Intelligent Design

On the topic of 'intelligent design' and 'irreducible complexity, Behe talks about the criterion being the inter-component necessity of all to produce a functional capability.

I think we can go just a little further than this observational summation.

From a systems perspective, the complexity is built up from the non-deterministic grouping of parts that have parsimonious close-coupled interfaces with each other.

The 'non-deterministic' is important. I mean it to convey that the final function is not pre-determined in any of the parts in themselves. This itself tends to point to 'design', indeed from a systems engineering perspective, I would say it lies at the heart of design.

That is, the parts have no in-built teleology that necessitates any particular function, but are brought together a-teleologically (unless by a designer, where the telos would lay) to do something which independently they are unable to do. 

What are the "Gospels"

I've come across a number of references to the gospels/gospel of late.

Muslims 

Muslims seem to think that The Gospel is a book given to Yeshua as the Quran was claimed to be 'given' to Muhammad.

The misunderstanding sets in, it would seem from Christian's casual use of the word 'gospel' to apply to the texts that convey it.

We do it often with a rule book. Typically we would ask that someone passes the rules to them, say, during a game of Scrabble. What they mean, of course is the rule book.

So Mo. thought the gospel was a book. That would make sense for one who had a reputation as an uncritical fountain of stories he had heard but not understood.

As a result Muslims regard the gospels according to the named four as somehow a corruption of what God 'sent down' with Yeshua (or his deprecating Quranic doppelganger 'Issa') 

But the 'gospel' the 'good news' (euangelion) which means 'good news' or 'glad tidings'. The Quran is simply unaware of this.

So the four gospel accounts (which we also shorthand to 'gospels') are four depictions of the work of Yeshua as the foundation of the good news. Fundamentally it is death and resurrection and defeat of death opening the way to fellowship with God through a new life that is the good news.

It is worth noting that some scholars consider the book that Mo. was referring to was the Syriac peshitta, a collection of a number of the books that now make up the Bible

Moderns 

Some detractors of the Gospel, and indeed some followers of Christ I've heard refer to the gospel accounts as 'biographies of Jesus' (sic).

They are not. They are concerned not about his life per se, but about his mission as the Son of Man, Messiah.

They link Yeshua's actions with the OT and show him as Messiah by his actions and words. God is the 'good author' in this way: Yeshua shows us, as well as tells us. Just telling is easy, anyone can do it. Muhammad, for example. 

In modern parlance, the gospel accounts are more like an 'after action' mission report. They sum up the mission, the actions taken, the ground covered, the people and conflicts encountered and dealt with and the final result (it is finished).

Far more focused than a mere biography. The separate accounts are four 'mission reports' by four of Yeshua's band. 

 

Science and metaphysical Christian theism

In his introduction to The Creation Hypothesis' anthology, the Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland lists 10 phenomena that science does not explain, but on which it depends:

1 - the existence of a theory-independent, external world
2 - the orderly nature of the external world
3 - the knowability of the external world
4 - the existence of truth
5 - the laws of logic
6 - the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth-gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment
7 - the adequacy of language to describe the world (propositional explicability)
8 - the existence of values used in science (e.g. "test theories fairly and report test results honestly)
9- the uniformity of nature and induction
10 - the existence of numbers.

The creation account in Genesis 1:2-2:20 shows these 10 phenomena in God's creating:

1 - the created cosmos (world) is separate from God and external to man while man is within it and comprehends it.
2 - the external world is created in terms of the rational causality set out in the sequence of days of our experience; placing the creation process in our world
3 - God communicates the creation event to  us in language (propositionally with real meaning in our 'space-time' experience of the creation)
4 - God does not deceive us by creating outside history or without sharing his actions with us (thus the natural days place the creation in the continuity of our history)
5 - logic is reflected in the direct causality of the creation, and in Adam's naming of the animals (on the basis of "A" does not equal "not A")
6 - the creation is described in communicable language  (see '3' above)
7 - the creation shows propositional explicability in God creating with language that is meaningful in the creation
8 - the creation account gives us real information congruent with our experience of the world and our perceptual faculties.
9 - the creation is shown to be causally reliable and consistent
10 - God works in countable days that exist in number-like terms of 'evening and morning'.

