Small Groups & Ministry

I recently attended a training session for small group ministry (they called it 'leadership' but wrong concept...its ministry: service).

The session touched on some biblical material...mainly about diligence in action, and it had a little of a Brookfieldian flavour, but was fairly mechanical, I thought.

In the time available it was possibly helpful for those who were new to small group ministry, but the big omission was the theological basis for meeting in small groups. There is one, and it is about the community together in mutual service; it is also about reading and talking together about the Word of God. None of this, or the theological outcomes were mentioned.

There was far more that could have been done from the perspective of using discussion as a means of teaching. Brookfield has some material on this (more articles here). The  only problem is that lead by the Holy Spirit, discussion can go places that aren't lined up with where some remote author of study material thinks it should go...dangerous for authors who think they know where it should go!

In that connection, Jack Mezirow's Transformative Learning is worth some consideration.

American Culture to Blame

An op-ed piece in the NYT by David Firestone "Is American  Culture to Blame for Failing Schools" caught my attention with this view reported:

Canadians’ acceptance and indeed pride in their more egalitarian society contrast with Americans’ acceptance of having an underclass,” wrote Blair P., of Palm Desert, Calif. “It’s an Ayn Rand philosophy.

This hints at something that may lie beneath the weird non-biblical theology of 'leadership' that emanates from US conservative protestantism. That is, that there are 'them' and 'us' in US society. Some people born to be an underclass, and the clever ones born to 'lead'. An aristocracy as repugnant as any in Europe and the Roman church (with its fond memories of the Roman Empire).

But the Holy Spirit teaches us differently, and opposes such hierarchy as much as the early church lived out this (in a good sense) anarchism where slaves and owners were together the people of God.

In fact, the NT has little time for the powerful, and much time for the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged.

Blow your head off!

A very encouraging article, on Think Theology spoiled by some 'blow your head off' hubris.

I liked this comment:

Kenny, you say "who (2) is leading a church that is comprised of 50% female humans". I don't think you are 'leading' a church. You are serving one, along with all the other ministers in the church. It is the Holy Spirit who is leading.

The central concept of Christian ministry is just that: ministry! That is, service to others, service to the church, the body of Christ, service to our Lord himself, service to the broader community of and outside the faith.

Once we import the modern glam of 'leadership' we aren't talking church...the body of Christ...we are talking king pins and underlings. We are talking one active agent and a passive, 'just tell me what to do, believe and think' bunch of sermon admirers. Nothing like the conception of the church in the NT, and nothing like the Christ, who came to serve.

The language about and conceptualisation of Christian community in the NT generally and by Paul particularly is just that; community, living growing and serving together. Henry Mintzberg nicely calls it 'communityship'.

End note

The word translated 'lead/leader' in Paul's writings is subject of  range of nuances that do not come into the modern English (particularly USA 'popular business') usage of 'leadership'.

This discussion of 'proistemi' (the Greek translated as 'lead') is useful, I think, but insufficiently radically aligned with the scriptures and opposed to the worldly usage that  has flooded the church. 

Creating

I remain puzzled by the view, usually an unclearly defined one, that 'evolution' was or is God's 'method' of creating.

It's an odd method, I must say.

The creation is God exhibiting who he is: it is an act of love and it brings life. These are the impetus and outcome of God acting. He acts in love to bring life, or rather relationship.

But, to turn around and say that death, which is the single dominating feature of evolution (the less fit die while the fit survive and innovate...allegedly innovate to transmogrify 'kinds'), is the engine of creation is perverse to say the least. Death is anti-creation and anti-love.

The proponents of this bizarre theology had better get their explaining skates on.

Colemak Genesis 1:1

Slip over here to read Genesis 1:1 written on the home row of the Colemak keyboard.

Institutional Child Abuse by Church Organisations

There's only one word for the cruel and depraved self indulgent perversion that church bodies have connived at. It's here.

Yehuda is dead

I think that there should be an essay set for all Christians. It would be to respond to and/or reflect upon the death of Yehuda. It is captured in the essay My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.

This young man was only 19, and his older brother posted on his website...follow the link.

Death is confronting. Having attended funerals of many relatives, including my parents, aged from 11 to 80, I know the dull weight of loss that death entials: the permanence. Eliezer captures it in his essay.

But there are a few things that are said about death, by Christians, and by Eliezer, that are both unhelpful and inaccurate: the former because of the latter.

They revolve around God willing death. God doesn't will death. It is a consequence of living in rejection of him and that we live in a world that is disjoined from God. Not his world any longer, but ours. Fellowship, family denied. We wrested from him. Death is the end of relationship with all the implicative vastness that this implies.

Yeshua wept because death was not of him, but contrary to him, the creator. His world was not like this! The warning to Adam was that the knowledge was not a thing to be sought, but a thing that would be experienced. The sentence in Gensis 2:17 is recursive. Yeshua stepped through death to undo it; because what is finally real is not material, but person-al.

University Goddess

Universities the seat of rationalism?
Sign at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia
Not that surprising, I suppose, because this university teaches...wait for it...chiropractic...witch-doctoring!!

 

Life? It means...molecules

And they think that evolution is not a religion:

“It now seems that modern evolutionary biology can answer not merely the chicken-and-egg conundrum but that it can also give some sort of objective and factually well-founded answer to the ultimate question: ‘Why are we here?’ (something to be especially welcomed, many would say, given the sort of fantastic nonsense which has been used to answer this question in the past). Today we can answer this question with brutal frankness: we are here to reproduce ourselves; we are providing a temporary home for our genes; life is ultimately only a very complex process of transmission of genetic information to future generations which is itself only a complex biochemical concomitant of the resurfacing of our planet brought about ultimately by nuclear fusion in the sun and nuclear fission in the interior of the earth.”

(Badcock, C.R., ‘The Problem of Altruism: Freudian-Darwinian Solutions’, Basil Blackwell, London, 1986, p. 25.)

What evolution is about

Darwin's god hits the mark:

Evolution is not about science. It’s about God.

Much as Darwin's biographer thought.

It's just a list

It is always both amusing and perplexing when commentators claim, against common knowledge of Hebrew poetic conventions, that Genesis 1 is 'poetry'; it is clearly not (see also Kugel's work and Barrick's review).

Most evidently, it is a delimited list, more akin to a modern computer database structure than anything else: it has repeated segments, we would call them fields: each record has marker fields, end of record fields and a count field surrounding the data field.

