Wisdom

The smarties of this theological world seem to wonder as to God's method of creation (I know, this is meant as a rhetorical question to we biblical creationists to challenge our view with an implied lack of method in the Bible). Reading right past Genesis 1, they grasp putative evolution as The Method. Odd, because they elect to defer to a method asserted to destroy God's relation to his creation, denying God's own statement of his 'method'. It is detailed in Proverbs 3:19-20.

Of course, it is very difficult for a fellow traveler with philosophical materialism's nostrums to understand that in a creation produced by a person of spirit (in love and by wisdom) this is The Method.

Locked into materialism, perhaps unwittingly, and certainly uncritically, they loose their Christian grasp and think that a method is necessarily a physicalist sequence. But where God is basic, not so. QV most of the NT miracles. Where there is 'method' it is set out. Mark 7:33 is an example of this.

Mike the robot

In Heinlein's book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mike the robot is asked "What do you know?" Being a logical robot he starts with the beginning of what he knows, saying:

"In the beginning was the heaven (sic) and the earth. And the earth was without form and void: and darkness was on the face of the deep"...

On the other side of the world, and at another time, Kirsty Birkett teaches in her book The Essence of Darwinism, that it wouldn't really matter how God actually created, but that at least we know that he did create.

Idealist tosh from a Christian academic (with a PhD in history of science, mind you).

The only information that we have that tells us God created is that by which he steps us through his actions in creation, in definitive terms; in effect, showing us his creative process and not just 'telling'.

Set this aside as having concrete meaning in the one and only real world (I think of Putnam), and we know nothing in fact about God and his creative relation to the same real world. Set aside the ' method' and one sets aside the proposition and the rug is pulled from under the epistemological and ontological foundation God gives us as the formative basis of our being-in-relationship with him!

Heinlein demonstrates this exact thing. In his book the quote from Genesis 1 is an ontological dead end. It is irrelvant in the philosophical materialism, and the existential loneliness of his book. Its basic proposition, that God who is love extended his love in creation as he set it out (and if we set aside the significance of the word of God, we turn our back on his love) has no part of Heinlein's world. It is void of God in practical terms.

So, it would seem, in Birkett's.

Heinlein on creation

Also from Stranger in an Strange Land

Heinlein on the universe

From Stranger in a Strange Land

When Gaia leads

Theistic evolutions entertain the naive view that somehow the unmixable can be mixed: a personal creator and a random material process.

This is where it gets you:

As soon as we look carefully, nature is neither nurturant nor benign. She is immensely indifferent to suffering and immensely profligate in the expenditure of individual existences. Vast numbers of sperms are wasted so that one ovum may be fertilized. Countless weaker animals are sacrificed to feed the few stronger ones. The evolutionary process as a whole wastes thousands of species as it selects the very few who will survive. It is this understanding of nature that we must appropriate. We will then also understand that, in the final analysis, life and death are one and the same, and nothing matters beyond the endless thrusting of the (Gaia) divine energy.

Gaia has another face. It has been revealed most fully in India. It is there given the name of Kali-Durga, consort of Shiva, the goddess who both gives and destroys life. She manifests herself naked, four-armed, her mouth gaping to show bloody fangs. In her four hands she holds a noose, a skull-topped staff, a sword, and a severed head. She is dancing on a mountain of corpses. Many people, perhaps even you, think they are not yet ready for this vision. But I assure you it is the future to which she calls us; it is the future that we have already embraced.

Peter Berger, "The Other Face of Gaia" First Things, Aug-Sep 1994

Big universe...small me...

One of my nephews sagely advised me "When you have worries, just think of how big the universe is and how small we are and your worries will go away."

I later told him that I prefered to think how wonderfully powerful and loving God is that he made all that we see and know, and that makes my worries go away.

This is not just a cute bit of theologising, but betrays an unarticulated and probably unconsciously absorbed materialism in the first statement; the second deals with it, but I'm concerned that we've so disconnected God and creation (now its God and 'the universe') that he drifts out of our framing of our experience; thus the importance of allowing the words of Genesis 1, etc. to confront us, discomforting our incipient materialism.

Eyes wide shut!

A friend directed me to an essay by Richard Rorty from 1992: "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids".

Read with a little thought it is scary. Not for its content, but for its indicators of a church that collectively fails to bring to a questioning mind the answers that only come in the Bible: not the John 3:16 answers...we have to get to that. But the philosophical answers that can only be formed from a sound and responsive theology of creation: of a God who made all in a loving immediacy, who is directly involved with a concrete reality and communicates in terms of that reality; who shows in his acts the primacy of personhood in community, of love, and of relationship; all of which evaporates when the church leans over to philosophical and ethical materialism, no longer able to answer anyone.

Some quotes:

I wanted to find some intellectual ... framework that would let me ... hold reality and justice in a single vision.

To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good -- like the God of St Thomas, or the 'nature of human beings' described by Aristotle -- would permit one to answer the Nazis...

 ...even if there were no such thing as 'understanding the world' in the Platonic sense -- an understanding from a position outside of (sic) time and history...

Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously.

...the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake...I decided that only religion .. only a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike my real parent, embodied love, power and justice in equal measure -- could do the trick Plato wanted done.

The two will, for some people, coincide -- as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable. 

Interesting to note that Dewey was not attracted by the theistic-evolutionist artifice...he saw no need for it's 'god' at all.

Also interesting that love power and justice come together in equal measure in God who created (setting the parameters of our approach to being, ethics and knowledge), loved and redeemed.

In avoiding a real time creation account, and fussing about obscure readings of 'days' instead of taking Moses' lead and building an assertive philosophy on this ground, the church talks to no issue of moment for any thinking person.

Real world effects only result from real world causes; if the creation account is not accurate to the real world of event and order, then it doesn't tell us what really happened and it is something else that really happened. It is this something else, then, and not the creation account, that is the real cause of the effect we experience and can only be the real basis for our approach to being, ethics and knowledge. This fact de-basing what would be built on a real-time creation as Moses has taught us, and been affirmed by the word of God in Exodus 20:1 and 11. So, what would this 'something else' be? As far as we could tell, it is akin to Dewey's position, leaving us in Rorty's dilemma, or equally in Sartre's...where nothing finally hangs together, no integration point, no final relationship, no final love, but everything an outworking of random material interactions: all that we have is...power. Not love, not hope, existentially alone in the universe and adrift.

8 years old

If an eight year old read Genesis 1, he or she would understand that the world was created in 6 days; or at least would agree that the text said that.

A typical Christian adult, one who read books, would hum and har, and say maybe this, or maybe that, or 'it could be read that way' or 'you have to understand the genre', and so on.

So, what happened between 8 and 28?

Genesis: the text.

There's an interesting section in Ladd's A Theology of the New Testament, in the chapter on Eternal Life (regarding the fourth gospel), called "Truth in the Old Testament."

It deals with the difference between the Greek idea of truth: basically the correspondence theory, which is, to my mind easily Platonised, and the Hebrew idea: trustworthiness and reliability.

Now, take this dichotomy to Genesis 1, noting its being the source of many points of reference throughout the Bible, and consider the difference between a Greek, (neo)Platonic view of truth; which allows the easy Idealist slide into all sorts of non-truth variations: the framework hypothesis, Genesis 1 as 'impression', rhetorical counter to ANE myths (meaning Enuma Elish, invariably). Could a Hebrew think in that fashion?

I think not. Truth as trustworthy conduct, or words: seems to sit with Genesis 1 being an event narrative, immune to the pressure of Western thought that would undermine it; words God has spoken to Moses, and God saying as much (see below).

This makes arguments about 'genre' trivial in their missing of the point so egregiously. Particularly the point reinforced in those reliable people: Jehovah and Moses! The question of taking the Bible 'seriously' without taking it as proceeding from the mouth of God in the detail that we are given undoes the seriousness instantly.

Particularly as one considers God speaking directly to Moses in Exodus 20, attempting, for the cool crowd, to put aside the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis and its kin, and consider the text in terms of the Hebraic understanding of truth as relational, not as something apart from the God who authors it, apart from people (creator and creature) in loving (and therefore trusted) relationship (which is one of the major implications of the text, in grand recursive fashion). From Exodus 20:1 

Then God spake all these words, saying...for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Ending with Exodus 20:11.

And that's it for Bird.

Bird's hermeneutical frame

Having looked briefly at the results of Bird's thinking about the Doctrine of Creation and its source in scripture, let's touch on his hermeneutical policy.