So to work, science is conducted as metaphysical Christian theism. Nothing to do with 'naturalism' because naturalism gives rise only to...dust.

The simple cell and what it needs.

 

Prof. Lennox: close, but no cigar!

John had a lot of good things to say, but he failed in the manner that most analysis of Genesis 1 fails, although he did touch it lightly: the theology that Genesis 1, the days of creation in particular, gives us.

I'm glad that he didn't avoid the obvious calibration of the days as normal earth days: the 'evening and morning earth frame of reference' type of days. That is their most obvious feature. However, I can't see them spaced out, their numbering and grammatical structure do not permit this. Other references, in Exodus, also preclude this.

So, what do the days do, theologically?

Three things

1. They place God's creating action in history, in the history that we are in. This establishes the basis, in real tangible terms, for fellowship between we his creatures in his image and himself (cf Gen 3:8a).

2. They thus show God present and active in his creation: he is not a God far off; not a God who is uninvolved but at the same time a God who is separate from and prior to the creation. He is not merged into the creation, which theistic evolution is in danger of requiring, destroying his identity. Nor is he the deist god, anonymous, remote, aloof.

3. To identify God and set the frame of reference for our understanding of the creation as those who are to govern it: his creative sequence shows dependency order, is done with rational causality, he shows evaluative summaries each day. His creating is nothing like the rational shipwreck of Enuma elish and other pagan fairy tales: unhistorical, disconnected and irrational, to repeat. The creation is propositional in nature: it shows wisdom and knowledge that we use, also propositionally, in governing the creation. (Prov 3:19, 20)

This also helps us answer Augustine's question as to why did God not create in an instant: this would also be a non-historical event. it would not show God at work and thus frame his identity and connection with us. Taking God thusly out of history would de-personalize him and destroy any intimacy between him and us. He would be then either not separable from the creation, or not identifiable with it.

Finally, it is worth noting that God, in direct speech reiterates the creation event in Exodus 31:12ff; interestingly this follows the 'skilled craftsmen' passage.

As to the age of the earth: pagans have almost universally held to very long ages of cosmic existence, and this would frame pagan stories, placing them in timeless de-historicized nowhere land.The purpose, as in modern long ages (care of Lyell and Hutton), is to keep the creator out of time and out of mind. OTOH, the timed genealogies in the Bible do what genealogies have always done in the ancient world. They show connection. Ours with God, and the timing shows the closeness of the creation and the history of the Creators' acts to our life-world experience of him.

Metaphysics - Another three things.

A few more aspects of the significance of the days as describing real historical events are also worth mentioning:  as the days of creation place God in not only history, but as an actor in the creation per se, and an actor who acts wholly in terms of his own nature; they thereby provide a real, concrete ground that anchors our metaphysics.

A. In a truly 'real' creation, spoken into existence by the God who is, we have certainty of knowledge, at least as possibility: there is knowledge that truly reflects what is in the material world, and is unfolded in the history of redemption. I alluded to this above, but our epistemology is thereby grounded in who God is. For this reason, we have confidence that (modern) science can be fruitful in the pursuit of material truth.

B. Similarly for our conception of being. The actual days framing a real history, imply quite directly that we truly are: the Creation does not elude us by being metaphorical or symbolic, it does not deceive us as illusion or absorb us into pantheism, it does not confound us with the shadow game of Idealism. It founds our true being: it secures an ontology by which we can work to a structural understanding of the external reality and our existential experience of it. We are grounded in the infinite person-ness of the creator.  A far cry from Sartrean recursion that we are merely grounded in our ephemeral selves.

C. Our meta-ethical grasp of value in relationships and actions also spring from who God is: Love. Love is only expressed in true relationship and the primal act of relationship toward us is God mediated only by his word showing his  domain overlaps ours: God and man together (thus going on in contextualizing and grounding the Incarnation).

So we are guarded against being seduced by both the religion of nature (paganism and its offspring) and the religion of the denial of nature (exilic religions that reduce our life-world to metaphysical illusion).

