Are We “Children of God’s Divine Evolution”?

I am writing in about the articule expressing doubt on a PBS evolution program, about sponges being the first animals.

First of all, Please do not limit God to a very old human book. God did everything we believe and more. God is the very spark of life and we are the living proof.

God is a gardener, and we are flora & fauna of this world.

For me the power of evolution is the force of God shaping this world and indeed the universe. We are indeed the children of God’s divine evolution. God has built us up from organic molecules charged with life in electified goo 2 billion years ago, to complex dna multi cell organisms.

God is eternal, he is the one that calls all time soon. Millions of years are as weeks in the summer garden.

Please forgive my ramblings, God is great beyond all our human knowledge. The more we learn about our world and our conection with in it, we see more the mind of God.

Mr. Joel Loblaw
Canada

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I am writing in about the articule expressing doubt on a PBS evolution program, about sponges being the first animals.

First of all, Please do not limit God to a very old human book.

I am pleased that you start off your correspondence by admitting your belief in God. You appeal to God for your authority. We have that in common.

Where I differ is this: you ask me not to “limit God to a very old human book.” I don’t limit God at all. The limit that I apply is this: I limit myself to what God has written.

You see, the Bible is certainly a very old book. Its antiquity, however, coupled with the lack of change in its contents over time, is part of the reason why I accept it to be the inerrant and authoritative Word of God. Like you, I look to God as my authority. Unlike you, I obtain this authority from the words that God has already given us, in the Bible.

God did everything we believe and more. God is the very spark of life and we are the living proof.

God is a gardener, and we are flora & fauna of this world.

These are pretty phrases, but what do they mean? They have no authority without backing from Scripture. They simply comprise your own opinions on the subject. An atheist would respond that we are not the “living proof” of God being the “spark of life.” My authority for believing that God is the source of life is the Word of God [i.e., Jesus Christ] Himself.

For me the power of evolution is the force of God shaping this world and indeed the universe.

The key phrase in this sentence of yours is “for me.” This illustrates that your view of the origin of life is based entirely on your presupposition that evolution is true. This evolutionary presupposition is without evidence or logic, and is held in the face of contradictory observations. My presupposition, that the Bible’s account of origins is correct, is entirely rational and self-consistent, also being consistent with the evidence. The trap you have fallen into is to suppose that belief in evolution is necessary. It is not. It betrays a materialistic worldview, unsupported by the evidence.

We are indeed the children of God’s divine evolution.

With this phrase, you are attempting to glorify evolution, as if it were a belief worthy of God. Yet evolutionary models rely on the idea of millions of years of death, struggle, bloodshed and disease. Thus, the evolutionist who believes in God, as you do, has to believe that God has chosen to develop this world by death, struggle, bloodshed and disease. These are hardly the actions of a good god. This type of god, to which your evolutionary belief must inevitably lead, is a monster.

The Bible explains that death, struggle, bloodshed and disease are results of the Curse, which came about as a direct result of the sin of Adam. An acceptance of the biblical worldview, therefore, answers the questions of present-day suffering and pain. Suffering is not part of the original divine order of things at all. Yet your worldview actually requires God to be the author of such suffering, in order to advance the human race.

God has built us up from organic molecules charged with life in electified goo 2 billion years ago, to complex dna multi cell organisms.

I ask this in all seriousness—were you there to observe this happen? Which experiments have convinced you that complex DNA can arise by chance, just by the passage of electricity? Your ideas of the formation of life seem to owe more to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than to serious science.

I assume your comments allude to the famous Miller-Urey experiment, in which electricity was discharged through a reflux mixture of water vapour in an atmosphere of hydrogen, ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and, of course, water vapour. At the end of the experiment, small molecules of amino acids were detected, because they had been removed from the experiment.

However, the experiment was based on a presupposition that the supposed prebiotic atmosphere had to be reducing, because only such an atmosphere could give rise to amino acids. This is a case of putting the cart before the horse. In other words, the experiment merely showed evidence of intelligent design producing the desired outcome. Moreover, the amino acids produced would have been destroyed by the presence of oxygen—some of which is inevitably formed when electricity passes through water vapour. The amino acids survived simply because they were removed from the apparatus. Finally, many of the wrong amino acids were produced. The molecules were produced in equal quantities of “mirror-images,” whereas life demands that only one of the mirror images be present.

In fact, the increase in information that you would require to lift this goo to the complexity of DNA is never observed.

God is eternal, he is the one that calls all time soon.

God is certainly eternal, and the sentiment of the second phrase is certainly correct—though it is a quote from The Chronicles of Narnia, rather than the Bible.

Millions of years are as weeks in the summer garden.

Again, this is a nice-sounding phrase. God could certainly have taken millions of years if He wanted to. The fact is that He has told us differently in the Bible. He did it in six days, according to Exodus 20:11.

Please forgive my ramblings, God is great beyond all our human knowledge.

That is certainly true! Nevertheless, there are some issues on which God has chosen to inform us. His act of creation in Genesis is one example.

The more we learn about our world and our conection with in it, we see more the mind of God.

Mr. Joel Loblaw
Canada

This is why we find that true science is fully consistent with Genesis. It is also the reason why the majority of significant scientific discoveries were made by people who believed that God created in six literal 24-hour days some six thousand years ago.

Paul Taylor, AiG–UK