Which is the other side of the same coin I described, but once again you fail to see that because you are extremely locked into your own perspective. My guess is that your are in a field or situation where everyone you work with has views very similar to your own in anything which matters to your work, or there is ongoing conflict. This has nothing to do with intelligence per se. Or maybe it is some specialized form of intelligence, but you simply cannot engage in productive dialogue “to understand and be understood” as it says in the blog intro, without making a far greater effort than you have managed to this point, to be able to understand and entertain thoughts with which you do not agree.
Wow. Plenty of people with doctorates doubt that it is true as a total explanation for life on earth. I don’t think anyone here argues that it does not happen. The debate is over how it happens and whether known evolutionary processes can reasonably be considered responsible for all of the changes in life observed in Earth’s history.
I agree the evidence is overwhelming for the age of the earth. I disagree that evolution by known natural processes as a total explanation for life on earth has anything like that level of certainty going for it. In addition, I am still able to dialogue with a YEC and address the things they consider as evidence on their own merit rather than immediately recoil and tell them that there is no debate and the evidence is so overwhelming that I don’t even need to consider or address (for example) an intact protein found in a dinosaur fossil. I can still consider their evidence even if I reject their overall conclusion about what it means. Because I can do that, I can comprehend how statements about their model fit into their framework and discuss it with them, even though I do not accept the framework.
My model is not a simple question of ‘evolution’ or ‘no evolution’. Creation is occurring in High Heaven and the Natural universe in parallel in Genesis chapter 1. There is a “land above” and a “land below”. In the land above, it is a lot like TE. God speaks, and the earth brings forth living creatures. He doesn’t have to do anything else. It just responds to His word. This realm is the place where His will is NOT done quickly, automatically, and perfectly. It may try, but it can’t do God’s will without God’s help anymore than we can. It is a place suitable for creatures like us, and a good place for deciding if we want to be where His will is always done or our unregenerated will is done.
Some ways this may have occurred also meet the bare definition of “evolution”, though avowed naturalists would object. Consider if you are able the following scenarios which I repeat from above…
For example “Descent with modification” is one definition of evolution, I guess a preferred one around here. To me it could also be a form of creationism or at least intelligent design, depending on how the modifications occur. For example, farmers breed animals for certain traits and get them through descent with modification. They select far more powerfully for desired traits than nature does. So that fits this definition of evolution, but surely it is intelligent design as well.
Let’s have a thought experiment: Now suppose instead of farmers who went around selecting for traits, God Himself did so. If a certain group got a rate mutation that would produce a benefit if paired with another mutation which existed only in a second isolated group He would know it and be able to put those two populations together so that they would have the suite of mutations that, when combined with yet another rare mutation four generations from now, would result in a new function. So He is using Divine knowledge to leverage natural processes to produce something new. I would say that is evolution (descent through modification), intelligent design (intent drives the changes not natural selection) and “soft-touch” creationism (He intervened in the natural world to produce outcomes even if He never touched the genomes directly, He merely guided natural events in a way that nature would not in herself at anything like the same rate).
Now suppose that instead of taking the role of a selective breeder (with perfect knowledge) only, He also assumed the role of Genetic Engineer. That is, instead of strictly waiting for Nature to come up with mutations which could be combined to create new function, He did just what our engineers do. He made cuts and inserts in genetic code. Maybe nature would never get a particular protein to fold just right waiting for chance or mutation so He inserted a gene which would. So when our scientists make mice which glow because jellyfish genes have been inserted in them, and this population breeds, is this “descent with modification”? Well maybe, but the modification did not come wholly by NATURAL descent. It is doubtless intelligent design and specialcreation, and questionably evolution as well.
That said, such a situation could still involve natural descent, but that would not be where the modification would come from. Take the gap between a fish and an amphibian. What if over the course of thirty or forty generations He put just enough changes in each generation that they would still be able to be birthed and bred by natural means but each generation would also be further toward the amphibian end of things. This so that even though no amphibian was created out of thin air, or clay, one still had a very different creature through only forty generations removed from the fish, thanks to genetic engineering moving things a bit further along each generation. That is “descent with modification” but the modification is via genetic engineering. So is that evolution, special creation and intelligent design all rolled up into one?
Like Jon, I don’t think “natural selection” or any of the natural means we have discovered could have on its own produced the vast diversity we see today or in the fossil record. I think nature had help. And I think some of this arguing we are doing over it is because we are talking past one another on terms.