Friday, July 27, 2007

Pope Benedict Accepts Evolutionary Theory

Pope Benedict XVI comes through in the clutch!! He managed to get right what Ken Ham and all the other YECs persistently don't:

"This contrast [between evolution and God] is an absurdity, because there are many scientific tests in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and enriches our understanding of life and being.

"But the doctrine of evolution does not answer all questions, and it does not answer above all the great philosophical question: From where does everything come?"

I knew he had it in him.

4 comments:

  1. I appreciate the work of Ken Ham and other "YEC"s... just learned a new acronym. He taught me that I don't have to compromise my YEC worldview. That it is ok to be a YEC. I can take my information from the account written by the designer himself and passed down through the ages. Some time ago I watched as Mt St Helens transform a landscape on a Saturday morning in the Northwest. Now I have a better understanding of what a global flood could do to reshape our world.
    Jim the YEC.
    San Jose, CA

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  2. I appreciate your willingness to join the fray and that you appreciate their work. The problem that I have is that although you can see a recent, rapid transformation of the landscape at St. Helens, for a worldwide flood to have happened, you would see that everywhere. You don't. This was the problem that so many geologists of the 18th and 19th centuries had--they saw too much evidence that there had been very slow deposition in places and rock strata that showed multiple biomes on top of each other.

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  3. Actually, we do see sedimentary deposits over much of the world. In many places we even have recent igneous deposits on top of sediments. I have a collection of fern fossils that I found in a coal strip mine when I was a kid. The leaf details are well preserved. That would not have happened with a slow process. They would have simply decomposed without a trace. The idea of a traquil flood caused me all kinds of problems in my earlier years when I looked at the world around me but when I learned that it was likely a very violent event which also resulted in volcanic activity, the subsiding of much of the ocean basins and uplifting of mountain ranges close to the same time the pieces started to come together for me and so did my faith. I also saw at Mt St Helens how the mud solidified to form thick layers of what is now rock. I was there moments before the same flows took out the I5 bridge. They were fluid and they quickly set up like concrete. We can find ash layers like that in many places.

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  4. But my point is that there are many different examples of sedimentation that show multiple biomes on top of each other--including complete forests found over deserts with fossilized footprints, coral reefs below marshland and so on. These simply could not have formed like this in a worldwide flood. Also unexplained is how the fossil remains of animals are PERFECTLY sorted stratigraphically (trilobites for example by number of segments) including humans.

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