbohydrates into energy, the most vital organelle of a cell (besides the nucleus.) This is why they could use mitochondriato construct a family tree of the entire human race, and how they could figure out how many generations we are removed from our common grandmother! They have their own DNA, called mDNA. Mitochondria evolved entirely seperately the rest of our cells, and do not participate in sexual reproduction. Each mitochondria is a clone of its own parent.
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