by Justin
Genesis Can Be Trusted… Literally
9:08 pm in Bible Thoughts, Miscellaneous by Justin
Let me start by talking about evolution to non-Christians (Christians can scroll down to see my section just for them).
People may ask where is the evidence for God’s creation as told about in a literal Genesis. My answer? The same evidence as the evolutionists. We live on the same earth, have the same fossils, access to the same information. Ben Stein said in his film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, “There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch a higher power, cannot possibly touch God.” That quote is so true. Please if you do not believe in God, open up your mind to allow the possibility as we examine the facts.
A good theory should be able to stand up to some basic questions. I will base a lot of my argument by simply asking questions.
Louis Pasteur attempted spontaneous generation of life and failed. He thus added to the evidence for the Law of Biogenesis: life only comes from life. (One Heartbeat Away) So, where did the first life come from?
How did we get from an inorganic world to the world of the cell?
The website “Understanding Evolution” (produced by the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education), explains how mutations work:
“Mutations do not ‘try’ to supply what the organism ‘needs.’…For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random—whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.”
The above quote demonstrates some things. Mutations are random. Nextly, even if a mutation could start something that could be beneficial, how would it survive as the immediate change was not beneficial?
Questions for evolutionists (Creation Science Evangelism)
1. Where did the space for the universe come from?
2. Where did matter come from?
3. Where did the laws of the universe come from (gravity, inertia, etc.)?
4. How did matter get so perfectly organized?
5. Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?
6. When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter?
7. When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?
8. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?
9. Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of its kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival? (Does the individual have a drive to survive, or the species? How do you explain this?)
10. How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.)
11. Is it possible that similarities in design between different animals prove a common Creator instead of a common ancestor?
12. Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true?
13. When, where, why, and how did:
* Single-celled plants become multi-celled? (Where are the two and three-celled intermediates?)
* Single-celled animals evolve?
* Fish change to amphibians?
* Amphibians change to reptiles?
* Reptiles change to birds? (The lungs, bones, eyes, reproductive organs, heart, method of locomotion, body covering, etc., are all very different!)
* How did the intermediate forms live?
14. When, where, why, how, and from what did:
* Whales evolve?
* Sea horses evolve?
* Bats evolve?
* Eyes evolve?
* Ears evolve?
* Hair, skin, feathers, scales, nails, claws, etc., evolve?
15. Which evolved first (how, and how long; did it work without the others)?
* The digestive system, the food to be digested, the appetite, the ability to find and eat the food, the digestive juices, or the body’s resistance to its own digestive juice (stomach, intestines, etc.)?
* The drive to reproduce or the ability to reproduce?
* The lungs, the mucus lining to protect them, the throat, or the perfect mixture of gases to be breathed into the lungs?
* DNA or RNA to carry the DNA message to cell parts?
* The termite or the flagella in its intestines that actually digest the cellulose?
* The plants or the insects that live on and pollinate the plants?
* The bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or muscles to move the bones?
* The nervous system, repair system, or hormone system?
* The immune system or the need for it?
16. There are many thousands of examples of symbiosis that defy an evolutionary explanation. Why must we teach students that evolution is the only explanation for these relationships?
17. How would evolution explain mimicry? Did the plants and animals develop mimicry by chance, by their intelligent choice, or by design?
18. When, where, why, and how did man evolve feelings? Love, mercy, guilt, etc. would never evolve in the theory of evolution.
19. *How did photosynthesis evolve?
20. *How did thought evolve?
21. *How did flowering plants evolve, and from that?
22. *What kind of evolutionist are you? Why are you not one of the other eight or ten kinds?
23. *Is there one clear prediction of macroevolution that has proved true?
24. *What is so scientific about the idea of hydrogen as becoming human?
25. *Do you honestly believe that everything came from nothing?
—
Below is my note on evolution to Christians.
My view is that the literal interpretation of Genesis is the right view. All other views concerning Genesis are wrong. Will you tolerate my view?
