Rowan?

A friend sent me this comment on Rowan's article:

1. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.”

“And Satan said to the woman, “Has God indeed said,…”

Coincidence or what?

2. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not 
occur precisely as they are described to us.”

However, the Spirit of God says, “And they HEARD the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I HEARD your voice in the garden”

The scientific explanation? Two possibilities: a. It never happened the way Satan's,  I mean, Rowan’s thought bubble said it did, or b. The forbidden fruit was actually psilocybin fungi and Adam and Eve (or maybe it really was Steve!) just hallucinated it all. Why not?

3. “What Peter has helpfully done is show how there is space within the (ultimately authoritative) Scriptures themselves for the integration of science and God’s revealed truth.”

Yes, yes, of course…but only after science, so-called, has first managed to salvage as much as it could for its valuable contribution.

We're now officially **cool**

As we approach CMS Summer School Season, I was browsing past articles on this venerable Sydney tradition, and came to a piece by Rowan Kemp.

He gushes for Peter in this piece, and distressingly, his general comments betray some huge lacunae in the education of Christians. That questions of the relation of the word of God to the world could elude a paid Christian for so long are shown in this paragraph:

Bible-honouring Christians can feel boxed in. If I embrace science and its findings I’m sometimes made to feel I’m betraying Christian belief in creation and respect for God’s Word. On another front if I suggest that there is intrinsic value in the arts, science, culture or work I run the risk of being told I’ve inappropriately elevated the merely temporal—the only thing of real value is evangelism and ministry.

 What?

This was not covered in Old Testament 1? Surely!!

But worse is to come:

Moreover, careful attention to the detail and nature of these chapters shows that we are not obliged to adopt a literal ‘six days’ or ‘young earth’ position in order to be faithful to Scripture. As Peter Jensen observed these opening chapters contain hints within them that suggest God is revealing truths selectively and sometimes symbolically. We’re not told everything that is going on everywhere: the old question of from where did Cain find a wife? Maybe there were other humans around—the text does not preclude it. Sometimes it seems the truth is being communicated to us in ‘parable-like’ form: was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden? Maybe the communication of truth in these chapters is like Jesus’ parables or the prophet Nathan’s parable to King David: it’s true, it concerns real events, but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.

 The damage done in this passage to the Biblical doctrine of creation is lived out every time a paid Christian does similar homage to the dominating materialism of our day: that is, God is, in effect, within the 'creation' and not the external author. This occurs because what really happened at creation is left to materialism: modern evolution is touted as the real 'creation' account. After all, if Genesis is not real events temporally located, then it is about nothing and can teach nothing, because its references are void. The vanity of this type of exegesis is astounding.

Careful attention to detail in Genesis 1 indicates that we are being provided a summary of events, but of events; actual real space-time events delineated by the repeated cross-referencing temporal references: I wonder how more clearly could an author communicate the passage and pace of time.

The most amusing comment is on Cain's wife. Of course there were other humans. The text does not merely preclude it; it states it: Genesis 5:4 does the job. I also refer to an article on the topic.

However, the greatest mash up is the 'parable-like' form. We have a word for this: metaphor!

At base, the escape hatch for materialism is in the philosophical idealism that allows a reality to be real in some way that is not temporally apparent. This is pagan nonsense. We need to take our philosophical bearings from the concrete realism of the Bible, with the compass being provided in the creation account as the starting point for our understanding of who God is; who we are; what the world is; and how it all relates together.

Nature...where it all starts

Quote from an article in Quadrant, quoting Camille Paglia:

Camille wrote her PhD at Yale, supervised by Harold Bloom, and in 1990 published Sexual Personae, which begins: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem.

TE-ers fall into the Paglia's observation: God from nature; nature first, nature sets the ground rules.

But, we look at Genesis 1, and we see, no, 'tis the other way; God sets the ground rules in his identity and action.

When we reject the face reading of Genesis 1, we end up party to Paglia's world; it is not the world of Christ our maker!

Story

Letter I sent to 'A Just Cause'

Dear Scott

I am studying your booklet Boundless Plains to Share? with my home group and must thank you for your work in this topic.

