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yamnnjr
Lv 6
yamnnjr asked in Science & MathematicsBiology · 1 decade ago

This is a serious question for creationists and Intelligent-design theorists, not for Atheists.?

Now, you will see why:

What do you think of the possibility that evolution and creation are hand-in-hand and both equally as true?

The reason this question is not for you Atheists is because you've pretty much made it up in your mind that you will not believe in creation, nor in intelligent design, thus I wouldn't expect a very thought out answer concerning this question coming from you. However, you're welcome to give an answer if you want.

Now I don't mean fish into frog and back into fish again, I mean that God designed the process of adaptation and change for the sake of survival when He created a very limited population of animals, for example a few types of fish, sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, e.t.c..., birds, and other types of organisms. Enough to really get the world going, but small enough so that Adam naming of all of the animals was actually feasible, provided that was not just a metaphor for mankind naming the animals, and by the time of Noah, fitting two of each type of animal on the ark was actually feasible, because if Noah existed today, I seriously doubt he could fit two of every single land animal that walks the earth into an ark even the size of a football stadium.

Although, I'm not sure exactly how big the ark was, mind you, and as I say below, fitting every animal type, might have meant that God only saved the current version of the original animals created, leaving the descendants of them all to die off.

My thinking is this: We know that adaptation occurs, as in subtle changes in the genetic code that happen to allow for traits that allow for a greater reproductive success among animals either directly through reproductive habits and/or through longer survivorship. My thinking is that perhaps a few or several types of fish actually did give way to all the varieties of fish we see now. I don't mean a fish into a shark, I mean that God created a few types of sharks, and they progressed into all the different varieties.

Perhaps there were several types of rodents, and perhaps the mouse actually progressed into the rat, which progressed into the banana rats later on. Perhaps the ground hog progressed into the beaver, the rabbit and some other similar rodents.

Now, I'm just suggesting here, but it's easy to see how over time, which I believe may have been a lot more rapid than we realize in the past, that there would be several small changes to the same animal over time that is genetically separated from others of it's species either by geography or by other means.

It would explain a few things, like how truly perfect God's creation is that it not only can be beautiful, but that it will continue to survive, and it will continue to increase in beauty and diversity even in a sin-imperfect world as time continues. It would explain how Noah would actually be able to fit every animal type, although every type of animal could have easily merely been the ones that were created specifically, while leaving all of the descendant species to die in the coming flood.

It would also explain the sheer variety we have now despite the limited number that survived the flood.

I mean, maybe there are a few things that God created specifically to keep us guessing and remembering that He designed it all, such as the duck-billed Platypus, Viruses, and other weird organisms that don't seem to make sense and are outside the norm of what one would expect even when trying to trace it's ancestry as evolutionists attempt to do.

What do you Intelligent Design and creationists think about this idea?

Update:

At GLH:

Actually, yes it is. God hasn't done much of anything to the biological world as we know it. The main purposes behind God's intervention has always had to do with Man, not the organisms of this earth.

It's not contradictory because we know that genetic changes occur, which means if God exists, he designed that process. No where does the Bible contradict this. And it makes sense because organisms would have to be able to change in such a dynamic environment in order for life to continue through all of the changes. Just because you decided on drawing a line between what would have been and would not have been God does not mean that your line is accurate, it merely means you may have underestimated what God would have done.

Update 2:

At GLH:

I'm not getting where you think that God intervened. Don't you already believe all of this happened without God. If so, where do you get this idea that God had to intervene anywhere? You can't assume that IF God exists that it automatically means he intervened somewhere, especially not when you've already accepted that it can happen without God's intervention. It stands to reason that God created it in such a way because He knew how it would turn out. If God is the creator, then the fact that life still exists as it does despite it all proves God did not fail. Do you know what a day is to God? It's like a thousand years, and thousand years is like a day. Is this a metaphoric representation of time to God, or a literal one? If it's metaphoric, there's no telling how long that day was that God set aside for the creation of the different parts of our world and universe. Why wouldn't God give certain organisms time to establish themselves in this world before introducing another o

Update 3:

At GLH:

. . . introducing another organism that feeds upon them?

