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Outline of Lesson 1
I. Why the Creationism and Evolution issue matters for the Church
II. Explaining Evolution
III. Explaining Creationism
I. Why the Creationism and Evolution issue matters for the Church
Content
The FBI preacher begins by raising awareness of why this issue is something that the Church needs to address head on. His primary thrust is that because what our culture accepts as truth contradicts what is in the bible, many Christians, particularly youth and young adults, come to view Christianity's position on Creation as an outdated fallacy. By extension, the rest of the doctrine becomes unreliable as the Church doesn't seem to address or have a solid position on how the world was created and how that meshes with empirical evidence.
The FBI preacher begins by raising awareness of why this issue is something that the Church needs to address head on. His primary thrust is that because what our culture accepts as truth contradicts what is in the bible, many Christians, particularly youth and young adults, come to view Christianity's position on Creation as an outdated fallacy. By extension, the rest of the doctrine becomes unreliable as the Church doesn't seem to address or have a solid position on how the world was created and how that meshes with empirical evidence.
He also points out that the Gospel requires the Genesis account to be true in several ways: There could have been no human death before the fall, or death would be part of the natural cycle and we are discrediting the apostle Paul, who teaches that death entered by Adam's sin. If there is no Creator God, there is also no standard for moral absolutes, no standard for sin and no standard for forgiveness.
A wishy-washy understanding of the Creation account has been a contributing factor for a diminishing view of who God is and what He intends for us.
Comments
I agreed with this section for the most part, and certainly with the idea that the Church has, for the most part, failed to address key issues with the current generation, which is why we are experiencing such a great time of apostasy. Where is God's voice in the debate? I was particularly struck by speaker's point that America is approaching a point where ten times more babies have been killed by abortion in the United States than Jews were killed by the Nazi regime. He was using it to illustrate the extent of moral degradation and how far the USA has left God's Law as a result of the lies that the Church's silence and failure to represent God has allowed to infiltrate popular culture.
II. Evolution
Content
Content
Atheistic Evolution - Completely undirected evolution was sufficient to give rise to the complexity we see today.
Religious Evolution - Evolution incorporated into some larger superstructure of religious belief.
The speaker points out that the majority of religions have no particular objection to evolution. He then provides a list of religions that are compatible with evolution. He also takes the argument that evolution should not be taught in schools and pushes it further, suggesting that the facts of Creationism should be publicised just as much and that people should be allowed to evaluate the evidence personally, instead of being presented with only one perspective on the issue.
Comments
I didn't really know what to make of the claim that evolution is also religious because other religions incorporate evolutionary ideas. Personally I do know that Buddhism and Confucianism have no objection, because they don't claim to have any authority on where things come from. However, with other religions like Animism, Bahaism, Spiritualism and so on, which he lists as 'structured around evolutional theories', I don't know enough about those beliefs to be able to accept that statement at face value. Of course, the idea that people would see the truth and past the lie of evolution once they are presented with all the evidence, or that evolutionists are afraid to let creationists stand up for themselves, smacks of the initial assumption that creationists have the truth in the first place, which isn't a very good place to start when addressing a skeptic.
III. Explaining Creationism
Content
The Young Earth Perspective - The earth is but several thousand years old, literal 7 days of creation. Supported by creation science and flood geology. The speaker claims that the majority of evidence that we have empirically supports a young earth, but evolutionists choose to rely only on the ones that can be interpreted to imply an old earth.
As part of a defence of creationism, he then goes on to attack what is traditionally used to support evolution, beginning with the sketchy nature of the fossil record and geological strata. He then moves on to untangle the observable examples and points that have been used to support evolution. Evolution is too slow to be observed - Seems more like a cover than anything else. Peppered moth - Doesn't demonstrate evolution, but only population dynamics. Mutations in subject animals like fruit flies - Doesn't demonstrate that evolution can drive increases in complexity, but rather overwhelmingly that mutation is negative and results in loss or corruption of information. Minor variation in a species does not imply evolution, just variety.
In other areas, there is no convincing theory for the origin of life. Darwin thought that the cell was a simple part of a complex organism when he proposed the leap from non-life to life, but we now know that cells and life, even the simplest prokaryotes, are already densely packed with complexity. If anything, the leap from non-life to life is larger than ever. Without God, we also have no convincing answer for the origin of the universe, as the Big Bang also doesn't return to T=0, and also offers no reason why it should have happened in the first place. The Big Bang is a theory of change, not of creation. He also suggests that the fossil record is not a result of evolution, but rather of the flood in Noah. The reason why the fossil record has been misinterpreted is that no one really took the time to consider what a catastrophic worldwide flood would produce. He argues that such a flood would indeed produce millions of dead creatures, all over the world, that are buried under layers and layers of silt compressed into rock, which is what we see with fossils.
