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.