First, if you are a Christian, then the Bible is a good source of information. I can now submit the Bible as evidence. Genesis 1 says in the beginning God created. In Genesis 1:26-27 is says 6 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, [b] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Is this literal? Jesus thought so. Matthew 19:4 says “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’
Evolution in and of itself is probably not heresy. What is heresy though is that death came before sin. Evolution works by random chance additions in the genome that are beneficial. These beneficial traits are then passed on to the general population by the lesser advanced creatures dying off and the new trait succeding – otherwise the new found trait would simply be swamped back into the gene pool. That means that someone/something has to die. Death came as a result of sin according to the Bible. Romans 1:12 says Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned-
Could the day be a different length of time in Genesis 1?The Hebrew word for ‘day’ is <wy (pronounced ‘yom’). This word can have many meanings—a period of daylight, time, a specific point in time, a year, or a period of 24 hours (actually, much like the word ‘day’ in English). Yom is the word used in Genesis 1 when God describes what He created on each day.
So, how do we know which definition of yom Moses meant in Genesis 1? (Answers in Genesis)
The meaning depends on the context—the words surrounding yom. When the phrase ‘evening and morning’ or a number is used with yom, throughout the Old Testament, it refers to a ‘period of 24 hours’—a normal-length day, not ‘time’ in general, or a ‘year’, or ‘millions of years’.
Both ‘evening and morning’ and a number are used with yom in Genesis 1 (look up verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), so we know it refers to a day of regular length. It is as if God wanted to remove any doubt, so he defined the word yom all six times He used it.
Because of the words of Scripture, we can be confident that God didn’t take millions of years, or use evolution, but created the universe in six real days, and rested on the seventh.
There is a movie coming out to called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I encourage everybody to go see it. See the movie trailer at http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php
P.S. If you are a professing Christian who claims to believe in macroevolution, I am not trying to be mean to you. But ask yourself these questions:
1) Why do I believe this?
2) What evidence that I can put my hands on exists to support this?
3) If I went to another country that had never heard of Christianity and handed someone a Bible, would they believe that Bible supports God’s creation of man or “theistic evolution”?
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You’re a college student. You have access to a library, presumably. Many of the questions you pose are addressed in some detail in the technical literature. Some have been the subject of literally hundreds of empirical studies. After all, tens of thousands of professional scientists from many countries and of many faiths are actively engaged in evolutionary science. There’s a tremendous body of knowledge at your fingertips.
Why don’t you look them up?
You just committed the google fallacy.
Well, how much effort have you put into answering your own questions?
Scientists have been researching evolution for 150 years, and it continues to be well supported by new research. Modern evidence for evolution derives from fossils, from genetics, from the development of organisms, and from many other fields unimaginable to Darwin or even to early 20th-century evolutionary biologists.
The nature of the scientific enterprise is for scientists to debate different explanations vigorously until research changes people’s minds, and a consensus gradually emerges. But even a consensus view is capable of being modified and in rare instances, even replaced. That living things descended with modification from common ancestors – the big idea of evolution – has been part of the scientific consensus now for over 100 years. It is conceivable, of course, that any well-founded theory could be overturned (as evolution itself overturned earlier ideas), but the more confirmatory evidence accumulates, the less likely this is to happen. Expelled expresses the opinion that the universal support of evolution in the scientific community is the product of some sort of bias or ideological inflexibility. It is, on the contrary, the result of decades of hard scientific work, building theory and conducting research. Similarly, the failure of intelligent design can readily be laid at the feet of its advocates, whose main activity appears to be to carp about the success of evolution.
On the other hand, look at the evidence for creationism – It says so in the bible, so you have to believe it. – Nope, the bible is not a science textbook. It was written in Poetic allegary so that it could be understood by the prople of it’s day.
To accept a literal 6 day creation is to say the the advances of mankind in the last 400 years are meaningless, but you use and appreciate those things everyday. I have no doubt that our society would be able to function without organized religion, but at this point, it could not function without our science and technology.
If you feel otherwise, prove your supposition.
A few quick comments–
“Louis Pasteur attempted spontaneous generation of life and failed. He thus added to the evidence for the Law of Biogenesis: life only comes from life. (One Heartbeat Away) So, where did the first life come from?”
What Pasteur (and others) demonstrated is that life does not spontaneously arise in a COMPLEX form from nonlife.
“Mutations are random. Nextly, even if a mutation could start something that could be beneficial, how would it survive as the immediate change was not beneficial?”
What do you mean by “it”? Are you referring to the mutation or the organism? Not all mutations are harmful. In fact, most seem to be neutral. So why would we expect “it” (either the mutation or the organism) not to survive?
A lot of your questions for evolutionists have little, or nothing, to do with evolution itself. In any case, as myrmecos stated, the answers to many of those questions are readily available in many places.
“Is this literal? Jesus thought so. Matthew 19:4 says “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’”
This says that Jesus acknowledged God the Father as Creator. It does not invalidate evolution in any way, as it does not invalidate the idea that God could have created THROUGH evolution.
“What is heresy though is that death came before sin. ”
The Genesis account does not say that there was no death at all, it only implies that Adam would not die unless he disobeyed God’s command. So what kind of death are we talking about here? Physical or spiritual?
In Genesis 2, God said “in the day you eat from it you shall surely die.” Yet Adam didn’t die physically in the very same day that he ate from the tree.
I believe it’s spiritual death, not physical death. In Romans (another book used to support the idea of physical death) Paul was also speaking of spiritual death. One of the main points of Romans is to demonstrate that the Jews are dead in their sins because they have the law and the gentiles are dead in their sins because God gave them a law unto themselves. Even if Paul was speaking of physical death, he says that “death through sin” applies to mankind…”death spread to all men because all sinned”…it doesn’t say death spread to EVERYTHING.
Speaking of Google, I just used it to determine that all you’ve done is cut and paste someone else’s writings into your post, as if they were your own.
Look. That’s probably not the best way to show people that you’ve thought about the matter all that much. I’m just sayin’.
You ask many questions about where space came from, how matter became organized etc. I assume that ultimately, your answer is God. So where did God come from? If you claim science’s argument breaks down because it can’t currently explain all of those questions, your argument does as well.
God is the uncaused cause. As to people saying Evolution is established science, I refer you to the upcoming movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.
“God is the uncaused cause. ”
Gosh, why didn’t you tell me?? If we’re allowed to stipulate uncaused causes, I’ll say that the universe at the Big Bang did not require a cause. Problem solved.
If you’re going to complain that uncaused events are impossible, it doesn’t make much sense for you to then appeal to one.
“As to people saying Evolution is established science, I refer you to the upcoming movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.”
I don’t think we scientists are likely to be counter-convinced of something we’ve determined exhaustively to be correct by the efforts of a propagandizing speech-writer.
“* Single-celled plants become multi-celled? (Where are the two and three-celled intermediates?)”
You have anticipated me. I’m writing a blog post on this topic today. I warn you, though, it contains science.
Seriously, most of these questions are extremely well-covered on the internet. Your post is like going to Yahoo Answers and having a bunch of school kids pester you to do their homework for them. Put some effort into it and you can find the answers for yourself. But I guess that’s probably not the point.
If you make the point of the exercise actually discovering the evidence and testing to see if the conclusions make sense, you do what I did and go from creationist to evolutionist. I get the impression that you’re not seriously curious,perhaps because it’s too risky.
Nimravid – looked for answers and guess what. The evolutionists cannot adequately answer them.
I will appreciate you trying to answer a question on the blog, why not do them all?!?!
There has to be an uncaused cause or you would have an infinite regress. I believe in the beginning God and you believe in the beginning dirt. Don’t say my theory is religious and yours is science.
Visit my blog for a discussion of the (fairly) recent evolution of multicellularity in volvocine algae.
So, your entire argument to science boils down to this. “We don’t know how ‘x’ happened, so logically, Yahweh did it.”
Obviously, there’s no logical fallacy there. Well done.
No, I believe that creation proves a Creator because you cannot have a creation without a Creator.
I agree with that, but circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works.
Hi Justin,
From your post above>
>>>Mutations do not ‘try’ to supply what the organism ‘needs.’…For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random—whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.”<<<
Consider the resistance to poisons that insect life has evolved since we started killing them.
