Big Bang and Christian Evolutionists

Tom Dean: Evolution cannot be right...simply the fact is you can say the big bang happened and all matter was created but you cant show where this happened. SOMETHING HAD TO CAUSE IT...
Edward Babinski: please visit the magazine section and look for the May 2006 issue of the conservative Christian magazine, First Things, and peek inside the "Letters" section in the front at the reply that "Stephen M. Barr" wrote to criticisms he received from Chuck Colsen and others, for an article that Barr wrote that was in favor of theistic evolution. Barr admits that not knowing what existed before the Big Bang proves nothing. It simply means we don't know.

Some Intelligent Design advocates have admitted that the "Designer" might not even be "personal."


Name: Tom Dean
Title of Article: Evolution challenge
Religious Belief: Christian

Comments: Evolution cannot be right Ed...simply the fact is you can say the big bang happened and all matter was created but you cant show where this happened. SOMETHING HAD TO CAUSE IT... If Hydrogen did create the stars where did that hydrogen come from, and if the thing that created the hydrogen created the hydrogen...where did that come from...and where did that come from...and where did that come from, because according to a certain famous scientific theory, matter cannot be created or destroyed...so unless somthing or someone higher than us had some involvment evolution is a rediculous claim to try and satisfy our human nature to know everything about everything...yet it is beyond us Ed, and will always be unless you looked into somthing that gave you spiritual satisfaction, because frankly Ed...what do you have to lose in beliving in god...your dignity???
PS. Please get back on this as I would like to hear your view on this.
Sincerely Tom

ED: Hi Tom. Please keep in mind that I was a born again Christian. (I can email my testimony to you as an attachment from my home email address upon request.) I also never totally lost my belief in God, though I have more questions now than I formerly did.

If you have a Barnes and Noble near you, or any large bookstore, please visit the magazine section and look for the May 2006 issue of the conservative Christian magazine, First Things, and peek inside the "Letters" section in the front at the reply that "Stephen M. Barr" wrote to criticisms he received from Chuck Colsen and others, for an article that Barr wrote that was in favor of theistic evolution. His reply deals exactly with some of the points you raised above, and he is a theoretical particle physicist whose speciality is the Big Bang and the origin of matter, and he is a Christian. Check out "Stephen M. Barr" on the web.

Barr admits that not knowing what existed before the Big Bang proves nothing. It simply means we don't know.

Some Intelligent Design advocates have admitted that the "Designer" might not even be "personal."

Even the Intelligent Design textbook, Of Pandas and People opens up the questions, "Who or what is the intelligent designer?" and "Who or what created the intelligent designer?" But it leaves those questions open.

Others argue that the cosmos was fine-tuned before the Big Bang but afterwards things evolved (and they reject "Intelligent Design" arguments)

The intelligent designer might be a divine tinkerer

One physicist has pointed out that physicist admit most of the cosmos probably consists of mysterious "dark matter," and that the stuff we see and that we are made out of is simply in the minority of matter, "light matter," and that the cosmos appears fine-tuned to create more and more black holes, which may lead to the creation of cosmos upon cosmos: Fine-Tuning a Killer Cosmos

Check out this list of prominent Christian evolutionists and visit their websites where you can discuss further theological questions with them.

Let me leave you with this:
Creationists Admit "Difficulties" With Their Hypothesis [especially when trying to explain away the evidence for stellar evolution].

Keep reading. The recent letter by Stephen M. Barr in the May 2006 issue of First Things magazine is an excellent place to start, seeing Christians discuss with fellow Christians many of the same questions you asked me.

Cheers,

Ed

5 comments:

nsfl said...

Sharon, I noted that at the bottom of section 2 of Ed's article on Christian Evolutionists [I hate that word] has a link to my website as "Another Christian evolutionist". I believe that this must have been from about 1.5 yrs ago when I started talking with Ed. I haven't been a Christian for a while now. Can you fix that?

I'm going to post something on cosmology soon. People seem to think that all the energy/matter in the universe had to be created, especially ex nihilo, when the Law of Conservation states the contrary, as does "something from nothing" logic. Of course, Christians have no problem assigning eternity to their God, but don't realize that time itself is a feature of the Big Bang, but that the energy/mass/matter of the Big Bang existed prior to the expansion (matter as we know it today resulted from the cooling, but the singularity was emphatically NOT mass/energy-less).

Anyway, I'll be following up with a cosmology post soon.

Scrivenings said...

corrected. thanks

Anonymous said...

FYI, it's Chuck Colson, not Chuck Colsen.

Edwardtbabinski said...

FYI...

“Colson Prison Success Inflated by Study, Says UCLS Professor”

It was claimed in a study (produced by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society) that graduates of Charles W. Colson’s Prison Fellowship program returned to prison at a lower rate than members of a control group. But Mark A. R. Kleinman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the study and showed that its results were inflated by the Prison Fellowship. Kleinman found that Prison Fellowship started out with 177 volunteer prisoners in its InnerChange program, but that only 75 of them “graduated.” To be counted as a “graduate,” an ex-inmate had to get a job. Prison Fellowship counted only these 75 in its study of the numbers of those who returned to prison. “The InnerChange cheerleaders simply ignored the other 102 participants who dropped out, were kicked out or got early parole and didn’t finish,” wrote Kleiman. “Naturally, the ‘non-graduates’ did worse than the control group.If you select out the winners, you leave mostly losers.”

Kleiman said that when all 177 participants were looked at, the results show that Inner Change participants actually returned to prison at a higher rate than non-participants. “Overall, the 177 entrants did a little bit worse than the controls,” Kleiman observed. “The result ought to discourage InnerChange’s advocates, but it doesn’t because they have just ignored the failures and focuses on the success of the successes.”

Kleiman called the misinterpretation of the study “one of the oldest tricks in the book” and wrote, “The technical term for this in statistics is selection bias; program managers know it as creaming. Harvard public policy professor Anne Piehl, who reviewed the study before it was published, calls this instance of it cooking the books.”

Kleiman contacted John Dilulio, former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Dilulio admitted that the study did not produce results favorable to InnerChange.

“Colson Prison Success Inflated by Study, Says UCLS Professor,” Church & State, Vol. 56, No. 8 (Sept. 2003) [See also the full article in the Aug. 5, 2003 edition of the online magazine, Slate.]

Anonymous said...

one thing for sure is that, God being the creator, there isn't one single person who could say what creation entails. Just because science doesn't claim diety in their findings they are rejected by religion. Well I don't see how this is possible considering there is no mention ever of a method used by God to create.
That he created everything I have no doubt, how he did it, your guess is as good as mine and since many smarter than me people are researching the matter and giving answers I can't say they are wrong. They might be but until someone shows something to the contrary I have to buy it.
Is evolution a method God could use to diversify life on any given planet? Why not. Living organisms seem to share similar DNA, some closer than others. I think humans are something like 4% different than monkeys. What a difference 4% makes eh? Too many uniformed people spouting off, I include myself in the uniformed but I try not to spout off but learn. While I have my opinions I have no problem being wrong.