The documentation below is a very insightful list of remarks from a
book review
by somebody at amazon.com, which is giving some of the "consequences" of
evolution in the area of ethics. I made a few comments of my own ( "a
matter of"
and "Joe:" ).
1. Concept violated: the goodness of God . A matter of why God would use
negative oriented entities without joy to create.
The Bible says 'God is good' and in Genesis 1:31 God described his just
finished creation as 'very good'. How do you understand the goodness
of God if He used evolution, 'nature red in tooth and claw', to 'create'
everything?
2. Concept violated: Adam's sin brought death and decay, the basis of
the Gospel.
A matter of why a widespread already existing lack of freedom
should be put
on Adam man's shoulders for just following the crowd. Actually, man
is the
first which killed for sport and perhaps does more killing of his
own kind than
other species. Is that it? This item is the most difficult for me
to figure out a
evolutionalist explanation for.
According to the evolutionist's (and progressive creationist's)
understanding,
fossils (which show death, disease and bloodshed) were formed before
people
appeared on earth. Doesn't that mean that you can't believe the Bible
when it says
that everything is in 'bondage to decay' because of Adam's sin (Romans
8)? In
the evolutionary view, hasn't the 'bondage to decay' always been there?
And if
death and suffering did not arise with Adam's sin and the resulting
curse, how
can Jesus' suffering and physical death pay the penalty for sin and give
us eternal
life, as the Bible clearly says (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:22, "For as in
Adam all die,
so in Christ all shall be made alive")?
3. Concept violated: the divine inspiration of the whole Bible
A matter of how truth can be found and convincingly communicated in
a
document which uses a wide variety of figures of speech in the eye
of the
beholder.
If the Genesis accounts of Creation, the Fall, the origin of nations,
the Flood and
the Tower of Babel - the first 11 chapters - are not historical,
although they are
written as historical narrative and understood by Jesus to be so, what
other
unfashionable parts of the Bible do you discard? The biblical account of
creation
in Genesis seems very specific with six days of creative activity, each
having an
evening and a morning. According to the evolutionary sequence, the
biblical order
of creation is all wrong. Do you think God should have inspired an
account more
in keeping with the evolutionary order, the truth as you see it, if
indeed He did use
evolution or followed the evolutionary pattern in creating everything?
Joe: I assume the 4th day is the main problem. I assume that that's when
the plants in the
3rd day started noticing the signs and adjusting their lives
accordingly.
4. Concept violated: the straightforward understanding of the Word of
God
A matter of how our stream of consciousness has a dynamic mode
wherein more
than one possibility is simultaneously considered feasible and fits
in with other
similar pieces in making a construct whole. The balanced scales
perform mappings
into more than one system of thought at a time with some items
amazing . Each
system is complete within itself, but is on another level of being
as others.
If the Genesis account does not mean what it plainly says, but must be
'interpreted'
to fit an evolutionary world, how are we to understand the rest of the
Bible?
How are we to know that the historical accounts of Jesus' life, death
and
resurrection should not also be 'reinterpreted'? Indeed, can we know
anything for
sure if the Bible can be so flexible?
Joe: According to Hebrews, there are invisible Spiritual Realms, i.e.
alternative
realities. There may be quite a few of them, potentially partially
overlapping.
5. Concept violated: the creation is supposed to show the hand of God
clearly .
A matter of how to discern the worth and equitableness of religion
if a
fancy Dan interpretation can be conjured up which totally leaves it
out.
I never heard of this concept before however. I'm sure God had an
awful
problem in selection of words which could transcend time. He
undoubtedly
had to make some compromises according to the 80/20 rule of thumb.
Dr Niles Eldredge, well-known evolutionist, said:
'Darwin . . . taught us that we can understand life's history in purely
naturalistic
terms, without recourse to the supernatural or divine.' [Niles Eldredge,
"Time
Frames - the Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of
Punctuated
Equilibrium", 1986, Heinemann, London, p. 13.]
Is it not philosophically inconsistent to marry God (theism) with
evolution
(naturalism)? If God 'created' using evolution which makes Him
unnecessary, how
can God's 'eternal power and divine nature' be 'clearly seen' in
creation, as
Romans 1:20 says? Evolution has no purpose, no direction, no goal. The
God of
the Bible is all about purpose. How do you reconcile the purposelessness
of
evolution with the purposes of God? What does God have to do in an
evolutionary world? Is not God an 'unnecessary hypothesis'?
6. Concept violated: the need of restoration for the creation
A matter of why man should be so valued as to have the entire
creation
redone for his convenience.
If God created over millions of years involving death, the existing
earth is not
ruined by sin, but is as it always has been - as God supposedly intended
it to
be. So why then should He want to destroy it and create a new heavens
and
earth (2 Peter 3 and other places)?
Received on Mon Aug 2 17:54:37 2004
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