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.

"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."

Science has not yet disproved the creation account in Genesis.

And it never will.

Scientists cannot say that it is wrong or not true, because then they’d be stating that they do know what is true and correct.

Scientists operate on the hypothesis du jour. It’s laughable that they think they can make any claim on having a corner on the market of truth so much so that they can tell others they are wrong.

In the early 1900’s, the steady state theory of the universe was the hypothesis du jour. Only those crazy Bible believing literalists thought it had a beginning. Even Einstein fudged his relativity equations with the cosmological constant to deny the beginning that his equations showed the universe had.

Only when Hubble’s Red Shift observations provided the evidence that it DID have a beginning were scientists forced to admit that *groan* the Bible was .... right.

Einstein adjusted his equations to fit the theory instead of (as any reasonable objective scientist would be expected to do) adjusting the theory to fit the equations.

Science is built on shifting sands. Empirical evidence depends on interpretation and until the perfect man comes along and can perfectly interpret the evidence, it’s next to meaningless.

"Personally, I think Biology would be liberated without Darwinism. Pitch all that overboard, start from scratch. I’d bet you’d see some real developments when you stopped assuming Darwin was right."

~~~~~~~~

As a physical chemist who elected to stop four hours short of a BS in biology, (thermodynamics in lieu of genetics) I would tend to agree.

There are so many problems with Darwinism per se as an explanation that I find it to provide a peculiarly unsatisfying description of how our Creator developed living matter from initial chaos to its present state.

I -- while a Creationist -- am not an evolutionist. Nor am I a YEC.

Therefore, I consider Mohler's position that Creationists who are not YEC adherents must be some form of "evolutionist" to be disingenuous, specious, and frankly, dishonest.

That is a typically liberal trick: categorize people, label them, and, then attack the label. Pure Alinsky stuff...

The second law prohibits an increase in order.

Only in an energy-isolated system.

That is utterly false.

Containment was assumed for the sake of developing a logical proof, but it was in no way a requirement of the proof. Nevertheless, containment truly exists, since the universe, by all observable properties, is bounded, much to the chagrin of the “copernicans.”

It appears that you have a deeply flawed understanding of what the 'system' in the case of the Sun-Earth example comprises of, in addition to the understanding of the kinds of exchanges that are permissible for the Second Law to apply.

Here's a detailed explanation:

Does evolution contradict the second law of thermodynamics?

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=441

I probably won't get an answer to this one..... but entropy says the universe is breaking down... evolution says the universe is getting better! Please explain this.

This idea has been put forward by many people to try to prove that evolution is impossible. However, it is based on a flawed understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, and in fact, the theory of evolution does not contradict any known laws of physics.

The second law of thermodynamics simply says that the entropy of a closed system will tend to increase with time. "Entropy" is a technical term with a precise physical definition, but for most purposes it is okay to think of it as equivalent to "disorder". Therefore, the second law of thermodynamics basically says that the universe as a whole gets more disordered and random as time goes on.

However, the most important part of the second law of thermodynamics is that it only applies to a closed system - one that does not have anything going in or out of it. There is nothing about the second law that prevents one part of a closed system from getting more ordered, as long as another part of the system is getting more disordered.

There are many examples from everyday life that prove it is possible to create order! For example, you'd certainly agree that a person is capable of taking a pile of wood and nails and constructing a building out of it. The wood and nails have become more ordered, but in doing the work required to make the building, the person has generated heat which goes into increasing the overall entropy of the universe.

Or, if you prefer an example that doesn't require conscious human intervention, consider what happens when the weather changes and it gets colder outside. Cold air has less entropy than warm air - basically, it is more "ordered" because the molecules aren't moving around as much and have fewer places they can be. So the entropy in your local part of the universe has decreased, but as long as that is accompanied by an increase in entropy somewhere else, the second law of thermodynamics has not been violated.

That's the general picture - nature is capable of generating order out of disorder on alocal level without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and that is all that evolution requires.

The idea of evolution is simply that random genetic mutations will occasionally occur that lead an individual organism to have some trait that is different from that of its predecessors. Now, it is true that these mutations, being random, would probably tend to increase the "entropy" of the population as a whole if they occurred in isolation(i.e., in a closed system). That is, most of the mutations will create individual organisms that are less "ordered" (i.e., less complex) and only some will create individual organisms that are more complex, so overall, the complexity goes down.

However, evolution does not take place in a closed system, but rather requires the existence of outside forces - i.e., natural selection. The idea is that there can be some environmental effect that makes organisms with a particular mutation (one that makes them more "complex") more likely to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation. Thus, as generations go by, the gene pool of the species can get more and more complex, but notice that this can only occur if the gene pool interacts with the outside world. It is through the course of that interaction that some other form of entropy (or disorder) will be generated that increases the entropy of the universe as a whole.

If the above is too esoteric, consider a simple analogy: a poker tournament. In poker, good hands are less likely to be dealt than bad ones - for example, the odds of getting three of a kind are much less than the odds of getting two of a kind. So in a poker tournament, most people will be dealt bad hands and only a few will be lucky enough to be dealt good hands. But it is the people with good hands who will be more likely to win and "survive" to the next round. So the "outside forces" (in this case, the rules of poker) acting on a random distribution (all the poker hands that were dealt) will tend to select out the best, least likely ones.

For further information, the Talk.Origins website has an extensive discussion about the evolution/thermodynamics controversy.

January 2003, Dave Rothstein

I hope this doesn't come across as flip, but in what way did the Almighty fail you?

The Almighty didn't fail me. The people—who created their version of what that Almighty is supposed to be—did.

I noted you found my question about a fictional character was amusing

Yes, it was because it sounded like something an atheist would say rather than a Christian. In fact David Silverman of American Atheists said that on FOX News to none other than Bill O', i.e. "you pray to some imaginary man in the sky?", or something straight out of Richard Dawkings' books (i.e. "imaginary friend").

See Luke 3. If Genesis is a literary construct such as an allegory, a historical book (Luke) is saying Jesus is descended from a fictional character. If Genesis is a historical book, there's no problem because both men are real people.

Allegorical reading of the scriptures is not alien to some Jewish sects, such as the Alexandrian diaspora (see Philo of Alexandria). For example, the two somewhat contradicting stories of the Genesis must be read allegorically for that reason alone.

As to how fictional Adam is depends how fictional the Bible is. I know that some people believe it is 110% factual, but I am not one of them. Obviously at some point in the evolutionary process there was a "first" humanoid, but probably not the only one. I seriously doubt he was anything like Adam.

The Bible also says that diseases are caused by "demons". That's about as fictional as it gets, as far as I am concerned. When you get sick, do you look for someone to drive the "demons" out of you, or do you submit to science?

If you do the latter, that's as good as calling the Gospels fictional narratives; it shows lack of belief in biblical explanation of what causes illness.

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