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.
