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Evolution, Creation, and You

Pick the statement that describes you best

  • I subscribe to the theories of the big bang and evolution.

    Votes: 52 61.9%

  • I subscribe to a creation theory, or something close, as well as evolution.

    Votes: 19 22.6%

  • I believe in creation, but not evolution.

    Votes: 5 6.0%

  • Some other version of this, please specify.

    Votes: 8 9.5%
  • Total voters
    84
Wrangor said:
that isn't really what the bible teaches. It pretty much says at anytime he can change the script. What biblical basis do you have for that?
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Isn't that interpretation of God (changing the script at anytime) at odds with the notion of an inerrant historical text?
 
Wrangor said:
This is where I have no problem accepting miracles, floods, etc.... If I believe the God that could create the universe with a Word came to earth in the womb of a frail teenage girl (and my faith hinges on believing this one fact) then everything else is very easy to believe. The Bible reiterates over and over that God's wisdom is not man's wisdom, and that the Gospel is foolishness to those who don't believe. It should come as no surprise to Christians that they are thought of as fools by the world. Without faith, the whole story is pretty ridiculous.
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If you don't mind my asking, how many miracles have you witnessed? Of these, how many could you conclude unequivocally are miracles?

And by miracle, I mean instance in which the laws of hard sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) are broken.
 
Deacfreak07 said:
Isn't that interpretation of God (changing the script at anytime) at odds with the notion of an inerrant historical text?
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Not in the least. And again - everything in the Bible isn't historical. That doesn't mean it isn't inerrant. Writing that someone's eyes are like the lillies of the field doesn't mean it is an error. For the most part of the Bible is pretty clear about what kind of writing it is portraying. When it says there was a great flood that killed all mankind save Noah and his family, that isn't poetry.
 
Wrangor said:
Not in the least. And again - everything in the Bible isn't historical. That doesn't mean it isn't inerrant. Writing that someone's eyes are like the lillies of the field doesn't mean it is an error. For the most part of the Bible is pretty clear about what kind of writing it is portraying. When it says there was a great flood that killed all mankind save Noah and his family, that isn't poetry.
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What I meant was the Bible is a completed text. If God can flip the script whenever God sees fit, what is to stop God from flipping the script in the last 2,000 years, and are you not limiting God to the parameters laid out within the text by assuming inerrancy?
 
Junebug said:
If you don't mind my asking, how many miracles have you witnessed? Of these, how many could you conclude unequivocally are miracles?

And by miracle, I mean instance in which the laws of hard sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) are broken.
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Most reformed theology (by which I hold pretty close) teaches that there are no overt miracles post Jesus/Disciples. As in God has not passed his power directly through humans since then. As far as witnessed events, I believe there are unexplainable medical miracles every day. When I was born for instance I had a hole in my heart that was threatening to end me. They were transferring me from Durham County General to Duke Hospital for emergency surgery in an ambulance. When I arrive at Duke they took a look and the hole was completely gone. No trace. I think we see what we look for. I believe so I see. I am not unaware of this notion. But I think it applies across the board (non-believers as well). Good question.
 
Deacfreak07 said:
What I meant was the Bible is a completed text. If God can flip the script whenever God sees fit, what is to stop God from flipping the script in the last 2,000 years?
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Not sure. Don't have an answer for that.
 
Wrangor said:
that isn't really what the bible teaches. It pretty much says at anytime he can change the script. What biblical basis do you have for that?
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Actually, I think the statement "God flips the script" is without warrant. Isn't that what the many temptations of Jesus show (either the Tempter in the wilderness or on the cross- save yourself)? That God refrains from changing the script? The issues of a God that just changes whatever laws of physics anytime is extremely problematic- as it makes God in a capricious and arbitrary deity.
 
Wrangor said:
Most reformed theology (by which I hold pretty close) teaches that there are no overt miracles post Jesus/Disciples. As in God has not passed his power directly through humans since then. As far as witnessed events, I believe there are unexplainable medical miracles every day. When I was born for instance I had a hole in my heart that was threatening to end me. They were transferring me from Durham County General to Duke Hospital for emergency surgery in an ambulance. When I arrive at Duke they took a look and the hole was completely gone. No trace. I think we see what we look for. I believe so I see. I am not unaware of this notion. But I think it applies across the board (non-believers as well). Good question.
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That's just poor theology (not your miracle story), but to say that miracles stopped at the NT. That defies a) Pentecost and b) the Trinity (neutering the Spirit). It's also rather hopeless to suggest that we've been orphaned (Jesus even says the opposite).
 
Wrangor said:
Not in the least. And again - everything in the Bible isn't historical. That doesn't mean it isn't inerrant. Writing that someone's eyes are like the lillies of the field doesn't mean it is an error. For the most part of the Bible is pretty clear about what kind of writing it is portraying. When it says there was a great flood that killed all mankind save Noah and his family, that isn't poetry.
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And how do you decide what's poetry/allegory/myth and what isn't? Or how about Creation, there are two accounts in Genesis 1-3 (plus tons more examples throughout Scripture where the same story is retold with different details), which is "historical" and which is "figurative"?
 
Junebug said:
If you don't mind my asking, how many miracles have you witnessed? Of these, how many could you conclude unequivocally are miracles?