Consider the resistance to biological agents that bacteria has evolved since we started killing them.
As most of the people above replied to you…there is way to much science out there that completely answers the questions posed in your post.
You’re in college…take advantage of it. The evidence is overwhelmingly in support of non-biblical reasons for our being.
You might also try some serious non-biased research into the bible. There is lots of evidence and serious research that contradicts what you were probably taught as a youngster.
Sorry I missed a couple of posts of yours, Justin. I thought I had put your RSS in my reader, but apparently not. I know it’s a little late in the game, but what the heck.
There is a lot of good, interesting information about Intelligent Design. I love the fact that there are a number of atheist/agnostic scientists who do not buy the theory of evolution. Of course, they are just bad scientists, right?
I’m no evolutionist, but I struggle with a supposed “literal” interpretation of Genesis. I’ve studied probably a dozen different views on Genesis 1, and they all perturb me. The reason is that Genesis 1 was written 3500 years ago. This was long before people were debating or even considering creation/evolution issues. The only thing I ever hear about Genesis 1 is this silly, futile debate. But it always makes me laugh to myself when I wonder, “What did all those God-fearing folk do before the mid 1800s?”
I encourage you to read some of Bruce Waltke’s works. He has some good insights into Genesis, attempting to see it in its context of the 15th century BC, shortly after the Israelites were delivered from Egypt. I’ll just leave it at that for now.
As for all the evolutionists commenting here, you are all so funny. “Non-biased research.” Haha. If only there were such a thing. The assumption that we can somehow study something without our own presuppositions bleeding through. Even biology doesn’t work like that. If there were such a thing as “non-biased research,” then every scientist would always agree. But that’s not quite the case, is it?
But back to Genesis 1, I’d like to agree with “airtightnoodle.” There is no reason to assume there was no physical death before the Fall. Did Adam and Eve not eat? Even being vegetarians (as some theologians insist A&E were), there would still be death as they ate from plants and trees. Did Adam and Eve never step on a bug? Was every animal a vegetarian (which still leaves plant death)? And, if Adam and Eve didn’t die the day they ate the fruit, then God was a liar and Satan was correct. They died that day, and from then on, spiritual death was the reality for all of mankind.
Anyway, you still raised some important questions for evolutionists to answer. Why is there something rather than nothing? How did something come from nothing if there was nothing/no one to put it there? The argument about the irreducible complexity of the cell is quite intriguing as well.
Anyway, just some thoughts from a rambler.
-Alan
Thanks for your contribution Alan!
Alan–
“There is a lot of good, interesting information about Intelligent Design. I love the fact that there are a number of atheist/agnostic scientists who do not buy the theory of evolution. Of course, they are just bad scientists, right?”
It may be interesting, but unfortunately for intelligent design, it’s been debunked time and time again. In some cases (some, not all), yes, those scientists who do not “buy” the theory of evolution ARE “bad” scientists.
“I encourage you to read some of Bruce Waltke’s works.”
From your description, sounds like something I may be interested in myself…anything from him in particular?
“As for all the evolutionists commenting here, you are all so funny. “Non-biased research.” Haha. If only there were such a thing. The assumption that we can somehow study something without our own presuppositions bleeding through. Even biology doesn’t work like that. If there were such a thing as “non-biased research,” then every scientist would always agree. But that’s not quite the case, is it?”
I’ll grant you that it is difficult for anyone to separate their work from their biases in ANY field (not just science). However, the scientific method is pretty much self-correcting and “fixes” any mistakes that may occur due to bias. This goes back to why evolution is scientific and intelligent design is not. Evolution has a huge amount of scientific work backing it up by scientists who follow the scientific method. They research, they repeat their work, they present it and let others review it, and others repeat it to see if they come up with similar results. What ID essentially does is try to circumvent that entire process. Instead of fighting for their ideas, like any “good” scientist with a “novel” idea does, they instead appeal to the public, to the government, to boards of education, etc, to insert their ideas into science curriculum where it simply does not belong because it ISN’T scientific.
I enjoyed your comments on the interpretation of Genesis. Thank you for sharing them. I do think, however, that you are making the same mistakes most people do who do not have a decent understanding of evolutionary theory.
