Gary Peterson of Country Keepers has joined Jerry Falwell in blaming gay marriage - and every other thing they don't like that's going on - on evolution. Like Falwell, Peterson is quoting Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who published a letter on their website with a scare list of allegedly horrible things going on and concluded:
Friends, the above are just a few samples of things happening in America and other Western nations. Ive said this before, but I want to say it againperhaps a little more bluntly, for Im so burdened for this nation.The major reason America (and the West) is losing its Christian influence and worldview is because the church gave up the authority of the Word beginning in Genesisand thus gave up the biblical basis for absolutes in the culture.
The culture as a whole now mocks the Bible as an outdated book of myths. Sadly, the church by and large bolstered this impression, by accepting the secular teaching of millions of years and evolutionary ideas.
This was followed by the obligatory and self-congratulatory declaration that AIG is fighting the battle against this horror and, by implication, you should be sending them money. Sorry folks, the earth is 4.55 billion years old and the evidence indicates that life has evolved for the past 3.9 billion years or so. The fact that your interpretation of one of dozens of claimed revelations from God disagrees with that has no bearing on the validity of those well-supported statements whatsoever.
First, thanks for the link and the mention. I do appreciate both, even though we disagree.
Second, I see the issue not as one of evolution, but rather as one of moving away from Biblical truth. Ignore Genesis - ignore Jesus. It's all really the same. If you choose to ignore the Bible, you put yourself in the position of God in defining what is right and wrong.
By the way, the letter we both linked on the Answers in Genesis page has no plea for money. True, you don't have to work that hard on their site to find an opportunity to give, but you painted it almost as a "see what's happening - only we can stop it" kind of thing. That's not what AiG is about.
By the way again, my last name is PetersEn, not sOn as you spelled it. Common error.
Thanks again for the link.
I apologize for the misspelling of your name, and you're welcome for the link. I know there was no plea for money, that's why I used the phrase "by implication".
I'm not much keen on arguing over biblical interpretation, since I am not myself a Christian and it doesn't make much difference to me how it's interpreted. But I think it's important to note that for those hundreds of millions of Christians who are not young earth creationists, it is not a question of "ignoring Genesis", but of interpreting it differently. This is true in many other matters of biblical interpretation as well. Assuming that you're not a geocentrist, Gerardus Buow would argue that by opting for a non-literal interpretation of Joshua 10:12-13 you are "ignoring" that verse, and 66 other verses that speak of the sun moving rather than the earth. But the truth is that you're not "ignoring" those verses, you're interpreting them differently. And the same is true of your fellow Christians who do not share a literal interpretation of Genesis 1.
I'd have to look up the word, geocentrist, before I could tell you whether I am one or not! BTW, I finally read something either by or about Jerry Falwell related to this topic. I hadn't understood the reference until then.
I don't doubt for a moment that God could hold the sun still in the sky for about a day, as is referenced in the verses from Joshua you mentioned. I've no clue how He'd accomplish that, mind you, but it is an easy thing to believe possible when the belief foundation you are building upon is that He created the world and all that is in it in six literal days.
As for the sun moving across the sky, we still say that today, even though we know it isn't true. That's just a perspective thing. And that's different than claiming that "there was evening and morning, the first day" means billions of years and not one day.
I look at the world starting from my belief that the Bible is God's truth and that it was written to give me a clue about God and His world. That doesn't mean that the Bible has all the answers about everything. Far from it. You can't learn about baseball, for example, in the Bible even though it starts off "In the big inning". Sorry, bad pun.
But my worldview originates with God. I interpret what I see in the world based on the Bible. And in doing so I find that what I see in the world fits quite well with what I read in the Bible.
Others, including many Christians, try to interpret the Bible based on what they see in the world. And in doing so, I believe they make mistakes and move away from God.
A geocentrist is one who believes that the earth is the center of the universe, as opposed to heliocentrism, which says that the earth revolves around the sun. My point was that geocentrists accuse you of doing exactly what you accuse old earth creationists or theistic evolutionists of doing - "ignoring" scripture. But the truth is that neither of you are "ignoring" it, you're interpreting it differently. I'm not terribly interested in how one should interpret the bible, not being a Christian myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning that claiming that your fellow Christians were ignoring scripture, as opposed to interpreting it differently, is to oversimplify and build up a straw man argument.
