Beyond the Pahl 3

Pahl:

Third, the point of the biblical creation stories in Genesis 1-2 is not to answer modern questions about exactly when or precisely how all things came about. It is to answer, through an ancient genre for an ancient people, some common human questions, questions about who God is as Creator, what the cosmos is as God's creation, who we are as God's creation, how God as Creator relates to his creation, how we are to relate to our Creator and the rest of his creation, and the like. All subsequent biblical theology—as my first point illustrates—continues in this same trajectory.

Thoughts:

Interesting that he sees Genesis as having the same function as I see, but for completely different reasons!
He thinks it has this function despite having no relation to the real world that we live and move in; whereas I think that it can only have this function by virtue of being entirely about things that happened in and connected with the real world. Indeed with their connection to the real world made clear both in language and the references to shared 'real world' markers (my phrase 'common causality' captures this, but I use it to refer to the spatio-temporal continuity between the effect of God's word for, to and in this world, and its results).
It it that these things happened that they provide the platform for the other things. If they didn’t happen, and I repeat, something else instead did; then God is not shown as an actor in the world, but a figment unrelated to the world. If every point of relational connection is denied, which Pahl does, the whole theory of being that we use, or 'basic ontology' has to be derived from elsewhere. And this is the nub of the problem that I don't think is ever really dealt with in putting Genesis 1, etc. out of ‘this world’ and into some other, emblematic world where none of us really live.

Notable moment

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Thomas Carlisle

Beyond the Pahl 2

Pahl:

Second, beliefs about exactly when and precisely how God created all things are neither central nor essential to an authentic Christian faith or a historically orthodox Christianity. Thus, it is not necessary for the sake of one's faith to hold to any beliefs about these matters with strong conviction; in fact, it may even be unwise to do so.

Thoughts:


Its interesting that people make this assertion just before they deny that Genesis 1, etc means anything in the real world. I always wonder about their information on this count and the rationale behind their claim. And it is always worth remembering that it is a mere claim. One made, I might add, that flies in the face of the biblical data, and is usually unsubstantiated (as per Pahl himself, of course).

But Pahl clouds the issue, just like Satan did in the garden, I might add, by inserting some concepts that aren't in the text, or in the Bible generally, then contradicting these concepts. An obvious 'straw man' manoeuvre.

Of course beliefs about EXACTLY when and PRECISELY how God created all things are neither central nor essential...etc. [And nor did God say ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden']

No one says that they are; but what the Bible is quite clear about is GENERALLY when God created, and, in BASIC terms the method he used.

Well, its a bit more than 'basic' terms when it comes to method, as the method is quite clear. He spoke things into existence; or brought them into being by divine fiat: by willing them so.

What is contended for is that generally the biblical time scale is orders of magnitude smaller than the naturalist time scale. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE! We are not talking about a small thing here. It's also worth noting that the biblical time scale has always been orders of magnitude less than the naturalist or pagan time scale; humanity seems to have a built in desire to push the genetic connection between God and itself as far away as it can.

While reading Bulfinch's Mythology I came across this, in Palmer Bovie's foward: "If our readers ask when all this took place, we must answer, in the first place, that mythology is not careful of dates...". Thus the placing of the creation in time is very important to its historicity. If it happened in time, it needs to be set in that time; which of course, places the events of creation in our history, and removes them from an idealist or fantasy (pagan) construction that has no real relationship with 'us and now'. This is also an important part of the specificity of the recount of events in the creation passage.

It is also contended that how God created differs radically from the naturalist/materialist formulation. It's not just a little different, different as to precise values; it is vastly different. Pahl might have gained some credibility if he'd recognised these matters rather than attempted to subvert them in yet another language game.

With the 'precise' means of God's creation in question, Pahl seems to think that the Biblical data has no real bearing on anything, and we can make of it what we like. But not so. Materialist/naturalist formulations are a world apart from the Bible's formulation and therefore mean entirely different things. Thus it is important that the creation account conveys real information, because it is about something that really happened. It would be odd (and irrelevant) if it were otherwise.

The basic issues I canvassed briefly in a previous blog, but to go further (and I stoop to using 'bullets'):

• creation is the representation of God as he is: that he acted (in the terms used; there being no other reference in the biblical world-concept) is his credential for god-ness, how he acted is the representation of his nature
• creation underpins the conceptualisation of the world and the world thus represents God's action in creating, and does not obscure it, or if the world doesn't connect with God's statements about creation, then the representation is a vain one, and empties God of any claim on us.
• the naturalist 'method' is alien to God, it is impersonal and loveless; the creation account shows that is not so and, rather, has its source and unfolding in the personal and is embedded in love; it results from the action of one who cares, and cares above all for relationship; not one who sets up a machine, then lets it run.

The contrast could not be more stark; the natural method denies that mind is essential to the creation of complex order, of information, and that love is unnecessary for the creation of community and interdependence.

It overturns the counter-conceptualisation of the world as naturally explicable, and in relation to no mind or will that is over above it; rather all mind and will is contained within it: hardly god-like!

Another quote from Palmer Bovie's forward to Bulfinch: "...just as Darwin was reviving man's physical life history..." One thing the creation account does, and that the Bible hinges on, is that man's physical life history, is one with man's 'any other' life history. Action is bound up with both thought and meaning in the Biblical conception of the world. The creation account tells us that there is one unified world from the will of God; Pahl would separate our world into different and disconnected compartments; multiple worlds at work, with the world's physical history unlinked from the 'religious' history in a move that would do a pagan proud and destroys meaning.

Thus it IS important how and when things were created by God. This information establishes a number of important things about us, the world and who we are before God and in the world; about the world as setting for our relationship with God and for his redemption of us, and about the basic ontology of the world; which Pahl sets aside to make the way for an ontology that contemplates a different world, and entails a 'god' different from the one who reveals himself.

Pictures and words

Some commentators seem to regard Genesis 1 not as an account of creation, but as a picture of it. They either say this explicitly, or imply it. For instance, the 'framework' hypothesis is said by some to provide a sort of 'picture' of creation.

If the creation account is a picture, then something else is the real thing and tells us really about origins and the world. It is this that 'really happened' that defines us and the world we are in, and not the biblical account.

On this basis, the picture isn't worth even a single word; it doesn't tell us anything worthwhile! But the good news is, you don't have to buy this picture.

Perils of Theistic Evolution

I saw this nice comment on the Creation website's article Perils of Theistic Evolution:

Theistic evolution also puts a material-based principle between God and his creation. It makes some impersonal principle the mediator between God and man, and makes humanity the result, not of God speaking in love for fellowship, but of some abstract 'machine' making us; our 'father' cease[s] to be God, and he becomes the one who has pushed us away. Not only does this make the recourse to his being creator hollow, but it makes God's love for us pale, and causes the the basis for the gospel to leak away.

 There's a bit more to this, I think.

Not only to the TE-ers do this, but they do it with no reason from the Bible. They do it purely to accommodate the materialist program that the universe made it self, life is the result of matter, and mind is mere chemical reactions.

But they do it despite the Bible's lack of basis for their insertion because, I think, they think the Bible has no business talking about origins at all and if it does, they don't think that its important. Its not the Bible's proper domain.

Well, this is just neoplatonic waffle; creation is important in the Bible, because God represents himself to us as God on the basis of him being the creator; Christ's sacrifice and resurrection only makes sense if he is the creator: something the NT is pretty firm about; and God shows us that the personal (God's personhood) is basic to reality; it is the Christian 'first philosophy'. Above all, the creation account shows us the attachment point of this world to God: he made it and did so directly. There is no machine mediating between his love, expressed in his will, and our being.

Put another way, the starting point in making sense of life; of who we are and what is around us, of our relationships and understanding of the world, is our thinking about our origin. To say that the biblical information about origins is somehow incomplete, incorrect or irrelevant is to say that it does not provide the real basis for making sense of these things. And the 'sense' cannot be made both in a 'theological' biblical world that is factually inadequate, a mere 'picture' and in a completely different real world, where the sense we make has to, necessarily, play out. It is only the real world that counts. The line from origins then, to life now, has to be one line, and that line, to have any meaning at all, has to be a line in this world, and be staked at both ends in the same physical reality: that made by God, in love. If one sets aside the information that is in the Bible (Genesis 1, etc.); one is left in the imaginary reconstructions of evolutionary speculation, making a completely different sense of the world and ourselves.

Beyond the Pahl 1

In a post on his blog, Pahl set out his mini-manifesto of creation theology. It forms a suitable representative of the typical 'have it both ways' beliefs of most theistic evolutionists and so, I think, is worth commenting on. I'm setting out to do it over four or so parts.

Here, part 1:

Pahl

When it comes to origins, I have held to the same basic perspectives for quite a while now. I have stated, taught, preached, blogged, or published all of these points in various ways and in diverse venues for at least fifteen years.

First, God created all things—God himself and not merely some impersonal forces or natural laws. God created the heavens and the earth, and made humans in God’s image. Through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the very image of God, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible; without him nothing was made that has been made. Thus, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Thoughts

One becomes instantly suspicious, I think, when a theologian has to declare his orthodoxy in this way; it seems to me that he must do so only because his position on these matters is not clear from his other writings. Indeed, I think we will see over this short series of discussions that most of Pahl's writing on the matter of origins would question every point of the statement he makes in such assertive tones. As if to say, "of course I believe what you believe, I just don't believe that it happened!" So he has to shore up his orthodoxy by denying that words have stable meanings and can be reliably tracked to 'this world' referents, across time and cultures. One thinks, in some matters, that a little too much is made of culture, and not enough made of words. Their range of intent seems to be mystifyingly rubbery and they thus can mean whatever one wants them to mean, except of course, what they actually say!

And thus, I wonder why Pahl believes as he states? He undoes the credibility of his belief at every turn, as later posts will show. To that extent he makes of belief the sort of nonsense that one might hear from a Mormon 'elder' so called, who urges belief because, well, he 'really-really' believes himself; nothing to do with the warranted belief that runs through the Bible.

 In Hebrews we are told that “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible”. “By faith” does not mean, ‘unrealistic  hope against the facts’ but, because we weren’t there, we apprehend this information and accept its reliabiltiy and veracity by virtue of the word of God. The writer speaks to this in the preceding verse. The only information to which the writer could be pointing is the genesian account of creation; and this because it is the only information there is about our origin...anywhere. The locus of faith in the Bible is never counterfactual, but always predicated on actualities: in someone to be truthful to their word, or in things about which we are told, pinned to events that participated in this world's causality and whether events in a mind, or events in space.

Moreover, when the Bible refers to the creation, you can bet that the reference directs us to the Genesis account. The base creation account upon which all other references depending. So God is not the creator in some vague ethereal terms, or author of some general creation that cannot be pinned down, but of a 'creation' with specific biblical reference, and specific meaning in this world. The same terms that make sense in and circumscribe our existance in the space-time frame we inhabit and are constrained by are those terms that give the creation meaning and make a specific connection  to us by the common reference frame applying to both (deny this and the connection gets vague to the point of vanishing).

Later, confusingly, Pahl tells us that the only account we have of the creation doesn't represent things that happened. It just didn’t occur: something else occurred, presumably (which claim has its Monty Pythonesque aspect, I must suggest), but we are not told about it! How we know, I can't fathom (oh...science...we'll get to that in a later post).

So I have to wonder from whence he obtains his belief that God is creator if he denies the terms by which God represents himself as creator. He sets aside the only source of information which could underpin his belief as not in fact having happened in the terms of 'the real' that frames our lives and experiences; the information by virtue of which, in detail, we understand God as creator.

And it is the detail that is important here: the detail demonstrates God as creator by the actions he did with time and space effects. These tell us how the creation is constituted. Presumably, if this was not important, and not just 'important' in some vacuous rhetorical sense, but really important in the world we stub our toes in, it wouldn’t be provided. So if the detail is not about events, but about something else, firstly, how would we know, but then, how could we establish that God is creator? The only information he can give us, it is asserted or implied by Pahl, doesn’t actually relate to creation events, but, evidently, some other thing? What other thing this might be, we are not told. Perhaps, just a verbal flourish to 'out-flourish' the competitor accounts? But, if none of it happened, it is hard to see how it can even hope to sustain this rhetorical function.

And it's not just that 'something else' must have happened, but it's Pahl's language game that fascinates me. He takes it that words have meaning, and that meaning conveys content in the world that we are in. Presumably the content is related to some substance within the world, or the content, and the words that convey the content, would have no meaning that delineates anything within the common causality in which we live; they would be un-grounded in one sense, empty in every other. These words would merely ascend in a futile arc never landing in the world in which they were uttered to make meaning in that world in that world's terms.

Pahl's handling of the creation account in philosphical terms is even more dramatically deracinating of its biblical purpose. In saying that all the details in a house plan are wrong; but the right house will nonetheless somehow, but inexplicably, be communicated, he is speaking nonsense. This is far from a Christian approach to epistemology; knowledge is contained in the words that constitute language and have reference to the Real World that came from the fiat of God (nicely recursively), and not in pagan fashion, where content is maleable to preconception and any specific meaning is only to obscure an asserted and contrary 'truth'.

Thus, I would contend, contrary to the Cedarville College people, that Pahl is far from othodox in that he undoes the basic ontology of the Bible, founded in Genesis 1, and supposes that in the beginning, not 'God', but 'God and something...' Like most harmonisers, he fails to appreciate the grand scope of God's creation, and what it means to be solely and comprehensively from God. Like the ANE creation myths, he by implication presupposes a universe prior to God's creation of the universe! Not Christian at all.

John Chapman Foundation

I went to John Chapman's memorial service at St Andrew's Cathedral on 24 November. I admired John for his simple humility as a man, his easy communication of biblical teaching and his genuine interest in people. For an Anglican, he was as unstuffy and unimpressed by outward show as a Baptist. Excellent.

