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.