A few tidbits from his talk:
He starts off by using Jesus' miracle at Cana (water to wine) as a structure to analyse the construction of hypotheses regarding the created world.
The creationary hypothesis is: that which is is ultimately not derived from pre-existing things, it is not developed through natural processes, but is created by fiat, and is, according to the biblical claim, young.
This remindes me of Hebrews 11:3
God created the entire universe as a polemic against man-derived ideas: God created the universe as a polemic against every false idea of man.
This attracted me, as some regard Genesis, not as an account of events that corresponds to those events in real historically accessible space-time, but as some sort of purely literary polemic against competing creation myths. Of course, it is, but not in distinction from its realism.
Those who think of it in purely literary terms must end up with an empty polemic: just a bunch of words that do not reflect something real about the creation we are in. It suggests that God's word is not potent and not connected with events: that is, is not joined causally with our world: the world we are in and by which we and all our relationships are circumscribed, delimited and defined.
I suspect that they've also swallowed paganism's 'idealist' framing that the material world is a 'given' and 'God-talk' occurs in a separate field from the real world with the only crossing point being the private knowledge of the priests.
Towards the end of the talk Wise talks about faith as being that by which we understand God to be creator, as all evidence: all theories, rather, will bring us short of completion.
At first I was a little taken aback by this, particularly as I had in mind Paul's words in Romans 1:20 that God's invisible attributes are visible to all through his creation.
So, what was Wise on about? Well, I think it is this: knowledge coming from facts is something that is without any interplay of persons, it is just the one having the knowledge that is in play, where as God seeks us to be with him by faith; that is, faith becomes the means of us seeking or joining God. Faith forms the relationship between man and God, and God's being creator is about that relationship, not just about bald facts. I guess he was thinking of Hebrews 11:3.