Flowing from this, as in God's image (the only information we have being in the creation account), our words, acts, and affections have real significance in history and interpersonally. They ramify through history meaningfully.

Because if the 'days of creation' are not really real as set out in Genesis 1, then something else happened in our history, and it is this something else that grounds our....everything. Alas, the alternatives then before us must reject that God acts in real days and overturn the great message it gives: God and man together in his Creation. Genesis 3:8a again.

Natural theology: a place and a purpose

For those who say natural theology is not a 'salvation' issue.

From Bray, 2012 God is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology, p. 27.

"Natural theology has its importance and is taken seriously in the Bible,  but it is a preparation for the gospel and not a substitute for it. It gives people enough knowledge for people to be able to respond to the message of salvation, but not enough to work it out for themselves."

Emphasis, mine.

The days of Genesis do this by placing creation and God's direct action in the history that we are in and showing that God is close, active in history, communicative, and personal and we are connected to him by his word.

Could God have used evolution to 'create'?

Answer is: NO!

The question presumes that 'evolution', taken as the Neo darwinian evolution theory (NDE), actually occurred, or could occur, as distinct from it being a retrospective effort to justify Darwin's mid-Victorian gross morphology bluster.

It is less a theory and more a set of conjectures that keep manufacturing sets of tendentious illustrative drawings, This instead of talking about mechanisms that even could orchestrate cross-system coordinated gradual change. Change that both 'improved' the organism, rather than just make it circumstantially more fecund, and did not have adverse effects on any of the involved systems, their interactions or general capabilities.

So, could God have used something that didn't happen and is designed to deny his creative action to create?

What would God be doing to bring the creation from a pea-soup of molecules? Would he be orchestrating the massive continuous culling that would leave the 'last man standing' to carry favorable variations to subsequent generations? Would he be making himself invisible in his creation by mimicking what are supposed to be, but evidently are not 'natural' processes, which deny his action anyway? Would he use a method of 'creation' involving continuous massive culling of creatures to produce a creation that was 'very good'?

Remember, the Genesis description of creation if full of life, beauty and love. There is no hint therein of the corruption that we see in a creation now full of death, struggle and decay. Such a God is not only self-contradictory on the face of it, but has merged himself into the creation. This not in keeping with his own holiness and distinctness from a propositionally rich creation, amenable to propositional explication (i.e. 'science'), but in denial of it. The denial is even worse than contradictory: but directly contrary to Paul in Romans 1:20 and Hebrews 11:3, and in keeping, rather, with his observation in Romans 8:20-23.

Furthermore, God expresses his identity in his actions: creation being the magnum opus of this. What 'identity' would theistic evolution demonstrate? A God merged into the creation and not distinct from it? This ends in pantheism, not the personalism which Genesis 1 shows.

Chance based on chance

I came across an old debate of WL Craig's on science and Christian faith.

In the debate Rosenberg completely misunderstands Christian faith, confusing it with animism at best, rather than giving the basis for a rational world view deriving from the direct rational source of creation in propositional information: God thinks of it, speaks it and it happens. What happens is directly related to the words spoken opening up the creation to propositional access.

As an intended creation, propositionally exposed to us, it is accessible to propositional enquiry: we can keep asking and exploring to find out what it is with no limits.

Schaeffer in The God Who Is There in the section on Musique Concrete reports an example of such:

"...The voice is first built up out of chance sounds, reflecting modern man's view that man who verbalizes arose by chance in a chance universe with only a future of chance ahead of him."

Chance here means irrationally, without reason, and so inexplorable and unfathomable.

This is the world, finally ungrounded, the world that Rosenberg unwittingly seeks to build science upon. But his world, the world of mere material with random and information-less interactions, is only the basis for non-science, for the animism that he ironically thinks represents Christianity.

Incidentally, this lies at the heart of the fatal contradiction of theistic evolution: That the God who speaks, didn't in fact speak, but somehow worked into a non-speaking cosmos that denies on its own nature any system of information and 'just happens', undermining any basis for a rational epistemology.

God ain't no use to science!

In a debate against William Lane Craig, the Christian philosopher and theologian, Dr. Alex Rosenberg stated:

God makes no contribution to the predictive power of any (part of any) of any of the the sciences.
...
Therefore no basis on which to invoke God for explanatory or any other purposes in science. Science has no more need for and indeed considerable reason to deny the existence of God than it has to accept the Easter Bunny, etc.

The absence of a role for God in the explanatory and predictive content of science is quite apart from the problem of evil is the principle reason that 95% of the members of the Academy of Sciences are atheists and why science can provide no only no good cases for theism but an excellent argument against it.

Craig's response was to reduce the importance of predictability, which was fine, then to talk about the fine-tuning (so-called) argument (about which I'm sceptical as it seems to be a case of affirming the consequent), the existence of objective moral values and duties and the indirect explanatory benefit of positing things as scientific: Craig put God into this category.

However, God is not 'scientific' while nevertheless giving explanatory context for most of human experience.

The most important point was to go to the heart of Rosenberg's attack, and point out that God is a free agent, and predictability is not applicable to such in the mechanistic terms of science.

Theism doesn't need or rely upon any putative scientific status as it provides a grounding ontology for all of our experience of the real world.

I think Rosenberg is one of the many atheists or anti-theists who think implicitly of the creator God as contained in the cosmos, rather than external to it.

The creator created, we know, by his word, and with rational causality, showing us a world that is propositionally available to us as its stewards and has a reliable relationship with propositional description and understanding (see also Proverbs 3:19, 20). Science is the work of making such descriptions and gaining understanding of the creation, within the nature of the cosmos as a place rationally created for our habitation as rational agents: that is, those in the image of the rational and propositionally communicating God.

This gives us the basis of and means for the pursuit of scientific understanding, but compared to knowing God, is the much like a souped-up version of bicycle repair.

Rosenberg also seems to think that Christians particularly rely on God as some sort of solver of difficult problems, or the 'mystery' behind the physical world. In this is could not be further from the truth. Confidence in the rational creator drives us and encourages us to exploration of a world that must be explicable in propositional terms; it must be because he has given it to us as its stewards, to understand and know it in terms of the completed creation set out in Genesis 1.

This is not a recipe for animism or indolence, which Rosenberg seems to mistake Christian faith for, but for continuous inquiry under the certainty of that inquiry being not in vain.

God used 'evolution'

This often pops up in Christian circles when someone wants to avoid being considered an anti-scientific creationist mystic who isn't up on the latest in anti-biblical theology.

Of course the first thing to ask the claimant is "How?"

How does God 'use' evolution? What happens?

Best also to ask what the person understands by 'evolution'

They probably think that it is a real, observed and calibrated natural process of the formation of unique 'body-plans' and systematic functionality of organisms.

Firstly, if this is so, there simply isn't enough time, even in a 14 billion-year-old universe, let alone a merely 4 billion-year-old earth for the known rate of mutations and the population genetics considerations to produce the divergent body plans and underlying differentiated biotic systems of life.

Secondly, the idea of 'theistic evolution' obscures God in nature. It holds that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. It is at best deist, and more properly pantheistic  While the scriptures tell us that Christ upholds all creation it also tells us that creation declares God's glory, not obscures it in wasteful destruction of his creatures. Furthermore, the state of creation we see now, is not good: Paul tells us that it is in slavery to corruption. Doesn't sound like God at work to me!

See: Problem with Theistic Evolution, Meyer on Theistic-evolution and Theistic-evolution contradiction for starters.

On Neo-Darwinian Evolution (NDE), evolution is a haphazard, yet not properly hypothesized process where random chemical actions produce increasingly complex (consistent with Darwin's Victorian era progressivist ethos) closely coupled interacting biological systems that improve an organism's rate of reproduction (on the Malthusian presumption of food limitation) to ultimately eliminate organisms that are less complexly functional. Yet such organisms do survive and propagate in abundance!

It has no real, observed, valid process for this, just a bunch of words and fanciful diagrams in books. Or deceit, such as Peppered Moths, Embryonic re-capitulation and so on.

That aside, it proceeds by the much vaunted intellectual deceit of 'natural selection'. This is better termed natural non-deselection. Nature culls out the organisms that are comparatively more miss-fitted to a particular ecology than others. Nature has no cognition, so it does not 'select' even by analogy. All it does is kill off some organisms less vigorously than others.

One factor underpinning the contemporary lurch to Theistic-evolution in some Christian circles is a pagan view of the Bible!

What I mean is that the Bible is conceptualized as a 'spiritual' or even worse a 'moral wisdom' book within a world that is of no interest to God, and disconnected to salvation. But the scriptures tell us differently.

Genesis 1 sets out a concrete creation that is an event in history, in the flow of history from creation to incarnation to kingdom and that encapsulates the history of the relationship between creator and creature-in-his-image.

The scriptures frequently connect the material world and God's 'world' and with spiritual implications: Psalms, Proverbs 3:19,20, slabs of Isaiah and other prophets, etc., let alone the NT connections, including notably Colossians 1:16, ff. The New Creation is promised in very material terms, and even Job knew this: 19:25ff.

Time and Chance

 Springing from a video by James Tour: 

I get the impression that people think 'chance' is a process, or a mechanism. 

No.

As JT points out in other words, chance is the probability assessment of some real-life process or mechanism.

If you even want to consider chance in life-sciences, you have to apply it to a something that has known possibility of occurring. It doesn't apply to non-mechanisms. So, first explain the chemical mechanism for the origin of the DNA-RNA system and its immaterial code, then the mechanism for the formation of chemical systems, then the coalescing of chemical systems into the functioning meta-system of the cell. You have to have the mechanisms, otherwise there's nothing to evaluate probabilistically, so 'chance' is inapplicable. All you have is fantasy!

Evolution of Systems? Oh really?

 A comment on a talk by Stephen Meyer

Incremental Change. Neo-Darwinian Evolution ("NDE") relies upon incremental change to create increased functionality. Leaving aside the teleological implications of this quaint Victorian idea of the ever-improving organisms, we have a systems problem. Fortunately biology is now moving to a 'systems' perspective. Organisms, indeed, the cell itself, is a complex orchestration of interacting systems, all with efficiently interacting interfaces and distinct boundaries and in a non-deterministic relationship. This means that one system is not necessarily benefited by the development of a function in another system which needs its input, e.g. muscles don't 'care' if there is a visual system, but are relied upon as a component of the visual system's global operation).

So a 'new' feature is not merely a 'light sensitive skin patch' as per dear Dawkin's supposed evolution of the eye but to afford a putative survival advantage (and why is this important?), the photons incoming need to be processed, the outputs of the process that turn light into neurological input, this output needs to be integrated into a further processing system that can create outputs that benefit the organism: avoid threats, find food, etc. These benefits also need a corresponding interlocking cascade of capabilities to actually achieve the (potential) benefit. Skeletal changes similarly: the autonomic nervous system and its muscle control pathways, connections and formations need to be adapted to the new skeletal geometry to make it functionally beneficial.

As in any system, all this needs to happen without degrading current systems, or imposing an energy burden on the creature. Point mutations won't do it; we need grand scale coupled inter-system changes that at each step confer benefits on the organism. To do this, the DNA-RNA control system needs new control instructions to create the required coordinated changes across multiple inter-acting systems and sub-systems. From whence do they come?

NDE remains at the mercy of Darwin's original naive (Victorian) gross morphology fiction and so provides no credible means of satisfying its own requirements and meeting its own claims. It is dead in the water from the get go and about as unscientific as one could get.

And don't start me on 'natural selection'. This is a tendentious fiction. All nature does is systematically cull those organisms with fewer comparative beneficial 'functions' for a particular environment. Darwin has given us a killing machine, not a flourishing biota.

Have you been sold a crock on Natural Selection?

Having just read of the propagandistic use of language, typically by the Left, I came to think about natural selection as propaganda when reading this:

" "...Darwinism threatened theism by showing that humans and all life" could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god" "

Note the language of willed choice, but attached to the 'trope' of nature, and personified: 'natural' selection. No will involved at all because no person is involved, just random molecular collisions.

