The faith has Rather, church leaders are aware that increasing numbers of Adventists worldwide face questions at colleges and "need to know how we deal with these complex issues. It follows decades of debate over Darwin's evolution theory in American churches and schools — and certainly won't be the last word. Skeptics and liberals see Genesis as outright myth, while many religionists meld the Bible's account with Darwinism.
The creationist movement, launched by Adventists and others in the s, champions the "young earth" time frame. Other critics of Darwin consider creationism an implausible distraction scientifically and pursue evidence for an "intelligent design" in nature that implies a divine cause.
The Adventist church's very name proclaims its strict observance of Saturday as the Sabbath, which is fused with a literalism on creation. That, in turn, "interlocks with other doctrines" — as the new statement puts it — creating the foundation for Adventist belief. Editor Bonnie Dwyer of Spectrum, an independent Adventist magazine , calls it a doctrinal domino theory that hinges on creationism.
Examples of irreducible complexity included in the books are: the cilium, blood coagulation, vesicular transport, the body's immune system, and the biosynthesis of AMP. The author states that no papers are available offering a testable, Darwinian scenario for the evolution of these complex systems.
A god-of-the-gaps argument. Design can easily appear to be a god-of-the-gaps argument to be refuted as further evidence is discovered. This has happened often enough in the past, and some biochemists see hints of evolutionary explanations for hemoglobin, cilia, and vision. It is easy to ride the bandwagon when science presents evidence for the fine-tuning and design, but without care it can set one up for disillusionment Premature appeal to special divine activity to explain nature damages the Christian apologetic.
In referring to the gap between life and non-life, Andrew Ellington, an Indiana University professor, warns "to trumpet the barrier today is to eat your words when it falls tomorrow. If you make a proof of Jesus or Buddha or any supernaturalism on the back of a biogenesis, be prepared for the disproof as well.
Such a disproof is unfair, and not necessarily logically linked, but it will be so perceived. A rigorous definition de sign needs yet to be carefully articulated. A higher probability for forming a amino-acid protein may be possible, if only a few of the amino acids are critical and if a functional molecule can be formed in a myriad of ways.
Flaws in design, such as the panda's thumb and the arrangement of rods and cones in the eyes, have been urged as evidence against an intelligent Designer. Hen's teeth, pseudogenes, vestigial organs, and other examples provide evidence of evolution. The ichneumonid wasp laying its eggs in a caterpillar provides evidence only of an evil designer unlike the biblical God. Some of these arguments can be answered by including the results of sin as a destructive agent, or assuming that we really don't know how God works; however, these are only partial answer and on-going study needs to be done.
This explanation is probably the most popular current alternative to a Designer. In complex systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, order and new properties can arise spontaneously. Self-organization results. These complex systems can be explained by simple laws: the complexity of the Mandelbrot set can be derived from a simple equation; the infinite variety of snowflakes can be explained from some simple laws of chemistry and geometry.
However, complexity theory may work better at explaining design on computers than in real life. At a summer conference at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico where these topics were being studied,.
Participants in the discussions constantly returned to the necessity to calibrate models and their parameters against observation of the real-world systems they purport to stimulate. Questions were raised and left largely unresolved about the potential usefulness and hidden dangers of models as "flight stimulators" … The agenda included a number of examples of applications of models and of the behavior of real systems.
Here is where the greatest divergences in views of complexity and the need for "reality checks" emerged most visibly. The discussion involving these contributions can best be summarized in terms of its emphasis on increasing, wherever and however possible, the amount of "hard" data that can be used to test the validity of models.
Cowan and Pines. The anthropic principle. This alternative to a Designer states that: This alternative to a Designer states that: we wouldn't be there if it weren't that the conditions were right for us to exist. This explanation is rather lacking in appeal and not the one most generally espoused by the scientific community. It is like explaining why you can see an elephant in your living room by saying that you wouldn't see it there if it wasn't there.
Infinite time and space have been suggested as possible explanations for the coincidences. Infinite time could be provided by multiple universe in series, and infinite space by having multiple universe in parallel. Unfortunately these can't be tested scientifically, but only discussed philosophically. Perhaps design in nature is only a construct of the human mind.
Nature appears ordered because the human mind is a product of nature and sees some of itself there. Perhaps the designer is just the environment. The apparent design of the environment for the organism may in fact be the design of the organism for the environment by natural selection and survival of the fittest.
The explanation easily works for many adoptions seen in nature. Darwinian evolution--useful scientific principles taken to an unwarranted excess. Mechanistic laws govern nature. Mechanistic laws invoking no supernatural intervention have worked well in the physical sciences, and it was hoped that they would work in all areas of the biological sciences as well.
The attempts was made to leave God out as an explanation, to use natural law as all-sufficient with no place for the supernatural or miracles, to treat life as governed by chance with not purpose, and to reject teleology.
For some this has led to meaninglessness, disillusionment, pessimism, and despair. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labor of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safety built.
However, mechanism laws are not sufficient to explain everything, even in the physical sciences. Nature changes. In the last century, society exhibited evidence of change, growth in knowledge, and progress. Charles Darwin rejected fixity of species and proposed that change and progress occurred in the biological realm as well.
His history of evolution was an extrapolation of the ubiquitous variation he saw in tropical animals. However, biological variation and change has its limits; it is not necessarily progress; and direct evidence for development of new types of organisms is lacking. Man as a part of nature. The Copernican revolution removed the earth as the center of the universe.
A logical next step assumed that man is not so special either. After all, physical and chemical laws and biological processes are same for man as for the rest of nature. However, in fact, man is unique; conscious mind and moral instincts cannot be reduced to these laws of nature.
