Christians, please consider...
09 Jan '08 08:53I think many believers in God's word can underestimate its Author. My mother-in-law, for example - a wonderful Christian woman - still makes me uncomfortable with her disdain for the evolutionary theory. Knowing Christ as Lord for nearly a decade now, I've yet to develop any adverse reaction to the concept of an evolving world and doubt I ever will. The theory of evolution has the deep ring of truth to it, which I've found no reason to discard in favor of an overly simplistic and, frankly, less awe-inspiring literal "six day" creation event.
People like my mother-in-law speak of the evolutionary theory as if it were the property of atheists and some kind of insidious lie meant to devalue the word of God. After all, the idea that we and everything else evolved from simpler forms is contrary to scripture. But is it? I would point out that the book of Genesis itself - not an atheist or a scientist - tells the contrary story. In the first chapter of Genesis God created Light, Space, Matter, Vegetation, Animals in the Waters, Animals in the Sky, Animals on the Land, and then Humans. But in the second chapter of Genesis God created Man before every other living thing. Both accountings are true, but not both can be literally true.
The notion of a perfect, deathless world full of plants and animals which only began to decay after the Fall is, I believe, a misrepresentation of the scriptural data. Did the lion not grow fangs until after the Fall? Did the shark not require consumption while Adam and Eve still enjoyed fellowship with their Creator? God ordered creatures to reproduce and fill the ocean, but without the presence of death the ocean's ecosystem would have utterly collapsed. Were the oceans in some kind of temporal stasis until the Fall? I doubt it.
At the beginning of Genesis we see God "brooding" over the void where the universe would eventually be. Since the mind of God is not bound by time and knows everything, He could no doubt see every conceivable detail of His creation, from beginning to end, before He spoke it into being. If we cannot understand God's mind, we must at least take into consideration the breadth of His omniscience as we read the six day account of creation.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
How does God, who knows the beginning from the end, go about creating a Robin? Did Robins, in their present form, exist 65 million years ago? Definitely not. But would God be able to see the Robin, as we now know the Robin to be, from His vantage point before the world began? Of course. Did God will the Robin to possess the form which it now does? No doubt; it could not be otherwise. Does God see the full grown man as well as his former embryonic state? Infinitely, yes.
God sees each of us as our fully mature selves even while we're still in our embryonic state, and in the same way He can see the fruition of life on earth even while the foundation is being laid for the universe. Given this, we must understand the six day account of creation as expressing first and foremost God as Progenitor. The account is not meant to be a scientific journal (though it may contain a strikingly prescient grasp of the evolutionary order of things). The account is largely generic and undoubtedly an overview; the details being secondary to the understanding that the world is first and foremost God's idea. When God stretches out His hand and says, "Let the earth put forth vegetation," from the scriptural data we know this as God's will and that God's will did indeed come to fruition (so to speak). What we are not told is how it came to fruition.
I don't believe it is biblically correct to assume that, after the Fall, God began to practice a hands-off approach to His creation. Otherwise one could not deduce that God "had me in mind when He created the heavens and the earth." If God created Man and then left Man's progeny to their own devices and to the artless whim of a random fate, then I could hardly call myself God's creation. God has His hands in everything, even to this day. And in spite of all the complaints brought before God because of the evil and suffering in the world, the reality is that God's will and purpose is always being accomplished. The particular life-form which we call a "Robin" was in the mind of God before the world began, and the confluence of events from time-out-of-mind purposefully contributed to the Robin arising in nature.
Astonishingly, there is a time and a purpose for everything under heaven.
Scientists can prove that evolution happens, yes, but what cannot be ascertained scientifically is the purpose of evolution. Survival is the immediately apparent purpose of evolution, but survival doesn't answer the whole question. For instance, how do scientists know that mutations are purely random? They don't. Neither do scientists know how life originated. There are speculations, but the mystery remains.
