Why The Retrovirus Argument for Evolution is No Threat to the Christ-Centered Model

What is the strongest evidence for evolution? I had a dialogue recently where someone put it like this....

We have pseudo genes for many olfactory receptors that our distant cousins supposedly have? Or how about the fact that we share the same endogenous retroviruses as the great apes in the same place in our genome? That's pretty powerful to me.

The term for the trail of such genetic clues is "Nested Hierarchies". There are some genetic snippets that we share only with chimpanzees. A wider set is shared with chimpanzees and gorillas. This pattern is hard to explain in terms of de novo special creation as most people conceive it. While Winston Ewert has done some interesting work regarding other explanations for these nested hierarchies, I'd say my acquaintance is correct. The nested hierarchy evidence strongly supports common descent.  

However, the evidence isn't quite the slam dunk that many naturalists believe. The question is in the nature of the descent. Proving the claims of naturalism is very difficult. Much more than most of its adherents let on or even understand. If they insist that nature alone explains all there is, no exceptions, that is quite an expansive claim. 

Now I said that the retrovirus data was hard for creationists to explain, but much depends on your definition of "de novo" creation, and your definition of "evolution". Despite all of the internet flame wars, there are some commonly accepted definitions of evolution which would not exclude creationism and vice-versa. Naturalism is excluded by creationism. But creationism is not excluded under some definitions of evolution. Many definitions don't have naturalistic premises built into the them, even if readers often impose them from the outside.  

For example, if God wanted to go from a fish to an amphibian I suppose he could have started from scratch. But He also could have done what I did as a coder and cut and paste from my old work and then just tie it together with more modules so that it is a new program. He could have gone from amphibian to fish in one move, but He did so by starting with lungfish "code" which He then modified as needed. 

When I re-purposed old code into a new program, on the first step I pasted in a big block. I would even leave in some unused code. or code that no longer does anything. This is a fair parallel for some of these genetic bits we see. They are analogous to unused "code". Suppose God did something like this when He was forming new kinds. Notice how if this happened often enough, the result would still look like the nested hierarchies that we see. This even though God intervened personally a million times. This would be a form of special creation that might also meet some definitions of evolution. For example it would be "Change in gene frequencies over time" but the source of the biggest changes would not be from nature acting alone. This scenario is definitely creationist, but under some definitions it is technically also evolution. It is naturalism which is excluded. 

Normally it is considered bad programming form to leave in any dead ends or extra code that you don't use for the new program. So some might be tempted to rule my scenario out on the grounds that "God would not be a worse coder than we humans". But this is short sighted. The big reason we clean up code is because it will confuse us or other programmers who look at it later if there is a bunch of code that is no longer called on left laying around. We do it because we are not sharp enough to see right away that it isn't functional or essential. That limitation doesn't apply to God. He doesn't need to clean up after Himself so He won't get confused later. 

Do you think it is unfair for me to describe such a scenario because it would be so hard to tell from naturalistic evolution? Well, I am about to take it further and if it is unfair it isn't my doing. Like I said, naturalists have set a high bar for themselves with the expansiveness of their claims. If they want to make absolutist all-encompassing claims then they should have to provide evidence of the same nature. As you will see, they don't have it and I don't expect they will be able to obtain it. It is beyond the scope of this post, but I'd make the case that not only is the assumption of naturalism as a philosophy unjustified, they can barely hang onto the idea that it is reasonable to think that known natural processes could have produced some of the biggest changes we see in earth's biota. 

Taking my scenario above farther, and extending a bit of an olive branch to all but the more ardent naturalists, there is another explanation that I think blends creation and evolution together in an almost 50/50 manner.......