Nothing to do with poetry.

Indeed, it is much like the counted list in Numbers 7, and nothing like symbolic language at all

Not that fundamentalist 6 day nonsense!

One of the fascinating things about Alpha course discussions is that they so frequently end up at the question of origins; no surprise, after all, as this is the dominating question: its answer tells us who we are.

In a recent Alpha course that I attended we spent our final meeting with, yet again, someone making reference to origins: "Did God create, or did we evolve?"

The sub-text was: "Whose explanation of who we are really counts?" That is: do we listen to the naturalists, or do we listen to the Bible? People normally don't see a common ground, because unreflective common sense is a good guide on this; there is no ground between doctrinaire naturalist fairy tales and the revelation of God. Paul reminds us quite pointedly of this and it is a modern day theologically ignorant conceit to think otherwise.

In the answer though, this question is usually interpreted as being: "Do we have to accept the Bible's fairy story?" But this misses the point; it is really a question of basic ontology: who we are is set by where we came from, "So tell me where we came from."

The credibility of any answer is measured by another implied question: "Is your basic ontology grounded: does it refer meaningfully to the world we are in, or does it float off in some deracinated fictive talk-fest?" Or, in other words: "Is your spirituality meaningfully connected with the life that I confront, or is it meaninglessly off in a different world to the one that constrains my life?"

That much is obvious, I would have thought, but the answer that comes back is usually obfuscating fluff as both being right (how can two things equally explain a concretely delineated origin when they are ontologically contradictory, and without overlapping explanatory connections?)

At my most recent Alpha group, we got into a tangle straight away when one person asked about the basis for belief in God. The answer was to be found for another person in contemplating the creation. And this is where it unravelled. Someone batted that back with "what about evolution?" Then we got into the old half-baked tail spin of what the Bible is and is not, and how we can, do and/or should read Genesis 1, etc. Certainly not as a credible account of events because...well...it's 'poetry' or 'picture language' or because of 'its genre', or it depends on 'how you read it' (of course). All reader response gunk. No one suggested that one might seek what the author's intent might have been, or what the literary signals were as to how to read it...nothing so objective was entertained, or how it is referenced throughout the Bible...why do scholarship, when you can play Prejudice? that great game that grown-ups love.

And so we are left with Christianity being rooted, not in love-acts of the creator that are brought to us in real-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and have meaning in the real world we live and move in; no, we have an image of what we don't know, that is subservient to naturalist dogma which itself serves to unseat the notion of a personal creator; furthermore, one that has a basic ontology that is incoherently materialist (or spooky spiritualist); not one to which person-hood, relationship and love are basic!

Wittgenstein's egg

Speaking at the dConstruct 2012 conference in Brighton, UK, science historian James Burke told the following story:

“Apparently, somebody once went up to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and remarked what a bunch of morons we Europeans must have been 900 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked... and to have thought what we were seeing up there was the sun going round the earth, when as anybody knows, the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to get that. To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied, as philosophers often will, ‘Yeah, yeah. But I wonder what it would’ve looked like up there if the sun had been going round the earth.’ The point being, of course, it would’ve looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that, in any given circumstance, you see what your version of things at the time tells you you’re seeing. If you’re an astronomer, and the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omelets, you build instruments to search for traces of intergalactic egg. And if you don’t find any: no problem. Instrument failure.”

And that's why evolutionists think its all sown up according to them!

How to read theories.

Some interesting remarks in Roberts and Pashler 2000 "How Persuasive is a Good Fit? A Comment on Theory Testing" in Psychological Review 107(2) 358-367.

The theory of evolution "appears to have successfully captured many of the patterns in the...data. This success [is] the main support for the theory"

[I've inserted the 'ToE' reference, and they go on to write]:

Why the Use of Good Fits as Evidence Is Wrong

This type of argument has three serious problems. First, what the theory predicts—how much it constrains the fitted data—is unclear. Theorists who use good fits as evidence seem to reason as follows: If our theory is correct, it will be able to fit the data; our theory fits the data; therefore it is more likely that our theory is correct. However, if a theory does not constrain possible outcomes, the fit is meaningless. [emp mine]

A prediction is a statement of what a theory does and does not allow. When a theory has adjustable parameters, a particular fit is only one example of what it allows. To know what a theory predicts for a particular measurement, one needs to know all of what it allows (what else it can fit) and all of what it does not allow (what it cannot fit). For example, suppose two measures are positively correlated, and it is shown that a certain theory can produce such a relation—that is, can fit the data. This does not show that the theory predicts the correlation. A theory predicts such a relation only if it cannot fit other possible relations between the two measures (zero correlation or negative correlation), and this is not shown by fitting a positive correlation.

When a theory does constrain possible outcomes, it is necessary to know by how much. The more constraint—the narrower the prediction—the more impressive a confirmation of the constraint (e.g., Meehl 1997). Without knowing how much a theory constrains possible outcomes, you cannot know how impressed to be when observation and theory are consistent.

...

That a theory fits data does not show how firmly the data rule out outcomes inconsistent with the theory; without this information, you cannot know how impressed to be that theory and observation are consistent.

Well, from this, I have a fair reason to be not very impressed at all with the theory of evolution!


Incidentally, the Meehl reference is a good read:

Meehl, P. E. (1997). The problem is epistemology, not statistics: Replace significance tests by confidence intervals and quantify accuracy of risky numerical predictions. In L. L. Harlow, S. A. Mulaik and J. H. Steiger (Eds.), What if there were no significance tests? (pp. 393-425). Mahwah, NK: Erlbuam.

Burden of proof

Darwin wrote:

…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

He's got it round the wrong way. What he, and evolutionists in general, have to demonstrate is that it could plausibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. That might be the hypothesis; it only needs a counter to undo it, but lack of a biochemically plausible pathway renders it a work of literature, not science; and fiction at that.

And all we have is stories such as Dawkins concocts pointing to all sorts of creatures with all sorts of eyes. But that tells us nothing and is certainly not science.

Theological Death

It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.

Religious vision

‘Darwin’s vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision.’

James Moore (Darwin's biographer)

Truth, but not as you know it!

Dr. Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC, said,

“What Darwin showed in his work on evolution and natural selection is that we don’t need to invoke any supernatural force or power to account for the development of life through time on earth.”

