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Sunday, December 16, 2012

God and His Testimony

It is so disappointing that Theistic Evolutionists put so much faith in a paradigm and less faith in God who reveals Himself in His Word Written and Incarnate. Do they really test that in which they have put their errant faith?

Correspondent John has previously drawn attention to "Haldane's Dilemma" at this blogspot and I mention it here in a slightly broader context. Just to give readers a background to Haldane's Dilemma I provide an acceptable explanation by Walter Re Mine in his monumental work "The Biotic Message - Evolution v Versus Message Theory" (1993):

"Evolution requires the substitution of old prevalent traits with new rare traits. There are limits to the rate these substitutions can occur, limits that depend primarily on the reproductive capacity of the species. Haldane's Dilemma examines these limits.

Imagine a breeding population of 100,000 individuals. Imagine 99,998 have the old trait O, and two (a male and female) have the new trait N. Imagine trait N has just arisen from O by beneficial mutation. The evolutionary goal is to substitute trait N for trait O in the population. To accomplish this goal, differential survival must eliminate the 99,998 type O individuals and all their heirs.

This can be accomplished in a single generation if there is perfect selection. (That is, if the survival values of O and N are 0 and 1 respectively.) Yet, there is an enormous cost involved. For every surviving type N individual there are 49,999 individuals (type O) that must perish without heirs. The population size must be regenerated from the two survivors.

Now allot the maximum speed to evolution. Let us assume evolution can happen like this continuously, generation after generation, for millions of years. Take a species like man with a nominal 20 year generation time. Extrapolate backward from this known species to a time 10 million years ago. This is three times earlier than the said occurrence of the four foot high australopithecine "Lucy." This is twice as old as the alleged split between gorilla, chimpanzee, and man. In that much time, how many traits could be substituted at this crashing pace? One per generation, maximum — approximately 500,000.

These substituted traits are simple changes having arisen by mutation. These can be of many types. The new trait might be a DNA inversion, gene duplication. or deletion, for example. Also, organisms are not merely the possession of the right genes. The position and sequence of genes on a chromosome are important to their action, expression, and propagation. So, a substituted trait can be some thing as simple as a new location of a gene on a chromosome. The substituted traits can be many different things. Yet, every time you wish to move a gene to a new position, or delete a gene, or duplicate a gene, or substitute any trait, no matter how trivial, then there is a cost to be paid.

According to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, these substituted traits are typically a new version of a gene — an allele. The new substituted gene typically differs from the old gene by one newly mutated nucleotide. So, the substituted trait is nominally a nucleotide. The following discussion deals with substituted traits as though they are all nucleotides. This focuses the problem and makes it more comprehensible, while remaining true to the essence of modern evolutionary thought.

With these clarifications, let us return to the example. Take an ape-like creature from 10 million years ago, substitute a maximum of 500,000 selectively significant nucleotides and you would have a poet philosopher? What does that sound like to you? How much information can be packed into 500,000 nucleotides? It is roughly one-hundredth of one percent of the nucleotide sites in each human ovum.

Is this enough to account for the significantly improved skulls, jaws, teeth feet, speech, upright posture, abstract thought, and appreciation of music, to name just a few? If you find it doubtful, then you are beginning to understand why this is important. It sets a limit on the number of traits that can be substituted by differential survival in the available time
."

"Haldane's Dilemma" has, for many decades, posed a serious time problem for advocates of Evolution. The time is just not there for life to have evolved to the state it is today. Yet Theistic Evolutionists remain inclined to distrust the straight-forward reading of the Word of God on Origins.

Adding to the absurdity of their course, Theistic Evolutionists ignore the findings of Collagen in fossils and bones of creatures alleged to have lived and died multiple millions of years ago. Scientists acknowledge that, even in the best preservation conditions, Collagen will not last more than hundreds of thousands of years. So, to find Collagen in a supposed 40 million year old lizard leg, a supposed 50 million year old fossil fish and allegedly even older fossils and bones of dinosaurs really throws serious doubt over dating of fossils, to the point where the dating is unsustainable. Yet Theistic Evolutionists blindly accept evolutionary dating.

