28 December 2017
Where did you go to school?
A friend struck up a conversation with a fellow of about 30 who lived near his country property. Friend asked if the fellow had gone to school locally: yes; a parish school, then an Anglican college...asked 'and do you still go to church'...answer: ''no, everything, evolution" was the uncrafted reply.
Which religion?
Tim Ball in his 2014 talk at Skagit Education Outreach The Climate, Science Based on Evidence, Mt Vernon Washington. From the 15 minute mark.
There’s one other thing with environmentalism because if you look at the bookshelves you’ll see there’s a lot of books about Darwin, Richard Dawkins talking about Darwin and is God dead. That’s one of the debates that’s going on in the academic world about all of this and certainly with the young people. Now Darwin of course was an atheist and for the reason that most men become atheists he had a young daughter who died, and Darwin said ‘I can understand a God that tests adults, but I cannot understand a God that would test children’, and that, as I said, is why most men become atheists.
But Darwin was used by science to defeat religion and I’m not here to argue pro or for or whatever...but in defeating religion of course then you take away the reason for humans being here...we’re here because God put us here...well, you get rid of that and then, why are we here?
You know what change that makes to the world? Enormous, because if you went to the university in Darwin’s day [the library was about humanities and natural sciences] the social sciences emerged because that was the scientific world's way of trying to justify why humans are different than all the other animals...[but the distinctives sought keep disappearing] they decided that what makes people different than other apes is that we can tell lies...thus homo sapiens sapiens: the double knowledge of lies. The distinctive is we think of afterlife...but is that not religion? Back to where we started.
Once you've got rid of God and religion, for most of the young people...a student said I don’t believe you...I don’t believe you Thomas...my names isn’t Thomas...how many in the room know what I’m referring to? Two students in 150 knew the references. I believe our distinctive is that we are a moral being. We have to have a belief system of some sort, so young people are vulnerable to environment as the new religion.
23 November 2017
What is a symbol for, and how does it symbolise?
The symbolist has to explain the real links between a symbolist view of Gen 1 and the realist purposes to which it is put.
The symbolist view of Genesis 1, etc. would have to entail a category error of the magnitude of the undergraduate 'fallacy'.
This is the 'fallacy' committed by many under-graduates who confuse possession (e.g. of a hand out, an e-book, a website address) with knowledge (produced by having read, considered and understood the given text).
The way it pans out in theology is that on the one hand we have, we are told, a 'symbolic' representation of God's creating, for various reasons to do, it would seem, not with creating, per se, but with bragging to ANE neighbours on the 'our story is better than your story' basis.
This places the creation account on the same rhetorical level as a Goon Show script where Neddie Seagoon fronts up to battle with a picture of a gun. Nice, but useless in the real world.
The fissure between a symbol of something rendered unknown by the declaration that the only information we have about it is a 'symbol' (of something else, presumably, but without any real world correlate), and real world events and relationships that are said to depend upon, or are referred to this symbol (that's like threatening your gun totting enemy with a read from your book of Kitchener's battle of Omdurman), have got to be given a connection that crosses the category boundary of 'we are in the real world' and the symbol is not. So where is the 'real world' link to the world of symbols?
Clearly they need a consulting philosopher who is up to date with Hegel, the Greek deceivers (Plato and his pupil Aristotle: a bright pair, but they made too many ontological mistakes to get full marks), and the tail enders, the Neoplatonists.
But seriously, folks, the problem is that there can be no link. God represents himself as creator at critical places in Scripture, which references can only point back to the Genesis account (note I carefully don't say, 'accounts', mainly because I don't think that Genesis is a second temple fantasy, and I can read what the text says...clearly one event, two subject matter branches). If the account is vaguely symbolic (that is, with no identifiable reference event), then it can have no meaningful connection with any of its citations.
God uses his credential as creator inescapably as being the one who created in 6 days, as he sets out in Genesis, and therefore dependable in doing what he says he will do, of being in relationship with us, and having a fellowship with us that characterises the relationship in objective and tangible terms which make sense in the continuity of time-space-event between his actions as reported, and our experience of being in the world created, on an intellectual level, defined by those actions and God's statements in relation to those actions.
Very simply the two are in different domains of meaning with no link apart from a hollow verbal one: Creation = symbol of something unknown, God's actions = thing is real space-time contiguous with the (claimed) basic reality of God-acting-with-wisdom-in-love.
19 November 2017
It just is...
A sermon I recently heard was a cracker.
Both insightful, and not!
How could this be?
The insight was the relation of God and creation, on creation being part of God's self-definition in relation to us in our space-time-causal world.
The 'not' was that creation as set out in Genesis 1, etc. was, we were boldly told, not about origins at all (despite it being God's foundational credential for our worship and knowledge of him, Roms 1:20 springs to mind, along with Hebs 4:3f and 11:3 ); indeed, that the Hebrews had no interest in origins per se (despite the credential popping up time and again throughout the OT and particularly pointedly in Acts 17:24ff) but were interested in the relationship that it indicated.
Now we start to play with category errors: the claim above notwithstanding that it only indicated a relationship, not because it is some purist 'form' in isolation, but because it was set out as a time-space event in our continguous objective causality. This is how it shows relationship. It is able to speak to such by demonstration of the fellowship between God and man particularly, but extending to creation in general. The fellowship is shown in the common space-time-event domain of God's action (by speaking, with immediacy as the scriptures insist), and our responses.
It went on. We were told that because God created we all need to be environmentalists, while not guarding against the environmental religion we are now beset by, or the need to balance benefits to people with our stewardship of the creation, it being our home, the place of our fellowship with God, the subject of his future redemption (which was touched upon, but not in this sense) and, in travail, although that was mentioned, and so no purist end state is available.
More significantly, we were told that things in creation 'just are' and didn't matter beyond this mute given-ness...yoga, tai chi, evolution...they just were, and didn't matter. This makes sense if you in fact, or implicitly, separate creation as a doctrine from creation in fact in the real world, denying that the use of real world terms because that's where it happened are telling us anything real.
Au contraire. Because of creation these things do matter, in a contra-positive way. Yoga is not merely body positions; it is represented that way to we dumb westerners, but it is an integral part of a pantheistic conception of the universe that is at root impersonal, its perception by us illusory. Tai chi is possibly the same but I don't know of it.
But even more 'contraire': nothing 'just is' but all is created by intention, in love, and is full the wisdom of God. As Rorty wistfully once sought a joining of justice and beauty that is denied in his random 'just is' materialist world, this provides it: everything comes together in the loving intention of God.
Evolution I do know about.
A few days after the sermon I was browsing in a bookshop (a time-space-event one, not an electronic one, as handy as they are). I came across a book published by the New Scientist: How Evolution Explains Everything about Life (although a recent book claims that it doesn't, with typcial journalistic shrillness).
This clearly asserted a dominating, total world view; not a mere technicality within God's creation-not-about-origins-which-just-is!
The idea that creation 'just is' was presented in terms that nothing in the creation is to be afraid of. And with this I emphatically agree; but the things cited are not 'in' the creation; they are intellectual (or spiritual in a demon sense) artifacts of human (or demonic) endeavour.
To put evolution in the 'don't matter' box, takes us to the edge of not one, but two cliffs.
The first is that evolution, not being a 'thing' but a set of ideas, comes from somewhere: it comes from a human desire to conceive the universe as 'just is' in materialist terms. How ironic. I would aver that this view was part of the ancient Greek's lack of interest in science as we know it today. Aristotle typifies this in that he attempted to deduce things about the world, rather than examine it. His legacy remains dominant in theology, despite its unbiblical premis (evolution). It was also the very contrary view of the universe by mainly what today we would call creationist investigators (scientists) that led to the flowering of modern science. Thus, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, rather it is the essential prolegomenon to any science.
The second cliff is that it either puts God logically within a materialist frame, evolution being a materialist, not a scientific conception of reality, or implies that he must be pushed off away from us. This is contrary, obviously, to Genesis 1 etc. where the universe is framed within and by the thinking, relating, loving being behind and through it all, who relates to us.
Genesis gives life to the relationship by demonstrating God's creation is a 'concrete-realist' set of sequenced events, in contiguous objective space-time causality with us; these events form the creation and are definitively placed in time and sequence. The time and sequence that we know and use. If they don't really tell of the creation, then something else, of which we have no historic knowledge, does. This inevitably plays out as undercutting the 'creation' as God's chief relational credential for our worship and demonstration of his work in fellowship with us as it can then do neither.
It undercuts because it renders the actual action of God unknown and perhaps unknowable and thus meaningless in the space-time-event deliminted universe we are in, shades of the category error again: that some sort of symbolism can be connected to real meaning, in the real world, even though its real-world-terms description is denied and said to be about something else (and how would one know, one wonderes) for which we have no reference).
The real-world-terms it is communicated in; and no other could have meaning, show us realist categories (not neoplatonic imaginative ones), the show that our ideas and actions have real meaning and our relationships have consequences because our relationship with God is real and has consequences. Oh, and they also start our knowledge, thereby, of the creation that we are to steward, and show that we have time-space-event objective, shared continuity with it and God's act in creation, and participatory being with him (the only way to have connection) to come full circle.
