A Spirited and Eclectic Discussion on Evolution and the Bible

This passage has nothing to do with science…Paul is preaching to the church at Corinth not to look to him or other apostles more highly than Jesus, which is the thing that is written. He is telling them to be “fools for Christ” and not develop their own theologies, calling for the church to be pure in what is written about Jesus, not to ignore science.

This appears to be an injunction for how to do your farming and breed your livestock, not about finding what occurs in nature repugnant.

Here it is YOU who is going beyond what is written.

One has to wonder why God insists on such a rule. Just what is it about growing two or more crops together that God doesn’t want? Presumably God has some reason for disapproving of a field with more than one type of plant.

Oddly enough, scientist have found that growing a diversity of plants on a field is actually beneficial to the field ecosystem, including both the plants themselves and pollinating insects.
Somehow God wants crops to be less resistant to pests, pollution, and variations in climate conditions?

Okay, so that’s what God wants. Of course, this still has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution is a process that results in diversity(like having multiple children that inherit different characteristics, some taller some shorter, some with more freckles), it does not require mixing different species, or whatever you mean by “kinds” together.

And whatever God may think of how human beings are supposed to run their farms can’t just be assumed to indicate what God thinks of how nature is suposed to proceed if left to itself.

Nothing to do with evolution, animal domestication, animal husbandry, or agriculture.

Rules for farming again, nothing to do with finding biological evolution repugnant.

You’re going beyond the written word.

One has to wonder why(maybe they’re scared of each other and get difficult to control, maybe God doesn’t like people inadvertently comparing the plowing performance of oxes and asses), but… okay. Don’t simultaneously use an ox and an ass to plow your field. I can live with that.

Still nothing to do with evolution.

So does this apply only to wool and linen, or other types of fabrics too?

Nothing to do with evolution. No organism ever evolved by someone wearing clothes from two or more fabrics.

And God’s views on human clothing does not indicate what God thinks about the process by which species diversify in nature.

No, nothing about you not being allowed to “mix seeds”. You just aren’t allowed to grow them on the same field.

And of course, evolution isn’t required or thought to have involved “mixing seeds” to result in more diversity.

You’re going beyond the written word.

Nothing about grafting is mentioned. You’re going beyond the written word.

Yeah you’re not supposed to grow two kinds of seed in your vineyard (because it apparently is thought to cause you to forfeit the yield, one has to wonder why, but okay). So what? What does that have to do with evolution.

So God doesn’t want farmers to allow breeding domesticated with wild animals. Okay, what does that have to do with God’s views on the process by which diversity arises?

Okay, what does that have to do with God’s views on the process by which diversity arises?

Please try to not “go beyond the written word”.

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This doesn’t make sense because the timing is completely off. Creation and your supposed “evolution that God used to create with” would have been accomplished at the beginning. Jesus would have arrived millennia later. How does the subsequent overthrow the antecedent?

Just checking, is this thread still about this topic?

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Perhaps surprisingly I don’t agree with that. I don’t think it is implied that the Bible is false simply because there are things it doesn’t say. There are many ways in which real events or processes are depicted in the Bible, at least in a superficial form, that really do occur in the world, and I don’t think the Bible is false just because it doesn’t flesh out every little detail whenever it gives such a cursory depiction.

If the Bible says it rains from clouds, I’m not going to say it’s false just because the Bible doesn’t describe the process by which water vapor condenses on airborne aerosols until such a time as their weight overcomes air currents and starts falling.

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I would think this would be a discussion for a whole new thread, and it would be a good one. Let’s say I’m following a recipe (probably for pizza since we seem to like to talk about pizza today! :slight_smile: )- I first read over the recipe and instructions, gather what’s needed, and if I stay within what’s written we’ll have a pizza that comes out right. If I go beyond what’s written, I may have something close to pizza, but not at all what was intended or should have been. Same with scripture. And though your an atheist by title, those of us who are not should understand the importance of this thought.

This argument also fails because Paul was giving instructions to Gentiles who ate everything, not Jews. While their mouths were stuffed with pigs in a blanket and pizza, Paul was telling them “Not to go beyond what is written” and expected them to follow the directive.

You’ll have a pizza that corresponds to the recipe, but of course there are relatively few such recipes in the Bible. Though there are a few. Case in point is @r_speir’s invoking of what appears to me nothing more than a “recipe” for animal husbandry, dress code, and farming. He goes well beyond what it actually says and takes it all to imply that God finds biological evolution repugnant.

Wear one one kind of fabric, don’t plow with both oxes and asses simultaneously, and keep one type of plant on a fieldor vineyard =/= God finds slow, gradual, transgenerational, polulation-level biological change and diversification repugnant.

But anyway, this “recipe” take may be fine as an analogy that is intended to convey the general principle, but it just becomes a lot more dubious when we come to Biblical passages that don’t take such simplistic recipe-like forms. Particularly when we get to descriptions that use words that have many plausibly synonyms, or are described in different and non-identical words in different places.

No, you are an atheist remember, so you will naturally not compare the spiritual to the spiritual when interpreting texts. There is specific language here about prohibitions to interbreeding of animals and not just farming.

Of course not. That would have been too reasonable.

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No there isn’t. It says “Ye shall, Thou shalt not”. That’s a command for what you, the reader, is supposed to do or not do. That’s the words that are there. Nowhere does God say anything about what God thinks wild plants or animals are allowed to do by themselves.

You’re going beyond what is written.

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He doesn’t have to mention elsewhere. The fact that God did not want interbreeding “on the farm” says he would not have wanted it in his Creation.

What makes you think that? It doesn’t say that, you’re going beyond what is written.

John 1:1-In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

That seems incongruous with Jeanson’s mixing of the species together in the DNA of hyper evolutionary “kinds”, does it not?

For the record, evolution does not entail cross-breeding between “kinds.”

Evolution doesn’t entail “kinds” at all. Whether there’s cross-breeding between kinds depends on what a kind is, but there’s certainly plenty of cross-breeding between species, sometimes quite distantly related one, and it’s been from time to time important in producing new species.

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In the spirit of the thread, I accept that you have a different opinion, and I am OK with you believing what you believe.

As a Christian, I find that there is no scriptural basis for the claim that the concept of evolution violates any biblical precept. The gospel of John clearly states that the bible is incomplete, yet I think we would both agree, it is still infallible. To say that because an idea does not appear in the pages of the bible makes it false is not logical.

John 21:25 - 25 And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.

Revelation 22:18-19 is about the prophecy of the book of revelation being complete, not that the bible is finished, I have noticed many people get that passage as meaning the bible is complete…there is no scripture that says that the bible is a finished work and therefore anything outside of scripture is false. The references to not straying from scripture are in reference to the biblical concepts presented, not a testament to the completeness of the bible.

Revelation 22:18-19 - 18 [a]For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, [b]God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God[c] shall take away his part from the [d]Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

Here is the rest of Matthew 15, which is about the condition of a persons heart, and about propensity to sin in inward thought life, not about whether or not you believe evolution to be true.

Matthew 15:16-19 - 16 So Jesus said, “Are you also still without understanding? 17 Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? 18 But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. 19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.

It would be false witness to deny the scientific evidence behind evolution, and not blasphemy to support it. I affirm that God created the universe. I affirm that evolutionary science provides reasonable explanations of how God created the universe. I can do both without blaspheming.

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I think that is common knowledge, but that wasn’t the argument. The argument said that if cross-breeding was prohibited by God in the Mosaic law, it reveals a God who wanted separation of animals at the beginning at Creation and a God who wanted that separation to continue.

And that is exactly what we see in evolution… :slight_smile: