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.