Some who take a second temple view of Genesis 1 have considered the six days of creation as a rationale for the Jewish week. But not so. The Sabbath pattern and God's using that very pattern is at the core of his demonstration of fellowship. Both he and his people fellowship in a common ordred pattern of the use of time.
To some extent, as a result of all this, Genesis 1 is a science text. John Buridan treated it as such, conceptually, to much profit.
As a footnote, the reign of Barth in the sermon was clearly evident; as was the influence of the Buddha, regretably, even if unconscious.
Theologians quoted were Brueggemann and Goldingay; both of whom miss the realist point of Genesis, and invite us into an Hegelian frolic. This direction is not helpful, although they do have plenty to provoke profitable thought.
Both insightful, and not!
How could this be?
The insight was the relation of God and creation, on creation being part of God's self-definition in relation to us in our space-time-causal world.
The 'not' was that creation as set out in Genesis 1, etc. was, we were boldly told, not about origins at all (despite it being God's foundational credential for our worship and knowledge of him, Roms 1:20 springs to mind, along with Hebs 4:3f and 11:3 ); indeed, that the Hebrews had no interest in origins per se (despite the credential popping up time and again throughout the OT and particularly pointedly in Acts 17:24ff) but were interested in the relationship that it indicated.
Now we start to play with category errors: the claim above notwithstanding that it only indicated a relationship, not because it is some purist 'form' in isolation, but because it was set out as a time-space event in our continguous objective causality. This is how it shows relationship. It is able to speak to such by demonstration of the fellowship between God and man particularly, but extending to creation in general. The fellowship is shown in the common space-time-event domain of God's action (by speaking, with immediacy as the scriptures insist), and our responses.
It went on. We were told that because God created we all need to be environmentalists, while not guarding against the environmental religion we are now beset by, or the need to balance benefits to people with our stewardship of the creation, it being our home, the place of our fellowship with God, the subject of his future redemption (which was touched upon, but not in this sense) and, in travail, although that was mentioned, and so no purist end state is available.
More significantly, we were told that things in creation 'just are' and didn't matter beyond this mute given-ness...yoga, tai chi, evolution...they just were, and didn't matter. This makes sense if you in fact, or implicitly, separate creation as a doctrine from creation in fact in the real world, denying that the use of real world terms because that's where it happened are telling us anything real.
Au contraire. Because of creation these things do matter, in a contra-positive way. Yoga is not merely body positions; it is represented that way to we dumb westerners, but it is an integral part of a pantheistic conception of the universe that is at root impersonal, its perception by us illusory. Tai chi is possibly the same but I don't know of it.
But even more 'contraire': nothing 'just is' but all is created by intention, in love, and is full the wisdom of God. As Rorty wistfully once sought a joining of justice and beauty that is denied in his random 'just is' materialist world, this provides it: everything comes together in the loving intention of God.
Evolution I do know about.
A few days after the sermon I was browsing in a bookshop (a time-space-event one, not an electronic one, as handy as they are). I came across a book published by the New Scientist: How Evolution Explains Everything about Life (although a recent book claims that it doesn't, with typcial journalistic shrillness).
This clearly asserted a dominating, total world view; not a mere technicality within God's creation-not-about-origins-which-just-is!
The idea that creation 'just is' was presented in terms that nothing in the creation is to be afraid of. And with this I emphatically agree; but the things cited are not 'in' the creation; they are intellectual (or spiritual in a demon sense) artifacts of human (or demonic) endeavour.
To put evolution in the 'don't matter' box, takes us to the edge of not one, but two cliffs.
The first is that evolution, not being a 'thing' but a set of ideas, comes from somewhere: it comes from a human desire to conceive the universe as 'just is' in materialist terms. How ironic. I would aver that this view was part of the ancient Greek's lack of interest in science as we know it today. Aristotle typifies this in that he attempted to deduce things about the world, rather than examine it. His legacy remains dominant in theology, despite its unbiblical premis (evolution). It was also the very contrary view of the universe by mainly what today we would call creationist investigators (scientists) that led to the flowering of modern science. Thus, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, rather it is the essential prolegomenon to any science.
The second cliff is that it either puts God logically within a materialist frame, evolution being a materialist, not a scientific conception of reality, or implies that he must be pushed off away from us. This is contrary, obviously, to Genesis 1 etc. where the universe is framed within and by the thinking, relating, loving being behind and through it all, who relates to us.
Genesis gives life to the relationship by demonstrating God's creation is a 'concrete-realist' set of sequenced events, in contiguous objective space-time causality with us; these events form the creation and are definitively placed in time and sequence. The time and sequence that we know and use. If they don't really tell of the creation, then something else, of which we have no historic knowledge, does. This inevitably plays out as undercutting the 'creation' as God's chief relational credential for our worship and demonstration of his work in fellowship with us as it can then do neither.
It undercuts because it renders the actual action of God unknown and perhaps unknowable and thus meaningless in the space-time-event deliminted universe we are in, shades of the category error again: that some sort of symbolism can be connected to real meaning, in the real world, even though its real-world-terms description is denied and said to be about something else (and how would one know, one wonderes) for which we have no reference).
The real-world-terms it is communicated in; and no other could have meaning, show us realist categories (not neoplatonic imaginative ones), the show that our ideas and actions have real meaning and our relationships have consequences because our relationship with God is real and has consequences. Oh, and they also start our knowledge, thereby, of the creation that we are to steward, and show that we have time-space-event objective, shared continuity with it and God's act in creation, and participatory being with him (the only way to have connection) to come full circle.
Some who take a second temple view of Genesis 1 have considered the six days of creation as a rationale for the Jewish week. But not so. The Sabbath pattern and God's using that very pattern is at the core of his demonstration of fellowship. Both he and his people fellowship in a common ordred pattern of the use of time.
To some extent, as a result of all this, Genesis 1 is a science text. John Buridan treated it as such, conceptually, to much profit.
As a footnote, the reign of Barth in the sermon was clearly evident; as was the influence of the Buddha, regretably, even if unconscious.
Theologians quoted were Brueggemann and Goldingay; both of whom miss the realist point of Genesis, and invite us into an Hegelian frolic. This direction is not helpful, although they do have plenty to provoke profitable thought.
8 October 2017
The Everlasting God
Comment to Matthias Media on this book
Just reading Knox's The Everlasting God. What a wonderful accessible book. And, rarely for Sydney these days, one that sticks to the biblical teaching on creation and distinguishes it from evolution. A pity that the idea of chance has overridded the biblical implication of purpose in creation. But then, with Genesis 1 regarded as figurative (it would do Barth proud), the fallback positon is that evolution is the real explanation of life the universe and everything, with the revelation of God a mere chance event within that paradigm.
6 October 2017
How to be pagan
A few prize quotes, for those who deny a link between evolutionary doctrine and Christian theology:
"...I myself have little doubt that in England it was geology and the theory of evolution that changed us from a Christian to a pagan nation."
F. Sherwood Taylor, ‘Geology changes the outlook’, in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, Sylvan Press Ltd, London, p. 195, 1949.
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."
Provine, W. B., "Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life." from 1998 Darwin Day address.
"Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the indoctinees (by Chinese communists)?...The first, the fundamental, lesson given was man's descent from the ape---Darwinism! Darwin negates God, the human soul, the after-life. Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and end-all of the intellecdtual slavery it has created"
O'Gara, C. M., The Surrender to Secularism, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, 1967.
O'Gara witnessed the communists in China running indoctrination 'education'.
"...I myself have little doubt that in England it was geology and the theory of evolution that changed us from a Christian to a pagan nation."
F. Sherwood Taylor, ‘Geology changes the outlook’, in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, Sylvan Press Ltd, London, p. 195, 1949.
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."
Provine, W. B., "Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life." from 1998 Darwin Day address.
"Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the indoctinees (by Chinese communists)?...The first, the fundamental, lesson given was man's descent from the ape---Darwinism! Darwin negates God, the human soul, the after-life. Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and end-all of the intellecdtual slavery it has created"
O'Gara, C. M., The Surrender to Secularism, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, 1967.
O'Gara witnessed the communists in China running indoctrination 'education'.
Playing games
Often I find evangelicals playing games with the first half of Genesis. But if you remove a true, historic, space-time Fall, the answers do not exist. It is not only that historic, biblical Christianity as it stands in the stream of history is gone, but every answer we possess in the area of man and his moral dilemma is also gone.
Schaeffer, F. A. 1972 He Is There and He Is Not Silent
3 October 2017
Escape from absurdity
Reading Schaeffer: The God Who Is There. (Crossway Complete Works)
p 164
FS lists the brokenness of man as: man separated [himself] from God, man separated from himself [no longer an integrated being], man separated from himself [no longer in integrated community], and “Fourthly, man was separated from nature”.
I came to a halt with the fourth separation. The word ‘nature’ suggests an independent ‘natural’ reality. But, not so. The non-human world is not ‘nature’, with its hint of autonomy from the creative acts of God, but The Creation, fallen as it is, due to the first separation. This makes the pain of our position even more sharp: we separated ourselves from God and as a result...we are separated from his creation which we were to be stewards of and live in in enjoyment and God’s company.
But FS goes on to some great analysis.
Page 168-9
“The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but cannot find it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.”
Page 183
“...The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance.”
The final sentence caps it all very well.
The alternative to being made and that through the purposeful love of the infinite-personal God is the ironic ‘autonomy’ of chance where purpose is absent, and we live a perceived absurdity of being people full or purpose and intent, and indeed, love, but in a universe, a reality, we imagine has none of this as basic. This man looks back to his roots in meaningless (purposeless) chance and sees a black absence of personality, love and purpose.
To joint the two, as theistic evolution does, for example, compounds the absurdity and evacuates the gospel of credibility. It would tell us that God 'used' purposelessness/chance on purpose, to produce a world of purposeful beings (in his image) that gave no evidence of his purpose! More than absurd because it destroys the fellowship of beings founded in the creation as described in Genesis 1 where God's acts and our being share contiguous objective space-time causality as persons in communion.
p 164
FS lists the brokenness of man as: man separated [himself] from God, man separated from himself [no longer an integrated being], man separated from himself [no longer in integrated community], and “Fourthly, man was separated from nature”.
I came to a halt with the fourth separation. The word ‘nature’ suggests an independent ‘natural’ reality. But, not so. The non-human world is not ‘nature’, with its hint of autonomy from the creative acts of God, but The Creation, fallen as it is, due to the first separation. This makes the pain of our position even more sharp: we separated ourselves from God and as a result...we are separated from his creation which we were to be stewards of and live in in enjoyment and God’s company.
But FS goes on to some great analysis.
Page 168-9
“The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but cannot find it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.”
Page 183
“...The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance.”
The final sentence caps it all very well.
The alternative to being made and that through the purposeful love of the infinite-personal God is the ironic ‘autonomy’ of chance where purpose is absent, and we live a perceived absurdity of being people full or purpose and intent, and indeed, love, but in a universe, a reality, we imagine has none of this as basic. This man looks back to his roots in meaningless (purposeless) chance and sees a black absence of personality, love and purpose.
To joint the two, as theistic evolution does, for example, compounds the absurdity and evacuates the gospel of credibility. It would tell us that God 'used' purposelessness/chance on purpose, to produce a world of purposeful beings (in his image) that gave no evidence of his purpose! More than absurd because it destroys the fellowship of beings founded in the creation as described in Genesis 1 where God's acts and our being share contiguous objective space-time causality as persons in communion.
1 October 2017
Its all continuous
This morning at church we had a rather wonderful sermon with this quote from Barth:
It reads wonderfully well. It reads as though Barth could be an author on this blog.
But not so.
Barth is famous for putting into different compartments scripture and the contiguous objective space-time causality that we inhabit, that scripture seems to speak to and in which terms scripture is delineated; making nonsense of one or the other!
Because: the creation account is presented in terms of the categories and the contiguous causality that we live in. Recursively, this makes the account congruent with the world that it describes and the world whose terms we share in our existential experience. So, we can make sense of it and take real meaning from it. It gives us a confidence that God has revealed truth to us, and we are not left to the winds of chance.
The world of the account is reflected in a world that has identicial causality with no break in the objective causal continuity between the two, otherwise, one would not make sense in terms of the other and the account would not tell us anything real about this world or God. Which is where Barth is.
The end result would be that the account would have no Real meaning in this world and we would have to seek elsewhere to know not only what really happened, but what is really real, in a basic sense, and how this world, us and god (whose identity is now obscured from us with no place for fellowship...more like Allah than Jehovah) inter-relate. And where would we go? Barth, Dawkins, Enuma Elish? Then, who would we be?
Or, in short:
The nub of it is: if the creation account is not about events (objective causality) in this space-time world, then it is about something else, and the real time-space world is otherly denominated...for which info we have to go elsewhere...where?
‘The
goal of creation, and at the same time the beginning of all that
follows, is the event of God’s Sabbath rest and Sabbath joy, in which
man, too, has been summoned to participate. It is the event of divine
rest in the face of the cosmos completed with the creation of man – a
rest which takes precedence over all of man’s eagerness and zeal to
enter upon his task. Man is created to participate in this rest.’ Karl Barth, Dogmatics III/I, 98.
It reads wonderfully well. It reads as though Barth could be an author on this blog.
But not so.
Barth is famous for putting into different compartments scripture and the contiguous objective space-time causality that we inhabit, that scripture seems to speak to and in which terms scripture is delineated; making nonsense of one or the other!
Because: the creation account is presented in terms of the categories and the contiguous causality that we live in. Recursively, this makes the account congruent with the world that it describes and the world whose terms we share in our existential experience. So, we can make sense of it and take real meaning from it. It gives us a confidence that God has revealed truth to us, and we are not left to the winds of chance.
The world of the account is reflected in a world that has identicial causality with no break in the objective causal continuity between the two, otherwise, one would not make sense in terms of the other and the account would not tell us anything real about this world or God. Which is where Barth is.
The end result would be that the account would have no Real meaning in this world and we would have to seek elsewhere to know not only what really happened, but what is really real, in a basic sense, and how this world, us and god (whose identity is now obscured from us with no place for fellowship...more like Allah than Jehovah) inter-relate. And where would we go? Barth, Dawkins, Enuma Elish? Then, who would we be?
Or, in short:
The nub of it is: if the creation account is not about events (objective causality) in this space-time world, then it is about something else, and the real time-space world is otherly denominated...for which info we have to go elsewhere...where?
30 September 2017
ESV Study Bible
A review that I am much in agreement with, although in enthusiastic disagrement regarding a few points.
My big 'likes':
Additionally, a possible “gap period” is supposed to exist between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, during which a Satanic rebellion occurred. The gap generally is perceived as possibly lasting millions of years, thus accommodating uniformitarian geology. Amazingly, it is argued: “None of these views requires denying that Genesis 1 is historical.” Supposedly, “each of these readings can be squared with other biblical passages that reflect on creation” (2008, 44). How in the name of common logic can the mutually exclusive views of “literal days” and “non-literal days” be harmonized with a biblical narrative that professes to be the inspired word of God?
The author of the introduction is careful to point out that some of the Bible’s genealogical records do not contain strict father-son relationships, and that is true. But if this is intended to suggest that a human longevity of possibly several million years can be accommodated by an elastic genealogy, then the hint is nefarious. Evolutionary chronology flagrantly contradicts Jesus’ statement that humanity existed “from the beginning of the creation” (Mark 10:6), and Paul’s declaration that God’s magnificent universe has been humanly perceived “since the creation of the world” (Romans 1:20). Scripture must not be twisted to conform to pseudo-science.
The ESVSB contends that the biblical text “does not necessarily mean that the flood had to cover the whole earth” (62). The author supposes that it is “questionable” that the flood explains the geological strata, the fossils, etc. (44). This leaves the matter wide open for evolutionary uniformitarianism as opposed to biblical catastrophism.
My big 'likes':
Compromising the Creation Account
In the “Introduction to Genesis” there is an inexcusable compromise with evolutionary chronology. It is alleged that “faithful interpreters” have explained the days of the creation week in a variety of ways. For example, there is the “ordinary days” view that sees the creation days as six periods of twenty-four hours. Others argue that the days represent “geological ages.” Then there is the “work week” of so-called “God days” (whatever those are).Additionally, a possible “gap period” is supposed to exist between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, during which a Satanic rebellion occurred. The gap generally is perceived as possibly lasting millions of years, thus accommodating uniformitarian geology. Amazingly, it is argued: “None of these views requires denying that Genesis 1 is historical.” Supposedly, “each of these readings can be squared with other biblical passages that reflect on creation” (2008, 44). How in the name of common logic can the mutually exclusive views of “literal days” and “non-literal days” be harmonized with a biblical narrative that professes to be the inspired word of God?
The author of the introduction is careful to point out that some of the Bible’s genealogical records do not contain strict father-son relationships, and that is true. But if this is intended to suggest that a human longevity of possibly several million years can be accommodated by an elastic genealogy, then the hint is nefarious. Evolutionary chronology flagrantly contradicts Jesus’ statement that humanity existed “from the beginning of the creation” (Mark 10:6), and Paul’s declaration that God’s magnificent universe has been humanly perceived “since the creation of the world” (Romans 1:20). Scripture must not be twisted to conform to pseudo-science.
The Flood Narrative
The Bible is perfectly clear that the great flood of Noah’s day was universal in its devastation. The Mosaic language could not be plainer concerning the extent of the deluge: “[A]ll the high mountains, that were under the whole heaven were covered. . . . And all flesh died that moved upon the earth” (Genesis 7:19, 21). While it is true that occasionally comprehensive terms are employed in a more limited sense, the context must demand such, and that factor does not obtain in the flood case. For a further discussion of this matter, see Questions About the Genesis Flood.The ESVSB contends that the biblical text “does not necessarily mean that the flood had to cover the whole earth” (62). The author supposes that it is “questionable” that the flood explains the geological strata, the fossils, etc. (44). This leaves the matter wide open for evolutionary uniformitarianism as opposed to biblical catastrophism.
25 September 2017
24 September 2017
Frittering creation
As I was reading it, and reflecting on the frittering of culture as chance, I drew a line from the work of the early evolutionists and their supporters in long age geologists who chorused for random chemical action, chance, as causal of the world we have today.
This instantly invites Rorty’s despair (based on a quote from Yates yearning for justice and truth to be drawn into a single vision, something inevitably absent in a material world defined (?) by randomness).
If this long line sprang from an evolutionary conceptualisation of the Real, then what is the disjunction with Creation? What light does Genesis 1 thrown onto it?
Why, it contradicts it at the first step.
The account tells us not of a universe where chance interactions deliver order, thought and love, but where these come from one who orders in love and wisdom, by his very nature. From one who is person (in community) and who has made us to bear that image.
Creation does not allow room for a chance impersonal universe, but reveals a universe of purpose internally, and intention externally: out of wisdom and love. Two very personal attributes of action.
But, this is thrown over of we hold that the words of purpose and wisdom obscure the reality of chance. Something that figurative views of Genesis 1 invite, and theistic evolutions, their typical end result, entails.
This must be the case, this overthrowing, if the words of purpose and wisdom are not congruent with the acts (events in contiguous time-space) that make sense in the world we inhabit, as image bearers of the creator, and relate the purposeful move of the creator in creating. This is so because if the creation is sensible in terms that have meaning for the image-bearer in their relationship to the image-maker, in terms that are real within and to the creation in which is set their fellowship in meaningful terms (giving life in the relationship of love and purpose), then something else is really true, and really sets the structure of the Real.
The frittering of epistemology into chance events reflected in contemporary culture presumes the chance structure of an evolutionary reality. The Creation is fundamentally not like this and so the run of chance will push us further from the real world in though and action, with the end result being some form of intellectual, if not political tyranny.
The two are not joinable. Thus Rorty’s despair, Paul’s warnings and the imperative to rely on the creation account as being grounded in events dimensioned as are any event sequence that we, the image-bearers, have existential familiarity with (‘existential’ as congruent existence, not mid 20C philosophy).
26 August 2017
I blame Aristotle
Here ends the popular modern misattribution of terracentricity and fixity of the species to the Bible. No, it was Aristotle.
Below a relevant page from Copleston's History of Philosophy.
Below a relevant page from Copleston's History of Philosophy.
8 August 2017
Genre
You've probably been in a discussion in a Bible study group, where one of the sage ones, patiently explains that understanding Genesis 1 starts with its 'genre'. A fancy word for literary type. Why they don't say 'type' I don't know.
But what is the 'genre' of Genesis 1?
It's not peotry...we can look at the psalms and see what Hebrew poetry is.
It's not symbolic...we get that lesson in Ezekiel...and a bit more in Revelation.
It's not quite history either: compare to the later pentateuch or Acts...a little different.
What are we left with?
Chronicle!
That is, a time-ordered list of events.
The writer has driven the point of 'time' and 'sequence' home in every possible way while retaining literary elegance.
Time markers are prominent:
We start with 'in the beginning', then after a set of events: set with chronoligical grammar (the 'waw' consecutive: 'then this happened' recurs through out the creation passage.
Each day is numbered and delineated so that we know what type of day is meant: an evening-morning type day, of course!
Numbers 7 has a similar structure, and it is clearly a chronicle as well.
Compare this with a snippet from Enuma Elish; a pagan theogony that some have the gall to compare to Genesis 1.
Quite the opposite to Genesis 1.
On history: despite this, there are clear historical elements in Gen 1. History compared to chronicle adds meaning, if not analysis. It is not only 'that' something happened, but 'why' and the consequences. It puts events into an existential coherence that Gen 1 certainly does.
The point I want to drive, tho' is that the objective chronological markers of sequence frame this narrative with unmistakable self-conscious precision.
But what is the 'genre' of Genesis 1?
It's not peotry...we can look at the psalms and see what Hebrew poetry is.
It's not symbolic...we get that lesson in Ezekiel...and a bit more in Revelation.
It's not quite history either: compare to the later pentateuch or Acts...a little different.
What are we left with?
Chronicle!
That is, a time-ordered list of events.
The writer has driven the point of 'time' and 'sequence' home in every possible way while retaining literary elegance.
Time markers are prominent:
We start with 'in the beginning', then after a set of events: set with chronoligical grammar (the 'waw' consecutive: 'then this happened' recurs through out the creation passage.
Each day is numbered and delineated so that we know what type of day is meant: an evening-morning type day, of course!
Numbers 7 has a similar structure, and it is clearly a chronicle as well.
Compare this with a snippet from Enuma Elish; a pagan theogony that some have the gall to compare to Genesis 1.
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,Here and throughout EE uses the chronological imprecession of pagan myth: time markers are not important to myth, in fact, not having them is the important thing to de-historicise the myth and place it beyond enquiry.
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being...
Ages increased,...
Then Ansar and Kisar were created, and over them....
Long were the days, then there came forth.....
Quite the opposite to Genesis 1.
On history: despite this, there are clear historical elements in Gen 1. History compared to chronicle adds meaning, if not analysis. It is not only 'that' something happened, but 'why' and the consequences. It puts events into an existential coherence that Gen 1 certainly does.
The point I want to drive, tho' is that the objective chronological markers of sequence frame this narrative with unmistakable self-conscious precision.
3 August 2017
The Gumbel Error
My previous post on Nikki Gumbel's removal of 'when' from history and giving it to science (he means, of course physical science, as history is a 'science' in that it seeks knowledge) left a gap: the gap was about time itself and its place in the Genesis narrative. I've already dealt with this from one perspective, but there is another I want to bring here.
The presumption that the time markers in Genesis are not germane to the revelation derives from an implicit physicalism: an ontological error that parts company with both the dualism of the Bible, and its concrete realism. Because it presumes that time is a 'given' its action within creation is not recognised and thus the error also parts company with time's existential dependence: that 'word' has priority. Moreover, 'word' strictly in the John 1:1-3 sense. Not a logos of the Greek kind, but the word as going out from the love of God as triune communion of unified will.
Time is integral to the revelation as a created thing, and the markers of time in the creation passage show not only that God orders within time, but uses time to bring order; he using time as the domain of fellowship within the creation (I don't know how the new creation will work in this connection...we'll have to wait and see) where it provides a shared constraint-space definitional of event sequence. Time forms the event-space in which we can join in relationship. Indeed, in which we are shown that the event-space is God's and is where he joins us in relationship.
To put this to one side is firstly a hermeneutical arrogance, then it treats time as an 'accident' of material, almost putting it behind God and not an essential part of the revelation. If God use the time markers as simply symbolic of something else ('what' is never canvassed), one would have to wonder at the specificity of the markers, the deliberation of the pace of creation, the connection formed by his people Israel reflecting his creation and use of time having their life pattern reflect God's.
But, time has to be signficant, and more than symbolic theologically (because the language denies a symbolic role and requires a concrete role for it), as time is our universal constraint: it dominates everything that we do and think; it is inescapable.
Physicalism evacuates time of its theological significance. The proponents fall back to the implicit materialism. Their reference to a paganised framework of understanding (that there are universal givens apart from God) this entails is a theological embarrasment.
The presumption that the time markers in Genesis are not germane to the revelation derives from an implicit physicalism: an ontological error that parts company with both the dualism of the Bible, and its concrete realism. Because it presumes that time is a 'given' its action within creation is not recognised and thus the error also parts company with time's existential dependence: that 'word' has priority. Moreover, 'word' strictly in the John 1:1-3 sense. Not a logos of the Greek kind, but the word as going out from the love of God as triune communion of unified will.
Time is integral to the revelation as a created thing, and the markers of time in the creation passage show not only that God orders within time, but uses time to bring order; he using time as the domain of fellowship within the creation (I don't know how the new creation will work in this connection...we'll have to wait and see) where it provides a shared constraint-space definitional of event sequence. Time forms the event-space in which we can join in relationship. Indeed, in which we are shown that the event-space is God's and is where he joins us in relationship.
To put this to one side is firstly a hermeneutical arrogance, then it treats time as an 'accident' of material, almost putting it behind God and not an essential part of the revelation. If God use the time markers as simply symbolic of something else ('what' is never canvassed), one would have to wonder at the specificity of the markers, the deliberation of the pace of creation, the connection formed by his people Israel reflecting his creation and use of time having their life pattern reflect God's.
But, time has to be signficant, and more than symbolic theologically (because the language denies a symbolic role and requires a concrete role for it), as time is our universal constraint: it dominates everything that we do and think; it is inescapable.
Physicalism evacuates time of its theological significance. The proponents fall back to the implicit materialism. Their reference to a paganised framework of understanding (that there are universal givens apart from God) this entails is a theological embarrasment.
Alpha boob
I saw the second video of the new Alpha course where Gumbel tells us that Jesus is the creator walking on earth. Good. Then, opps, 'I've mentioned creation, I'd better hose down that one straight away'. So he moves onto science and assets its non-connection with history (the Bible).
