A Question for the Evolutionist (of any stripe)

[QVQ]

There isn;t any reason for death or for the savagery evident in nature.
Trees could be immortal and derive nourishment from the sun, water and earh
DNA could evolve to withstand the deleterious effects of environment
Trees are not dependent on the slaughter of other species for survival.

So what "necessary" triggered the first species to consume its neighbor and be able, in that first instant, to digest same?

 

[John Bauer]

Jesus stated that Adam and Eve were created directly by God. Was he wrong then?

No, Jesus did not state that Adam and Eve were created directly by God. You are reading far more into the text than is there. Jesus said only that the Creator God “made them” (Matt 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9), which states nothing about how he did so. You are injecting the idea from outside the text that it was a direct, instant de novo creation—and then making that do all the work for you.

For the record, I agree with every statement Jesus has ever made. However, I might disagree with how you’ve interpreted one of his statements—especially if something outside the text is doing all the work. That is eisegesis and ought to be rejected.

So Genesis 1:24 means
God said, “Let the earth produce living creatures after their kind, livestock, creeping things, and animals of the earth after their kind;” and it was so.

I don’t know what you were going for here. Yes, Genesis 1:24 says, “God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ It was so.”

Per the Bible, God created Adam first divinely, and then Eve from Adam, true or false?

True—I think? I am not entirely sure what your question is asking. I mean, yes, he created Adam first divinely, but he followed that with creating Eve divinely, too. It’s not as if he created Adam divinely but Eve undivinely. But then what is “divinely” even supposed to mean? It is a little vague here in a conversation that usually involves terms like “immediate de novo creation” (as opposed to mediated creation through ordinary providence).

They had no prior parents that gave physical birth to them true or false?

Unknown, due to insufficient biblical data. Whilst I know how the different creationist interpretations answer that question, I am not convinced by any of them, so it remains an open question. I prefer the interpretation suggested by Walton, but it likewise doesn’t provide a definitive answer to that question; in other words, his interpretation doesn’t exclude either view, whether they had parents or were created de novo as adults.

Currently, I personally lean toward them having parents, but that’s speculative and tentative and I could easily be moved with a solid argument.

 

[JesusFan]

No, Jesus did not state that Adam and Eve were created directly by God. You are reading far more into the text than is there. Jesus said only that the Creator God “made them” (Matt 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9), which states nothing about how he did so. You are injecting the idea from outside the text that it was a direct, instant de novo creation—and then making that do all the work for you.

For the record, I agree with every statement Jesus has ever made. However, I might disagree with how you’ve interpreted one of his statements—especially if something outside the text is doing all the work. That is eisegesis and ought to be rejected.



I don’t know what you were going for here. Yes, Genesis 1:24 says, “God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ It was so.”



True—I think? I am not entirely sure what your question is asking. I mean, yes, he created Adam first divinely, but he followed that with creating Eve divinely, too. It’s not as if he created Adam divinely but Eve undivinely. But then what is “divinely” even supposed to mean? It is a little vague here in a conversation that usually involves terms like “immediate de novo creation” (as opposed to mediated creation through ordinary providence).



Unknown, due to insufficient biblical data. Whilst I know how the different creationist interpretations answer that question, I am not convinced by any of them, so it remains an open question. I prefer the interpretation suggested by Walton, but it likewise doesn’t provide a definitive answer to that question; in other words, his interpretation doesn’t exclude either view, whether they had parents or were created de novo as adults.

Currently, I personally lean toward them having parents, but that’s speculative and tentative and I could easily be moved with a solid argument.

God made Adam from the elements, breathed life in to him, did not mention born from parents

 

[JesusFan]

No, Jesus did not state that Adam and Eve were created directly by God. You are reading far more into the text than is there. Jesus said only that the Creator God “made them” (Matt 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9), which states nothing about how he did so. You are injecting the idea from outside the text that it was a direct, instant de novo creation—and then making that do all the work for you.

For the record, I agree with every statement Jesus has ever made. However, I might disagree with how you’ve interpreted one of his statements—especially if something outside the text is doing all the work. That is eisegesis and ought to be rejected.



I don’t know what you were going for here. Yes, Genesis 1:24 says, “God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ It was so.”



True—I think? I am not entirely sure what your question is asking. I mean, yes, he created Adam first divinely, but he followed that with creating Eve divinely, too. It’s not as if he created Adam divinely but Eve undivinely. But then what is “divinely” even supposed to mean? It is a little vague here in a conversation that usually involves terms like “immediate de novo creation” (as opposed to mediated creation through ordinary providence).



Unknown, due to insufficient biblical data. Whilst I know how the different creationist interpretations answer that question, I am not convinced by any of them, so it remains an open question. I prefer the interpretation suggested by Walton, but it likewise doesn’t provide a definitive answer to that question; in other words, his interpretation doesn’t exclude either view, whether they had parents or were created de novo as adults.

Currently, I personally lean toward them having parents, but that’s speculative and tentative and I could easily be moved with a solid argument.

Both Jesus and Paul though stated that God made the first Man Adam, and that Jesus was the second Adam, so both confirmed man was and is a special creation of God, as ONLY one made in the very image of God

 

[John Bauer]

God made Adam from the elements, breathed life in to him, did not mention born from parents.

That is not found anywhere in Matthew 19:4-6 or Mark 10:6-9. You claimed that “Jesus stated that Adam and Eve were created directly by God.” That was incorrect. He did not.

