Since I might have talked to a "real" creationist some months ago and I just read about it in here, I think it is a good idea to fully understand the concept and what's behind it.
How does a creationist see evolution, as in what's the concept that is seen here. There are a lot of different views that might be called "evolution" like "I don't believe we developed from monkeys" or "I don't believe the Universe is billions of years old".
Also where does the creationist believe come from? From what I remember, and I have read the New Testament quite recently, it is not mentioned there, so I guess it stems from the Old Testament. Which doesn't really make any sense for me. I try to put into few words how I see it, so you will know what might help my understanding. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew from and for the Jews (guided by God), who knew how to read it - every one of the letters is a letter, a number and a sign, without any vowels, and the Old Testament was written in one go without blanks. That means there is a huge amount of interpretations for, not even just every word, but for every letter in the Bible, depending on its numeric value, the symbol it represents and the connection to all of its surrounding letters and words and their numeric values and symbols. For example the first word of the Bible "Barasheet" - "in beginning" - can also be read as "The Son of God will be destroyed by His (Gods) own hand on a cross" (yes, just in that single word).
Even more important for me is that the Old Testament doesn't matter for the Christian believe. While the simple, and because of that as seen from the explanation above, very inaccurate / incomplete translation given in the Christian Bible can act as an added helpful guidance, its rules have become obsolete by Jesus teachings and his death on the cross and our exact believes in how our Creation took place plays no role for our Salvation in Jesus.
For me it looks as if the inaccurate /incomplete translation has been taken completely literal, without any bonuses for our transformation in Christ, while creating a huge disadvantage in the conversion of people to the Faith in Jesus. Because for an atheist rhetorician arguing with a creationist is like fishing in a barrel, which on its own is not the best promotion for the Christian Faith, but quarreling over such a moot point only distracts from the "good news" (I hope I got the translation correct, in German "good news" would be the "frohe Botschaft" which sounds a lot better and is another term for the New Testament).
An explanation into the believes of a creationist would be really helpful for me. Mhm. Probably best from someone who himself is not, but has experience in dealing with them and knows about the way they are thinking, because what I have written might offend some creationist, which was not my intention at all. But knowing about the way a creationist is thinking will not only help me in my own dealings with them, but will also help me when I am talking to my non Christian friends, which are still most of them, some of which are already showing interest in Christianity because of my own conversion (more accurately, because I am praying for them and Jesus is working through me, I don't want to put a claim on any of His doings :) ) and if creationism comes up it would help to be able to explain it more deeply.
Thank you for your time & my apologies to anyone I might have offended - praise the Lord :)
Replies
You have to ask yourself if you believe in intelligent design or cosmic accident. The Bible is obviously what gives people the most trouble Which is perfectly understandable so forget about all of scripture for a second whether it be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or what ever else and ask yourself if in your intelligent experience when have you ever seen 0+0=anything...This world is scientific and does have rules. something +0= something though right...something was before everything...some force made this thing evolve and I want to give my life to that force.. call that force what you want to (I call Him God and follow Christ) Some say its The old Big bang and they too give their lives to follow and support this view....Now you have religion..
I would like to talk more about this with you if you are down...I can tell you my opinion of why the old testament is important for the new but I'm not here to cram my heart into your throat...The debate of creationism vs anything else is free game because its world view and not religion, what I mean is that how ever it happened...it happened before man was here to write about it..so it definitely happened one way or the other..also check out the difference between micro evolution and macro evolution...
One Love
Matt
First of all it is just your opinion that the translations are inaccurate and incomplete. Mankind has been perfecting this book and the forces of evil have been wishing they could destroy it for thousands of years. There are just so many ways to study this book including looking at the Greek(since the apostles spoke to Gentiles in Greek to convert them and hence the epistles were written in Greek) translation of crucial words to expand upon your understanding of key passages.
Second the Old Testament is not irrelevant to the New Testament, but it's exact relevance is certainly misunderstood and misinterpreted IMO.
Now you say Creationism isn't in the Bible, but neither is the Trinity. LoL. God created the Universe. That is creation in a banana peel. God in his genius had a plan for everything and designed everything to be perfect and everything is meaningful and part of his grand design. The reason life is so remarkable and that everything works so perfectly is how God designed it to be.
Evolution on the other hand says we are a bunch of accidental random mutations that accumulated over millions of years with no grand design or purpose. Since there is ZERO proof that one specie has ever differentiated into another specie, and by proof I mean fossil records, evolutionists have to theorize that it takes millions of years for a "lung" to randomly appear or over a million years of countless generations a series of random, accidental mutations created a "wing".
Now we can say there is a certain sort of evolution within a specie such as in a snowy area black rabbits will die and white rabbits will live, or that a tadpool turns into a frog and it's different. But this is not differenciation of species. They can still breed and are the same species. What evolutionists can't prove is that missing link. They've never found it. Fossil evidence for these slow changes over millions of years accumulating does not exist. Instead what we have is evidence of life suddenly appearing just as it is all over the world. A wing or a lung is a highly integrated structure that interacts delicately with the entire organism. As a Creationist you know that God designed everything perfectly and that knowing how inaccurate and what a farce carbon dating is IMO the Earth could only be a handful of thousands of years old. As a Creationist you know the Old Testament has important things to teach you since they are real, accurate and historical records such as gigantic, reptilian, dinosaur-like monsters being alive with humans being further correlated by ancient cave drawings of creatures that resemble stegosaurus and other dinosaurs and even tales of dragons(flying lizards) in multiple cultures across the globe. For example a pterodactyl fossil with a 55 foot wingspan was found in texas.