He tells us that science is about how and when, but the Bible tells us about who and why. He gives us the analogy of a birthday cake.
Now, when did 'when' slip into the domain of science? I don't remember that happening!
Nikki clearly wants to offset any recourse to the timing of early history in Genesis 1-11, and let us slip comfortably into the idea that Genesis' timing is something to do with 'who and why' isolated from science and its 'how and when'. Thus letting science appear to take the lead when it comes to the understanding of time in ancient texts, Genesis in particular.
But 'when' is always history, my friend, and in early Genesis (1-11) reaches far more into our relationship with God, and God's relationship with his creation than a bare 'scientific' fact. It carries profound implications for who God is in relation to us, and how the Bible positions itself as revelation.
Gumbel fails to tease out the ontological issues that Genesis 1-11 deals with and the setting that God thereby delineates for his fellowship with us, his creation-in-his-image.
Gumbel also fails to deal with the evidence in the text (a fail for an ex-barrister, let alone a theologian): its form of language (consecutive narrative), its time references (natural days delineated in two ways, just to make sure we follow), its style (unadorned fact), its reference by other parts of Scripture (Exodus 20:11, for example, and note God's direct speech in this passage), its parallel with other passages of historical narrative (Numbers 7 springs to mind), and its 'first philosophy' of word, not matter (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 11:3).
So Alpha carefully places the train of developing belief on tracks that lead through the dark tunnel of pagan confusion before it ends at the precipice of materialism's emptiness.
Thus The Gumbel Error.
He tells us that science is about how and when, but the Bible tells us about who and why. He gives us the analogy of a birthday cake.
Now, when did 'when' slip into the domain of science? I don't remember that happening!
Nikki clearly wants to offset any recourse to the timing of early history in Genesis 1-11, and let us slip comfortably into the idea that Genesis' timing is something to do with 'who and why' isolated from science and its 'how and when'. Thus letting science appear to take the lead when it comes to the understanding of time in ancient texts, Genesis in particular.
But 'when' is always history, my friend, and in early Genesis (1-11) reaches far more into our relationship with God, and God's relationship with his creation than a bare 'scientific' fact. It carries profound implications for who God is in relation to us, and how the Bible positions itself as revelation.
Gumbel fails to tease out the ontological issues that Genesis 1-11 deals with and the setting that God thereby delineates for his fellowship with us, his creation-in-his-image.
Gumbel also fails to deal with the evidence in the text (a fail for an ex-barrister, let alone a theologian): its form of language (consecutive narrative), its time references (natural days delineated in two ways, just to make sure we follow), its style (unadorned fact), its reference by other parts of Scripture (Exodus 20:11, for example, and note God's direct speech in this passage), its parallel with other passages of historical narrative (Numbers 7 springs to mind), and its 'first philosophy' of word, not matter (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 11:3).
So Alpha carefully places the train of developing belief on tracks that lead through the dark tunnel of pagan confusion before it ends at the precipice of materialism's emptiness.
Thus The Gumbel Error.
26 July 2017
How to start a conversation.
Many years ago in a Bible study I was asked for my thoughts on Genesis 1. I gave the direct non-pagan view, which seemed to evoke some surprise.
Now I would start in one of two ways:
In an essay on Wittgenstein, the writer points out the split in Wittgenstein's work of the use of langauge to talk about a chair: a brute fact; and a subjective 'event'. He has to say that these are different; but cannot live as though they are...
Or
In a wonderful essay by Richard Rorty, he approvingly quotes Yates' yearning to be able to capture reality and justice in a single vision. He cannot. He cannot see how to, he cannot integrate his delight in the beauty of orchids with his desire for justice. His world, which he experiences as an integral continuity, fails his own explanatory program...
The only place these seemingly disparate (but only because of entrenched philosophical mistakes endemic in modern thought) elements of the world are brought together is in Genesis 1, and its elaboration in John 1:1.
I leave the rest to you, dear reader.
Now I would start in one of two ways:
In an essay on Wittgenstein, the writer points out the split in Wittgenstein's work of the use of langauge to talk about a chair: a brute fact; and a subjective 'event'. He has to say that these are different; but cannot live as though they are...
Or
In a wonderful essay by Richard Rorty, he approvingly quotes Yates' yearning to be able to capture reality and justice in a single vision. He cannot. He cannot see how to, he cannot integrate his delight in the beauty of orchids with his desire for justice. His world, which he experiences as an integral continuity, fails his own explanatory program...
The only place these seemingly disparate (but only because of entrenched philosophical mistakes endemic in modern thought) elements of the world are brought together is in Genesis 1, and its elaboration in John 1:1.
I leave the rest to you, dear reader.
22 July 2017
The eye!
Dick Dawkins is well known in some circles for his story of the evolution of sight, or 'the eye'. It starts with a light sensitive spot on a worm, and goes from there.
His story is what I call a Victorian gross morphology fantasy. It considers only the macroscopic anatomy, has some vague inferences about underlying bio-chemical processes, and that's it.
Now let's think about the human eye and its orchestration of quasi independent sub-systems that all had to come together to give us what we have today.
Let's start with the eye itself.
Its shape, various membranes, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, chemical supplies (to maintain light sensitivity) and differentiated rods and cones all had to come together to work together. Any single element by itself would have been eliminated as biologically useless.
The eye-brain system would have to be functional. Nervous connections to the appropraite part of the brain would have to form in step with the formation of the eye as an anatomical component. The 'software' would have to keep step with the 'hardware'. All the eye does is create an image optically on the retina. This then gets decomposed into electric impulses that go to a part of the brain that then assembles these impulses into something that is mentally meaningful for the organism (us). Each step requires substantial 'evolution': optical accuracy and control, translation to electrical impulses, transmission to the brain, some form of re-coding, formation of the mental impression of an image, and then this impression's meaningfulness to us! The orchestrated systems then keep track of the images as they change, smoothing them into a stable continuous image of the scene around us. None of this complex processesing, no use for the eye. No eye.
Now this system has to coordinate information that comes from the eye muscles, that point the eye, and those that focus it. They also have to coordinate with the amount of light coming in as the pupil changes size due to movement of the iris.
This enables the eye-brain system to maintain its stability of orientation, focus and illumination as it assembles moving images.
The body also moves on its axes. The eye-brain-ocular feedback system needs to coordinate with the balance mechanism and its whole system: detection organs and a processing centre in the brain. This helps to maintain a stable image as we move, lean over, turn around...
While the eye as a sense organ is 'evolving' its controlling muscles, blood supply and ancilliary nervous network need to keep up with it.
The eye's housing and accessories need to 'evolve' in line with this: facial bone structure, eye socket, skin, and surrounding (non-occular) muscles and their control system have to keep in step. The external apparatus, and eye lubricant system needs to be there: tear ducts, detector and triggering mechanisms, eyebrows, eye lashes, the lids and blinking system have to happen.
This doesn't even touch on the complexity of the eye's internal anatomy and its fine visual control features.
Then there's hand-eye, foot-eye coordination where major systems of systems interact to enable us to write, play tennis, produce sculptures and do the washing.
I've not mentioned the integration of the eye's lubrication system with another meta-system: emotions. The connection between feelings of supreme joy or suffering, or pain (physical or emotional) and the production of tears!
Genetic information drives all this, and not a simple change in DNA 'letters' here and there, randomly. Because the genetic information system is multiplexed several 'letters' have to change in concord. And groups of multiplexed letter sets need to change in 'super-concord' to bring chemical, nervous, interpretive facility and musculo-skeletal anatomy to the party.
As Dawkins might assert: 'simple'!
His story is what I call a Victorian gross morphology fantasy. It considers only the macroscopic anatomy, has some vague inferences about underlying bio-chemical processes, and that's it.
Now let's think about the human eye and its orchestration of quasi independent sub-systems that all had to come together to give us what we have today.
Let's start with the eye itself.
Its shape, various membranes, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, chemical supplies (to maintain light sensitivity) and differentiated rods and cones all had to come together to work together. Any single element by itself would have been eliminated as biologically useless.
The eye-brain system would have to be functional. Nervous connections to the appropraite part of the brain would have to form in step with the formation of the eye as an anatomical component. The 'software' would have to keep step with the 'hardware'. All the eye does is create an image optically on the retina. This then gets decomposed into electric impulses that go to a part of the brain that then assembles these impulses into something that is mentally meaningful for the organism (us). Each step requires substantial 'evolution': optical accuracy and control, translation to electrical impulses, transmission to the brain, some form of re-coding, formation of the mental impression of an image, and then this impression's meaningfulness to us! The orchestrated systems then keep track of the images as they change, smoothing them into a stable continuous image of the scene around us. None of this complex processesing, no use for the eye. No eye.
Now this system has to coordinate information that comes from the eye muscles, that point the eye, and those that focus it. They also have to coordinate with the amount of light coming in as the pupil changes size due to movement of the iris.
This enables the eye-brain system to maintain its stability of orientation, focus and illumination as it assembles moving images.