At an Alpha meeting question time I recently attended, one of the course members asked about Adam and Eve...clearly wanting to know if we believed that they had existed, or how we took them.
One of our Bible teachers, a learned and godly man whom I'll call Joe, gave a multi-pronged reply that I'll summarise and comment on here.

I'll aim to be brief, as its all been well rehearsed before, for example, in my posts on Pahl's similar comments.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Joe told us:

1. I believe that God is creator
2. Genesis is picture language, like the picture language of other ANE origins accounts but tells us truth
3. When you compare Genesis 1 to other texts in the Bible, you can see that it is picture language
4. Science tells us 'how' but not 'why'. Genesis tells us 'why'.
5. The Bible is not a book of science
6. The order of events is wrong: light comes before the sun.

 Comments

1. If the content of the only direct reference to God being creator is denied, then I wonder how Joe sustains his belief that God is creator. All the biblical references to God's chief credential as creator rely on Genesis 1, and can only work coherently if Genesis 1 is grounded and shares the same event frame with those references and our own experience of the world. The alternative is that it is a story disconnected from the real and throws into question what the real is...not much different from paganism with identical epistemological challenges.

It strains credibility that God can not or would not describe his creation in terms that authenticate it in the world that resulted. There seems to be a disconnect that God created the world, but the terms of the creation account have no real connection with that very world. Absurd is the word.

2. 'Picture language' means 'imagery', I suppose, but I wonder if the authors of the pagan tripe such as Enuma Elish regarded their work as imagery. Even a rough comparison of EE and G1 shows a huge divergence; the main one that EE is a theogony, it presupposes a cosmos, and not creation out of nothing. We have to wonder what sort of world it is about, then. Moreover, it has evil as a part of the world in the 'creation phase'. This would line up with evolutionary dogma, but not the creation in G1. The difference is vast, and unbridgable. A more plausible relation between the two is that EE is a corrupted derivation of G1, rather than the other way. But then, if G1 is merely a competing story, how would an account of what did not happen persuade anyone? 'Your story...my story'; both just stories. It's like trying to stop a tank with a picture of a rocket!

3. The claim of G1 being imagery fares poorly with other passages in the Bible. It is nothing like the imagery in Ezekiel and Revelation, for example. The ordered, sequenced and delimited event segments in G1 are more like the lists that occur in other passages; Numbers 7 springs to mind.

4. The why only emerges from the how, and in this case the asserted 'how' is at odds with the 'why'. Any attempt to sever the two relies on a pagan ontology and not a biblical one, and stems more from an external philosophical idealism than the concrete-realism of the Bible and its unified approach to reality. Indeed, the flowering of modern science was brought by the approach to the Bible, and indeed the world, that the 'how' and the 'why' are intimately connected; as is sensible. To split them apart means that you reference an alternative real world to the one you are in where different aspects of the unified world we live in can only be explicated by their locus in different 'fields' of being. In fact, can't be done!

5. The Bible is the account of relations between God and his creation, specifically man, and God's work to restore us to fellowship with him. The creation is the essential and definitive starting point and it shows who God is, as loving author of creation, who we are, in this created world, and that relations are grounded in what really happened, not in some disconnected fantasy that attaches to nothing. It also teaches that the material world is ontologically continuous with God's effecting word.
But, where the Bible touches the physical world it is relevantly accurate, because it is about what really happened!

6. Light is produced by the sun, not created by it. Energy is basic to the material world and it is unsurprising that it was created early. Perhaps the order that G1 is relating is that first a basic 'stuff' was created, then it was energised. So, I read the creation of light as the formation of the general energy field: perhaps including the known forces: the strong and the weak atomic forces, gravity and electromagnetic forces; all of which must have prior existence for production of light by a particular body.

Mousetrap yanking

A friend's response to McDonald's mousetraps, kindly e-mailed to me:

Didn’t think much of the mouse traps but, probably, 25 years ago, would have really enjoyed the pot you smoked in order to dream up such nonsense.

But, I suppose, I shouldn’t be so prematurely critical. Maybe if you could intelligently CREATE one of those mechanical devices and let me see how it actually works I might be impressed.

In the mean time, inhale some more mate.

Mousetrap stories

On his otherwise wonderful website, John McDonald says:

To poke fun at creationist Michael Behe's claim that a mousetrap is a good analogy for an "irreducibly complex" biochemical system, I have drawn mousetraps in several stages of reduced complexity.

Trouble is, the mousetraps are not Behe's mousetrap and therefore have nothing to say to his analogy; they are also unworkable in the real world, as far as I can see. They thus give the evolutionary game away in that evolution works well as a story, but that's about it! Its relation to the real world is yet to be established.
McDonald has to establish how Behe's mousetrap can be reduced and remain workable, not propose completely other mousetraps...designed, of course.
To continue Behe's line, what McDonald has to do is establish how complex biological sub-systems can come about incrementally as working systems incomplete compared to the final system.
This has to be established biochemically, not story-wise in Darwinian fashion. That is, Darwin, and his followers are great story tellers (Dawkins and his 'eye' story is typical, and as easily rebutted). Their fiction is wonderful. But they establish nothing.
So, McDonald has to give us, firstly, a plausible biochemical explanation of the incremental development of a complex subsystem. Then he has to plausibly place this within a functional organism. Of course, at step two he can only fail. The putative organisms aren't around.
But even if he could do this, he's only established what could happen; not what did happen. We're still in story-land.
Then, to give evolution any legs at all, he's got to show that it did happen. I can tell that he'll point to the geological record. But for this to work as an explanation, he's got to do more than the gross morphology hoodwinking that we're used to and talk biochemistry! There's more, though. He's also got to step outside the circular non-logic of proving evolution by assuming it, and prove that the geological record is more than a sorted collection of dead creatures.

Too many problems, John, and finally we only have the superficial flippancy we've become used to from doctrinaire physicalists.

Nevertheless, thanks for the Stats text. Its great.

How do I know who you are?

Quote from von Foerster's 1995 article Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics
(emphasis mine):

However, we do not need to go to Russell, Whitehead, Godel, or to other giants, to learn about in principle undecidable questions, we can easily find them all around.