In the service papers there was a promotion for the John Chapman Foundation. Not a bad idea to remember the man and his ministry, and raise funds for the work of evangelism (probably just like Catholics have orders, Anglicans have foundations).

When I read the biog of John, I almost gagged. It was nothing like John himself, but full of the empty vanity of outward show and panting after worldly prestige and influence, as though these things are of any importance in the outlook of a Christian. They certainly never struck me as being of any significance in the John Chapman who I knew!

So, for the first time, I learn that he's preached in London; and presumably not London, Ontario, or London, Ohio. I wonder where in London he preached? In the middle of Baker Street? In Carter Lane? Clerks Place, near Wormwood St? All pretty pointless to say that he  preached in London. Anyone can preach in London. They do it all the time in Hyde Park!

But further, I see that he preached at Oxford University and Cambridge University. All I can say is, 'so what'. Does this make him a better preacher. Should I be impressed that he's been to some old stone buildings, where, incidently, anyone can preach, or am I supposed to infer that the VC called him up and said "John, what say you come along and preach to the Council here at Oxford." I think not. Rather these references represent mere Anglican bluster and hankering after worldy adulation, which, incidently, has zip to do with preaching the gospel, and double zip to do with anything in Australia, let alone Sydney. I note that there is no mention of mission work that John did (if he did) in Sydney University; right next to Moore College, or in Newtown, a densely populated suburb, also right next to Moore College, or work with the riff raff that inhabits the Sydney University Colleges (I think of St John's particularly), or about what he did do; and that was tirelessly work as a minister of the gospel in whatever setting he had access to, with humble and prayerful perserverance. And, that is the Christian way, not puffery about prestigious locations or institutions.

Or, maybe I'm wrong, maybe  John preached at Miami University, Oxford, in the USA...

Pahl...not orthodox?

An e-pal sent me his note to Michael Pahl, of recent post on this blog:

I've heard that you and Cedarville have parted company.

Unlike Cedarville, I *would* question your othodoxy.

Your view on Genesis 1, etc. amounts to a claim that nothing in Genesis 1 actually happened, and that our ontology, as Christians, therefore cannot be framed from the Bible (ontology being about what is, and ipso facto, what really is), but has to be grafted onto Christian faith from a pagan perspective in some sort of idealist conceit. So it seems that you want to pretend that questions of origins are 'scientific' questions, when their ontological implications are such that they are always finally theological questions, mediated in some ways philosophically.

Thus, you've resigned the field, and instead of allowing the revelation of God about his creation to set the structure of our understanding of our world, our setting in it, and the relations that reticulate through it, with reference to God himself (and this can only happen if G1 recounts things that happened, not fantasies, "fameworks" emblems, signs, or 'suggestions'), we are left to start our thinking with an ontological framework premised on there being no God, or if there is one, one who doesn't communicate and doesn't matter.

This is not in any way orthodox, but a view that makes Christian faith take its philosophical underpinning from a pagan world view, and is ultimately derivative of a materialist orthodoxy and not a challenge to it.

2 churches

I couldn't help but compare two local churches that have recently letter boxed my street.

One, an Anglican church, is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of...wait for it...their building! No, not a church meeting on that site, or a church meeting in the area, or the local proclamation of the gospel, or a century of mission, no, none of those...but a darn building. As part of their celebration, they will be raising money, seeking to raise a lot of money, well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And for? Missions? Aid? Helping people?

No, not on your nelly. They want to do more building work!

Then the other, not an Anglican church. It will be having its annual spring market. "Proceeds going to help refugees settling in Sydney".

I know which church I'd prefer to be part of.

Leave it to science

One of my listed blogs lead me to 'rustlings in the grass' where the basic perspectives on origins is to, finally, 'leave it to science' to connect us with our origins, and, presumably, to some sort of faith in some other-world set of events that God must be talking about in Genesis 1.

If I get around to it, I'll go into this a little more, but you can see my drift.

Just theological

Another zinger of a sermon this morning, further knocking Grudem out of play, for which I'm all cheers.

The minister unfortunatley has a view of Genesis 1, etc. (hereafter G1) that is common these days: that it is 'theological' and not anything else; and not therefore factual where it comes into conflict with contemporary cosmogony, evolutionary speculation or rampant materialism. One wonders how then one is able to figure which bits are important and which bits are mere 'dressing'?

But this is not a new position. I read of it in a work by Robert S. Candlish, D.D. (1806-1873) of Scotland who succeeded Thomas Chalmers in the chair of divinity at the New College, Edinburgh in 1841.

Quoting a work on Genesis:

To clear the way, therefore, at the outset, to get rid of many perplexities, and leave the narrative unencumbered for pious and practical uses, let its limited design be fairly understood, and let certain explanations be frankly made. In the first place, the object of this inspired cosmogony, or account of the world's origin, is not scientific but religious.

So...if its only religious, on what is the religious information carried, if it is not a factual account of events...is it carried on a mere fiction? If so, then the religions information is hardly worth our attention!

Yet, by the very notion of creation as set out in G1, it only has theological significance because it is about things that have happened. Just like the resurrection only has theological content because it had historical and physcial coordinates in history, and is in the same world of general causality as the one we live in. And so the resurrection has content for us. If it were in a different 'world' it would have nothing for us. And so 'creation' which sets the scene for all that follows.

Of men and women

This morning the sermon at church started a series looking at 'gender' as it is treated in the Bible.
We started with a reading from Genesis 1, which covered this passage:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ²⁷ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ²⁸ God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply,

(NASB)

Of course, the NASB makes the same mistake as the NIV, which our church uses, and renders 'adam' as 'man'; when it should be 'mankind' at least, or preferably 'humanity' in today's usage.

The sermon series will deal with the arguments for 'male headship' put in Grudem's edited book on this topic. We dealt with the first today, and found nothing in G1 that can be construed as giving one sex primacy over another, contrary to Grudem's assertion. The notion of priority evaporates in the Bible's definition of 'man' as being created 'male and female' That is, together in the image of God, not one sex or the other so. This is further explicated in that [together] they are to be fruitful and multiply. A bloke can't do that by himself!

The sermon mentioned in passing the ANE context of Genesis 1, and I detected here, I think a verring to the idea that Genesis is a cultural work, rather than an inspired one, giving us concrete information about us and God. The minister made the point that the passage treated humanity in its relation to God completely differently from the ANE mythology. For example, humanity is not there to get food for the gods, but is fed by God. But this is not mere rhetorical point scoring by the Genesian author; it is that related thusly because that concretely corresponds to the real that the account reflects. If it is not doing this, then, of course it is without meaning and ranks only with other stories, bearing no relation to what really is and thus how our relationship to God is founded.

It ended rebutting the silly modern idea that men and women are different but equal, or are equal but have different roles. In the final analysis both versions of the rule-making error end up with a fake distinction between inequality and 'functional difference'. Its a thin language game that convinces no one outside the camp of the bluffers.

