The Birkett-Payne fallacy

Many years ago a colleague had a discussion with a Kirsty Birkett and Tony Payne at Matthias Media, as he recalls.

He was propounding a view of Genesis 1's timing that was in line with the historic Christian position, as do I.

Birkett and Payne considered that they rebutted this view in their contrary propounding of the Framework Hypothesis. As we know, the Framework Hypothesis is a bit of theological confection designed to suppress the real-world connection of God's creation with...well...God.

Their view was that, finally, my colleague didn't know the meaning of Genesis 1 and they didn't know, therefore, he was wrong.

The Birkett-Payne fallacy is this: because I don't know something, you don't know it either.

You will often find this fallacy played out by your charges if you are a pre-school teacher.

Upon hearing of this fallacy, my thoughts in this context turned immediately to 2 Timothy 3:16, and I reflected on Colossians 2:2, in hand with John 1:1-3, and Colossians 1:16-17, thence on to Colossians 2:2-10.

There!

Days are just days...get used to it.

In a recent article I read that seeks to rebut the views of Hugh Ross and other 'old earth' 'creationists', much time was spent, as is usual, on textual issues, without touching the important theology.

Ross et al skip over an important theological implication of the sequence of ordinary days in the Genesis 1 account. It has a general timing implication, of course, and that timing teaches us about the order, dependencies and nature of causality in the creation (that is, being directly connected to the word of God).

It also has an important implication for the relationship of God and man.

It characterizes the immanence of God and shows that God is active and present in the 'life-world' that we are constrained by: he is God 'here and now' in the world and showing this by creating in the terms of the world that we know and are bound by.

His work is timed as is our life, and in the only tempo that is unmistakable across history and cultures: day by day. It uses the categories, constraints and historical flow of our world: driving the point that it is done in the very same world that we live in. The world of creation and the world of our lives as its stewards are the same world. This is the unmistakable thrust of the passage. It shows movingly that God's domain overlaps with ours: heaven and earth shown in spiritual connection. He demonstrates that he is with us and proximate, not remote and inaccessible. Note, God shows this, he doesn't merely assert it, but gives the grounding reality that establishes this (I am thus reminded of Chekhov: "Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."). This is echoed in Genesis 3:8, but with great sadness here as A&E hide from God and repudiate relationship with him.

All in all the Genesis 'days' show the creation within the flow of biblical history and the continuity of God's word, action in creation and our experience of that creation as the 'creatures in his image' in a continuous isotropic fabric. Creation is in the time and space that we are in. It is continuous with our world-experience, and God's presence is thus continuous with the same biblical history that connects us to the seed of Genesis 2 and his redemption. We are thus demonstrated to be part of the continuous ontology of God's creation, and the continuity of our genesis and the history of the 'seed' of Eve is intermingled from the very start, and reprised in the genealogies replete in the Biblical collection.

Denying the direct information in Genesis 1 places the creation in another time and space from ours, it inserts a disjunct in biblical history, severing us from this astonishing and gripping intimacy between God and man-in-his-image, mythologising it, deracinating it and disempowering it, and all to save materialism!

Extraordinary claims

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan who reworded Laplace's principle, which says that “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness” (Gillispie et al., 1999). [refer to this article]

Now, here's an extraordinary claim: all life as we know it has descended from an initial microscopic organism (just comprised of one cell) through random variation and environmental selection (I prefer 'environmental' selection as a term to 'natural selection'. The word 'natural' smuggles in a higher level belief that is not warranted).

This is an extraordinary claim, and it becomes more extraordinary the more we learn about the cell, microbiological processes, protein 'machines' and the information that runs the cell. It is a claim beyond extraordinary and flies against all we know about formal systems.

The basic extraordinary claim

The basic extraordinary claim is that more specialised organisms arise from random errors in complex, finely tuned living close coupled interlocking systems of systems that are preserved, propagated and accumulated against environmental pressure to result in completely novel systems, body forms and functions.

This is first asserted, then assumed. It is never demonstrated, let alone 'proven'.

Typically it is merely propagandised by illustrations of creatures reconstructed from fossils tendentiously arranged in a series.

At a more sophisticated level it is 'proven' by gene sequencing and other microbiological comparisons. But this is vulnerable to the fallacy of affirming the consequent. A first-year science undergrad error. Much more needs to be proved than taking the observations of organisms and reversing them up a steep slope into a stupendously extraordinary hypothesis.

So, Mr evolutionist. Present your extraordinary evidence.

....long period of silence follows.

Moreland on apologetics

Moreland has an interesting and largely helpful talk on apologetics on Utube.

There are a few points that I want to enlarge upon at the given time points:

24:41 - in his list of examples he mentions 'science' telling us about unused frog organs. This sounds a bit like the shallow darwinism of 'vestigial' organs.

38:12 - "John loves Mary" an example of complex ordered symbols denoting language. What JP leaves out is that this complex ordered set only contains information in the English language. His parallel to genetic information would be strengthened by this. The gene has complex specified order. The order is nothing to do with chemistry as all sorts of orders are possible on the same chemistry. Its a code. But a code can only be read in the language of that code. Language is immaterial and independent of its coding.  So we have order > reader > code > language > information.

41:00 also relies on this concept.

53:14 - heaven tourism has to deal with Hebrews 9:27. Also Luke 16:30 bears considering.

1:07:12 - evolution is open to fundamental criticism such that it is on shaky ground. It poses no threat to the information in Genesis 1 because it has no explanation for any of its claims or conjectures. Behe's work is strongly critical of it at every level. Too often the obvious changes in creatures ('evolution' as  mere change within a kind of organism) is conflated with information-increasing change driving organism variety across 'kinds'.

He also mentions somewhere (found later; 5:42) - I couldn't find it in my brief scrolling through the talk - that science tells us that amphibians came from fish, or similar. Of course, it doesn't; it hypothesizes on a number of contestable grounds, and like most of evolution commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Besides it does not tell us how. No analysis of the microbiology that could achieve this within the combinatorial space of the required chemical and genetic changes is given.

One error in the talk is at 49:39. CDs are optical, not magnetic. But the illustration still holds water.

The work of Stephen Meyer, and on theistic evolution, Jonathan Wells and William Dembski are good references on this point, along with John Sandford.

What creation does

 My letter to Wayne Grudem

Dear Dr Grudem,

I was eager to watch the YouTube video of your talk at Biola ( https://youtu.be/rUPbMmfAp8M ) on Genesis 1 defying its corruption by theistic evolutionist tendentiousness.

I know you only had a short time, but there's at least two hours that could be spent to examine the theology that comes out of Genesis 1-3. This is an area of thought that needs the attention of evangelicals. A theology will  answer the 'so what' of defence of the historicity of Genesis 1-3.

Firstly, if I may, a couple of comments on the structure of Genesis 1. I know it is grammatically historical, and it also reads like 'dead-pan' history. It has none of the arch imprecision or time and place or existential discontinuity of myth.

From my studies (at masters level) in computer science (not my major, mind you), the narrative of the days looks like a BC Normal Form data structure, 'days' are the key, each has a count field, a definition field (evening and morning, as a calibration of their duration), a description field and an end of record field. All very economical of space and parsimoniously precise.

Another aside. People worry about incest in the first generation. Not because of the law, but because of biology. However, we can assume the gene pool of A&E was perfect, eliminating that quibble.

The major concern we should have of the three theistic-evolutionists you mentioned in your talk is their implicit philosophical idealism: this results in God communicating what is by a 'story' of what is not: that is, not true to events in our time and place (I avoid 'space' so as not to confuse this with physics). Therefore they must hold that something else really happened, not what is stated, and that it is this something else (evolution!) that defines reality and our experience of it. Thus we end up with both an ontology and an ethics denominated by chance (despite the warning of Isaiah 65:11, for instance). Yet this does not reflect our innate aspiration, or our experience of our own interaction with the world. Our 'word' is reliably casual in achieving effects. No one takes their car to an 'evolutionary mechanic'!

The theology of Genesis 1 starts, in my thinking, with God's creation over a series of days. Days are how we experience life. Specificity of place and time denominates our 'life-world'

Genesis 1 shows that God is active and present in our life-world, working in the circumscriptions of time and place that we have, by God's grace. God is near, as Jeremiah 23:23 reminds us, and not far off. God moves the creation by logical stages from the creation of energy (light) to the completed habitable setting of our fellowship with him: where, to borrow from N. T. Wright (ironically) heaven and earth are shown to 'come together', to overlap, or to become coincident existentially as God forms us in his image and speaks to us (A&E) within our place.

There is an astonishing intimacy that God shows us in coming into our constrained world, it's terms, categories and how it works with reliable causality showing us its nature, and to create it for us to bear his image and be his people in a commutative relationship (relationship expressed mutually).

There is nothing of the myth here: God is not remote or unapproachable, he is not restrained in some place of which we are unaware. Nor is he unknowable and depersonalised. He is here, in our life-space, being the relating God in community with his creatures, showing and being love.

God also creates in a rational, causally reliable continuity from Logos (he speaks) to effect (techne) making our episteme also reliable and truthful. This is not the 'world' of the Hindu or materialist illusion. It is the world where we directly and reliably experience what truly is. There is no platonic, or mythic 'is' that we need to refer to, there is only what comes from God's word (Hebrews 11:3 reminds us).

The TE theologians must split God off from his creation and sever his intimate connection with the concrete reality he creates for our habitation and pleasure, and for communion with him. They sever God's creating actions from the flow of history and its continuous ontology in which he overcomes the fall and brings about his Kingdom, yet the Bible brackets this flow of history with two great conjunctions of Heaven and Earth, both in terms of our existential place in a real reality. These are the Creation, and the New Creation, with the peak event where this also happens in the Incarnation.

These theologians  place their theology of creation in Genesis 3:8b: they hide from God. Evolution starts here: it's the means, along with the long fantasy ages of materialism and paganism ( https://creation.com/the-long-story-of-long-ages ) to separate God and his creatures. Indeed this was expressly the mission of Hutton, and carried out by Lyell ( https://creation.com/huttons-a-priori-commitment-to-materialism ). Our TE brothers advance this mission.

God is a good author

 A bad author doesn't show his characters in play, he only tells us (e.g. "Eric was a ratbag").

A good author shows us his characters in play through dialog, action and circumstances (e.g. "As Eric mounted the stairs he noticed the edge of Gwendolen's shawl dragging on the floor in front of him. He put his foot on it.")

God is a good author.

The creation account shows us.

The folklorists think he's a bad author, and can only tell us and not show us.

They think that the creation account is about something else. And so it tells us noting about something, but something about nothing.

The Genesis telescope

We've all heard the hoary old error that there are two versions of creation in Genesis: chapters 1 and 2.

Part of the problem we modern readers have is that the Bible was not written in 'chapters'. It was written in 'books'. Any chapter divisions are artificial, and as they say in legal documents, the headings (the chapters) do not form part of the contract.

Ignore the chapters, and the verses. They are just a location grid imposed on the organic unity of the books.

Besides, if one want's to talk about separate creation accounts in Genesis, I count three:

Genesis 1:1, 2

Genesis 1:3-2:4, and

Genesis 2:5-25.

However, not so.

This passage (Genesis 1-3) is composed like a journalist's telescope (or how I was taught to write governmental documents). It moves from the chief message to a sequence of more detailed elaboration.

Genesis 1:1, 2 is the grand revelation of God's creating.

Genesis 1:3-2:4 is about the cosmos in detail in terms, and elaborated on earth itself: the home of man-in-God's-image.

Genesis 2:4-3:8 focuses on man-in-God's-image and the relationship with God, coming to a jarring climax and crushing disruption in 3:8.

3:8 shows that this is the domain of God in fellowship with Man: God seeks Man. Man hides from God. This verse is where the idea of material evolution springs from: creation without God, without Word, wisdom, knowledge or understanding (Proverbs 3:19, 20); without purpose and without persons a creation where Man hides from God and puts Fortune and Destiny in his place (Isaiah 65:11),

The remainder of 3 is the denouement: man has rejected God. God leaves man to confront his choice, but yet acts to save (3:21).

All of this is the creation account. It tells us how and why we have arrived where we are.

Get crackin' Joe

 Letter to a theologian:

I've read a number of your pieces on the interpretation of Genesis 1, and while I largely agree with the position that you defend (for example, against the so-called 'framework hypothesis'), I cannot recall any conservative theology about Genesis 1.

God created in six days. So?

There's a vast theological richness in these short verses that we need to explicate. The fantasists (who engage in a view that Genesis presents fantasy, not fact) have no theology and can have no theology, because they claim that Genesis tells us nothing in the real world and therefore can mean nothing in the real world. But we do.

For example, the 6 days of creation are vital to our understanding of who God is, what the creation is and our relationship to both.

Above all God working in 6 days is not about duration or lighting conditions, per se, but a demonstration that he is present and active in the world he created for the congress of God and man. He is here, able to achieve his ends, working as we do, with the constraint of time that fixes the tempo of our lives. God shows that he works Real-ly in the space-time-event-material cosmos. He doesn't work in  Platonic forms, he doesn't work in symbols, or in some remote unreachable Mt Olympus, but, as Jeremiah teaches. He is hear, and he shows it

Of course, if the days are merely a 'framework' one has to wonder what they are a framework of; because if nothing related happened, then the framework suggests that God tells us what didn't happen to inform us about something unstated that did happen. Worse even than gnostics!

Lots flow from God's domain overlapping his created domain of time and space, where he demonstrates a collocation of persons: he the divine, we the contingent, but loved and in his image. Word is prior to material, minds are real and can know and be known, our from God's word to its result in the production of our world and our experience of our world in consistent rational categories is of a continuous ontology breeding a real epistemic. We can know things truly and act on that knowledge reliably.

 

When did the idea of 'evolution' start?

I mean the idea of Darwinain type from dot to Dot evolution.

The start is documented in the Bible!

It is Genesis 3:8. The very end of the creation account, the demonstration of it's termination.

Darwin's fake theory

 Notes I found while going through my old papers.

I didn't date the note or attribute it, so all I know is that I have it. I can't even remember making it, let alone photocopying it.

Nevertheless, here it is:

Darwin's theory is 'evaluative', based on observations of species (or single species -- a number of them). It is not a theory; that is, a priory explanatory but forms itself a posteriori -- observation without considering alternative explanations and without experimental or observational support of its central thesis which is derivative: derived from the evaluative component which itself is purely verbal, or literary, not scientific.

Interestingly, the engine of Darwin's theory: natural selection and chance variation is depletative. It was also identified by Edward Blythe as the engine of change in organisms: but not beneficially accumulative.

Ok, I know what it says, but what does it mean?

We seem to have one of two basic approaches to Genesis 1 in the church (although this itself is part of the whole of 1-3). Either it is said to convey information by telling us something that didn't happen. Or it is understood to be telling us what happened, but only as a mechanical curiosity.

The latter party tell us that 'days mean days', God spoke everything into existence and it was very good. And that's it. The former tell us that days aren't days, but some framework construction...but not why.

Tim Challies' part 7 of his series Basic Christianity is a case in point for the second group. Reading it prompted me to the following.

Once we know what happened, we also learn what is and how it is, who we are and of our relation to God, and who God is.

There is a theological richness in Genesis 1 that seems to be set aside by both approaches. The former, because if it didn't happen, it can't teach us anything Really (that is, in or about the real world where we live). The latter because the story ends with factual assent, just a string of facts.

In the whole sweep of scripture the creation is essential. It provides to us the identity of God: creator. This identity is God's 'credential' for our worship of him. This is God's 'worth' to us.

As God's first act in history it places the creation events in the continuity of our history. It shows an underlying continuous reality (ontologically unified) of God's word/action, the world we are in and the 'life-world' we live. It does this by God creating with decisive effect in the days that we live in. He enters into our event-space. He starts with the basic physical constituents of our STEM (space-time-event-material) world, organises them into a living space and places man in it in his image to reflect his glory in the creation through real knowledge of it and continuing his loving care of it all in communion with the creator.

