Is belief in Intelligent design enough when it comes to the creation account in Genesis?
Interpretation of Scripture is a significant issue. How do we understand not only the creation
account, but other references to God being creator?
“A God who
created mathematical consistency …and then sits back expectantly and waits for
the proper sort of universe to show up and life to appear and sentient beings
to evolve who will respond to him, is a safe God to believe in if you don’t
want to come to blows with Science.”
The only models that
can work are the “Framework Hypothesis” and the Kairological reading of the 6 day creation account. Both deny any time reference, just broad categorical references of sorts to
the appearance of things.
Framework Hypothesis: Days 1-3 correspond to days 4-6 (1-4, 2-5,
3-6). Using the interpretation of the first and fourth
days, framework advocates argue the similarities between the days indicates the
days progress in topical rather than chronological order. It appears parallelism is the method the author of
the creation account used in order to describe God's work, not in a way that
was intended to be read literally. In this sense, the creation account serves a
greater role in purpose as revelation rather than simply to give a
historical account of the events of creation.
William Dembski, Philosophy research professor at
Southwestern, says evolution is workable
in his Kairological reading of Genesis.
Only his view works with the existence of evil in the world before Adam
and Eve, but it is a long shot view.
"Kairos" is Greek for time or seasons, the divisions of
creation are seasons of creation. A Kairological reading of Genesis is that we
are to see fundamental divisions in the creative order. Man is the final creative event of the day 6
division, the end of creation. This
could work with evolution with the major divisions of natural development
programmed into the creation to occur at the right time.
One can be an evolutionist and still be conservative in
other respects and evangelical. D L
Moody’s close friend in evangelism was a Theistic evolutionist, Henry Drummond, “a man who loved Jesus Christ
and grew deeply committed to foreign missions, was also a popularizer of
Theistic evolution.” Moody biography: A
Passion for Soul.
Creationism is not anti-Science. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t seek to
understand how things work.
Stephen Hawking: “Because
there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from
nothing …Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing,
why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God
to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." (The Grand
Design, p. 180)
Richard Dawkins sets out to explain how the process of
natural selection (“the Blind watchmaker”), acting over time, can successfully
explain our origins. There is no need, argues Dawkins, to postulate a divine
Creator; evolution can explain all.
The Catholic Church accepts
evolution. Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi told reporters
that: "One thing is sure. Evolution is not incompatible with faith."
"Creationism from a strictly theological view makes sense,
but when it is used in scientific fields it becomes useless," Ravasi said.
Quoting the late Pope John Paul II, Ravasi said that
"evolution can no longer be considered a hypothesis."
Pope Benedict XVI warned last week against fundamentalists'
literal interpretations of the Bible.
The pontiff told a gathering of intellectuals and academics in
Paris that the structure of the Bible "excludes by its nature everything
that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never
simply be equated with the letter of the text," Benedict said.
Anti-Catholics often cite the Galileo case as an example of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching, and clinging to a "tradition." They fail to realize that the judges who presided over Galileo’s case were not the only people who held to a geocentric view of the universe. It was the received view among scientists at the time.
Centuries
earlier, Aristotle had refuted heliocentricity, and by Galileo’s time, nearly
every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus refrained from
publishing his heliocentric theory for some time, not out of fear of censure
from the Church, but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues.
Many people
wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the
strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years
earlier by Aristotle:
Thus Galileo
did not prove the theory by the Aristotelian standards of science in his day.
In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and other documents,
Galileo claimed that the Copernican theory had the "sensible
demonstrations" needed according to Aristotelian science, but most knew
that such demonstrations were not yet forthcoming.
Galileo could
have safely proposed heliocentricity as a theory or a method to more simply
account for the planets’ motions. His problem arose when he stopped proposing
it as a scientific theory and began proclaiming it as truth, though there was
no conclusive proof of it at the time. Even so, Galileo would not have been in
so much trouble if he had chosen to stay within the realm of science and out of
the realm of theology. But, despite his friends’ warnings, he insisted on
moving the debate onto theological grounds.
Dr. Brian Alters,
the president of the National Center for
Science Education‘s board of directors, has emphasized that the
consensus of scientific community is decidedly in favor of evolution.
“Overall, the nation
has a big problem,” he said in 2006.
“Approximately half of the U.S. population thinks evolution does (or did) not
occur. While 99.9 percent of scientists accept evolution, 40 to 50 percent of
college students do not accept evolution and believe it to be ‘just’ a theory.”
Survey, 2014 (Huffington Post)
How many scientists, though evolutionists, believe in intelligent
design? On what basis do they come to
that conclusion if science proves all things evolved? Is it because it took an intelligence to make
life possible? But what of those
“professionals” (Hawking, Dawkins) who ask “what need for a creator?”
This is how creationists are looked at with there ridiculous
notions of Divine creationism…
“It’s turtles all the way down”…
“A well know Scientist once gave a lecture on
astronomy. He described how the earth
orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around a vast collection
of stars called our galaxy. At the end
of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said,
‘what you have told us is rubbish. The
world is really a flat plat supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before
replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever young man, very clever, “ said the Old lady. But it’s turtles all the way down!’” from Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time”
Hawking actually responds to this story saying that such a
picture of our universe supported on the
back of tortoises is rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know
better? Hawking believes the universe is
finite but I thought I had read that he wants to believe it is eternal as
opposed to the big bang.
How can time and gravity create life or intelligence?
How could time and gravity create male and female, evolving at the same rate of change?
Matthew 19. 4 And He
answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He
who made [them] at the beginning `made them
male and female'
It seems impossible
to imagine how nature could have brought forth male and female simultaneously,
both evolving at the same rate with both necessary for propagation of their
kind.
A true hermaphrodite is rare in nature, that is a creature
having both sex organs. The natural
form in nature is separate. It is
usually an abnormality to have both sex organs.
How did so many creatures end up separated into 2 sexes? It would seem each living kind would have had
to start as a hermaphrodite that split into separate sexes. There isn’t any evidence that I can see in
which such a process would have worked with humans. What came first, a fully developed human
hermaphrodite able to reproduce within itself or the fully developed and
separate human male and female, the two of which are needed to reproduce their
kind?
No comments:
Post a Comment