Speed

I recently heard a discussion that one of the indicators of God's being creator, and not the cosmos itself being its own 'creator', or processes within the cosmos being required to give effect to God's fiats in Genesis 1, is the parsimony of action implied in Genesis 1.

That is, a clear result of intelligence brought to bear is the economy of effort that is applied.

This is echoed in a number of passages in the Bible:

The centurion's servant is one. The centurion expected instant results from Jesus' command, just as he expected from his troops.

There are also examples in the Psalms:

Psalm 33:8-10: he spoke and it happened!

Psalm 148:5: same as above!

Genesis 1 itself indicates parsimony of causative effort: God spoke...and it was so!

I don't think this leaves much room for setting aside the implications of rapidity in Genesis 1.

Bavink, Lankshear and myth

Recently, searching my emails I came across this letter from 3 years ago: in Internet time, this is ancient history, of course, and what fun to share it.

William,

Bavink in "In the Beginning" makes the observation that materialism leads to occultism, and points to the late 19th C when it did just that... I'll hunt up the quote as its quite pithy.

Along those lines, thinking about Lankshear's jumble of ideas; particularly his joining of EE [Enuma Elish] and Gen 1: it seems that his fundamental take on reality in referring to a mythical view as having credibility; that is, an a-historical tale being able to meld with what is historical (or at least factual; as he seems to think for some reason that God is creator), must itself be mythical.

He is letting a source that is outside biblical revelation structure his world view... what is that source? Well, it could be either purely materialist (maybe provide links to Gisler's JETS paper on beware of philosophies and Mortensen's The Master's Seminary Journal paper on materialism and age of earth; I can give links if you don't have them) which means that he is judging the bible on the basis of a view that denies the world view of the bible: that is, a view that says "there is no god'; 'material is all there is' and 'man has no moral, generative or epistemological relationships outside himself' that is, is ethically and actually independent. So; Lankshear appears to base his thinking, at least by default' on this world view and uses it to analyse the Bible; from the get go he has prejudiced his thinking.

Alternatively, his view might be that consequence of materialism: mythological: that there are factors to consider that are not principally material, but have arisen culturally as a response by the imaginatively powerful to their situation in the material world...which reduces entertainingly to 'mere fiction'. If myth is a cultural response to a historical situation, then its interesting, but probably unimportant... Lankshear is then using the unimportant to assess the credibility of the Bible!

Another thing about ANE and other myths, they all take the cosmos as a given; effectively; even if they pretend to be a true cosmogony; they are not, as in EE they are either a theogony, or a story of the origin of something within the cosmos, not of the cosmos and its ontological implications for us...so, myths are pretty skinny; and they do not allow us to build anything of substance; thus mythologically referenced cultures have not produced natural science; nor objective history.

On this last point, he fails also to understand the critical importance in Jewish culture of objective history: Jewish thought regards objective history with bedrock importance; it is not a mythological culture at all, but a concretely historical one; for it to base this on a myth is both absurd and incoherent: cultures do not and cannot build objective historically referred structures on mythological foundations: the Jews have done the reverse: their culture is objectively historical and concretely real down to day 1.

Once Lankshear manages to reflect on the structure of his thought world he might be able to adopt a biblical noetical frame of reference which would instantly eliminate the explanatory dead ends of materialism and its cousin mythology.

BTW, I'll lend you Bavink: he's old fashioned (well...just old) but has some great ideas, including a wonderful logical critique of Darwinism as it then was.

Southern Baptists

I've mentioned Al Mohler's work in previous posts.

Al has written a goodly amount on the matter of origins on his blog.

Here are some links:

The Futility of Theistic Evolution

Christianity and Evolution: Seeing the Problem

Creation vs. Evolution: The New Shape of the Debate

Evolution on the Mind

Should we really thank God for evolution?


