User:Jonathan/Creation & Evolution: How should we respond? - 1
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- by Bro Jonathan Pogson, 2 June 2018
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The Glory of God
When discussing creation and evolution we must first acknowledge that the heavens declare the glory of God, and that the Bible points all men to consider Creation as fundamental to who God is. Nature is God’s self evident witness; day after day and night after night it reveals knowledge; knowledge of God’s eternal power, his righteousness, his goodness, his character and his invisible attributes. Because of this evidence God holds all men accountable and without excuse.[1] And we are not exempt; God will humiliate even his most favoured servants when in ignorance of creation they presume to know God’s way and “hide counsel by words without knowledge.”[2]
These simple truths came home to me with force during the 90’s soon after joining the Anglo-Australian Observatory in 1988 for work. Like many Christadelphians then I thought that modern biology was at odds with belief in God and the Bible, and imagined that Genesis could be harmonised with scientific evidence by appeal to the ‘gap theory’ as recommended in 1848 by John Thomas in Elpis Israel[3]. But in 1990 I was appointed to the role of Telescope Operator and for 17 years took my place at the controls of the giant instrument to probe the immensity of creation in time and space. It was a deeply humbling, awe-inspiring and formative experience. Directly engaged in frontline research operating one of the world’s finest telescopes I saw with my own eyes what most people would only later read about in books or see on TV and the internet. I soon realised how utterly wrong and naive I had been, and that the dominant voices in our community are hopelessly ignorant of science, and speak nonsense against its discoveries. I determined to seek where the truth in Genesis lay. In time, and helped by Harry Tennant, I found the answers in Jesus Christ; for whom all things were made, in whom all things hold together and for whom the ages were created from the beginning. [4] We would be wise to pause and reflect here. On this topic most of our teaching is a disgrace; we trample over things too wonderful to grasp, and despise truths we neither know nor comprehend.[5]
For if God truly exists, and if the Bible is his Word, then like Abraham our faith in God and our understanding of the Gospel will not be threatened by a scientific understanding but will be consolidated and enriched when we consider the awesome spectacle the heavens reveal today. This has certainly been my own experience. But there is a flip side, for the Creation is no more a respecter of persons than its Creator. As Thomas Huxley famously expressed it, "Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." Applying this essential humility in hand with the Scriptures leads to an important realisation:- for if the heavens declare knowledge, [6] and provide compelling reasons for faith,[7] and if Nature is witness to God’s goodness, [8] and if Creation reveals God’s eternal power and invisible qualities to all humanity, [9] then when God’s own witness demonstrates that evolution is true it follows that evolution also declares the glory of God, and is witness to His eternal creative power, and is a source of knowledge about God’s ways and character that can provide assurance for faith in Him and the Gospel. And if evolution is true then those who oppose it are confounding the wisdom and power of God, and thereby doing harm to the Gospel.[10]
- ↑ Psalm 19:1-4, Psalm 50:6, Romans 1:20
- ↑ Job 38:2
- ↑ ‘Fragments, however, of the wreck of this pre-Adamic world have been brought to light by geological research, to the records of which we refer the reader, for a detailed account of its discoveries, with this remark, that its organic remains, coal fields, and strata, belong to the ages before the formation of man, rather than to the era of the creation, or the Noachic flood.’, Thomas, J, Elpis Israel, p. 11 (1990 ed.).
- ↑ John 1:1-17, Colossians 1:15-18, Hebrews 1:1-2.
"Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say supernatural) plan“
— Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the microwave background radiation, 1978 Nobel Prize recipient in physics; Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83 - ↑ Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know....therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Job 42:3,6 - ↑ The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. Psalm 19:1-2
- ↑ And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:5-6
- ↑ Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.Acts 14:17
- ↑ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. Romans 1:19-20
- ↑ This is not a new problem as the following complaint from Augustine shows:-
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticised and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience and the light of reason?”
— Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (translated and annotated by John H Taylor, S.J.; Newman Press, New York, 1982)