Its a great confusion.

Not only does it introduce the arbitrary into the practice (so which bits of Genesis 1 are to be taken seriously? the days? Clearly not; God speaking? Maybe; God doing? Don't know; God?), but it assassinates the perspicuity of scripture; one needs to be a specialist to read and understand it. You need the Bible, but you need other books.

Should we take that seriously? I know the JWs do: they must have their 'other books' to gain their bizarre understanding of scripture. Mormons similarly.

And so theistic evolutionists, or interpretive readers, or framework hypothesists, or scriptural impressionists, like Bird, must also do.

And what guides the metaframe of though that compels this take on Genesis? Nothing in the Bible, but only what comes from outside the Bible: at root materialist ideas that have everything in the Bible as a mere epiphenomenon of matter; and not, 'so to speak' the other way around. And there goes their ability to confront a lost world with a comprehensive gospel of God's comprehensive totalising love at work in his son, our Lord.

Seriously?

My (almost) last piece on Bird on taking the Bible seriously, not literally (in the case of Genesis 1, etc.).

What is it to take this passage seriously?

For a start, it is to take it literally; taking it seriously without taking it literally substitutes for its account of creation, and the ontological context it provides, an alternative account, and an alternative ontology: perilous.

If the passage does not set out what happened, then clearly something else that we don't know from the text happened. How, then is it possible for the text to convey anything to us about the theological implications of creation, if all we have is an impression of what we know not.

A substitute will spring up instantly, the current substitute displaces God; not only in the popular mind, but in the critical mind too. It is only in the minds of some theologians that the displacement is innocuous.

So, what is the creation account, theologically?

The centripetal significance starts with it being God's credential for our worship. As with passages that remind Israel of historical events that signpost God's relationship with them, so the reminders of who God is, being creator.

These passages point only to one place: Genesis 1. God's chief credential in relation to us is this passage. That the passage sets out an ontological basis for real life, is fundamentally important; and this is, contrary to the pagan speculation from Plato on (arcing out in Hegel, most recently); we are told that the world is basically communicable and God's relation to it is in concrete acts that have effect in the world that we know. The framework of our existence is set out in these terms. Thus is provided our metaphysical bearings, our ethical epistemology, and our existential location. Sweep this aside and we look to, for instance Mr Darwin and his 'neo' followers for these; and they then start not with the God who communicates, loves and draws relationship, but with mute matter; all else being a random chemical epiphenomenon.

The trace that starts in Genesis 1 (and with a profound physical fact in light being created first: light...energy, then arguably, the expanse of space), tours through the huge milestones of our relationship with God: the fall: another actual real event; the dispersion of Babel, the flood; and the trajectory of redemption that is grounded with Abram. Indeed, Christ points back, centripetally to the cluster of events of creation in some of his basic teaching. He speaks as though the account refers to something that happened and is meaningful for our understanding of who we are.

To reiterate; absent that grounded (concrete) location; we drift...and mostly, we drift away from  our Creator.

Seriously?

My last piece on Bird on taking the Bible seriously, not literally (in the case of Genesis 1, etc.).

What is it to take this passage seriously?

For a start, it is to take it literally; taking it seriously without taking it literally substitutes for its account of creation, and the ontological context it provides, an alternative account, and an alternative ontology: perilous.

If the passage does not set out what happened, then clearly something else that we don't know from the text happened. How, then is it possible for the text to convey anything to us about the theological implications of creation, if all we have is an impression of what we know not.

A substitute will spring up instantly, the current substitute displaces God; not only in the popular mind, but in the critical mind too. It is only in the minds of some theologians that the displacement is innocuous.

So, what is the creation account, theologically?

The centripetal significance starts with it being God's credential for our worship. As with passages that remind Israel of historical events that signpost God's relationship with them, so the reminders of who God is, being creator.

These passages point only to one place: Genesis 1. God's chief credential in relation to us is this passage. That the passage sets out an ontological basis for real life, is fundamentally important; and this is, contrary to the pagan speculation from Plato on (arcing out in Hegel, most recently); we are told that the world is basically communicable and God's relation to it is in concrete acts that have effect in the world that we know. The framework of our existence is set out in these terms. Thus is provided our metaphysical bearings, our ethical epistemology, and our existential location. Sweep this aside and we look to, for instance Mr Darwin and his 'neo' followers for these; and they then start not with the God who communicates, loves and draws relationship, but with mute matter; all else being a random chemical epiphenomenon.