More on this, see Christians for Biblical Equality.

Let's be Buddhists

I can't see any real difference in their appraoch to 'religion' and the world between that of Theistic Evolutionists and, say, Buddhists; or Hindus, or animists, or Aboriginal dream-time story tellers.

All of them separate religion from the real world and make claims that lie outside the world we are in!

Yet the world-concept of Christianity is that the real world shares the contours of existence with the God whose speech is his actions, and his actions occur in the world of common causality that we inhabit; and its a 'real' world, not a lesser world that we can disregard, with the really real world elsewhere.

Theistic-evolution, along with Buddhism, discounts the real ness of the world we are in and has it that 'holy books' as a class (the Bible, for TEs) are about somethiing other than the real world, which therefore, must be other than the real setting for the ontological play between what is basically real, and our life-experience.

Bollocks, of course, because Christ emptied himself of God-claims to be one of us, for our sake!

The Perils of Theistic Evolution

Any critique of Theistic Evolution has to start behind the direct facts that might be contested (that is, 'science' and the Bible), and with the philosophical position that underpins the theology which allows the Bible to be relegated to a set of ancient stories and legends that may convey spiritual truth, but have no necessary relationship to the space-time world of common causality, even in the view of some evangelicals.

The theology is more about a Barthian approach to the Bible than the world-concept of the Bible, where words connect only to ‘faith’ ethereally and do not do so by way of depicting or explicating anything in the real-world of "A does not = non-A". The ‘real’ in this formulation, is not of this world, but in a philosophically idealist move is elsewhere, so the Bible, to communicate its ‘truth’ in this higher manner does not need to tell us anything about what has really happened; and in fact, in this view both need not, and probably cannot!

The counter to this is that the very account of creation shows that God and we participate in the same real world where words relate to events and actions that are denominated in the common causality upon which we depend, and, created by God, mediates our concourse with God as well as each other.

It is actual events and actions that are real, and that instruct our apprehension of the ontological coordinates that bring us to encounter God in action by which he demonstrates who he is and who we are in relationship to him. The idealist would have it otherwise, of course, but to attempt to impress them with science, while it may influence some, will probably have little effect, as they consider that we have missed their point that the Bible is a 'faith' book, not a 'fact' book; of course, it is only a faith book because it is a fact book, otherwise faith would be in irreversible dis-connect from the world in which we act and is the scene for our encounter with God, our salvation and for God's covenants.

To encapsulate this with an illustration, you may know the old Goon Show where a bank holdup involves the use of a picture of a gun. The theological idealist would have it that the Bible is a ‘picture of a gun’; but of course, this can have no real-world effect; what we need to hold up a bank (and to make a creation by fiat that delimits the world we are in) is a real gun (and a real creation in events that make sense in the world in which they are set, and which they define).

In short, the Bible is only theologically meaningful if it is meaningful in the real world terms by which it denominates itself. God is thus creator, not by weaving a symbolic story, that point to something or other, but because he created. He identifies himself with the sequence of fiat acts, not becuase they are symbolically meaningful, but because they occured. They are meaningful, then, because they occured, and not because they did not.

An example of how this plays out was in a post and exchanges on Michael Jensen's blog, the bloggin parson. (Jensen is a lecturer at Moore College, and son of the current archbishop of Sydney, Peter J.)

Jensen was asked if he thought that Noah, of flood fame, was a real person, and by implication, that the account related events that occured. Jensen avoided a direct answer, instead asking what the text was telling us.

Now, if the text is not telling us that there was a global flood and only Noah, his family, and the animals listed were saved, then it is not telling us anything and is just a story, 'made up', with no real world referents! The point of the account is that the events recounted really happened and had a real effect on the world: thus is scripture linked to the world we are in.

The alternative, that the text is 'telling' us something based on non-events, or events mis-recounted, then it has no content relevant for our consideration as it is not about anything real, and anyone can 'make up' a story. That's the easy part.

If true, then unimportant!

A very apt comment on this article about Richard Dawkins:

The great irony of views such as Dawkins' is that, if they are correct, they are at once unimportant! How so? No arrangement of atoms has a value privilege over any other arrangement; value refers to something external to the arrangement, which the materialism that Dawkins espouses denies exists.

Are you kidding?

This line of thinking is known as "Theistic Evolution." But its followers are kidding themselves if they think it is compatible with Darwinism. First, to the extent that anyone--either God, Pope Mary's physicist, or "any being...external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties"--set nature up in any way to ensure a particular outcome, then, to that extent, although there may be evolution, there is no Darwinism. Darwin's main contribution to science was to posit a mechanism for the unfolding of life that required no input from any intelligence--random variation and natural selection. If laws were "implanted" into nature with the express knowledge that they would lead to intelligent life, then even if the results follow by "natural development," nonetheless, intelligent life is not a random result.

From Behe, The Edge of Evolution.

Bolt on Dawkins

atheist speaks

Couple of letters to papers:

As for the existence of God, the question to which no theologian has ever given a satisfactory answer - ''why does God permit natural evil (all the suffering of humans and animals caused by natural disasters and disease) to occur?'' - is sufficient to make the existence of any God extremely unlikely, to say the least.

Dennis Biggins Cooks Hill

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/pleasing-no-one-maybe-rescue-plan-is-on-target-20111129-1o5aw.html#ixzz1f89erRKH

Dennis Biggins has to explain what he means by 'natural evil' in a material world. He is clearly referring to something outside the natural world to say that some things are 'evil'. Of course they are not; the notion of evil is at best a mere social convention for events that are outside an organism's adaptive range. Evolution will, in time, deal with it through the death of mal-adapted organisms, or their eventual adaption to the natural world. The atheist position has to do away with any concept of evil, because the concept itself implies a divinity outside this world!

And that about says it!

Theistic evolution? You're kidding!

"God is the Creator of heaven and earth. If God produced the universe by a single creative act of His will, then its natural development by laws implanted in it by the Creator is to the greater glory of His Divine power and wisdom" (the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia).

To which Behe responds:

This line of thinking is known as "Theistic Evolution." But its followers are kidding themselves if they think it is compatible with Darwinism. First, to the extent that anyone--either God, Pope Mary's physicist, or "any being...external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties"--set natuer up in any way to ensure a particular outcome, then, to that extent, although there may be evolution, there is no Darwinism. Darwin's main contribution to science was to posit a mechanism for the unfolding of life that required no input from any intelligence--random variation and natural selection.

From "The Edge of Evolution" by Michael Behe.

The first theistic evolutionist: Darwin?

From the last sentence of The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

And we know where that ended up: not with the Creator's enduring praise, but with Dawkins referring to Darwinism as allowing him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist!

Walton's lost world

Copy of a letter I sent following on from this sermon.

I was recently reminded of a part of your sermon on Genesis 1 that I had not discussed with you. Your reference to ANE cultures forming their conceptualisation of reality by creating stories about it (much like, and precisely as useful as Aboriginal 'dream time' myths), and this being the function of Genesis 1 (if I recall it accurately) came back to mind as I read a review of a book by Walton "The Lost World of Genesis 1" (reviewed here, which covered this very topic. The review, I think, deals reasonbly well with Walton's failure to comprehend the biblical data on creation, but it doesn't go far enough in philosophical terms, and lets Walton get away with his framing the creation account on a materialist basis, rather than a biblical one. This is dangerous territory as it immediately gives materialism primacy in our approach to the scriptures, and fails to use the scriptures prophetically to instead unseat materialism and make the way for their repentance.

As I read it, Walton effectively makes the Genesis account a 'story' that socially realises the cosmos and our lives and relationships within it. This is reminiscent of the much more circumscribed thesis of Berger and Luckman's book 'The Social Construction of Reality', which does have some applicability to social systems, but does not, however, apply to the external objective world.

The reason I say that Walton defers to a materialist basic philosophy in his work (although as far as I know he's a creationist, of sorts), is that his approach to Genesis 1 is conceptually congruent with one of the most significant implications of the evolutionary world view: that there is no necessary connection between our sense perception, our mentalisation of sense perceptions and the external real world. This arises because the evolutionary world view has as its only essential reproductive success, everything else is an accident, including the viability of our sense perceptions and the accuracy of their mentalisation! This of course is the unavoidable 'self-defeater' of materialism.

But the biblical world view is contrary to this, and it sets a necessary connection, not just an accidental correlation, between external real world constituents, features and relationships and our sensory-mental response to them. Therefore, in a biblical world view, things in the world have existance and relationship to other things even before they are named, and our perception of them is reliable. While we use langauge to identify objects, categories (and only in the social world, might we 'create' them in Berger and Luckman's terms) and relationships, naming is only used to identify particular charcteristics of relationships for specific purposes (e.g. Adam names the animals, but doesn't find a companion); the limit of naming is that it presumes the prior existence of the things named, their external relationships and the external real world that they occur within. It has a 'concrete realist' (as opposed to an 'idealist') conception of the world because the creation account sets out that this is the actual real world and how it works; Adam's 'naming' episode is an event within and predicated upon the real external world. The naming is to pursue a much more limited objective than a grand cosmogony: identifying his companionship need.

Walton's claim might be true of pagan ANE cultures, but I don't think he's provided evidence, either biblical or historical, that these cultural practices were applied to Genesis 1. Indeed, the fact that we see an instance of naming and construction in Genesis 1, and in highly circumscribed terms against a context of external objectification, indicates, I think, that Walton's appraisal is misplaced even on textual grounds, let alone by the philosophical abyss that he leaps into.

Walton has failed to deal with the materialist-evolutionary world view which has in fact been the basis of his thinking (every thought not being conformed to Christ: [Roms 12:2), and which sets out in question begging fashion to actually deny the biblical world view, so when taken up theologically, it sets aside the base data of theology, relying on a stance that denies that there is any theological data at all. Naturally, Walton ends up with the conclusion he does, because he starts from an assumption that only leads to that conclusion.

Why Theistic Evolution is rubbish

I would hope that Christians who think that biblical creation and evolution could be coupled ponder this quote:

In general we can be assured that we know what things are good in themselves, he submits, if what we think is in harmony with what 'other people think': "For what we think has...been determined by the course of evolution" But what we think, even if it is harmonious with the thoughts of others, does not by itself support the view that we think rationally or truly, or even that we probably do so; and appeals to "the course of evolution" in this quarter only thicken a philosophical plot already gone wrong. Unless we have independent reason to believe that what "the course of evolution" leads us to believe is, or is likely to be, correct or rational, the appeal to "evolution" is logically illicit. To suppose that some things are good because evolution leads most of us to believe that they are grievously flaunts Moore's stern requriements that we avoid naturalism in ethics.

From a biography of G. E. Moore

The pagan world

I mentioned the review of Walton's book in my post on the dangerous sermon, but would like to discuss it futher.

I think that Walton must be the source of much of the sermon in question. Walton's mistake however, is that he adopts a pagan framework from the start, and fits the Bible within it, ending up not with the God of creation, but a God within creation, who adheres to the categories of modern atheistic materialism, not the categories of the Bible. The Bible's categorical structure has will exercised in love basic to all being. A pity the speaker did not explore this, or start his thinking from the Bible instead!

Walton's view is founded on the great irony that the creation account is not about creation, but something else, also called the creation, but not the creation that we are talking about (if that seems 'double-dutch' it is). It requires creation to be independent (effectively asserting a prior material creation); he also, like most today, misunderstands the creation as an exercise in only material formation (it is far more than this), and the world view that is required to sustain his position (a pagan world view) either deifies the material creation, or regards it as a ‘given’ and does not conceive of it as having been originated in the will of one who is love.

Like many other moderns, he wants to split the creation into categories that evacuate it of meaning: some split ‘how’ and ‘why’ as the domains of science and theology, respectively. Walton, likewise splits function and being, but being is function in the unified creation that comes from God’s hand. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the pagan error, now repeated in the use of materialist categories, that the creation is otherwise originated, this origination so remote from us in every way as to be an impersonal given, destroying God’s representation to us as creator of a world where his words have real meaning in terms that make sense to us within the world (as it is from his hand, and we, his image bearers, can make sense of the words God gave to us) relating to him. In effect he ‘de-gods’ the world in its totality. This makes God not the creator of a world that is dependent upon him, and part of the means of his relating to us and extending his love to us, but a being derivative of, or referred to from the world which is beyond him.

On these grounds, who, then, are we, who is this god and whence relationship, if there is one that has any meaning at all?

The proposal is pagan from start to finish, and even if Walton truly understands ANE culture, he understands a pagan culture, against which the Bible stands and the word of God confounds! To take this as a reference is to set to one side the work of the Spirit of God in communicating the word to us and the relegate the Bible to merely another meaningless ANE curiosity of history.

And the creation account opposes both these errors in its unification of ‘how’ coupled with ‘why’, and function being part of formation.

'How’s' coupling with 'why' is made in the creation being about the relationships between persons, by the will of the almighty person, exercised in love for the bringing about of other persons to participate in that love, with all the other-centredness of love. The 'function' being part of 'formation' is made in the creation leaving God’s hand caused only by his word (will) and not an interposed mechanism so beloved of materialists who must split off matter from love to make it pre-eminent, and love subservient, and then seek a machine to do the work that the Bible tells us is the work of God’s loving mind!

Walton’s proposal, like every other attempt to defuse Genesis 1, etc. simply represents an embarrassment from pitting Genesis 1 against modern conventional materialism and wanting materialism to have the first and final word!

Inconvenient Information

The trouble with many parts of the Bible is that the information it contains is inconvenient to the aims and objects of fallen mankind.

Thus it is with Genesis 1. Many Christian commentators undertake, with great effort, the exercise of telling us that Genesis 1 doesn't say what it clearly does say. Because it is inconvenient.

