Do I Reject Natural Selection?

I'm writing this on St. Genevieve's Day, Jan. 3, but leaving previous posts on top to honour Christmas.

Some people don't go to my main blog and see me honour Christmas there, this year I had two Christmas themed things that were also Genesis themed, so, I can show the guys who read only this one, I do honour Christmas.

Here is CMI:

The fact of natural selection
First published 16 Nov 2014; last updated 23 Nov 2023.
https://creation.com/natural-selection-fact-contra-guliuzza

Here are a few featured positions commented on in this post:

• Guliuzza believes God could have programmed kinds to be able to do "continuous environmental tracking";
• he denies that the term "natural selection" is appropriate, since it personifies nature, which is undue.
• CMI accepts natural selection as being at work in preserving different genes in different environments.
• CMI accepts epigenetics as partially fulfilling the role of "continuous environmental tracking".

Here is the argument by CMI for natural selection:

CMI scientists are unanimous that natural selection is a fact, and part of this fallen creation where unfit creatures die and sometimes even become extinct. Creationists proposed it before Darwin, so why should we be fearful of the term, and let Darwinists monopolize this phenomenon? So our major books like The Greatest Hoax on Earth? and Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels each have a whole chapter explaining this.

Now, I accept epigenetics and reject other options for "continuous environmental tracking. However, this is not directly telling us why kinds diverge into different species that keep different genes.So, it is not really the issue.

But I also accept Guliuzza's rejection of the term "natural selection" for two reasons:

• "nature" is quasi personified into an agent
• it involves "survival of the fittest".

Instead I propose "providential selection", that is God is constantly using the kinds for his purposes, and on some occasions letting the fittest survive is not the means that best serves God's purpose.

Psalm 103 (as it is in Catholic Bibles), also a go to for Geostasis,* has a few verses.

20 Thou hast appointed darkness, and it is night: in it shall all the beasts of the woods go about: 21 The young lions roaring after their prey, and seeking their meat from God. 22 The sun ariseth, and they are gathered together: and they shall lie down in their dens.

Often when lions hunt gazelles, the weakest and naturally slowest gazelle is the one caught, which means in a way the culling of the least fit. However, this would not necessarily mean gazelles are all the time primed to be fitter and fitter, it would, if totally systematic, mean that God in that way preserves a gazelle population from degrading.

However, there are occasions when this is clearly not so, since the slowest gazelle might be slowest for being born last. It could have excellent material genetically and epigenetically. But it would on such an occasion still be lost. Or the gazelle caught could have stumbled on an obstacle, if the fright by the lions came very abrupt for all the gazelle herd, each gazelle off-tracked when it came to detecting stumbling blocks, it would be a matter of providence that this particular gazelle was the one which took the path that led to the stumbling.

There is even a Biblical example:

Genesis 22:13 Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw behind his back a ram amongst the briers sticking fast by the horns, which he took and offered for a holocaust instead of his son. 14 And he called the name of that place, The Lord seeth. Whereupon even to this day it is said: In the mountain the Lord will see.

If you have any sense of what sacrifice means, it is inconceivable that God was culling a herd of its least fit member, rather the ram had the absolute best genetic material, and was not transmitting more of it, when Abraham was done.

So, instead of "natural selection" I propose a "providential selection" which often, but far from always, coincides somewhat with what "natural selection" would predict.
/Hans Georg Lundahl

* It's neutral between flat earth Geostasis in a boxed universe that could be vertically assymetric, and globe earth Geostasis in a globe shaped or orange shaped universe, which by definition means Geocentrism. I hold to the latter.