The Perils of Theistic Evolution

Any critique of Theistic Evolution has to start behind the direct facts that might be contested (that is, 'science' and the Bible), and with the philosophical position that underpins the theology which allows the Bible to be relegated to a set of ancient stories and legends that may convey spiritual truth, but have no necessary relationship to the space-time world of common causality, even in the view of some evangelicals.

The theology is more about a Barthian approach to the Bible than the world-concept of the Bible, where words connect only to ‘faith’ ethereally and do not do so by way of depicting or explicating anything in the real-world of "A does not = non-A". The ‘real’ in this formulation, is not of this world, but in a philosophically idealist move is elsewhere, so the Bible, to communicate its ‘truth’ in this higher manner does not need to tell us anything about what has really happened; and in fact, in this view both need not, and probably cannot!

The counter to this is that the very account of creation shows that God and we participate in the same real world where words relate to events and actions that are denominated in the common causality upon which we depend, and, created by God, mediates our concourse with God as well as each other.

It is actual events and actions that are real, and that instruct our apprehension of the ontological coordinates that bring us to encounter God in action by which he demonstrates who he is and who we are in relationship to him. The idealist would have it otherwise, of course, but to attempt to impress them with science, while it may influence some, will probably have little effect, as they consider that we have missed their point that the Bible is a 'faith' book, not a 'fact' book; of course, it is only a faith book because it is a fact book, otherwise faith would be in irreversible dis-connect from the world in which we act and is the scene for our encounter with God, our salvation and for God's covenants.

To encapsulate this with an illustration, you may know the old Goon Show where a bank holdup involves the use of a picture of a gun. The theological idealist would have it that the Bible is a ‘picture of a gun’; but of course, this can have no real-world effect; what we need to hold up a bank (and to make a creation by fiat that delimits the world we are in) is a real gun (and a real creation in events that make sense in the world in which they are set, and which they define).

In short, the Bible is only theologically meaningful if it is meaningful in the real world terms by which it denominates itself. God is thus creator, not by weaving a symbolic story, that point to something or other, but because he created. He identifies himself with the sequence of fiat acts, not becuase they are symbolically meaningful, but because they occured. They are meaningful, then, because they occured, and not because they did not.

An example of how this plays out was in a post and exchanges on Michael Jensen's blog, the bloggin parson. (Jensen is a lecturer at Moore College, and son of the current archbishop of Sydney, Peter J.)

Jensen was asked if he thought that Noah, of flood fame, was a real person, and by implication, that the account related events that occured. Jensen avoided a direct answer, instead asking what the text was telling us.

Now, if the text is not telling us that there was a global flood and only Noah, his family, and the animals listed were saved, then it is not telling us anything and is just a story, 'made up', with no real world referents! The point of the account is that the events recounted really happened and had a real effect on the world: thus is scripture linked to the world we are in.

The alternative, that the text is 'telling' us something based on non-events, or events mis-recounted, then it has no content relevant for our consideration as it is not about anything real, and anyone can 'make up' a story. That's the easy part.

If true, then unimportant!

A very apt comment on this article about Richard Dawkins:

The great irony of views such as Dawkins' is that, if they are correct, they are at once unimportant! How so? No arrangement of atoms has a value privilege over any other arrangement; value refers to something external to the arrangement, which the materialism that Dawkins espouses denies exists.

Are you kidding?

This line of thinking is known as "Theistic Evolution." But its followers are kidding themselves if they think it is compatible with Darwinism. First, to the extent that anyone--either God, Pope Mary's physicist, or "any being...external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties"--set nature up in any way to ensure a particular outcome, then, to that extent, although there may be evolution, there is no Darwinism. Darwin's main contribution to science was to posit a mechanism for the unfolding of life that required no input from any intelligence--random variation and natural selection. If laws were "implanted" into nature with the express knowledge that they would lead to intelligent life, then even if the results follow by "natural development," nonetheless, intelligent life is not a random result.

From Behe, The Edge of Evolution.

Bolt on Dawkins

atheist speaks

Couple of letters to papers:

As for the existence of God, the question to which no theologian has ever given a satisfactory answer - ''why does God permit natural evil (all the suffering of humans and animals caused by natural disasters and disease) to occur?'' - is sufficient to make the existence of any God extremely unlikely, to say the least.

Dennis Biggins Cooks Hill

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/pleasing-no-one-maybe-rescue-plan-is-on-target-20111129-1o5aw.html#ixzz1f89erRKH

Dennis Biggins has to explain what he means by 'natural evil' in a material world. He is clearly referring to something outside the natural world to say that some things are 'evil'. Of course they are not; the notion of evil is at best a mere social convention for events that are outside an organism's adaptive range. Evolution will, in time, deal with it through the death of mal-adapted organisms, or their eventual adaption to the natural world. The atheist position has to do away with any concept of evil, because the concept itself implies a divinity outside this world!

And that about says it!

Theistic evolution? You're kidding!

"God is the Creator of heaven and earth. If God produced the universe by a single creative act of His will, then its natural development by laws implanted in it by the Creator is to the greater glory of His Divine power and wisdom" (the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia).

To which Behe responds:

This line of thinking is known as "Theistic Evolution." But its followers are kidding themselves if they think it is compatible with Darwinism. First, to the extent that anyone--either God, Pope Mary's physicist, or "any being...external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties"--set natuer up in any way to ensure a particular outcome, then, to that extent, although there may be evolution, there is no Darwinism. Darwin's main contribution to science was to posit a mechanism for the unfolding of life that required no input from any intelligence--random variation and natural selection.

From "The Edge of Evolution" by Michael Behe.

The first theistic evolutionist: Darwin?

From the last sentence of The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

And we know where that ended up: not with the Creator's enduring praise, but with Dawkins referring to Darwinism as allowing him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist!

Walton's lost world

Copy of a letter I sent following on from this sermon.

I was recently reminded of a part of your sermon on Genesis 1 that I had not discussed with you. Your reference to ANE cultures forming their conceptualisation of reality by creating stories about it (much like, and precisely as useful as Aboriginal 'dream time' myths), and this being the function of Genesis 1 (if I recall it accurately) came back to mind as I read a review of a book by Walton "The Lost World of Genesis 1" (reviewed here, which covered this very topic. The review, I think, deals reasonbly well with Walton's failure to comprehend the biblical data on creation, but it doesn't go far enough in philosophical terms, and lets Walton get away with his framing the creation account on a materialist basis, rather than a biblical one. This is dangerous territory as it immediately gives materialism primacy in our approach to the scriptures, and fails to use the scriptures prophetically to instead unseat materialism and make the way for their repentance.