It was all going smoothly until I came to the phrase 'the creation stories'. I wondered what this could imply. Generally the word 'story' is used in lieu of the word 'account' to impute some lack of factuality in the subject text. If this is the case here, then the usage undoes all the good that your book seeks.

If the creation passage (I  disagree that there are two accounts) is not directly connected to the world we inhabit, and is not sufficiently explanatory of events to allow us to invest in it, then we must go elsewhere to develop an understanding and appreciation of our world, ourselves and, indeed, of who God is and what he represents to us.

Indeed, if the account is best described as a 'story' then it is not obvious that it provides a basis for anything in fact because what is finally real is elsewhere.

The basis in fact would only come from what is really factual, and this, if the creation account is set aside, defaults to the dogma of organic evolution.

A basic premise of this dogma is that the world is constituted as a field of competition and destruction (and this is basic to the world and not the result of the fall) where inevitably the strong will outdo the weak. This puts the 'real' world in direct conflict with how God calls us to think and act.

Of course, in evolutionary terms, those who seek our help (or access to our wealth and freedom) are weaker than us and it is our vital duty to outdo them; because reality is that way, and the strong will do this. There is a grand determinism that is inescapable.

Better, I think, to take the scriptures as directly congruent with the world and factually related to it, setting aside materialist stories as pagan obfuscation.

The dogma also takes us back to the ideas of eugenics and to race selection doctrine: that some people and some 'races' are inferior. Arguably those 'races' that have produced repellent cultures are inferior to those that have produced attractive cultures, and it can only be 'right' (that is, congruent with how things really are) to oppose benefiting them.

On the other hand, of course, maybe your use of the word 'story' in connection with God's revelation of the actual setting between him and us is not meant to diminish the content of the Genesis account and detach it from the world we live in.



If so, it seems odd that you would use the deprecating term 'story' when if there is a 'story' it is the materialist story of evolution that sets us in a pagan world of a random and depersonalised universe.

G.U.T

Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere; at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore, psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time.

Wilson, E.O., The Meaning of Human Existence, Liveright Publishing Corporation, NY, p. 184, 2014.)

There you have it, theistic evolutionists, Christo-materialist syncretics and their fellow travellers are in bed with the wrong crowd.

Wilson is wrong, of course...none of this can be made sense of without the revelation of God...and the history of rationality and modern science is no my side, not Wilson's.

Challenges raised by Darwin

In his Gresham College lecture Alistair McGrath shills for Darwin, it seems:

This lecture sets the scientific and religious context for Darwin’s theory of evolution, before considering this theory and the challenges this raised for traditional religious beliefs...

Why not talk about the challenges Biblical revelation has for Darwinian speculation...?

Time makes distance

In an article in Quadrant magazine was the following:

His imagery is evocative, including his invocation of expanses of time that would dazzle anyone other than paleontologists and cosmologists.

"Expanses of time that would dazzle..." The expanse to which Noel Pearson refers is the claimed 53,000 years since the current aboriginies moved to Australia (it was not called Australia then, of course).

The vast expanse dazzles...what does this mean? Is it that a 'mere' 53,000 years is astonishingly great a period to contemplate in the span of human civilisation and relationships? Indeed it is. The vastness removes one from the period in question.

In our context, the very same effect operates when it is claimed by some Christian commentators that the world is really multiple billions of years old, and not the 6,000 odd indicated in the Bible. The vast period de-reifies both our creator God and our relationship to him. God, the person behind it all, becomes an abstract spirit, and we skirt the edge of animism, or panentheism because love with no exercise over eons is a lot like no love at all.

Art not life

Question in a study on Genesis:

5. Read Genesis 3.7-24. In these verses we see the consequences of human sin in the breakdown of relationships between people and people and God. In this highly symbolic section we see a reality that is still with us today. What area of brokenness troubles you the most?

As soon as a part of scripture is identified as symbolic, I get wary. To regard something as a symbol threatens its dereification. It makes it 'art' not 'life'. Art comments on life and relationship, it is replete with symbols and representations, but it is not, in itself real life; its a type of decorative communication about real life.