Well, it did help a bit in my understandings.
In my post I actually only meant that the Old Testament was, inherit to the nature of the Hebrew language, incomplete / inaccurate, because a complete translation would probably fill more than a bookshelf. But yes, I also think that the New Testament is lacking some information that might be helpful, but I also think that God certainly managed it to include the most important teachings like Salvation in Jesus and love God, yourself, your next and your enemies.
My personal background was in philosophy, disproving everything back and forth, not believing in anything, neither God nor science, Buddhism, Taoism, ... and so forth, but taking them all in and thinking with them. So I know about the shortcomings of science, which is mostly scientists ignoring its shortcomings :). When it comes to evolution and Gods creating everything, those are not two concepts that have to exclude each other - if you take away the randomness the big bang & mutations might just been the way God created the Earth and Humans. As you can see, I didn't make any clear statements there, because I just don't know. But it should mainly just serve as an example for a few things. One of them would be what I meant with that the exact way Gods Creation happened plays no role in the Salvation in Jesus - it is possible to believe it happened that way and still love and believe in Jesus (for me only the second part holds true, the other is just a working hypothesis - didn't let go of that part completely when I converted ;) ). Which also leads to the other thing, arguing over the exact way God created everything will on the one hand, not convince any atheist or scientist otherwise, the same way that I wont be able to convince you that creationism is wrong (which is not my intention, not only because I don't know - it might be true after all :) ), while on the other hand distracting from Jesus message of Love & Salvation.
And this is also a first hand experience for me in dealing with a creationist, so .... how am I doing? :)
Still appreciate it if anyone has something else to add here.
OIC. Well, I don't see any reason we would need the entire old collection of Hebrew writings. The early Church father's who translated it into Greek for the gentile converted Christians did it that way for a reason.
Now I think, IMO, that creationism and evolutionism are mutually exclusive. As much so as Law and Grace, or the old and new testaments. You're absolutely right though it's not a salvation issue, but then again so isn't most things Christians spend their time talking about, lol.
I've only believed in Creationism for less than a year as several radio programs opened my mind to realize all the bologna they crammed into my head in the public education system was just that, evolutionary bologna.
I guess it has to do with me not trusting the early Church fathers, or more precisely the late-early ones, specially belonging to the catholic church. But when it comes to that I have less suspicion of the Old Testament. While there might be some minor issues, like the apple that was probably an unspecified fruit, for the OT there are still the Jews who did their job of preserving and being able to interpret it. It is mostly the stuff that got (probably) left out. There have been a lot of rowing in the early Church and and sadly also struggles for power. A good example for that would be that the early catholic church declared Christians who been vegetarian as outlaws, which was more or less a death sentence at that time - from a scriptural point there was no base for that, looking at Adam & Eve's diet, Daniel & the writings of Paul, maybe even the opposite, so there might even be more stuff about vegetarianism that didn't made it. Some stuff might just not exist, like a lot of stuff that Jesus taught his disciples e.g. how to exorcise demons, the 12(?) year training of Paul and general a lot of the teaching of the early Christians - but it is not that unlikely that there have been more letters, more general writings that just didn't made it, because of power struggles. Well, there is a lot of research going on all around the world of Christians and I guess the important things that are needed will be given to us (again?) by God when the time comes.
"but then again so isn't most things Christians spend their time talking about, lol."
Amen to that :). I am also with you that there is a lot of "bologna" being taught in schools today, and not only there, which is not that easy to get rid of. While I don't have problems with the general concept of evolution, I too see a problem in the one without God that is based on randomness, When people put the survival and development of the human species as their highest target, instead of God, everything that leads to that goal is an acceptable practice, including killing and torture, because the individual Human becomes just an object placed under that goal.
So true my fruit filled, Christian brother.
Still I must stand entirely opposed to you on the canonization of the scripture and the early Church fathers. This all happened BEFORE the RCC came into play. In fact the people who preserved and perused and analyzed and ultimately decided the fate of the permanent canonization of scripture were Christian fathers who were being tortured and murdered for their beliefs. Not likely that they would be willing to be tortured and murdered for something they believed in, and then to lightly and inaccurately canonize scripture. After Emperor Constantine it was all about theological debates on issues which aren't salvation related. Such as the trinity and whether or not Adam had a belly button.