 For instance, the question about the origin of the universe is one of those in principle undecidable questions: nobody was there to watch it. Moreover, this becomes apparent by the many different answers that are given to this question. Some say it was a single act of creation some 4 or 5,000 years ago; others say there was never a beginning and there will be never an end, because the universe is a system in perpetual dynamic equilibrium; then there are those who claim that approximately 10 or 20 billion years ago the universe came into being with a "Big Bang," whose faint remnants one is able to hear over large radio antennas; but I am inclined to trust most Chuang Tse's report, because he is the oldest and was therefore the closest to this event. He says:

Heaven does nothing; this nothing-doing is dignity;
Earth does nothing; this nothing-doing is rest;
From the union of these two nothing-doings arise all
action
And all things are brought forth.

I could go on and on with other examples, because I have not told you yet what the Burmese, the Australians, the Eskimos, the Bushmen, the Ibos, etc., would tell us about their origins. In other words, tell me how the universe came about, and I will tell you who you are.

Darwin blooper

A suprising place to find a Darwin quote:

On the Herding Cats project management blog.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone - well Darwin wasn't connected with the reality of the times was he?

Trinity

During a discussion at a recent Alpha course session, someone gave an illustration of the Trinity using aspects of computing:

Using a typical business computer requires that three units of software work together: the application (e.g. word processor), the operating system (e.g. MacOS) and the bottom layer of code: firmware or microcode.

To use the word processor all three levels of software are involved: they all cooperate intimately; none works without the other; all three are completely unified in achieving a system outcome. All are totally 'software'; they all have 'software nature', but each has an independent identity, yet all work in harmony.

For the user, the work between the layers is invisible: they cannot tell which layer is doing what; but all work for the outcome.

Seemed pretty good to me. Software is a 'three in one' deal.

Father Brown

The Father Brown detective series has just started on ABC-TV (21 Saturday evenings), based on the character by G. K. Chesterton.
In the first episode a character, evidently an entomologist, says words to the effect: "...evolution makes God superfluous..." To which Brown replies with some twaddle about the unfolding understanding of God's work, or something similar.
The character has it right, of course, and, of course, evolution is but a pack of pooh tickets, but the great irony is that Chesterton would be unlikely to have given such words to Brown, as Chesterton himself was decidedly averse to the idea of evolution!

Collider

In an interview on the Megastructures episode on the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Dr Dave Barney, the CMS Outreach coordinator, said:

...what we are doing is just...trying to find out what we are made of, where we come from and what the universe is like...

Or, to decode:

1. "what we are made of": science
2. "where we come from": not in the domain of science: so, religion (probably the religion of materialism in this case)
3. "what the universe is like": both science and religion. To enquire about the universe requires axioms of departure for the enquiry. These are not established by science, but by a basic ontology and the epistemology that derives from it; thus religion, broadly defined.

Theologians who bend in the wind of evolutionary speculation misunderstand point 2 and act as though they hadn't thought of point 3 and the significance of Genesis 1 as the basis of our 'first philosophy'. But that is Gen 1 as grounded event sequence; not as ungrounded idealism.

It doesn't matter...

God created; we know that. It just doesn't matter when (or how, or over how long...).
This is a common enough view amongst Anglican clergy persons. I was going to write 'position' but I don't think that the notion is well enough thought out to be elevated to a 'position'.

No, its just a view, fairly ill-formed, if not completely uninformed, at that. And, I don't mean with respect to current debates, but I mean with respect to the 'biblical data' as theologians like to say, as if the Bible is a mere theological data mine to sustain their occupations (humph!).

The trouble with this view is that it does matter when and how and over how long that God created, because all these are elements of how God's creation is communicated and defined in the Bible, and are therefore part of what God's creation means: they establish its ontology and its historical placement with respect to us. They delimit creation in the Bible, showing its attachment to the world we are in. Indeed, the world that is created, and we as a part of it.

And the time references themselves are significant. Time's constraints are universal and order our experience, giving a trans-cultural and meta-historical system of coordination of our knowledge of events and relationships, everything has a time denotation that is part of the things characterisation in respect of all other things. It makes the disparate inseparable!

However, theology that it rooted in philosophical idealism, rather than the 'concrete-realism' of the Bible will engineer the pretense of separability between what the Bible 'says' and what we take it to mean as soon as a desire emerges to blend the Bible with paganism.

The common or garden variety of modern Anglican clergy person does this all the time, and here most particularly, betraying a view of Christian faith that has nothing to do with God's created world,  or thus the world we inhabit and find the coordinates of our meaning in, but resigns the real world over to materialism and the fantasies of evolution, just to appease the intellectual power-brokers of today.

It's a pity, really, because the Biblical tradition scorns the intellectual power-brokers of any day, and maintains a prophetic witness against them!

Evolution: don't take it literally

In my previous blog post, quoting Darwin we have Darwin giving the game away: similar language is used today about evolution: I don't take it literally, of course, but literarily; because its not science, but a 'just suppose' fantasy.

Just time: enough of it and...can anything happen?

In his interesting paper “How not to reconcile evolution and creation” (2006) Alex Pruss helpfully (that is, I don’t have to look it up) provides a quote from Darwin on the eye’s (supposed) evolution. Its a completely farcical story, but will serve to allow me to make a point.
The quote:

We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better one is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

Richard Dawkin’s gross morphology stories don’t get much better than his level of fantasy (note the language: 'suppose', 'may we not believe', 'might'), I might add, but more to my point is Darwin’s reliance on vast time periods, as well as the number of creatures involved, to do this transformative magic, sans an actual mechanism.
Simply put; if the process is mindless, time is the necessary ingredient. Time is a marker then, of no designer. Pruss’ paper elaborates on this in terms of stochastic explanations.
So the lack of this time in the Bible’s creation account, conversely, is indicative of a designer. Darwin et al have to remove the designer, and the means they use, to hide their overall implausibility, is extended time, in the vain hope that time will allow stochastic processes to achieve what otherwise would need a designer.

Evolution vs? Christianity

Nicely put piece on Evolution vs Christianity, by an atheist or agnostic! Better put than I've heard most Sydney Anglicans able to say!

Mississippi

Mark Twain:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi  River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower  Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

And so with the puffery of evolution!

How dead is dead?

Every so often some theistic-evolutionist bright spark will attempt to contradict the Bible and tell us  no death before A&E's sin doesn't refer to animal death. This great big exegetical secret lets them off the hook and thus the supposed evidence of ancient death (pre-dating A&E) in the fossil record is not a problem for theistic-evolution. and let us in on the great big exegetical secret that this does not include animal death!

