Internet atheist reviews God and Science

[Katabole]

Hi Neo.

Every Christian knows at an intuitive level that there is tension, some kind of conflict between what most people believe about God and what most people believe about Darwinian evolution. But it's often poorly defined. I believe one has to look at the central aspects of theism; what it really means to be a theist, what does it entail and what does the mainsteam neo-Darwinian theory of evolution claim. If everyone is allowed to create private defintions of words in their head so that when I say "evolution" what I mean is a puposeful teleological process of something that works itself out over time but was present at the beginning, well sure, for theistic evolution that's easy because I just defined evolution in a teleological and theological sense. The problem is, and the focus should be on what the theorists themselves mean by the word evolution. It doesn't mean just change over time nor does it mean common descent. It certainly doesn't mean a progressive and teleogical idea like it meant 150 years ago. When modern evolutionists refer to evolution, they mean neo-Darwinian evolution which means that all the adaptive complexity we see, is the result of random genetic mutation acted on by natural selection and they mean that as an impersonal and puposeless process. So when they say random, that's not a mathematical term which is perfectly compatible with a view of God's providence; they mean purposeless. And that's the problem. It's a logical problem. Not even God can direct an undirected process. God cannot have puposes for a purposeless process. So if we want to integrate our understanding of God and of evolution, we have to get the meanings of the terms straight and we can't resort to private defintions of these words. Then we can do some fruitful thinking and exploring. It's not as if every aspect of the written word and every aspect of evolution are imcompatible. It's that the general or orthodox meanings of theism and neo-Darwinian evolution as understood by the theorists themselves are imcompatible. And that is what most theistic evolutionists don't want to face squarely. There have been over 20 books written on theistic evolution over the last decade. I've read most of them and it seems that most of the authors are trying to defend some version of theistic evolution and it ends being an exercise in ambiguity, almost as if the pupose of the books is to confuse the readers because the authors do not want to deal with the main source of conflict.

I would suggest that you read professor John Lennox's recent book, 'Seven Days That Divide the World', specifically, appendix 5. Lennox does a great job in dealing with the conflict, sytematically explains how theistic evolution is flawed and gives rebuttals against Christian scientists which believe in theistic evolution, including Francis Collins. Another good book to reference would be by the microbiologist and theologian Dr. Jonathan Wells, 'The Myth of Junk DNA'.

The Doctrine of Creation

Some proponents of theistic evolution today, try to argue that the Christian doctrine of creation is a secondary doctrine and that it is not very important to the Christian faith. All you need to do is believe in Jesus; you don't really need to have an understanding of God as creator. This is a misreading of the Christian tradition from the very beginning. The idea that God is the Creator, that God created all things and brought them all into existence out of nothing as part of His loving and intentional plan, is really a foundational doctrine of what C S Lewis might call Mere Christianity. And it wasn't a secondary doctrine at all. Now, this is to distinguish the Christian doctrine of creation from creationism, which is the more recent idea of trying to fit the Biblical text into a certain reading of what science claims and to use the book of Genesis as a science textbook and more recently to argue that you have to believe that there are six, 24 hour days or that the earth has only existed for a few thousand years, I say that creationism is not a foundational Christian doctrine but the doctrine of creation, as God as creator of everything and the guide of everything, is. If creation is a secondary doctrine as the author Karl W. Giberson believes it is in his book, 'Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution', and we go back and compare that to Christianity's historical tradition, we find the exact opposite. For example, when the early Christians hammered out their theology in the Nicene Creed which was accepted by the majority of Christians for close to 1700 years, what does that document claim? It doesn't start talking about Jesus. It claims, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible."
Similarily, the early church father Irenaeus, (c. 115-202) when he began his second book on refuting civil heresies, he started not with the doctrine of Christ but with what he deemed the most important topic: God the Father Almighty creator of all things. Why did the early Christians believe that this doctrine of creation was so important? I believe they did because they realized that the rest of the Christian story of redemption makes very little sense, if you don't understand why God created things and that He created things good. So we just can't have Jesus apart from the idea of God as the Creator. Where we really get the idea of not being able to seperate God as Creator from belief in Jesus is in the Gospel of John. In verse 3 of chapter 1 of John, the Bible claims that all things were created by Jesus and Paul adds to that in Col 1:16 and in the book of Hebrews chapter 1 verse 2, where Paul claims it was not some creative process that was the catalyst for creation but it was God Himself, through His Son that was the catalyst for all creation. And so it really isn't true that a person can say they just believe in Jesus but can dismiss the idea of God as Creator because the New Testament claims that Jesus in fact, was the creator. It's pretty hard to understand when theistic evolutionists claim that you can seperate those two; the Creator God and the method by which God created, which was through his Son. According to Iranaeus, part of the purpose of why the Gospel of John was written, was to counter the teachings of the first century gnostics because the gnostics claimed that the world was not created by God the Father almighty but by some secondary entity that God appointed, to sort of do-his-own-thing, apart from God's specific direction and intention. John 1:1-2 was written to counter the teachings of the gnostics, who denied that God was the specific and intentional creator of all that is. So that has a lot of relevance to the claim of modern theistic evolutionsts, that God did not create things actively. Instead He was a sort of passive creator and created an entity, an unguided entity of natural selection acting on random variation that was a designer substitute.

