Not Even Sponges Came Early

 "The evidence for sponges from Precambrian strata iscircumstantial, often based on confirmation bias, and lackstesting of valid alternative non-animal hypotheses."

So concludes this comprehensive 2014 study of the seventeen instances of claims for Pre-Cambrian evidence for sponges. Instead, it turns out the first solid evidence we have for the appearance of sponges is the Cambrian, as with every other phyla of life alive today (and a good many which have gone extinct). 

So far as I know, there has been no evidence uncovered to refute this conclusion in the last seven years. The Cambrian Explosion is indeed an explosion. Whatever the mysterious Ediacaran forms were, the body plans which fill our world today show up within an astonishingly short period of time by evolutionary standards. How did nature prodcue new forms and change orders of magnitude bigger and faster than we see today? The creationist answer is that nature had help. 

Also see this study. 240 million years of missing glass spicules. The DNA and other evidence suggests that sponges should have been around, producing spicules, 240 million years (at least) before we find them. Of course life forms showing up way later than they should based on the distance in their genes is very common and very large problem in the early Cambrian. I would call it a biomarker for Divine Intervention. 

Crisis in Particle Physics - Are they looking at this wrong?

 I really just want to start with a placeholder to this article talking about using "UV-MR interactions" to solve some of the thorny problems they have encountered in particle physics. This is not my speciality, but I have long wondered if they were looking at this wrong and that gravity could be unified with the EM force simply by looking at it as the "net change" from EM-force/ matter interactions at the smallest scales. Doing so has the potential to also solve the mystery of "Dark Matter" and maybe even "Dark Energy"  I am intrigued because a lot of what the article said dovetails well with some of my musings on the matter. 

I even wrote a bit about it, so long ago that I put in on my old Arkansas Politics blog where it was completely out of place. I do wish someone who is an expert in the field would take a look at it. To do so and give it a fair shot, they would need to approach it in a more open-minded manner and not reject it out of hand because of its simplicity yet in a way that was far out-of-whack with how they have been talking about these issues- until now apparently. 

I reproduce some of my pithy postulates which lead to my conclusions below, 

In a universe containing only two monopole particles of opposite charge, the force of gravity and the EM force are one and the same.

When an EM wave of high enough frequency to be resonant with the spin of a particle passes that particle, the particle’s motion is altered so as to maximize the EM force of attraction and minimize the EM force of repulsion during the interaction. I call this EM Wave-Particle Optimization.

During EM Wave-Particle Optimization the particle moves so that attractive forces increase while repulsive forces decrease. This results in a net attractive force for the event, which we call gravity.

Particles generate tiny EM waves as they spin, and the waves they generate are most ideal in form to maximize EM wave-particle optimization, unlike waves of longer wavelength, such as visible light.  Scientists should be looking at incredibly high frequencies for gravity waves, not just super low ones from black hole collisions. I am not convinced that the shock waves that they occasionally detect from colliding black holes is even a gravity wave.

In macro-scale objects, the gravity waves of their constituent atoms can resonate with one another to produce waves of increased (but still low) average amplitude (still at incredibly high frequency).

When a photon strikes a particle it produces a repulsive force. If the wavelength associated with  the photon is too large for EM wave-particle optimization to work efficiently then the repulsive force of light pressure is stronger than gravity within that EM-wave/photon system. This is known as radiation pressure.

Virtual matter pops in and out of existence, sometimes sending gravity waves out into the cosmos before they disappear. This helps makes some regions seem "heavier" than their regular matter can account for and makes up a component of "dark matter". UPDATE: I note with interest this article which says they have observed matter being created from high-energy photons striking one another. IN this case an electron-positron pair which quickly annihilate each other. But I propose not before contributing a tiny amount of gravitational pull to the cosmos.  Another update. Have they looked small enough and cold enough to see that gravity is a result of electromagnetic interactions with this experiment? What if an absence of heat allows virtual particles to pop into existence more easily and last longer? It would explain the "halo" of dark matter observed around galaxies.  Another update: diffuse galaxies have more diffuse dark matter halos. Denser galaxies have dense dark matter halos. As would be the case if I am right. It isn't that dark matter doesn't have collisions, but they are not around long enough to have them often. The amount of dark matter is a function of the EM energy from a galaxy, especially at a range where the ultra-short wavelength waves can only constructively interfere because you are away from a galaxy's center where it is coming from all directions.