At GLH:

You can't propose that ice ages and other mass extinctions were all God's doing because we already pretty much believe that they weren't God's doing, thus if they can happen naturally, then God may have just set the cycles of earth in motion. Also, we don't know for sure exactly what caused most of the mass extinctions, only that they happened so we only have our best theories, and no one is ever going to say that any of them was the flood because no one believes such a thing as a world wide flood is possible. That means that even if the evidence pointed in that direction, scientists would find another direction because they believe a world wide flood to be impossible. Imagine our earth was bombarded in a meteor shower of pure H2O, and it did, in fact, cause a world wide flood. Until we saw that possibility, no one would ever explore it because they believe it to be impossible.

It's like if a person died of

Update 4:

At GLH:

It's like if a person died of a witch-craft induced illness, no Doctor is going to diagnose that, nor will any forensic pathologist, no matter how much the evidence might point in that direction, they will find another direction or reason that might possibly fit, why because they'd lose their jobs because of the absurdity of how it sounds, no matter how true it may be.

Also, the flood may have very well been one of those mass extinction events and it's just that we don't realize that the flood was, in fact, the cause, i.e., perhaps because we don't believe such a thing could have taken place, thus we come up with other theories, all of which we are not completely sure about.

It's not that I have a need to believe, in fact, it would be nice to think God didn't exist, but it's the fact that I cannot look around the world and see it as it is today and think to myself, oh no, this all just happened circumstantially due to billions of years of accidents and survival.

Don't be li

Update 5:

At GLH:

Don't be like the silly ant who can easily see the simplicity of an ant hole and know that it was created and designed, but can climb all over cabinets and walls all day long and never realize that those too were designed merely because the complexity of it goes way over the ant's capacity to truly understand it. We are like that ant with God. We can see our own designs and know that they were designed and created due to the complexity of them, but we the world around us with much much deeper complexity in every way, yet we have the audacity to say that it all just happened over billions and trillions of years. We're not just a silly ant to God, we are fools.

Update 6:

At Duke:

Actually, I don't think that most Christians see anything bad in science at all. It's like my father said, it's not science that challenges the notion of God, it's human speculation of scientific facts that challenge it. It all boils down to us in the end. It's our choice to think what we want, it's our theories and our ideas, and our unbelief, and what we choose to believe that challenges the notion of God and it has always been us. It has never not been us.

In all of science, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, no fact, nothing we've ever seen or even know about that even remotely challenges the existence of God. Only what we speculate. In the end it all boils down to us, what we choose to believe from the beginning of man, to compromising our religion all the way until today, and even to our end that's all it will ever be about, what we speculate, what we choose to believe. Science is merely the study of God's architecture, the rules and laws he chose to implement. Ever

Update 7:

At Duke:

Everything else, the theories, the speculations, that's all us, that has nothing to do with fact, only what we speculate about the facts. In the end, it's all us, not science.

Update 8:

At GLH:

About the flood, as of right now, I'd have to agree, after all it doesn't seem plausible that it could have happened other than God making it happen unless there is something else we don't know yet. I mean would we know it if H2O asteroids actually did bury the earth in water? We might find debris, but we might also think that debris was just the normal asteroids hitting earth regularly. Would we know it if there used to be massive amounts of water surrounding the earth under the crust of the earth floating compressed upon the mantle. We might ask where did all the water go, but what if we had a lot less water back then then we previously thought and it was all able to merely drain into the oceans, how would we know? If such a thing was true, then a world wide flood could have happened even without God making it happen. But that's just a thought, I agree that a flood could only have happened within God's making it happen.

7 Answers

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  • Midnite Rambler
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    There are two themes in your question and to a large extent they contradict each other:-

    1. The concept that god built into his original creation the ability to evolve. In other words, god in effect started the whole thing off and then just let it all happen.

    2. The Flood.

    The idea god starting it all off and then sitting back is very difficult to refute because it requires no godly intervention. If god made the basic rules of chemistry biology and physics so that Abiogenesis followed by evolution would take place without further intervention then it would be very difficult to "see god's hand" in the process. However, such a light touch by god is not really what the bible describes.