Now you’re making a new claim, that God made Adam from the elements. But what do we find in Scripture? Genesis 2:7 says that God formed Adam “from the dust of the ground” (‘āfār min-hā’ădāmāh). Nothing there about elements. Anyone who pictures God shaping a pile of dirt into a human form is failing to apprehend the witness of Scripture, for we are no less formed by God from the dust of the ground than was Adam. “Like the one made of dust, so too are those made of dust” (1 Cor 15:47). According to W. Robertson Nicoll, in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, the word used in Psalm 103:14—“he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust”—literally means formation or fashioning, “coming from the same root as the verb employed in Genesis 2:7 to describe man’s creation.” You and I are formed by God of the dust of the ground and yet we have parents, so on what basis should we conclude that Adam had none? “Your hands shaped me and made me,” Job said. “Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?” (Job 10:8-9). Being formed by God from the dust of the earth is not unique to Adam, and it does not preclude having parents. (And not mentioning someone's parents doesn't mean they had none. The Bible never mentions Job having parents, for example.)

Both Jesus and Paul, though, stated that God made the first man, Adam, and that Jesus was the second Adam, so both confirmed man was and is a special creation of God, as ONLY one made in the very image of God.

You are confusing several different passages there and consequently misrepresenting what they say. For example, Paul never described Jesus as the “second Adam.” He describes Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 as the “second man” (v. 47) and the “last Adam” (v. 45). But all of this is for naught anyway because my view does not deny that Adam was created by God, that he was made in the image of God, that he really existed 6,000 years ago, that he was the federal head of the old humanity (with the last Adam, Christ, being the federal head of the new humanity), etc. I affirm all of that.

 

[QVQ]

The OP is "Where did Death come from?
I will state this question again

Trees live on water, sun and earth.

In evolution, just as our our current cars are powered by gasoline and our technology is very rapidly evolving to sun and wind power, why has evolution not moved in those directions? It is much more efficient.
This predatory, savage and death dealing food chain that energizes the supposedly evolved life forms is inefficient, at least and actually was not the original energy souce. The original amoeba in the ooze fed off the ooze, not each other. (according to modern science)
It takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and death to provide for the nutritional needs of higher life forms.
Surely, if evolution can evolve to trees that are sustained by water, sun and earth, then the higher life should have evolved to more efficient and abundent energy sources.
So the question to the evolutionist is "Where did death come from?"

Also, death is caused not only by predatory life forms, (disease) It is caused by the inability of cells to regenerate themselves (old age)
It would seem that if an organism has the evolved ability to regenerate 20 year old cells then it should have the same ability to regenerate 80 year old cells.
If evolution actually worked then Death and this predatory savage world would not be the chosen or necessary path for evolution.
Trees would be the pattern of best possible evolved. Why did amoeba evolve to eat one another? There isn't any compelling reason for doing that at all as there are many single celled organisms that exist on water, sunlight and mineral earth.

Death is not necessary in the evolutionary model.
So where did death come from? Evolution should have weeded it out as inefficient models of flawed celluar organisms and bad source and use of available energy.

 

[JesusFan]

That is not found anywhere in Matthew 19:4-6 or Mark 10:6-9. You claimed that “Jesus stated that Adam and Eve were created directly by God.” That was incorrect. He did not.

Now you’re making a new claim, that God made Adam from the elements. But what do we find in Scripture? Genesis 2:7 says that God formed Adam “from the dust of the ground” (‘āfār min-hā’ădāmāh). Nothing there about elements. Anyone who pictures God shaping a pile of dirt into a human form is failing to apprehend the witness of Scripture, for we are no less formed by God from the dust of the ground than was Adam. “Like the one made of dust, so too are those made of dust” (1 Cor 15:47). According to W. Robertson Nicoll, in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, the word used in Psalm 103:14—“he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust”—literally means formation or fashioning, “coming from the same root as the verb employed in Genesis 2:7 to describe man’s creation.” You and I are formed by God of the dust of the ground and yet we have parents, so on what basis should we conclude that Adam had none? “Your hands shaped me and made me,” Job said. “Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?” (Job 10:8-9). Being formed by God from the dust of the earth is not unique to Adam, and it does not preclude having parents. (And not mentioning someone's parents doesn't mean they had none. The Bible never mentions Job having parents, for example.)



You are confusing several different passages there and consequently misrepresenting what they say. For example, Paul never described Jesus as the “second Adam.” He describes Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 as the “second man” (v. 47) and the “last Adam” (v. 45). But all of this is for naught anyway because my view does not deny that Adam was created by God, that he was made in the image of God, that he really existed 6,000 years ago, that he was the federal head of the old humanity (with the last Adam, Christ, being the federal head of the new humanity), etc. I affirm all of that.

That last part would be the essential part of our discussion, as while we would disagree on the issue concerning creationism proper vrs your Thestic Evolution, that would not be one of the essentials of the faith, and your affirming that Adam was created by God, was our feudal head representing all of mankind yet to come before God and the Lord Jesus now being new head over those who were now redeemed would be essential

 

[John Bauer]

The OP is "Where did Death come from?
I will state this question again

Trees live on water, sun and earth.

In evolution, just as our our current cars are powered by gasoline and our technology is very rapidly evolving to sun and wind power, why has evolution not moved in those directions? It is much more efficient.
This predatory, savage and death dealing food chain that energizes the supposedly evolved life forms is inefficient, at least and actually was not the original energy souce. The original amoeba in the ooze fed off the ooze, not each other. (according to modern science)
It takes a tremendous amount of time, energy and death to provide for the nutritional needs of higher life forms.
Surely, if evolution can evolve to trees that are sustained by water, sun and earth, then the higher life should have evolved to more efficient and abundent energy sources.
So the question to the evolutionist is "Where did death come from?"

Also, death is caused not only by predatory life forms, (disease) It is caused by the inability of cells to regenerate themselves (old age)
It would seem that if an organism has the evolved ability to regenerate 20 year old cells then it should have the same ability to regenerate 80 year old cells.
If evolution actually worked then Death and this predatory savage world would not be the chosen or necessary path for evolution.
Trees would be the pattern of best possible evolved. Why did amoeba evolve to eat one another? There isn't any compelling reason for doing that at all as there are many single celled organisms that exist on water, sunlight and mineral earth.

