They’ve got an answer to that one - Adam and Eve were perfect, but when they sinned things went downhill and the design went to hell. Your argument is a good riposte for those who say our perfect bodies prove intelligent design, but not a good one against creationism.
The most clear and obvious one to me is this. There absolutely no surer way to get kids to abandon their religion that teaching them that Creationism is part of it, and Evolution runs counter to it.
The fact is evolution is the basis for modern biology an corner stone of modern science as whole. When kids grow up and go into higher education they WILL realize this. Being taught creationism does not automatically make your kids dumb. They WILL realize how flimsy and laughable creationism is from a scientific stand-point (or at least a good chunk of them will).
At that point, if they have been taught evolution is not compatible with Christianity, but come to realize that in-fact evolution is a fact, the obvious conclusion is that they can no longer be Christian.
That’s pretty funny. Here’s another appropriate one: Mr. Deity And The Science Advisor
Oh, wow. I never came across that particular argument. Most creationists I’ve argued with went with the ID approach.
I guess you could take the track of arguing that the punishments set forth in the Bible i.e.
don’t cover “And I shall mess up thy design so that thy eye is truly absurd.” Also it’s not just our eye. The problems are similar in many other creatures, presumably blameless. They aren’t punished at all as far as I can tell. Of course I give this approach a slim chance of working. Why is it that people who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible (or regional equivalent) tend to read all manner of spurious detail into it?
You are correct, of course. It doesn’t make sense. It is a straw to grasp. There are even bible verses the gist of which is that God doesn’t create confusion.
The fact is that most young-earth creationists just don’t talk about this stuff with anyone but true believers. My study group has never discussed it. I am pretty sure they know that I am not a YEC, but they have not confronted me about it. I know that most of them are YECs because most of them have actually gone to the Creationist Museum about 90 miles from here, and gave it rave reviews.
I can attest that this is true from first-person experience.
What’s the main concern- Young-Earthism or Creation-vs-Evolution?
Dr. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe is a Old-Earth Creationist who doesn’t accept biological macro-evolution but totally accepts the billions of years of the Universe and the Earth, and also accepts the existence of pre-Adamic humanoid creatures. He just doesn’t believe we’re related to them.
Francis Collins, head of the Genome Project and now director of NIS, is a very vocal Christian evolutionist.
My personal situation is mostly Creation vs Evolution. Young Earth Creationism is way too sophisticated to bring onto the table.
I am liking the argument of kids eventually “believing” in evolution and then assuming it means they cannot be christian as it runs contrary to that. You are setting your kids up for atheism if you insist in one vs the other.
Mine starts there and expands into how vast and magnificent my universe is compared with the eensy-weensy universe, both in time and space, YECs believe in. This is followed by an explanation of how my God (or the one I’m promoting that day, which varies from a “competent one” to “tain’t none” as we progress from Sunday through the week) is better than their crappy, little, barely-effectual God because he set the rules billions of years ago and left them alone as He knew where they’d lead.
They are usually half a block away at that point.
I spent a lot of time on talk,origins, mostly as a lurker since there were people there who knew a hell a lot more biology than I do, and this was pretty common. You could hardly keep the creationists away from that place, not that anyone ever tried to.
But the wages of sin are death, so the flaws make for death after the sin. Plus, only the sinless are perfect, as Adam and Eve were before they sinned, so after they sinned they could no longer be perfect, right? But you’re right - they are literalists until they have to become non-literalists to deal with contradictions and the like.
Which seems to imply that they think Catholicism isn’t compatible with Christianity either. No doubt.
What does he consider macro evolution? I’m curious about what he thinks has been going on for hundreds of millions of years.
Sorry to quote myself, but I went to the RTB website, and here is what I find on the home page
Confused abiogenesis and evolution right on the first page - not a good sign. Browsing some other pages makes me think he is a long day creationist. So they recognize some of the contradictions of Genesis - but not all. I didn’t notice if they believe in the Flood - my guess is that they have to.
That was a response to the probabilistic model of the atom, which was proposed based, among other things, on Einstein’s own research; it’s the equivalent of “I don’t like it, therefore it’s impossible” (which sadly I’ve heard several researchers say, in different versions). I heard it has a second part, “don’t tell God how to do His job.”
Other than that, seconding a look at some of Teilhard’s books. He specifically got comissioned with figuring out whether creationism could be matched with evolutionary theory.
Plenty of people do indeed think that:
The arguments for micro-only seem to be based on the idea that there is some hidden and immutable master template for each organism (a bit like Platonic ideals), from which the organism is only able to deviate slightly in any given example - so successive generations of organisms may vary in all sorts of trivial ways, but will on average remain tethered fairly closely to the template.
The problem with all of this is… there isn’t any such static template. There’s the organism’s genome, but once that’s changed, and the changes passed on to offspring, and the parents have died, the original template is gone - all that remains is the altered version, which will in due course be discarded and replaced with copies altered in yet new ways, and so on.
Over time, there is no particular reason why changes cannot and will not continue to accumulate, taking the genome progressively further away from its ancestor.
How about the onion tactic? To get to the centre of the onion (i.e. God) you can either cut the onion in half (religion) or you can gradually peel one layer at a time (science).