Why it is that the Church has many within prepared to insult our Lord by casting doubt on His Word is all but beyond me. I guess I have to remind myself how it was that Israel of old so many times cast doubt on God though they had seen His works.

Sam Drucker

13 comments:

Farel said...

" I guess I have to remind myself how it was that Israel of old so many times cast doubt on God though they had seen His works."

Jud 2:10 And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.

Job 21:14 Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.

Heb 3:12 Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.


sam drucker said...

So, there are cautions through the entire Bible yet the doubters arise and persist.

How sinful is sin?

Sam Drucker

Farel said...

Perhaps, not so much the question, 'how sinful is sin'. Rather to observe its power to corrupt the heart (mind-affections)and induce error in thought and speech. So the puritan who said, "it is always corruption in the heart that produces error in the head."

It is the subtle character of remnants of Sin (capital S)that can pervert the thoughts and teaching of even 'orthodox' men. So the need even for us, dear brother Sam; to,,,, (parentheses mine)
Heb 3:13 But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened (that is, rendered obstinate or stubborn, refusing to give heed to exhortation or correction) through the deceitfulness (deceivableness, self-deceiving action) of sin.

Farel said...

Or in another's words, Samuel Johnson, the person I should be most cautious and suspicious of as a scholar,,, is me,, in the first place. That should be the leading principle taught at Moore,,

When first the College Rolls receive his Name,
The young Enthusiast quits his Ease for Fame;
Resistless burns the fever of Renown,
Caught from the strong Contagion of the Gown;
O'er Bodley's Dome his future Labours spread,
And Bacon's Mansion trembles o'er his Head;
Are these thy Views? proceed, illustrious Youth,
And Virtue guard thee to the Throne of Truth,
Yet should thy Soul indulge the gen'rous Heat,
Till captive Science yields her last Retreat;
Should Reason guide thee with her brightest Ray,
And pour on misty Doubt resistless Day;
Should no false Kindness lure to loose Delight,
Nor Praise relax, nor Difficulty fright;
Should tempting Novelty thy Cell refrain,
And Sloth's bland Opiates shed their Fumes in vain;
Should Beauty blunt on Fops her fatal Dart,
Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd Heart;
Should no Disease thy torpid Veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's Phantoms haunt thy Shade;
Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Nor think the Doom of Man revers'd for thee:
Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,
And pause awhile from Learning to be wise;
There mark what Ills the Scholar's Life assail,
Toil, Envy, Want, the Garret, and the Jail.
See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust.
If Dreams yet flatter, once again attend,
Hear Lydiat's Life, and Galileo's End.
Vanity of Human Wishes

sam drucker said...

Farel, that was not something I was aware of from Samuel Johnson. Thanks.

I am just about finished reading Weir's account of the Revival in Ulster, Ireland in 1859. One of the telling marks of the event was the conviction of sin, repentance and peace found in Jesus Christ within the congregations including clergy, even those who had been praying for Revival because they heard of the work of the Holy Spirit in America at that time.

We need a good clean-up.

Sam Drucker

John said...

Don't forget Haldane was a keen evolutionist, yet he found serious theoretical difficulties with it.

Despite working out that it was impossible for evolution to rapidly bring about the genetic change that must occur if evolution is viable, he concluded that it must have happened because he knew that evolution had occurred.

John said...

Don't forget Haldane was a keen evolutionist, yet he found serious theoretical difficulties with it.

Despite working out that it was impossible for evolution to rapidly bring about the genetic change that must occur if evolution is viable, he concluded that it must have happened because he knew that evolution had occurred.

sam drucker said...

Yes, amazing how the paradigm remains beyond reproach despite the evidence refuting it.

Just to put the 'icing on the cake' to show evolution is not science they reinterpret or massage the contrary evidence to make it uphold the paradigm.

