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.

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.

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.

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.

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.