The trace that starts in Genesis 1 (and with a profound physical fact in light being created first: light...energy, then arguably, the expanse of space), tours through the huge milestones of our relationship with God: the fall: another actual real event; the dispersion of Babel, the flood; and the trajectory of redemption that is grounded with Abram. Indeed, Christ points back, centripetally to the cluster of events of creation in some of his basic teaching. He speaks as though the account refers to something that happened and is meaningful for our understanding of who we are.

To reiterate; absent that grounded (concrete) location; we drift...and mostly, we drift away from  our Creator.

Genre, seriously now.

Bird, like most who want to engineer a heterodox view of Genesis 1 so as not to offend the rampant materialism of our time (I mean philosophical materialism: the view, world view, to borrow Bird's label, that dust is all there is), tell us that on the basis of 'genre analysis' we don't need to take the text as conveying objective information; back to impressionism.

Genre...that is the 'type' of text: is it poetry, description, narrative, and so on. Its a great escape hatch.

However, we can through some biblical light on the question. We have a poetic response to creation. It is in Psalms 8 and 19 as great examples. We also have a list of events in Numbers 7.

A quick comparison tells one which Genesis 1 is more like: the list, of course.

Bringing a modern conception of information to Genesis 1, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a structured computer file of 6 records. Each record has a record opening field, an event description field, a count field and an end of record marker.

Nothing like poetry, nothing like an impressionistic account, nothing mystical. The closed thing we have to it today is a concrete list of events.

Moreover, the grammatical signals are of historical narrative, with consecutive constructions used throughout.

Additionally, the author's driving insistence on the passage of time is remarkable. In Numbers 7 (which also, like Genesis 1 states the first day differently to the subsequent days) the announcement of the day is quite simple. In Genesis 1, it is quite elaborate, as if to make quite sure that the reader understands what 'day' means, precisely. It is counted, it is described: a 'evening and morning' type day. Not a day of indeterminate time, or a day that is detached from our everyday experience of day.

World view

So, Genesis 1 is mainly about world view!

How would we know when we are assured that the account is, at best, impressionistic? It is only about world view (and I think that notion is itself contestable: the idea of world view operates within a non-absolutist ontology that the Bible does not partake in), if it gives a world view. Now, setting aside for the moment that there is such a thing as a world view, as one in a range of options, let's think: how does the Bible give us a world view that is not as fictional as the world views of those whose world view sets the Biblical data at nought and erects a world view on that basis? Their world view is clearly wrong, but, still...its a 'world view'.

We go in circles, of course. The Bible does not present a 'world view'. It tells us how the world actually, really, and concretely is. There is no alternative that aligns with what it is. It is our god-given  duty to have our thinking conform to the Bible, not to use it to generate yet another 'world view' option!

Of course, if the Bible does not tell us how the world actually, really, concretely is; then it is hardly able to provide even a 'world view'. We only have the impressionistic picture that I've already mentioned. This does not 'refute' Darwinism (which truly is a 'world view') because it is categorically different. Darwin claims to tell us what the world is truly. But it is wrong (for lots of reasons, including human experience). This is what refutes Darwinism, and every other 'world view' that denies that we are here by the loving agency of God who brings forth from nothing by his will.

The creation account relies upon and teaches this: its detailed list of events underlines two very important things by demonstration (not mere picture painting): The personal (God) in loving relationship, is fundamental to all being, in the most profound way, and that this personal God is concretely involved in events and substance of creation: he is directly and intimately connected to its outcomes, and not remote from then due to an intervening or mediating principle that is, itself, not God (that is, not Christ, the only mediator, but some other medaitorial, impersonal principle as is proposed in darwinian evolution).

Let me tell how it is...

A lot of what I've written to discuss Pahl's views would be applicable to Bird's; but why avoid writing when writing is such fun?

Here goes:

There's an old joke, at the expense of economists that has members of three professions on a desert island with only a can of beans for food. The first two puzzle over what to do...it comes to the economist who starts by saying "let's assume we have a can opener..."