So when something in the Bible is declared to be symbolic, one first has to ask, symbolic of what? Of what concretely is it a symbol (and if we can't say, then its hard to declare it to be symbolic; maybe we should instead say that as modern Westerners we are just uncomfortable with it). Perhaps of 'a reality that is still with us today'. But if it is our reality, why would we need a symbol?

What the passage does is give to us the source of the current reality. Is the source a symbol of the source? How would we know? Has the current reality been always with us? In which case it doesn't need a source, but is inherent in the creation (as the problem only emerges when the face reading of Genesis 1-3 is denied, then the word 'creation' may be erroneous, and we should just say 'cosmos' or 'reality' as something that is unbound from God's creative acts that we've just denied).

And if it is a symbol what is the connection with our non-symbolic experience of the world as a subject? Where does symbol stop and concrete start?

I doubt that there is an independent epistemic basis for the declaration when our topic is a type of 'first philosophy' topic; that is, about the start of it all, so perhaps we are all just symbols of something else, our relationships are symbols of something else, and our concrete experience of death, pain, suffering and frustration is not due to actual estrangement from God, but is a mere symbol of some other actual thing.

No, it just doesn't wash.

So what is so symbolic about the passage? I think it is just that we have trouble with a talking snake (maybe all animals talked pre-fall...and how would we know they didn't...or did), and an actual tree being a reminder of a covenant. And what a simple gracious reminder. Nothing complicated to do, just remember the God-man relationship by your action of not taking the fruit. A fruit! Nothing to interfere with an enjoyable life, and it self demonstrating the mercy, graciousness and love of God; actually!

Theistic evolution

I was discussing with a friend the notion that God might have used evolution to complete the creation.

We were talking about Wilder-Smith’s wonderful book God: To Be or Not To Be and came to the conclusion that for God to have used evolution he would have had to make it do that which it is not able to do.

That is, he would have to use change processes not to produce chance outcomes, but purposed outcomes. He would have to inject teleology into that which is purely stochastic.

But that means he would have made a thing (chance) which could not achieve his ends (a creative purpose) and so work against the thing made (chance); which is to say, that he couldn’t have used chance at all, because chance leads to dissolution, not creation!

So God could only conceivably use chance to create by not using chance at all, but by over-riding (guiding, people might like to suggest!) it. The very notion breaks down under the weight of its own incoherence.

Chiasm

Some claim that because of the chiastic structure of Genesis 1, etc. that it cannot be history. I guess that rules out Matt 13 as being teaching, then.

Law 2

Granville Sewell has copped a lot of flack for offering this article on the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The detractors have said the usual thing: that he fails to understand that energy coming into an open system overturns the 'law'.
However, the critics beg the question and fail to explain what they assume...and fail to provide the probability-increase-engine that turns high probability states into low probability states.

What does evolution tell us?

Let Will Provine open the box:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear...There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation of ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

in Origins Research 16(1):9, 1994.

What is evolution?

According to Michael Ruse:

Its practitioners promote evolution as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion--a full fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality...Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning and it is true of evolution still today.

Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians, National Post, 13 May 2000

How to win an argument with a scientist

From a recent Seth Godin e-mail:

The act of being a scientist is the commitment to the scientific method, a series of hypotheses, tests and re-evaluations. When you make better science, the scientist's previous opinion doesn't matter, not if she's being a scientist.

On the other hand, if you want to win an argument with someone who refuses to act like a scientist, making better science isn't going to help you very much.

The person you're arguing with now (who might be a scientist during the day, even, but is merely being a person right now) is not going to be swayed from a firmly held opinion by your work to make better science. It's more likely that it will take cultural pressure, shame, passion, humor, connection and a host of unreliable levers to make your point.

This disconnect is why it's so frustrating to encounter people with deeply-held pseudo-scientific beliefs about things like whether or not to support your project. It certainly feels like better science and the relentless power of the scientific method would be sufficient to help them get things straight, but they fail because, in fact, there's no science happening here.

Anecdotes, non-falsifiable premises and most of all, a willingness to change tactics if it helps maintain the culturally-enforced norm are all hallmarks of a non-scientific point of view. In other words, the sort of thing humans do all the time.