It is inconvenient to smart modern people (imblued with or cowed by materialist views) that God created by his will (the method) within the span of 6 days. So much effort is put into explaining that this information, which structures and upon which the text depends, is not an essential part of the information conveyed.

Indeed, it must end up being held that Genesis 1 conveys no actual information, but merely allows the impression that God is creator, with the text providing no evidence fo the fact.

Extrodinary. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

In this vein, I'd refer to a book review by Howard Van Til: [title], where Van Til does just this, and fails to bring a Christian world-view to his work.

Creation and agency

Letter I sent to the speaker of a recent sermon:

Thank you for your sermon on Genesis 1 recently at church. I was very taken by your approach, and pleased with your conclusion that the pinnacle of creation is not the creation of man, on day 6, which is often stated (although among created things man does represent this, given his role in naming the animals and God giving him the garden to tend), but God resting, in his holiness and glory. I think this notion is quite important, as it makes the climax of creation symmetrical with the opening of the account in Genesis 1:1: ‘In the beginning God....at the end, God’.

There were a couple of points you made where I didn’t see the connection with the text so easily.

I liked your illustration of agency and will by referring to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. But this does not, I think, throw light on how we are to regard agency in the Genesis account. The ‘five-fold’ repetition in the account that Joseph Pipa notes in his essay in “Did God Create in 6 Days” is such a tight concatenation as to prohibit the entry of non-divine (and therefore, mindless) agency. Indeed, taken together Psalm 33:6, John 1:3 and Hebrews 11:3b would seem to eliminate the need for and possibility of such agency altogether. And particularly agency from within the creation to effect the course of creation unfolding between the word and conclusion (“it was so”). This applies something that God has created (at best): an impersonal principle from within the creation (or even independent of the creation!), to do the work of creation, the outcome of which the Bible clearly attributes to God, or requires an anachronistic recursion as something ‘not yet’ is used to produce that which will come to be. I don’t think this stacks up logically.

This also couples with your suggesting that science tells us the ‘how’ of creation as act, or perhaps as achievement (that is, the cosmos we are in and the reality by which we and it are drawn into a structured set of causal relationships), but the Bible tells as ‘why’.

I don’t think that God’s act and its realization can be so easily severed, and certainly not from what is set out in the Bible itself; nor can the component parts of creation be allocated to different frameworks so easily in theological terms.

The very mental act of separating aspects of the creation and giving them separate identities is itself seems to be conceptually contrary to the creation as it is set out in the Bible, and must assume, implicitly if not explicitly, that there is some uncreated ‘reality’ to which both God and his creation separately refer. This is because the creation account as it stands makes the ‘why’ depend totally on the ‘how’. That is, God’s speaking the creation into existence, and concluding that his word has achieved its object without reference to any principle or mechanism external to himself. There is, therefore, not only no place for something interposed between God and his creatures, but no reason for it. In similar terms, some have said that the details of Genesis 1 do not correspond with events in time-space, but nevertheless identify God as an orderly creator. However, this is incoherent. One cannot deny the basis for a conclusion’s reality (events on days) yet persist that the conclusion itself has an objective status (what only events on days can indicate).

If the biblical ‘how’ is a nullity, then the ‘why’ is hollow and cannot promote either God’s glory or his worship by his creatures, contrary to its purpose throughout the Bible (that is, God’s being creator, in biblical terms, being that which calls us to worship of him).

But it is also at odds with its place to think that science does tell us the ‘how’ of creation, as science deals in the repeatable and observable within the completed (and fallen) creation. The creation is not accessible to ‘science’. Ideas of evolution, which are often regarded as explaining how life, or organisms as we know them, or indeed the entire cosmos came about does not in fact do this. It is not science, but religious materialism. To think that the variation we do see in organisms reaches back into their origin moves from science to unfounded belief almost instantly, and a belief that has its feet in the idea that there is no God, or if there is, he is the remote and uninvolved deist god. Not the God of the Bible who created in love for relationship.

To even look for a ‘mechanism’ that would execute the creation beyond the terms of scripture misunderstands both the account itself and its theological place. The account is not, and the cosmos and us in it, are not about ‘mechanism’ in some materialist vision of how the world is, but about relationship: that between God and what he has made to glorify himself and give us life to live in his presence. Science and mechanism occur post-creation, and any light they are thought to throw does not illumine the creation account or our understanding of it, but colours it to the detriment of understanding and in congruence with a prior materialist conceptualisation.

Blessings

David Green



PS. Some references that may be of interest are:

http://creation.com/john-dickson-vs-genesis

http://www.christianity.com/ligonier/?speaker=mohler2

(Al Mohler’s talk at the 2010 Ligonier conference, summarised here:

http://www.ligonier.org/blog/2010-ligonier-national-conference-albert-mohler/)

http://www.grbc.net/sermons/index.php?action=by_conference&conference=5

http://www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?keyword=GPTS%20Conference%201999

http://www.stillwaterrpc.org/genesis.php

A recent book review reminded me of another point that the speaker made: he spoke of Genesis 1 being about 'funciton' not origination in material/cosmic terms. I didn't pick up on this, but a review of Walton's book on this matter reminded me.

The fatal flaw in this line is the pagan separation of being and action (or pure origination and function). It encapsulates a world-view that is not biblical, where only God is 'pre-supposed', but where a cosmos is regarded as a 'given' and not something that results from the will of God who is love. It depersonalises the basic nature of 'being' and ultimately 'de-god's' our world.

scientific knowledge

"Scientific knowledge occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant" F. Hayek's critique of 'scientism' quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald's Weekend Business by Nicholas Gruen, 21 Jan 12.

If only my Anglican colleagues in this diocese had the courage to assert this in favour of theological knowledge!

History: event or interpretation?

Some quotes from Elton, The Practice of History, that touch on, and raise questions about the way Genesis 1 is approached by many commentators today, who deny that it is history, or take it as a type of verbal gloss on an underlying but unnominated set of events:

The task of history is to understand the past, and if the past is to be understood it must be given full respect in its own right. And unless it is properly understood, any use of it in the present must be suspect and can be dangerous.

p. 47.

A long one which is interesting in the difference between ‘natural’ science and history:

As a matter of fact, in a very real sense the study of history is concerned with a subject matter more objective and more independent than that of the natural sciences. The common argument that, unlike the scientist, the historian cannot verify his reconstruction by repeating the experiment at will can be turned round to give him greater assurance of objectivity...All scientific experiments are essentially constructs, and this applies to both the physical and the biological sciences...Of course, he obtains his problem by asking questions of nature--of something outside himself--but his method enables him to treat nature willfully and to compose for himself the argument which he wishes to resolve...scientific experiments are...artificial; theses things would not have happened but for a deliberate act of will on the part of the experimenter; the matter studies may be taken from nature, but before it is studied it is transformed for the purposes of the investigation. It is not going too far to assert that nearly all scientific study deals with specially prepared artificial derivatives from what naturally occurs.