Suppose instead of going from fish to amphibian by cutting and pasting code and building a new creature, God simply adapted a particular school of fish much like our genetic engineers do. Maybe He did it over a few dozen generations instead of building a new creature all at once. But all of the changes He did were acts of creation, not something that nature did or was likely to do in the time allowed. He just did it starting with a population of fish rather than taking some fish "code" and modifying it to make an amphibian "de novo". Rather He made "de novo" changes in existing organisms until He wound up with a "de novo" organism. Fifty generations later you wind up with amphibians that would still have the genetic markers in question. Is that "evolution"? Yes, under some definitions. But it is also creationism because God repeatedly intervened in nature to enable new forms of animal life. It just isn't naturalism.

This might be where some naturalist would object that whatever god operated like this, it would not be the one in scripture. That's because there is a class of unbeliever who thinks that Christians should not be able to alter the interpretation of scripture that was predominant when they were born, but they, the naturalists, should be free to alter their interpretation of evidence from the natural universe on a regular basis. I am not a big fan of gross hypocrisy, so I don't indulge such double-standards. 

Creationism isn't limited to God forming creatures directly out of earth. Although I do believe that happened within the garden, that's not what the text says happened in the larger world outside. In the Christ-centered model chapter two isn't a retelling of the same story as chapter one. It is a tale within that larger tale, of the initiation of God's plan to reconcile that larger creation to Himself, ultimately through Messiah. Yes the limited set of animals in the garden were specially created, but they were created as domestically useful versions of some of the animals outside the garden. 

What about the animals made outside the garden? The text gives us less details about the larger work of filling the world with the much larger variety of animals there. All it says is that God commanded the earth and seas to bring them forth.....as if creation itself had some creative power...but then says that God involved Himself in this process. That sounds a lot more like what I have described above. So if an unbeliever wants to undermine the veracity of the text, the above scenarios are the kinds of things they would need to discredit. I don't think they can. They are more likely to discredit themselves trying. 

I would add that even an act of de novo creation like the kind described in the garden, if it was based on an existing type, could still be expected to have all those markers. For example, I think the more limited set of creatures God formed in chapter two were based on more domestic strains of the ones made in chapter one. If He formed some cattle that were suitable for domestication with an Auroch gene template, then they would have the same genetic retrovirus profile as their wild brethren. Why bother to take it out? It is what He was adding or changing functionally that was what was important. And those wild ones He could have formed step by step from a stem mammal in the gradual manner I described for fish to amphibians above.

With man, the situation is different. God wasn't assisting the earth or seas with a command He gave. He did the job Himself. In the case of Adam, by direct formation from earth elements. I believe that scripture teaches there were already people, humans like us, outside the garden when Adam was formed. Whether they were formed in the same way as Adam or not is an open question I guess, but it was God's doing and not nature's. But once again, why start from scratch if you have some perfectly good hominin code available? 

When most "theistic evolutionists" talk about this I think they are not saying what I am saying. They would be more like DIESTIC evolutionists. Where God set up all the dominos in advance so that when He knocked the first one over He could just sit back and watch the rest of them fall.

That isn't what I am talking about. The universe can't do God's will without God's help (thus it is a fit universe for creatures like us). Even if He told the SEAS to bring forth living creatures, they can't do it without Him. Maybe they could try for 100 million years and get stuck at the Ediacarans. When He steps in we get the Cambrian. 

Those with faith in naturalism may ask "why is assisting nature even necessary" because they are convinced that nature alone could do the job within the time frame she had. But the truth is we only know what has been done. We don't know if it was nature alone doing it. Indeed Gunter Bechly's three biggest objections to nature alone being responsible still stand. These are the information problem, the search space problem, and the waiting time problem. The scenario I described above, pulled straight from my view of early Genesis, would solve those problems even if it isn't a natural solution. 

The Christ Centered Model has no problem with any of the endogenous retrovirus evidence, or any other evidence from either history or the natural universe. It only takes issue with the a priori insistence that nature alone produced everything we see. The evidence itself is all reconciled in the most amazing manner- assume the text is speaking of the work and person of Christ from the start. If you do that first, what you get effortlessly reconciles all the evidence from nature and history to the text. 

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