The easy way to tell the two varieties of argument apart is to ask, "what evidence would you need to see to change your mind about this?"

Evolutionists...they're evidentialists...aren't they?

This was written to the Administrator (note I use biblical role descriptions, not worldly job titles) of a Christian mission organisation:

Dear sir,

I was surprised by a number of statements in the most recent Prayer News in relation to faith and belief. The juxtapositions that you created were in many ways remarkable.

Take your use of the word ‘faith’. You seem to use it in two completely different senses without really distinguishing them.

You write “...this newfound (sic) knowledge is actually a great boost to their faith”. And rightly so. Biblical faith is our response to knowledge of who God is and what he has done in history. Then you go on to say that “...evolutionists, by faith, have to believe...”. But this is not biblical faith, but some other type of faith: a completely different species of faith; one that is not rooted in fact, but that finds its only ground in the vague postulations of a particular ‘research hypothesis’.

The conversation about ‘fact’ in evolutionary speculation is a very short one. So this faith is nothing like biblical faith. It is more like the ‘faith’ that a person might have in a shaman or an 'Applied Kinesiologist' [the fake 'science' of 'muscle testing'], to put it in modern western terms. It is misplaced trust in something that has no basis in this world.

But, you undo this when you write that “Evolution is a propositional belief system couched in  rationalism and evidentialism.” I detect the arid apologetic strategy of Van Til here, a strategy which is famous in Christian circles, but which has any effect only in those circles! Evolution is indeed a propositional belief system, but it is grounded in fiction. There is nothing truly rational or evidential about it at all. Indeed, there is NO evidence for it. If there were, then this would suggest that evolution is a true explanation of the world: not only in relation to biogenesis, but that extends to every corner of our being and understanding, our relationships and behaviour. However, it offers nothing in these areas either.

Oddly, the whole mission of your organisation is about evidence and its rational use, and this is right in terms of the doctrine of creation. God has given us the ability to undertake stewardship of his creation, and this requires knowledge, wisdom and understanding. We are called to examine, think and test, applying what we thus discover. That’s being good stewards. God also points to his credentials in history as the basis for belief. The Holy Spirit clearly is not a follower of Van Til.

Fangs

From Natural God by Beth Houston:

[in] Darwin's world of fangs and ovipositors, good equals harm successfully inflicted on another. In other words, benefit exists only through harm...Darwin know that his theory was dependent up on the inherent ruthlessness of Nature, not upon something reminiscent of the benevolent God of his abandoned religion (p. 167)

This type of observation, unsurprising for one familiar with Darwin's work, and the Victorian atmosphere that hosted it, one finds theistic evolutionary positions held, particularly by evangelicals (or their 'neo' cousins) completely untenable, and requiring a god most unlike the God of the Bible.

Young ages

On a website on Australian Aboriginal culture, it has this to say about creation stories:

This shortened concept of time may be universal within the origin of religions. For example, in the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible’s Old Testament tells how God created the entire universe, including the four major rivers local to Babylon (now Iraq and Iran), in 6 days. It then goes to great lengths to describe many of the people who lived following Adam and Eve, the first people.

 It then goes on to explain:

The earliest bible stories may have only been in oral form, later becoming written in Aramaic and Hebrew possibly around 1700 B.C.. and read as though the time of creation was about 4,000 B.C.

But, we get the party line at the end:

However, since modern dating techniques have placed the earth’s age at about 3,600 million years, many people embracing those religions today still believe that God created mankind and the universe, but imagine this happening over a different time scale to that described in the bible. For all of us, the concept of a million years of humanity and thousands of millions of years of existence for our planet is beyond our comprehension.

A few observations: the first look at the Bible is taken, not to be a metaphor...but the metaphor has to be introduced to align belief with materialism; and that makes our attachment to our origins "beyond our comprehension". Good for materialism, not good for fellowship with our Creator.