Gradualism is NOT Back, but they are Trying

 "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."- Mohatma Ghandi

It looks like we are on stage three now. I say this because of a study that was recently concocted which purported to show that darwinian gradualism could still explain the biological record despite the appearance of a vast number of sudden changes that seem to fly in the face of any gradualistic answers. The study was entitled "General statistical model shows that macroevolutionary patterns and processes are consistent with Darwinian gradualism"by M. Pagel et al. Here is an article, optimistically entitled "Gradual Evolution is back", on the study. 

Over my years of attempted dialogue the narrative has changed. Early on, the narrative was that there was no such thing as "macroevolution", only "evolution". A long series of gradual minor changes becomes a big change over time. You still hear that now and then from those whose knowledge isn't current. But lately the focus has shifted as it has become obvious that there are very many large and in evolutionary terms very fast changes in living things at certain times. These periods of rapid change are usually followed by long periods of relative stasis. 

A handful of scientists in prior decades attempted to float the idea of massive sudden changes in organisms via natural means. The proponents called it "punctuated equlibrium", the critics "the Hopeful Monster Theory". Either way, it looked too much like miracles for the dedicated philosophical naturalists who have control of our science institutions, and it has fallen into disrupute. After all, there are no known evolutionary mechanisms anywhere in the animal kingdom that have any reasonable chance of producing such changes at the rates and volumes observed in the biological record. 

What they needed then, was a way to show how known evolutionary methods which are inherently gradulaistic could produced big changes quickly in some cases. Rapid gradualism seems like a contradiction in terms, but that is what they needed to preserve a naturalistic explanation for the earth's biosphere. With this study, they claim they have found it. I guess many will accept their claim. Just don't look too closely at the details. This study will only convince those who want to be convinced. Of course science has a higher standard than that. Even propaganda is designed to seem superficially plausible to those who want to be convinced. 

Please forgive me here as I break into a few paragraphs to explain where I am coming from. What I have to say may not fit any of your existing categories, and thus further explanation will often be essential to understanding my point. Are these mechanisms enough to provide a reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth?  I say "no", though do I acknowledge that nature has significant power to shape living things. In other words, "evolution happens." Indeed as I have explained before, many if not most defintions of evolution do not exclude creationism. "Change over time" says nothing about whether the change came from naturalistic causes only, or whether God acted to cause the largest changes and nature only filled in the gaps.

At this point I expect two tribalistic reactions, one from creationists and the other from naturalists. The naturalist will cry "God of the gaps!". Here is why this accusation falls flat: I am not saying that God stumbled into a universe complete with laws and decided to intervene in it. I am saying that He created a universe including the laws but is Himself above them. He is God of both the gaps and everything inbetween them. And the universe is a test, a test for beings like us. And to be suitable for the test it has to be like us- we can't really do God's will without God's help, and neither can creation. I could go on about this but the bottom line is that most creationists have it very wrong concerning what scripture says about the initial conditions of the universe. 

The tribal creationist might recoil at my "mixing" of evolution and creation. To them I would suggest a closer look at the actual text of Genesis chapter one that they think they are defending. God commanded the waters and the earth to bring forth living creatures. That was the original command. Subsequent to that, God intervened Himself and formed "kinds" of various broad categories. That doesn't change the initial command. It just means that what I said in the paragraph above is true. The earth can't do God's will without God's help. He did the hard stuff, but the earth itself filled out the details in accordance with God's command. So evolution and creation are working hand in hand. This doesn't apply to humanity of course, but that is for another post. 

It is my position that what science is discovering about nature confirms at least that aspect of the text of the creation account in Genesis. There is constant graudual change which is driven by nature combined with (in the past) a large number of greater changes which happened quickly and seem beyond any reasonable natural explanation available to us. The Pagel paper attempts to fill this gap with a model (they call it the "Fabric model") which they offer to show how gradualism can still be the answer, even if it often wasn't gradual in effect.

To even attempt this, they must cede some ground. They freely acknowledge the distinction between "macroevolution" and "microevolution", They then divise two categories of observed change. One they call "evolvability", which is how well a population of organisms can adapt to their environment. You might think that is all the positive power that evolution has, but they describe another component which they call "directional". This they vaguely describe as one which changes which environment is optimal for the population of organisms. The two types interact, but they say there is no correlation between them as far magnitude is concerned. For example, an organism which doesn't have much room left to further adapt to its environment is just as able to have a directional change as one with a lot of "evolvability" room in its present environment. Thus every "evolutionary dead end" is still a possible source of great change, right up until extinction. That's gotta help the odds some, right?                          