And to the shame of the Church there are Christians who fall for it. So much so that they reinterpret the Word of God to make God say something He didn't say - all to stay in with the world.

Shame, Shame, Shame.

Sam Drucker

Eric said...

I think that the big reason that TE-ers disregard the direct reading of scripture is two fold: 1. being influenced by the evolutionary view of history (and being incipient naturalists) they dismiss that the Bible could be other than a collection of myths unconnected with actual events; and secondly, they think that the Bible has no business in the real world; but dwells in an ethereal 'upper storey' world that is not the one we are in. So they are philosophically at odds with the Bible from the start.

sam drucker said...

And, as such, you have to wonder how many are wheat and how many are tares?

Christianity is submission of all one's being in love to Jesus Christ. Those of whom you speak, Eric, are just not fulfilling that prescription.

Sam Drucker

Eric said...

I think that there's a further aspect to the TE world concept. If the Bible gives no information about the creation of the world (but perversely, they usually agree that it tells us that God did create while denying that he is able to give any explanatory detail), then the whole footing of our understanding of God as creator has to do, not with a few 'gestural' claims in the Bible, which are not predicated on what is 'really real', but with what they say is real: that material either assembles itself, or that God is invisibly manipulating material without being at all obvious, not allowing their belief in evolution to be rocked, or that there's some occult (hidden) principle in matter that leads it to produce love! But what I think it comes down to is that God is not alone in the beginning, but there's something else in which he acts; like pagan myths, the action of creation occurs within some sort of field that is there before the creation! That is, the universe is a given and not ultimately, created. What this does is indicates that what is really real, what we should refer to when we consider who we are and what the world is actually, is other than the depiction of what is really real in the Bible. And so, their thinking is based on other than the world that is sketched in Genesis 1.

John said...

As Jesus said to the religious leaders at the time, "for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You have never gone in yourselves and you have hindered everyone else who was at the door!”

SADs have obliterated Jesus as Creator. To these people, Jesus is no longer the God of miracles, and so the creation more or less creates itself through natural,so called, processes. The key is Jesus because through, for and by him all things came into existence. Jesus did not take his time or make mistakes: He created perfectly and rapidly, once.

Jensen and co. have the key, but they stop people going further because they water down Jesus' role and make Jesus do less, not more. After all, don't they say, when asked about how God created, "We don't know...and either do you."

They put distracting emphasis on the superficial appearance of God's word, not its information content: "Oh, it's the numerical pattern and it's the poetic literary devices that are important. Therefore, it just can't be the case that God is REALLY saying what he seems to be saying. Such childish understanding of God's word is for, well, children and hillbillies." (The last is from that great leader of Christians, Peter Jensen.)

Let's hear from our Lord, our Saviour and our Creator again: "Alas for you experts and leaders in religion, for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You have never gone in yourselves and you have hindered everyone else who was at the door!”



sam drucker said...

John said: "they water down Jesus' role and make Jesus do less, not more."

Or, alternatively, they would have Jesus of Nazareth, at the wedding in Cana labouring with a body of water which takes a frustratingly long time and process of chemical introduction and reordering to eventually produce a grape plant, nurtured, watered, pruned, fruit bearing, seed collection, planting in plenty to produce plentiful plants, nurturing, watering, and pruning to bear plentiful grapes which the servants (who were still standing around the table - nothing else to do while waiting for wine) trampled to produce juice, which Jesus of Nazareth has them place in vats (or was it wineskins?) for maturation to wine. Then, and only then, did Jesus of Nazareth order the servants to pour and the guests were able to complete the celebration of the wedding.

I would like to be able to say that in all that time the clothing and sandals of Jesus of Nazareth, the bridegroom, the bride, the Master of Ceremony, the servants and the guests did not wear out but that would be invoking the miraculous which is disallowed.

So, who was that guy Jesus of Nazareth? To whom shall we compare him? The husbandman of Galilee?

Sam Drucker