As I read it, Walton effectively makes the Genesis account a 'story' that socially realises the cosmos and our lives and relationships within it. This is reminiscent of the much more circumscribed thesis of Berger and Luckman's book 'The Social Construction of Reality', which does have some applicability to social systems, but does not, however, apply to the external objective world.

The reason I say that Walton defers to a materialist basic philosophy in his work (although as far as I know he's a creationist, of sorts), is that his approach to Genesis 1 is conceptually congruent with one of the most significant implications of the evolutionary world view: that there is no necessary connection between our sense perception, our mentalisation of sense perceptions and the external real world. This arises because the evolutionary world view has as its only essential reproductive success, everything else is an accident, including the viability of our sense perceptions and the accuracy of their mentalisation! This of course is the unavoidable 'self-defeater' of materialism.

But the biblical world view is contrary to this, and it sets a necessary connection, not just an accidental correlation, between external real world constituents, features and relationships and our sensory-mental response to them. Therefore, in a biblical world view, things in the world have existance and relationship to other things even before they are named, and our perception of them is reliable. While we use langauge to identify objects, categories (and only in the social world, might we 'create' them in Berger and Luckman's terms) and relationships, naming is only used to identify particular charcteristics of relationships for specific purposes (e.g. Adam names the animals, but doesn't find a companion); the limit of naming is that it presumes the prior existence of the things named, their external relationships and the external real world that they occur within. It has a 'concrete realist' (as opposed to an 'idealist') conception of the world because the creation account sets out that this is the actual real world and how it works; Adam's 'naming' episode is an event within and predicated upon the real external world. The naming is to pursue a much more limited objective than a grand cosmogony: identifying his companionship need.

Walton's claim might be true of pagan ANE cultures, but I don't think he's provided evidence, either biblical or historical, that these cultural practices were applied to Genesis 1. Indeed, the fact that we see an instance of naming and construction in Genesis 1, and in highly circumscribed terms against a context of external objectification, indicates, I think, that Walton's appraisal is misplaced even on textual grounds, let alone by the philosophical abyss that he leaps into.

Walton has failed to deal with the materialist-evolutionary world view which has in fact been the basis of his thinking (every thought not being conformed to Christ: [Roms 12:2), and which sets out in question begging fashion to actually deny the biblical world view, so when taken up theologically, it sets aside the base data of theology, relying on a stance that denies that there is any theological data at all. Naturally, Walton ends up with the conclusion he does, because he starts from an assumption that only leads to that conclusion.

Why Theistic Evolution is rubbish

I would hope that Christians who think that biblical creation and evolution could be coupled ponder this quote:

In general we can be assured that we know what things are good in themselves, he submits, if what we think is in harmony with what 'other people think': "For what we think has...been determined by the course of evolution" But what we think, even if it is harmonious with the thoughts of others, does not by itself support the view that we think rationally or truly, or even that we probably do so; and appeals to "the course of evolution" in this quarter only thicken a philosophical plot already gone wrong. Unless we have independent reason to believe that what "the course of evolution" leads us to believe is, or is likely to be, correct or rational, the appeal to "evolution" is logically illicit. To suppose that some things are good because evolution leads most of us to believe that they are grievously flaunts Moore's stern requriements that we avoid naturalism in ethics.

From a biography of G. E. Moore

The pagan world

I mentioned the review of Walton's book in my post on the dangerous sermon, but would like to discuss it futher.

I think that Walton must be the source of much of the sermon in question. Walton's mistake however, is that he adopts a pagan framework from the start, and fits the Bible within it, ending up not with the God of creation, but a God within creation, who adheres to the categories of modern atheistic materialism, not the categories of the Bible. The Bible's categorical structure has will exercised in love basic to all being. A pity the speaker did not explore this, or start his thinking from the Bible instead!

Walton's view is founded on the great irony that the creation account is not about creation, but something else, also called the creation, but not the creation that we are talking about (if that seems 'double-dutch' it is). It requires creation to be independent (effectively asserting a prior material creation); he also, like most today, misunderstands the creation as an exercise in only material formation (it is far more than this), and the world view that is required to sustain his position (a pagan world view) either deifies the material creation, or regards it as a ‘given’ and does not conceive of it as having been originated in the will of one who is love.

Like many other moderns, he wants to split the creation into categories that evacuate it of meaning: some split ‘how’ and ‘why’ as the domains of science and theology, respectively. Walton, likewise splits function and being, but being is function in the unified creation that comes from God’s hand. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the pagan error, now repeated in the use of materialist categories, that the creation is otherwise originated, this origination so remote from us in every way as to be an impersonal given, destroying God’s representation to us as creator of a world where his words have real meaning in terms that make sense to us within the world (as it is from his hand, and we, his image bearers, can make sense of the words God gave to us) relating to him. In effect he ‘de-gods’ the world in its totality. This makes God not the creator of a world that is dependent upon him, and part of the means of his relating to us and extending his love to us, but a being derivative of, or referred to from the world which is beyond him.

On these grounds, who, then, are we, who is this god and whence relationship, if there is one that has any meaning at all?

The proposal is pagan from start to finish, and even if Walton truly understands ANE culture, he understands a pagan culture, against which the Bible stands and the word of God confounds! To take this as a reference is to set to one side the work of the Spirit of God in communicating the word to us and the relegate the Bible to merely another meaningless ANE curiosity of history.

And the creation account opposes both these errors in its unification of ‘how’ coupled with ‘why’, and function being part of formation.

'How’s' coupling with 'why' is made in the creation being about the relationships between persons, by the will of the almighty person, exercised in love for the bringing about of other persons to participate in that love, with all the other-centredness of love. The 'function' being part of 'formation' is made in the creation leaving God’s hand caused only by his word (will) and not an interposed mechanism so beloved of materialists who must split off matter from love to make it pre-eminent, and love subservient, and then seek a machine to do the work that the Bible tells us is the work of God’s loving mind!

Walton’s proposal, like every other attempt to defuse Genesis 1, etc. simply represents an embarrassment from pitting Genesis 1 against modern conventional materialism and wanting materialism to have the first and final word!

Inconvenient Information

The trouble with many parts of the Bible is that the information it contains is inconvenient to the aims and objects of fallen mankind.

Thus it is with Genesis 1. Many Christian commentators undertake, with great effort, the exercise of telling us that Genesis 1 doesn't say what it clearly does say. Because it is inconvenient.