Myth

I've rarely come across good definitions of myth. Here's one I read today:

"Myth" has many connotations, but for our purposes "myth" is defined as a  "thing existing only in imagination of whose actuality is not verifiable; a belief given uncritical acceptance by members of a group in support of existing...practices and institutions. [Myth] is...used to designate a story, belief, or notion commonly held to be true but utterly without a factual basis. In this context myth is opposed to history since it is "usually fabulous in content even when loosely based on historical events".

That's a pretty good summary in my view. So if you insist that the Genesis account of origins is not factual, then it is myth: either imaginary, non-verifiable, or without factual basis. If it has a factual basis, then it is confabulated. Not a good look for theistic evolutionists, because they are left with the theological basis for Christian belief being content free.

On the other hand it describes evolution very well: fabulous in content and loosely based on historical events. Very loose...so loose as to obscure the particular facts on which it is based.

And the source of the quote? "The Myth of Maneuver Warfare" a critique of the U.S. Marines' warfare doctrine manual FMFM-1. Just thought you'd like to know.

Self-organization

There was a phase of evolutionist fantasy that looked with forlorn hope to 'self-organising' systems being a model for the outfolding of creation: all these complex creatures, why, they 'self-organised'.

An engineering blog had this to say about self-organising systems (edited by me to clean up the English and particularise it for here):

Self Organization requires several conditions for it to occur and be observed:
    •    A high degree of structure
    •    The capacity for coordinated action
    •    A mechanism for system-wide feedback and amplification
    •    Some means to transform a small event into a larger driving force for the system to organize itself into a coherent system
Primary is coordination across boundaries and the capacity for action. This implies - quite explicitly - a deterministic response to external stimulus. The self-organization properties require structured communication channels for the systems to posses this property.
So next time you hear self organizing as the way evolution works, best ask to see what structures are identified to provide the channels for coordinated actions. What mechanisms are being used for system-wide feedback within that highly structured process framework, and what are the means of transforms small - potentially very small stimuli - into the collective actions of the whole?
In the broader sense, these concepts all live in a world governed in a deterministic manner through...
    •    Feedback - the return of a portion the output of a process or system to the input. These means modeling the transform function - usually G(S), where S is the system dynamic model, and G is the transform function. Both can be represented by non-linear differential equations
    •    System Dynamics is the next level of modeling for the structured, coordinated, system-wide feedback and amplification (both positive and negative).
    ◦    This involves state-space modeling or phase space) where an abstract space - a mathematical model in which all possible states of a system - are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the state space. Dimensions of state space represent all relevant parameters of the system. For example state space of mechanical systems has six dimensions and consists of all possible values of position and momentum variables.
    ◦    The Trajectory of the system describing the sequence of system states as they evolve.
    ◦    A fixed point in the state space where the system is in equilibrium and does not change. In complex projects and systems they represent, this is the steering signal needed to compare the feedback to so corrective actions can be taken by the system to maintain equilibrium and run off the cliff.
    ◦    The Attractor is a part of the state space where some trajectories end.
    •    The actual dynamics of the system - where the set of functions that encode the movement of the system from one point in the state space to another. This is the foundation of the mechanism for feedback and structuring of the disconnected components of the system. These dynamics are many times modeled with sets of differential equations containing the rules for the interactions.

Above all this, it must be remembered that the control system has to be at least as complex as the system it is controlling: accommodating entropic loss; somewhat along the lines of an Ashby-Conant regulator.

Of course, evolutionary speculation contains none of this detail, or even a sketch of it...

Carl Sagan

In a recent post on Lifehacker, as part of their series on people's productivity tips, was a set of 'tips' from Carl Sagan; notwithstanding that he is long dead. So I guess there's a bit of a paean to the famous scientism-ist in that.

But two of his tips collided with each other:

"Scrutinise your own beliefs" and "Remember your place in the Universe"

The latter is a belief and Sagan's notion of placeness is a direct outgrowth of his materialism. His dictum amounts to saying that we are just dust so nothing is of true value...indeed that statement itself has no value in Sagan's world as he dumbly excludes himself from his own epistemology. But it also means that the notions of 'belief' and 'scrutinise' collapse into the same self-important dust.

Another self-refuting puff from a materialist! Must we give these people air time when by their own world-view nothing is important, only momentarily diverting.