The historian’s case is different...he cannot invent his experiment; the subject of his investigation is outside his control. When the problem of truth is under consideration, his essential difference from the natural scientist works in his favour...the matter he investigates has a dead reality independent of the enquiry.

pp. 52-3.

When it comes to views of Genesis 1 that see it not as an account of time-space events in the sequence given, but a sort of meta-historical account that abstracts from events to convey some inferred ‘truth’ that lies beneath them, I can’t but help think that such views consider God to be a historical relativist: a position that has to be argued and demonstrated, rather than asserted glibly and taken for granted as though there are no alternative positions:

Interpretation, or general acceptance of a thesis, has nothing whatever to do with its independent existence...others who think that history is what historians write, not what happened, come dangerously close to suggesting either that it does not much matter what one says because (interpretation being everything) there are always several reasonably convincing interpretations of any given set of events, or that history is altogether unknowable, being merely what happens to be said by a historian at a given moment.

p. 56.

...but that men cannot ever eliminate themselves from the search for truth is non-sense, and pernicious nonsense at that, because it once again favours the purely relativist concept of history, the opinion that it is all simply in the historian's mind and becomes whatever he likes to make of it.

p. 57.

So those who think that Genesis 1 is a late Jewish ‘interpretation’ of what they think happened, against the conceptions of the day as to origins, have succumbed to the notion that it is interpretation (the ancients’ or theirs) that matters and not the facts. But this is a perspective, not itself a self-evident fact, and it is what actually happened that is important, because this is reflective of who God is and what we are in relation to him, in every aspect and dimension of our being. To think that the interpretation is more significant than the events is to express a view that the cosmos and its ‘reality’ is something other than what is from God’s hand, somehow independent of God and that principles and mechanisms have an independent existence to which God in his creation tale also makes reference. But this undercuts the whole notion of a meaningful creation account and leaves us knowing nothing about ourselves or our world, subject to the changing whims of contemporary ideas: currently, of course these are materialist.

CMS Summer School

A friend who'd attended the school sent me a copy of his letter to the Archbishop, who addressed the attendees on the subject of creation.

I am very glad that you broached the controversial question of creation at the CMS Summer School.

The question is often delimited in the terms that you used in your talk: that is, both by science and theology, thus your deferral to science, I would expect, on the scientific questions.

This represents, I think, a profound mistake! The question of our origin is not a scientific question at all. It is, from start to finish, a theological question and its answer has only theological implications.

The question has only become regarded as a scientific one by a sleight of hand to which the church has caved in from the day of its active promotion by Darwin and his supporters in the mid 1800s and resiled from its prophetic function ever since. The great sleight of hand is two-fold: firstly that processes within the creation can throw light on the supernatural act of creation, and that something must be interposed between the word of God and the effects of that word, some ‘mechanism’ to give life to what God has called to be! How extraordinary for a Christian theologian to buckle before the puffery of materialism and its typically atheistic proponents (or unwitting Christian fellow-travellers) and agree that our God needs a ‘mechanism’ to achieve his ends; particularly when he has gone out of his way to tell us precisely what happened in sufficient detail to eliminate the role of any subsidiary mechanism.

And just think what a mechanism might imply for the doctrine of creation itself? It might imply that agency apart from God was necessary for creation: so whence this agency? It might imply that God made something in order to make something else, as though ordinary providence operated in the extraordinary period of the creation, ending as it does with God in his glory! It might imply things that exist that are outside God and outside the creation: some principle, power, or ‘mechanism’ that is uncreated? What does this say, then about God? But what, also, of us? The effect is to immediately de-personalise the creation work and destroy the filial relationship between us and God. We would be the sons of a machine, not God if he interposed a mechanism between himself and us; yet the only mediator is Christ!

Clearly, this opens up a can of worms.

The reason creation is a theological matter, and one of prime importance is because the creation both shows and defines our relationship with God and sets the entire cosmos and all that is within it in theological context: arising only from God, for God’s purpose and reflecting God as ‘very good’, then to be under the stewardship of his creature that is in his image.

Importing evolutionary ideas into this is not innocuously adding a ‘scientific’ explanation, but is mounting an attack on the sovereignty and capability of God, if not his very being; re-founding humanity as a mere assembly of material, and making the cosmos the foundation of being, with person-hood, shown in will and love relationships and actions occurring within this and not prior to it, in the three-person God. Apart from this, it is also allowing a fiction to explain God’s supernatural acts, a fiction for which there is no evidence, any actual evidence cutting off after it has explained the variation in creatures (but not their origin).

I would ask you to re-consider your position on creation and re-take it as a theological question, because those who deny God see the theological issue very clearly and make materialism the engine of their view of humanity. The two do not co-join. Materialism, how ever it trumps itself up, does not mix with Christian supernaturalism. Each places man and the cosmos on utterly different trajectories.

A sermon that deals with this topic which may be of interest is at:

http://www.gty.org/resources/Sermons/90-359

I would also add that to argue for any mixture of evolution and creation removes God from creation: as many published works attest, as does the lack of movement to God brought by expousal of evolution. My posts on de-godding God and the Creation discuss this.

Furthermore, to claim that the text is empty of historical content, but still serves to show God as creator, fails. If the content is inaccurate, then nothing is communicated but puffery, and it is empty of information that relates to the creation in which it is purported to make sense: that is connects with the categories, relationships and common causality of the creation. It is a sad sign of theological neglect to let this hollow argument pass into print, or sermons, which it does from time to time.

Creation, but not as you know it

The sermon on Genesis 1, to which I referred the other day, started off very well, I thought, and it ended well too, for that matter. It was the middle that was the problem; or where there were a number of problems, to my mind.

At one point the speaker made an analogy by asking if we believed that Hitler killed millions of Jews. Of course, most people affirmed. He then told us that in fact all Hitler did was give orders. The killing was done by others. He extended this to say that creation was similar. God gave the orders, but other factors did the work.

There are a couple of basic problems with this: there is no biblical evidence that God used intermediaries, or had to rely on agency (apart from Christ, the only agent mentioned in the Bible: John 1:1-3) particularly noting Hebrews 11:3 and Psalm 33:6 and 9. There is also an irrationality in God having to rely on, or use, something from within the creation to recursively do the creating itself, when God's resting on day 7 marks the division between creating and the world as created. It means that God used something from what was not there do make what became there. Simply unworkable!

The speaker also brought up the notion that the creation account gives us the 'why' or the meaning behind it all, but 'science' gives us the 'how'.

Again, this fails. The failure is a basic linguistic one, as the account clearly provides the 'how' (God spoke, it happened) as the 'why'. The two are inseparable. But the failure is also logical: if it is imagined that a materialist, de-godding doctrine (evolution) which relies on observations within the completed (but fallen) creation gives the detail of the pre-fall, pre-normal-providence creation acts, then we are using imaginary paddles on this particular canoe!

