Could Jesus have accepted Evolutionary Theory?

Yes, the current state of the scientific evidence is that we did. Darwin’s theory and subsequent refinements of it attempt to plausibly and parsimoniously explain how it occurred.

(Still waiting for that ecclesiastical declaration that Darwin’s theory is “heresy”, BTW…)

 

I did no such thing. You wrote that Darwin’s theory is (somehow) “heresy.” Heresy is a deviation from ‘right faith.’ As ‘faith’ is not a matter of what Scripture says but rather what it means, and whether that meaning sets limits to what may be believed and held in good conscience, it is the Church, not individuals, that determines what is orthodoxy and what is heresy. One of the functions of the Creeds is precisely to enshrine just what orthodox belief consists of. All you have to do is tell me when the Church declared Darwin’s theory to be “heresy.” A simple Google search should resolve the matter easily. Absent such a declaration, there is nothing binding my conscience to interpret Scripture in such a way that it rules out provisional assent to Darwin’s theory even prior to the consideration of evidence. To assert that such amounts to “heresy” is plainly absurd.

 

Did you not say that if anhing is no l

 

I want to decant about using sword heresy, and focus on the validity of evolutionary theory and God as Creator

 

Very well. On that, opinions vary.

I will point out that the theory as such is non-teleological, and does not require any appeal to the supernatural for its validity, so notions of 'theistic evolution', whereby God somehow uses evolution in order to create, are at variance with the theory itself as well as counter to reason, by proposing two sufficient causes for the same set of events. At the same time, Darwin's theory does not rule out theism for the origin of life, or as the basis of moral and physical laws.

 

That's an easy one to answer!

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

Did man evolve from some lower form of life, or did God make man?
Did the sparrows evolve from some reptile, or did God make sparrows?
Did all living things (both plants and animals) ultimately evolve from a single-celled organism, which in turn came into being by spontaneous generation, as the godless scientists claim, or did God make the thousands upon thousands of different animals and plants?

One either believes that God is the maker of all animals, plants, and human beings, or one believes the macroevolutionists. The two are mutually exclusive beliefs. And frankly, it takes one H___ of a lot more faith to believe the macroevolutionists than it does to believe in a Creator of all things.

So, yes, I'll stick with "heresy".

 

Did God make you, or did your parents make you?

You're asserting that the portion of the Creed quoted above commits us to holding a view of creation that is both direct and immediate, yet there are aspects of the living world to which this clearly does not apply, and which the original promulgators of the Creed knew it did not apply. It also raises the question of the intent underlying the quotation of the cited biblical passage (Colossians 1:16) in the Creed, which seems to have nothing to do with the process of creation but rather with the status of all other existing things - the very issue which the Creed itself was intended to address. (The quote is also interesting in that the creation of things "visible and invisible", applied to the Father in the Creed, is actually said of the Son in the Colossians passage.) Your interpretation of the Creed thus seems highly implausible as a strategy for treating the theory of evolution - a theory that is empirically supported, I remind you - as somehow a "heresy." It is also strange that no prominent ecclesiastical body defined it as such with reference to the first article of the Creed, especially during the time when controversy over the theory was the most pronounced.

 

The Creeds, like scripture, are to teach us the author of creation.
The science is to account for the way things are.
I see no contradiction here.
Anselm argued that science and religion when followed with integrity would arrive at the same conclusion.

Existentialism has become the dominant philosophical school of our age, and although some are convinced that existentialism denies God, that is not necessarily true. The question revolves around the foundation of existence, and whether the foundation of existence is God or existence itself. That of course is a philosophical question and not a scientific question.

It is not heresy to deny evolution, it may simply be out of sync with current scientific thought, and indeed it may yet prove to be wrong. From a pragmatic view, I think the theory of evolution may well be the best theory of how things came to be, and I have no trouble accepting that without shaking my faith or questioning the veracity of the Holy Writ.

 

To the above, I would also add that it's perfectly fine to accept the provisional conclusions of each discipline on its own terms. The truth is what it is; it's not our job to try to make everything fit together by concocting various ingenious qualifying statements about the compatibility of conclusions reached in one discipline with those reached in another. (The false distinction, or perhaps better, the false understanding of the distinction, between 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' is one example of this, stemming from the needs of apologetics rather than the scientific discipline itself. Proposals of 'theistic evolution' are another example.) It's fine - indeed, preferable - to let science be science and let religion be religion, rather than to allow either domain to censor the other in its own area of competence. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God or an objective moral world, nor can abstract religious principles enable us to deduce the facts of natural and human history.

 

Actually if the Nicene Creed is read carefully it becomes clear that the whole of the first paragraph after the words "And of all things visible and invisible" refer to Jesus Christ, as 2nd person of the Trinity. The words "Being of one substance with the Father, (are refering to Christ), By whom all things were made", actually still refers to Christ Himself not the Father, as is testified to in the Colossians passage you referred to. Thus; "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him."

The whole of the first paragraph ends with the words: "Whose kingdom shall have no end." (full stop/ or period, end of paragraph). A colon, comma or semi colon does not end a paragraph.

