Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Hermetic Seal" data-source="post: 1476505" data-attributes="member: 10915">Personal pet peeve of mine: when creation/man is described as &quot;perfect.&quot; Actually, it's &quot;very good,&quot; so I don't think this is a great argument against evolution.The best reason for rejecting evolution (and probably long timeframes as well) is animal (and depending on your particular view, human) death and suffering prior to the Fall. This is simply an intractable obstacle and that's why those desperate to realign the creation account to modern secular understanding (like William Lane Craig) spend so much effort trying to work around or downplay this problem. I spent years trying to wiggle around this but it just doesn't work. The implications are just devastating.Either God is a psycho whose creative plan involves millions of years of death, violence, and bloodshed, or He built the entire universe in a &quot;fallen&quot; state to accommodate us fully expecting Adam to fall, revealing that the &quot;choice&quot; to sin or not sin was just an illusion (this option sharing considerable overlap with Psycho Calvinist God) and we were set up to fail from day one. The only real resolution to this is to take Romans 8.20 at face value, that God altered creation at the fall to accommodate man in his fallen state, and the world we observe is not its original intended state, but &quot;subjected to futility&quot; for our sake. This is consistent with the Patristic interpretation you'll find in Fr. Seraphim Rose's &quot;Genesis, Creation, and Early Man,&quot; which is a helpful read on this subject.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Hermetic Seal, post: 1476505, member: 10915"] Personal pet peeve of mine: when creation/man is described as "perfect." Actually, it's "very good," so I don't think this is a great argument against evolution. The best reason for rejecting evolution (and probably long timeframes as well) is animal (and depending on your particular view, human) death and suffering prior to the Fall. This is simply an intractable obstacle and that's why those desperate to realign the creation account to modern secular understanding (like William Lane Craig) spend so much effort trying to work around or downplay this problem. I spent [B]years[/B] trying to wiggle around this but it just doesn't work. The implications are just devastating. Either God is a psycho whose creative plan involves millions of years of death, violence, and bloodshed, [B]or [/B]He built the entire universe in a "fallen" state to accommodate us fully expecting Adam to fall, revealing that the "choice" to sin or not sin was just an illusion (this option sharing considerable overlap with Psycho Calvinist God) and we were set up to fail from day one. The only real resolution to this is to take Romans 8.20 at face value, that God altered creation at the fall to accommodate man in his fallen state, and the world we observe is not its original intended state, but "subjected to futility" for our sake. This is consistent with the Patristic interpretation you'll find in Fr. Seraphim Rose's "Genesis, Creation, and Early Man," which is a helpful read on this subject. [/QUOTE]

Verification