Question For Evolutionist Baptists

First, Trotter, thanks for the honest reply. Since you have changed position over time you have some information from both sides and made an informed choice. I disagree with you, but I respect that and appreciate your reply.

Next, Matthew 16:24. thanks for going and finding my original answer and for copying the relevant part over here so people following this thread can know what I said.

I think you ask a very good question. I can see things from your point of view and I think I understand why you ask the question. I've snuck off to my desk for a minute, so I'll try and give you a little time. Maybe more when I get up tomorrow afternoon before heading back here.

I suppose that for me, I do not have the same objections that you do. I do not know how to work it all out. I do not even know if I really am on the right track here as far as origins goes. For me, the bottom line is that we are here. I think God is all powerful and could have accomplished this in any manner He chose. Six 24 hour days...no problem. Six seconds...no problem. 14 billion years...no problem. I just happen to think that the evidence God has given us points towards Him using natural means to get us here. So often God choses to act through natural means, I have no problem with that here.

I think that at some point, God chose to give man a soul. That spiritural aspect is how we are in the image of God. And with that came a choice to follow God or to rebel. Man has a sinful nature which makes it natural for him to rebel. The details...I just do not know. At the appropriate time did God pluck up two homo sapians, give the souls and put them in a literal garden to allow for a literal fall? Possibly. Is the story of the fall alegorical and meant to show the sinful nature of man and the need for repentance and redemtion and salvation? Possibly. I don't know. So many other possibilities.

For me, the key thing is that man is sinful and in need of a salvation only available through the blood of Jesus. Believing in the diety of Christ and the resurrection and such, you just have to take that on faith and what you believe and what you feel convicted of.

How the rest of it works out, well I'll find out one day, though it likely will be on the other side of the grave. To me, even to go to the point of saying that there was never an Adam and Eve nor an original sin does not make the Bible wrong. Was there a literal Adam and garden? I do not know. As literal fact or as an allegory, the message remains the same. We are sinful and lost and in need of a Savior. It does not bother me to have New Testament writers referring to the accounts as literal. The people of the time of the Old Testament would have been completely unable to understand a story of origins involving the Big Bang and evolution. They did not need to. All they needed to know was that God was responsible for creating everything. Same think in Jesus's day. They would not have been able to comprehend it and it would add nothing to what was trying to be communicated. To have explained better would have complicated and confused the issue.

To me, it takes nothing away to let evolution have its place. God is still the creator. Man is still in the image of God, possessing a soul, knowledgeable of good and evil, and sinful. Only the death of Jesus is sufficient to cover our sins.

And I'll repeat here what I have said before. I would love for someone to be able to pull out the evidence in nature that shows a recent rather than an old creation. Of course that makes it easier to reconcile the different parts of the Bible when you can take everything literally. But I have not seen it. The more pieces of data I see, and the more I discuss it and read about it, the more convinced I become of an old creation. It is cetainly not beyond God's ability.

 

Science is not a special way of knowing, it's just a word we give to a highly refined system for discovering and organizing factual knowledge of any kind. Thus, it's like a web or piece of cloth -- the integrity of one part strengthens the whole. And the cloth encompasses all rational knowledge: science, engineering, medicine, common sense, and logic. Rational, sound approaches to scientific disputation increase the integrity of the cloth. Irrational approaches are like pulling a loose thread on a garmet: the whole thing begins to unravel until finally even common sense and logic decay.

I'm a professional scientist and engineer, and it never surprises me when people end up knowing more about my designs than I do. In fact it delights me! In engineering, a superior design is one that grows beyond its original scope and boundaries into something even more interesting. In a sense, the design becomes an independent child with a life of its own. This delights us and we're mad in God's image, so perhaps God favors this approach as well -- giving things a scope and independence to grow into something rich and strange.

-Neil