So, the left uses language similarly, an in-group knows that 'progressivism' is a mask for 'revolution' in leftist political usage: they know what they mean, but the public reads it as nice people wanting positive change. Tosh!

Natural selection as the engine for evolution is similar. There is no selector, no willed 'natural' substitute for a creator. There's nothing.

What evolution is, but would hobble it from the get go, is random change with variable extinction. Same result, different public impact. The horror is obvious.

Not very gripping, or encouraging, but is about cyclical death: biological eugenics!.

 

Later edit:

 

A more catchy and startling term for 'Natural Selection' and one far more accurate, and that gives the game away:

 

Ecological culling of creatures unable to out-compete others in reproduction within a niche.

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

Letter to Zaphod

This letter wasn't really sent to Zaphod Beeblebrox, but to a tutor in a Christian school. Nor did I write it. It was composed by a pal.

Dear Zaphod,

Having been a Christian for many years - this being against all odds given my family lineage – and now well into my maturity, it never ceases to amaze me that Christians are often oblivious to the Evil One’s machinations. Sometimes his intrigues are subtle, on other occasions far less so. (In my extensive travels and working life overseas I have on several occasions witnessed first-hand his unambiguous malevolence.) One thing I can tell you is that whenever a man thinks he has steeled himself sufficiently against his wiles or, arguably worse still, ignores his influence, that is when the man is most vulnerable to his influence. For us Christians it often doesn’t begin or end with any overt signalling that he is present or even operating; it is his secretive, secondary layer of attack which charms a man to a parlous falsehood.  Falsehoods are always dangerous; it’s just a matter of degree. (Don’t forget Paul recognised him as “the god of this age” and the “unseen ruler of this world”!) Let me illustrate my point through analogy.

A man borrows a car from a friend and within a few metres of moving off he realises the brakes are deficient. He returns the vehicle to his friend as he understands that continuing his journey will be hazardous, if not fatal. However, let’s imagine that the car has solid braking and so the man drives on. After some time it begins to rain and on approaching a bend in the road, he eases up on the throttle to compensate for the turn and poor weather conditions. What he doesn’t realise is that his tyres are perilously bald and no matter whether he brakes (which would be entirely inappropriate once in the arc of a corner and given the wet road) or not, he is destined to accident.

My point is obvious: A man can believe he has compassed the entire terrain but has submerged something of clear importance, relegating it to a stumbling block status.

Let me be bold. Contrary to the oft-repeated misconception, creation is a salvation issue. Get the Creator even a little wrong here, and everything comes asunder, including all that our unique soteriological arguments’ purpose.

It is oddly naïve to believe that error, even if conceived in ignorance, attracts no further casualty against truth. Error, particularly one so integral to God’s primary office of Creator, can affect nothing and be contained to itself. Error, like disease, grows and spreads and ignoring it by, well, turning one’s back to it, makes the Evil One extremely satisfied as his work is already near completion. C.S. Lewis, somewhere in his Screwtape Letters I believe, alludes to this zero-sum outcome.

You claimed in your mail that you “have no problem with a young-earth interpretation of Genesis [or an old-earth]”, as though truth somehow depends on your particular state of mind and hermeneutical preference and not on what actually happened. Well before I completed my Philosophy degree I was aware of the ubiquity of post-modernal epistemology in our media and political environment. What I was not prepared for was its controlling influence in the Church and, more parochially, its effect on university Christian groups’ thinking when I was an undergraduate. Far more than an occasional meme is the eisegetical defence “I have no problem with God’s creating in 6 days [but I prefer to believe that God did it over eons].” Textual considerations are set aside and, though it is not recognised, a priority is given to feelings or personal indulgence as the controlling “epistemic”, rather than God’s Word, revealed to us by His Spirit, undergirded by His written word.

Your belief – and it is merely a belief, not knowledge according to His revelation – that both a young world and an ancient world can be accommodated is an egregious error. First, it falls foul of the Law of non-Contradiction. That is to say, one thing cannot be another mutually exclusive thing. Second, it is claiming that God’s revelation about what and how he created is nugatory. That is, the Holy Spirit, despite textual statements to the contrary, has not only failed to impart unambiguous and accurate information about God’s creative works, but he has serially misled men like myself who read the Bible and conclude that it is unequivocal God created quickly and the world, for both textual and scientific reasons, screams young, young, young. (Again, the Law of non-Contradiction applies: either I am wrong and you’re right or its contrary is true.)

The yardstick must be independent from the things being measured. The only yardstick we have concerning the beginning is God’s Word, not our relativistic measuring tools. Zaphod, you are not at liberty to take Exodus 31:17 any way your feelings dictate (after all, what verses can you point to that unambiguously tell us that the world is old?). It’s neither biblical nor according to a Christian epistemology to do so. I fear, and know, that teaching young people that the creation toledoth is not a toledoth (Genesis 2:3) is a serious dereliction of your duty to instruct the young.

I can recognise when a man does engage with an argument. I don’t think you really have with mine. That’s disappointing as I don’t converse with people on such important matters in order to hear myself talk. You’ve relegated Creation to a bin of the unimportant; I on the other hand have argued that the issue cannot be separated from salvation. The substance, the nuts and bolts, of the topic form a whole.

The issue you’ve brushed aside is that you, without any explanation, hold God could have taken eons to bring the whole creation to its completion. What you didn’t address is the purpose for God’s taking such an enormous amount of time when he could have done it far more quickly, as intelligent beings tend to aim toward. There is a point at which God’s taking eons becomes God’s not being there and time obfuscates or even erases God’s actions and footprint. God and Time become indistinguishable to the extent that God’s presence is invisible. Do you really think that young people don’t go on to reason to this conclusion given the vagueness and two-bob-each-way stand you’ve claimed is a logical possibility?

Over my working life I’ve worked in factories, picked fruit, taught in seriously prestigious schools, taught in underground schools where the pupils belong to violent street gangs, worked with murderers and other psychopathic patients…but I think working in cocoon environments, like Chatterhouse, insulate you from what people really are about, what they go on to become and, far more importantly, what they believe about the world.

Screwtape instructed his nephew with the following advice: “[R]emember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. [It’s the] cumulative effect to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing…Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Encourage a man (or, in your case, a Chatterhouse lad) that he is at liberty to impose meaning upon a biblical text which already has its meaning well and truly contained within it, and you’ve begun to redirect his attention from the Light back to himself.

Bernard Williams, writing in his book on Descartes, stated “one false belief can be the condition of my acquiring or retaining many other false beliefs, through its logical relations to them [and one way this may occur is] in some holistic adjustment of my beliefs to produce a coherent whole, misguidedly adjust my beliefs to some false assumption, and thus make everything worse.” I suggest this is exactly what you’ve done by saying that a young earth and an old one have equal epistemic value. Claiming God took ages to bring the Creation to this present state comes with much unwanted baggage and some terribly uncomfortable conclusions directly related to soteriological concerns.

Here’s a neat historical summary of what the Church did believe, contrary to people like Hugh Ross, John Dickson and a plethora of other heterodox have claimed.

https://www.robibradshaw.com/chapter3.htm

Methodological Theism?

We are often told that science proceeds on the basis of an underlying 'methodological naturalism'. Not so, to my mind. It is dominated today by philosophical naturalism, but it depends on methodological (Christian) theism to make the reliable presumption that the universe is amenable to rational examination and that our rationality is congruent with the nature of the universe. For these reasons science flowered in the soil of modern Christian thought (that typically took Genesis 1 seriously). I think we are seeing science under attack today, with the shrill dominance of 'critical theory' so called, and a growing 'identity' based subjectivism a growing undercurrent in all cultural streams. Both turn their back on the idea of rational examination and methodological objectivism.

Why did God create in 'days'?