God is a God of purpose, and His will is always accomplished. If His creatures could not evolve, then His creatures would be unable to adapt; if His creatures were unable to adapt, then the planet would currently be barren. Since an individual creature cannot exercise control over the evolutionary destiny of its own species, it is therefore God's providential care evident in species survival. (The scientist cannot agree with this, of course, not recognizing God as having reality.) The point is, though, evolution doesn't justify atheism and neither is evolution the intellectual property of atheists and scientists.
Thoughts?
People like my mother-in-law speak of the evolutionary theory as if it were the property of atheists and some kind of insidious lie meant to devalue the word of God. After all, the idea that we and everything else evolved from simpler forms is contrary to scripture. But is it? I would point out that the book of Genesis itself - not an atheist or a scientist - tells the contrary story. In the first chapter of Genesis God created Light, Space, Matter, Vegetation, Animals in the Waters, Animals in the Sky, Animals on the Land, and then Humans. But in the second chapter of Genesis God created Man before every other living thing. Both accountings are true, but not both can be literally true.
The notion of a perfect, deathless world full of plants and animals which only began to decay after the Fall is, I believe, a misrepresentation of the scriptural data. Did the lion not grow fangs until after the Fall? Did the shark not require consumption while Adam and Eve still enjoyed fellowship with their Creator? God ordered creatures to reproduce and fill the ocean, but without the presence of death the ocean's ecosystem would have utterly collapsed. Were the oceans in some kind of temporal stasis until the Fall? I doubt it.
At the beginning of Genesis we see God "brooding" over the void where the universe would eventually be. Since the mind of God is not bound by time and knows everything, He could no doubt see every conceivable detail of His creation, from beginning to end, before He spoke it into being. If we cannot understand God's mind, we must at least take into consideration the breadth of His omniscience as we read the six day account of creation.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
How does God, who knows the beginning from the end, go about creating a Robin? Did Robins, in their present form, exist 65 million years ago? Definitely not. But would God be able to see the Robin, as we now know the Robin to be, from His vantage point before the world began? Of course. Did God will the Robin to possess the form which it now does? No doubt; it could not be otherwise. Does God see the full grown man as well as his former embryonic state? Infinitely, yes.
God sees each of us as our fully mature selves even while we're still in our embryonic state, and in the same way He can see the fruition of life on earth even while the foundation is being laid for the universe. Given this, we must understand the six day account of creation as expressing first and foremost God as Progenitor. The account is not meant to be a scientific journal (though it may contain a strikingly prescient grasp of the evolutionary order of things). The account is largely generic and undoubtedly an overview; the details being secondary to the understanding that the world is first and foremost God's idea. When God stretches out His hand and says, "Let the earth put forth vegetation," from the scriptural data we know this as God's will and that God's will did indeed come to fruition (so to speak). What we are not told is how it came to fruition.
I don't believe it is biblically correct to assume that, after the Fall, God began to practice a hands-off approach to His creation. Otherwise one could not deduce that God "had me in mind when He created the heavens and the earth." If God created Man and then left Man's progeny to their own devices and to the artless whim of a random fate, then I could hardly call myself God's creation. God has His hands in everything, even to this day. And in spite of all the complaints brought before God because of the evil and suffering in the world, the reality is that God's will and purpose is always being accomplished. The particular life-form which we call a "Robin" was in the mind of God before the world began, and the confluence of events from time-out-of-mind purposefully contributed to the Robin arising in nature.
Astonishingly, there is a time and a purpose for everything under heaven.
Scientists can prove that evolution happens, yes, but what cannot be ascertained scientifically is the purpose of evolution. Survival is the immediately apparent purpose of evolution, but survival doesn't answer the whole question. For instance, how do scientists know that mutations are purely random? They don't. Neither do scientists know how life originated. There are speculations, but the mystery remains.
God is a God of purpose, and His will is always accomplished. If His creatures could not evolve, then His creatures would be unable to adapt; if His creatures were unable to adapt, then the planet would currently be barren. Since an individual creature cannot exercise control over the evolutionary destiny of its own species, it is therefore God's providential care evident in species survival. (The scientist cannot agree with this, of course, not recognizing God as having reality.) The point is, though, evolution doesn't justify atheism and neither is evolution the intellectual property of atheists and scientists.
Thoughts?
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