by dottie 172 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Frankly, I think that everything we call real was created by God (or, more properly, AGENTS of God), and that the technique used for this creative explosion is evolution. I cannot for the life of me accept the notion that God could not, did not, use evolution as his creative technique. Perhaps someone will tell me why that is. I just don't see them as mutually exclusive.
francois
Francois, not only is macro-evolution completely unbiblical (For example in the Bible Whales came before land mammals such as cattle; whereas evolution teaches that Whales evolved from land mammals similar to cattle, or wolves.) , but it is also actually a poor way to create new stuctures. Why take millions of years of trial, death, and evolutionary dead ends, to create a structure such as the eye? In fact the "God of macro-evolution" basically sat back and watched things make themselves.
Don't really care anymore --as long as I'm creatively evolving!!!
mac
which do you think you'd choose to believe more??
I choose not to believe. I can acknowledge that given a certain set of data, it can point to certain ideas, but there is no need to jump to any conclusions. For most people creation also implies a personal God in the likeness of man, certain ideas about time etc. which of course makes certain assumptions. There is the alternative of an open ended question like "how did it all get here?" I think this would work better if we really want to examine the issue, 'this vs. that' will have people taking sides right from the beginning.
Hooberus,
You are putting theology ahead of observation. This is the same thing the Catholic church did to refute Galileo's helocentric model. They were wrong. This is the same thing the Mormons do today when they try to prove that ancient jewish civilizations existed in the Americas. They are wrong.
The bible by itself is just an ancient book written by superstitious men. Without evidence, there is no reason to put its words above observation.
Your second argument is interesting in that you seem to make such concrete assertions about god and his powers and his ways when all you are going off is the above mentioned ancient writings of men which have been shown to be innacurate in many ways. If god is so powerful, and humans are not able to know the mind of god, who are you to say that god could not have used evolutionary forces to create life? Who are you to say that this was not his master plan? If it is and you believe it is not good enough for god, then you are putting yourself in a precarious postion in critcizing him!
We can only honestly interpret our direct observations of nature in three ways:
1) God(s) created life through evolution, which takes advantage of his wonderful laws of nature and his magnificent foresight.
2) God(s) created life through special creation and erased all of the evidence and made it look like evolution was used. In this case god is a liar.
3) Life was not created by an intelligent being but is a consequence of natural laws that have always been in existence.
Most Christians in the world select 1. you select 2 because you think 1 is too inefficient... nevermind the fact that it makes god a liar. I select 3 because there is no evidence of gods. If there ever is evidence of gods, then I will select 1 for the sake of intellectual honesty.
rem
rem said:Hooberus,
You are putting theology ahead of observation. This is the same thing the Catholic church did to refute Galileo's helocentric model. They were wrong. This is the same thing the Mormons do today when they try to prove that ancient jewish civilizations existed in the Americas. They are wrong.
The bible by itself is just an ancient book written by superstitious men. Without evidence, there is no reason to put its words above observation.
Rem, while creation itself was not observed by man, the site I listed appeals to observations from the present world to show evidence (from science) for creation. Also, macro-evolution was itself not subject to direct observation (no one observed fish turning into people over millions of years).
Unlike the Book of Mormon, which has virtually no archaelogical support whatsoever, the Bible has been generally supported by archaelogy. This is not to say that all Bible/archaelogy issues have been reconciled, but that there is a general agreement between the two.
rem said:2) God(s) created life through special creation and erased all of the evidence and made it look like evolution was used. In this case god is a liar.
God didn't "erased all the eivdence" for creation (much is listed on the site I gave.) and made it look like "evolution was used" (Cindy Crawford doesn't look like a product of evolution to me). So you claim that believing in creation makes God a liar is false.
The following site provides a response to the talkoriginsite:
Hooberus,
Just because you can make evidence consistent with a particular viewpoint doesn't mean that the evidence supports that viewpoint. I can say that the fact the color pink exists is consistent with the existence of pink elephants. This obviously does not provide evidence that pink elephants exist. The evidence that you are using to support creation is just this type of evidence.
Evolution, on the other hand, has evidence that supports it. This is why evolutionary theory is able to make correct predictions and has helped us understand biology better, including how microorganisms become resistant to medicine. Creation theory has made no worthwhile predictions for science.
rem