Thinking that the Genesis creation account tells us something about God and creation without actually telling us anything that really happened is similarly empty. How can telling us something that didn't happen teach us anything about what did happen? How can a 'story' of what didn't happen respond to contemporaneous (and that I'd question) ANE tales which were also of what didn't happen (even tho' this confuses theogony and cosmogony)?

The idea is nonsensical. Its a Goon Show approach ( I recal one show where Neddy Seagood thought that a picture of a gun was an adequate weapon). Just like a mountain climber setting off with a picture of a rope: no actual rope, and the picture itself not even telling what a rope could do or how it could be used....that's the divide between concrete events and an account that does not encompas concrete events being asserted to lead us to conclusions about that which it fails to reveal.

More Hegel than Hegel...and nothing like the God who is concretely involved with his creation, where it is the details that make the general, and not the other merrily Platonic way around.

Darwin does it down

The cool TE crowd love to say that evolution was God's 'method' of creation...or the creation account is a culturally situated tale to tell us that God is creator. If it is not concretely real, of course, it teaches no such thing. But atheists are also unpersuaded:
From The Australia a few days ago.

Daniel does it better

Daniel Dennet does it better, but this is more consice: a comment to an article by Bernard Salt in The Australian today:

Showing the bird!

According to Michael Bird, its not in how it reads, but in how you read it (this is called reader response theory, cooked up by one Stanley Fish):

In recent full page peaen to neo-orthodoxy (well, nothing to do with orthodoxy to my mind, so meta-orthodoxy might be a better term) in Eternity we get this:

I'll write about it later, but for the moment, let's think about Exodus 20:11, then Deuteronomy 5:32, and finally, reflect on Genesis 3:1, the serpent's words particularly.

For Bird, taking the word of God seriously means taking it not quite seriously enough and cutting it to fit the cloth of contemporary materialist ideas. Not on, as Deuteronomy 5:32 tells us, reflecting on the coupling of creation and statute in God's words in Exodus 20:11 and more emphatically in Ex 31:12-17

Now, some bright spark will tell us that God was really a Hegelian idealist when he was speaking, and was not referring to concrete acts in the actual real world, but a story about something else of which he did not reveal (as though the concrete events of creation were not in fact important to understanding God and us).

Bird courts a significant epistemological problem which he hides under the obfuscation of 'competing narrative'. Of course one cannot 'compete' against a non-truth by a factually decoupled narrative that merely paints an alternative but unsubstantiated picture; one must compete by the truth.

That's why in the army we don't use pictures of bullets, but actual real bullets.

Just not credible

Many of my Anglican friends ( I think of you, Michael Jensen) seem to want to hold two contradictory beliefs: that evolution is the proper description of the world, and that God is creator; of course with the two being divergent at every point, one of them has to give. It is always the idea of creation and its implications that gives.

Some like to think that they can proclaim a gospel split on these lines, but here's what someone outside our faith thinks:

Unger's [The Religion of the Future] view is that none of the old religions is credible any longer as regards claims about the origins of the cosmos, the nature of life, the history of humanity or the workings of the world. this is because of the findings of the modern sciences concerning the nature of the cosmos, the evolutionary realities of life and the knowledge of human evolution and archaeology acquired only in the very recent past.

Paul Monk, 'letters' Quadrant, June 2016.

Nothing in that quote points to the creator God, but away from him. Thus does the forlorn mixture of creation and evolution instantly collapse in the estimation of all but those who want to mix the two and deny the involvement of the creator in the concrete reality that he has made and described in early Genesis.

The Flood: a big 'so what'?

In a recent article I read that Greg Koukl, a US Christian talk show host, wonders what rests theologically on the extent of the flood.

Aside from the sense of the narrative and the language regarding its extent (fairly significant considerations), and the marks of the flood over the planet, there are theological issues that turn on the extent.

The flood is a counterpoint to the creation; as the creation is a total production that is 'very good' the flood is an 'unproduction' given the 'very bad' that God sees in rampant sin.

A local flood would make this literary and theological point nonsensical: the very good has become the very bad that God seeks to 'un create' at a significant level: to uncreate mankind.

This also builds the pattern of salvation: that God will and does rescue in the midst of that which rejects him, his love, and his nature (to love): despite the reaction to his love being rejected and denied (by sinful behaviour) in wanting to destroy: showing us the depth of betrayal, he acts to save, and does so. Salvation is a 'totalising' move by God and is rendered pointless by a local flood.