For most Anglicans that I've discussed this with, their thinking seems to be dominated by an excessively, and I think, misplaced forensic understanding of death.

They seem to hold who God is and what happens in his creation as being in two different thought worlds. If they are theistic evolutionists, this makes sense, because their theism is usually a conceptual bolt-on to their core world concept of naturalistic evolution.

Unwittingly, thought, they betray their misunderstanding of death, and fail to see it as a breach in both the fabric of the creation, and in God's relationship with his creation as a totality.

The creation per se is the representation of God's nature extended beyond himself. This has to be consistent with who God is (and that is love, if we are to follow the scriptures); God is also thoroughly alive and in relationship within the god-head.

For God, with such a nature to have the very opposite of relationship, life and love anywhere in the creation, would be to undo the representation of himself. He would demonstrate flaws a mile wide in a creation where basic anti-godness (death) was both the 'last enemy' and 'very good'.

It is simply incoherent to maintain death as some sort of inconvenience in the creation, affecting only animals, as though creation has multiple 'departments'. Some have death, others do not. But death in one department is death in all of the creation

And death is the negation, antithesis and reversal of God: it is maximally 'not-god'. It denies him, undoes creation and terminates relationship: love ceases to operate.

In Time

I drove a truck loaded with musical instruments and related hardware from our school's band camp back to the school today.

Our job in unloading the truck was simplified as we were told that the band leader would organise for everything to be put away properly the next day, by band members.

I idly thought to myself: we could just leave everything in the band room and let chance random events sort everything into its proper place.

Ah, but no! If we left it to random events, that is to the 'principle of evolution' it would be likely that we'd have to wait for an enormous amount of time to elapse before the instruments and equipment was in the correct place. Not helpful.

We would also have to rely on energy being converted to meaningful work; and the meaning would have to come from somewhere to achieve the organisation required; where, I wondered? Thus, not just energy: unstructured randomly directed energy is better known as an explosion; also not helpful; we would need structured energy, delivered to achieve an intention. From where?

What we'd have to rely upon is the directed, intelligent activity of people committed to the band's best interests (that is, intelligence motivated, at some level, by love) to achieve in a day what the universe, left to itself would not be able to achieve in a convenient, or even a practical time, or maybe any time at all.

This relates to a theme that I've heard discussed that one of the marks of the application of loving intelligence to the creation is that it proceeds rapidly: to wit, in 6 days. To extend the time to the meaningless durations stipulated in evolutionary writings merges purposeful intelligence with unpurposed randomness: hard to understand, then, how the event sequence of this type of creation bears the mark of a creator: of a loving intelligence.

What counts as a mark of intelligence is the time density of events along an outcome vector: events that in sequence lead to a specific time-space outcome, represented probably as a material change in the configuration of an element in an environment that achieves something meaningful (of course, all this needs greater definitional clarity); but that's the nub of it: the time density an event set along an outcome vector marks one event set as resulting from intelligence, and another set; with a very sparse density, as random; one tells of an author, the other of no author.

Survival

Anaximander makes a clever guess as to the origin of man. "...he further says that in the beginning man was born from animals of another species, for while other animals quickly find nourishment for themselves, man alone needs a lengthy period of suckling, so that had he been originally as he is now, he could never have survived." He does not explain--a perennial difficulty for evolutionists--how man survived in the transition stage.

Coppleston's History of Philosophy, v. 1, p. 25
(the Contiuum edition, 2003; first published 1946)

Dasein

From an essay by Roy Hornsby on Heidegger's thought:

By using the expression Dasein, Heidegger called attention to the fact that a human being cannot be taken into account except as being an existent in the middle of a world amongst other things (Warnock, 1970), that Dasein is 'to be there' and 'there' is the world. To be human is to be fixed, embedded and immersed in the physical, literal, tangible day to day world (Steiner, 1978).

I believe that H was on to something of profound importance in this concept: the significance of the concrete real world as the frame of our being (the world where you bump your nose if you attempt to walk through a wall and not a doorway). The creation account links that frame to God, the creator, in the account which must therefore also be denominated in the 'physical, literal, tangible day to day world' in its references, categories and relations. Once the creation account is un-linked from the world we are in, it is reduced to mere story (myth, fiction, or fantasy, it all amounts to the same thing); it breaks the link between God, his creation and us; and re-defines us as discontinuous with the creative will of God: no longer are we 'in God's image' linked by the chain of creative outcomes, but are linked to nothing and the materialist are right, in the grimness of the dust to which materialism reduces us all.

Evolutionists are right!

People like Dick Dawkins are right? How can I say such a thing?

Well, it's 'right' in a limited kind of way.

They are asking the right question.

Our origin is the fundamental question. Its answer tells who we are, what the world is like, and illuminates our quest for significance. So, it's a religious question!

In the case of evolution, mind you, the lamp is not working and no illumination occurs, because evolution is a knowledge-free industry!

The strangest thing happens when people attempt to answer the question of origins in two ways at once.

This is the ploy of theistic evolution, which attempts to add materialism's evolutionary dogma to the notion that God created.

But we end up with a funny sort of 'creating' that undoes the very meaning of the word: creation by non-creation (that is by random working of mindless material processes).

So what would this answer tell us about who we are, what our world is like, and how would it illuminate our quest for significance? Or would it even explain why we act as though we are significant, because at every turn whatever reference to God adds, acceptance of evolution takes away.

Impressive timing

From Peter Morris' book "The Management of Projects" (p. 4)

Projects have always enjoyed a symbolic, often even religious connotation. Some consider the Creation as the first great project - the timing was certainly impressive...

Morris is right; the timing was impressive; but if the timing was not in fact impressive; as is held by many who bolt their belief in evolution to their reading of the Bible, then it is hard to see how the creation bears the mark of an author, and it merges with the product of non-authorship. Consistent, of course, with the denial inherent in evolutionary thinking that there was and is no author.

One of the marks of authorship: of the application of persons to effects, is efficiency of means: remove this, and you remove the signature. The author soon follows.

ANE Science?

In his article "The Emergence of Creatures and Their Succession in a Developing Universe", Wolfhart Pannenberg (Ashbury Theological Journal 50/1, 1995) writes, referring to references claimed to be made to "Babylonian and other mythological descriptions of the origin of the world...":

Regarding both types of materials one is entitled to judge that the priestly document made comprehensive use of the science of its day in critically selecting and interpreting its results by relating them to the creative activity of God.