The body also moves on its axes. The eye-brain-ocular feedback system needs to coordinate with the balance mechanism and its whole system: detection organs and a processing centre in the brain. This helps to maintain a stable image as we move, lean over, turn around...
While the eye as a sense organ is 'evolving' its controlling muscles, blood supply and ancilliary nervous network need to keep up with it.
The eye's housing and accessories need to 'evolve' in line with this: facial bone structure, eye socket, skin, and surrounding (non-occular) muscles and their control system have to keep in step. The external apparatus, and eye lubricant system needs to be there: tear ducts, detector and triggering mechanisms, eyebrows, eye lashes, the lids and blinking system have to happen.
This doesn't even touch on the complexity of the eye's internal anatomy and its fine visual control features.
Then there's hand-eye, foot-eye coordination where major systems of systems interact to enable us to write, play tennis, produce sculptures and do the washing.
I've not mentioned the integration of the eye's lubrication system with another meta-system: emotions. The connection between feelings of supreme joy or suffering, or pain (physical or emotional) and the production of tears!
Genetic information drives all this, and not a simple change in DNA 'letters' here and there, randomly. Because the genetic information system is multiplexed several 'letters' have to change in concord. And groups of multiplexed letter sets need to change in 'super-concord' to bring chemical, nervous, interpretive facility and musculo-skeletal anatomy to the party.
As Dawkins might assert: 'simple'!
7 July 2017
Time is the hero
‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot … given so much time the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable and the probably virtually certainly certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.'
Wald, G., The origin of life; in: Physics and Chemistry of Life, p. 12, 1955
Of course, this is nonsense, and Wald probably knew it. Stochastic chemistry does not make the impossible possible. That which is impossible will not happen. All it does is allow the less likely to occur. No matter how long we wait, people will not grow younger and water will not flow up hill.
However, this view does up the ante for Theistic-evolution. Time is given agency, and Wald gives it the honour of creating, in effect.
Contrast this with Paul in Colossians: 1:6 For by him [Christ] all things were created...2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.
Time as agent could well be one of those principles.
And consider this in the light of Hebrews 11:3:
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
The primacy of word and not time, ‘chance’ or ‘the “impossible” becoming possible! What are theistic evolutionists doing? Implicitly they are placing the material outcome prior to the creating word of God who is love!
The timing of creation in Genesis 1, etc. obstructs pagan conceptualisations of ‘creation’ or ‘origins’ more generally. There is inevitably a timelessness to these conceptualisations, with what Eliade (in The Myth of the Eternal Return) refers to as a sacralised, or mythologised use of time, to disconnect us and the world of gods; time here is vague, allusive, cannot be pinned down...read Enuma Elish carefully. Its time references avoid being pinned down, and are unclear...like a liar in a police interview, attempting to make a case by being unclear. Of course, it does not and cannot work. We see through it immediately.
In the creation account, many things are being done theologically that don’t often get explored. One of them is that the use of concrete time references brings the creation into the existential frame that we occupy. God in making concrete time the one that he acts in, sharing his domain of action with us: he forms fellowship between us and himself, and starts the long process of establishing his credential for being worshipped by his successive acts in history (in the history that defines our worship of him). Denials that mutate the timing of Genesis 1 into something other than concrete timing that we understand destroys this: symbolic time, a 'framework' of events, the general theistic evolutionary reconfigurations of creation destroy the primary credential that God presents to us: that he created, and in terms that are congruent with our experience of time, space and 'extension'. What 'god' then does this leave us with? How is his action giving sense to our experiental engagement with history?
In this context it is critical to note that the Jewish sense of time was different from the symbolic or mythically indeterminate time, or the ‘sacred’ time of paganism that has to keep its ‘gods’ away from the real world, because they in fact have no place there. Theistic evolution takes us to this empty room. But for Jews time was unilinear rather than pagan cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall movement with and orchestration in 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, and it starts with God embarking on creation by working in the flow of history as we do: forming a common experience, a common existential ground in the common days of working then rest. It is the start of God’s tabernacling with those he created in his image...in concrete acts that occurred in real time with real extension, as the word as prime went out to form the material world, the setting of our fellowship with our creator.
If we reject this: that the word was God and with God...etc, then we are left with Wald's time that can do anything...and an unworshipable ‘god’ who has left us for a vague untimed ‘sacred’ world...the world we are not in and cannot be in, the world where we have no fellowship with our creator.
Wald, G., The origin of life; in: Physics and Chemistry of Life, p. 12, 1955
Of course, this is nonsense, and Wald probably knew it. Stochastic chemistry does not make the impossible possible. That which is impossible will not happen. All it does is allow the less likely to occur. No matter how long we wait, people will not grow younger and water will not flow up hill.
However, this view does up the ante for Theistic-evolution. Time is given agency, and Wald gives it the honour of creating, in effect.
Contrast this with Paul in Colossians: 1:6 For by him [Christ] all things were created...2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.
Time as agent could well be one of those principles.
And consider this in the light of Hebrews 11:3:
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
The primacy of word and not time, ‘chance’ or ‘the “impossible” becoming possible! What are theistic evolutionists doing? Implicitly they are placing the material outcome prior to the creating word of God who is love!
The timing of creation in Genesis 1, etc. obstructs pagan conceptualisations of ‘creation’ or ‘origins’ more generally. There is inevitably a timelessness to these conceptualisations, with what Eliade (in The Myth of the Eternal Return) refers to as a sacralised, or mythologised use of time, to disconnect us and the world of gods; time here is vague, allusive, cannot be pinned down...read Enuma Elish carefully. Its time references avoid being pinned down, and are unclear...like a liar in a police interview, attempting to make a case by being unclear. Of course, it does not and cannot work. We see through it immediately.
In the creation account, many things are being done theologically that don’t often get explored. One of them is that the use of concrete time references brings the creation into the existential frame that we occupy. God in making concrete time the one that he acts in, sharing his domain of action with us: he forms fellowship between us and himself, and starts the long process of establishing his credential for being worshipped by his successive acts in history (in the history that defines our worship of him). Denials that mutate the timing of Genesis 1 into something other than concrete timing that we understand destroys this: symbolic time, a 'framework' of events, the general theistic evolutionary reconfigurations of creation destroy the primary credential that God presents to us: that he created, and in terms that are congruent with our experience of time, space and 'extension'. What 'god' then does this leave us with? How is his action giving sense to our experiental engagement with history?
In this context it is critical to note that the Jewish sense of time was different from the symbolic or mythically indeterminate time, or the ‘sacred’ time of paganism that has to keep its ‘gods’ away from the real world, because they in fact have no place there. Theistic evolution takes us to this empty room. But for Jews time was unilinear rather than pagan cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall movement with and orchestration in 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, and it starts with God embarking on creation by working in the flow of history as we do: forming a common experience, a common existential ground in the common days of working then rest. It is the start of God’s tabernacling with those he created in his image...in concrete acts that occurred in real time with real extension, as the word as prime went out to form the material world, the setting of our fellowship with our creator.
If we reject this: that the word was God and with God...etc, then we are left with Wald's time that can do anything...and an unworshipable ‘god’ who has left us for a vague untimed ‘sacred’ world...the world we are not in and cannot be in, the world where we have no fellowship with our creator.
20 May 2017
6 days...really?
In The Economist:
Or, perhaps it is a counter-story to rebut the stories of Islamic supremacy that abound in the Islamic fairy story, the Koran
No, perhaps it is a type of the Temple Theology that points to Jewish wishful thinking for the old days...
Or, perhaps it is the account of something that happened.
If I believe an Israeli solder about this, I believe God about his 6-day story.
Doing so I can resist the pressure around me to start with a materially framed reality and proceed with a God-first ontology.
- In the beginning they destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and knocked out the planes of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. That was Monday.
- Then they broke Egypt’s massive defences in Sinai. That was Tuesday.
- Next, they took the old city of Jerusalem and prayed. That was Wednesday.
- Then they reached the Suez Canal. That was Thursday.
- They ascended the Golan Heights. That was Friday.
- Then they took the peaks overlooking the plain of Damascus. In the evening the world declared a ceasefire. That was Saturday.
- And on the seventh day the soldiers of Israel rested.
Or, perhaps it is a counter-story to rebut the stories of Islamic supremacy that abound in the Islamic fairy story, the Koran
No, perhaps it is a type of the Temple Theology that points to Jewish wishful thinking for the old days...
Or, perhaps it is the account of something that happened.
If I believe an Israeli solder about this, I believe God about his 6-day story.
Doing so I can resist the pressure around me to start with a materially framed reality and proceed with a God-first ontology.
30 April 2017
Could have...
I love the way people claim that God 'could have' 'used' evolution.
I don't know what 'used' is supposed to mean;do we posit a mechanism, and what is it; how are the links made in absence of God telling us...but what are we to do with 'could have'?
He either did or didn't; if he 'could have' show us how; give us an argument that understands evolution's historic contempt for the idea of a relating god from Epicurus onwards; let's see how the modern development of the idea intersects with a concrete actual God in a concrete actual world...'could have'?