    Your argument really falls down with the Flood. The Flood is a stated event. There should be evidence of it which just isn't there:

    - All humans should be much more genetically similar (remember we should all be descended not from Adam and Even but from the humans on the Ark)

    - Likewise all animal species should show comparable genetic identities. INstead the diversification shown in many species and between species we know to have shared common ancestors requires millions if not billions of years to evolve. Such rapid evolution would require god's intervention (which is what point 1 argued against.

    - You may not know how large the Ark was but we know roughly how many "primary species" there are. So even if you take, for example, just "elephants" instead of the various species of elephants, just "mice" instead of all the species of mice, etc etc you still end up with a structure that is impossibly large. Wooden construction has limitations. You cannot build refrigeration units, habitat control units massive water tanks, etc out of wood. You cannot build ships out of wood beyond a certain size - ask a structural engineer.

    - The Flood implies that all land was under water for 40 days. That would destroy all the soil. Soil takes thousands of years to regenerate through a sucession starting with the tiniest plants right up to trees. Or did the already impossibly large Ark also contain all the soil of the World?

    - The Flood implies a mass extinction of all the animals not rescued (and all the people). There is no evidence of such an event.

    - There very obviously isn't enough water on planet Earth to flood all the land - again requiring godly intervention to first add it and then remove it afterwards.

    So basically, the Flood as described in the bible is impossible and would require just the kind of godly intervention that you have ruled out by saying god just set the ball rolling and let everything happen. In effect, you say that god didn't intervene in evolution the first time but intervened at every level during the Flood, making it a "second creation" where he did exactly the opposite of the first time.

    As god is supposed to know everything in advance (being omniscient is one of the things that makes him god) then he either isn't a god because he didn't anticipate the need for a Flood or he changed his mind even though, being god, he always knew he would have to.

    EDIT: "God hasn't done much of anything to the biological world as we know it" - does the term "Ice Age" mean anything to you? How about mass extinction events? All documented with plenty of evidence. For most of Earth's history the plants and animals we see today didn't exist - even stuff like grasses and flowers.

    Of course it contradicts because we know the speed of genetic change. We know roughly when the Flood was alleged to have taken place. The two don't match - by millions upon millions of years.

    "you may have underestimated what God would have done" - precisely my point... you say god started the whole thing and then sat back and now you say god had to do so much that I've underestimated it. You can't have it both ways. God, being god would know in advance what would happen (or do you deny god's omniscience?) therefore he would have known that his non-interventionist approach wasn't going to work (something god planned didn't work? impossible, surely?)

    In any event, you've now departed from scientific discussion and are talking like a zealot. So all I need to do is remind you what Carl Sagan once said:-

    "You can't convince a believer of anything because their belief is not based on evidence but on a deep-seated need to believe".

    You seem to have based your question on your own deep-seated need to believe

    EDIT: where god intervened: in every aspect of the flood because it's impossible any other way

  • Zaax
    Lv 4
    1 decade ago

    I am what's called a theistic evolutionist.

    I.e. as a scientist I understand and accept whatever scientific theory is currently the consensus, so that means I teach and accept evolution.

    As a theist, I also believe that god created, or is the causer of Everything.

    I also believe the Hebrew Bible. (Jewish...)

    Ah, so how to I reconcile any "problems". Well a few points:

    My believe is more sophisticated than "God gave the Bible down to humanity and everything in it is historical fact". It can't be. Judaism has no real problem with NOT reading the Torah literally. The opposite is true - most of the law and the Bible is NOT taken literally, rather it is a moral guideline, that is NOT to be performed in practice.

    So if I do not take "eye for an eye" literally, there is no need to take the Flood literally. It is more a story that teaches us what is expected of us. Same with the Creation story. Heck the Bible itself is telling us that is is not to be taken as a an historical account - just see the clear contradiction between chapter 1 and 2. (yes, I know the classic answers to that...)

    Anyway, there is no reason to see all the Bible as History, and then there is no problem...