I could not imagine a more profound misrepresentation and am surprised that Pannenberg made it. The use of phrases such as "the science of its day" and "interpreting its results" is an anachronistic move designed, it would seem, to put the mythological fictionalising of pagan seers on an equal footing with the work of the CSIRO.

Nothing could be further from the truth. ANE pagans didn't have a science, let alone one that had results! Indeed, if you think that they did, you may as well talk about the 'results' of astrology. Go read Enuma Elish and see if you can see any traces there of a conceptualisation of the universe that would allow observations to be made as though (a) humans could draw meaningful conclusions about the characteristics of the universe and that (b) the universe was able to be subjected to rational enquiry. There is nothing in any ANE text outside of the Bible that suggests that the thought world of that day gives the universe a dependent and well structured relationship with its rational, orderly and loving creator. (You might have thought I would say that the universe was 'natural', but  not so; it is created. See my previous post on Methodological Naturalism).

Rather, quite the opposite. The ANE world didn't do science at all, and couldn't have as the modern scientific project is only a few centuries old and is rooted in Christian biblical theism. The concepts that we use today are as foreign as could be to the ancients.

The Genesian account doesn't critically select and interpret anything (to suggest it does renders it to be no more than an empty and ultimately meaningless polemic: an advertising gimick, no less!); no, it overturns competing accounts and makes of the relationship between the world its creator and humanity something entirely different from paganism's mish-mash of speculation, improbability and nonsense (this is what Pannenberg illogically, and ignorantly misnames 'science') and unique it its and any other day.

Apart from everything else it does, it lays the foundation for modern science, compared to the dead ends that paganism repeatedly runs into and creates the environment in which we relate to God as person to person, in trust and love.

Methodological Naturalism

Over a quite lunch today at Diethnes restaurant in Sydney (always a haunt when I'm in that city) I was reading an old review by Willem Drees in Zygon  (the journal, not the Dr Who characters) of Philip Clayton's "God and Contemporary Science". Although only a review, anything by Drees is worth reading, and this article was no exception. Plenty to think over, despite my being at odds with him over many of his views (that's like a gnat being at odds with an elephant over real estate, I know) but one thing caught my attention.

He mentioned the reliance of science on 'methodological naturalism'. This wasn't the main thrust of the review, and its a common enough claim in both philosophy and theology of science, but I wonder if it really holds the water claimed for it.

It sets out to eliminate reference to non-natural, or non-physical/material entities in explanations of relations in the material world. At one level this is unremarkable, as the project of science (knowledge of the material world) is that very thing. The phrase adds nothing particular to the understanding of the mission: the mission of science is to understand the  material world and to do this it seeks to understand the material world in terms of the material world. Gets us nowhere special!

However, it is more frequently extended to imply a certain ontological twinning, that is, that methodological naturalism works because naturalism is the only game in town. This view also tends to misconstrue general Christian understanding of the relation of God and his creation and the specific views of biblical creationists.

In setting its charter, MN has to refer to other than the naturalism that it seeks to rely upon; for instance, it holds that minds can have real knowledge about entities outside those minds, and that there are other minds that are interested in that knowledge; it also has to make reference to a framework of what knowledge is and how reliably it can be garnered by minds and through the senses. The reliability of its mission is not entailed in MN, but stands above it.

Moreover, MN is set within a frame of reference which is not, I think, naturalistic, but Christian-theistic; and inescapably so. That is because modern naturalism, and its pal practical atheism, is, in fact, a Christian heresy in my view. It, too, has its roots in the Christian world concept; despite protestations to the contrary and its evoking of the idea of an independent reality in the very term 'natural', when it really operates as 'methodological creationism'. By this I mean, its approach to the creation (the universe) as a place that operates with regularity, and in its own terms, at least at the level of our investigation, is an approach that derives, not from an atheistic/naturalist frame of reference, but from a Christian-theist one. This is not mere opinion, but a factuality of the history of modern science.

A pure naturalist position would have to contend with un-grounded randomness where anything can happen; but this would cripple scientific enquiry and put us back in the pagan nonsense of arbitrary gods doing all sorts of things for no sort of reason. Nor do we actually do science this way; we look for systematic relations and put aside any notion of the arbitrary as well as relying on all sorts of elements of methodological creationsim. This is not to say that non-material entities can be relied upon in materialist relations, but that our equipment for understanding, and the very systematic nature of the relations reaches to something beyond the material; otherwise we would have no hope of any worthwhile explanation of the material world if the only categories we had were within the material world.

Alvin Plantinga touches on this in his essays on Methodological Naturalism, although he goes in a different direction to mine.

God could have....

Occasionally I run into someone, or hear of someone (usually someone else, as it happens) who claims that God 'could have used evolution', or 'could have used long periods of time to do his creating'. They usually advertise these claims with the smug triumphalism that such speculation proves some point. I don't know what that point could be, of course, because there is no point at all made by idle speculation.

One may as well claim that God could stand on his head!

Lita Costner in a recent article in Creation magazine starts with quoting this sort of vain claim; to rebut it, of course; but I think that her rebuttal could go further.

The theological point that she makes is appropriate, with the implications for the very goodness of the creation being imperiled by the contradictory (you could say incoherent) presence of the last enemy in its basic makeup, but there are other considerations that bear on the question, in my view.

God's revelation is not only a representation of what he has done, but, because God is a unified being (but not a unity, being in three persons), that is, there is no separation of who he is, what he wills or thinks and what he does, as there is with us, his revelation is also a representation of him, when it addresses his acts or relationships.

So, to claim that God could act slowly through error-prone chance processes to produce something that is purpose rich on many levels seems absurd at best; but given that the revelation is all the other way: the creation occurred quickly in direct response to his will, and this as part of God's claim on our worship, representation of him who is love, it is more than absurd. One could say it refers to another god, if it makes any god-reference at all.

Could God have created over billions of years? Which 'god' in which 'world' would that be that you are referring to, now? Our God, who represents himself as his revelation sets out? I think not. He explains his relationship to his creation in completely different terms, predicated on fellowship, not distance.