This is a truth that even most Trinitarians cannot get their minds round properly.
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No it's not - this is no answer.

This says nothing whatever about HOW God creates or created the heaven and the earth, only that God was and is solely responsible for them being here.

'It is God that hath made us and not we ourselves.' But that is not a description of the method God has used to make a universe and all it contains. We can be sure though that God didn't uncharacteristicly use magic.

If sparrows evolved from reptiles then God made both. Actually both sparrows and reptiles probably evolved from something similar to both but now extinct, but God still made them, all three.

If we are to accept the existence of a Creator Spirit which Jesus Christ called Abba (Father), then it is possible that there can be no truly "Spontaneous" event other than the existence of God being the primary cause of all subsequent events. Metaphorically 'speaking', "God SPAKE the word, and they were made : he commanded, and they were created'. Ps.148:5 BCP Psalter.

No; one does not have to believe atheists at all. Created does not have to mean 'magic-ed into existence from thin air'. everything tangible, apart from helium hydrogen and some other gasses, is made of star-dust, not thin air.

No they're not, not if you have a sufficiently accurate concept in mind of what God is like and the extent of God's creative ability through deep time.

I have no difficulty whatever in believing in macroevolution and also in God. It just takes a little thought and intelligence to understand what paleantological research and The Holy Spirit are revealing to us concerning God's creation. It takes only a little ignorance to fail to comprehend the magnitude of God or the divine creativity of evolution or in some cases, only a very little more to remain ignorant of both.
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I think it is perfectly possible that proto mankind was created along with cattle and other things, i.e mammals.

and there is an evening, and there is a morning--day fifth. And God saith, `Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind:' and it is so. And God maketh the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, and God seeth that [it is] good. And God saith, `Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that is creeping on the earth.' And God prepareth the man in His image; in the image of God He prepared him, a male and a female He prepared them.

Mankind existed physically but was little more than an intelligent animal, because they were not yet in the image of God, because God had not yet prepared them 'in God's image', i.e. put into them a creative spirit. Our physical origins may be from a common ancestor, now extinct, of all primates to which we all bear some definite similarites, in greater or lesser extent, depending on how distantly we may be related.

Spiritually though human beings are all created by God and therefore bear a likeness in spirit, (now marred and distorted in the unregerate but progressively restored in the elect), to the image of God who is Spirit. John 4:24.
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Well said. Let’s not forget that a number of the Church Fathers (including St. Augustine) - the very people who defined ‘orthodoxy’ in the first place - endorsed the theory of rationes seminales, which basically asserted that God created everything in ‘seed’ form and then providentially allowed the world to develop from there.

The Church Fathers in general also did not believe that the bare literal sense of the OT was the intended inspired sense, and therefore tended to interpret it allegorically (while not denying that there were parts which were also intended to convey knowledge of real events).

 

I am of the opinion that science has not been followed with integrity when it comes to the question of the macroevolution hypothesis. Those who have advanced the idea most ardently were scientists who had an anti-supernatural bias and were strongly motivated to convince themselves of the naturalistic origin of all things.

If a lie is told enough times, with enough conviction, the general populace usually will accept the lie as fact. The anti-God scientists have had about a century and a half since Darwin's day to repeat their lie.

 

I am no scholar of Hebrew, but is there any version besides Young's Literal Translation which comes up with "prepared" for בָּרָא ? Every other Bible version I checked translates it as "created" or "made."

 

This is an almost miraculous cross between a conspiracy theory, a ‘guilt-by-association’ argument, and an ad hominem attack: “a bunch of atheists have pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.” That’s basically what you’re saying. It’s almost cartoonish in its lack of seriousness. Darwin wasn’t an atheist. The quality of the evidence supporting the Theory of Evolution doesn’t depend on the bias of the observer. (Their biases didn’t invent the fossil record, for example.) That’s the beauty of science: it’s ruthless when it comes to bad theories, and there have been plenty of frauds in the history of paleontology that were uncovered by dedicated scientists who weren’t believers. In all fairness, you genuinely don’t seem to understand what you’re arguing against. Ignorance in the name of religion is still ignorance. It would behoove you to set aside your presuppositions and make the effort to learn about the subject from reputable sources. You might just find it was worth the effort after all.

 

If I’m not mistaken, the past participle in Proverbs 8:23 has been variously translated as “established”, “prepared”, and “created.” It would appear that the main idea behind God’s “creating” something in these texts was the image of something being “set firm”, as on a foundation. It’s apparently not a reference to what would later be called creatio ex nihilo. The assumption at the time seems to have been that the raw material was already there. Since creatio ex nihilo doesn’t seem to be required by a plain sense reading of the biblical text (and this question remained a live issue in medieval Judaism), and the notion ran against the Middle Platonist presuppositions of many of the Church Fathers, my guess is that it was deduced from the attribute of divine omnipotence, and then came to full doctrinal expression in opposition to the Aristotelian theory of the world’s eternity during the High Middle Ages.

 

"Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion -- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today." -- Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, atheist, and ardent supporter of macroevolution (as quoted by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D. in the linked article)