  • FakePlasticTrees
    Lv 4
    1 decade ago

    There are many people out there who believe versions of what you have put forward. In fact I once met a Franciscan friar who proposed that all universal laws both physical and biological are in fact just ways of admiring God's handwriting. This of course only really makes sense if you remove the flood from the context. The flood is a tale, a myth, there was perhaps a very large flood in history, records of various civilisations make mention of such a thing, but it was not word for word like what is in the bible.

    There are even those who would say that the laws of physics and other observable phenomena are in fact the omnipresent God.

    It's a very metaphysical topic, one mystics are comfortable with but fundamentalists are not. Talk to a Sufi, a gnostic, a mystically minded Christian, someone who knows something about Kabbalah (not the popular stuff, the old fashioned kind) or a Hindu and you will be more likely to find acceptance of this idea.

    Personally, I don't think anything objective can be said about God, He is a purely subjective topic, something someone can only really learn about with personal experience, experience that they cannot relay in any meaningful way.

    I'm a scientist, but I haven't ruled out the existence of God. I cannot prove or disprove it. So I will just live and try to be good to others and myself, in universal, non-trivial ways.

    Source(s): life, thought, deliberation, trial and error.
  • ?
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago

    you are wrong in saying that an atheist doesn't "believe" in the creation as the word "believe" denotes some kind of lep of faith on something that you can't see , touch or feel at all.

    an atheist just use a reasonable argument to give a reasonable score on the chances that some big event like the existence of life will ever happens randomaly.

    According to a reasonable logic argument, i don't see anything in this world that can give a minimal score to the creacionist argument while natural selection already got all the points in explaining why life exist.

    your arguments are wrong as you assume that in the beginning this god of yours created some sharks, some rodents, some insects, etc and the nature just run from there without god's interference.

    fossil records shows well that before the vertebrates cames the invertebrates and before that the prokariotis.

    every chain of adaptation , every branch in the tree of life can be expalined well by natural selection.

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  • Duke
    Lv 5
    1 decade ago

    I actually did a lecture on this at my church, how science is not something to be feared/rejected, rather it is our method of exploring and discovering more about the wonderful universe God created. Therefore repressing the cornerstone of modern biology, the theory of evolution, amounts to nothing more than tragic hypocrisy.

    Surprisingly many people were very open to evolution, however I have a feeling they weren't so open to the part of my presentation where I argue the vast majority of the OT is fictional, literary in genre. There was TONS of questions though.

    I was impressed with how learned most of the congregation was, even though none of them have had any formal secondary education in biology. The press likes to do stories on the extremist Bible bashers in Christianity and paint us as an ignorant bunch. Not that I blame them, a bunch of intelligent, mild mannered people would make a boring news story.

  • Topheh
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago

    But why stop there? Why stop at 'God made evolution, but only from one sort of fish to another sort of fish'? It has never quite made sense how one can accept some forms of evolution, but somehow there is a big wall that evolution runs up against and says 'whoops, we'd better turn around. Any further and we'd be a turtle!'

    Instead, the far more sensible option ot me is that God is behind all of it, but that it is, in fact, acting in the way that now centuries of scientific thought and research have confirmed. Its God. He can do anything. Why set strange limits on him?

  • ?
    Lv 4
    5 years ago

    I think the targeted identical thing that the scientific neighborhood does. That they have got absolutely no proof to back their claims. And i am not even speakme of evolution, that conception took over a hundred years to figure out. And whether it is authentic or now not, it does have a tremendous amount of scientific reality connected to it. Evolutionists don't deliberately debunk Creationism considering the fact that they just do not like God. They accomplish that on account that they've yet to gift any proof or legit knowledge founded on scientific procedure. And them they run and scream they will not be heard. The one time this has ever been asked to be established in a court docket of regulation was once last yr. During a listening to regarding the American school board and the teachings of Creationism in public faculties. Yet the Creationists didn't even show up for court docket and the persons who did exhibit refused to swear below oath. What type of proof is that fairly? In the event that they is not going to even take the step to the scientific and legal structures in the us how can they expect to be taken critically by anyone?

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