The damage this does goes beyond events in the world, to the way the world is structured. There is an at least implicit ontology in the creation account; it tells us a lot about reality, how it is structured, and the concreteness with which it 'operates'. To set this aside evaporates the Bible's ontology that comes out of the structures in the creation account, and must invoke an alternative; but this time, not implicitly. The alternative has to be developed explicitly as it denies there is one from the will of God, as it denies that the creation account has concrete content that makes sense in the categories of this world: the world it relates to by referring to its categories, and therefore has no ontological content. Yet any alternative ends up conjuring up a different god and falls into idolatry by proposing a different kind of reality, from an ontology that is structured on other than the God who is, and who speaks.

Moral Tinkering

Christians seem to want to do this all the time.

I was reminded of it, listening to a sermon by Rob Jones, one time rector of St James Turramurra (I don't endorse the current silly sermon series title 'man up for God', by the way; puerile!). In mentioning Puritans, he observed that they generally failed in their objectives for a couple of reasons. One was that they sought to legislate what they saw as godliness.

Christians still do it today. I call it moral tinkering.

The 'debate' on 'gay' marriage (really homosexual marriage) is an example. The talk by churchmen of 'ethics' classes in lieu of scripture in public schools is another.

Now, I don't really care what the world does with its idea of marriage and nor should public Christians. For Christians its a distraction. No matter who is married to whom, for what reason or by whom, if the are not followers of Christ, they are not in his family. Our mission is to proclaim the gospel, not to encourage cute, but etermally useless moral conformity. If the ship is sinking, I don't care where the deck chairs are and neither should any other Christian.

The debate on 'ethics' was similar. No Christian churchman made the point that no end of ethics classes would not deal with people's inability to do as even they would want to!

So what happens when ethics fails?

Christians would point to forgiveness and salvation in Christ. All the world can do is shrug its shoulders, and maybe throw you in gaol.

Its a bit different when it comes to the death penalty, free access to firearms and abortion. These kill people and remove their opportunity for life and future encounter with Christ. All should be stopped. That's not moral tinkering, that's part of proclaiming the gospel and acting mercifully to seek opportunities for people to join the family of God.

Poverty of position

Quote from David Brickner in this month's Jews for Jesus Australian newsletter:

...in the open market place of ideas, surely it is the poverty of one's own position that leads to the desire to stifle the debate"

That goes particularly for the dirt squad (materialists), who want to promote the fiction of evolution by suppressing contrary views.

The anti-leader

I came across this piece on a church website on leadership. Now, you may know how I hate the use of this non-biblical concept, making of a type of action a static role.

But I wonder if the notion of 'leader' has any applicability in the church. After all, the church has servants, not leaders; we are all lead by Christ. The implication of 'leader' is that they know where we are going!

'Leadership' is about the one; service is about the others. Henry Mintzberg touches on this in a FT article on the subject.

So, I sent this to the church in question:

The conceptualisation of leadership in church life that I read in your blog seem to me to be at odds with the way the church is portrayed in the NT. In fact, it looks like a complete inversion of the notion of the church as a body of believers whose head (source) is Christ. As soon as you talk 'leaders' you talk the individual, inevitably, at the expense of the church as a body.

To think that a church needs a 'leader' installs a concept that is foreign to the NT theology of church. It uses a concept that is at best a modern misunderstanding of how a charismatic group 'works' (or that denies that it is charismatic, in the biblical, not the modern sense), and at worst uncritically apes the world in the installation of a paganistic hierarchy where there should be none.

In the NT, the church is a community, indeed, a family, where gifts are distributed for the mutual growth and edification of people working and living together in love. A leader at once demolishes this notion and makes of the church an organisation with someone, or a small group, who commands it, takes responsibility (in an organisational sense) and is not primarily a servant undertaking a role in a particular context.

Nowhere in the NT do I see an 'archon' mentioned in the church, which is the ancient world's equivalent of the 'leader' that comes to us from the secular world. The world of 'one is more important than the many', a world where political structure, whether in business, politics, or other social groupings is the default ordering mechanism, and social influence or the imperatives of the one are prime. This displaces the considerations of love, service and the promotion of others for a world where the leader is the front (usually) man, the one with the prestige, the one who calls the shots and sets the pace, if not the total mission.

I can't think of anything further from the church, or more likely to make the church a passive shell of what it should truly be: a mutually supportive and responsive body of serving believers.

Leaders are anti-humility, where as the notion of servant is pro-humility.

I think of the program of the church in the 1980s, when 'ministry' was often the theme in church 'development'. Ministry is where we seek how we are to serve, how we are to put the other ahead of ourselves, and how we are to express our love. Those we today would call leaders now appear to be the locus of ministry, and a magnet for prestige and adulation, at least by the secular media and institutions.

But we do not have leaders, we have people who serve in various ways and at various times, in various contexts. Some as teachers, some as pastors, some as administrators, etc. No 'leader' here, except that the whole church does the deciding, and the acting. It is the church that has presence in the kingdom of God, not 'leaders'.

Its well time that this was straightened out and we forgot about borrowing our structuring terminology from the hubristic world of business and affairs, and rather judged that world with a way of being community that showed up its puffery. Even the piece on 'anti-leadership' misses the point, I think, of the biblical passage cited, and makes of a structure, what was an organic and participative set of relationships...and, anyway, Peter was an apostle. We don't have them today in they way they were then.

Now, instead of 'leader' I'd like to see churches, and Christian organisations (ministries?) use Christian titles for their contributors: organiser would be good for people who organise things, convenor for those who bring people together for a task or activity, overseer has a biblical warrant; I think moderator also has a functional ring to it (apologies to the Presbyterians), facilitator is possibly OK, and administrator is directly biblical. Anything but the turgid puff of worldly organisations were titles are used to garner prestige!

Beyond the Pahl 5

Pahl:

Finally, if I’m right about these first four points, then whatever my personal perspectives are on exactly when or precisely how God created all things is a moot point. I'm not a scientist, so my thoughts on these matters carry no weight. And, with respect to my salvation, my orthodoxy, and my biblical fidelity, any thoughts I have on these matters are irrelevant.

Thoughts:

No if you are right about the first four points, then that God created at all, or if there is a personal God in relation with us is the moot point, if the details are rejected, then the world picture the details paint must also be rejected.

But, he's not a scientist, so his thoughts carry no weight? He's a theologian, and questions of origins are religious questions. He is eminently qualified to comment, because what we understand about origins is basic to how we grapple with the world and how we build our world picture. Our view of origins is our view of both ourselves and God (or what is independently basic). Resign this religious ground, and you leap towards deferring to an alternative conception of the world and not the one God provides.

