We're all pagans now?

The website of the Sydney Anglical Diocese features the 'acknowledgement of country' effectively a paean to the paganised 'spirits of land and ancestors'.

I am astonished that a prominent Christian church would advertise pagan ideas.

 

Now I wonder if the Sydney Anglican disparagement of the direct reading of Genesis 1 might play into this.

 

Cutting off God from our material world and active obvious presence in our flow of history must make him less palpable (not palpable at all).

 

It must reduce his closeness and real-ness to some extent, and must make him less present to those who do this. He becomes figurative, part of a tale rather than part of our history and our life-world and one becomes de-sensitised to his glory and wonder.

Days ain't days, so God ain't God.

Comments on a video by William Lane Craig - Creationism is an Embarrassment:

Integrate the Bible with the modern science worldview? A 'worldview' is the foundation of one's religion. The 'worldview' of modern science is metaphysical naturalism: a closed order of cause and effect, not subject to any external or prior factors or actors. Yet the Scriptures are wholly predicated upon the priority of word over cosmos, its energy field and its material. Information before matter. Indeed, science is based on the coherent objectivity and causal rationality set out in Genesis 1-3:8.

Modern science is nevertheless methodologically biblical theist: Genesis shows in its tersely objective list form (compare Numbers 7, for example) a rational causality, which science relies upon. The cosmos itself springs from the close couple of God's word and its effect in our phenomenal world, with no intervening actors, principles or 'forces'. As the western world view drifts to a materialistic monism (expressed, for instance in Evolutionary conceptions of being) the ability to do science will erode. We see the skirt edges of this in some current rhetoric that prizes 'gender' positions over mathematics, for example.

AND, reply on 'days'

The days could not be anything but days as we know them. They are objectively calibrated in a culture-independent and terse phrase as 'evening and morning' type days. If they are not regular days, then their theological impact is destroyed and they dehistoricise Genesis 1. The passage is written to obstruct pagan or mythical interpretations and the days place the creation in the continuity of the history that we are in and that extends back to the God who speaks. They show God is present, not distant; communicating, not enigmatic; loving, not indifferent; intentional not capricious; purposeful not reactive. The days finally demonstrate that reality is grounded in God's word (ref John 1:1-10, etc.) and the creation is thus existentially grounded in what is really real. No days, then we have either a platonic/deist god who does not connect with his creation, or a god who/that is indistinguishable from his/its creation, reifying monism in all its glum dullness and diffusing god to meaninglessness. The latter is evident in both Theistic Evolution and to a lesser extent in Long Age Creationism.

William Lane Craig - Creationism is an Embarrassment https://youtu.be/pC9wokZGL8w?t=381