Death is not necessary in the evolutionary model.
So where did death come from? Evolution should have weeded it out as inefficient models of flawed celluar organisms and bad source and use of available energy.

Where did death come from in evolutionary theory?​

In evolutionary biology, death is not an anomaly but a built-in consequence of three facts: finite resources (because no ecosystem can sustain unlimited replication, including trees), trophic regulation (wherein herbivores regulate primary producers and apex predators regulate herbivores), and differential survival and reproduction (since not all individuals can survive to reproduce, some variants leave more descendants). The efficiency is not in minimizing death but in maximizing ecosystem stability under energy constraints.

Watch this fascinating five-minute video about the effects of trophic cascade (YouTube), which explains how the simple act of reintroducing wolves 30 years ago in Yellowstone changed elk behavior, allowed vegetation to regrow, increased biodiversity across birds, beavers, and fish, and even stabilized riverbanks so rivers meandered less and their channels narrowed.

“The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. … All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things” (Ps 104:21-30).

Trees are not an example of energy efficiency or absence of death​

It is true, of course, that trees get their carbon from CO₂ and energy from sunlight, but photosynthesis converts less than 2 percent of incoming solar energy into usable chemical energy. That is extraordinarily inefficient compared to heterotrophic metabolism (which provides a concentrated package of energy, minerals, and biomolecules). Furthermore, there is widespread death among trees—their leaves die seasonally, their root tips continually undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis), large trees shed branches, forests experience disease and fire, and so on.

Indefinitely replicating cells​

Unlimited cell replication is not hypothetical; it is cancer. Senescence exists as a stabilizing trade-off in complex organisms because it supports tumor-suppression systems such as telomere shortening. Without programmed cell death and replication limits, every lineage of somatic cells would accumulate an ever-growing mutational load, cranking Muller’s ratchet—the irreversible buildup of deleterious mutations in the absence of lineage turnover. Tumor suppression, mutation accumulation, and the energetic cost of perfect repair jointly impose finite lifespan. If an organism could perfectly regenerate indefinitely, it would become cancerous or nonviable under real-world entropy and mutation rates.

Conclusion​

The whole picture is straightforward. In a finite world, death is not an evolutionary oversight but the structural condition under which complex life persists at all. Ecological limits, trophic regulation, and differential survival guarantee continual turnover. And every level of biology, from forest dynamics to cellular architecture, assumes that reality. Death is the mechanism that recycles nutrients, maintains genomic integrity, restrains cancer, stabilizes ecosystems, and allows life to adapt across generations. In an energy-limited, entropy-driven world, a living system without death is biologically impossible.

 

[EarlyActs]

I hav

Back when you had asked me that question, I answered in the affirmative because I have that book.

Lewis does not disagree with my position about the laws of nature being a reliable guide for inferring what will happen (or has happened), provided that nothing interferes, he said. “[The laws of nature] can’t tell you whether something is going to interfere,” he said, or has interfered. And I agree with him. To answer how likely nature is to be (or has been) interfered with from outside, he said, “you must go to the metaphysician” (i.e., theologian)—because that is a theological question, not a scientific one. [1] “For Christians,” Moore said, “the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their Author, science relates them to one another as integral parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell us of their interrelations, science cannot speak of their relation to God.” [2] And that was the whole point of the analogy: The explanatory level must match the kind of question asked. We don’t use science to study what the Bible says, and we don’t use theology to study how nature works. Lewis was distinguishing levels of explanation, which is determined by the nature of the questions being asked.

As for the question as to whether “something happened” prior to Genesis 1:2, that is a textual question answered with biblical exegesis. And you have provided that argument a number of times, an argument I don’t pretend to understand at all.

That being said, my view finds more agreement with Moore than Lewis, for he said that “the common distinction between the natural and the supernatural is unreal and misleading.” I completely agree. If God is providentially sustaining and governing all of creation, then to contemplate divine interference is to sing theologically off-key. It introduces a theological dissonance. Since creation is not in any way autonomous, there is no sense in which God could “interpose” upon himself. As Moore said,

There are not, and cannot be, any divine interventions in nature, for God cannot interfere with himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labor between God and nature, or God and law. … The plant which is produced from seed by the “natural” laws of growth is his creation. … We need hardly stop to remind ourselves how entirely this is in accord with the relation of God and nature, always assumed in the Bible. What strikes us at once, trained as we are in the language of science, is the immediateness with which everything is ascribed to God. He makes the grass to grow upon the mountains. To him the young ravens look up for food. He holds the winds in the hollow of his hand. Not a sparrow falls without his knowledge. He numbers the hairs of our head. Of bird and beast and flower, no less than of man, it is true that in him they ”live and move and have their being.” O Lord, how glorious are thy works! For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God. [3]

I don’t see any room in a coherent, self-consistent Reformed theology for a two-tiered ontology of the created order, natural and supernatural. As Alexander observed, “There is only one great ‘dualism’ in biblical thought—that which describes the relationship between God the creator and everything else that exists.” [4] I think this is articulated in Reformed covenant theology as the Creator–creature distinction. There is God, and there is everything he has made. There is nothing else. To bifurcate creation into natural and supernatural realms is unnecessary.

