On Sat, 20 Dec 1997 16:32:16 -0700, John W. Burgeson wrote:
>John Rylander wrote:
>
JR>"If you mean that God builds in the appearance of age and an evolutionary
>history down to the atomic level, I'm sure you're right."
JB>Whether I'm "right" or not, I don't know. What I am saying is that I
>THINK if God DID create anything in a "sudden" manner, i.e. not through
>mutation/selection processes, that the thing He created, be it a new
>organism, or wine at the wedding supper, or food for the 5,000, or
>something as ordinary as a stone, must necessarily have been created with
>an apparent history.
While I disgree about the "food for the 5,000" (see below), in general I agree
that any sudden creation of a whole thing, be it the universe, plant or animal,
must have some appearance of age, as Del Ratzsch points out:
"The principle that the universe was created fully functioning has an
extremely long history. As discussed briefly in chapter six,
contemporary creationists accept the idea and conclude from it that
at least some appearance of age is absolutely unavoidable in a fully
functioning universe, even were it in fact created only moments ago.
Any humans would have the appearance of some age or other, and if
such humans were expected to care for the creation, harvest food for
themselves and so forth, the apparent age would have to be at least
beyond infancy. Similarly, if the world were created as ecologically
fully formed, plants would unavoidably have to have the appearance of
varying ages. And if God wished to present the new humans with a
dazzling stellar night sky involving a wide variety of objects at
genuinely stellar distances, he would have to either sit and wait
millions of years for the light to arrive at the earth or else create
light in transit-again, giving the appearance of age." (Ratzsch
D.L., "The Battle of Beginnings", 1996, p96)
JB>And that fact does not postulate a "liar God." I
>hold that an analysis of the Cana beverage done with scientific integrity
>would have found evidences of grape picking and fermentation that never
>happened. Analysis of the fish and bread at the 5,000 man picnic would
>have shown evidences of farming and fishing that were imaginary. Most of
>the fish served that day had never seen water! As you bite into one of
>those fish, would you consider the ONE who provied it a liar because you
>encountered a fish bone? Of course not!
On Sat, 20 Dec 1997 21:21:33 -0600, Glenn Morton wrote:
GM>have you considered the possibility that when Jesus broke the bread and the
>fish that the individual pieces of fish and bread were duplicated, i.e., the
>molecules were duplicated in each piece. This would then mean that EVERY
>piece of fish had seen the water and every piece of bread had been farmed.
On Sun, 21 Dec 1997 16:09:28 -0500 (EST), Walter J Hicks wrote:
WH>Why should this be so? I can see your point when it is the duplication
>of something that exists (like wine or fish circa 30AD)...
I agree with Glenn and Walter here. The feeding of the 5,000 was
most likely a duplication of existing bread and fish. Therefore the
duplicated fish and bread would be expected have the same apparent
age as the original. But the Cana example of making water from wine
is the most interesting, since except for the water component, the
wine was presumably created de novo with an appearance of age:
"and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned
into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the
servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom
aside and said, `Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then
the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you
have saved the best till now.'" (John 2:9-10). Here the guests
thought the wine was "choice wine", which presumably includes the
meaning of aged, yet it was created instantaneously! But is this
deceit? No, because the Bible makes it clear that the wine was
created instantly out of water. If some of the guests got it wrong
and thought the wine was produced naturally, that is their problem,
and in any event, no harm was done. It is a necessary entailment of a
miracle, that some can misunderstand it (eg. the resurrection of
Jesus), but that does not make God a liar.
If God created a fully functioning universe 6,000 years ago (which
would necessarily entail an apparent age of the Earth, and light
en-route from the stars), that is logically possible, and would not
be deception if God clearly and unambiguously told us that He had
done so (as He does with the other miracles). The fact that the
Bible does not clearly and unambiguously tell us that the Earth was
created in 6 literal days, but a). gives a number of meanings of
days within Genesis 1; b) strongly hints at much process within those
days, and c) does not give a complete chronology after it, points
away from the apparent age interpretation.
JB>Wich leads me to the conclusion that, given the ICR position is
>correct, no amount of "science" can ever show it.
The problem with the ICR position is that they are not consistent. If
the universe really was created with an appearance of age, then they
should be enthusiastic supporters of all evidence which supports that
appearance (eg. the Big Bang, the age of the Earth, the fossil record,
etc). How can the ICR simultaneously claim there is an appearance,
while attacking that appearance?
JB>Less to my liking, but still it seems this way, is that the
>"Progressive Creation" position is also of this nature -- possibly
>true -- but no "science" will ever have a chance of showing it.
It is not clear why science will be unable to show if progressive
creation occurred. If God did progressively create new higher taxa by
either genetically modifying existing species, then it would appear
to science as the sudden appearance of innovations substantially
fully formed with little or no transitional intermediates, and then
stay the same. This is exactly what science does show:
"The history of most fossil species includes two features
particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species
exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They
appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they
disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise
gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears
all at once and "fully formed."....The extreme rarity of transitional
forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of
paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have
data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is
inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. (Gould
S.J, "The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change", "The Panda's
Thumb", 1980, pp150-151).
Note that my position is Mediate Creation, which is close to
Progressive Creation but would allow some vertical creation (eg.
eukaryotes by prokaryote colonisation and eventual fusion), to take
place by naturalistic processes. It would also allow some vertical
creation to take place by special providence (aka. second-class
miracles), eg. reptile-mammal jaw-ear transition.
JB>Still less to my liking is the conclusion that the TE position is
>of a similar sort. What I see Phil Johnson doing is testing that
>position. And that is interesting, though I don't expect success.
AFAIK the TE position makes no testable scientific predictions or
retrodictions at all, ie. that would distinguish it independently
from naturalistic evolution. This is not the case with PC which
predicted back in 1955 that gaps in the fossil record would remain
because vertical progress creation took place by creation:
"In progressive creationism there may be much horizontal radiation.
The amount is to be determined by the geological record and
biological experimentation. But there is no vertical radiation.
Vertical radiation is only by fiat creation. A root-species may give
rise to several species by horizontal radiation, through the process
of the unraveling of gene potentialities or recombination.
Horizontal radiation could account for much which now passes as
evidence for the theory of evolution. The gaps in the geological
record are gaps because vertical progress takes place only by
creation." (Ramm B.L., "The Christian View of Science and
Scripture", 1955, p191).
This prediction has been confirmed:
"4. Darwinian predictions. Darwin predicted that the fossil record
should show a reasonably smooth continuum of ancestor-descendant
pairs with a satisfactory number of intermediates between major
groups Darwin even went so far as to say that if this were not found
in the fossil record, his general theory of evolution would be in
serious jeopardy. Such smooth transitions were not found in Darwin's
time, and he explained this in part on the basis of an incomplete
geologic record and in part on the lack of study of that record. We
are now more than a hundred years after Darwin and the situation is
little changed. Since Darwin a tremendous expansion of
paleontological knowledge has taken place, and we know much more
about the fossil record than was known in his time, but the basic
situation is not much different. We actually may have fewer examples
of smooth transition than we had in Darwin's time because some of the
old examples have turned out to be invalid when studied in more
detail. To be sure, some new intermediate or transitional forms have
been found, particularly among land vertebrates. But if Darwin were
writing today, he would probably still have to cite a disturbing lack
of missing links or transitional forms between the major groups of
organisms." (Raup D.M., in Godfrey L.R., ed., "Scientists Confront
Creationism", 1983, p156)
Happy Christmas!
Steve
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