Can an Evangelical Christian Accept Evolution?

[Bertie]

Lecture by Dennis Venema who is an evangelical biologist at Trinity Western University. He considers recent genomics data and asks whether an evangelical Christian can accept evolution.

Part 1

[canny]

Hello Bertie and welcome to Lampstand ,

an Evangelical Christian proclaims Christ as Saviour, as far as I am aware, so I would answer yes to your question.

I am now ready for the onslaught

[Chuckt]

I took Physics so I learned some things as to why I wouldn't accept Evolution.

I think the reason why people don't accept Evolution is because it has been used by atheists to attack the existence of God. The atheist says that a volcano spit out life millions of years ago and man evolved from the slime and wasn't created.

There are some theists who believe in Evolution but I am not one of them.

There is a possibility that with the fall, things changed. The things which changed because of sin changed the way we look at creation and possibly why people see Evolution. I don't have much evidence for this but it is only my unproven theory.

I personally believe in intelligent design and I could say more but I'm too tired to.

[Onesiphorus]

In answer to your question Bertie ,and welcome , is If you are a bible- believing ,born again ,Christian ,then NO ,but in saying this "The New Evangelical "movement believes very little in the truth of the Scriptures

[DeaconDan]

I do not accept Evolution because it is stupid. I mean, the evolution itself, not the mental effort applied to it in the attempt to make it look not stupid.

For example, the speaker in the video points to the similarity of insulin in chimps and humans. This similarity does not show Evolution because if they were not similar, they would not both be insulin and not do the function of insulin. (Even though the speaker concedes this point, high school biology books do not concede this point.)

The speaker goes on to argue that the there are many trillions of gene sequences that can make the same insulin. Yet, the gene sequences themselves are very similar. The genes are the same when they do not have to be. Hoping you are too stupid to suspect the underlying assumptions, the speaker announces that this is proof, err, evidence, of common ancestry.

In Evolution, all genes are produced randomly. Why would an Evolutionist expect the genes to be the same when they do not have to be? Does the theory of Evolution predict that chimps and humans have a single common ancestor ancestor? No.

Evolution allows for, but does not predict, a single common ancestor. How far back is this single common ancestor? Was there a primate bottleneck a hundred million years ago in which only one (or two) primates survived to leave human and chimp ancestors? Evolution makes no prediction of this. But, let us suppose it. Why would the genes have stayed essentially the same when they do not have to be? Allegedly, a quintillion gene combinations could make the same little insulin molecule. Natural Selection would be powerless to eliminate any of these mutations because it does not matter what the genes of the combinations that make the insulin.

Evolution does not predict the genes will be the same. I would even say that Evolution predicts the genes would be relatively random. The genes are created by random mutations and should any similarity ever form (such as from a population bottleneck), random mutations would eat away at the similarity.

What would predict that the genes would be the same? Would God create chimps and humans with random genes for the same protein? Same designer, same design. Man has not been around for a hundred million years for random mutations to destroy the similarity.