I could have bought out BHP...if I had the money...I could have swum naked to Chile...if I could have...this phrase is an embarrasment of absence in argument and stands for nothing but an intellectual black hole: everything enters, and nothing comes out.
If this is merely a logical 'could have' it gets us nowhere, particularly as it pretends that the logic is patent, which it is not, and leaves it to the listener to imagine what the proponent's logic is and insert it. Its a bluff; God could not have used evolution, because he told us that he didn't. God doesn't deal in hypotheticals.
But there's more to it:
God 'could have' used evolution, but only if we rob both of their meaning. An easy error that is made is to think that 'evolution' is a real thing in the world; it is not! It is a theory that exists in the human mind. It was made up expressly to eliminate God. So 'evolution' and 'creation' (or 'design') are only 'compatible' if we talk about two things that didn't happen, two things that seem to float in an ill-considered make believe.
In the real world Evolution = not by God; creation = by God. So to put them together is to claim that God used 'not by God' to create, celebrating Epicurus' separation of the 'gods' and the world in a most peculiar fashion.
Why would we follow a pagan?
Moreover, the small changes have to be 'evolutions' small changes from ooze to humans; there is no way this has been, or seemingly could be, explained in the real world (not the imagination of materialists who seem to think that it could have happened...).
So God could not have 'used' 'not by God' as the idea evaporates in a puff of meaninglessness.
I don't know what 'used' is supposed to mean;do we posit a mechanism, and what is it; how are the links made in absence of God telling us...but what are we to do with 'could have'?
He either did or didn't; if he 'could have' show us how; give us an argument that understands evolution's historic contempt for the idea of a relating god from Epicurus onwards; let's see how the modern development of the idea intersects with a concrete actual God in a concrete actual world...'could have'?
I could have bought out BHP...if I had the money...I could have swum naked to Chile...if I could have...this phrase is an embarrasment of absence in argument and stands for nothing but an intellectual black hole: everything enters, and nothing comes out.
If this is merely a logical 'could have' it gets us nowhere, particularly as it pretends that the logic is patent, which it is not, and leaves it to the listener to imagine what the proponent's logic is and insert it. Its a bluff; God could not have used evolution, because he told us that he didn't. God doesn't deal in hypotheticals.
But there's more to it:
God 'could have' used evolution, but only if we rob both of their meaning. An easy error that is made is to think that 'evolution' is a real thing in the world; it is not! It is a theory that exists in the human mind. It was made up expressly to eliminate God. So 'evolution' and 'creation' (or 'design') are only 'compatible' if we talk about two things that didn't happen, two things that seem to float in an ill-considered make believe.
In the real world Evolution = not by God; creation = by God. So to put them together is to claim that God used 'not by God' to create, celebrating Epicurus' separation of the 'gods' and the world in a most peculiar fashion.
Why would we follow a pagan?
Moreover, the small changes have to be 'evolutions' small changes from ooze to humans; there is no way this has been, or seemingly could be, explained in the real world (not the imagination of materialists who seem to think that it could have happened...).
So God could not have 'used' 'not by God' as the idea evaporates in a puff of meaninglessness.
25 April 2017
An atheist tells us
Theistic evolutionists wax lyrical about the compatibility of the biblical doctrine of creation, and materialist ontology.
One atheist is unmoved (a comment on the Andrew Bolt Herald Sun blog):
One atheist is unmoved (a comment on the Andrew Bolt Herald Sun blog):
Atheist1
Within a materialist framing, of course, I don't see where 'incredible' fits in though.
La La Land
Theistic evolutionists live in a different world to you and I. They live in La La Land. A world where belief about what is basic has no influence on all derivitive beliefs.
You and I and Peter Singer live in the real world. Singer is mistaken...he accepts evolution as explanatory of the real world. I do not. My belief springs from the word of God and leads where God lays out the path; Singer's belief leads elsewhere, as shows the quote below from his book Writings on an Ethical Life (Fourth Estate, 2000). TE-ers attempt to combine these 'worlds' into one; but it doesn't work, and leads (ill)logically to Singer's position. If the world truly is as Darwin (and Singer) believe, then it is so; if not, they are mistaken. There is no bridge between them.
Singer is mistaken about Coperncius and Galileo, who overturned not the biblical world, but the Aristotelian one...and good thing too; trouble is, TE-ers have their feet stuck in Aristotle, and not Moses.
You and I and Peter Singer live in the real world. Singer is mistaken...he accepts evolution as explanatory of the real world. I do not. My belief springs from the word of God and leads where God lays out the path; Singer's belief leads elsewhere, as shows the quote below from his book Writings on an Ethical Life (Fourth Estate, 2000). TE-ers attempt to combine these 'worlds' into one; but it doesn't work, and leads (ill)logically to Singer's position. If the world truly is as Darwin (and Singer) believe, then it is so; if not, they are mistaken. There is no bridge between them.
KAK
I'm sure you are as turned off as I am by the routine of many American media award winners who want to 'thank Jesus' for their gong. Now, I don't want to decry their faith, but it sometimes seems like hollow sloganeering.
We do it differently in Australia. Here's the ending of Kerrie-Anne Kennerely's 2017 Logies acceptance speech:
"Darwin said it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that will survive, it is the most adaptable to change. So thank you TV WEEK, thank you mum, thank you audience."
Not only no mention of God, but, our theistic evolutionist friends might note that her reference to Darwin does not conduct any hint of the creation being out of love and by God using a 'method' that is congenial to modern materialism.
Indeed, being completely oblivious to any hint of a loving creator it didn't lead her to praise her him in any way, nor did it suggest that the final reality is nevertheless persons in fellowship; nup, it was self centred (she is the one 'adaptable to change') built on random physical events that seem to presume a reality where the material is final.
I think the theistic-evolution project is a dead end idea running off the main street of materialism, and too weak to mount any criticism of said materialism.
We do it differently in Australia. Here's the ending of Kerrie-Anne Kennerely's 2017 Logies acceptance speech:
"Darwin said it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that will survive, it is the most adaptable to change. So thank you TV WEEK, thank you mum, thank you audience."
Not only no mention of God, but, our theistic evolutionist friends might note that her reference to Darwin does not conduct any hint of the creation being out of love and by God using a 'method' that is congenial to modern materialism.
Indeed, being completely oblivious to any hint of a loving creator it didn't lead her to praise her him in any way, nor did it suggest that the final reality is nevertheless persons in fellowship; nup, it was self centred (she is the one 'adaptable to change') built on random physical events that seem to presume a reality where the material is final.
I think the theistic-evolution project is a dead end idea running off the main street of materialism, and too weak to mount any criticism of said materialism.
11 February 2017
What's the chance?
Often we talk about the probability of things in evolution, of life forming by natural processes, for example. Murray Eden put the nail in this with a paper he gave at the Wistar Institute many decades ago on the mathematical challenges to evolution.
But, what does it mean to have a probability of a 'one-off' event?
Some quotes from the very much pro-evolutionist book A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried (pp. 206-7). Emphasis mine.
But, what does it mean to have a probability of a 'one-off' event?
Some quotes from the very much pro-evolutionist book A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried (pp. 206-7). Emphasis mine.
So here's a clue about what to do when you know nothing about the probabilities in the system you want to study. Choose a probability distribution that maximizes the entropy! Maximum entropy means maximum ignroance, and if you know nothing, ignorance is by definition at a maximum. Assuming maximum entropy/ignorance then is not just an assumption; it's a factual statement about your situation.And, there's the rub. When we talk about the 'probability' of life evolving by chance, it must be a type of 'blunt instrument' probability because it remains to be established that there is anything possible in the story of life evolving by known processes. Life is a very low entropy phenomenon and needs a mechanism to overcome the comparitively high entropy equilibrium of the environment and then to keep it there as it 'evolves' the components, inter-dependent sub-systems and dependent machinery to do the job.
...
But what, exactly, does it mean to 'maximize the entropy'? It simply means choosing the probability distribution that would result from adding up all the possibilities permited by the laws of nature (since you know nothing you cannot leave out anything that's possible).
4 February 2017
Paley's watch
Paley's watch remains one of the most famous arguments for design being produced by a designer. Of course the world and creationist discourse has moved on, but there are those who keep running the arguments of previous centuries and thinking they are cool in so doing.
The typical pro discussion runs this way.
But there's more:
I wonder if a watch is truly complex. It is ordered, no doubt, but it is fairly simple even as machines go: cogs and springs, essentially. Although the dependency chains from any component would be staggering, let alone the interactions between the chains to produce a watch.
However, I think the issue is that coming across a watch in a field we come across something that is not in equilibrium with its environment and that could not be produced by any local equilibrating process. It has very low entropy and very high specified information producing a radical disequilibrium in an artifact with strongly specified function. A mechanism/s is required to achieve this state in the absence of disequilibrating process.
The heart of Paley's argument is that this state is typically and reasonably achieved by a designer; that is, one who applies intelligence to the organisation of materials and processes, rather than the stochastic interplay of 'natural' factors which produce equilibrium even in the short run.
The typical pro discussion runs this way.
