The above statement and this statement compete in meaning:
In the first statement you said that I, a Christian, argue for the NT as a God-of-the-gaps argument…because…(according to you per the 2nd statement) the occurrence of a naturalistic argument [forces me?] to accept the NT as a “gap-filler”.
Strange reasoning that I am afraid I will have to deny on a personal level. Unless I misunderstood you.
I have no problem with the idea that the first cells might have been specially (miraculously) created, but it seems to me that the data is leaning the other direction.
The point of God-of-the-gaps as a fallacy is that God doesn’t start working where science ends. We don’t (or shouldn’t) strive for naturalistic answers and only after all hope is lost finally resort to “must have been a miracle”. Miracles should be relatively straightforward. Dead people don’t rise. The Resurrection isn’t an alternative scientific theory, it’s a violation of the cosmic order, which was precisely the point. Miracles are outliers, where reality doesn’t fit what we know about the world.
This doesn’t make much sense. Tour, et. al claim that Origin of Life researchers have gotten nowhere in the past 30 years and yet they know what the normative chemistry and pre-biotic environment is well enough to know that it’s inexplicable? You can’t have both “it’s so mysterious it must be a miracle” and “we know so much we can be assured it wasn’t natural processes”. Tour, Smalley, and Eberlin are bright chemists and I have a lot of respect for them, but none of them are OoL researchers nor biochemists nor evolutionary biologists. In the mean time, real peer-reviewed, experimentally-driven scientific papers are being published in OoL.
I think most all scientists who are Christians would affirm that it’s certainly possible. I don’t see people saying otherwise. The problem is that means nothing when the question is “how did it happen?”. If it is possible God created the first cell de novo and it’s also possible that it came about by more ordinary means (processes and matter created and sustained by God), don’t we need to examine the evidence to lean more towards one way vs. the other? We need positive evidence one way or another. So far, it seems like the evidence is fairly consistent with ordinary means, we certainly don’t know enough to assert the miraculous as anything other than speculation.
I will worship God if life began as a miracle or not. I will see his handiwork as much in the amazingly beautiful and intricate ordinary as the special, inexplicable miracles. The Bible spans hundreds, if not thousands of years, and yet even in Scripture miracles are still far from the norm. That’s why they are immediately recognized as miracles. If burning bushes, parting seas, and dead people rising were the norm, they wouldn’t be miracles, right? Does it really matter if God “poofed” the first living being out of nothing or had the knowledge and imagination to create a world where life could emerge impossibly from non-life? Is he less God?
Does the Creator God need corroboration? Isn’t He self-evident to the Christian?
Yes, it really matters, and yes, he would be “less God”. Simply put, the account he left us speaks directly to this issue and answers your question with no equivocation. He becomes “less God” to the mind who dismisses his clear description of the miracle involved.
So here’s what we have.
So no matter how weighty or lightly you view his written account is besides the point. The point is that I am the only one holding any kind of evidence at all in this argument.
You have nothing but hope.
OK, well, that seems odd to me. It seems like common sense to me that, for instance, a maker of a Rube Goldberg machine is considered more creative and skillful than a person that just does the simple task.
But it isn’t mechanistically clear. God also gives “clear descriptions of the miracle involved” in the multiple lines of physical evidence that all say “the universe is old!”. That doesn’t cause me to think less of God (quite the contrary) or dismiss Genesis, but it does make me think maybe my interpretation of the “clear description” was a bit off.
Where did you get that? I have never said anything like that. I have, repeatedly, said that I am ok either way, but right now the evidence is leaning towards God using “ordinary means”.
Argument for what? A “poofed” 1st cell is a terrible “first piece of evidence” for pretty much any argument I can think of. There are much much better arguments for the existence of God, inspiration and reliability of the Bible, the Resurrection, God’s action in the world, miracles, etc.
I do take the account very seriously, and as to the rest of this I’m not sure what to say.
I have made no argument one way or another regarding abiogenesis, only that I think God could have done it either way so we should let science do its thing. Genesis just says things like “Let the water teem with living creatures”. There is a whole lot of mystery to be unraveled there, it seems to me, and science and theology can explore it together if we’ll let them.
These kinds of statements amaze me because of what has to be ignored to even arrive at this kind of reasoning. Why are we letting science do its thing but not letting God do his thing?
For instance, please tell me what is lacking in the above statement from God’s Scripture that we would even remotely have to invoke something like “science” to make up the difference?
I am amazed at the disbelief in what was clearly written, and the disbelief in the utter power of God to bring it about just as it indicates and in just a moment’s time.
The problem with that is that the evidence clearly shows that it didn’t happen in just a moment’s time but over the course of at least 550 million years (or very much longer, if we count microorganisms as “living creatures”). Neither the fossil record nor genomic comparisons can be fit into the scenario you suggest other than by positing that God is trying to fool us.
Complete malarkey. I have already shown you an entirely different pathway that overturns your millions of years “evidence” and posits it as thousands instead. You have convinced yourself only with your “evidence”. Of course, the weight of belief and sway of opinion is overwhelmingly on your side,;…so where does that leave me?
All on my own apparently.
Thank you for your tightly reasoned argument.
Find me that zircon crystal.
Not possible, since you will not accept any evidence that a zircon formed in situ. Your position is that it’s a zircon so it must be a xenocryst. Presumably this is also true for any K-feldspar, biotite, or other mineral used in dating, but you haven’t confirmed that. Still, you do understand that this is about more than zircons, right?