And I don’t think such a concept is found in Scripture. It was a drift that began in the 12th–13th centuries as Aristotelian categories were imported into Christian theology. Reformed orthodoxy doesn’t really cohere with that kind of ontology. Rather, we affirm the original and patristic view of creation as upheld by and contingent at every moment upon the creator’s willing. Like Augustine and others, we treat nature as the continuous theater of providence. Even in Old Testament times, there was no idea of a self-existing, stable “natural order” into which God would intervene. They believed, as did later Christianity, that deity pervades the world. “The Israelites, along with everyone else in the ancient world, believed instead that every event was the act of deity—that every plant that grew, every baby born, every drop of rain and every climatic disaster was an act of God,” explains Walton. There are no “natural” laws governing the cosmos; God does that. And there are no miracles in the sense of events deviating from that which was “natural,” there are only signs of God’s activity (either favorable or not):

The idea that deity got things running then just stood back or engaged himself elsewhere (deism) would have been laughable in the ancient world because it was not even conceivable. As suggested by Richard Bube, if God were to unplug himself in that way from the cosmos, we and everything else in the cosmos would simply cease to exist. There is nothing “natural” about the world in biblical theology, nor should there be in ours … [because God] is thoroughly involved in the operations and functions of the world. [5]

Those who defend this idea of occasional interventions by God seem to have failed to notice that “a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence,” Moore noted. Indeed! And that mindset reflected the deism prevalent in the 18th century which, even when trying to sound orthodox, spoke of God much like an absentee landlord who doesn’t mind his property as long as the rent comes in. “Yet anything more opposed to the language of the Bible and the fathers can hardly be imagined.” [6]

“As a result,” Walton says, “we should not expect anything in the Bible or in the rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God’s level of creative activity relates to the ‘natural’ world.”

The categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have no meaning to [the people of the Old Testament], let alone any interest (despite the fact that in our modern world such questions take center stage in the discussion). The ancients would never dream of addressing how things might have come into being without God or what “natural” processes he might have used. Notice that even the biblical text merges these perspectives when Genesis 1:24 says, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” but then follows up with the conclusion in the very next verse, “So God made the animals.” All of these issues are modern issues imposed on the text, and not the issues in the culture of the ancient world. We cannot expect the text to address them, nor can we configure the information of the text to force it to comply with the questions we long to have answered. We must take the text on its own terms—it is not written to us [though it was written for us.] Much to our dismay, then, we will find that the text is impervious to many of the questions that consume us in today’s dialogues. Though we long for the Bible to weigh in on these issues and give us biblical perspectives or answers, we dare not impose such an obligation on the text. God has chosen the agenda of the text, and we must be content with the wisdom of those choices. If we attempt to commandeer the text to address our issues, we distort it in the process. [7]

Let me tie this back into what Lewis was arguing. His point was that the laws of nature, studied scientifically, describe the workings of the created order through secondary causes—a distinction that is itself theological, since it directs one’s attention to the primary cause, namely, God. The explanatory level must match the kind of question asked. The laws of nature tell us what follows within the created realm, all else being equal. If the result departs from what would ordinarily arise under those same conditions, then the conditions themselves have changed. In some cases—such as the virgin birth—the shift is not a breakdown of natural law but an instance of God employing an extraordinary mode of providence. The explanatory level moves accordingly

Moore’s argument exposes the hidden and ultimately needless assumption operating in Lewis’s analogy. If creation is never autonomous, then talk of “interference” misconstrues the relation between Creator and creature. The entire framework of “outside” and “inside” dissolves. What Lewis treated as a metaphysical question becomes, in a coherent Reformed ontology, a straightforward matter of providence. God does not step into a system running on its own; the system has no independent existence apart from his sustaining will. The created order is not a vast machine engineered by a distant Designer but a sacred kingdom upheld and governed by a sovereign Ruler. In that sense, Moore does not so much contradict Lewis as carry the logic of providence to its proper conclusion. Lewis was right to distinguish explanatory levels; once the ontology is clarified, the levels align without strain. Science addresses the regularities of secondary causation, while theology speaks of the God who grants both ordinary and extraordinary providence their existence, purpose, and meaning. Miracles are not breaches in the natural order but particular, purposeful expressions of the same sovereign agency that upholds all things.

---

References:

[1] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), 74.

[2] Aubrey L. Moore, Science and Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects, 6th ed. (1889; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1905), 185. Emphasis mine.

[3] Moore, ibid., 225–226. Emphasis mine.

[4] Denis R. Alexander, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Monarch, 2014), 216.

[5] John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 18.

[6] Moore, ibid., 184–185.

[7] Walton, ibid., 18–19. Emphases mine.

I have had a full plate this week! I hope to get to it in a week. I saw the length you went to; I wasn’t expecting that much on top of all I have to do.

As communication specialists say, by the time the 3rd point is made, interest and attentiveness drops drastically.

 

[QVQ]

In evolutionary biology, death is not an anomaly but a built-in consequence of three facts: finite resources (because no ecosystem can sustain unlimited replication, including trees), trophic regulation (wherein herbivores regulate primary producers and apex predators regulate herbivores), and differential survival and reproduction (since not all individuals can survive to reproduce, some variants leave more descendants). The efficiency is not in minimizing death but in maximizing ecosystem stability under energy constraints.

I must suspect long, complicated answers to be AI generated.
Therefore I will address the summation of the argument
1) finite resources: resources such as sunlight water and earth, minerals are practically infinite in terms of biomass
2) limited resources: reproduction, Reproduction can be self limiting. The urge to reproduce is prompted in part by the desire to repopulate.
Rabbits and lately, man himself, has stopped reproducing when the get exceeds the available resources. It seems species stop reproducing when there isn't any need to repopulate and there is overpopulation pressure.
3)Trophic regulation is untrue. There has never been any biodiversity or ecosystem stability under the rapacious hierarchy of herbivores or predators. There are endless cycles of starvation and war in the system, huge systems vacillating between extremes. The obvious answer would that the ones who could do the most with the least, the ones who were self sufficient as to water, sun and minerals would have a vast natural advantage.
The entire system could not have evolved with the Darwin axim of "Survival of the Fittest.
Evolution had forms, supposedly, that could live on sunlight water and earth. Those are the fittest.

The nostrums and pablums, suggested by what I suspect is AI and presented under a byline, do not explain why evolution would have prompted a perfectly adapted and peaceful amoeba basking in the ooze to take a bite out of his neighbor. And instanteously have evolved to digest same.