Man and Wife

Quote from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger (1999):

...it does seem that the Anglo-Saxons separated and divorced when they had to, without any particular ethical complications. The only concern of the community was practical -- the proper partitioning of property and the care of the children. One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property.
The Old English law codes were concerned to shield women against the hazards of life in a rough, male-dominated society...

And the terms for man and woman? Men were called waepnedmenn "weaponed-persons" and the women wifmenn "weaving-persons".

But, the point of the quote?

Today, there is much ado by the social engineers to have the state create male-male and female-female marriages (whether the people are actually male and actually female). It is as though the state, the community empowered, is interested in people's romances. It is not, and should not be, and the Anglo-Saxons set the precedent: the state's interest in marriage its about protecting children (and women).

I think the sub-plot to 'same sex marriage' is to legitimise an artificial union so as to enable the exploitation of children. This might not be sexual exploitation, but forcing children into an arrangement where they are inevitably (and not accidentally) deprived of one of their parents is exploitation. Children become possessions subservient to the interests of adults. If money changes hand in procuring such children we have returned to child slavery, and sanctioned by the state!

It is that that is abhorrent. The social tinkering of pagans I'm not the least interested in, otherwise.

Changing Feet

Simon Smart opens his mouth to change feet in this article on The Drum. And without a biblical doctrine of creation, that's all he can do.

Not biblical? Not as far as I know. CPX is famous for thinking that the materialists have it all sewn up when it comes to how things really are, and not the Bible; so he can't really argue a biblical position, because he doesn't really have one. He's got a quasi materialist position if he's anything like John Dickson.

So how do you argue with a  materialist like Fry? First off, his ethical epistemology is derived from a Christian one...so let's find out what his world view really has to say....[waiting]...[waiting]...why, nothing, of course!

If material, or as I like to say, 'dirt' is all there finally is, then nothing has any significance, finally. And therefore, not at all, really. So where does his notion of bad things come from?

Then to deal with the substance of Fry's complaint, its baselessness in his world aside: God created a perfect world but mankind rejected fellowship with him: turned its back on life, and so continues to do, reaping as a result death, which by the rend from God has permeated the entire creation that was given to our stewardship. It is by God's mercy that it's not worse, and we can turn to him to join his undoing of it; but none of this death and falling apart, anti-love is his doing. It is all the death mankind brought that we are reaping: from little chln with cancer and up.

God shared our plight in Christ, so we can share his life in the same person.

Churchill and Darwin

From Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 4, p. 73

Religious preoccupations were probably more widespread and deeply felt than at any time since the days of Cromwell. But thinking men were also disturbed by a new theory, long foreshadowed in the work of scientists, the theory of evolution. It was given classic expression in The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin in 1859. This book provoked doubt and perplexity  among those who could no longer take literally the Biblical account of creation. But the theory of evolution, and its emphasis on the survival of the fittest in the  history of life upon the globe, was a powerful adjunct to mid-Victorian optimism. It lent fresh force to the belief in the forward march of mankind.

Keroauc

A friend and I were discussing On the Road, Kerouac's famous 'beat' novel of the 1950s. Sal and his pals madly drive about the USA, adrift, no centre for their souls, no place in the world, they are just...adrift.

They are located in a world were the personal has no real connection with being, where persons are solipsistic fragments drifting like plankton in an ocean (I'm reminded of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being) and relationships' only parameter is proximity.

Cut life away from the truly personal ground of being (apologies to Tillich), and it drifts madly like Sal: always yearns, never has satisfaction, the soul gapes at life, but can't find the connection to truly participate in it. He never finds, and never can find what he seeks: he gropes for an integrating universal that makes the sense his mad racing around after something that will bring it all together he seeks to lift his experience above the randomness of dust blowing in wind.

Any time you like

In a conversation with most Anglican theistic evolutionists, or 'long age' creationists, you'll come to some sort of argument that the days of Genesis 1 do not mean days like we experience them, but something else. The 'something else' is, of course, indeterminate periods of time, or epochs, or some long period that correlates with modern 'geological time'.