So, its very, very important and fundamental to our relationship with God in all its complex flow: 'very good' to fall (Genesis 3:8 is the signal result: man hiding from the creator who is to be worshiped), then redemption, resurrection and new creation. Worship characterizes our relationship with God, and worship is what we are made for. Being in his image (and in communion with him) is how we do it (Romans 12:1 cf 1:25).

God makes the first move in relationship, of course. Not only in creating us and the domain of that relationship, but in the way he creates.

He enters into our time-space world and works within its constraints; within the same constraints we work within. And he works the same way we do. Not by 'chance and destiny' (Isaiah 65:11) but by word and wisdom (Logos, expanded in Proverbs 3:19, 20). God shows himself in our world: active with decisive effect, available, proximate to us and our domain, sharing his being with us in the domain he creates for that very purpose. This is utterly unlike the pagan fantasies of distant gods to whom man is a slave and whose origin, status and place is lost in the mists of mythic imprecision. God is here, he speaks and shows us the nature of the creation he has made for us. Hebrews 11:3 reinforces this (and eliminates materialist speculations). There is in this an intimate commutative relationship that is beyond astonishing in its implications.

God 'endorses' his creation by working directly to effect and within its constraints honouring us in that these are the constraints God put around us as he made the place where he would come to us in fellowship.

He shows that even using our constraints that he is Lord of creation and what he says happens, effortlessly.

God shows in his creative activity being done in the very terms of our experience of the creation (creating ontological and causal continuity between his Logos and our episteme) that our experience of our 'life-world' is real experience of a real place where real fellowship with God occurs.

I've touched on the next thing Genesis 1 teaches. Logos is prior to 'techne' and produces 'episteme'. Materialism has it the other way: techne (the self-crafting of material) produces episteme (knowledge) that Logos is merely a response to. Yet we do not and cannot live that way because that's not how it really is.

Lastly, we are taught what the Real is. God in direct creation by the effect of his word shows us a rational causality, shows us the categories of reality and shows us there is nothing hidden that's more real outside God's bringing together heaven and earth (that is his domain - heaven, over lapping and interpenetrating ours - earth) in the creation.

He creates the world in the terms of the world that he creates: It will be full of life. He creates the life. To figure out what the life is we don't need to drift off to a Platonic 'form' or Aristotelian 'perfection'. The perfection is the relationship with the God who is.

This world is concretely real, and Genesis 1 demonstrates its concrete reality.

The 'days' are vitally important in God's action: they are as it were, the signature of his action. To hold otherwise is like saying to the hand-builder of a car that he really only drew a sketch and some other unknown process built it. An insult. They are also important as the secure God's action in our Space Time Event Material world  This is not the some other 'world' of the pagans, where people are enslaved to the whims of mini gods (and often in a world that is at some level taken as given) a world shrouded in occulting vagueness and dislocation from the real world.

OTOH, if nothing in Genesis 1 happened. Then it teaches us nothing about the world, ourselves or God and God is pushed away to make room for materialism, a project that started in Genesis 3:8 and just like the pagan stories, the cosmos 'just is'. No author, no meaning and of no consequence of any significance to us.

Not a morality club

I came across this article on the importance of Genesis 1 in giving society its 'moral' compass (like that will save anyone).

I offered this comment:

Moral standards are indicative of people's understanding of what it is to be human...or as we say, to be truly in God's image. But also let's remember that following Jesus of Nazareth is not to join a morality club. It is it seek to conform to him, the exemplar of true humanity: true imageness of God. It is also about looking forward to being in the unalloyed presence of God forever in his new creation.

It was not published!

It seems that Christian faith has been reduced to moralising for too many people. But first the gospel. Behaviour follows redemption.

It's what I say, not what I do.

Symbolists, in their view of Genesis 1, want us to understand what God did by an account of what they claim didn't happen.