Evolution, by all the rules ,would have followed the path that man has taken in evolving his machines, sun, water, mineral energy and forms that could maintain or repair themselves. Perhaps all that is needed is another X x X billion more years to evolve what supposedly was evolved in the beginning. The models for "no death" were, basking in the primal ooze, according to modern science.

 

[John Bauer]

I must suspect long, complicated answers to be AI generated.

And that’s the thanks I get for putting that kind of time and effort into my answer.

 

[QVQ]

And that’s the thanks I get for putting that kind of time and effort into my answer.

Fair enough
However I cannot bold anything in my little box here
Perhaps other people write their stuff in word processor programs which allow the bolding, italics and tiny script then copy and paste here.
But then AI freely uses all those features, bold, italics et alia and I do suspect postings which follow the customs and format of AI as c/p of AI generated material.

Am I the only poster here whose entire top bar of B I tT (bold, italic tiny text) up to and including "delete draft" is whited out and unusuable?

 

[John Bauer]

Fair enough. However, I cannot bold anything in my little box here. Perhaps other people write their stuff in word processor programs—which allows the bolding, italics, and tiny script—then copy and paste here.

But then AI freely uses all those features—bold, italics, et alia—and I do suspect postings which follow the customs and format of [being] AI as c/p of AI-generated material.

That is almost exactly what I do, although my “word processor” is actually Typora—a beautifully minimal Markdown editor—which I’ve been using for years to compose my posts for Reddit. Earlier this year (April 29), I configured the forums to automatically convert basic Markdown into BBCode, so that people could write posts in Markdown—like I do—and it would automatically convert to BBCode, which is what these forums accept.

Explanation: Markdown and BBCode are two ways of adding basic formatting such as bold, italics, and links.

Markdown uses simple symbols you type as you go. For example, placing asterisks around a word makes it italic or bold.

• Putting a single asterisk around something—*like this*—converts the text to italics.
  
  ​
• Putting two asterisks around something—**like this**—converts the text to bold.
  
  ​
• Putting three asterisks around something—***like this***—converts the text to bold italics.

BBCode comes from older internet forums and looks more like stripped-down HTML. It uses tags in square brackets to tell the forum what to do. You write something like [B]bold[/B] or [I]italic[/I], opening and closing the tag around the text you want formatted.

As a writer and copy editor, I am fastidious about proper formatting. It’s not AI, it’s OCD.

Am I the only poster here whose entire top bar of B I tT (bold, italic tiny text) up to and including "delete draft" is whited out and unusuable?

You might be. But there is an easy fix. Look at the image below. See those two brackets? That symbol toggles between automatic and manual BB Code. If all the formatting buttons are grayed out, then it’s set to manual. Click that button and it will switch to automatic, which should light up those formatting buttons.

 

[John Bauer]

[MOD HAT: I will move the two preceding posts to their own thread in the Questions/Concerns/Suggestions forum later today.]

 

[JesusFan]

I must suspect long, complicated answers to be AI generated.
Therefore I will address the summation of the argument
1) finite resources: resources such as sunlight water and earth, minerals are practically infinite in terms of biomass
2) limited resources: reproduction, Reproduction can be self limiting. The urge to reproduce is prompted in part by the desire to repopulate.
Rabbits and lately, man himself, has stopped reproducing when the get exceeds the available resources. It seems species stop reproducing when there isn't any need to repopulate and there is overpopulation pressure.
3)Trophic regulation is untrue. There has never been any biodiversity or ecosystem stability under the rapacious hierarchy of herbivores or predators. There are endless cycles of starvation and war in the system, huge systems vacillating between extremes. The obvious answer would that the ones who could do the most with the least, the ones who were self sufficient as to water, sun and minerals would have a vast natural advantage.
The entire system could not have evolved with the Darwin axim of "Survival of the Fittest.
Evolution had forms, supposedly, that could live on sunlight water and earth. Those are the fittest.

The nostrums and pablums, suggested by what I suspect is AI and presented under a byline, do not explain why evolution would have prompted a perfectly adapted and peaceful amoeba basking in the ooze to take a bite out of his neighbor. And instanteously have evolved to digest same.

Evolution, by all the rules ,would have followed the path that man has taken in evolving his machines, sun, water, mineral energy and forms that could maintain or repair themselves. Perhaps all that is needed is another X x X billion more years to evolve what supposedly was evolved in the beginning. The models for "no death" were, basking in the primal ooze, according to modern science.

Death came into the creation due to the sinning and Fall of Adam

 

[QVQ]

I understand your answer to be:
The world is the way it is because the way it was required it to evolve to be the way it is.
According to Theory
Man evolved to slaughter animals and adapted to wearing animal skins in self same cultures that wove baskets.
Surely, man, who is very clever and quickly "evolves" his own technologies would have made light basket weave cloth to clothe his nakedness.
Which he did eventually, supposedly a few billion years after he draped himself in hides.
It took a few billion years...and he was still slaughtering buffalo in the 1880s for their hides.
There wasn't and never has been any evolution explanation for the propensity for slaughter on this planet.
The underlying and unstated assumption in evolution is that everything is "evolving" to higher and better forms when the best form was the amoeba in the ooze who lives on water, sun and earth and had absolutely no reason to consume his neighbor.

And consuming his neighbor would require mechanisms for digesting neighbor that evolved instantaneously?
Was it the first bite that was consumed or did it take a few billions years and trillions of bites before an act with no reason to perform, biting, evolved a mechanism for digestion so the act became evolutionally necessary and useful?
Did the beast bite and then evolve to make the action necessary and logical to perfom?
Or did the beast evolve the mechanisms for digesting that bite then so prompted by evolution, take the first bite?

