Posted by cav on October 30, 2004 at 03:34:30:
In Reply to: big picture posted by giveawayboy on October 30, 2004 at 01:25:54:
: Bill: I believe in the whole picture. Let me apply this to the origins of man. As a youth fundamentalist creationists were telling me that man was formed 6000 years + ago and that his origin was the Fertile Crescent, somewhere in Iraq. My uncle taught me about the theory of evolution and showed me the famous Carl Sagan video production, COSMOS. Now we are told that man's origins may lie in Africa. Comparing this to those who interpret the creation account of scripture with a literal geographical statement about man's origins, Africa seems a rival source. However, if we have the big picture then all the pieces of this puzzle will eventually fit. Whether man came from the Tigris River or the Nile River, the Congo River or heck, even the Yangtze River, it should do no harm to pure science of good biblical scholarship. All this can fit.
: I don't know if I believe in evolution across class or order lines. I definitely believe what has been observed and proven. No problems there. I never sat too easily with 'evolutionary tree' diagrams, though I did enjoy looking at them and contemplating their mysteries. On one hand they had a sort of kabbalistic feel, but with a sort of scientismic presumption about them. I came to believe, not in the literal branches of all those contradictory trees, but instead I started to see what I came to call the 'order of forms', which is almost a playful way of approaching the idea of evolution. If indeed large scale evolutionary leaps were being made across class and order lines, then there must be some kind of chain or succession going on. Still, without proof, we had to be honest and keep all our controls in place and look at our theories as theories. It would do no harm to note that a seal barked like a dog and had whiskers, or that his flippers suggested in some logical way, the paws of a canine. However, it would be presumptuous to run ahead and make bold declarations without some kind of proof. Personally, I think dogs and seals are related in the order of forms although I don't know if they are genetically responsible for each other.
I think you hit on a major point...that the whole classification of the universe including taxonomy was originally begun as a way to think about the world logically, in the west, this was a means to reveal God's design, and thuis learn more about God. But with the advent of modern evolutionary theory (and I don't mean Darwinian, because he never went that far, he was a good naturalist and relied on observations) we disjoined the chart from our own making and applied it to the world as a whole. Thus the relationships between seals and dogs began to mean that seals must have been dogs, or the reverse, rather than they are similar creatures, that share many traits thus revealing an aspect of good biological design across environments.
Since we're on the subject, I might as well say that I don't really beleive in evolution across class and order lines. It is irrefutable that species do change over time through a process of response to their environment, even people have changed within recordable history. It is also irrefutable that these changes when including geographic isolation can lead to the development of distinct species...but none of this in any way contradicts the Biblical creation accounts. Then we are forced to look at the stratification of life in rock forms, which gave rise to the whole Era of Evolution theories. Obviously, if rocks are laid down under other rocks, the ones beneath must be older. So why is it that certain creatures appear below, and then others, with mixing zones between? This still doesn't contradict the Bible, it only says that many species didn't die in a fashion that laid fossils in areas we have access to. But then various forms of dating come into play, and all have some degree of accuracy. Despite the debate on how much accuracy, it is safe to say that the earth has to be older than 6000 years. The fact is, granite only forms at a certain rate...and it only erodes at a certain rate. Now we are faced with the many theories that try to match the Biblical 6 day account to the geologic record. Some are good, some are not, but if anyone wants to read about them, buy a theology book. I don't want to try to summarize years of my own opinions on them.
Suffice to say, I tend to lean in this direction: that since the Biblical account roughly matches the order of events in the geologic record (i.e. watery world, dry land, plants, then animals, birds before mammals, finally man) accept for the time frame, then maybe the time frame isn't a literal 6 days. Certainly God is powerful enough to make the world in 6 days, but it doesn't hurt my faith any to think that he chose to take longer. So then why would he explain it in a 6 day account? I think that we need to look at the state of humanity at the time. People could barely recon years at all at that ancient time. Mostly people just used seasons. There was no conception of plantets spinning in space, or that the stars were gaseous balls of nuclear reactions. To explain that creation happened in several orders of millenia would be beyond comprehension. Now if we look at the structure of myths as ways to transmit information from generation to generation, they all tend to work like the Biblical creation account. Meaning they distill large ammounts of information into key points that are communicated in a symbolic narrative, like a dream...we have to understand that many primitive cultures do not understand the empirical divisions that we make between the physical and the ethereal.
Now compare the Biblical account to the thousands of creation myths... which came from an unsophisticated nomadic tribe of sheep herders that lived far from the centers of civilization such as Egypt and Summeria and Phonecia. The fact that they came up with a story that so closely communicates the order of events as we see them in empirical evidence is nothing short of miraculous. It's like saying some man from Djiboudi with 10 skinny sheep just wrote a letter to NASA with a detailed map of Mars. To me that is the mark of God.
So lastly to address the change of animals into other animals...I withhold judgement on this issue altogether. I don't have enough info. It wouldn't hurt my faith to be forced to accept the fact that the Biblical account is actually all symbolic and species envolved from one to another...that would be the way God chose to reveal himself, and would have guided the path of evolution as it went. To even come up with us through that process is miraculous enough. But to prove that species were created ex nihilo at whatever point in time God chose to form them, also does not shake my faith. So when enough evidence is in, I'll form an opinion on this.
I can tell you that a very interesting theory has been posed by non Christian scientists that addresses the very existence of God. One form of it is called the Gaia hypothesis. But it takes various forms. Basically it centers on the idea that the balance of ecology is so delicate that it couldn't possibly maintain itself without some sort of will. In fact the law of entropy says that it shouldn't maintain itself. Now the mainstream scientists use this to form a sort of Triumph of Life scenario, and the ecospirtualists call it the global consciousness of mother earth, but I call it God. After all, in him we live and move and have our being.