Further, even if we ignore radiometric dating, the fossil record is clearly a temporal series. Otherwise, index fossils would be impossible to correlate. And why are there no teleosts or angiosperms or mammals in the entire Paleozoic?
Hmm, I feel like you are misunderstanding me. I am all for letting God do his thing, but one of the things he did was create intelligent creatures (us) that are capable of and, it seems to me, encouraged to pursue an understanding of how God does his thing in various ways. In other words, to me science is one of the best ways to understand how God did “his thing”. It’s not the only way, but it is a powerful one. That does not negate other ways, including Scripture, but if we affirm that God is the author of all truth then we have to take both science and Scripture seriously, in my opinion.
It’s not a zero-sum game. This is what is so frustrating in these conversations. It’s not “if science explains it, Scripture can’t” or “if Scripture explains it, then science can’t”. It seems pretty clear to me, both Scripture and science are talking about different aspects, facets, dimensions, of the same thing. They are both answering the question “how’d we get here?”. The way they answer the question seems different, which makes sense given that they were written thousands of years apart, using different methodology, for different purposes, but in the end they should work together to bring us a fuller picture of our own history. Many of us struggle with exactly how they work together, and so interpretations and theories may come and go, but the goal is a noble one, to my mind anyway.
Once again, I have no disbelief that God could easily do it in just a moment’s time, the question is did he? Maybe, but it’s far from clear to me that what you are calling “clearly written” was meant to be interpreted the way YEC and OEC folks interpret it. I don’t disbelieve Genesis, I’ve spent a majority of my lifetime pursing what it says, what it means, and what it calls us to. We can disagree on how to read it, but please don’t accuse me of disbelief simply because I read God’s message differently.
r-speir I’d appreciate if you could explain how this happened in a one year one time Flood only 4500 years ago. Thanks!
Ok, since you objected, I won’t say that theistic evolutionists identify themselves as using God-of-the-gaps reasoning. I will point out however, they profess the miracles of Christ and the Apostles.
That said, did the Apostles or the Christians who witnessed miracles accept God-of-the-Gaps arguments? I mean, a miracle of healing or the raising of Lazarus from the dead seems like a God-of-the-Gaps argument to me.
No I do not think they did or do.
I appreciate your comments, and it was a beautiful response. BUT, speaking only for myself, God wasn’t self-evident to me. I nearly left the Christian faith in 2000-2002 because God and Christ seemed self-evident to others, not to me…
The Creationist church I attend was once a tiny little church, but then grew to a megachurch while Lon Solomon was its pastor.
Lon was an atheist, and was, at age 16 converted to believe in some sort of Deity by the Design Argument (even before Pandas and People was published). At around age 22 he became a Christian.
Here are the two accounts for anyone interested:
4-minute video of Lon talking about his experience at age 16 after studying enzymology at age 16!
and though he concluded God existed he wasn’t immediately converted to Christianity. He financed his way through a college chemistry degree by selling drugs! Then became a Christian through the witness of a street preacher after graduating. This is a 7-minute video where he relates his journey:
After his conversion he became pastor of small little congregation which grew into a mega church. Solomon’s son became a medical doctor and his congregation became a Mega Church and spun off several congregations.
My path was not like Solomon’s, except to say, the origin of life argument, the Virchow-Raspail principle, the law of biogenesis, struck me as compelling. And even though abiogenesis researchers assert the environment was different in the past, I never thought environmental differences could bridge the fundamental improbabilities of creating cellular life.
As I studied the issue more over the last 20 years, on-and-off, the improbabilities have appeared far more accute the more I learn. It seems it would take greater faith on my part to believe there wasn’t a God behind the origin of life. Further, this seems a fulfillment of Romans 1:20. Both Lon Solomon and myself view the origin life as related to Romans 1:20.
McLean Bible Church has naturally reflected the creationist views of Lon Solomon. Solomon then got an MS in Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins and also makes apologetics arguments based on archaeology and is part of the organization Jews for Jesus.
Wait. wait. wait. Who says its not a zero-sum game? I believe - at least in this conversation - that Scripture and science are violently and mutually exclusively at odds.
Just because you believe it is not a zero-sum game, does that mean you are correct? What if I am correct?
No, it doesn’t automatically mean I’m correct, but it is the core issue I think. I have a hard time comprehending how one holds this view as a sweeping assessment of the relationship between science and Scripture.
For me, as a Christian, a scientist, and science educator, I worry that statements like “Scripture and science are violently and mutually exclusively at odds.” have caused great harm to the Church and to God’s mission for us.
I’m not saying science is infallible (even ardent atheist scientists wouldn’t say that) or has ultimate authority, but it’s hard for me to comprehend what it says about God if special revelation and general revelation, properly understood, are mutually exclusive. It seems deceptive, almost malevolent, for God to lead well-intentioned, honest, faithful Christian scientists down a false road.
In the Gospels Jesus invites people over and over to not only to believe, but to see and touch and hear. The church rightly rejected gnosticism centuries ago, let’s not bring it back.
Hmm. If your argument is wrong, why would you lay this at his charge so casually and not blame yourself for you going down a false road?
Question. What if your evidence is found to be entirely invented and you turn out to be wrong in the end. Then one further question - What if it does matter to God what you believed?
Note: I am exempted if I am wrong for ignorance sake.
It certainly wouldn’t be casually, but if God created the world in such a way that when we use our senses and brain to see how the world works we have no confidence that it is actually true, I think I would be fairly justified in laying that incongruity at his feet.
A clarification first – evidence of what? and wrong about what?