Struggle and natural selection in nature. Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, In Memoriam, gave from to the concept of struggle and natural selection:. That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems,. From scarped cliff and quarried stone. She cries, 'A thousand types are gone;. And love Creation's final law-. Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw. With ravin, shriek'd against his creed-. In Darwin's autobiography, he acknowledged his debt to Thomas Malthus' book, Essay on Population, in the often-quoted passage:.
In October , that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement "Mathus on Population," and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed.
The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work. However, the observance of struggle does not necessarily make it right or applicable to humans, especially the excesses that have at time been seen in social Darwinism.
There are two types of design arguments: 1 the conditions for life were fine-tuned, and 2 life itself was designed. The second type of argument is valid in any kind of creation theory. However, some evidence for the first type of argument is not compatible with all creation theories. This evidence from astrophysics assumes a Designer who works through naturalistic processes in the formation of the physical matter of the universe.
The argument from is a strong argument. It is a faith-affirming for the believer when facts in the natural world provide empirical evidence consistent with belief in a Designer and the supernatural God of Scripture. It provides evidence for the unbeliever to suggest that a totally naturalistic world view is not sufficient. The argument is strongest when it is carefully presented and doesn't claim more than it can deliver.
Exaggerated negative predictions of the past only made the Christian appear a fool when they happened: "man will never synthesize any organic molecules" or "man will never set foot on the moon". Scientists like to have incontrovertible facts, but the design argument doesn't go that far. The far existence of God cannot be proved. However, this evidence is also consistent with some kind of progressive creation. The issue of time--how long life has existed on this earth--is next addressed.
Although I myself prefer a short-age recent, world-wide, catastrophic flood model to a long-age evolutionary model, I do not believe a short-age model is supported scientifically: much data does not easily fit, no comprehensive model is available, and a supernatural component must be included.
I am not overly concerned with this situation, because I am not basing my belief in the short ages on science. So, what do I do? Empirical evidence should be necessary for any belief system, and I do find evidence as discussed above that a totally naturalistic worldview is insufficient.
This leads to some kind of a religious approach to life, which is in my case is Bible-based Christianity. With a Christian world view as a basis, it is difficult to picture the biblical God of love as using competition, survival of the fittest, the rule of tooth and claw, and death as His preferred method for the development of life; however, we find evidence for this kind of activity throughout the geologic record.
In order to harmonize this evidence with a biblical worldview, it is easiest to assume that this destructive activity was the result of man's sin and thus happened after the creation of man and was buried in a worldwide flood. This suggests although doesn't require a short time period since God created the various life forms, man fell, and sin resulted in the destruction of the world.
It is from the philosophical framework that I try to find at least some empirical evidence that preferentially supports short ages and more that is at least consistent with it; however, I don't expect overwhelmingly good scientific evidence, nor to be able to prove my viewpoint, because a supernatural component must be included.
Some of this evidence is presented in the next several sections; however, this and similar evidence should not be used as good scientific reason to believer in short ages, because it can easily leave one with an incomplete picture, and thus a philosophical misunderstanding: 1 If one believes that the limited data consistent with a short-age model makes it a defensible scientific model, he can easily be unprepared for facing the much greater weight of data that has been fit into the long-age theory.
The weight of scientific evidence is on the side of long ages. Belief in a short chronology [and perhaps the Bible as well] can then easily be discarded when the scientific evidence is found to be lacking. The sample evidence below and other evidence similar to it can be useful in suggesting that some scientific data is consistent with a short-age model, as long as it is recognized that: 1 The arguments are in a very simplified format, but are more complicated and equivocal when all factors are taken into account.
Some scientific data preferentially supports a short chronology. How long did it take to lay down the rock layers, for example those so readily seen in the Grand Canyon?
The standard interpretation requires millions of year; however, flat contacts representing the passage of tens of millions of years as dated by fossils between layers can be found rather frequently. Major erosion would be expected at these contacts, if left exposed for long periods of time. The frequent lack of significant erosion suggests that the successive layers were deposited much more rapidly. Roth, Is geologic activity local or wide-spread?
A massive collection of data is available suggesting that ancient water currents were uni-directional over wide areas. The standard geological paradigm would expect water to flow into a depositional basin from many different directions; whereas, a flood model would more likely propose flood waters sweeping across large areas in a single direction, as is observed.
Some reinterpreted scientific data will not fit either paradigm. In the last 20 or 30 years, more and more evidence has been interpreted in terms of catastrophism. Fossilization processes and mass burials also suggest catastrophic activity. Mount St. Washington University in St.
We may be cooling. But I do believe in the six day creation. According to the Pew Research Center, a sizable chunk of the U. Even among doctors, typically equated with scientists in the public mind, 22 percent reject evolution, according to a survey from the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Clearly, religious belief is not an impossible barrier to acceptance of evolution. Raised by an Adventist mother, baptized SDA at age 8, and then again at 12 by his own request, Ben Carson has been an Adventist virtually his entire life.
And his religious inheritance puts him close to the sources of the creationist movement. Many believing scholars today argue that the first of two creation accounts in the biblical book of Genesis, with its familiar structure of days, took its current form around the sixth century BCE. As a minority group in Babylon after the destruction of Israel, Israelites were pulled in two directions: cultural assimilation or divergence.
In writing Genesis 1, Israelite priests split the difference , reshaping Israelite creation traditions in Babylonian ways to demonstrate their respectability, while simultaneously arguing against Babylonian religious ideas about polytheism and the nature of humanity.
In spite of its seven-day structure, this priestly remix of creation had no interest in the age of the earth or the length of creation; they just wanted to survive by appealing to their cultural and political overlords while keeping as much of their religion as possible in a foreign land.
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