3 posts tagged “evolution”

I’m going to abandon the Socratic method on the issue of the evolution of Christianity.  Attempting to lure you into my way of thinking by asking just the right questions now seems rather sneaky and disingenuous.  Instead, I’ll simply lay out my position up front and then respond to comments, issues, complaints. 

1. The Christianity of today is markedly different from the Christianity established by the writers of the New Testament.
   1. The God of Jesus’ time and the writers of the New Testament was a God with attributes that most Christians would not accept today (a far more human God, both physically and emotionally, than Christians generally assume today)
   2. The path from the Christian God of 100 AD to 2009 AD is defined purely by human interpretation and intervention in religious concepts (e.g., Papal decrees, Martin Luther, John Knox, etc.)
   3. The only explanation for the difference is that man, through interpretation, decree or warfare, has changed it
   4. If this is the case, then the God of today is a man-made fabrication, based on the God of Jesus’ time but reinterpreted and translated over time
   5. This does not assert that the God of Jesus’ time is man-made (something for a different discussion), only that today’s God is man-made

The latest thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is slightly out of the realm of language and religion.  It has to do with the evolution of religious concepts within a particular religion.  Really, it’s not outside the realm of language.  Language is the vehicle by which totality of evolutionary changes in religious concepts is carried.  But that’s a different issue than I’ve been considering lately.  My recent focus has been on what the evolution of religious concepts means for the religion.

Let’s imagine for a moment that thousands of years ago a religion came into existence and we’ll also imagine that the religion’s God-concept was rather unique for its time.  (For this excursion, I’m not interested in the details of how the religion came into existence or how it came to spread.  I’ll talk about that more in the future.)  Let’s say that the God-concept is of a being, an entity that’s identified as male.  This entity shows distinctly human qualities of anger, vengefulness, jealousy, love, a desire for recognition and a willingness to reward for recognition or cause suffering for lack of recognition.  This God identifies itself with a particular and small group of people (it just so happens that it’s the people who came to believe in the God) and not with all the other people.  This God has no qualms killing (i.e., punishing) those who would threaten the small group of believers and will punish the group of believers for their sins by causing military attacks against them or starvation from the ruination of crops or suffering from plagues of disease. 

You may recognize this God as the God of the Old Testament, of the Torah.  It’s the God of Moses and Abraham; the God of the great flood and the exodus from Egypt; the God that caused the people of Israel to wander for 40 years in the desert because they hesitated in their belief that they could defeat the people who populated the land God told them they should take; the God that caused seven plagues to afflict thousands upon thousands of Egyptians who likely had never heard of the Israelites.  He was a God prone to acts of conspicuous intervention (bringing down the walls of Jericho) and non-intervention (the slaughter of all the people, men women and children, in Jericho).  A God with particularly small thoughts (the only way to control the people he populated the earth with was to kill them all in a great flood) done in a big way (you have to admit that raining for 40 days and nights with enough water to completely cover the Earth is pretty spectacular).  A God who didn’t hesitate to punish someone in an extremely severe manner for a relatively minor offense (turning Lot’s wife to a pillar of stone for the disobedience of looking back at Sodom’s destruction).  This was the beginning of the God Christians now worship.

My guess is that most Christians would argue that the God they worship today is not exactly the same God as the one described in the Old Testament.  (Actually, we’re probably all over the map here.  There are Christian sects that hold that the Bible, all of the Bible, is the infallible, divine word of God.  The evangelicals that believe the earth and the universe is no more than 6,000 years old based on a literal reading of the Old Testament might be one extreme.  The other extreme might be some new age interpretations of the stories in the Bible.  How we got to the point where there are so many interpretations of something that started at one point is very interesting and related to where we’re headed here, but not directly.  It’ll be another discussion.  For this discussion, we’ll avoid the extremes.  In fact, for the sake of argument, we’ll be Protestant, taking the position of the majority of Christians in the United States.  This by no means claims that Catholicism is an extreme.  In my mind, the extremes of Protestantism tend to define the extremes of Christianity.  But those aren’t the Protestants we’re going to be for this argument.  I’m not going to identify the position with any particular denomination, though I certainly believe the denominations are important.  And I don’t mean to say I’m taking the position of a “non-denominational Christian.”  I find that claim to be a rather ludicrous attempt to place themselves above the problems of various Protestant denominations.  What they don’t realize is that by believing that they’re ‘non-denominational,’ they’ve made themselves into a denomination.  I’ll have more to say about denominations in a later post.)  When asked why, they may respond with:

            “There have been events in the history of our religion that have served to more clearly define how we understand God.  In fact, the totality of the Old Testament with its writings from prophets and the reports of God’s actions show the growth in our understanding of God.  Ultimately, the teachings, life and death of Jesus gave us the greatest clarity on the nature of God.”