The heart of their study is a computer model in which they use these two methods working together to get big changes in a small amount of time with gradualistic processes. But how flexible do they have to make the scenario in order to do this?  In their introduction they are vague enough, but admit, "Our methodology does not constrain the number, position or trajectories of effects,...". 

So unlike the real world where there are physical and chemical contraints on basically everything, in the model, none of these things were contrained. And just in case you missed the hint that this risks becoming a sophisticated GIGO exercise, they add "By comparison to parametric models that fit one or a small number of processes throughout a tree, the Fabric model is typically rich in parameters, and this requires care in fitting and interpretation..."

Did they just say their algos basically allow them to make up different rules as they go along? I think so. They are saying in effect that a process that happens over here need not be happening throughout the tree or even anywhere else in the tree. And the parameters of those processes are varied. It really sounds like they are saying that the mathematical equivilent of miracles are built into their computer model, but let's not call it that! That is what they are trying to not say. 

Maybe that is why they follow their statement up with "But the Fabric model’s approach avoids the potential for one or a handful of effects in a tree to give the impression that the parametric model’s form is true everywhere in the tree when it might not even be true of any part of the tree."

Got it? Things can happen from time to time in some part of the tree we build that are not true in any part of the tree when you look at it from the perspective of fixed laws! That sounds like a fancy way of saying in their model, miracles can happen. OK then, but why are you using the model to defend a naturlistic view of evolution?

"The average correlation in the posterior sample between the observed and predicted data at the tips of the tree (obtainable from Eqs. (4) or (5)) is 0.90 ± 0.03, 95% range 0.82-0.95; we do not explore the predictive capabilities of the model further in this paper." - so one not-great fit even after all the leeway they gave themselves, and then they quit looking. It doesn't sound like they thought their results were exactly bursting with exploratory power. More like just enough so that they could spread the word that they have "shown" that known evolutionary processes can explain it all!

On the positive side, they used the term "macroevolution" freely. A refreshing change from the conversations I've had with ardent naturalists who insist that there is no such thing, only evolution. Even though that is basically what these researchers are trying to prove too, they admit that the best way to get a fit is to 1) not have fixed rules, allow some things to happen that can't ordinarily happen and 2) view the system in terms of two distinct kinds of changes, directional changes and evolvability changes. Both must occur for macroevolution to occur in their view.  Microevolution can happen with either one, but mostly the latter.

I say that because they write....

Directional and evolvability changes are substantial and distinct

Comparison of the five models’ marginal likelihoods (Table 1) illustrates one of the central points of this article: that a statistical description of macroevolution must account for the substantial and distinct contributions of directional (β) and evolvability (υ) changes: modelling one of these processes at the expense of the other or linking them a priori, risks missing important elements of the macroevolutionary picture.

They based their findings on looking at only one very narrow slice of nature- changes in body size in mammals. So they were not even talking about the creation of new orders of animals but rather the changes in body size in the orders and sub-orders of a particular class. Even at this level, changes that were "large and abrubt" frequently occurred, or as the heading of the next section put it.

"Directional changes are large and possibly abrupt"

And in this section they note, " the net amount of directional change in a branch appears not to be limited in any general way by the length of that branch.". Just calling it "directional change" doesn't make a large and abrupt change any more likely. It still looks like a miracle and it still contravenes what most of them have been telling us for decades about how evolution was supposed to work.

Zooming out to the big picture, if there is no correlation between directional changes and evolvability changes, and having no correlation is necessary to their model, then all they are doing is "spreading out" the miracle, not eliminating it. That's because you would need a lot of graudal directional changes in a row, in the same direction, intersperesed in the evolvability changes to get the big and abrupt directional changes observed. 

So instead of rolling pair of die with a billion faces and rolling snake eyes when needed, you have a thousand rolls of dice with a million faces and each of them come up snake eyes when needed, moving you in the same direction each time. The results are still unreasonably improbable even if you break the odds down into a series of somewhat more probably but still unlikely events. Maybe no one directional change is unreasonably improbable in itself, but stack them all together and it becomes so. A population of organisms may vary rarely have a successful mutation producing a "directional change", but to assume that the same population can reach fixation on dozens of such events which happen over a brief period of time so that a "large and abrupt" direction change occurs is still as indistinguishable from a miracle as the original Hopeful Monster theory. 