And by miracle, I mean instance in which the laws of hard sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) are broken.
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Right- this leaves a WIDE door open to the "god of the gaps," which folds as quickly as cheap suit.
 
RevDeac06 said:
That's just poor theology (not your miracle story), but to say that miracles stopped at the NT. That defies a) Pentecost and b) the Trinity (neutering the Spirit). It's also rather hopeless to suggest that we've been orphaned (Jesus even says the opposite).
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It seems to me that it's not God who has changed, but us. Frankly, I think that makes the experience of God more profound insofar as it's more inward.
 
TWDeac said:
It is behind a paywall.
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source Wall Street Journal

In the Beginning There Was an Atom
With respect to the big-bang theory, science and faith are not at odds.
Amir D. Aczel
May 8, 2014 7:02 p.m. ET

According to a recent Associated Press poll a majority of Americans—51%—do not believe the universe began with the "big bang." The skepticism of half the country may seem startling, given how essential the big-bang theory is to modern cosmology, but there is a good reason for it. The big bang is at first hard to swallow. I am a physics writer, and yet I remember how perplexed I was many years ago when I heard MIT cosmologist Alan Guth describe the universe expanding within a fraction of a second from the size of an atom to "as big as a marble." My initial thought was: How could he possibly know the size of the entire universe when it was less than a second old? Believing in the big bang seemed to require a leap of faith.

And if you feel uncomfortable with big-bang cosmology, you're in excellent company: The greatest physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, stubbornly refused to believe in it. Ironically, it was a Catholic priest who first came up with the big-bang idea in 1927. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, who was also an astronomer and physicist, theoretically deduced the expansion of the universe and proposed that it was launched from a "primeval atom"—the process later known as the big bang.

At the time of Lemaître's prescient idea, not only Einstein but other physicists and astronomers believed that the universe was static, with no beginning or end. Lemaître did not buy this supposition. He believed in the story of Genesis, which outlines the birth of the universe, and he searched for a way to prove it scientifically. He presented his complicated mathematical results on the beginning of the universe—based on Einstein's own general theory of relativity—in a 1931 meeting in London of the British Science Association that was dedicated to the relationship between science and spirituality.
Dr. Edwin Hubble examines the photographic plate on which a super nova was found, June 1936. Associated Press
This was after Edwin Hubble's astronomical observations of 1929 had proved that Lemaître was right about the expansion of the universe, and as the news about Hubble's discovery spread around the world, Einstein and many other scientists eventually came to accept the big-bang theory.

On March 17 of this year, in a dramatic news conference held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (Bicep) research group of astronomers presented their discovery of gravitational waves, which confirmed the existence of this major theoretical phenomenon associated with Einstein's general relativity, thus providing overwhelming evidence for the big-bang theory. It also strongly supported cosmic inflation, a mechanism by which the early universe expanded from the size of an atom to that of a marble and beyond—just as predicted by Alan Guth three decades ago.

And so the big-bang theory is verified not only by the Bicep evidence, but also from decades of data on the microwave background radiation in space ("embers of the big bang") as well as high-energy particle collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (a tiny-scale simulation of the big bang). It also fundamentally does not conflict with scripture. So why do so many deny it?

The culprits might be "scientific atheists," a small but vocal group of thinkers who employ science to claim that there is no God. Some argue that the universe came into existence all on its own. In particular, physicist Lawrence M. Krauss's 2012 book "A Universe from Nothing" insists that the big bang occurred within a complete emptiness, and thus there is no need for a "God." But the key assumption of Mr. Krauss's conjecture is flawed and at odds with modern cosmology. The big bang did not occur in "nothing." It had to be spawned in some kind of pre-existent medium, known by physicists as "quantum foam," though we don't know exactly what it is.

Despite the damage scientific atheists are doing to public opinion, the truth is that—at least with respect to big-bang cosmology—science and faith are not at odds. For it was the story in Genesis that inspired the big bang's founder to discover how the universe came to be. And it was Genesis that provided the stimulus for the first mathematical calculations that led to the "primeval atom." The 51% of Americans who deny the big bang—if they do so because they think the theory conflicts with faith—should come to trust our science.

Mr. Aczel is the author of "Why Science Does Not Disprove God" ( William Morrow, 2014).
 
Interesting article. I don't personally see how a dude in the sky creating the whole universe is much more plausible than the Big Bang theory though.
 
This is kind of my problem with scientific atheism. It just can't explain the emergence of something out of nothing.

miracle-occurs2.jpg
 
tjcmd said:
This is kind of my problem with scientific atheism. It just can't explain the emergence of something out of nothing.

miracle-occurs2.jpg
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Doesn't the same problem exist with theism? It seems both share a linearity problem.
 
Theism is the miracle, isn't it? Theists don't pretend to "explain" God, do they? They just say that God is the answer, is the miracle, whereas an atheist might say that there is no need for any God. Scientific atheists would have to nail existence down a little bit better IMO. That is how I have been thinking about this problem.
 
tjcmd said:
Theism is the miracle, isn't it? Theists don't pretend to "explain" God, do they? They just say that God is the answer, is the miracle, whereas an atheist might say that there is no need for any God. Scientific atheists would have to nail existence down a little bit better IMO. That is how I have been thinking about this problem.
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But where does God come from?
 
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