The Old Earth Perspectives
The Gap Theory - Tries to stick with a literal interpretation of Genesis, but finds sections of the text that could allow for vast ages of prehistory. This gap is generally taken to be between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Dinosaurs and the fossil record fit into this extended period that was hastily glossed over. The speaker argues that the gap theory begins with the assumption that an old earth is correct. The age of the earth is only necessary to explain gradual geological and biological change. Since the gap theory rejects evolution, which requires millions of years, and still proposes a massive flood, which can explain the fossil record, there is no need for such a convoluted explanation. In addition, the idea of the gap theory was initially proposed as an explanation for when Lucifer's fall took place, and that the gap theory only works with science as it was understood 150 years ago, when gap theory was first proposed.
The content on the gap theory and old earth ideas continues into next week's lesson.
Comments
This section might be better titled: Arguments against evolution. I felt it was a little premature to bring some of what he did. It would make more sense to present the various creationist stands in an overview before going into arguments against evolution, or internal contradictions in the stands. Anyway, since this was what he did, I shall have to tag along in my reflections.
It was funny to see classic biological examples used to support evolution overturned. In truth, if one thinks critically, they often only demonstrate the premises of evolution, such as population drifts, genetic change, variation within a population and so on, but fail to demonstrate macro-evolution itself. It is of course compelling to claim that all these observations must add to up evolution on a long and large scale, as many people have done, but it does seem that we haven't observed it empirically.
It was funny to see classic biological examples used to support evolution overturned. In truth, if one thinks critically, they often only demonstrate the premises of evolution, such as population drifts, genetic change, variation within a population and so on, but fail to demonstrate macro-evolution itself. It is of course compelling to claim that all these observations must add to up evolution on a long and large scale, as many people have done, but it does seem that we haven't observed it empirically.
A long standing issue that I have with evolution, and this was addressed by the speaker, is that evolution demands that coherent, complex information is able to emerge from randomness. The evolutionist argues that out of the pool of mutations, one in some improbably high number is beneficial and proliferates within the breeding population. I accept that as true, and we have seen it with traits like lactose tolerance. However, I don't think we have examples of new information actually emerging, rather than just existing information being modified. In the case of lactose tolerance, it has to do with extending the time in which lactose is expressed, a far cry from something like the emergence of the lactose enzyme in the first place. It seems to me that in our daily experience, new information does not arise from an unintelligent source, but existing information can be modified or corrupted, and the result of that may even be beneficial, but the information itself is not genuinely new.
If one takes a simple image, and photocopies it, and copies the copy, ad infinitum, we do not expect that a final product will somehow acquire the same complexity as Da Vinci's Last Supper or Van Gogh's Starry Night. Rather, errors that do creep in distort the image and one eventually ends up with a streaky, blurry mush. If one makes a copy of an audio track ad infinitum, we don't expect it turn into Debussy's Arabesque or Dvorak's New World. Even if there are some snatches of randomly generated good music from copying errors, and even if there was a 'natural selector' looking out for those good melodies, the sheer rate of bad mutation would overwhelm any snippets of sense. In our everyday experience, information as a net whole is lost in repeated replication. I never liked the idea that evolution wants to make an exception in this area.
Another major exception that the atheistic evolution worldview begs us to make is that of the transition between non-life and life. The speaker touched on the idea that when early evolutionists made their suggestion that a cell could have arisen from non-life, we knew much less about cells than we know now. Cells are not simple building blocks in a complex arrangement, they are complex building blocks in a doubly complex system of a whole organism. What we have learned about cells in recent decades should, if anything, convince people about how difficult it is to make that transition from the inorganic to the organic. All these recent studies that have had research teams making artificial genomes and advances in what we might call artificial life are subject to the same problem. They do not prove that life could have arisen by chance. If anything, they show how much thought, experimentation, planning, resources and calculation have to go into creating even a single cell. What they do prove is that human beings are acquiring the technical capacity to craft life. In my opinion, such advances do not do away with the need for a designer, any more than the experiment could have succeeded without a dedicated researcher.
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