The big 5

On the Christianity Today site an article was run the other day on questions Christians need to face about creation.

I'll summarize:

1. Are we willing for the Bible to change our minds?

OR are we content to ride with the materialism that denies God's communication and seeks to deploy its mythology of evolution?

2. Does the timeline really matter?

OR should I deny the import of the coordinated chronology markers in the text and refer instead to a materialist dogma, noting that pagans have always sought long ages to disconnect themselves from any primary causal event.

3. Is your view a compromise to the spirit of the age?

OR does the creation account just not matter in its inspired detail?

4. Am I allowing the text to speak for itself?

OR am I retrospectively filling it with the documentary hypothesis and all this entails for its facticity?

5. Is there more to agree on that disagree on?

OR do I want to supress argument (in the good sense) so I won't have to explain how modern humanist-materialism is consistent with Adam's rejection of relationship with God?

If I get to it, I'll summarise the argument and comment over coming weeks (as I get time).

Evolution in business

In their book Competing for the Future, Hamel and Prahalad write:

Palace coups make great press copy, but the real objective is a transformation that is revolutionary in result  and evolutionary in execution.

Great! I wonder how many businesses would succeed following an evolutionary path:

• random changes that might or might not produce a useful result
• meandering adaptation, most of which are discarded by the environment,
• large numbers of which have no discernable benefit or detriment and one or two that might be good, but we won't know if they are good until other changes make them good: so energy expended into features that may not, probably won't be of ultimate benefit, and no particular end result in view...

That's evolution for you.

Hubble

A letter sent to Peter Jensen, many years ago:

-->

Dear Dr Jensen,

I would have loved to have been at the lecture by yourself and Dr Hubble. I read the report in the Herald, which while it probably was but a pale reflection of the event, nevertheless, I take indicated the lines of argument used by yourself and the other gentleman.

If you permit, I would like to 'weigh in' on your side.

Firstly, Dr Hubble's four points are very simple to deal with:

The Earth was no longer considered the centre of the heavens

Whether the earth is 'considered' to be the centre of the universe or not is beside the point. The earth is, by assumption, taken to be not the centre because the universe is assumed to be isotropic (that is the same everywhere). This is an assumption of convenience. But there is nothing in the scripture, as far as I know, that requires the earth to be geometrically centred in the universe. All we are told is that the earth was created first: big insult to the cosmological 'principles' which themselves, are mere ideas. Hubble is probably referring to the Ptolemaic astronomy taken up by the medieval church; but there is nothing scriptural about that.

The discovery of mammoth fossils proved extinctions

I don't see how this is relevant to Hubble's view. He appears to think that the Bible requires fixity and permanence of species (a misunderstanding emerging from the church's long infatuation with Aristotle). It does not. Genesis tells us that creatures reproduce 'after their kind' which is exactly what we see. This says nothing about our particular intellectual construct of 'species'. We know species emerge and sucumb to extinction; the latter of which we expect given the fall and the calamity it was for all life; bringing death to this universe. I wonder what answer Hubble had to the problem or the fact of death? What does he offer his fellow humans who face death and, in his terms, are mere arrangements of matter of no particular 'real' signifciance.

Rock sedimentation shows the planet is millions of years old rather than a few thousand

Naturally, rock sedimentation shows nothing of the sort, but sediments are interpreted on the basis of naturalistic assumptions to give this view. This approach to geology commenced in the 19th Century with geologists who intentionally put aside the history we have in the Bible on the basis of naturalism being their operating cosmogony. Of course, cosmogony derived from human assumptions (or fallen predilictions) that seeks to cut itself off from what history we have (and I take it that we have such history from the Holy Spirit in Genesis, for the very reason of providing us with the basis for a true, godly and ultimately salvific cosmogony) will be off the rails from the 'get go'. It is interesting to consider that we have examples of strata build up were we know multiple strata over tens of metres depth to have been laid down in a few hours, throwing into question the conventional view of strata as necessitating great periods of time. The examples are at the Mt St Helen's volcano explosion of the 1980s where we saw gross geological transformations occuring within seconds, hours and days. One of these was a mudflow which cut a rock canyon in a number of hours!