It is inconvenient to smart modern people (imblued with or cowed by materialist views) that God created by his will (the method) within the span of 6 days. So much effort is put into explaining that this information, which structures and upon which the text depends, is not an essential part of the information conveyed.

Indeed, it must end up being held that Genesis 1 conveys no actual information, but merely allows the impression that God is creator, with the text providing no evidence fo the fact.

Extrodinary. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

In this vein, I'd refer to a book review by Howard Van Til: [title], where Van Til does just this, and fails to bring a Christian world-view to his work.

Creation and agency

Letter I sent to the speaker of a recent sermon:

Thank you for your sermon on Genesis 1 recently at church. I was very taken by your approach, and pleased with your conclusion that the pinnacle of creation is not the creation of man, on day 6, which is often stated (although among created things man does represent this, given his role in naming the animals and God giving him the garden to tend), but God resting, in his holiness and glory. I think this notion is quite important, as it makes the climax of creation symmetrical with the opening of the account in Genesis 1:1: ‘In the beginning God....at the end, God’.

There were a couple of points you made where I didn’t see the connection with the text so easily.

I liked your illustration of agency and will by referring to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. But this does not, I think, throw light on how we are to regard agency in the Genesis account. The ‘five-fold’ repetition in the account that Joseph Pipa notes in his essay in “Did God Create in 6 Days” is such a tight concatenation as to prohibit the entry of non-divine (and therefore, mindless) agency. Indeed, taken together Psalm 33:6, John 1:3 and Hebrews 11:3b would seem to eliminate the need for and possibility of such agency altogether. And particularly agency from within the creation to effect the course of creation unfolding between the word and conclusion (“it was so”). This applies something that God has created (at best): an impersonal principle from within the creation (or even independent of the creation!), to do the work of creation, the outcome of which the Bible clearly attributes to God, or requires an anachronistic recursion as something ‘not yet’ is used to produce that which will come to be. I don’t think this stacks up logically.

This also couples with your suggesting that science tells us the ‘how’ of creation as act, or perhaps as achievement (that is, the cosmos we are in and the reality by which we and it are drawn into a structured set of causal relationships), but the Bible tells as ‘why’.

I don’t think that God’s act and its realization can be so easily severed, and certainly not from what is set out in the Bible itself; nor can the component parts of creation be allocated to different frameworks so easily in theological terms.

The very mental act of separating aspects of the creation and giving them separate identities is itself seems to be conceptually contrary to the creation as it is set out in the Bible, and must assume, implicitly if not explicitly, that there is some uncreated ‘reality’ to which both God and his creation separately refer. This is because the creation account as it stands makes the ‘why’ depend totally on the ‘how’. That is, God’s speaking the creation into existence, and concluding that his word has achieved its object without reference to any principle or mechanism external to himself. There is, therefore, not only no place for something interposed between God and his creatures, but no reason for it. In similar terms, some have said that the details of Genesis 1 do not correspond with events in time-space, but nevertheless identify God as an orderly creator. However, this is incoherent. One cannot deny the basis for a conclusion’s reality (events on days) yet persist that the conclusion itself has an objective status (what only events on days can indicate).

If the biblical ‘how’ is a nullity, then the ‘why’ is hollow and cannot promote either God’s glory or his worship by his creatures, contrary to its purpose throughout the Bible (that is, God’s being creator, in biblical terms, being that which calls us to worship of him).

But it is also at odds with its place to think that science does tell us the ‘how’ of creation, as science deals in the repeatable and observable within the completed (and fallen) creation. The creation is not accessible to ‘science’. Ideas of evolution, which are often regarded as explaining how life, or organisms as we know them, or indeed the entire cosmos came about does not in fact do this. It is not science, but religious materialism. To think that the variation we do see in organisms reaches back into their origin moves from science to unfounded belief almost instantly, and a belief that has its feet in the idea that there is no God, or if there is, he is the remote and uninvolved deist god. Not the God of the Bible who created in love for relationship.

To even look for a ‘mechanism’ that would execute the creation beyond the terms of scripture misunderstands both the account itself and its theological place. The account is not, and the cosmos and us in it, are not about ‘mechanism’ in some materialist vision of how the world is, but about relationship: that between God and what he has made to glorify himself and give us life to live in his presence. Science and mechanism occur post-creation, and any light they are thought to throw does not illumine the creation account or our understanding of it, but colours it to the detriment of understanding and in congruence with a prior materialist conceptualisation.

Blessings

David Green



PS. Some references that may be of interest are:

http://creation.com/john-dickson-vs-genesis

http://www.christianity.com/ligonier/?speaker=mohler2

(Al Mohler’s talk at the 2010 Ligonier conference, summarised here:

http://www.ligonier.org/blog/2010-ligonier-national-conference-albert-mohler/)

http://www.grbc.net/sermons/index.php?action=by_conference&conference=5

http://www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?keyword=GPTS%20Conference%201999

http://www.stillwaterrpc.org/genesis.php

A recent book review reminded me of another point that the speaker made: he spoke of Genesis 1 being about 'funciton' not origination in material/cosmic terms. I didn't pick up on this, but a review of Walton's book on this matter reminded me.

The fatal flaw in this line is the pagan separation of being and action (or pure origination and function). It encapsulates a world-view that is not biblical, where only God is 'pre-supposed', but where a cosmos is regarded as a 'given' and not something that results from the will of God who is love. It depersonalises the basic nature of 'being' and ultimately 'de-god's' our world.

scientific knowledge

"Scientific knowledge occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant" F. Hayek's critique of 'scientism' quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald's Weekend Business by Nicholas Gruen, 21 Jan 12.

If only my Anglican colleagues in this diocese had the courage to assert this in favour of theological knowledge!

History: event or interpretation?

Some quotes from Elton, The Practice of History, that touch on, and raise questions about the way Genesis 1 is approached by many commentators today, who deny that it is history, or take it as a type of verbal gloss on an underlying but unnominated set of events:

The task of history is to understand the past, and if the past is to be understood it must be given full respect in its own right. And unless it is properly understood, any use of it in the present must be suspect and can be dangerous.

p. 47.

