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.