No credible proof has been found of the Great Flood.

It is amusing that he refers to rock sedimentation in the 'breath' before he denies evidence of the flood. Sedimentary rock is rock laid down under water. There are thousands of feet thickness of this around the world, full of water bourne and other fossils. I think this is astonishing evidence for the flood. Only the conventional (naturalist) view inserts vast periods of time between strata. There is no independent evidence for these time periods, incidently, only an elaborate circular argument, with the unspoken naturalist basis underlying it and needing rebuttal.

I applaud what you are reported as saying about Genesis, but I would go further. Much that is said about Genesis by modern theologians is said in commission of the error that the medieaval church committed. That is, it takes the lens of Greek philosophy (in practical terms, neo-platonic idealism with an admix of Stoicism) and reads the Bible through this. In Genesis this means that what God reveals as a succession of events in time (thus in obstinately anti-mythic terms) gets converted to 'ideas' about the cosmos or God's relation to the cosmos. This usually results in the vacuous claim that evolution is God's method of creation and leads to neo-gnostic 'theories' of Genesis such as the 'framework' hypothesis, 'days of revelation' and the like.

But to substitute 'ideas' for events, one has to set aside the worldview of the Bible: that concrete events in time are substantial and real, to instead utilise a species of Greek idealism, where the concrete reality is set aside or substituted by an overarching idealist fancy. This is something we must guard against with all our vigour. And it is the challenge the church has always faced: gnostics have always wanted to make the concrete non-real, or less real, than abstractions, ideas, or intellectual figments. The Bible stands squarely against this. Our salvation is real, because of real events in a real world, brought about in real time, and quite recently, in which there was a real fall which had real consequences. As soon as we reject the Bible's realism and the chronology which underpins it we walk away from the biblical 'world-view'. The very purpose of the Biblical chronology is to make sure we understand the concrete realism of the revelation: only myths rely on dateless vagueness. To toy with idealism in gnostic fashion, we join the classic 'liberals' on their Kirkegaardean slope of paganising Christ and endorsing the materialist explanation of reality.

The unhappy amalgam of 'theistic evolution' is grease on the slope. The 'hypothesis of God' in this construction is unnecessary in evolutionary terms. Occam's 'razor' would cut it out without a second thought. Its superfluousness denigrates God and his revelation. Going the other way, the notion of evolution adds nothing to our knowledge of God, but detracts from it. It is moreover contradicted by the clear words of Scripture, as I imagine you appreciate.

It surprises me that the philosophical and kerygmatic riches to be found in Genesian realism have not been tapped by Christian theologians. These have ramifications for our approaches to ontology, epistemology, ethics, soteriology and theodicy, giving to these studies a rigour, a realism and a substantialness which makes their idealistic counterparts appear to be hand-waving sophistry which help keep men bound and under subjection to evil principalities and powers. Paul on Mars Hill gives the great illustration of a scriptural realist reaching out to idealists with a gospel of concrete salvation in a concrete world given credibility by the God who saves being the creator of this world. It occurs to me that the very point of God revealing that he created in 6 definite dateable days in recent time, is to eliminate all the alternative cosmogonies by which people cut themselves off from him. We see people using their cosmology to cut themselves off from God, today, in spades: the New Age movement, the last gasps of modernist humanism (of which Hubble appears to be a devotee) and in so much theology and evangelising which unconsciously adopts pagan constructs to deny the Scripture's embarrasing discord with our contemporary paganism.

In your talk at the Engineering school, I would look forward to your tracing the revolution in thinking that the reformation brought in. True, it was tinged with elements of Grecian approaches to thinking, but Luther's great revolution was that we can think for ourselves, without 'authorities' because the Bible gave us insights into what truly is. The whole ediface of modern science is built on this. Engineering rides the wave of the success of Luther's revolution which comes from his taking the Bible's challenge, the challenge of the real world, of which the Bible tells us against the unrealism of the authoritarian idealism of his day. Everything in the modern West starts from this.

Mysteries

We are often told by theistic evolutionists, or 'head-in-sand-proto-creationists' that creation is 'a mystery'.

Here's what Jeremiah has to say about mysteries:

17:5

Thus says the Lord,
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his ^[a]strength,
And whose heart turns away from the Lord

And 33:2,

Thus says the Lord who made ^[a]the earth, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name, call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know. ['great and mighty' is translated 'mysteries' in some versions].

