Crisis in the Church: Christless Theology, Evolution, and Subjectivism

PatriotandLiberty ^ | 2023 | Linda Kimball

[spirited irish]

“The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.” (Psalm 37:23)

Today, much of the American Church preaches an arrogantly man-centered theology not ordered by the Lord but by sinful men. It is a subjective, evolutionary, ‘feel good’ theology in which the opinions of ministers, elders, deacons and congregants are elevated above the eternally unchanging Authoritative Word of God.

[spirited irish]

ping to crisis in the church

[xenia]

From the article:

“Second, because evolution requires long ages they must say the Lord God created a world of suffering and death right from the beginning, a position that makes God responsible for evil. Thus because God’s creation was not “very good” right from the beginning then God is not good either. In this way the Lord is robbed of goodness and the cause of man’s sin, suffering, and death is projected onto the Lord and creation.”

That is a great point.

[spirited irish]

When we comprehend meaning of that point, we can understand why orthodox Christians must be persecuted and crucified in lieu of the bad God Who can’t be reached.

[ganeemead]

Evolution: Categories of Disproof

A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.

In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.

At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.

The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

• The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.
• The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)
• The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)
• The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
• The question of irreducible complexity.
• The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.
• The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.
• The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).
• The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
• The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...
• The question of genetic entropy.
• The obvious evidence of design in nature.
• The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.

Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

I ask you: What could be stupider than that?

Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.

Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.

There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.

[schaef21]

Bkmk

[spirited irish]

Thank-you for posting this excellent refutation!

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

Sparkle creed read by Reverend “Jenny Talls”, with a hymn / hyrn / thym by the Crotch Choir.

[ViLaLuz]

If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.
.............................................

The proof isn’t what fails. The failure occurs at the point of someone’s delusion or ignorance of Truth. That’s the horror of moral relativity, it blinds people so they behave foolishly.

[xenia]

We need to commit some of these points to memory for conversation.

People believe the vagaries of evolution and their thinking is unchallenged. I truly believe this atheistic theory has been at the core of our nations falling apart. God was removed from our society.

[ViLaLuz]

Excellent article!! The life-or-death points are very clear.

Prayer To Keep Me From Spiritual Pride

Father God, You alone are worthy to receive all honour and might and majesty and power and glory and honour and blessing, for you have created all things and You have made us for Your pleasure and to Your honour, and so I come today to offer myself to be used of You. Thank You, Father, for the spiritual gifts that You have given me. Lord, I know that today there are many evidences all around us that the spiritual gifts that You have graciously given to many in the Church, seem to be abused in the same way that they were misapplied in the church at Corinth.

Lord, I pray that You would use my spiritual gifts as well as my natural abilities to Your praise and glory and not for my own personal use or pride, and Lord, I accept that spiritual gifts are not necessarily an evidence of spirituality. Nevertheless Lord, I pray that I may grow in grace and in a knowledge of Jesus. May I grow spiritually and become mature in the faith, so that my spiritual gifts may be used as befitting a mature man or woman of God.

Humble me if necessary Lord, for I do not want to become puffed up with pride, knowing that You have been bestowed so much grace and generousity with the spiritual gifts that you have given to me. Help me to rightly use all that You have given me wisely and appropriately, and keep me ever low at the cross and broken before You.

Father, I praise and thank You for every spiritual gift I have, and I prayerfully dedicate each one back to You, so that they may be used as You would have me use them, to help and encourage other believers in these difficult times and to lift up Your name – for I desire that You increase in every area of my life and that I decrease, until it is not I, but Christ that lives in me and works through me.

Help me I pray, to discover the proper way to use my spiritual giftings, and I pray that You would teach me how exercise all my spiritual gifts, to Your praise and glory. In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

Source: https://prayer.knowing-jesus.com/search?q=Pride

[JesusIsLord]

It is a subjective, evolutionary, ‘feel good’ theology in which the opinions of ministers, elders, deacons and congregants are elevated above the eternally unchanging Authoritative Word of God.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Why is the cause for having 45,000 Christian denominations globally? The church is divided because as a whole it cannot agree on what is is. What do I mean? Every church that names the name of Christ will tell us that they use and believe in the bible. If so, then why the division among denominations and believers? I would argue that it's "interpretation". We see the same problem in our Constitution. Liberals, conservatives and everyone in-between tell us they uphold the Constitution - so, why are we in disagreement? "Interpretation!"

Supposedly, all Christians received the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Truth. So, why are Christians in disagreement? When a Christian is led by his flesh or what seems rational to him or what seems reasonable or ... but not the Word as revealed by Holy Spirit - the result will be disagreement and infighting.

The Lord is not the author of confusion!

"I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me." - John 17:21

There may be some who argue that the church is not divided in a spiritual sense. When I hear that the word gaslighting comes to mind.

[LS]

100%

I agree with the original intention of the mega-seeker churches such as Willow Creek. But in the process of “bringing people to Jesus,” they watered down Jesus until He no longer stood for anything except a one-time confession/get-out-of-hell-free card.

I noticed in baptism ceremonies at our “seeker” church, most of the testimonies were not sinners who came to grace, but were former believers who either fell away, didn’t believe they were really saved, or church-switchers.

The epitome of this eviscerated church is the Andy Stanley approach, where nothing in the Old Testament is necessary (Not gonna even start there) and where homosexuals are welcome in their so-called “lifestyle.”

This is an abomination. Recent research shows ONLY one conservative variant of the Presbyterian Church and the Assemblies of God are growing Protestant denominations, and Catholics are only “growing” due to immigration, legal and criminal.

[spirited irish]

Amen!

[mitch5501]

Indeed God has been removed from society and the immediate effect is the same as removing the umpire from the game.

[mitch5501]

Amen!

[mitch5501]

Sorry, meant to ping you to #15

[spirited irish]

Amen!

[xenia]

I ponder the ridiculousness of evolution often. What you wrote is so true. There are people who chose to believe it and it doesn’t matter how much evidence put forth.

This point hit me one day. Let’s say evolution speeded up, and someone in Asia was born with 4 arms. There would be a lot of benefit of having two extra hands etc. So then, this person’s offspring also had 4 arms. Now..... would that mean all other humans with two arms would die off? And how would this wonderful mutation spread to all humans all over the earth so that all humans would have the extra limbs? It wouldn’t. So why do people assume all the billions of in between versions of creatures die off?