A long one which is interesting in the difference between ‘natural’ science and history:

As a matter of fact, in a very real sense the study of history is concerned with a subject matter more objective and more independent than that of the natural sciences. The common argument that, unlike the scientist, the historian cannot verify his reconstruction by repeating the experiment at will can be turned round to give him greater assurance of objectivity...All scientific experiments are essentially constructs, and this applies to both the physical and the biological sciences...Of course, he obtains his problem by asking questions of nature--of something outside himself--but his method enables him to treat nature willfully and to compose for himself the argument which he wishes to resolve...scientific experiments are...artificial; theses things would not have happened but for a deliberate act of will on the part of the experimenter; the matter studies may be taken from nature, but before it is studied it is transformed for the purposes of the investigation. It is not going too far to assert that nearly all scientific study deals with specially prepared artificial derivatives from what naturally occurs.

The historian’s case is different...he cannot invent his experiment; the subject of his investigation is outside his control. When the problem of truth is under consideration, his essential difference from the natural scientist works in his favour...the matter he investigates has a dead reality independent of the enquiry.

pp. 52-3.

When it comes to views of Genesis 1 that see it not as an account of time-space events in the sequence given, but a sort of meta-historical account that abstracts from events to convey some inferred ‘truth’ that lies beneath them, I can’t but help think that such views consider God to be a historical relativist: a position that has to be argued and demonstrated, rather than asserted glibly and taken for granted as though there are no alternative positions:

Interpretation, or general acceptance of a thesis, has nothing whatever to do with its independent existence...others who think that history is what historians write, not what happened, come dangerously close to suggesting either that it does not much matter what one says because (interpretation being everything) there are always several reasonably convincing interpretations of any given set of events, or that history is altogether unknowable, being merely what happens to be said by a historian at a given moment.

p. 56.

...but that men cannot ever eliminate themselves from the search for truth is non-sense, and pernicious nonsense at that, because it once again favours the purely relativist concept of history, the opinion that it is all simply in the historian's mind and becomes whatever he likes to make of it.

p. 57.

So those who think that Genesis 1 is a late Jewish ‘interpretation’ of what they think happened, against the conceptions of the day as to origins, have succumbed to the notion that it is interpretation (the ancients’ or theirs) that matters and not the facts. But this is a perspective, not itself a self-evident fact, and it is what actually happened that is important, because this is reflective of who God is and what we are in relation to him, in every aspect and dimension of our being. To think that the interpretation is more significant than the events is to express a view that the cosmos and its ‘reality’ is something other than what is from God’s hand, somehow independent of God and that principles and mechanisms have an independent existence to which God in his creation tale also makes reference. But this undercuts the whole notion of a meaningful creation account and leaves us knowing nothing about ourselves or our world, subject to the changing whims of contemporary ideas: currently, of course these are materialist.

CMS Summer School

A friend who'd attended the school sent me a copy of his letter to the Archbishop, who addressed the attendees on the subject of creation.

I am very glad that you broached the controversial question of creation at the CMS Summer School.

The question is often delimited in the terms that you used in your talk: that is, both by science and theology, thus your deferral to science, I would expect, on the scientific questions.

This represents, I think, a profound mistake! The question of our origin is not a scientific question at all. It is, from start to finish, a theological question and its answer has only theological implications.

The question has only become regarded as a scientific one by a sleight of hand to which the church has caved in from the day of its active promotion by Darwin and his supporters in the mid 1800s and resiled from its prophetic function ever since. The great sleight of hand is two-fold: firstly that processes within the creation can throw light on the supernatural act of creation, and that something must be interposed between the word of God and the effects of that word, some ‘mechanism’ to give life to what God has called to be! How extraordinary for a Christian theologian to buckle before the puffery of materialism and its typically atheistic proponents (or unwitting Christian fellow-travellers) and agree that our God needs a ‘mechanism’ to achieve his ends; particularly when he has gone out of his way to tell us precisely what happened in sufficient detail to eliminate the role of any subsidiary mechanism.

And just think what a mechanism might imply for the doctrine of creation itself? It might imply that agency apart from God was necessary for creation: so whence this agency? It might imply that God made something in order to make something else, as though ordinary providence operated in the extraordinary period of the creation, ending as it does with God in his glory! It might imply things that exist that are outside God and outside the creation: some principle, power, or ‘mechanism’ that is uncreated? What does this say, then about God? But what, also, of us? The effect is to immediately de-personalise the creation work and destroy the filial relationship between us and God. We would be the sons of a machine, not God if he interposed a mechanism between himself and us; yet the only mediator is Christ!

Clearly, this opens up a can of worms.

The reason creation is a theological matter, and one of prime importance is because the creation both shows and defines our relationship with God and sets the entire cosmos and all that is within it in theological context: arising only from God, for God’s purpose and reflecting God as ‘very good’, then to be under the stewardship of his creature that is in his image.

Importing evolutionary ideas into this is not innocuously adding a ‘scientific’ explanation, but is mounting an attack on the sovereignty and capability of God, if not his very being; re-founding humanity as a mere assembly of material, and making the cosmos the foundation of being, with person-hood, shown in will and love relationships and actions occurring within this and not prior to it, in the three-person God. Apart from this, it is also allowing a fiction to explain God’s supernatural acts, a fiction for which there is no evidence, any actual evidence cutting off after it has explained the variation in creatures (but not their origin).

I would ask you to re-consider your position on creation and re-take it as a theological question, because those who deny God see the theological issue very clearly and make materialism the engine of their view of humanity. The two do not co-join. Materialism, how ever it trumps itself up, does not mix with Christian supernaturalism. Each places man and the cosmos on utterly different trajectories.

A sermon that deals with this topic which may be of interest is at:

http://www.gty.org/resources/Sermons/90-359

I would also add that to argue for any mixture of evolution and creation removes God from creation: as many published works attest, as does the lack of movement to God brought by expousal of evolution. My posts on de-godding God and the Creation discuss this.

Furthermore, to claim that the text is empty of historical content, but still serves to show God as creator, fails. If the content is inaccurate, then nothing is communicated but puffery, and it is empty of information that relates to the creation in which it is purported to make sense: that is connects with the categories, relationships and common causality of the creation. It is a sad sign of theological neglect to let this hollow argument pass into print, or sermons, which it does from time to time.

Creation, but not as you know it

The sermon on Genesis 1, to which I referred the other day, started off very well, I thought, and it ended well too, for that matter. It was the middle that was the problem; or where there were a number of problems, to my mind.

At one point the speaker made an analogy by asking if we believed that Hitler killed millions of Jews. Of course, most people affirmed. He then told us that in fact all Hitler did was give orders. The killing was done by others. He extended this to say that creation was similar. God gave the orders, but other factors did the work.

There are a couple of basic problems with this: there is no biblical evidence that God used intermediaries, or had to rely on agency (apart from Christ, the only agent mentioned in the Bible: John 1:1-3) particularly noting Hebrews 11:3 and Psalm 33:6 and 9. There is also an irrationality in God having to rely on, or use, something from within the creation to recursively do the creating itself, when God's resting on day 7 marks the division between creating and the world as created. It means that God used something from what was not there do make what became there. Simply unworkable!

The speaker also brought up the notion that the creation account gives us the 'why' or the meaning behind it all, but 'science' gives us the 'how'.

Again, this fails. The failure is a basic linguistic one, as the account clearly provides the 'how' (God spoke, it happened) as the 'why'. The two are inseparable. But the failure is also logical: if it is imagined that a materialist, de-godding doctrine (evolution) which relies on observations within the completed (but fallen) creation gives the detail of the pre-fall, pre-normal-providence creation acts, then we are using imaginary paddles on this particular canoe!

One remark perhaps gave the game away. The speaker mentioned 'intelligent design' which, to my mind is a non-Christian approach to origins, when it is extended past the observation that the creation is replete with the characteristics of design. ID does not a theology make, nor is it adequate to inform theological work. Our consideration of creation must start with the Bible, as for instance this sermon on the theology of creation demonstrates.

Underlying the speaker's thesis, I think, was a misunderstanding of the creation account itself; which is about relationship and soverign action, not providing openings for us to 'grope' for 'mechanisms'. And, as I've argued, the quest for a mechanism is itself recourse to materialism and rejection of the biblical world view, sith its use of history to establish the basis for relationship and the connection between creator and creation, and gives primacy to materialism as basic within the creation and probably prior to it!

One of the nice touches in the sermon was how the speaker characterised the pinnacle of creation. Usually it is said that this occurs on day 6, with the creation of man. But Duncan suggested that it is day 7, when God rested. And this has a symmetry to it (in chiasmic fashion) with it a book end to God being the focus of the start of the passage in Genesis 1:1.

Thus, it is all about God, and the detail of the account is even less some literary artifice to convince us that God is creator, but is very much about God creating: about what he, as God, did as the work of God in bringing a creation into being as the place where he would be in relationship with his creatures.

Creation in pictures

Not quite clear in the picture (using phone not camera) but this shows a children's activity at a church I was visiting today (15 Jan 12). The chart was divided into 7 sections, and children were asked to stick pictures of what God created on each day in the appropriate section. Was very enjoyable as Alison, the moderator (I hate, as you know, the word 'leader' in a Christian context), led us through the questions, answers and sticking up.

The sermon that followed (thanks Duncan) took us into some interesting territory, but included, I think, some views that are not defensible from the Bible.

More on this in a later post.

evolutionary history

“The evolutionary theory of history has a good deal in common with that which sees the hand of God in history; after all, evolution was thought to explain the facts of natural creation in default of the existence of a creator.”

Elton, G The Practice of History p. 31

The suppression of Christianity

In "The Good Weekend" of 17 December 2011 Greg Bearup wrote:

...he remembers being fascinated reading about the Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer, a German philosopher, physician and musician who set up a hospital in Africa and supported it by performing organ recitals.

Note, no mention of Schweitzer's christian devotion being the major factor in his life and work or the sacrifice of his opportunities in Germany for the work in Africa. Note also the 'on purpose' mistake to call him a philosopher, but to not mention that he was a theologian, and a significant one!

Bearup also downplays Schweitzer's musical capability. He indeed was a great musician, but he was also a noted musicologist, with a two volume work on Bach.

Typical atheistic revisionism that attempts to erase the Christian heritage from the popular mind.

Elton on OT

“No other primitive sacred writings are so grimly chronological and historical as is the Old Testament, with its express record of God at work...”
G. R. Elton The Practice of History, p. 2

Theistic evolution's project

The project of theistic-evolution, in any of its various forms, is a project to establish that God did, or could have, created by some ‘mechanism’ or ‘principle’ not identified with God but ipso facto, from within the creation itself.

But its seeking an ‘explanation’ for the creation from within the creation is not only incoherent nonsense, but is to miss the very point of the creation as accounted in the Bible. Indeed, to even consider that God’s creative acts could be shared with something from within the creation is to undo God’s chief credential with respect to us, his creation, for our worship of him, his self identification as one who wills in love, and his capability to communicate true content in his revelation, which revelation is only made into the world that he created in which such content must have meaning in terms of elements and relations within that creation.

Thus, to embark upon a quest for a mechanism for creation, interposed between God’s speaking and its effect is to embark upon a quest to avoid God: to imagine that God would share with something within the creation his unique identifying capability is to misunderstand God and deny (1) that his creation is a means of contentful communication between him and us, (2) his love (in making the creation ‘very good’), and (3) the very point of the creation (for God’s extending in love to us ), is as grand a mistake as could come from a human mind.

The creation is not about mechanism, but about relationship wherein we know, love and glorify God. The account itself is not devoid of content, by this fact, but provides information about what and how God did his acts.

To think that the notion of mechanism adds anything to the creation account inserts into understanding of the account a materialist conception; so it counters the Bible’s ‘world view’ at the outset, holding that person-hood, love, intention (word) are not basic, but that mechanism is: materialism's only ontological recourse.

Rather, the account sets in a tight couple word-act and result: God in relationship with his creation; mechanism de-couples result from word-act: word-act - mechanism - result: this breaks the relational connection and puts us in filial relationship with something within the creation! So, asserting a mechanism doesn't explain anything about the creation account, nor does it fill a gap that the account leaves; instead, it voids the creation as a love-act and robs it of the very personal link that it explicates and within which it occurs.

The theistic-evolutionary project ends up by replacing God as he reveals himself in acts, with a ‘something’ that denies this revelation and requires agency outside of God, and, as I’ve indicated above, something that is founded in a conception of the world that is at odds with the Bible as it makes a materialist make-over of the word of God.

An analogy in human relationships would be to think that one could maintain a marriage relationship not by being in fellowship with your spouse, by asking the butler to look after it for you.

This post is related to the ideas discussed in 'de-godding'.

Happy Holiday?

Leading up to Christmas I received a few emails from business contacts in North America. Some ended with the sign-off line: 'happy holiday' or similar pabulum.

Just to keep the facts straight, I replied with 'Christmas Blessings', just to make the point for religion avoiders and their appeasers.