Thus finally we come full circle to the ontology that Pahl must entertain: it must be a materialist ontology, where all that doesn't fit in a purely material conception is grafted on 'idealistically', or if I would be blunt: 'paganistically' where access to the real is not direct, but by conjuring because in the  materialist world we are either cut off from it, or 'it' is fictional, but hints of a deeper 'occult' reality to which our only access is illegitimate. Either way, not Christian.

Why don't they get it?

In the current Creation Ministries International Prayer News (Jan-Mar 13), the lead article bears the title used by this post and asks why do evolutionists refuse to be persuaded by the evidence (and arguments, presumably) put to them in support of the biblical flood and creation accounts.

Two answers are suggested in the article:

1. most evolutionists have not heard a [substantial] presentation of the case for creation, etc. and
2. they assume that all the evidence...supports evolution.

I think this misses the point.

Sure, if a disinterested person was given good reason to change their mind, one assumes that they would. But most evolutionists are not disinterested. They have a commitment, indeed, a religious commitment, to evolution's dogma.

Even should the evidence be overwhelming, many would retain their commitment because it is the basis for their world-concept and structures the foundational parameters of their life and understanding. To be persuaded they would have to, necessarily, change their intellectual, and spiritual allegiance from material which cuts them loose morally, epistemologically and ontologically to a person who seeks relationship and fellowship (with the converse if he, God, the creator, is rejected).

I think most evolutionists would understand this. Oddly, most Christians, being those who attempt the futile and non-credible amalgam of evolution and creation known as theistic evolution, don't see it. Odd, because one would think that Christians above all would understand that basic beliefs set the direction and preferences of the superstructure of understanding they support.

Lennox

A recent review of a book on the 7 days of creation (I thought it was 6, but there you go) by John Lennox addressed his disdain for the reliability of the information we have in Genesis.

Lennox is a very active debater, and a very engaging speaker as well. He is one of the current darlings of the Sydney Anglican TE crowd, likely because he endorses their uncritical acceptance of evolution as though it was a technical matter, equivalent to bicycle repair!

Lennox and those like him, however, as one of the comments on the review article pointed out, denies that God's self-disclosure about his creating has any content. I wonder what he thinks it's for then? Then in an absurd irony, he accepts that God created, but not any of the information that God gives us to show that he created!

So, how does Lennox know that God created, if the information in Genesis is incorrect?

Then, on the other hand, how does Lennox know (KNOW) that Genesis 1 is conterfactual? As another commenter pointed out, evolutionary rhetoric itself relies on a set of beliefs, not on anything to do with knowledge; a set of beliefs whose only job is to overturn the idea of creation and install a world picture that makes material primary.

Beyond the Pahl 4

Pahl:

Fourth, these modern questions about exactly when or precisely how all things came about, while potentially having tremendous theological significance, are best left to science. One should consult astronomers, physicists, geologists, paleontologists, biologists, and geneticists for these questions, not biblical scholars and theologians, let alone people who are neither trained theologians nor trained scientists.

Thoughts:

Interesting that something with potentially tremendous theological significance is best left to a pursuit which has no theological interest! But these are not simply modern questions. The church has held for about 1850 years that the world was formed about 6000 years ago. I suppose he must include Ussher in the 17th century as modern, and while in historical terms he is, I suspect that ‘modern’ in this passage means contemporaneously. So the question has been in the minds of theologians since theologians have been writing.

Nor is it that these are questions of potential theological significance; rather, they are questions pregnant with theological, and I might add, philosophical significance that go to the very foundation of Christian faith and the formation of the Christian world picture. The answers to the question will either respond in faith to Genesis 1, as the writer to the Hebrews exemplifies (11:4), and thus think within a theological structure that has God acting, relating and speaking with effect into this world circumscribed by common causality, physicality and where the Word of God delineates actual and not imaginary formations and relationship; or will reject the Hebrews writer’s faith response and defer to a world picture that refers to material as self-made, rejects that the personal is fundamental to reality and whose basic ontology is conjured up out of imaginings (thus the idealism that echoes throughout paganism, and marks its tracks) which connect only faintly with the real world of relationships and events.

Pahl's deference to science is completely misplaced and itself imports a prior concept of the world into biblical analysis. The concept is akin to the hollow and finally self-refuting nostrums of logical-positivism!


It is in pagan religions that questions of the material world are of secondary moment, because they are not engaged with the world that is, but an imaginary world of the mind; the world that is rejected with paganism’s rejection of the God who is. It is Christianity that stands in the world as present, and engages the world that is, that we all share as the setting of our existence, knowing and being. A great example of this is that the flowering of modern science is fixed firmly in the understanding that the Genesis account relates what happened; modern science started in no other thought world!

The question of origins is the question of who we are, what our connections or relationships are with other parts of the world, and sets the field of our thinking. It is the most profoundly important question that there is.

Thus the question doesn't 'potentially [have] tremendous theological significance' and is best left to science! The question of origins is a basic religious question, not a question for science at all. Pahl does his trade an injustice in slipping over this demarcation point and then fails to be able to make any real address to the world which conceptualises itself primarily in materialist terms, and uses these terms to bring all other considerations to heel.

Christianity doesn't adopt materiality as basic, of course, but has it as the result of God's willful love, and a real place where our lives are lived (including our life with God). But it and its processes being contingent, are not basic; in opposition to materialist conceptions.

And so, Pahl ends his excursion into resignation by suggesting we consult physical scientists about origins. Of course, in so doing we get modern, largely materialist speculation, and the 'meaning' that flows from this. We do not get any reflection of a world made by the will of God, but a world whose 'origin' denies that there is a God, or that his will (should there be one) has any bearing on life in this universe at all.

Mr Looking-both-ways

People who espouse 'theistic-evolution hold two incompatible ideas simultaneously:

1. the universe was created, but in such a way that it is fully explicable without a base in, or even a hint of, the personal-divine, and

2. God did this creating and uses his being the creator (referring to the terms of his activity in the Genesis account) to link his identity to our world-experience, making a god who represents himself by something that has no obvious connection with him!

This peculiar idea quickly falls back to an understanding of the world that is hard to distinguish, in the final analysis, from the idea of a world not created at all.