I don't think they realise that in relying on this move to save their accommodation of naturalism they have left biblical theism and adopted a pagan approach where the truth is obscure, hidden, not amenable to any but the 'adepts'. Our world in paganism is shrouded in non-causal mystery and we are not free.

The Bible frames our world and relationship with God differently. It is open. We know who we are and who God is. It is revelation, not occult (hidden). The creation in Genesis is part of the great arc of revelation that ends in Christ and sets us free.

It's about time

There's an old saw in the world of engineering that goes like this: anyone could build a safe, efficient bridge; but an engineer will do it first time, anyone else might take decades of trial and error: expensive, dangerous and wasteful.

The application of intelligent capability achieves the objective parsimoniously. Any other approach is profligate and depletative: it wastes resources and impedes society.

I've heard similar thinking applied to biblical creation: an intelligent agent, all other factors being equal, will do something more quickly than an unintelligent agent. This works in exams: smart students get more right answers more quickly than non-smart students.

Hilariously, some Anglicans, I've been told will attempt to rebut this, saying that a really smart person might take their time to 'get it all right'. But this is an obduracy.

God is clear about the tempo of creation: it is rapid. He uses terms that are meaningful within the creation he is speaking about (i.e. "day", "evening and morning") and are unambiguous. He even counts them to drive the point.

Evolutionists seem to acknowledge this point too, in that I've heard some say that while evolution is improbable, given enough time, almost anything can happen (this omits to consider that natural randomness can only produce results that are possible. Evolution has not been shown to even be possible). Leave intelligence out of it. Given time, a non-agent can achieve an outcome that only an agent could achieve in short time! QED.

Dr Who

The episode of Dr Who in series 8 (reduced price DVDs at the ABC shop) "Listen" is probably the best Dr Who episode that I've seen.

It doesn't have in it creepy robots, historical figures, spooky aliens or the such. It has just three characters, or four if  you count the time traveller who really is an echo of character number 3: Dan Pink.

The episode is an existential confrontation with our end-state as had by materialism: there is nothing. Ironically it starts with the Doctor musing on the evolution of hunters, and reflecting on how an organism would have evolved to be always hidden; its end objective? To listen.

Dr and his girl-pet travel to the end of time and the edge of the universe (both metaphysically interesting concepts) where there is no one. All life gone, all is but matter and about to vanish. The aching alone-ness is courted in the script, but tantalizingly avoided in the question that the one that listens may be there. This theme is played with in a run through the time travel paradox loved of science fiction writers. That the characters confront the question raises the great materialist promise: one has finally no significance and is not distinguishable from the mute matter of the universe. But no one lives this way: the characters cannot live as though this is true; they live as though there is final significance; that the personal is above matter and  history.

Modern materialism has at its heart a confusion: it relies on the Christian significance of the person and the basic underpinning of the personal, but cannot deliver this in its dogma.

No concrete?

A lot of Christians, and even some non-Christians, regard Genesis 1 as symbolic: symbolic that God is creator, but empty of content about his creating. As one minister I heard put it; he doesn’t regard it as ‘concrete’.

Where does this leave us?

Where indeed, when on this view the act that God grounds his self-identity in has no concrete meaning in the world that he created! The world by which its meaning is established.

The proponent has to explain what it means that God is creator, when the content of the only thing he could be referring to does not refer to anything that has happened in the time and space that cirscumscribes the creation.

Thus, when God tells us he is creator, we cannot really understand what this means, particularly if evolutionary dogma is taken as the real information about ‘creation’: this has no place for God at all but turns the Bible’s world upside down placing God as a social afterthought in the minds of those who are randomly assembed dust.

Or did God guide evolution? Seeing that similar ideas were available in ancient times, it is a surprise that the writer to the Hebrews resolutely opposes them, and the ‘principles’ they imagine that operate in the world when he says: what is seen is the result of God's word, not prior visible things Heb 11:3, and the works were complete from the foundation: Heb 4:3. Together these verses tell a very different story from the retrospective evacuation of meaning from Genesis 1, which only leaves us materialism with its pagan references for what ‘creation’ means and for the dimensions of God’s identity.