Re: The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back To 195,000 Years Ago

Peter Ruest wrote:

"This doesn't follow, because the time required to prepare a suitable
environment for us is not taken into consideration. It is a question of
"natural" geological, chemical, and biological processes. Of course, God
could take shortcuts if he wanted to. But why should he? By the way, is
it so important that we feel important? Shouldn't we rather rejoice at a
demonstration of _God's_ greatness reflected in the immensity of the
times involved?"

But you're arguing that God for some reason felt obliged to use wholly natural means to prepare the world for humans and yet was free to use wholly supernatural means to go from one species to the next. This would constitute glaring inconsistency (as David Campbell recently suggested). If there indeed was an important reason for God to use natural means to prepare the world, why wouldn't the same reason constrain him to use natural means to the degree possible for generating the different species? Conversely, if natural means aren't important for generating species, they shouldn't be important for preparing their environment, either.

(Actually I'm an ID sympathizer in that I think God has used supernatural means from time to time, but only if and when the world would not conform to his will without such interventions. I'd be OK without most such interventions, but at the moment I simply can't believe they weren't required. On the other hand, once the basic forms of life were established, it's reasonable that wholly natural means gave rise to large numbers and varieties of different species.)

If God takes shortcuts for one process, we'd expect him to take shortcuts for other processes as well. Why? Because we'd like to believe God has important underlying reasons for his actions. If he were inconsistent, we'd get the impression he's capricious; capriciousness would not be conducive to faith and trust.

My theological perspective expects God to be consistent here: He wanted a world with humans whose origin would be as independent of him as possible. This is because, ultimately, he was seeking a wife, not a child. (Why shouldn't God make a world that would allow him the deepest possible sort of spiritual relationship--a relationship of consenting adults--rather than just a father-child relationship?) If God were seeking a child, why wouldn't he do the whole creation in six days? A wife, on the other hand, must come to maturity in some sense apart from him, and that takes time and as much absence of divine intervention as possible.

(George Murphy teaches that all of God's revelation is kenotic. My theology explains why God chose that route.)

Why should we need to feel important? Well, as the Church we owe our sense of importance to our religion, which is anthropocentric, as I stated right at the beginning. And John 3:16. Many scientists look at the scale of the world and conclude that man is zilch. Christianity doesn't allow us to do that.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Peter Ruest<mailto:pruest@dplanet.ch>
  To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 11:36 AM
  Subject: Re: The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back To 195,000 Years Ago

  Don Winterstein wrote (3 Mar 2005):

> ... Christianity teaches that humans are special to God, and that
  God's creation culminates with humankind, especially in the person of
  Christ. That is, the creation according to traditional Christianity is
  anthropocentric. <

  Agreed.

> Given this premise, it's hard enough to make the billions of years
  without humans seem reasonable. Add the appearance of aimlessness in
  the origins and extinctions of species to those billions of humanless
  years and the minds God gave us all are going to start asking why. Yes,
  we acknowledge that God can do what he wants, but doesn't it tend to
  make us feel less important than the traditions taught to find that
  almost none of world history involved us? So there's a need to account
  for God's behavior. If we're so important, why did God spend three
  billion years or so nurturing only bacteria? <

  This doesn't follow, because the time required to prepare a suitable
  environment for us is not taken into consideration. It is a question of
  "natural" geological, chemical, and biological processes. Of course, God
  could take shortcuts if he wanted to. But why should he? By the way, is
  it so important that we feel important? Shouldn't we rather rejoice at a
  demonstration of _God's_ greatness reflected in the immensity of the
  times involved?

  The same kind of situation applies to cosmology. Do you consider it a
  "waste" to have a universe of 10^22 stars, today extending through
  billions of light years, growing for 10 billion years before the Earth
  is even produced? The anthropic astrophysical justification for this has
  repeatedly been presented in a fine way by Hugh Ross. In brief, the long
  time is required because a large universe is required for a
  life-protecting environment to be feasible.

  A similar case, i.e. that the long time was required, can be made for
  the history of the Earth. Just think of the collision forming our Moon
  and the Earth's magnetic-field-generating core protecting us from cosmic
  radiation, then producing a revolving mantle and plate tectonics to
  generate a circulation of elements required by life. Then, huge amounts
  of oxygen had to be produced by photosynthesis, in order to oxidize the
  iron formations, before larger than microscopic animals could live and
  move quickly in an oxygen-containing ocean and atmosphere, and all that
  while continuously keeping life-friendly temperatures and weather. Up to
  that point, 4 billion years of the Earth's age were already spent. We
  are only just beginning to get a picture of the interrelatedness of the
  development of the Earth and its biosphere.

  If you feel God might at least have abbreviated the last 400 million
  years somewhat, ask yourself in which of the earlier geological periods
  you would like to have lived instead of today! I think in any of them,
  we might be quite miserable, if we could survive at all. And I'm not
  just thinking of Jurassic Park.

> Rational people seek rational explanations. We don't demand an
  explanation, because we know that Christianity is foolishness to the
  wise of the world. Still, we know from the successes of science that
  the human mind can comprehend much of the world quite well. Therefore
  we conclude that God must have had some deep underlying reason for
  bringing us into existence in the slow and circuitous way that he did.
  To say that each species of bacteria, etc., was a special creation
  suggests that there was no deep underlying reason but that God was
  simply--pardon the expression--playing with his world. <

  Many of those bacteria were and are quite essential to our survival. For
  2 billion years, cyanobacteria made most of the oxygen to prepare our
  home. And why should it diminish God's honor if he liked to "play" (even
  "play dice", cf. Einstein, or anything else) in his creation?

> If God was primarily interested in humans, and his methods involved
  only special creations, our imperfect, finite minds can easily think of
  ways he could have reached his goals much more efficiently than the way
  he actually chose. So why did he unnecessarily deprive himself of
  success for so long? <

  I think it might take scientists another 100 years or so to comprehend,
  perhaps not even fully yet, the efficiency of the way God actually chose
  for developing the Earth's ecology. Of course, I don't believe "his
  methods involved only special creations", but he used evolution, and
  (perhaps) scientifically invisible providence. And "success" is a
  concept which I don't think is applicable at all to God's activity -
  unless you believe in a process god.

> Now I don't have anything against God's playing with the world, but
  if that's what he was doing, I get the impression that humankind isn't
  as important to him as our religion has told us. <

  I think humankind is so important to him that he "went out of his way"
  to prepare a livable world for us. If he made 10^22 stars just for this
  visible world, how inconceivably more marvellous will be the future home
  Jesus is preparing for us!

  Peter

  --
  Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
  <pruest@dplanet.ch<mailto:pruest@dplanet.ch>> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
  "..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)
Received on Sun Mar 6 05:06:48 2005