I'm still waiting to hear how their view can have any weight over here in the real world.

The Neddy Seagoon fallacy

Now, just what is, the Neddie Seagoon fallacy?

It is this:

In a Goon Show script Neddy Seagoon offers a picture of a gun as his bit to fight a battle. Nice, but useless in the real world.

It is the term given to any assertion where an image of something is said to have an effect in opposition to an actual something else.

It is similar to turning up to a gun fight with a knife.

Here's an example of its use.

Young people, faith and the future?

 If you want to understand the gospel and younger people, this graph, based on a Barna group survey, tells it all.

Creator rejection syndrome

I think we fail, in this modern world dominated by metaphysical materialism, to appreciate what it means to worship God, and the relationship between us as creatures-in-his-image and God that this rests upon.

In many passages, our worship of God is predicated directly on his being creator. When creator is mentioned in the Bible, it is a pointer to Genesis 1 (and on to 3) where creator-ness is defined by demonstration. The culminating expression of this is Revelation 14:7.

When the sequence of connections between the words of creation, the events reported as directly consequential of those words, and our experience of results of those words is broken by interposing principles, processes or systems of chance, which is the materialist recourse, we break the worship relationship. Instead we defer to the gods that Isaiah castigates in 65:11, (Fortune and Destiny) because we have ignored the God who speaks, as in Exodus 31:12-17, and particularly 17.

In fact, we have displaced God as the one who created and rejected the evidence he gives us of his being creator for our preferred story that the world created itself. 

Having displaced God as the direct, involved, committed creator, we have replaced him as the one to be worshiped because he is creator. The worshipful intent slips from the creator to the product of the creator. God's Image-bearer turns from God to find an 'image' in the work of the creator's hands.

We thus, like the Israelites in the wilderness, worship the creature rather than the creator.

The dull witted scientist, and his pal, the dull witted theologan

A scientist told me that Genesis 1 is 'unscientific' because we have light before stellar bodies, and days before light.

For a scientist to be hung up about light before stellar bodies beggars belief. Genesis 1, like the rest of scripture, is written in 'ordinary observer' language to be able to communicate across cultures and history.

I would expect a scientist to understand how this works.

Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and possibly a synecdoche for the entirety of the energy field. So God's first step in creation is the creation of energy. Essential.

Next energy is partly condensed into fundamental particles of matter. I've been in the bush on moonless nights. It's dark. No light, but plenty of matter without light, and its all dark. In a couple of days, God forms this fundamental matter into the stellar furniture, whereupon these bodies can be light producers.

Days are calibrated for us as 'evening and morning' type days. The time markers themselves come a little later, but what is important is calibrated time passing.

This is a vitally important part of scripture as God thereby demonstrates that he is active in our 'life world'. He is in communication with us by his acts making the domain of real fellowship between persons: him and we in his image in the place where he brings together the life of his creatures and his own life.

It also shows that the infinite God has made himself present in our finite world allowing a two-way relationship. The creation is thus shown to be something that is continuous with the time and space of human life and history and God is right there in it showing the primacy of his word, or 'logos' in all of human affairs.

Oh, and by the way, names of times and lighting conditions are independent of each other, as you would discover in the Arctic in mid summer. It’s always light!

The re-mythologisation of reality

Every so often it happens. Some bright theologian or minister resiles from the exposition of Scripture and turns it into myth.

Genesis is usually the butt of their myth-making: anything from 1-11 fades from this world and ends up on Mt Olympus, in the Dreamtime, or the Theogonistic battles of Enuma Elish.

Dis-interpreting Genesis 1 always involves denying its real-world placement, its anti-mythic posture and backs it into the world of 'not-in-this-world'. It then is supposed to be about this world without having a this-world reference.

But this means that it is not about this world, our experience, or God's connection with his creation.

Walton is the latest in this long line of deceit. Tim Mackie, whose work on The Bible Project is very helpful does it in his talk on Genesis 1. Alas.

With these characters we've got a Genesis that is off in myth-land. It breaks our connection with God and God's connection with his creation. May as well be a pagan, then.