From a peronal perspective, since I am an OEC gap creationist, I cannot accept the premise of neo-Darwinistic evolution because I do not believe there was anything alive for life to evolve from. In the gap creation model, the first heaven and earth age was destroyed in a worldwide catacalysm, the fossilized remains of which remain littered all over our planet. In the second age, our present age, God created what is described in Gen 1 & 2 not by an entity based on natural selection through randomness but as the Bible claims, through His own Son.

[neo-x]

Hi Katabole,

I understand what you are saying but you do realize that if I start looking into gap theory I could probably makes some dents too and perhaps some writers have done that. I mean if you want to you can trace loopholes in almost all views on Biblical creation. As you said, there is no single definition of Evolution. People put it different ways and in different models.

When modern evolutionists refer to evolution, they mean neo-Darwinian evolution which means that all the adaptive complexity we see, is the result of random genetic mutation acted on by natural selection and they mean that as an impersonal and puposeless process. So when they say random, that's not a mathematical term which is perfectly compatible with a view of God's providence; they mean purposeless.

Being purposeless would be the implication of the process, not the intent of it. How did the eye evolve? for the purpose of better seeing, yet the process was not controlled, it was unguided, but the process itself had a purpose, which was, to see. It only becomes purposeless when you start with the premise that there is no God, something that is not even in the boundary of Theistic evolution.

So if we want to integrate our understanding of God and of evolution, we have to get the meanings of the terms straight and we can't resort to private defintions of these words. Then we can do some fruitful thinking and exploring. It's not as if every aspect of the written word and every aspect of evolution are imcompatible. It's that the general or orthodox meanings of theism and neo-Darwinian evolution as understood by the theorists themselves are imcompatible. And that is what most theistic evolutionists don't want to face squarely.

I am afraid that we lack unified beliefs and definitions on evolution.

Some proponents of theistic evolution today, try to argue that the Christian doctrine of creation is a secondary doctrine and that it is not very important to the Christian faith. All you need to do is believe in Jesus; you don't really need to have an understanding of God as creator.
...
For example, when the early Christians hammered out their theology in the Nicene Creed which was accepted by the majority of Christians for close to 1700 years, what does that document claim? It doesn't start talking about Jesus. It claims, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible."
Similarily, the early church father Irenaeus, (c. 115-202) when he began his second book on refuting civil heresies, he started not with the doctrine of Christ but with what he deemed the most important topic: God the Father Almighty creator of all things. Why did the early Christians believe that this doctrine of creation was so important? I believe they did because they realized that the rest of the Christian story of redemption makes very little sense, if you don't understand why God created things and that He created things good. So we just can't have Jesus apart from the idea of God as the Creator. Where we really get the idea of not being able to seperate God as Creator from belief in Jesus is in the Gospel of John. In verse 3 of chapter 1 of John, the Bible claims that all things were created by Jesus and Paul adds to that in Col 1:16 and in the book of Hebrews chapter 1 verse 2, where Paul claims it was not some creative process that was the catalyst for creation but it was God Himself, through His Son that was the catalyst for all creation. And so it really isn't true that a person can say they just believe in Jesus but can dismiss the idea of God as Creator because the New Testament claims that Jesus in fact, was the creator. It's pretty hard to understand when theistic evolutionists claim that you can seperate those two; the Creator God and the method by which God created, which was through his Son. According to Iranaeus, part of the purpose of why the Gospel of John was written, was to counter the teachings of the first century gnostics because the gnostics claimed that the world was not created by God the Father almighty but by some secondary entity that God appointed, to sort of do-his-own-thing, apart from God's specific direction and intention. John 1:1-2 was written to counter the teachings of the gnostics, who denied that God was the specific and intentional creator of all that is. So that has a lot of relevance to the claim of modern theistic evolutionsts, that God did not create things actively. Instead He was a sort of passive creator and created an entity, an unguided entity of natural selection acting on random variation that was a designer substitute.

This is not the way we can base an argument. The text seems to be criticizing theistic evolution rather by treating creationism as the default biblical view. Christian tradition is not set in stone, it has changed for the better. When I say theistic evolution, to me it means God created all of it. God is still the creator. He can not be passive, that is just a semantic, if he designed evolution and natural processes then how could he be passive. I mean God made the fist humans and then never created a human like them, does that make God passive? comeon. Most of this is straw men for the argument. General perception can not be used to "SAVE" a view. The view itself should have evidence, which is exactly what we don't have for any of it and hence we are arguing over it.

The people who put nature over God are clearly wrong, that I agree with. If you say most theistic evolutionists do that, then it is irrelevant, brother. What the majority does personally, does not hold weight in such matters, though people can make a fool of themselves, and that can include anyone from any creation camp, mine, yours anyone else's.

I say that creationism is not a foundational Christian doctrine but the doctrine of creation, as God as creator of everything and the guide of everything, is.

Katabole, now you are saying two opposite things in the same sentence. In other words you are saying that creation as in "directly created by God with his own hands" is not necessary, spiritually; but still is necessary cuz the lack of it will result in spiritual disaster. That is self contradicting, brother. Theistic evolution does say God made everything, just by a process. He started it, he guided it, the result is what he saw "was good". I don't see how this makes it a spiritual disaster. As a matter of fact the second part of your sentence actually supports theistic evolution .