Absolutely not if by evolution you mean the "humans were formed from some genetic bowl of soup" rubbish.  Or that we used to be monkeys; that's a load of rubbish too.  God created humans to be above other animals, therefore we could not have first been monkeys.

However, if by evolution you mean that animals have evolved and changed into what there are now, then I cannot argue with you.  That is not to say that we used to be monkeys, we just aren't neandertholls (sp?) anymore.

Absolutely not if by evolution you mean the "humans were formed from some genetic bowl of soup" rubbish.  Or that we used to be monkeys; that's a load of rubbish too.  God created humans to be above other animals, therefore we could not have first been monkeys.

How do you know that the "genetic bowl of soup" wasn't the work of God as well?

However, if by evolution you mean that animals have evolved and changed into what there are now, then I cannot argue with you.  That is not to say that we used to be monkeys, we just aren't neandertholls (sp?) anymore.

That's all evolution is, really.

And who says Adam and Eve weren't neanderthals? Or gorillas? Or maybe... chimps?

Emilio said:

" If God created time and space, then he is outside of it and therefore is not affected by it- time has no meaning to God! I believe that God created the laws of physics, and therefore everything that results from such laws is God's creation. To say that the species evolved does not deny God's act of creation. Quite the opposite: evolution is the science that studies how God created the species."

Can you point out the three mistakes Emilio makes?

First mistake:

The problems rests on a misunderstanding of what contemporary scientists mean by that word evolution. If they meant only a gradual process of God-guided creation, then Emilio might be on the right track. A God-guided process is not what modern science educators mean by "evolution", however. They are absolutely insistent that evolution is an unguided and mindless process, and that our existence is therefore a fluke rather than a planned outcome.

A famous evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson, said:

" Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

If nature is all there is, then nature had to have the ability to do its own creating.

The Darwinian theory doesn't just say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and God had nothing to do with it.


Second mistake:

Even if evolution itself was mindless, God could still be the author of the ultimate laws of nature by which evolution operates. Thus we have Emilio's second attempt: God made the laws of physics and chemistry, and evolution follows those laws. Therefore God is ultimately the Creator of everything, even if evolution was, as the Darwinists say, unsupervised and purposeless.

The notion that God is a remote First Cause who establishes the scientific laws and thereafter leaves nature to its own devices is called deism.

The important question is not whether God exists; it is whether God cares about us, and whether we need to care about God's purposes. Deism answers no to these questions.

Emilio is willing to exchange the Creator God of the Bible for the lifeless First Cause of deism. It's like trading real gold for counterfeit money.

Third mistake:

The kind of science Emilio is worried about says that " in the beginning were the particles" and "creation required no preexisting mind or purpose." One account starts with God, the other with matter.

On one hand, science is empirical. This means that scientists rely on experiments, observations and calculations to develop theories and test them. On the other hand, contemporary science is naturalistic and materialistic in philosophy. What this means is that materialist explanations for all phenomena are assumed to exist.

Thanks to Phillip Johnson for the Emilio example !

Emilio believed he could be both a Creationist and an Evolutionist. I explained his thought process on this issue. Then provided what was wrong with the issue. Unless I am misinformed or don't understand, I thought I was on topic.

I think it's logically possible... the idea of intelligent evolution was one of the few things that brought me to a belief in a God in the first place.  I believed (what is referred to above as) Emilio's Second Mistake for about a year.

the great thing about the CONCEPT of the darwinian mechanism (even if you don't feel that's what happened in nature) is the way that stepwise improvement can occur because (non-random) selection allows the accumulation of just the "useful" changes even when those changes arose randomly.

but this is just the worst case scenario - the mechanism is still powerful under non-random changes. Think of the car industry: nobody really designs a car from scratch; despite all the idiots coming up with idiot ideas we still get this continued progression because we repeatedly change last year's concept of a car.

My point is that god can make mutations do anything he likes, evolution can still proceed in a way indistinguishable from the way biologists expect and yet this is still a type of creationism

Just out of curiosity, is there ANYTHING that can't be explained by step-wise processes?

Why can't these things be explained that way?

Because you say so?

The things you listed.

Phil?  Is that you?

I asked if there was anything that couldn't be explained via stepwise procesess.  You responded with a couple of examples.  I wanted to hear if you had any reasons why they couldn't be explained that way, or if that was just your opinion.  And you got confused somehow in there.   The forum rules are not clear on this point, I realize, so let me explicitly state that you are permitted to scroll up and read previous posts if you get lost somewhere.