The direction of evolution should not have been to create the present reality.
The direction of evolution should have been the path of least resistance, not the path of most resistance which is self same neighbor taking extreme exception to being bitten and fighting back, causing even more death and injury, thereby removing what might be better genetic material, willy nilly, from the gene pool
Certainly, that battle, between eater and eaten would have discouraged that path of evolution, especailly in a culture of peaceful ameobas basking in sun, water and earth.

I say, if using the theory of evolution, the world did not and actually could not have turned out this way.

 

[QVQ]

Here is the answer to whether organisms who were able to live on water, sun, earth would have evolved into the current life forms
This is AI generated answer and I posited my answer above before I queried AI
Not surprisingly, AI seems to agree with me

The first organisms were able to live on sun, water and earth (minerals)

AI Response:
Evolution fundamentally relies on available resources and environmental pressures. If the very first organisms could sustain themselves using only sunlight, water, and minerals, the subsequent path of evolution would have been dramatically different, primarily by eliminating the need for predation and decomposition as primary energy acquisition strategies [1, 2].
Here is how evolution might have changed:

1. The Dominance of Photosynthesis/Chemosynthesis
All life would essentially be autotrophic from the start. Organisms capable of synthesizing their own food from these abundant, non-living resources would thrive universally. This would likely mean:

• No Herbivores, Carnivores, or Omnivores: The entire concept of a complex "food chain" driven by one organism consuming another for energy would not develop in the same way [1, 2].
• Reduced Need for Mobility: With energy universally available (as sunlight and minerals are widely distributed), there would be less evolutionary pressure to develop complex movement systems to chase food. Sessile (stationary) life forms might dominate most ecosystems [1].
• Simpler Digestive Systems: Complex digestive tracts, stomachs, and predatory adaptations like teeth, claws, and venom would likely never evolve [1].

2. Altered Ecosystem Structures
Ecosystems would be structured around efficiency in resource capture rather than competition for consuming other life.

• Competition for Light and Space: Natural selection would heavily favor adaptations for maximizing surface area for light absorption (like broad leaves or complex cellular structures) or for accessing scarce minerals/water, leading to intense competition for prime physical locations [1].
• Different Biomass Distribution: The base of the food web would be astronomical, leading to massive global biomass. The "pyramid of energy" would look very different, with a potentially uniform distribution of high-density life forms rather than the sharp drop-off from producers to apex predators we see today [2].

3. Different Defense Mechanisms
The primary threats would be environmental (UV radiation, drought, mineral deficiencies) rather than biological (being eaten).

• Focus on Environmental Protection: Adaptations would center on robust protective coverings, efficient water retention mechanisms, or chemical defenses against harsh sunlight [1].
• No Immune Systems (as we know them): The sophisticated immune systems evolved to fight off pathogens and parasites might be vastly simplified or non-existent, as parasites, which rely on consuming other life forms, would also struggle to evolve [1].

In summary, the resulting biosphere would likely be a peaceful, green, and highly efficient world, but one lacking the complex behavioral and physical adaptations that drive much of the "drama" of current evolutionary history [1, 2].

 

[John Bauer]

I must suspect long, complicated answers to be AI-generated.

It could be, but that isn’t necessarily true. When it comes to my responses, long and complicated answers are usually the result of Brandolini’s Law (which states that rebuttals tend to involve more effort than what was required to make the original false claim). A succinct claim like “trophic regulation is untrue” can be made in a single sentence, but explaining why that claim is false requires much more than a sentence. This kind of asymmetry existed long before AI and is just the nature of correction.

I made a post about the Top 10 Core Internet Laws of Debate, and Brandolini’s Law comes in at number 1.

Therefore I will address the summation of the argument.

I don’t mind someone addressing the summation of the argument, provided they take into account the argument and evidence to which that summation pointed—which you didn’t really do.

Finite resources: Resources such as sunlight, water, and earth minerals are practically infinite in terms of biomass.

Resources look “practically infinite” only because mortality keeps recycling them. Remove death from the system and you discover immediately how finite water, nutrients, and minerals really are. Bacteria alone would strip every usable nutrient within days. And without decomposition, nothing returns nitrogen, phosphorous, iron, or carbon to the soil or oceans; all of it becomes locked inside ever-growing, never-dying biomass. Starting from the actual bacterial population of the oceans, it would take less than 36 generations, roughly, for microbial biomass to equal the mass of the earth. At that point, nothing can grow, nothing can reproduce, nothing can eat, and nothing can starve. Oceans are gone; they are just a mass of bacterial ooze. You get a planet-wide metabolic gridlock: trillions of tons of living matter frozen in place because the biosphere has lost the one mechanism that keeps resources cycling—death.

(I had to Google this: Ocean water contains on the order of 10⁸–10⁹ bacteria per liter, and the planet holds about 1.3 × 10²¹ liters of water. That gives ~10²⁹–10³⁰ bacteria to start with. That means in just 36 generations, because there is no death, the mass of bacteria would equal the mass of the entire planet, which is 10²⁴ kg. And bacteria will hit 36 generations is just a matter of days. Obviously physics would stop this long before, but the math shows how fast exponential growth blows through any finite resource base if nothing ever dies. Google AI will tell you that the facts and math checks out; you can read it here.)

Limited resources: Reproduction can be self-limiting. The urge to reproduce is prompted in part by the desire to repopulate. Rabbits—and, lately, man himself—stop reproducing when the get exceeds the available resources. It seems species stop reproducing when there isn't any need to repopulate and there is overpopulation pressure.

The problem is that self-limiting reproduction is itself a mortality-driven adaptation. Species evolve reproductive restraint precisely because individuals that reproduce too much die faster, starve, or leave fewer surviving offspring. Even in your rabbit example, population collapse always comes from predation, disease, starvation, or competition—all of which are mortality mechanisms. The population only “slows reproduction” after mortality pressure pushes the system against its limits. If death is not clearing space, food, territory, and nutrients, then there is no mechanism by which reproduction could self-limit in the first place.

