Christians, Creation, and Evolution

I tend to favor the theory presented by Gerald Schroeder in ‘The Science of God.’ This theory attempts to incorporate relativity into the Genesis story.

The basic premise is that the first 6 days are based on the passage of time as it would be measured immediately following the big bang. Since gravity was much much stronger in the first few moments of the universe, time would move much slower, and the entirety of Genesis 1 would be encapsulated in 6 days. It is only at the creation of Adam that the Bible shifts to a narrative based on the current concept of 24 hours. When we use the current concept of 24 hours to measure time, the Earth looks 15 billion years old.

I may favor this theory since I place physics in a much higher regard than biology. In one viewpoint it could explain away any possibility for macro-evolution, as all creation events could still be instantaneous spoken events. It tends to eliminate the controversy of evolution, as God would have had plenty of time to use evolution in his creative steps as he would not be limited by our 24 hour day to accomplish everything. He could have let science handle the details, and just let his creation work as designed.

In the Bible and evolution debate I have to be a little pragmatic at the end and realize that this is one question that cannot be answered through pure faith or pure science.

I personally like Alvin Plantinga’s arguements against evolution check out some of his stuff at “homestead” really good. I am willing to accept evolution as true and think it can be compatable with Crhistianity, however I simply am NOT at all swayed by the “evidence” for evolution. So much og the data being interpreted is theory laden (interpreted presupposing a theory) It is hard to avoid this outside of raw mathmatics and physics. For example when an unkown species fossil turns up it is automaticaly described as a “link” to modern species of some sort. The problem is that there is really no way of knowing that, it could be a species that simply went extinct some time ago.

Even the dating methods have problems. Carbon 14 only is accurate to about 50,000 years (thats generous) so the big millions and millions of years numbers come from usually Uranium 213 dating. The half life is some lrge number I forget off the top of my head, and when it breaks down it leaves a daughter product (a form of lead). So based upon how much U 213 and lead is in a rock supposedly we can add father/daughter halflife numbers to get the age. PROBLEM: How can we know the half life of U 213? If in a lab there is a process which causes its decay to speed thus giving an estimate, than why cant a similar process occur naturaly making measurements impossible? Also there are problems because the daughter product may be naturally ocuring lead in rock. This is a bit of the stuff I am talking about, however a more philosophical critique of evolution theory is given by Alvin Plantinga (really good).

Hello,
Could I suggest that the fossil record may be interpreted within a literal Biblical framework as being primarily the result of Noah’s flood. After all, to get a fossil you need rapid burial of an organism and a worldwide flood would have provided plenty of sediment that would have allowed this to occur.
I am not familiar with Avida, but as a general comment any computer program will do what it is programmed to do. How closely does it mimic reality? After all even the so-called ’simple cell’ is a hugely complex structure, much more complex than anything constructed by man. To my understanding there has not been a single information-increasing mutation observed in all studies of biological entities, ie a random change that results in a new structure. Yet evolution proposes that billions of such events have occurred - so I wouldn’t be putting my faith in this program as a sound basis for a belief of origins.

Science consists of making observations and interpreting the data which is done within a person’s philisophical framework; if you start with a belief that nature is all that there is, ie God is excluded, then of course you have to come up with an evolutionary storyof some kind to explain our world.

I would suggest that reinterpreting the Bible to fit with current and popular scientific theories is dangerous, and akin to saying that man knows better than God.

On the other hand you can start with an assumption that God made everything as described in the Bible, and view the evidence from that starting point.

The best website I have found that addresses these issues (and more) in a lot more depth is creationontheweb.org.

I hope this helps!

Wyane,

Thanks for you comment. There are several things I would like to bring up.

How does the Avadia software emulate evolution? Well, it has been several years since I read the article, but the software was built with the mechanisms of evolution in mind. It allowed the researchers to speed up the process. One reason that explains why we have not seen the mutation that you are talking about in your comment is because we have only been looking for one for a 100 years or so. Since evolution is such a slow moving process taking many more years to change species, it is very reasonable that in all the cases we have observed we just have not seen one.

