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January 23 - January 29, 2020
Walton’s insistence that Genesis 1 has nothing to do with the material origin of the universe unconvincing for a further reason. It leaves the Bible without an account of that origin in the very place where it would be expected to occur, and where generations both of ordinary people and of scholars have thought it to be.
Scripture is concerned with matters arguably more important than science — the why of existence, for instance, as distinct from the how of the laws and mechanisms governing the universe—nevertheless there is an important overlap. Perhaps the most important example of that overlap is the fact that both the Bible and science claim that the universe had a beginning.
when scientific evidence began to indicate that the universe had not existed eternally, some leading scientists put up fierce resistance because they thought it would give too much support to those who believed in creation!
Those resisting scientific advance because they feared it supported the biblical worldview did not get their way, as the scientific evidence for a beginning proved too strong.
Houghton deduces: For human beings to exist, it can be argued that the whole universe is needed. It needs to be old enough (and therefore large enough) for one generation of stars to have evolved and died, to produce the heavy elements, and then for there to be enough time for a second-generation star like our sun to form with its system of planets. Finally there have to be the right conditions on earth for life to develop, survive and flourish … But that is not all. Our current understanding is that for the universe to develop in the right way, incredibly precise fine-tuning6 has been
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the idea of a “Big Bang” is a point of concern for some people who have been influenced by Richard Dawkins’s simplistic insistence on our choosing either science or God. However, these are false alternatives, on the same foolish level as insisting that we choose between Henry Ford and a car-production line to explain the origin of a Ford Galaxy.
we do not have to choose between God and the Big Bang. They are different kinds of explanation — one in terms of God’s creatorial agency and the other in terms of mechanism and laws.
the term “Big Bang” is essentially a label put on a (fascinating) mystery. It is used by scientists to express their belief that the universe — more accurately, space-time—had a beginning. Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering an echo of that beginning in the cosmic microwave background, wrote, “The best data we have … are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.” Therefore, the Standard (Big Bang) Model developed by physicists and cosmologists can be seen as a scientific unpacking
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Collins suggests that the Genesis 2 account has nothing to do with the original creation of plant life on day 3, but rather is saying that at a particular time of the yearly cycle in a particular land, before the plants had started to grow, God created human beings.
Some translations of Genesis 2:19 suggest that the creation of animals took place after that of man. For example, “Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them” (esv). Collins argues that the Hebrew verb should be translated by the pluperfect “had formed” (see esv margin), thus obviating the chronological clash.4
Genesis seems to be saying that nature has not been absolutely uniform. Genesis is not denying the important fact that nature is largely uniform. Indeed, a further implication of the Sabbath is that, after his creation activity, God continues to sustain the universe. The universe constantly depends on his providential care,1 which means we can rely on the regularities of nature that God himself built in at the beginning.
Christianity, therefore, is not to be equated with deism, which holds that God lit the fuse triggering the origin of the universe and then retired from the scene and had no further involvement. On the other hand, the very concept of the Sabbath implies that God’s providence in maintaining the universe in existence does not exhaust what the Bible means by creation.
The fact that the information on a printed page is not within the explanatory power of physics and chemistry is not a gap of ignorance; it is a gap that has to do with the nature of writing, and we know how to fill it—with the input of intelligence.
reference to the Spirit of God hovering near earth could be understood as a dramatic indication that God’s special action is now going to begin. The aeons of waiting are over. The Creator is about to shape his world, to create life and fill the earth with it in preparation for God’s crowning final act, the making of man and woman in his image.
Life does not emerge from nonlife without God having to get directly involved and speak his word.
Richard Dawkins was simply wrong when he said in The Blind Watchmaker that natural selection explained not only the variation in life but also the existence of life. His error has nothing to do with belief in God but is a simple matter of logic. Darwinian evolution presupposes the existence of a mutating replicator in order to get going in the first place. Hence Darwinian evolution, by definition, cannot be an explanation for the existence of the very thing without which it itself cannot get started. This obvious fact was recognized long ago by the famous Russian biologist Theodosius
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Any adequate explanation for the existence of the DNA-coded database and for the prodigious information storage and processing capabilities of the living cell must involve a source of information that transcends the basic physical and chemical materials out of which the cell is constructed. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates has put it: “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”33 Such processors and programmes, on the basis of all we know from computer science, cannot be explained, even in principle, without the involvement of a mind.
Geneticist Steve Jones writes, “A chimp may share 98% of its DNA with ourselves but it is not 98% human: it is not human at all — it is a chimp. And does the fact that we have genes in common with a mouse or a banana, say anything about human nature? Some claim that genes will tell us what we really are. The idea is absurd.”41
Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin, whose research is on the properties of matter that make life possible, issued the following warning to scientists about the dangers of this kind of thinking: Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that it has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great
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I suspect that belief in an evolution of the gaps is probably more widespread than belief in a God of the gaps, since concentration on the latter allows the former to thrive undetected.
Suppose that scientists manage one day to produce life in the laboratory from nonliving chemicals — as many believe they will, in light of Craig Venter’s construction of a synthetic bacterium using a genome contained in a computer programme. Suppose, further, that this life thrives and establishes itself as a new species, Species X, say. Now imagine that all scientific records of this are lost, and in the far distant future scientists come across Species X. If neo-Darwinism is still the reigning paradigm, these scientists will inevitably argue that Species X is related to all other life by an
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