You ask, for example, for an evolutionist to explain how something came from nothing. That has nothing to do with evolutionary theory. You also mentioned irreducible complexity…you may be interested to know that any case presented thus far as being “irreducibly complex” has been debunked.
Again, thanks for sharing. I’ll be looking up Waltke soon myself.
Ciao.
Actually, your comment on all examples of irreducible complexity being debunked is not true. The idea has been shown that the various components of something could come about if each had a prior function, but the scientists have NOT shown what each of the parts functions could be in every case.
Testing…I’m not sure my replies are going through.
My blog spam filter stopped your posts for my approval because of all the links in them. I did not send your posts through because of the types of links. You can post what you want said from these sites, but not the sites themselves.
As I mentioned earlier, I doubt Talk Origins claims any religious affiliation, but I could be mistaken. I know I have read several things on there from people who are NOT atheists. One of the other links (I forget the name…Skeptico or something like that) was an atheist site, from what I can tell.
In any case…here was what I tried to post yesterday.
I apologize for my poor wording earlier. There have been cases found of irreducible complexity. However, they have been found to EVOLVE to that state.
“”Irreducible complexity” is a simple concept. According to Behe, a system is irreducibly complex if its function is lost when a part is removed1. Behe believes that irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve by direct, gradual evolutionary mechanisms. However, standard genetic processes easily produce these structures. Nearly a century ago, these exact systems were predicted, described, and explained by the Nobel prize-winning geneticist H. J. Muller using evolutionary theory2. Thus, as explained below, so-called “irreducibly complex” structures are in fact evolvable and reducible. Behe gave irreducible complexity the wrong name.”
“Behe claims that irreducibly complex systems cannot be produced directly by gradual evolution3. But why not? Behe’s reckoning goes like this:
(P1) Direct, gradual evolution proceeds only by stepwise addition of parts.
(P2) By definition, an irreducibly complex system lacking a part is nonfunctional.
(C) Therefore, all possible direct gradual evolutionary precursors to an irreducibly complex system must be nonfunctional.
Of course, Behe’s argument is invalid since the first premise is false: gradual evolution can do much more than just add parts. For instance, evolution can also change or remove parts (pretty simple, eh?). In contrast, Behe’s irreducible complexity is restricted to only reversing the addition of parts. This is why irreducible complexity cannot tell us anything useful about how a structure did or did not evolve.”
“Irreducible complexity can evolve. It is defined as a system that loses its function if any one part is removed, so it only indicates that the system did not evolve by the addition of single parts with no change in function. That still leaves several evolutionary mechanisms:
deletion of parts
addition of multiple parts; for example, duplication of much or all of the system (Pennisi 2001)
change of function
addition of a second function to a part (Aharoni et al. 2004)
gradual modification of parts
All of these mechanisms have been observed in genetic mutations. In particular, deletions and gene duplications are fairly common (Dujon et al. 2004; Hooper and Berg 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000), and together they make irreducible complexity not only possible but expected. In fact, it was predicted by Nobel-prize-winning geneticist Hermann Muller almost a century ago (Muller 1918, 463-464). Muller referred to it as interlocking complexity (Muller 1939).”
Kenneth Miller also touches on this in his book, “Finding Darwin’s God”.
One of the many problems I have with ID is that it essentially promotes a “God of the gaps”. We can’t understand how these complex systems evolved, therefore, God must have stepped in and created them specially. This is demeaning to God, in my opinion. It is also dangerous to faith, as science keeps filling in these “gaps” with explanations of how these systems did, in fact, evolve.
I disagree that ID promotes a “God of the gaps”. It seems to me that if we can find certain principles that seem to indicate design (such as information being involved), then we can point that there must have been an intelligent designer. ID does not even say it is God. I, of course, as a Christian believe it is so, but not because of a gap. I have the Bible and creation to know about the Creator.
Augustine of Hippo, writing around 400 AD, considered the question about whether Genesis is literal or not. In an essay, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis), Augustine wrote:
Well said, Michael. Thanks for sharing the Augustine bit.