The Buzzing Fly: Why the Creation-Evolution Debate is So Important

The Christian World View as Master Narrative: Creation

Mohler on Hawking on Creation

Mohler on Ruse on Creation'ism'

A darwinian compendium.

A knight of the mind.

Darwin's dog.

You'll get the idea!

God and Science

This letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today (16 July 2011)

God and science
Mike Phillips (Letters, July 15) suggests that Tony Maher has engaged in cherry picking of his beliefs and that there is an inconsistency between accepting climate change science on the one hand and belief in a creator god on the other.
As many theistic scientists will attest, it's a false dichotomy to pit God against science. Scientific inquiry looks at the world and how it works, while theology looks behind the curtain and wonders why it all exists to begin with.
One might look at how the world began, the other at why and by whom the world began. The two disciplines ask and answer completely different questions about life.
Cherry picking? I don't think so. But Mike Phillips might be comparing apples with oranges.
Andrew Miers Bardwell Valley

Phillips' letter rightly identified the foundation of Christian theism (although without using that term) being that God is creator. Oddly, he sees the significance of this cornerstone idea or doctrine, while many teachers of the church fail to understand it, leading at best, in many cases to views such as Miers' above.

Miers and others who see a spilt between what happened and what it means are philosophically out of tune with the Bible's world concept, and theologically under-done when it comes to discussion of origins. The Bible is very clear that what happened is the basis for the significance of what happened (the 'why' that Miers notes). There is no split in the Bible's framing of the world of thought and event so that 'meaning' is carried on a different plane to causal continuity. Certainly the Bible insists that 'word' is necessary, but you may note, that the word with respect to origins is about what happened in causal continuity, and not other than what happened.

Phillips gets it: if the Bible is not to be trusted when it deals with events in causal continuity, then what it derives human significance from is but a fiction, and the 'really real' events, and their inherent meaning, are otherwise, and God is divided! A house divided, of course, is a house bound to fall, particularly when theologians set out to divide what God has conjoined.

Phillips knows that it is 'God of the real world' that Christianity has in mind; he just disbelieves. Miers on the other hand seems to think that Christian faith is in a God of other than the real world: disconnected, not Elohim who connects with us, or draws worship from us because he is creator of the real that we are in!

For the sake of brevity I won't go through the flowering of modern science in the rich bed of Christian theology and belief, including the face-value reading of Genesis 1.

Un-knowledge

The application of symbolism to critical biblical passages remains an interesting thing to contemplate.

Going on from my earlier post,

There is a major problem in attempts to cast the early chapters of Genesis as other than having the meaning of their face reading; particularly noting that the face reading is set in terms of of the causality of the world of our being and experience (coordination points are in the chronological alignment, the pattern of causality that is identical our experience, the continuity of space-time between the Genesis 1-3 depiction of the world and ours, and the uniformity of relationships between that depiction and ours, for example).

The problem is that unfooting Genesis 1 unfoots the understanding of our origin, relationships and sin (particularly the relationship with God) that only can come from Genesis 1.

The claim that G1 is mythic, or symbolic (which amounts to the same thing) immediately removes the information-content that it would otherwise convey. This means that the origin of all things, of our relationship with God (both made, in Genesis 1:27? and broken in Genesis 3:n, and fore-redeemed (Genesis 3:n), and our self-identity are not known, if they are not factual in the only account we have.

Then to explain sin, for example (but also to explain anything else in these chapters), becomes problematic. To understand the claims of scripture people must know the real connections that did, do and will affect them; they mythic connections will not do this, as people's lives are lived, challenged, enjoyed and frustrated in the real world, not the uninformative mythic one from whence comes at best metaphors of the real world. So is we can't show a 'real-world' engagement that explains our situation and all its dimensions, then it does not provide for us to understand our position.

This has a pastoral aspect.