I would recommend reading the discover article I linked to in the post and reading it carefully. It was the first time I had read something that countered my creationist claims. It detailed how these programs mimicked the theory of evolution and matched what was going on in bacteria evolution observations.

One of the problems for evolution is irreducible complexity. The idea that some organs (or processes) are simply too complex to naturally evolve. Take the eye for example. It is too complex to evolve in a linear fashion. Think of it in terms of prime numbers. You can’t multiply two numbers to get a 15 digit prime number it must have been purposely designed or written that way. There is a philosophic/mathematical work around. I forget the name of the Russian that popularized it, but the idea is that irreducibly complex things have to be random! Otherwise there would similar processes that lead to it creation and therefore it would not be irreducible.

The avadia program emulated irreducible complexity:

If life today is the result of evolution by natural selection, Darwin realized, then even the most complex systems in biology must have emerged gradually from simple precursors, like someone crossing a river using stepping-stones. But consider the human eye, which is made of many different parts—lens, iris, jelly, retina, optic nerve—and will not work if even one part is missing. If the eye evolved in a piecemeal fashion, how was it of any use to our ancestors? Darwin argued that even a simpler version of today’s eyes could have helped animals survive. Early eyes might have been nothing more than a patch of photosensitive cells that could tell an animal if it was in light or shadow. If that patch then evolved into a pit, it might also have been able to detect the direction of the light. Gradually, the eye could have taken on new functions, until at last it could produce full-blown images. Even today, you can find these sorts of proto-eyes in flatworms and other animals. Darwin declared that the belief that natural selection cannot produce a complex organ “can hardly be considered real.”

Digital organisms don’t have complex organs such as eyes, but they can process information in complex ways. In order to add two numbers together, for example, a digital organism needs to carry out a lot of simpler operations, such as reading the numbers and holding pieces of those numbers in its memory. Knock out the commands that let a digital organism do one of these simple operations and it may not be able to add. The Avida team realized that by watching a complex organism evolve, they might learn some lessons about how complexity evolves in general.

The researchers set up an experiment to document how one particularly complex operation evolved. The operation, known as equals, consists of comparing pairs of binary numbers, bit by bit, and recording whether each pair of digits is the same. It’s a standard operation found in software, but it’s not a simple one. The shortest equals program Ofria could write is 19 lines long. The chances that random mutations alone could produce it are about one in a thousand trillion trillion.

To test Darwin’s idea that complex systems evolve from simpler precursors, the Avida team set up rewards for simpler operations and bigger rewards for more complex ones. The researchers set up an experiment in which organisms replicate for 16,000 generations. They then repeated the experiment 50 times.

Avida beat the odds. In 23 of the 50 trials, evolution produced organisms that could carry out the equals operation. And when the researchers took away rewards for simpler operations, the organisms never evolved an equals program. “When we looked at the 23 tests, they were all done in completely different ways,” adds Ofria. He was reminded of how Darwin pointed out that many evolutionary paths can produce the same complex organ. A fly and an octopus can both produce an image with their eyes, but their eyes are dramatically different from ours. “Darwin was right on that—there are many different ways of evolving the same function,” says Ofria.

The Avida team then traced the genealogy leading from the first organism to each one that had evolved the equals routine. “The beauty of digital life is that you can watch it happen step by step,” says Adami. “In every step you would ordinarily never see there is a goal you’re going toward.” Indeed, the ancestors of the successful organisms sometimes suffered harmful mutations that made them reproduce at a slower rate. But mutations a few generations later sped them up again.

Irreducible complexity was beat.

Now, one important thing here is that the program was created and designed. Once it was created and designed, the programs within it were able to evolve undirected. What does that suggest to me? Perhaps guided evolution.

Lastly, I agree completely that we should not import modern views of science onto an ancient text. But I would carry that through completely. I would not take centuries old science and do the same thing. I want to recognize that Genesis is an origins story and not a modern scientific text book.