In a world with no death, reproduction would not stop; it would jam. You would have every individual organism ever produced/born still occupying space, consuming resources—until they are exhausted (and that within days)—and locking nutrients inside immortal, non-decomposing biomass. Reproductive restraint does nothing to solve that problem. The system cannot reset because nothing exits the system—ever.

Population cycles in rabbits and deer and every other species are driven precisely by predation, disease, and starvation—classic mortality-driven cycles. Ecosystems fluctuate, but that is how trophic regulation works: predators constrain herbivores, herbivores constrain vegetation, and the system stabilizes over time. Yellowstone is a clear empirical demonstration: remove predators → herbivores explode → vegetation collapses (and even affects rivers). Reintroduce predators, the ecosystem re-stabilizes. We must reckon with the evidence.

Trophic regulation is untrue. There has never been any biodiversity or ecosystem stability under the rapacious hierarchy of herbivores or predators. There are endless cycles of starvation and war in the system, huge systems vacillating between extremes.

There are at least three falsehoods contained in this quoted segment, starting with the claim that “trophic regulation is untrue”—which is like claiming that gravity is untrue because things sometimes bounce.

If any reader needs me to unpack what’s false here and why it’s false, I would be pleased to do so.

The obvious answer would that the ones who could do the most with the least, the ones who were self-sufficient as to water, sun. and minerals would have a vast natural advantage. The entire system could not have evolved with the Darwin axiom of "survival of the fittest." Evolution had forms, supposedly, that could live on sunlight water and earth. Those are the fittest. [Your] nostrums and pablums … do not explain why evolution would have prompted a perfectly adapted and peaceful amoeba basking in the ooze to take a bite out of his neighbor. And instantaneously have evolved to digest same.

Evolution, by all the rules, would have followed the path that man has taken in evolving his machines, sun, water, mineral energy and forms that could maintain or repair themselves. Perhaps all that is needed is another X x X billion more years to evolve what supposedly was evolved in the beginning. The models for "no death" were, basking in the primal ooze, according to modern science.

Your objections assume evolution is a goal-driven system that seeks the most peaceful or energy-efficient lifeform. That assumption does not hold either with the theory or real life. (You are, in fact, describing a view nobody holds.) Evolution works with whatever biochemical and ecological constraints a lineage already has; it cannot simply abandon heterotrophy and invent chloroplasts. Animals cannot “trend toward” becoming trees because the foundational machinery is unavailable. Sunlight and minerals may be abundant, but they are not usable by organisms lacking the cellular machinery to exploit them, and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous are limiting everywhere on Earth. Space, shelter, and habitat are finite as well.

Finally, the “fittest” is not synonymous with the “most energy-efficient” or the “most peaceful.” Trees convert less than two percent of solar energy into usable chemical energy and survive only because they are stationary, low-metabolism phototrophs (i.e., minimal energy requirement). Heterotrophs—including some plants!—require a lot more energy than photosynthesis alone can provide. Think of detritivores (e.g., earthworms), or filter feeders, or non-photosynthetic orchids. Predation is but one heterotrophic strategy among many (all of which persist because they work in specific ecological contexts). Biological evolution has resulted in millions of non-killing heterotrophic species. Many plants lose photosynthesis over time because parasitism or saprotrophy is more profitable in their ecological niche. If the “most efficient” path were truly sunlight–water–minerals, then species like Neottia nidus-avis would not exist at all.

My goodness, just bugs alone span nearly the entire spectrum of heterotrophic strategies, including herbivores (e.g., caterpillars), detritivores (e.g., cockroaches), sap-feeders (e.g., butterflies), and so on.

Why did evolution produce far more heterotrophs than phototrophs? Because heterotrophy is a far more flexible, generalizable, and energy-dense strategy than phototrophy, and can succeed in almost every environment on earth. Phototrophy, by contrast, is highly specialized, biochemically demanding, and restricted to a narrow ecological niche. There is a lot evidential argument for this which I can get into.

 

[QVQ]

I don’t mind someone addressing the summation of the argument, provided they take into account the argument and evidence to which that summation pointed—which you didn’t really do.

Read Post # 237

Evolution, with a starting point of organisms that lived on water, sun and minerals, which the first organisms did, would not have evolved into the forms that we have.

AI
Evolution fundamentally relies on available resources and environmental pressures. If the very first organisms could sustain themselves using only sunlight, water, and minerals, the subsequent path of evolution would have been dramatically different, primarily by eliminating the need for predation and decomposition as primary energy acquisition strategies

In summary, the resulting biosphere would likely be a peaceful, green, and highly efficient world, but one lacking the complex behavioral and physical adaptations that drive much of the "drama" of current evolutionary history

 

[John Bauer]

I understand your answer to be: The world is the way it is because the way it was required it to evolve to be the way it is.

No, that is not my answer.

According to [the] theory [of evolution], man evolved to slaughter animals and adapted to wearing animal skins in self-same cultures that wove baskets. Surely, man—who is very clever and quickly "evolves" his own technologies—would have made light basket weave cloth to clothe his nakedness.

[Emphasis added.]

No, that is not the theory of evolution, which means we have an equivocation here with the term “evolve.” What you’re describing is anthropology, which is certainly related but categorically distinct from biology. The theory of evolution concerns changes in heritable traits across populations over time—genes, anatomy, physiology, morphology (i.e., biology). It does not prescribe cultural practices or specific technologies. Killing animals, weaving baskets, and making clothing belong to culture, not genetics—as you noted, yourself.

I would argue that hunting emerged first as a response to dietary and energy demands; the use of hides, bones, and organs follows naturally as secondary cultural and ethical adaptations (where waste is minimized and the animal’s remains are fully incorporated into subsistence life rather than discarded).