Still, since you are keen to learn on what I consider to be an immensely fascinating and debatable subject, second only perhaps IMO to eschatology whether you are a pre or post millenialist or a partial pretarian or a dispensationalist(which most Christians today are whether they know it or not), etc., I think you will be an expert on this subject if you ingest this debate:
http://youtu.be/PEcau2LpgL0
Watched it. I haven't been thinking much about this subject since my conversion to Christianity so it helped to form a few new associations. Was nice to see such a civilized discussion, with only mildly destructive undertones from Steve. I specially liked the starting quote that we might have come into existence a few seconds ago with a bunch of memories about a past. Both didn't touch the subject of the earth being only a couple of thousand years old though, as they seem to both think other wise.
As a bit of advise though, if you want to convince someone of creationism, as in either one or the other, I don't think this video is a good choice, specially since a lot of Steve's statements going into that direction have been proven wrong with blended in information. It might weaken the certainty a little bit for some folks, that evolution is a scientific fact, which was the main statement Steve was trying to make, which did not suffer from his wrong statements in between. I was already with him on that one, because I just love philosophy :) , but it didn't disprove that the universe is billions of years old and neither that evolution at least might have been one of the tools God used to make his Creation happen.
For me personally it seems even more genius to put all this potential for the whole universe into the big bang thing, and then maybe adding a spark of life with the same concept of the big bang to create living beings on earth developing into all this species, than to put the whole universe into being a few thousand years ago.
The main conclusion is, that while it can be fun to speculate about it, it just doesn't matter. But I will think and pray for guidance if my point of view or the creationist point of view (or maybe even both :) ) might be a stronghold of the mind, since I got some associations in that direction.
Well thanks for the info I never watched that video. I'm pretty sure Steve Gregg thinks the universe is around 6thousand years old or so. But he also says it's not really important since he can take a literal or figurative stance on it. Fortunately I'm not trying to convert anyone into being a Creationist. It's enough for me that they don't take evolution at it's word. Primarily though I would like to deconvert most Christians from being dispensationalists, or from thinking that they have some bizarre requirement to uphold Mosaic Law(as if that's even possible). My newest understanding of Revelation is that it is timeless. That the apocalypse is always happening along with the salvation of God. It's the best explanation I have found for why every generation thinks it's happening, sometimes more than once, and finds signs from the book it does. That it was designed that way.
"It's enough for me that they don't take evolution at it's word."
Interesting that I didn't do that even before my conversion, because of philosophy, at least when it comes to its negative conclusions, since in a way I still consider it a likely possibility. I had one stream of thought though getting into the reasoning why I thought it to be unlikely. My primary thought was, that the evidence produced by science makes it seem as if the universe is billions of years old and while God does have the power to create it as literal as described in the Bible, it would have to be trickery from Gods side, which is extremely unlikely, to lay evidence for the opposite - the new thought that entered was that the evidence to the contrary might have been from satan. I have to let my brain think about that some more.
"Primarily though I would like to deconvert most Christians from being dispensationalists, or from thinking that have some bizarre requirement to uphold Mosaic Law(as if that;s even possible)."
Could you explain those in a bit more detail please? While I am not that bad in English, it is still my second language and I am also quite new to Christianity, still getting to know a lot of the vocabulary. If I understood it correctly, it is about stuff that has been explained partly in the Fuel Project series, that it is no longer necessary to uphold Mosaic Law - yes? The other thing dispensationalism, I had to google that one, is about people thinking that there will be a pretribunal rupture? Again on that one, the Fuel Project seems to have a book about Revelation, I was thinking of buying, since there is no video yet, which seems to also argue against pretribunal rupture, but that is the only contact with that subject I had so far. If that is correct or not, could you explain it to me and why it is a bad thing? Because people wont be prepared or ... ?
"My newest understanding of Revelation is that it is timeless. That the apocalypse is always happening along with the salvation of God."
Oh I really like that one :). The more other people might think a theory is completely crazy, the more I love it. Very interesting concept, going to let my brain play around with that one. That will be fun :). My spontaneous critic for me would be that the destruction of human livelihood can already be seen without any apocalyptic background - destruction of the rainforrest, the ocean, poisoning everything, ... - but from a higher perspective those things don't have to mean much and it might as well be that we are going to switch on to another plane of existence, where those aren't relevant factors any more, either because it is timeless or just to give the whole thing a few more years (as I said, I like the crazy ones ;) ).
Yes you are right dispensationalism, which is highly prevalent in the Church, centers around the concept of a pre-tribulation rapture. They believe Jesus will return, and then rapture out the Church, and then a tribulation of seven years will begin that are really bad and that's why Jesus spares the Church. Personally this concept is absurd to me as historically Christians have not been spared terrible sufferings, especially Christ himself. There is also considerable evidence IMO that the tribulation has already taken place and many of these prophecies were fulfilled with the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem. So people pick around Revelation saying here's this sign, there's that sign, it's going to happen any minute now! And that is what dispensationalists have been saying since the 1830s when it began. They haven't stopped. Every generation sees signs form the book of revelation. So thats' why the timeless model made sense to me. And it came from a popular Catholic Priest, lol. Catholics can actually be pretty sensible about some things even if their tradition is full of heretical practices. It's essentially you're either unknowingly a dispensationalists like most Christians reading the Left Behind series or listening to the radio hearing the same stuff about the end times all the time or you do some serious inquiry and learn there are other very credible theories.
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