Dear Seth

A recent letter to Seth Godin, of 'Seth Godin' fame.

Dear Seth,

There was an error on your post. You wrote:

"The world is not flat. Gullible actually is a word. The ice is melting. The world is not 5,000 years old. Stevie Wonder, is, unfortunately, blind."

I don't know if anyone thinks that the world is 5,000 years old, but plenty think that it is 6,000 years old. You don't clearly, along with many people, but truth is not established by vote (nor should it be silenced by opinion).

The point that you don't explore is that very long ages of 'earth life' have a long tradition stemming back to the dead hand of pagan beliefs; those who cannot locate mind as a reality in the world have to resort to great age in the hope that THAT will give mind a place. It doesn't however, because time plus material just gives us material. You will have to look elsewhere for mind.

OTOH, those who hold a short age for the world (indeed, the universe) do have a place for mind and hold that mind is the source of creative power...so the improbability of a short age disappears. Of course, once a long age is held to, conclusions will be constrained to that belief as proponents merrily question beg their way to deeper error.

One amongst many

In the film 'Superman v Batman', one of the protagonists...it might have been Lex Lother, or even Alfred (Jeremy Irons) said:

Since Darwinian evolution, we are not special, just one life form amongst many.

In the context of the indecisive good v evil of this singularly religious movie, we are dumped into the metaphysical materialism that the church fails to understand and therefore cannot bring the gospel against. The film deals clumsily with some classic topics in the philsophy of religion on the good v evil line but is hoist with its own petard; having no possible resolution, but a hopeless universe where there is no compass, and none possible; just where most Christians are as they trudge through the mire of theistic evolution, unwittingly intellectually equipped by Darwin to Dawkins.

Who's time?

From Siedentrop, Inventing the Individual, p. 54 (Penguin edition):

The Jewish sense of time was different. It was unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events. Had he not led his people to the promised land, and saved them repeatedly? The Jewish God expressed himself in time. Nothing would ever be the same as before. That was the nature of time. Is it fanciful to trace this sense back to the experiences of a nomadic people in the desert, aware that wind blowing across the sand transformed their landscape from one day to the next?

The critical idea for my purpose is in bold: The Jewish God expressed himself in time.

Today we are immersed in the Jewish concept of time and it is very difficult to step outside it and feel what a contrast it would be to pagan concepts, so we miss the importance of the chronology markers in Genesis 1: these are profoundly significant for the sense of Genesis 1 and for its implications for our understanding of creation as God's acts in time to found his relationship with his creation.

To defer to other time-concepts, or to radically set them aside with the pretence that they merge with pagan concepts is to turn one's back on the Biblical conception of time (that is, how time really works) and with it the Biblical information about creation. Creation founds worldview, another concept of 'creation' founds another world view.

Today the worldview of choice is metaphysical physicalism (even though physicalism itself cannot give rise to a metaphysic, meaning tha the metaphysic produced falls victim to post-modern accusations of (mere) narrative).

Shamans of the day

The question of time and the tempo of events often pops up in discussions about Genesis 1. Should we take seriously the timing of events, the tempo of action, that is ostensibly in the text, or should we sideline it as irrelevant?

Those who want to make room for materialist dogma and confer credibility on the idea of evolution will typically vote to sideline the timing as irrelevant.

This is a mistake. If we take our lead from Paul, all scripture is profitable...so, where is the profit in the tempo of creation.

To answer let’s look at it the other way around. Where is the detriment in denying that the tempo is in any way related to what has really happened in our time-space domain?

If the tempo is disconnected from the real world, then there are gaps in the flow of God’s relationship with us. If evolution is deferred to as describing what *really* happened, then the gaps are immense, and the very flow of creation bears no relation to reality. On these grounds it can teach nothing: it is empty, or at least entails vast stretches of emptiness where the touch of God is absent. If the one who is love is absent, what takes his place?

The vacuum gets filled pretty quickly (which is one of the motives of materialism in ousting the supernatural): not with the one who is love and acts in love, but with myths and tales of demons who are not love in action, but the reverse. These gap fillers pave the way for the shamans of the day to use the power thus given to them against us, keeping us from knowing ourselves in relation to God.