            “The more we learn about the world, the more we understand the nature of God.  The ancients understood very little of the world.”

            “The God of the Old Testament is unsophisticated because the people of the Old Testament were unsophisticated people.  We are much more adept at logical thinking and can see that some of the things the ancients believed are not possible in a being with the core nature that God must have.”

So, I have a few questions:

1.  How would you explain the difference in what you now believe is the nature of God and what the Old Testament says of the nature of God? 

2.  If, for example, someone believes in a God that intervenes and another person believes in a God that doesn’t intervene, do they not believe in two distinct Gods?

3.  If the God that Jesus believed in was the Jewish God (since Jesus was Jewish) and the God that we profess is our God today has different traits from the God that Jesus believed in based on the teachings of Jesus, do we not believe in a different God than Jesus?

Whatever responses I get will form the basis of the next post.  If I get no responses, I’ll use the ones above as representative.

This is from a website (answersingenesis.org) I stumbled across the other day.  I was dumbstruck.  The effort it must take to be this ignorant of facts is astounding.  For me, nothing is quite as fearful as ignorance parading as religion. 

Although the Bible does not tell us exactly how long ago it was that God made the world and its creatures, we can make a good estimate of the date of creation by reading through the Bible and noting some interesting passages:

1. God made everything in six days. He did this, by the way, to set a pattern for mankind, which has become our seven day week (as described in Exodus 20:11). God worked for six days and rested for one, as a model for us. Furthermore, Bible scholars will tell you that the Hebrew word for day used in Genesis 1, can only mean an ordinary day in this context.

2. We are told God created the first man and woman—Adam and Eve—on Day Six. Many facts about when their children and their children’s children were born are given in Genesis. These genealogies are recorded throughout the Old Testament, up until the time of Christ. They certainly were not chronologies lasting millions of years.

As you add up all of the dates, and accepting that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to Earth almost 2000 years ago, we come to the conclusion that the creation of the Earth and animals (including the dinosaurs) occurred only thousands of years ago (perhaps only 6000!), not millions of years. Thus, if the Bible is right (and it is!), dinosaurs must have lived within the past thousands of years.

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The Bible tells us that God created all of the land animals on the sixth day of creation. As dinosaurs were land animals, they must have been made on this day, alongside Adam and Eve, who were also created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24-31). If God designed and created dinosaurs, they would have been fully functional, designed to do what they were created for, and would have been 100% dinosaur. This fits exactly with the evidence from the fossil record.

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Evolutionists declare that no man ever lived alongside dinosaurs. The Bible, however, makes it plain that dinosaurs and people must have lived together. Actually, as we will soon see, there is a lot of evidence for this.

God sent two of every (seven of some) land animal into the Ark (Genesis 7:2-3; 7:8-9)—there were no exceptions. Therefore, dinosaurs must have been on the Ark. Even though there was ample room in the huge ship for large animals, perhaps God sent young adults into the Ark that still had plenty of room for them to grow.

Well, what happened to all the land animals that did not go on the Ark? Very simply, they drowned. Many would have been covered with tons of mud as the rampaging water covered the land (Genesis 7:11-12,19). Because of this quick burial, many of the animals would have been preserved as fossils. If this happened, you would expect to find evidence of billions of dead things buried in rock layers (formed from this mud) all over the Earth. This is exactly what you do find.

By the way, the Flood of Noah’s day probably occurred just over 4,500 years ago. Creationists believe that this event formed many of the fossil layers around the Earth. (Additional fossil layers were formed by other floods as the Earth settled down after the great Flood.) Thus, the dinosaur fossils which were formed as a result of this Flood were probably formed about 4,500 years ago, not millions of years ago.