Darwinistic Evolution is scientifically impossible!
(1) The random assimilation of the first single-celled organism is mathematically impossible. The simplest known single-celled organism has about 200 proteins. Due to know necessities, scientists can scale this back (in theory) to a bare MINIMUM of about 100 proteins. The chances of just A SINGLE protein coming together by chance is roughly 1 over 10 to the 60th power. To put this in perspective:
(number of atoms in the universe)
X
(number of seconds universe existed)
X
(number of metabolic processes in a cell per second)
...is a number with about ONLY 125 zeros.
To get 100 of these proteins to come together in the simplest single-celled organism imaginable would need the following chances:
at best, one over 10 to the 600th power!
This number blows away Carl Sagan's "billions and Billions". This is like blowing up an alphabet soup factory and having the letters fall in the order of a Websters unabridged dictionary. Impossible. Plus, what are the chances of survival and reproduction for this ONE cell... What would it "eat" in a world void of other creatures and their by-products? So much could go wrong here and, given the impossible odds in the first place, a 2nd chance is especially impossible!
(2) Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER! Even as scientists study mutations in fruit flies or viruses... the mutations sometime just scramble existing DNA... but MORE OFTEN, they DELETE DNA structures. Certainly, "survival of the fittest" is a means by which nature purges the gene pool of bad mutations, but NO evolution occurs here. (This alone is a DEATH BLOW to Evolution.) I repeat... not a SINGLE scientist in the entire world has EVER recorded a mutation which produced additional DNA structures or material.... but DELETIONS are recorded ALL THE TIME!!!
(3) As a result, when evolutionists say that mutations combined with natural selection only requires a great deal of time to produce Evolution... this is like a storekeeper who loses a little bit of money on each sale and then says, "don't worry, I'll make it up on volume".
(4) Because the process of Evolution depends on mutations adding DNA and being "selected" through survival of the fittest... it is, by definition, a very, very slow process. Too many mutations in one generation and who is that creature going to mate with? (not to mention, this usually produces a "miscarriage"). As a result of this process being SO slow, the fossil record should have so many imperceptible different variations on each species that paleontologists should have extreme difficulty even classifying ANY newly dug up fossil ("this is 40% the way from creature A to creature B", for example). Instead, in the fossil record, we find fully formed types with little to no variation in between these forms.
(5) The whole dating process is deceptive. The geologists use the fossils found nearby to date their rocks. The paleontologists use the nearby rocks to date their fossils. Circular reasoning! Also, carbon dating only goes back a couple of thousand years. Radiometric dating is a joke because it DEPENDS on several factors being a certain way and these factors are conveniently assumed and are NOT provable or testable.
(6) Regarding dating, many, many things are found in the "wrong" layers all the time. Also, Charles Lyell's geological layers are almost always in the wrong order or have missing layers. The geological record we have is better explained by a flood (as in Noah) rather than millions of years and with an Ice Age. A world-wide & roughly year-long flood would "lay down" sedimentary layers in a very inconsistent way... many strong tendencies, but with a lot of inconsistencies. Millions of years, on the other hand, would be MUCH more uniform. The geological evidence, therefore, points more to a flood. Also, the EXCELLENT PRESERVATION of so many fossils is better explained by a huge flood. Ironically, the largest major dinosaur parks across the world claim that their dinosaurs died in a catastrophic flood. (Obviously, THEY don't consider this to be Noah's flood... but the coincidence is breathtaking).
(7) As a result of these things, the science of evolution has degenerated into a pseudo-science. Unlike REAL science, it fails to make risky predictions. For example, Darwin did make risky predictions about what the fossil record would look like after more digging is done... and these predictions failed! ...absent better evidence, and in the face of such opposing evidence, Evolutionists ought to at least say "we don't know". You never see other areas of science stick to provably false theories just because they haven't figured it out. Thank God medical science didn't go this route. (We know that this particular brain surgery procedure will kill you, but we still haven't found a better method... so we'll proceed with the surgery.)