One remark perhaps gave the game away. The speaker mentioned 'intelligent design' which, to my mind is a non-Christian approach to origins, when it is extended past the observation that the creation is replete with the characteristics of design. ID does not a theology make, nor is it adequate to inform theological work. Our consideration of creation must start with the Bible, as for instance this sermon on the theology of creation demonstrates.

Underlying the speaker's thesis, I think, was a misunderstanding of the creation account itself; which is about relationship and soverign action, not providing openings for us to 'grope' for 'mechanisms'. And, as I've argued, the quest for a mechanism is itself recourse to materialism and rejection of the biblical world view, sith its use of history to establish the basis for relationship and the connection between creator and creation, and gives primacy to materialism as basic within the creation and probably prior to it!

One of the nice touches in the sermon was how the speaker characterised the pinnacle of creation. Usually it is said that this occurs on day 6, with the creation of man. But Duncan suggested that it is day 7, when God rested. And this has a symmetry to it (in chiasmic fashion) with it a book end to God being the focus of the start of the passage in Genesis 1:1.

Thus, it is all about God, and the detail of the account is even less some literary artifice to convince us that God is creator, but is very much about God creating: about what he, as God, did as the work of God in bringing a creation into being as the place where he would be in relationship with his creatures.

Creation in pictures

Not quite clear in the picture (using phone not camera) but this shows a children's activity at a church I was visiting today (15 Jan 12). The chart was divided into 7 sections, and children were asked to stick pictures of what God created on each day in the appropriate section. Was very enjoyable as Alison, the moderator (I hate, as you know, the word 'leader' in a Christian context), led us through the questions, answers and sticking up.

The sermon that followed (thanks Duncan) took us into some interesting territory, but included, I think, some views that are not defensible from the Bible.

More on this in a later post.

evolutionary history

“The evolutionary theory of history has a good deal in common with that which sees the hand of God in history; after all, evolution was thought to explain the facts of natural creation in default of the existence of a creator.”

Elton, G The Practice of History p. 31

The suppression of Christianity

In "The Good Weekend" of 17 December 2011 Greg Bearup wrote:

...he remembers being fascinated reading about the Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer, a German philosopher, physician and musician who set up a hospital in Africa and supported it by performing organ recitals.

Note, no mention of Schweitzer's christian devotion being the major factor in his life and work or the sacrifice of his opportunities in Germany for the work in Africa. Note also the 'on purpose' mistake to call him a philosopher, but to not mention that he was a theologian, and a significant one!

Bearup also downplays Schweitzer's musical capability. He indeed was a great musician, but he was also a noted musicologist, with a two volume work on Bach.

Typical atheistic revisionism that attempts to erase the Christian heritage from the popular mind.

Elton on OT

“No other primitive sacred writings are so grimly chronological and historical as is the Old Testament, with its express record of God at work...”
G. R. Elton The Practice of History, p. 2

Theistic evolution's project

The project of theistic-evolution, in any of its various forms, is a project to establish that God did, or could have, created by some ‘mechanism’ or ‘principle’ not identified with God but ipso facto, from within the creation itself.

But its seeking an ‘explanation’ for the creation from within the creation is not only incoherent nonsense, but is to miss the very point of the creation as accounted in the Bible. Indeed, to even consider that God’s creative acts could be shared with something from within the creation is to undo God’s chief credential with respect to us, his creation, for our worship of him, his self identification as one who wills in love, and his capability to communicate true content in his revelation, which revelation is only made into the world that he created in which such content must have meaning in terms of elements and relations within that creation.

Thus, to embark upon a quest for a mechanism for creation, interposed between God’s speaking and its effect is to embark upon a quest to avoid God: to imagine that God would share with something within the creation his unique identifying capability is to misunderstand God and deny (1) that his creation is a means of contentful communication between him and us, (2) his love (in making the creation ‘very good’), and (3) the very point of the creation (for God’s extending in love to us ), is as grand a mistake as could come from a human mind.

The creation is not about mechanism, but about relationship wherein we know, love and glorify God. The account itself is not devoid of content, by this fact, but provides information about what and how God did his acts.

To think that the notion of mechanism adds anything to the creation account inserts into understanding of the account a materialist conception; so it counters the Bible’s ‘world view’ at the outset, holding that person-hood, love, intention (word) are not basic, but that mechanism is: materialism's only ontological recourse.

Rather, the account sets in a tight couple word-act and result: God in relationship with his creation; mechanism de-couples result from word-act: word-act - mechanism - result: this breaks the relational connection and puts us in filial relationship with something within the creation! So, asserting a mechanism doesn't explain anything about the creation account, nor does it fill a gap that the account leaves; instead, it voids the creation as a love-act and robs it of the very personal link that it explicates and within which it occurs.

The theistic-evolutionary project ends up by replacing God as he reveals himself in acts, with a ‘something’ that denies this revelation and requires agency outside of God, and, as I’ve indicated above, something that is founded in a conception of the world that is at odds with the Bible as it makes a materialist make-over of the word of God.

An analogy in human relationships would be to think that one could maintain a marriage relationship not by being in fellowship with your spouse, by asking the butler to look after it for you.

This post is related to the ideas discussed in 'de-godding'.

Happy Holiday?

Leading up to Christmas I received a few emails from business contacts in North America. Some ended with the sign-off line: 'happy holiday' or similar pabulum.

Just to keep the facts straight, I replied with 'Christmas Blessings', just to make the point for religion avoiders and their appeasers.

Next thing is to start a movement to put Christ firmly, defiantly and unmistakably into Christmas: pickets outside schools that soft-pedal the Christian-ness of the day would be a good start; the noisier the better. Petitions to school principals, meetings with them (easy if you are a parent), phone calls, of course, letters and emails. You name it. Next year: beat the drum!

De-godding God

There is, I think, a futher ramification to denying the direct reading of the creation account in the Bible beyond my post on eclectic creation and the one on de-godding.

That is, not only is the creation de-godded, but God himself suffers this process, in his being represented as other than his own self-representation.

Moves such as 'theistic'-evolution make God's self-proclaimed acts to be of other than God: a process, or matter itself. It undoes God.

Now, this may not be a problem for many commentators on the topic of origins, as most think the cosmos has been thoroughly de-godded anyway. Even for many ostensibly Christian commentators, the cosmos has been de-godded along deistic or gnostic lines, following a pagan, rather than a biblical lead.

But for conservative evangelicals the implications are more than stark.

God places nothing but himself between 'said' and 'is was so'. The interpolators go beyond the text and say that there is something in between. That God has not told us the full story, and that mechanical process is there. Over time, God will thus be 'faded' from his palpable presence in our life-story (man's life-story) to be replaced by another agent; not a personal one, but at best an occult one (occult as in 'hidden' and not known, if not unknowable) and at worst a completely material one, that is set free from God, his personhood and love for his creation.

The genesian connection between creation and creator is direct and unmediated (but by Christ). There is nothing impersonal between us and God as maker. In alternative views, this is destroyed, and we end up with a removed God, if God at all.