Ironically, what they are doing sounds a lot like the language I used five years ago to describe how creationism and evolution are not inherently contradictory. I wrote "Take the gap between a fish and an amphibian. What if over the course of thirty or forty generations God acted to put just enough changes in each generation that they would still be able to be birthed and bred by natural means but each generation would also be further toward the amphibian end of things? This so that even though no amphibian was created out of thin air, or clay, one still had a very different creature though only forty generations removed from the fish. That result would be due to genetic engineering moving things a bit further along each generation. That is “descent with modification” but the modification that matters is via genetic engineering. So is that evolution, special creation and intelligent design all rolled up into one?" 

Okay so maybe they are saying 4000 or more generations instead of 40, but does that really matter? And it is not because they know it took that long, it is just because they have a hard time believing what they have seen. In a sense they are doing what creationists have been accused of, "Argument from Incredulity". They find it increduous that God could intervene in nature and so they must propose models like this one instead, which might make creationists incredulous. The issue isn't who is arguing from incredulity, but whose incredulity is the most reasonable.

Given all this, I didn't feel the need to dive into the details of this study as I sometimes do with others. Scientists have every right to keep looking for natural explanations, but it is pretty clear to me the science media is way over-selling this. The researchers were honest about their goals- they are trying to retain gradualism (thus keeping the door open for naturalism) in the face of massive evidence that these changes were very often not gradual, especially the largest ones. But the result sounds a lot like what I as a particular form of creationist was proposing five years ago! Perhaps we are finally reaching a place where creationists can find out they still have something important to learn about the bible, and evolutionists can learn whether they are really committed to science or their real committment is to philosophical naturalism. 

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My book on early Genesis is mostly not about this, but something far more wonderful- a proof that early Genesis was pointing to Christ, thus proving the validity of both scripture and the Christian faith. Amazingly, doing so resolves the supposed conflicts between scripture and science merely as a by-product of viewing the text through the lens of Christ. 

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Heiser and the New Translations are So So WRONG about the 89th Psalm

 The King James says:

5 And the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O LORD: thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints.

6 For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD?

My thesis is that these verses are saying no one in heaven or on earth can compare to the LORD. The parts I think refer to heaven are in blue, the parts referring to earth are in earth-tone. Heiser and some of the newer translations make it sound like the verses are just talking about "Divine Counsels" in heaven.  One Heiser fan complained on my YOUTUBE video about this..

These verses are exclusively about the divine council ; color coding the passages you want to be about humans/earth imposes meaning onto the passage that is not in the verse: "Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones! 6 For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings[b] is like the Lord, 7 a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him? 8 O Lord God of hosts, who is mighty as you are, O Lord, with your faithfulness all around you?" (Psalms 89). Coloring the different parts of a verse does not make your interpretation accurate.

My response: No, the translation you are relying on imposes meaning that is not in the verse. Here is a link to where the word translated above as "assembly" is used. It is routinely used as an assembly of God's holy people, in an "assembly of the LORD" https://biblehub.com/hebrew/bikhal_6951.htm 

The word in your verse 5 above translates "holy ones"- here is a link to how it is used. ...

  https://biblehub.com/hebrew/bikhal_6951.htm Again it is overwhelmingly used of human beings who are sanctified and set apart for God! Indeed that is what the word means. It doesn't mean "Divine Being". It means "set apart ones'. Holy in that sense. Like Israel was supposed to be, and Christians are supposed to be today. Here is the meaning from Strongs.. note the root word. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/6918.htm 

In verse six what is translated 'heavenly beings' there is "ben-ne elim". The first part means "sons of" and the last is plural for "El", which means god or God. So in the plural, it means 'gods'. So it isn't even saying these are "sons of God" like in Job. It is saying they are "sonS of godS". That is the group that is mistranslated "heavenly beings" in your translation. Is it talking about the Nephilim here? No, in the ANE context kings declared that they were descendants of gods. So verse six is doing just like verse five. No one above can compare to the Lord, and no one below can either. How can heavenly beings have sons, unless it is talking about the Nephilim, which is a silly view? 

Verse seven is cut off in your cite but it has the same theme. The word for "holy ones" is the same as is used in verse six which is often used of the human congregation of the Lord. As we keep reading the pattern continues. …9You rule the raging sea; when its waves mount up, You still them. 10You crushed Rahab like a carcass; You scattered Your enemies with Your mighty arm. 11The heavens are Yours, and also the earth. The earth and its fullness You founded.…" So it sums up by saying both the heavens and the earth are His. Totally keeping with the pattern I am teaching, and contrary to that of Heiser. 