But there's more:
I wonder if a watch is truly complex. It is ordered, no doubt, but it is fairly simple even as machines go: cogs and springs, essentially. Although the dependency chains from any component would be staggering, let alone the interactions between the chains to produce a watch.
However, I think the issue is that coming across a watch in a field we come across something that is not in equilibrium with its environment and that could not be produced by any local equilibrating process. It has very low entropy and very high specified information producing a radical disequilibrium in an artifact with strongly specified function. A mechanism/s is required to achieve this state in the absence of disequilibrating process.
The heart of Paley's argument is that this state is typically and reasonably achieved by a designer; that is, one who applies intelligence to the organisation of materials and processes, rather than the stochastic interplay of 'natural' factors which produce equilibrium even in the short run.
29 January 2017
Creation by God...or was it Hayden?
I was amused to hear the announcer on ABC FM intro The Creation by Haydn, explaining that the problem for the librettist was that there was no story!
Unlike those who would have us believe that the creation account is (merely) a story, an arts person can see the blinding obvious: there's no story here folks, just facts; move along now.
Thus, of course, Haydn's librettist had to use his imagination to make a story out of the bare account he had to work from.
Unlike those who would have us believe that the creation account is (merely) a story, an arts person can see the blinding obvious: there's no story here folks, just facts; move along now.
Thus, of course, Haydn's librettist had to use his imagination to make a story out of the bare account he had to work from.
25 January 2017
Scientist-satirising sense of humour
Creation issues pop up everywhere.
I came across this reference in Wheels Magazine from late 2015, by Stephen Corby (reviewing the Lamborghini Huracan; nice car too).
He even had a graphic of some fossils on the page too, just so we would remember what he was talking about.
Aside from getting it wrong (his view quotes an idea that was around centuries ago), and not understanding that fossils are evidence of rapid flood-like burial, he did have one observation, bottom, that shows how the average person views the history of death that evolution requires.
I came across this reference in Wheels Magazine from late 2015, by Stephen Corby (reviewing the Lamborghini Huracan; nice car too).
He even had a graphic of some fossils on the page too, just so we would remember what he was talking about.
Aside from getting it wrong (his view quotes an idea that was around centuries ago), and not understanding that fossils are evidence of rapid flood-like burial, he did have one observation, bottom, that shows how the average person views the history of death that evolution requires.
23 January 2017
How do I tell my minister #2?
Using an illustration can be helpful.
Eg. Anyone could build a suspension bridge, but an engineer will do it quickly, efficiently, economically, safely and fit for purpose. Or would you prefer an evolutionary approach: almost endless mistakes, dead ends, death and disaster?
Perhaps you'd like to take your car to an evolutionary mechanic? He'd use any old part on any old location, may try water in the petrol tank...just trial an error for a couple of years, instead of an expert service that would have your car back in a day.
Contrast Proverbs 3:19-20: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, By understanding He established the heavens.
People will talk of using 'evolutionary' processes: I quip "oh, full of waste, frustration, dead ends, delay and mistakes; how is that good?"
Compare Romans 4:17b: there's no foolish delay here, but God creating through his call.
Creation is full of purpose; evolution is devoid of it.
Eg. Anyone could build a suspension bridge, but an engineer will do it quickly, efficiently, economically, safely and fit for purpose. Or would you prefer an evolutionary approach: almost endless mistakes, dead ends, death and disaster?
Perhaps you'd like to take your car to an evolutionary mechanic? He'd use any old part on any old location, may try water in the petrol tank...just trial an error for a couple of years, instead of an expert service that would have your car back in a day.
Contrast Proverbs 3:19-20: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, By understanding He established the heavens.
People will talk of using 'evolutionary' processes: I quip "oh, full of waste, frustration, dead ends, delay and mistakes; how is that good?"
Compare Romans 4:17b: there's no foolish delay here, but God creating through his call.
Creation is full of purpose; evolution is devoid of it.
21 January 2017
How do I tell my evolutionist minister about creation?
Firstly, I'd ask why he or she sees a difference in the Scriptures between God's action in respect of the physical world, and his action in the spiritual world when God integrates the two from the start.
If God can't tell us what really happened and the factual basis for relationship with him (and each other) and what his love 'really' did, then how can we have any faith, given that God as creator is the basis and starting point of faith? The creation account demonstrates our link with God, it doesn't merely assert it in story-book fashion, or as an illustration with a tenuous link with the real world, but tells us how it came about, with objective clarity and detail that dismisses any attempt to 'paganise' it.
Many ministers split the two, in a move that has more to do with philosophical Idealism than the 'concrete realism' of the Bible. This allows them to follow pagan philosophy and split the 'world' into a 'really real' spiritual world, and an unimportant physical world, where God is not as serious as he is in the spiritual world. But, they have to tell us what the real really is: is it as per evolution, where material is the final basis for reality, and love, relationship, and moral meaning are just stuck onto it for no particular reason, or is it as per creation, where the personal God: wisdom acting in loving relationship is the starting point of all being and the one in whom all being makes sense and coheres together.
The Scriptures belie any attempt to graft the personal onto the material, but turn this over and make the material reliant on the personal God. The Genesis creation account, aside from anything else, puts God's creative intention in the very physical world where his spiritual intent plays out. The two are intertwined.
If God can't tell us what really happened and the factual basis for relationship with him (and each other) and what his love 'really' did, then how can we have any faith, given that God as creator is the basis and starting point of faith? The creation account demonstrates our link with God, it doesn't merely assert it in story-book fashion, or as an illustration with a tenuous link with the real world, but tells us how it came about, with objective clarity and detail that dismisses any attempt to 'paganise' it.
Many ministers split the two, in a move that has more to do with philosophical Idealism than the 'concrete realism' of the Bible. This allows them to follow pagan philosophy and split the 'world' into a 'really real' spiritual world, and an unimportant physical world, where God is not as serious as he is in the spiritual world. But, they have to tell us what the real really is: is it as per evolution, where material is the final basis for reality, and love, relationship, and moral meaning are just stuck onto it for no particular reason, or is it as per creation, where the personal God: wisdom acting in loving relationship is the starting point of all being and the one in whom all being makes sense and coheres together.
The Scriptures belie any attempt to graft the personal onto the material, but turn this over and make the material reliant on the personal God. The Genesis creation account, aside from anything else, puts God's creative intention in the very physical world where his spiritual intent plays out. The two are intertwined.
2 January 2017
What's it all about?
I've just finished reading Evolution's Achilles' Heels (Robert Carter, ed.); much there of interest, of course (with the usual detractor websites springing up). The last chapter was the most interesting for me, but the least well done. It is entitled "Ethics and Morality" and gives a fair tour of that topic, but one that ends up, despite a disclaimer, tending to make Christianity look like a system of ethics; back to the past of 'do this...don't do that' Christian life.
It is far more, of course: the challenge of the Bible to the modern world is that of how one structures the world. The World's basic or first philosophy could be characterised as simple materialism, which courts the naturalistic fallacy: that one can somehow derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (the world is thus, so therefore you ought to do 'x'), and must contend with not only a biological information code (whence 'information' in a materialist world?), but an immaterial language that makes the code meaningful as a crucial constituent of it materialism. The Bible's first philosophy is what might be called 'theistic personism'. Basic to it all is that God in community of persons (the trinity) is, loves, and acts with wisdom. This makes our shared echo of his personhood unavoidably basic to being (i.e. ontologically basic).
This feature of the Real drives all else. It gives the person significance over and above material; whereas the materialist world makes the person derivative of an arbitrary material assemblage with no claim to any particular value, status or substance.
Love between persons is therefore the fundamental aspect of us as persons in community (and in existence) and 'information', wisdom and communication are sourced in this: not 'epiphenomena' of matter, but real in their own right.
The 'ethics and morality' chapter should have built on this, with the point made of us not being able to live consistently humanly (and raising the question of the source of that value) being isolated by our own will from basic being (God) and needing to rejoin community with him through his extension in love towards us to become whole.
It is far more, of course: the challenge of the Bible to the modern world is that of how one structures the world. The World's basic or first philosophy could be characterised as simple materialism, which courts the naturalistic fallacy: that one can somehow derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (the world is thus, so therefore you ought to do 'x'), and must contend with not only a biological information code (whence 'information' in a materialist world?), but an immaterial language that makes the code meaningful as a crucial constituent of it materialism. The Bible's first philosophy is what might be called 'theistic personism'. Basic to it all is that God in community of persons (the trinity) is, loves, and acts with wisdom. This makes our shared echo of his personhood unavoidably basic to being (i.e. ontologically basic).
This feature of the Real drives all else. It gives the person significance over and above material; whereas the materialist world makes the person derivative of an arbitrary material assemblage with no claim to any particular value, status or substance.
Love between persons is therefore the fundamental aspect of us as persons in community (and in existence) and 'information', wisdom and communication are sourced in this: not 'epiphenomena' of matter, but real in their own right.
The 'ethics and morality' chapter should have built on this, with the point made of us not being able to live consistently humanly (and raising the question of the source of that value) being isolated by our own will from basic being (God) and needing to rejoin community with him through his extension in love towards us to become whole.
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