Which he did eventually, supposedly a few billion years after he draped himself in hides. It took a few billion years, and he was still slaughtering buffalo in the 1880s for their hides.

Humans have been around for only 250,000 years or so—considerably less than a million, never mind billions.

There wasn't and never has been any evolution explanation for the propensity for slaughter on this planet.

My argument provided one. Pretending it doesn’t exist is certainly a choice.

The underlying and unstated assumption in evolution is that everything is "evolving" to higher and better forms, when the best form was the amoeba in the ooze who lived on water, sun, and earth and had absolutely no reason to consume his neighbor.

I already responded to this (see here). Evolution is not a goal-driven system that seeks “higher and better forms.” Again, your assumption doesn’t hold either with the theory or real life. “You are, in fact, describing a view nobody holds.”

And the idea that early life had “no reason to consume its neighbor” simply ignores the fact of resource limitation and my argument regarding that.

And consuming his neighbor would require mechanisms for digesting neighbor that evolved instantaneously? Was it the first bite that was consumed, or did it take a few billion years and trillions of bites before an act with no reason to perform—biting—evolved a mechanism for digestion so the act became evolutionally necessary and useful?

No, it does not require anything “instantaneous” in the sense you’re suggesting. Single-celled organisms already possess hydrolytic enzymes for ordinary metabolism, waste processing, and autophagy. Phagocytosis is simply the extension of those same processes to engulf external particles. Once engulfment exists, intracellular digestion follows by redirecting enzymes that already break down macromolecules. No new chemical principles are required—only incremental changes in regulation and compartmentalization.

We see the same pattern in real time in the Lenski long-term evolution experiment. E. coli did not suddenly invent a brand-new metabolic system from scratch. It already had the genes needed to metabolize citrate; what evolved were modest regulatory changes that allowed existing machinery to be used under new conditions. After ~30,000 generations (roughly 15 years), one population gained the ability to import and metabolize citrate aerobically. Fifteen years is a long time for bacterial populations but it is “instantaneous” on geological timescales. Predation and intracellular digestion arise the same way: by repurposing existing systems, not by spontaneous invention of fully formed organs.

The direction of evolution should not have been to create the present reality. The direction of evolution should have been the path of least resistance, not the path of most resistance which is self same neighbor taking extreme exception to being bitten and fighting back, causing even more death and injury, thereby removing what might be better genetic material, willy nilly, from the gene pool.

There are two core assumptions packed into that paragraph—both false—and one confusion about how selection works. I know you dislike long, complicated answers, but this is Brandolini’s Law in effect. And I am writing this regardless of whether or not you appreciate it because there are readers who could benefit from it. (For what it's worth, this post took me over three hours to research and write.)

You are claiming (a) that evolution has a “direction” and ought to move along the path of least resistance, (b) that this path should have been peaceful, non-competitive, non-violent, because conflict creates injury and death, (c) that predation and conflict are maladaptive, because they could kill organisms with “better genes,” allegedly degrading the gene pool.

So, the implicit argument is: “If evolution were real, it would minimize conflict and maximize survival of the best individuals. Since predation introduces chaos and kills ‘good’ organisms, it contradicts evolutionary logic.”

Evolution has no direction

This is the foundational error. Evolution doesn’t move toward anything. None of its mechanisms are teleological. There is no preferred end-state, no optimal design, no moral trajectory, no “should.” Natural selection has no vision. And it operates locally on immediate reproductive success under current constraints. “Path of least resistance” is meaningless unless you specify resistance to what. Avoiding conflict? That is not inherently adaptive. In many environments, conflict is exactly the path of least resistance to reproductive success.

Predation is not the path of “most” resistance

In fact, heterotrophy is the most energy-efficient strategy available, as I argued previously. It delivers calories, amino acids, lipids, minerals, and micronutrients in ready-made form. And it removes a competitor while feeding the consumer.

On the one hand, photosynthesis is low-energy and requires huge surface area, immobility, and slow growth. On the other hand, heterotrophy is high energy and supports mobility, cognition, and rapid reproduction. From a biological standpoint, predation is often the path of least resistance, not the most.

Killing “good genes” does not break evolution

Evolution doesn’t sort things out based on some abstract notion of “better” genetic material. It selects based on what reproduces under actual, local conditions. If an organism with “great” genes is consumed, then by definition those genes failed in that environment, or were expressed in a vulnerable body, or were attached to behaviors that were maladaptive in context. See, predation is not “willy-nilly” or random; it is biased toward the slow, the poorly adapted, or the injured within constrained systems. This isn’t corrupting the gene pool, it’s shaping it. (If you wanted to call genetic drift random, scientifically speaking, that would hold up.)

A teleological and moral presupposition

You appear to be smuggling in a teleological and moral intuition: “A good system wouldn’t look like this.” But that is a philosophical judgment (pertaining to morality or aesthetics), not a scientific argument. If what you want is a philosophical discussion, rather than a scientific one, I can get on board with that. However, as Christians, that is going to be based on biblical theology—which is fine by me, because theology is my preferred arena.

Evolution does not aim at peace, fairness, efficiency, or survival of the nicest or cleanest organisms. It produces systems that work under constraint, and those systems often involve competition, death, and turnover because the world and its resources are finite and entropy exists.

And let me add this

I hinted in my previous response that Scripture never describes the natural world or the predator–prey model in terms of censure or moral judgment the way you have, as if it is aberrant, evil, corrupt, savage, cruel, brutal, etc. There are no scriptures that describe it as evil (which is part of my reason for rejecting the concept of “natural evil” itself).

Look at Psalm 104, for example, which was in my previous response: “The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. … All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things” (vv. 21-30). As even Jesus implied, God is not ignorant or powerless about death in the animal kingdom: “Aren't two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will” (Matt 10:29; cf. Luke 12:6. “not one of them is forgotten before God”).