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Epigenetics: Something Old and Something New
* The following is an
email response to this article on "epigenetics":
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi158.html
I don't really
see anything new here. Creationists have always recognized
change/adaptation within species. So, there is a new mechanism
for this process. Likely, there will be another one
tomorrow.
That is the nature of science, and why science is not truth,
even creation science.
There is something more disturbing here. A person is both body
AND soul. By traducianism, the soul is transmitted from the
parents to the conceived child. The best theological scholars
seem to think that this method is the most logical and Biblical.
The competing claim is creationism in which God creates a new
soul at each conception which is problematic for transmission of
the sin nature.
(1) Almost all Biblical scholars believe that there is nothing
sinful about matter... material things in the universe and in
man himself... the opposite being a central idea of
neo-Platonism. It is the spirit (soul, mind, heart... all
designations for the same immaterial substance) that sins and is
regenerated to become a member of the Kingdom of God. Since
matter does not carry the sin, epigenetics cannot account for
sin and cannot account for the reversal of man's nature in
redemption. That error is most major for this article. I find
it amazing that, otherwise well-intentioned Christians, and
"scholars," overlook this simple truth.
(2) What turns the chemical triggers on and off? Methyl groups
or strings of DNA (p. 3) are inert chemicals... what causes them
to appear where they can have epigenetic expression? I wrote
some 20 years ago that something had to turn genes on and off...
by themselves they are inert. Almost NONE, including Frances
Collins, a Christian, who headed the Human Genome Project,
understood this first cause effect. And, thus genetic answers
to medicine have been stalled for some 10 years. The ultimate
question is "What is life," and what regulates it. Of course,
it is not a what but a Who.
(3) Surely, characteristics of parents are transmitted to their
children through their souls, as well as their genes. Which is
foundational? The spiritual world, and the Spirit Himself, are
the hypostasis of the material world. How easily Christians
become materialists. In psychology and neuroscience, this focus
on the material is getting to the point of denial of the soul...
it is an "epiphenomenon," not a reality of being. I am going to
write an article, soon I hope, that this elimination of the soul
is heretical.
Likely, this response is far more than you wanted, but issue has
to be addressed carefully within a Biblical context first, and a
scientific context second.
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