Next thing is to start a movement to put Christ firmly, defiantly and unmistakably into Christmas: pickets outside schools that soft-pedal the Christian-ness of the day would be a good start; the noisier the better. Petitions to school principals, meetings with them (easy if you are a parent), phone calls, of course, letters and emails. You name it. Next year: beat the drum!

De-godding God

There is, I think, a futher ramification to denying the direct reading of the creation account in the Bible beyond my post on eclectic creation and the one on de-godding.

That is, not only is the creation de-godded, but God himself suffers this process, in his being represented as other than his own self-representation.

Moves such as 'theistic'-evolution make God's self-proclaimed acts to be of other than God: a process, or matter itself. It undoes God.

Now, this may not be a problem for many commentators on the topic of origins, as most think the cosmos has been thoroughly de-godded anyway. Even for many ostensibly Christian commentators, the cosmos has been de-godded along deistic or gnostic lines, following a pagan, rather than a biblical lead.

But for conservative evangelicals the implications are more than stark.

God places nothing but himself between 'said' and 'is was so'. The interpolators go beyond the text and say that there is something in between. That God has not told us the full story, and that mechanical process is there. Over time, God will thus be 'faded' from his palpable presence in our life-story (man's life-story) to be replaced by another agent; not a personal one, but at best an occult one (occult as in 'hidden' and not known, if not unknowable) and at worst a completely material one, that is set free from God, his personhood and love for his creation.

The genesian connection between creation and creator is direct and unmediated (but by Christ). There is nothing impersonal between us and God as maker. In alternative views, this is destroyed, and we end up with a removed God, if God at all.

Creation: eclectic?

In Michael Jensen's blog, he announced recently his plan for a book on anthropology: interesting project; he also commented on the connection points with the doctrine of creation. I commented as follows:

Michael,

Sounds like a fabulous project; although I don't know that the doctrine of creation can be set as you've suggested: as more eclectic than the Doctrine of God, or as being integrative rather than comprehensive. If these poles determine your analysis, then I think that other than the polarities you have selected might be considered. For example, I don't think that the doctrine of creation is up for grabs in the eclectic manner you suggest here. The scriptures set it as definitive and determinative of the identity of God and the parameters of our relationship with God and each other. Therefore I think that some of your themes may need to be cast in a less individualistic, atomistic manner, and more in terms of the cluster of relationships which make the setting and sense of questions 1 and 6, particularly, but all as they hang off question 4.

I think Calvin brought creation and his doctrine of God into a close coupled arrangement, and indeed, it would be hard to see anything else in the scriptures, I would think; God provides the creation as his chief identifying element, and his credential for our worship of him; collecting other perspectives in an integrative manner, rather than for prophetic analysis, seems at odds with this.

However, it will be interesting to read your handling of literature in this context, particularly as most, particularly more modern works, seem to share with ancient pagan creation myths (and encapsulate it in the modern myth to which they implicitly refer and give credence: the idea of evolution) a conception of the totality of the material world, the 'given-ness' of the cosmos as a complete basis for our life and the reality in which we are embedded. Then going on to capture any conceptualisation of the divine as a comparative triviality completely captured by the over-arching material world, expressed in some sort of man-glorifying way as either unknowable or not worth really knowing, being merely some sort of cultural fabrication borne of ignorance, or at best, a folorn protest at the ultimate lonliness of persons in a cosmos which is finally impersonal.

However, knowing your acceptance that the idea of evolution is genuinely explanatory, and this cannot be prevented from being explanatory at all levels (contrary to the oxymoronic 'theistic-evolution'), I would fear that your project will more than tip its hat to the nostrums of materialism/naturalism and capture God to a human intellectual-aesthetic (not to say political) construction to remove him from his place as creator, in real terms. I would hope that it holds up the teleological barrenness that literature leaves man in when it denies God as real, or God as creator as he discloses in the early chapters of Genesis, then unfolds to provide the contraverting frame for the news of the new creation.

I touch on some of these issues in my blogs:

http://anglicanoriginsdiscussion.blogspot.com/2011/12/de-godding-creation.html

And also in Four Moves.

Remarkable Claims

Nice quote from Carl Sagan, ironically, at Herding Cats:

Remarkable claims require remarkable proof.

OK, let's hear the remarkable 'proof' for:

Evolution

Extra-terrestrials

Theistic evolution (evolution, really, but where's the biblical data...seriously!)

Big Bang

I mean 'REMARKABLE' proof, not just the circumstantial hand waving we get instead.

De-godding the creation

Letter I sent to Dr Harbin, regarding his 1997 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society "Thestic-Evolution"

I recently read your 1997 article in JETS on theistic evolution. I acknowledge that this was written some time ago, and that your interests may have shifted over the intervening period, but, on the assumption that you have maintained some connection with the thinking in this paper; I would like to offer some comments.

In a debate as complex and challenging as the one you have addressed, it was refreshing that you distinguished between different usages of the concept ‘evolution’. I also appreciated your canvassing of some of the more obvious theological issues (I say ‘more obvious’ not to downplay them, as I think much work remains to tease out the implications of the points that you made).

The nub of the problem, is, as you identify, that theistic evolution has more of evolution than ‘theism’, at least of the biblical variety, and subsumes biblical considerations under materialist/mechanistic ones.

A couple of aspects of the attempt to blend the biblical doctrine of creation and contemporary framing of the origins ‘story’, I think challenge how we understand God and his relation to us (which of course the salient issue of the fall and its counter in God’s redemption opens).

In brief, to assert evolution as basic to the formation of life as we see it, makes a representation about both God and the cosmos that differs from the representation that God himself makes in the Bible, at many points. It says something about God which God doesn’t say!

At root, it makes God not an author in direct relationship with his creation, contrary to what the Bible sets out, and the creation thus as consistent with who God is, but an author who is hidden, occulted by intervening principles which in themselves not just obscure his hand, but negate it entirely. Hard then to align evolution even if ‘theistic’ with God relying on his being creator as the basis of worship, especially throughout the prophets.

This voids the real dependence of the creation on the creator and allows the deist view to run riot and invert the relationship of creator and creature, to enclose the God within the creation, in effect; this is the critical failing of all the ANE creation myths that I’ve read in that they all presuppose a cosmos at some level.

In the creation account God sets out the marks of his activity (and ReMine, for example would say that the marks remain patent) in his close and immediate involvement with the components of the creation. They are not independent and not the result of mechanism, but all the result of intention at every point, underscoring that person-hood (God’s) is ontologically basic, whereas to push God into an occult role obscures this and proposes some 'principle' as basic, I think.

As a result, the cosmos is ‘de-godded’. God as an effective and involved creator: which one who is love would be expected to be, is removed, and a void is opened up that non-love, exemplified in materialism, fills; but it is a faux filling, because the filling is beyond human/personal engagement and is not relationally accessible (personal relationship, that is). It is an empty filling!

De-godding re-configures the cosmos, ‘reality’, in ontological terms, and the core of reality being God’s wisdom at work through love in relationship is gone, to be replaced by the echo of a plea for significance that seems to be pre-supposed in almost every human activity, and indeed extended to the rest of life that is arrayed for human attendtion (that is, in the presence of man as worshipping creature place over the creation to care for it).

De-godding also makes Adam’s naming the animals a meaningless gesture. With God patent and involved in the creation as we experience it (e.g. made the kinds of animals, not a pathway where chemicals could become cells, could become animals…maybe) the naming is steward’s response to his lord’s lovingly knowing his creation. Adam, therefore also now knows it in terms that are congruent with his being the steward.

A de-godded cosmos is one where God is no longer able to demonstrate his ‘god-ness’ to us for us to know him, but one where the focus of our gaze ends at the creature, and that in its mute form: dirt and energy, and tells us nothing about ourselves. Redemption then drifts to myth instead of re-connecting us with what really is.

Finally, if Genesis 1 doesn’t convey information about the cosmos, in terms that make sense in the cosmos, and correspond to what they claim to describe: that is events occurring in space and time, and predicated on the same categorical arrangement and space-time causality in relationships that we would meaningfully apply; then they tell us nothing, and cannot, by telling us something other than what happened, what in fact happened in summative terms contrary to the well worn irrationality that the creation account doesn’t tell us what God did, but that he is creator; well, he is only ‘creator’ on account of him telling us what he did. If we deny that, we deny that he is creator; which is where theistic-evolution must leave us.

Why Leadership? #2

I got a reply to my previous post, and the writer wanted some background, so I rejoined with this:

My observations on 'leadership' come from years of ministry and advanced formal study in management.

The problem as we conceptualise the body of Christ (thus different from the pre-incarnation references to God's people) in terms that gives sense to 'leadership' is that we run, I think, the very risk that Mintzberg identifies as fatal to an enduring practice in any organisation, where one, or even a small group is stuck out the front or on a pedestal and isolation between leader and lead is created: the word itself does that; and renders everyone else a follower, induced to passivity; against how I think the biblical injunctions on church life would work.

The induction to passivity leads pretty quickly to the church coalescing around the 'priesthood' and ministry, the ministry of all believers, ceases to be the central motif of church life. It also gives the 'leader' an impossible job to do. Isolating this person from the coalition of mutual service that is in situational flux in the paradigmatic church. That is we take different roles with respect to one another as circumstances adjust. I've seen many a home group 'leader' feeling overburdened by the false responsibility they think they have, when if their service had been characterised, as it truly was, as 'convening', ministering or even just helping, their and the group life would have been simpler and more effective.

But, I think what disturbs me about the slide from talk about ministry to talk about leadership over the past 30 years, in my observation, is that we adopt organisational terminology which points away from the gospel. Thus my use of terms about my own experience above, which are community centric terms, not 'me-centric', I hope, and I hope my efforts have been genuinely of this manner, and the list I suggested in my first email to you. So, not 'youth leader' but youth minister/worker, not children's 'leader' (if there are any children's leaders, they are their parents), but children's worker, teacher...etc.

As I composed this list, I reflected on my admiration for my late father's trade union work. His union adopted terms for the service roles they had that reflected their beliefs about the way things should work. Oddly enough the 'leader' of the smallest unit (called a chapel) was the 'father'. They had organisers, delegates and similar roles, because they were all equally workers, and no one 'led' them!

So too in the church. If we are serious about our profession, I think that we must organise congruently with this profession. As soon as we say that there are leaders ('archon', is, I think the Greek equivalent word, and not used of church life in the NT) we say that there are followers; but we only follow Christ. Paul is clear on that as he teaches against party spirit; if we say there are leaders and followers, we also say that we have leadership, not community-ship (a coining by Mintzberg that I particularly like).

Thus, as I read the list regarding healthy church life...which list I've worked with in another denomination, I think, if a church has 'good leadership' that is expressed in the natural reading of the phrase, ministry will inevitably break down, the 'pastor' and elders will burn out and the church will dry up, the idea is a problem both terminologically and instrumentally. But what if a church was characterised by a resilient network of ministry groups? Much better I think, and very much what chimes with the NT church life exhortations.

A couple of references that may be of interest:

http://complexityandmanagement.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/hello-world/ and quite a few other posts

http://oss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/961.abstract (I can send you this article if you don't have access)

http://www.faithandleadership.com/multimedia/ronald-heifetz-the-nature-adaptive-leadership

Why Leadership?

I read with interest you piece on the healthy church in the current issue of Together.

Lists that motivate action are always helpful, and one could probably not disagree with your nine points, even though we would all probably give the phrases differing understandings.

But, I do disagree with one of them: point 2 "empowering leadership". I think that there is much wrong with this notion from many perspectives.

I will, however, be brief, and argue that I don't find this concept in the New Testament at all. All I find there is a charismatic community: joint 'leadership' at work, if we must still use this term. It is a great concern that we've imported into our conceptualisation of church, and rather uncritically, the worldly concept of 'leadership'. And its not even uncontested in the world of business organisation, whence it came.

Refer to this article by Henry Mintzberg, for instance: http://www.oxfordleadership.com/journal/vol1_issue2/mintzberg.pdf, and this one:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c917c904-6041-11db-a716-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=8d70957c-6288-11db-8faa-0000779e2340.html#axzz1bDm1PwMc

What the concept of leadership does in a church is instantly disempower everyone, no matter how 'empowering' it sets out to be. The paradox is, that if a 'leader' wants to empower, they must think that they have the power to give out. I don't think that this is the case scripturally, or in terms of the sociology of congregational organisations, such in your denomination.

With the joint exercise of ministry, a healthy church will not have a 'leader', someone who has the ideas, gives out power, forges into the future, because we are lead as a church by the Holy Spirit. I would not want to usurp this role.

Now, its a pity that our adherence to the scriptures does not permeate the way we think about ourselves as organisation. Our language should reflect our beliefs. We don't have leaders, we have organisers, coordinators, helpers, facilitators, teachers, convenors, moderators (a good concept in the Presbyterian church that has morphed into 'leader' unfortunately), delegates and above all, ministers: servants of the people of God. And we don't have that awful oxymoron, the 'servant-leader' which is a trick of business rhetoric and has no real meaning within a church context.

