Actually 2. Not necessarily picking on you, but reading your posts makes me curious of your opinion.
Have you heard of, or suscribe to, the idea that the New Testament of Christ was meant to replace the Old Testament (viewed by many as a history of the Jewish people) and that it can stand alone as a guide to eternal life?
Yes there are a few variations of the idea that none of the OT is valid for the church age. I believe there are some hyper-dispensationalists that do it.
I do not subscribe to the notion that the OT is meaningless to the Church age. Christ said He came to complete the Law, not destroy it.
The OT types and figures stand. The morality taught in the OT carries over but not the civil law. OT Israel was a theocracy much like modern Islam teaches.
A good example would be children. It was in the civil code that disobedient children could be killed in the OT. There seems to be little evidence that path was taken very often. Certainly, the NT teaches that children should be obedient but provides no death sentence but rather grace for those who do (prodigal son).
Christ's death IMO had two components of grace: general and personal. General grace withheld the swords of the legions of angels standing by to destroy creation had Christ chose to leave the cross. I think it also set aside or delayed many of the more extreme OT punishments.
Can it not be accepted that evolution is God's intelligent design?
I used to try to reconcile things that way. Many, many Christians did and still do.
The advantage of taking a supernatural presupposition is that you can look at the straight up claims and evidences of both spiritualism and naturalism... and accept/reject them without violating your primary premise.
Evolution could be 100% true as you offer without disproving the supernaturalist presupposition. A Gallup poll from 2004 said that about 75% of those who believe in evolution believe that God guided it. So a very clear majority of those polled believe exactly what you suggested.
For me however, I do not think it is reasonable or necessary from either a scientific angle or religion angle. I believe it to be so inconsistent with the Bible that a person must resort to bending the scriptures around a very fluid, manmade THEORY in order to hold the two views together.
It is very difficult to reconcile evolution with any sort of respect for the text of not just Genesis but the whole of the Bible. Many have tried. There are critical passages of the NT like Romans 5 that treat Adam as a very literal person... and if he wasn't then the passages are a mockery. I mention Romans 5 because Adam there is coupled with the plan of salvation itself. IOW's, if Adam was not a real person then perhaps the second Adam was not either... and there is no salvation in the Bible or Christianity.
Independent of the Bible or any other Christian presupposition... I find evolution's claims very unreasonable. They call on stronger faith than one must have to believe God simply said so. For instance, according to evolution all of life exists in all of its wonderful complexities... as a product of a process that has never been observed and cannot be simulated or reproduced in a lab. Mutations simply do not work to produce the types and amounts of genetic information needed for amoeba to man evolution.
Population geneticists do not see genomes that are adding new information and branching out into new, novel species. Speciation occurs as existing genetic information is either lost by deletion or corrupted by mutation. What they see is genomes in decline and moving toward extinction because of mutations and weakening genomes.
Behe's irreducible complexity argument gets poo-pooed by evolutionists... but not really answered. Discovery Institute and other web sites will give you the "pro". Behe so panics evolutionists that you will have no problems finding the "con". You have to consider it for yourself.
The fine tuning of the universe... especially in light of recent discoveries that universal constants aren't really constant... is a fairly strong argument against the reasonableness of Big Bang cosmology. The reliance on "dark" matter and space should also give you pause since the only real proof of them are mathematical projections.
IOW's, something was needed to balance the equations so something was dreamed up to fill in.
None of these things or many others depend on biblical creation being true. To me, they just provide significant evidence that evolution is not true.
IPO or others may or may not come by with counter arguments... I would be surprised honestly if they presented one I have not seen or heard. But I find the lack of a sufficient, demonstrable process for the ascension of species to be pretty telling all by itself.
Mendel and Darwin were contemporaries. Mendel was an Augustinian monk and the father of genetics. Darwin is credited as the father of evolution. Both were aware that some type of programming mechanism existed in living things. Darwin suggested a black box that when penetrated would be relatively easy to change. His black box could provide all the information needed for species to arise and gain complexity. Mendel suggested the gene would be very, very complex and have rigid boundaries against change.
Mendel who died about 130 years ago was correct. Darwin was very wrong.
In those 130 intervening years, genes and cells have been subjected to every imagineable type of radiation, chemical environment, and physical catalyst. The gene simply will not change as evolution requires by any naturally occurring condition.
Sorry for the long response... but you asked.