In regards to the flood issue and fossils, there are simply too many fossils for that to be the case. If all the known fossils were resurrected at once the earth could not physically support them.

Whats more, one would expect that if all the animals were killed in the flood, then there should be mixing going on along with a lot of fossilized human remains. But that simply does not match the fossil record, which, for the most part, where the has not been local geologic activity to disturb the record, shows a progression in complexity.

Also, I see ID as being a God-of-the-Gaps argument, which while it is a great placeholder, leads to embarrassment when the gaps are filled in with natural processes.

I find it much easier to say that Genesis is a true account of creation - but it is not a scientific explanation of the processes behind it. Just leave it open like that. We really don’t know exactly what happened. There are some good explanations - why not use them?

Interesting thoughts, here’s my reply:

I would say that any computer simulation would be a huge simplification of the reality of life. Now I am no expert in this but in my reading on genetics the difference between humans and chimps or apes has been reported as something like 4%, ie 96% similar. That doesn’t sound like much but it equates to something like 120,000,000 different DNA base pairs. Now what is the probability for all this just happening by chance? Then each supposed beneficial change would have to be propagated by the lucky individual and other populations would have to die off.

Of course this is just one aspect of life on earth that supposedly happened by random chance, but there are many others, eg the fossil record gives no definite candidate for an intermediate between amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. They have completely different body systems and to say that one evolved from the other without concrete evidence is is not so much science as belief.
WIth regard to the number of fossils, I wonder how the number 800 billion was arrived at? I can be pretty sure that they weren’t counted; lets see, counting 10 fossils per day = 3650 per year… it would take a long time to get to 1 million let alone 800 billion.

From my experience things do not just get better and improve by themselves. To get anything of value, I have to work at it. If things are left to themselves they run down. I have worked on some interesting and technically complicated projects, but nothing that compares to the complexity of a ’simple’cell. So I have a lot of trouble accepting that something amazing can happen with nothing driving it.

The huge gaps in the fossil record are a witness against darwinian theory. Then there is the punctuated equiblibrium theory which says that the reason there are gaps is that evolution happened too quickly so there are no records. (ie no evidence = evidence) That’s any interesting basis for a theory!

I have no problem with science, and there is not one bit of scientific observation that I have a problem with, including those from geology, astronomy and biology. The thing we need to realise though is that a lot of what is presented to lay people is not scientific observation but interpretation of data, and there is no way to interpret data without your preconceptions coming into play. Artists who provide illustrations of suposed missing links show them as they think they should look to fit into the evolutionary story, eg the amount of body hair, when there is absolutely no physical evidence to tell what type of body hair was present. (By the way, it’s interesting to note that the famous ‘Lucy’ is now considered by some evolutionary scientists to be definitely an ape.)

We had to come from somewhere, either we were made, or we evolved. I see evolution as trying to explain life without the need for God, and over the past 200 years this paradigm has gained such a stronghold in western science that anyone who suggests that God made everything and the the Bible is a reliable witness is considered to be a nutter. This is despite the fact that there is no concrete evidence to support the idea of life starting from nothing, and then changing into the amazing diversity we see on earth today. Perhaps we should ponder what is the spiritual and philosophical force that is really driving evolutionary domination of western thinking.

You know it is rather ironic that here in Australia the indigenous people are widely accepted to have been here for something like 40,000 to 60,00 years on the basis of radio-active dating methods (which are full of up assumptions that are not published along with the reported dates). On the other hand the Genesis story is widely considered to be myth despite the fact that it gives a reasonable and feasible description of creation and a genealogy with records of years up to the time when dates can be verified by other historical records. Does that seem right?

I would like you to consider God’s words to Job in Job 38:4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” I think if you read the Bible with the approach ‘What message is the author seeking to convey’ it is very difficult to interpret Genesis in any other way than what it plainly says .

I hope this is food for thought and I’m looking forward to your reply.