Comment on: https://creation.com/the-creation-hyperbola

I think there are a couple of possibilities in God's creating over six days as we experience them (very clear from the 'evening and morning' definition of 'day'). Firstly, God demonstrates that, while the eternal creator, he is present and active in the world that we live in and is created as the stage for our communion with him. God is 'here', not distant. He is in our 'space' not some ethereal unobtainable place that is incomprehensible to us (pace Plato, Aristotle and pagan stories in general). Each day shows a sequence of events that commence with God's will: with 'mind', and result in an effect, which God then evaluates. He demonstrates that mind (a person) is the source, and not things visible, as per Hebrews 11:3, and each stage of creation is complete, established to get on with life and its cycles of reproduction, ecological adjustment, and cultural development (for man). He also demonstrates a creation where rational causality operates. Finally God demonstrates that he is in fellowship with his creature-in-his-image, reinforcing the 'imageness' that is exhibited in creative work: mind applied to the creation. He adopts the same tempo that we are constrained by the daily cycle that dominates our lives. God demonstrates that he knows our limitation but nevertheless exhibit his capability. Thus he shares, fellowships, despite our finitude, making sense of the 'imageness' that allows the fellowship.

 

If God had created instantly, it would seem to make God one with creation: monism. If he 'created' through evolution (over long periods) it would seem to absorb him into the creation, making him included in it.Either way a creator disconnected from the creation and its creatures. We know from Genesis 3:8 that this we have a fellowshipping God, not a god like the pagans imagine, distant, impersonal, impassible.

The creation in 6 days shows God separate from the creation and its creator. He demonstrates this by describing the way he created. All of God's acts in the Bible are public, and they are all about the fellowship (or not) of man and God. The creation account is similarly public. We weren't there, so the next best thing is its description showing it was done in terms of the world that we are in. The creation account, unlike any pagan account, is clearly in and about *this* world, not some other figmentary world of which we can know nothing and cannot make sense of in our lives denominated by the passing of time, location in history and setting in place.

A fistful of books

I've been looking for concise books that would introduce the main issues of origins for (particularly older high school age) Christians.

I contacted a couple of creation organisations, and got either directed to their website, or recommendations for massive tomes, or nothing!

Then, in a recent 'specials' leaflet from one such organisation I saw what looked like the books, and bought them.

All good.

Here they are:

The Dawkins Proof by Barns

Taking aspects of Dawkins' book The God Delusion and uses them to provide evidence for God that Dawkins must rely on to prosecute parts of his argument. Irritatingly quotes from the AV, for some reason. NASB would be far better.

Evidence for Creation by de Rosa

A brief but sufficient survey of the basic evidence for Special Creation.

Six-Day Creation by Burney

Examination of the defined duration fiat creation of the Bible. Another irritation, he adopts the tedious Puritan authorial habit of enumerating points in ordinals (firstly.....sixthly.... ninthly...), when the modern pattern of simply numbering paragraphs would suffice.

World Winding Down by Wieland

Overview of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its application to information theory.

Did God Use Evolution? by Gitt

Another tedious presentation, yet with good content from a largely scientific point of view. He doesn't really deal with the theological reasons very well, although he does touch on them relevantly.

Foolish Faith by Judah Etinger

An apologetics summary covering origins, the Bible and faith.

What is design?

Design naturally implies teleology: to achieve a future state to meet a prior purpose.

Design can therefore be characterised in these terms, but what about design itself.

Thus this comment to a video by Behe:

I think his definition of design needs work.

Design features the bringing together of components, whether they be parts, assemblies, systems, or systems-of-systems to interface in a way not predictable by the components themselves. That is, that cannot arise from the operation of the component taken in isolation.

With parsimony this is the mark of mind. Coordinated across components it denies random 'trials'.

The other problem that foolish 'component' level natural selection skips over is the concomitant change in interlocking supporting systems, themselves not dependent on the primary function in question, but are essential for the function in question.

The eye for instance. To work it would need continuous congruent changes in the skeletal system, muscular system, autonomic nervous system, and its component parts, the endocrine system, the brain's 'software' to turn the electronic signals into smoothed images, the balance system and its multiple parts, the blood supply, the operations of eyelids, tears, the presence of eyebrows, motor coordination (e.g. for throwing a ball at a target).

All these complex systems, sub-systems and 'systems-of-systems' (system congregates) must be coordinated and in step to allow the eye to function and to be 'selectable'. Darwinism is early-Victorian gross morphology fantasy that is at best naive, at worst ignorant, implausible and finally impossible.