If God created the world and directed evolutionary change, then why didn’t He provide a textbook? This book could be distributed to high schools everywhere. Since He didn’t provide a biology textbook, God does not exist. The Darwinian scheme of evolution, despite all its maddening gaps, must be true.

Lawrence Auster responds to a similar argument here. Below is most of his exchange with a reader:

Auster:

I’ve never presented a theory of human evolution. I’ve presented my own speculations and intuitions, always making clear that that is what they are. I’ve also said that I believe that the universe, life, and consciousness come from God. I”ve said that since Darwinism and theism are mutually contradictory, and since Darwinism is inherently impossible, theism must be true. However, saying that life comes from God does not explain how the evolution of life occurred. It is no more a scientific theory than the general statement that life shows ample evidence of intelligent design is a scientific theory. At the same time, scientists claim to have knowledge of how evolution happened which in reality they do not have. I’ve said over and over that the scientific truth is that we do not know how evolution in general happened, and how human evolution happened, and that the only way science can regain its integrity is for the scientists to admit that they do not know.

 Richard Hoste writes:

I’d read [your] article. It didn’t address exactly what I was asking about the timeline. I like precision in arguments. You always accuse Darwinists of trying to make implausible things sound plausible. But you believe…

4.5 billion years ago-God creates world

for 3.5 billion years God sits around and plays with rocks and oceans

1 billion years ago- God creates life

Then God sits around until 100,000 ya and creates man.

That’s pretty implausible, but you never put it like that.

My understanding is you accept mainstream science on everything except macro evolutionary changes (I don’t think you ever addressed where you draw the line between macro and micro changes. if you did before, forgive me). Correct?

Auster writes:

It’s impossible to have a sensible discussion with materialists on these matters, because they keep discussing God as though he were a guy, like us, and they demand that his actions make sense in human terms.

And I can already hear Dennis Mangan’s victimological cry: “Auster says Darwinians are incapable of thinking!” However, in this case his characterization of my statement would be correct, because material reductionism does destroy people’s ability to understand anything beyond the material level.

It’s just amazing to me that people deny the existence of God, then turn around and talk about God as though they understood his nature, and his nature just happens to be just like ours, and they think we ought to be able to understand it. Thus you want a scenario of why God “waited” three billion years to start creating complex life. Why does not the simple idea occur to you that it took a very long time for the earth to reach the point where it was ready for complex life? It makes perfect sense to me. Why do you find it so difficult?

The other absurd thing about Darwinians, just alluded to, is that the only theistic scenario they will allow is that God created everything at once, sort of the way a human would have done it if he had the power. Since God is omnipotent, and he can do whatever he wants, he must have created everything at once. And because it’s evident that everything did not come into existence at once, the Darwinians declare victoriously, “See? God is disproved. Darwinism is proved.” They’ve shot down a caricature of God, and this for them proves that Darwinism is correct. About a third of Jerry Coyne’s book consists of such firing of cannon at straw men.

In reality, divine creation is perfectly consistent with a gradual unfolding over great periods of time.

A further joke is that the materialists despise Genesis, yet the only view of God they will allow is the most literalist, brainless version of Genesis. And if that brainless version of Genesis is shown to be untrue, then God doesn’t exist and Darwinism is proved. This is beneath the level of proper human thought. But that’s what materialist reductionism does: it destroys people’s ability to think, or, rather, it reduces their thought processes to a single dimension where proper understanding of any subject beyond the movements of matter becomes impossible.

Richard Hoste replies:

“Why does not the simple idea occur to you that it took a very long time for the earth to reach the point where it was ready for complex life? It makes perfect sense to me. Why do you find it so difficult?”

Because God could do anything! Why waste billions of years? Why would the earth need a second to get ready? Why create species millions of years apart making it look like they evolved? If you’re just going to say “We can’t understand God” then I guess there’s no way to argue with that.

As far as Genesis goes, what metaphorical meaning is to be found in “x begat y and live 845 years, y begat z who lived 900 years, z begat q who begat r and f, etc.”? The only conclusion one could draw from reading Genesis is that it was meant to be taken literally. That’s the way Christians interpreted it throughout history, and only when science proved that Genesis was bunk did the historically understood version become “brainless.” 

Auster replies: 

Thank you for proving my point. Your materialist reductionism, your ignorance of and hostility toward anything outside materialism, and your insistence on the most literalist and one-dimensional view of the Bible, in which lists of generations are seen as of equal truth value as God’s creation of the universe, make you incapable of intelligent reflection on the subject at hand. For you, if the list of “begats” is not scientifically proven, then God is false. For you, either God creates in one moment the entire universe and everything in it including all life forms and man, as per YOUR expectations of how God ought to do things, or else God doesn’t exist. And you don’t see how silly your argument is.

Please follow and like us: