Why Rock the Boat? -- Guest Post

This is a guest post from an author I really like:  my wife, Kaye Sims,  who asks some of the questions she has been wondering about lately.  This one is addressed to church leaders who encourage cutting edge ministry... and then fail to support their pastors who actually implement innovative methods, some of them ultimately losing their jobs as a result.

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Why do you encourage missional thinking?  Why do you bring in innovative thinkers with their radical and transformational ideas?  Why do you invest so much time and energy getting pastors fired up to lead their churches into organic, refreshing, authentic ways of doing ministry?  Why do you push these amazing, wonderful, life-changing concepts and encourage pastors to implement them?  Why do you convince people that disciple-making is not a program, but that it is a radical way of thinking and living, a fresh but ancient wave of spiritual reproduction?  Why do you challenge church leaders to dismantle their fortress mentality and to learn instead what it means to unleash the church - to BE the church outside the institutional walls?

But the real question is this:   When pastors follow these principles and find themselves and many of their people invigorated and becoming more effective in reaching their community, and then when the local power brokers get up in arms about the inevitable break from tradition, why, oh why, do you refuse to stand with those pastors?  Why in the world do you stand instead on the side of the status quo as yet another pastor gets kicked to the curb?  Why do you blame him and the people who followed him into the new Spirit-led ministry that you introduced?  Why do you label them rebellious - those who dared to venture out and live out these transformational disciple-making principles?  

Why indeed do you encourage such innovative thinking that violently upsets the apple cart?

Innovative thinkers blow up the status quo.

Wouldn't it be better to promote ways to keep things running smoothly?  Wouldn't it make more sense to invest your leadership resources and energy in training pastors how to avoid making waves?  Why don't you bring in speakers and organize conferences around the principles of compliance to authority?  Forget finding the "man of peace" in a community who might be instrumental in welcoming a move of God that would transform that town.  Instead why not train each pastor how to quickly recognize the "man of power" in the local congregation - the one who pulls the strings or at least holds them?  Wouldn't a pastor benefit from learning the steps of how to keep that person happy?  

Instead of challenging pastors and people to resist the status quo, maybe it would be smarter or safer to train them to submit to it.  Wouldn't that be the way to keep the machinery oiled and running smoothly?  The way to avoid church splits and to keep the statistics steady and the monthly reports rolling in on time.  Isn't that what matters?  

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Kaye Sims very much enjoyed serving in church ministry for pretty much all her life until suddenly finding herself on the outside.  She has since discovered glorious freedom and loves to  watch for opportunities to be involved in reconciliation, redemption, and restoration.  She still finds herself wondering about lots of things and writes about some of them at her blog,  Wondering Journey.

Evolution - On Steroids

  On my previous post, My Problems with Evolutionary Theory, I complained about the unbelievability of the essential foundation of traditional evolution: natural selection.  In this post I am going to answer my own questions and satisfy my skepticism by describing what I think is the most sensible scenario for the origins of life.  This is all about what makes the most sense to me - and it has nothing to do with faith.

  My current belief in a supreme being is mostly based on logic.  In fact, it could be a product of my doubts about evolution.  The deal is that, as I explained earlier, I don't think natural selection is a powerful enough mechanism to produce the amazingly complex organisms that nature presents throughout the world.  It is incapable of even imagining the many intricate organs or systems or higher forms of life, let alone making them appear from the original protozoans - even with the generous time framework of billions of years and as many alleged chance mutations.

  The apparent impotence of natural selection makes some sort of miraculous intervention essential.  There had to be strategic upgrades between every major life form and the next most complex organism.  According to natural selection, these were the products of random mutations that allowed species to improve over time.  Darwin ventured that enough of these progressive adaptions would eventually accumulate to change a plant or animal so much that it could be classified as a new, different organism.

   But probability says that's a stretch.  That seems so improbable to me that I might as well call it what it is: impossible.  The only way these significant changes could have occurred is with the activity of some outside creative source.  Charles Darwin drew his hypotheses in part from his observation of different varieties of finches in the Galapagos Islands, saying that a long series of minor changes could add up to the next distinct species.  To say this happened two or three times would be daring, to maintain that it happened thousands of times is nothing short of outlandish.

Differing food sources result in beak adaptations.

  Just a cursory study of the human body or the wildlife in the tropical rain forest or the miracle of a newborn baby is enough to make one suspicious of the notion that these things could come to exist by chance.

  So natural selection isn't ultimately about chance.  Because so many coincidences would have to take place in such a fantastic sequence that the whole process ends up being nothing short of miraculous.  It's way beyond chance.  If I flip a coin and it comes up heads, I could call it chance.  But if I flip it a thousand times and it comes up heads every time, it is not chance, it is a miracle.

  My skepticism of natural selection is the if-then operative that makes me conclude there must be a creator.  This stuff could not have happened without some sort of intelligent help, and lots of it.

  But I don't subscribe to the young earth creationist stuff either.  I don't think God was in a hurry to get the entire universe and everything assembled in six earth days.  I understand that this theory comes out of the desire to interpret the Bible literally, but it is not necessary in my thinking.  (Actually, nobody interprets the whole Bible literally.)

  If the universe is at least 13 billion years old, as astronomers say, and if the earth is at least 4 billion years old, as geologists say, then the creator is at least that old.  Why would he wait until just 7000 years ago to start putting together the solar system and the plant and animal kingdoms on the earth?  This idea is man-centered and earth-centered.

  There are many creation theories, and my favorite is one called the Day-Age Theory.  The premise is that the six days of creation described in Genesis 1 are not actual earth days, they are long ages of time, epochs, when a lot of adaptation could have taken place.  I can keep my scientific integrity intact with this theory, because it allows for the universe to be billions of years old and the earth to be really old too - without dethroning God.  It even allows for the possibility of prehistoric ancestors of homo sapiens (mankind), since it introduces the possibility that the creation account set forth in Genesis was really a re-creation ("...the earth became without form and empty..." Gen.1:2).  Maybe the account has a huge gap after the creation of the universe and then picks up again at the end of the last ice age for the re-creation (creative upgrading) of mankind and the plant and animal kingdoms.

Man and dinosaurs co-exist in displays at the creation museum.

  The Day-Age Theory also allows for the literary nature of scripture, the possibility that Moses' creation account was figurative, more like legend or folklore and was not meant to be scientific - or even historical for that matter.  This helps me with the discrepancies in the account, like the fact that the sun was formed on day four of creation.  Tell me what kind of "days" were the first three?  Earth days can't happen without the sun.

  So the more practical scenario I have settled on is a hybrid: Bob's Creationist - Evolutionary Theory.  And it is mostly based on logic and science but not without regard for the Bible.
  Because evolution needs to be turbo charged to get the job done.  And because creation doesn't need to be rushed.

  If you haven't done so, you really need to read the previous post for more scientific explanation about my problems with evolution.

My Problems with Evolutionary Theory

  I have a logical, scientific mind, and I have trouble with some of the assumptions made by evolution scientists.  Maybe I haven't read the right stuff yet and maybe I will happen upon some sensible explanations at some point, but here's where I am right now.

  First let me say that I don't have a problem with energy and matter and physics and astronomy and geology.  I believe the universe is really old.  Just last month astronomers reported the discovery of the farthest away, oldest galaxy (named z8_GND_5296) at the other side of the cosmos.  It is 13 billion light years away, making the universe at least that old.  The Big Bang that apparently started it all is entirely logical to me and consistent with what I see when I look up into the sky at night.  I am fully aware that what I see is not current but rather a snapshot of the universe the way it was millions and billions of years ago.

  Similarly, while I was in college my geological studies led me to conclude that the earth is millions of years old.  I could see it in the fossils and strata that I was digging up with my little rock hammer in the strip mines of southern Indiana and in the cut-away cliffs of the Rockies.

  So my problems are not with the physical sciences.  I am not a young earth theorist;  that doesn't make any sense to me.  At this point my fundamentalist creationist friends and I part company.

  But I'm also having trouble with some of the foundational biological premises of evolution.  Here's where my evolutionist friends and I part scientific company:

Problem #1:  You can't evolve if you can't reproduce.  Evolution requires time.  Lots of time.  Millions of years of evolutionary process must take place to deliver any noticeable change in a species.  And evolution also requires reproduction - lots of it - and right from the outset.  But if you can't reproduce, how can you evolve?  You don't have the luxury of millions of years to grow a male penis and then millions more years to develop a female vagina, and then millions of millennia to produce reproductive cells and everything else that goes with the reproductive systems, male and female.  It all has to be working in the first generation in order to have a second generation, if you know what I mean.  Excuse my explicit logic here, but if you can't procreate, you're screwed...  in a manner of speaking.  It doesn't require a whole lot of thought to arrive at the obvious conclusion that it is not possible for reproductive systems to evolve.  There must have been some creative point of origination when everything was suddenly working.  But is that still evolution?

  In the evolutionary sequence (called the Tree of Life) there is a huge gap between the slime molds and the duckbilled platypus, early ancestors of humans.  Somewhere in that gap sexual reproduction had to develop, and it had to show up all at once, along with a lot of other things.  This is a big problem, because natural selection does not have the balls for this; it is not a viable operative here.  Biologically speaking, natural selection can't get 'er done.

Problem #2:  Mutations can't close the gaps.  Natural selection (sometimes called the survival of the fittest) assumes that the positive adaptations of nature will live on to further evolve and the negative mutations will die out.  That's fine within species, but it seems pretty farfetched when trying to evolve from one life form to the next.  It is counterintuitive for me to concur with an evolutionary timeline that is a virtual continuum of development from lesser to greater, from simple to complex, from dumb to smart.  In my view, there's an insurmountable gap between every major family and the next higher life form. (See Hillis' completely sequenced genome Tree of Life here or Darwin's and several other early models here.)

A simplified version of evolutionary sequence called  Tree of Life

  On the contrary, a more panoramic observation reveals a slow decline of the biological world.  There are fewer species of plant and animal life on the earth now than there were last year or last epoch.  So the dinosaurs are gone, along with the dodo birds and a bunch of other cool stuff, gone forever.  Occasionally a scientist discovers a new butterfly in the Amazon jungle, but it is not really a new insect, just a newly discovered insect.  Many species are lost every year.  The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports in their latest update to the Red List of Threatened Species, which reviews more than 60,000 species, that 25 per cent of mammals on the list are at risk of extinction.
In my mind, this points to a grand beginning and a slow diminishing of biodiversity.  Natural selection and the tree of life standing on its head, if you will.

Problem #3:  The Missing Links are still missing.  There should be transitional forms of every kind of organism in the fossil record.  But there aren't.  150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), they are still missing.  300-million-year-old fossils of the sea turtles show no significant variation from those alive in the ocean today.  Fossils exist of plants and animals that are now extinct, amazing things we have not seen before, but there have been found no viable transitional forms between the frog and the cat, the cat and the dog, the dog and the horse.  And there should be.  In fact, there should be millions upon millions of these "in-between" specimens embedded in the earth's crust, and with the thousands of archeologists who are on the job around the world, these should be emerging from the soil every day to be displayed in our newspapers, our science classrooms and our museums.  But they're not.

  Logically, this makes me think there was a definite point in time for the origination of each plant and animal group.

Problem #4:  DNA lacks creativity.  Adaptation falls short.  Adaptations can be the results of external forces applied on a particular life form.  So humans who lived in the tropics for many generations developed dark skin for their own protection.  And when they migrate to temperate climate zones they continue to birth babies with dark skin for many generations following, because of an essential change in the DNA when they lived in the tropics.

  But the original adaptation was a mutation, an adjustment to the DNA in response to an outside stimulus: sunlight.  This is the normal modus operandi for adaptations.

  But DNA do not have a mind of their own.  They are a reliable code or program that is automatically followed, usually without variation, a consistent phenomena called genetic homeostasis.  They cannot originate new body parts.  They cannot convene a committee and collaborate to develop an organ, a system or a sense, like the sense of sight, for example.  They cannot initiate a group effort to form an eyeball with a cornea, retina, optic nerve and eventually a center in the brain that interprets sight from nervous impulses - even though their blind host organism would certainly benefit from it if they could.  DNA are oblivious to the needs and wants of their host; they are not able to initiate these necessary monumental changes; they are barely able to react and adapt to outside stimuli and only do it infrequently and reluctantly through an occasional mutation.

  What I'm getting at here is that complex systems like digestion and breathing and circulation and the senses of sight and smell and so on, could not be generated by ignorant DNA.  Without the help of some miraculous, creative outside force, they cannot cause the countless improvements that are essential for the evolutionary process.

   Many evolutionists give examples of adaptations as proof of evolution, and indeed, it is essential to the entire scheme.  But adaptations never have and never will change one type of animal into another as evolutionary processes require.  Thousands of miraculous mutations - strategic upgrades - would have to take place for this to happen.  Yet this remains the foundational core of evolutionary theory.

  So I think that much of evolution science rides along on the backs of some very hopeful but unlikely hypotheses.  I have talked to some of my evolutionary friends about these fundamental gaps, and no one has offered explanations for any of this.  I guess maybe Charles Darwin could be excused for his optimism, hoping that science would eventually fill in the gaps, but I'm a bit more skeptical.  I am not comfortable with the cognitive dissonance that natural selection creates for me; it's just too fantastic.

  When my daughter came home from her first year at university she told me that her professor had said that, "Evolution has pretty much been proven by now."  My first thought was, "Really? When did that happen?"  Scientists don't even agree among themselves about the classifications of the simplest life forms.  In their search for the earliest universal ancestor evolutionary biologists are discovering that "...the emerging picture is far more complicated than had been expected, and the ancestor's features remain ill-defined.... Five years ago we were very confident and arrogant in our ignorance; said Dr. Eugene Loonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.  'Now we are starting to see the true complexity of life."*
  It seems that the more information that scientists gather, the less there is that they are certain of. (See also, Oldest Human DNA Reveals Mysterious Branch of Humanity for more speculation on human ancestry.)

  Post Script:  There is a battle continuing between creationists and evolutionists that is as unscientific as it is polarized.  I think part of the problem is the "package deal" that both sides are expected to embrace.  The creationists have a complete platform that they promote including an actual 6-day creation and a young earth (7000 years old) theory turned to dogma.  The evolutionists do the same, driven by the prerequisite that there be no intelligent creator in the equation.  And both sides have made their platform into a political and an emotional campaign.  Both sides overlook the obvious.

  When it comes to the origin of species, I am a man without a country, so to speak.   As you can see in this post, I do not subscribe to either traditional platform.  I think it is more reasonable to take an objective approach that is based on observation and real scientific evidence and without initial bias.

  My study and interest in this will be on-going, and I'm looking for facts. Conjecture is fine at the start.  That's where the scientific method begins.  But when reliable results aren't forthcoming after 150 years of study, it may be time to look for other answers.

  Also, please notice that I wrote this entire post in the first person.  That is an attempt to keep my friends from becoming offended and disowning me.  I respect the right of everybody to have their point of view, and I haven't made suggestions about what anyone else should believe about evolution; I have simply stated my own opinion.

Thank you for reading!

To make a comment or to suggest the next expert that I should study on the subject, click on "Post a Comment" below.  (There will be a delay before it is posted as I have to moderate all incoming comments.)  Thanks again!

* Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, article "Tree of Life Turns Out to Have Complex Roots".
   --Cartoons by Mueller and Ham, in The Funny Times, December 2013, Volume 28, Issue 12