If a person grappling to understand sin and God's redemptive response is told that sin is only explained in the Bible in symbolic terms, then the person can ask "then where did it really come from?" And how would we know? If G1 doesn't tells us what really happened, then what did really happen, and how would we know? Are we therefore really linked to God as G1 says, and do we really bear God's image, or is that just an ex-post facto hope for significance and meaning? The person could well ask, what is 'really real' and the 'real' point of reference for our existential position. If G1 is relegated to the symbolic, then the person would well look to materialism as the final reference point: materialism which eliminates God and the existential position would be the tissue of nonsense that Camus, Satre et al would leave us.

The unwitting, or perhaps just unacknowledged reference made when G1 is regarded as symbolic is that the world as we know it becomes 'a given' not created, and the result of itself, not of will. Alternatively it defaults to an implicit materialism which provides that true knowledge about the world in its totality (our world as experienced) leaves God out, as a not quite real figure; linking only through the tendrils of symbol, not the stout columns of what is real. So he's not really part of our world, but is set more in pagan terms, being an element of a prior world: the world as given, as Enuma Elish, for instance, assumes.

The odium of theistic-evolution

What is so odious about theistic-evolution, I think, is that it makes a represenetation of God, with respect to origins, that diverges from the representation God makes of himself through the creative actions; actions that are linked to who he is (Romans 1:20).

In saying that 'no, God didn't do that, but he did something else that not he but I tell you.' it is saying that God is different from how he has communicated himself, and the relationship of God to creation is not what the Bible sets out.

This arises, I think, in part from the thrall of modern materialism, but partly out of a misplaced idealism descended from ancient Greece, where 'god' is too exulted to have any real connection with the material.

But this is not Christianity. God has provided the material world as not only the setting, but as part of his covenant with man, as him who is in God's image, the steward of the creation, to whose redemption the 'whole creation' looks.

The theological trouble with theistic evolution

The trouble with theistic evolution (or Christian Darwinism) is that it says something about God that is different from what God says about God.

It makes a different relationship between God's words and actions from that which God states.

Adios theory

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald 25 June 2011: trouble is Lyell was right...adios theory!

4 big moves

I recently re-listened to Al Mohler's address on the age of the universe at a recent Ligoner Ministeries Conference.

In it he remarked that the Bible has four essential movements that condition the span of action between God and man: creation, fall, redemption and new creation.

These are four moments in the relation between God and us, where God's actions are material in the relationship.

And the relationship parameters are isotropic. That is, the zone of contact doesn't shift between them: sometimes metaphor, sometimes imaginary, sometimes real-world. They all must be real world and interact with our life-perspective, our experience as subjects, uniformly. Some cannot be appraised as 'lets agree this is important' (myth), and others as 'this occupies unique space in the time-space zone that effects and constrains my actions, choices and life-perspective'.

But even more, the zone of contact is action by God.

Most of the views of the account in Genesis 1 that depart from the direct meaning also seem to set aside that this is God telling us what he has done. Him describing the actions through which he represents himself to us in an unavoidably meaningfully tangible manner. It is not some artful allusion to 'teach that God is creator' but is the sequence of things that he did, being creator by which he communicates himself to us, and demonstrates that his claim to being creator is not empty, but delivered! So its 'personal'. Most of what I've read seems to want to de-personalise the account; yet the Bible is all about God's actions towards his creation, within his creation to the end of the new creation; once it is denied that he can give information about his acts, or that they occur in terms of different parameters from all his other acts, and from how acts 'work' (with causal continuity and contingency) in the time-space creation, then we don't have God's telling us about himself at all, but about someone/thing else. Strange way for one who is love to operate then. Does one write to a friend to tell him what one didn't do, or what one did do, as genuine self-revelation?

A friend made this comment in response to the above:

Interesting to note that when Philip said to our Lord Jesus "Lord show us the Father and that will be enough for us." The Lord Jesus replied with "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father...at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves."

The historical evidence of the Lord Jesus' recreative acts gave testimony of who he is; and so the evidence of God's creative acts giving testimony to who the creator is. Undo one, and you undo the other.