Todd Wood: A Call for Being Reasonable

Nope. Not if they submit to the Bible, which they say they believe. If they insist on putting outside claims on a higher level of authority than the Bible’s own words, then it will continue to be impossible for us to come together on this issue.

The disagreements among Christians on such issues doesn’t have to be a sad witness—but how those differences are often manifested in rancorous and accusatory division certainly can be a destructive witness.

I would like to see us all come together in praising God for the amazing evolutionary processes he wisely chose for his creation—to diversify life on earth and to adapt organisms to virtually every kind of environment. It is mind-blowing and awe-inspiring everywhere we look! Learning about evolutionary processes has been a faith-building experience for many, a huge incentive to greater worship of the creator, YHWH God.

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Of course it does. To outsiders, it gives the impression that God hasn’t spoken clearly, when in fact He has. This in turn gives unbelievers even less reason to accept God’s word, since many who claim to be believers also reject it themselves.

It seems that you are asking them to submit to you.

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No, that is not a fair assessment in any way. I am asking them to submit to God’s clear revelation first and foremost.

14 posts were split to a new topic: Side Comments on Wood’s Call for Being Reasonable

And if other Christians who accept evolution feel they have submitted to God’s clear revelation, then what?

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I don’t know what more there is to say here. I believe it’s very clear they are wrong. If they continue to refuse to see this, then there will continue to be division in the church forever, until the Lord comes.

I think this is where Todd Wood’s call for understanding and building bridges would come in handy.

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In my experience, those who talk about “building bridges” (including some here at PS) are really talking about a Hegelian synthesis. I’m not interested in going down that road.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Evidence for Feathered Dinosaurs

That does not answer the question, since he is absolutely correct about that…

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Of course he did. He was being truthful about the abundant evidence of evolution. You implied that he claimed an opponent’s argument was good when it wasn’t. I see no evidence that Wood did that.

And other than the fact that you as a non-scientist with zero training in the field (according to one of your posts) reject that evidence, why do you derisively refer to it as a “bandwagon” and why is Wood in error for accepting that evidence?

Interesting. 2 Peter 3 makes no mention of a “global” flood but your favorite tradition gets imposed upon the scriptures. In this case you place your personal hermeneutic on a equal plane with scripture.

What is “evolutionism”? (I’ve certainly heard the term before but find that the definitions assumed by those who mock evolutionary processes can vary widely. How do you define the word?)

Is evolutionary biology “nature worship”? Why is a study of the evidence in any way a “worship”? Is it just a rhetorical technique to deprecate something you dislike? Could I just as easily say that CMI worships the global flood?

Of course, The Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with the “generation of life”. But why does “unaided” matter? Is gravity “aided”? Is photosynthesis “aided”? Is the orbiting of planets around the sun “aided”? If God is fully able to create a universe where countless natural processes bring about various results we continually observe, why do you doubt that God can create a world where biological life is produced by natural processes? It sounds like you assume that “instantaneous poofing” is somehow more honorable for God to perform than what we actually observe in his creation:

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. — Genesis 1:11

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. — Genesis 1:24

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Irony again. Is Wood causing division by admitting there is enormous and obvious “gobs and gobs” of evidence for evolution? Fervently deprecating those who notice that evidence is what is divisive! That kind of divisiveness is certainly contrary to the scriptures.

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Hey, you brought it up. Just try answering my question. It would take only one sentence.

There is "gobs and gobs” of evidence for evolution.

There is no harmonizing the evidence to support the idea of a young earth.

Little of the elaborate world building exercise which fills the pages of YEC is in the Bible.

You reject almost the entirety of science anyways, why not go the distance and just declare science to be anathema? Instead of denying cosmology, biology, and geology, just proclaim that youth in the church should not think of such matters. Pull the kids out of science class. Thunder from the pulpit that the pursuit of knowledge of nature is akin to the sordid chasing after worldly pleasures. That way, you would not have to bother with all this accelerated radioactive decay, accelerated speed of light, accelerated chalk cliffs and speleothems, accelerated cratering, accelerated everything. You could be done with trilobites and dinosaurs and the fossil record. None of that is in the Bible anyways.

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Wood makes it very personal, and describes it as his position. I don’t see anything in that blog post insinuating that others are foolish for not believing as he does.

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This kind of exchange reminds me of the history of the Reformation when the tradition-driven church hierarchy based in Rome demanded that devout Christ-followers like Luther and Hus submit to “God’s clear revelation first and foremost”. So many Reformers basically replied, “Show us that what you claim is in the Bible. If you can, I will gladly repent of what I have published and I will enthusiastically embrace what God has revealed.” Of course, they couldn’t—and so the Reformers didn’t repent. The church leaders were just demanding that everyone agree with their brand of tradition and what they claimed made them “right” and everybody else “wrong.”

Of course, many of the Reformers were pronounced not only heretics but atheists. (At the time the word atheist was primarily used for one who is in defiant opposition against God.)

Human nature has not changed over the centuries.

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And, of course, this is one of the reasons why he is treated quite poorly by many in the YEC community. I know from my own experiences in that community (when I was part of it)—and the tribalism and adamancy is far more aggressive today----that the predominant peer-pressure is to perceive the conflict as a major culture war with massive stakes. Wood is considered too friendly with the enemy, precisely because he refuses to join in the denigration campaign.

I have a lot of respect for Todd Wood but I would like to ask him: "If there is gobs and gobs of significant evidence for evolutionary processes but you nevertheless believe the evidence is not sufficiently compelling, such that the Theory of Evolution will eventually be rejected by the academy, how do you explain the fact that the massive consilience from so many fields of science continues to grow exponentially? Considering the sheer quantity of research by armies of scientists, why hasn’t the foundation crumbled? Wouldn’t we expect to see major flaws by now?

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Not “every single bit”.

From his blog that was linked (I suppose you decided to jump in without reading)

I also think there are substantial errors in the evolutionary perspective, places where things have gone wrong. I believe this for scientific reasons, because of evidence that I have myself examined, and for religious reasons related to my understanding of the Bible and Christian theology, and for personal reasons based on my encounters with almighty God in my own life.