He just has this wrong. He is also wrong most places he tries to impose the viewpoints of the intertestamental period Jews unto the text. They didn't get it and there is no reason why we should look to them for meaning.

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Denis Lamoureux and Classification of Origin Scenarios

 I attended a Zoom lecture from Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux billed "beyond the Evolution vs. Creation debate". Lamoureux is a doctor of both theology and biology. A Canadian, he has the voice, cadence and mannerisms of Dr. Jordan Peterson. 

The highlight of the lecture wasn't anything to do with the proposed topic. Counter-intuitively, his strong-suit was connecting on an emotional level describing his own conversion to Christianity and God's work in his life. Especially moving was his discourse on the problem of pain as expressed in the slow and painful death of his godly mother. It is obvious that this man loves God and cares about people. 

Ironically, the weak point of the talk was the nominal topic. He went from a handout which he developed, part of which is pictured below. He used scriptures which he said pointed to a three-tier view of the cosmos which he posited was so far from known scientific observation of the cosmos that it precluded the idea of concordism. That is, that the bible will speak with accuracy about the natural universe because scripture and the universe have the same Author. 

I think he gave this topic very short shift and as such it would not have been possible form him to have made his case even if he is correct. It is true that the ancients had some ideas about the construction of the universe that we know to be false, the question is whether scripture really takes the same position or whether it takes some other position that was misinterpreted by the ancients. 

I would argue the latter. The Apostle Paul wrote of being taking up to "the third heaven", clearly his cosmology didn't fit the "three tiered" view of the Ancient Near East. Dr. Lamoureux made repeated reference to "the waters above" to indicate the ancients believed there was an ocean of water beyond the stars. There isn't a literal ocean there, but the idea of "waters above" is very well documented scientifically. Just last year scientists discovered a vast cloud with 140 trillion ocean's worth of water in it. Here is an article from NASA claiming earth's oceans came from ancient comets. So literally the waters above were split off into the waters below. 

That is not even considering the Christ-centered view of the matter where what is happening in the physical world is only a figure or shadow of what is happening in the unseen realm. The bottom line is that if the bible writers thought that there were waters exceeding those of earth beyond the visible stars, they were right, so dismissing scripture as accurately depicting the natural universe can't be done on account of that claim. 

A lot of this is just being hasty. Time is a tyrant, but the good doctor was also hasty to discount the suggestion that Christ and the Apostles spoke of Adam and Eve as historical figures and the flood as an actual historical event, not just archetypes. The idea was that Christ and the Apostles were just "meeting people where they were" and speaking as if these were historical facts instead of just archetypes because that was what the hearer's understood. But the assertion itself is not evidence that this was indeed the case. 

I think the term "dismissive" was used, and as incongruent as it seems for an obviously decent fellow like Dr. Lamoureux, it was probably fair in this case. If one is going to make such a claim, sufficient evidence should be put forth to support the claim, because everything in the text of scripture seems to indicate the very opposite. Christ and the Apostles spoke as if Adam and Eve and Noah were historical figures. Pointing out that the word "adam" can also mean "mankind" doesn't begin to suffice because he was supposed to represent a sort of "federal head" for us all as a figure of Christ. Adam was an archetype, so we might expect him to have a name suitable for this position, but this isn't evidence that Christ or the Apostles viewed him only as such. 

While these issues are important, it was his system of categorization that I found most disappointing. I believe it is important to define our terms so that we don't talk past one another, but the definitions should be fair, rather than skewed to move the audience to one position or the other based on the way things are defined rather than the evidence to be considered. For example, here are Dr. Lamoureux's categories...

(EDIT - Dr. Lamoureux was very upset at my review and complained that the picture I had of his chart was used without his permission and is copyrighted material. I don't know how the laws are in Canada, but down here I am really sure that if you credit properly, which I did saying it was his chart and even providing a link to the paper it was used in above, that other people have fair use rights to excerpts. Nevertheless, I have deleted my screen shot of his chart, which until he takes the link down you can see by scrolling down here. In the meantime, everything I say about it below is an accurate representation.) 
 

click on picture to get a large view

One issue I had was that it wasn't quite accurate to say that Progressive Creationists, or even Young Earth Creationists. don't believe in the Evolution of Living Organisms. Almost all Christians acknowledge that some evolution has occurred. Some Young Earth Creationists even believe in rapid evolution of creatures off of the ark. The question is whether evolution is powerful enough to explain everything we see or whether nature merely diversifies from types provided from beyond nature. I think we agreed that "No macroevolution" would be a more fit label for these two positions. 

 What is macroevolution? We didn't even agree on the definition of evolution! No wonder people are talking past one another. Dr. Lamoureux defined it as....

"Scientific theory that natural processes over billions of years produced all living organisms & humans"

This definition isn't neutral. If evolution is merely a "scientific theory" rather than the actual phenomenon of changes in the biota of the world, then it can only be considered to occur by naturalistic means. Science after all can't properly test for supernatural causes, it is limited to methodological naturalism. He doubles-down on this a priori assumption by specifying that it was natural processes that produced the change. This biases the discussion by excluding the possibility that God actively intervened in the evolution of life on earth. The way he defines it, if it was evolution, then God wasn't involved, except perhaps in setting things up at the very beginning. Nature took it from there and no divine intervention in the process is allowed by definition. 

I find this effort to exclude divine action from the mix by re-defining the terms to be injurious to the debate in a very unnecessary way. Look how mainstream sources define "evolution":

Merriam-Webster defines it as : descent with modification from preexisting species : cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms : the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations.... 

Cambridge Dictionary puts it: 

"the way in which living things change and develop over millions of years:
Darwin's theory of evolution

B2
a gradual process of change and development:"

As you can see, several of these definitions do not rule out divine action as a possible source of the change and there is surely no need to use a definition which does so in a discussion on creation and evolution. It biases the debate right from the start. 

What if God took a population of fish and "created" the amphibian kind by inducing a series of genetic changes over a few dozen generations that nature would be extremely unlikely to achieve on her own? Would that meet most of these definitions of "evolution"? It would. But it would also be creationism. The war would be over, at least among believers. The war against naturalism, the belief that nature is all there is and that all causes are natural ones, would continue. But Christians shouldn't be defending naturalism anyway. It is an inherently anti-theist philosophy. 

Dr. Lamoureux insisted more than once that God intervened in his life, and his conviction and sincerity could not be doubted. And yet he described his own position as "Evolutionary Creationist" which according to his own chart claims that life arose by evolution, and as defined by him evolution operated by natural processes alone. So one has the dichotomy of a God who never intervened throughout the course of all of life's history but repeatedly does so in our lives today. Shackled with his one-sided definition, I sense some inconsistency in the position. 

I objected to his defining "evolutionary creation" as God using natural processes, period. Where is the "creation" in that? It can be nowhere but at the very beginning, I.E., in God designing the process so that the dominoes fall a certain way. But this is just the same as what he has for "Deistic Evolution". There is no difference in process, the only difference is that the God in his definition of "evolutionary creation" is a personal God, but one who- despite what Genesis chapter one says- impersonally stays out the first 99.999% of the history of living things, at which point he starts intervening in the life of Denis Lamoureux et al. 

I maintain that the broader category "theistic evolution" should be used to label the position which he calls "evolutionary creation". At least it only has "evolution" in it and not "creation"! The "Evolutionary Creation" label is better suited for those who believe that evolution of life on earth was actively God-directed or at least God-assisted. In other words, also creationism. He left "theistic evolution" off his chart on the grounds that it is the same as "evolutionary creation". But as you can see this is not really true. There may be some overlap in the positions but I maintain that there should be another entry in his chart. Another chair at the table in his conversation as it were. 

That it was excluded was particularly annoying to me because the Doctor noted that in the late 80's, his own position was somewhere between "Progressive Creation" and "Evolutionary Creation". In other words, pretty close to the position that I suggest should be included in the discussion. He is leaving off a position that he once held!

My own position on these issues is complex and I believe the text of scripture describes a more complicated relationship between natural effect and His own actions than either side is acknowledging. Dr. Lamoureux described his journey and how he changed his position over the years and so I hope he is a life-long learner and is not done changing yet. The Christ-centered model in my book below reconciles these paradoxes from history, scripture, and the natural world in a most glorious way- just by looking at the text through the lens of Christ these other issues resolve elegantly. 

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Gunter Bechly is Right: Three Biggest Problems for the Undirected Evolution Hypothesis

 I say that because we things so much the same way regarding problems with evolution of the naturalistic variety. Here he names the three biggest problems with evolution as taught today. 

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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