Don't know...maybe

Mick Jensen, in a recent article in Eternity magazine claimed that it's OK for Christians not to be certain about everything.

Well, of course, but by what epistemological slight of hand do we extend that to the Bible and overturn its literary clarity?

For instance, Michael was asked a while ago if he thought that Noah's flood occured. His answer? "Maybe".

Well, where did 'maybe' come from? On what basis does he set aside the biblical information for some other information? and where does this hermeneutical project draw its lines?

I have a fairly good feeling that he would think that uncertainty about the basic doctrine of the creation has a similar status: that is, the uncertainty is acceptable. Only this time we're not considering a trifle, but something that is basic about God, us and what connects us.

Mc'Neill puts it nicely, talking of Calvin:

Throughout his thought a judgement of the nature of man accompanies the doctrine of God; theology is linked with anthropology. God is not for a moment conceived merely as the author and ruler of the universe, but always as Creator and Redeemer of man. God's resources answer man's need.

Calvin de-abstracts the God which I think idealist views such as I think MJ entertains make increasingly theoretical and detached from the real interactions grounded in his word-acts in Genesis 1. The creation is about connection, its deconstruction evaporates this and isolates man from God, undoing the connection that is patent in the text.

So here, I think the Bible expects us to have certainty. If we want uncertainty, we can only achieve that by an arbitrary epistemological move, a move, I think, against the revelatory capacity of the Spirit, and one that muddles the historical stream of relations between God and man.

I've also talked about this in the four moves between God and man.

CBM 13532

A tablet, older than the Gilgamesh tablet, with a better story:

Unam Sanctam

In the Bull of 1302, Pope Boniface said:

..he pretends that there are two prinicples, which doctrine we judge to be false and heretical because, as Moses testifies, God created heaven and earth not in several but in one prinicple.

Now, PB was talking about Manichaeans, but the observation applies eminiently to the philosophy of origins. He was right, Moses in scripture conveys a unitry principle of and in creation: God's speaking in wisdom and love producing one entire creation de novo: no room for alternative principles, such as idealism, materialism or naturo-mysticism. When attempts are made to mix the unified creation with materialism, we get an attempt at two principles going at once: incoherent, crazy and undoing Christ, who is the creator!

I have to wonder at people like our esteemed Archbishop, who think that the notion of the two mixing is somehow rational! Of course Christ diluted is Christ eliminated. Not Good Peter!

Growing Science

From The World of the Reformation by Hillerbrand:

Protestant learning enjoyed the advantage of not being unduly restricted by the weight of tradition. It was able to explore new avenues. that the Nuremberg reformer Andreas Osiander contributed a preface to Copernicus's famous work on The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, in which he defended the scientist's right to offer hypotheses, is worthy of note in this connection.

Sistine Chapel

Another from Elton's Reformation Europe:

The God of the Sistine Chapel is the pre-Reformation God: man's answer to the problem of the universe.

Now, of course, the 'answer' is not God, not a person, not the one who is love, and makes our love of value, but the universe ourself...a mere pile of powder, albeit a big one, above which nothing can rise!

the world ends

Quote from David Byrne's blog:

“The end of the world happens every time somebody dies.”

Something for a theologian to do something with, although, an atheist (or en evolutionist, for that matter), of course, could do nothing with it.

So, where would that leave the Archibisop of Sydney, given that he's an evolutionist and there's no between category.

Reformation Europe

Quotes from Elton's Reformation Europe:

The revival of Greek studies might add to the number of authorities consulted, but it did not encourage any idea of criticising received knowledge by personal observation...astrology deserves to be called the specific science of the humanist.

Reminds me of so much that is said of evolution!

it is now thought that he probably arrived at his revolutionary notion by pure reasoning, without any scientific investigation. This is a method which has yielded as much error as truth, and in the sixteenth century reasoned error predominated.

Same again!

Theistic evolution #2

I mentioned TE a while ago, but I've moved on a little, and think that the term should be expunged from discussion. Once Christ is mixed with another 'principle'; in this case, the principle that not only did the Word create, but the creation created itself, Christ is diminished. So, there can't be two creators: Christ and the creation; with separate ontologies, but only one.

So, if a Christian thinks that the two can mix, then I think they are referring to a 'god' other than the creator, and so they are only referring to evolution.

Open letter to Peter Jensen: atheism debate

Dear Peter,

I followed with interest your recent participation in the 'atheist' debate. One remark that you made in that debate caught my attention.

You said:

Thus, it is not with evolution as science that I have a problem; it is with evolution as an idolatrous explanation of all things; it confuses mechanism with agency; science with theology.

It seems from this that you regard ‘evolution’ as being restricted to mere biological machinery descriptive of, for instance, the development of new species, or indeed, all life from just one cell. I get the impression that you conceptualise this within a basically creationist frame of reference: that is, you hold that God created, although, possibly not as the Bible sets out (how one could know that God did create, or that it was God who did the creating, when what is currently claimed about the universe's origin, and seemingly accepted by many Christians does not line up with scripture is not entirely clear, but that is another matter).

The fearful thing is that your position allows the unravelling of any proclamatory opportunity by its acceptance of the materialist framing of being when discussion of origins arises (as it did in the speech by Russell Blackford). As soon as it is denied that Genesis gives any information about the history of the cosmos, the biblical conceptualisation of the compass of God and our existential ground is unseated, the point of contact between a real God taking real action in making then redeeming the world, for real effect is gone and the way to repentance is effectively closed. This is denial, in short, that there is any possible objective concrete reference in Genesis 1 to real events or the world we stand in and where God’s covenant is operative.

As soon as we say that Genesis conveys truth, but not in the only information that it presents, we invite the materialist to maintain his conceptualisation of the world and find no place for God. This comes about because we say that the world can at once be created with the only representation of this in the detail set out in Genesis 1, by a God who is love, and for loving reasons, and be the aimless product of random material interactions, and full of un-love, at the same time.

This hardly brings glory to God. Modern evolutionary atheism is clear on this: it sees no place for the glory of God in an evolved world, only ‘facts’ that show there is no god (a stark example of this is provided by Sommers and Rosenberg in “Darwin’s nihilistic idea: evolution and the meaninglessness of life” Biology and Philosophy 18: 2003)!

And it doesn’t help to grasp at analogical views of Genesis 1 to hope to change this. These end up not explaining the text, but explaining it away. Thus, ‘framework’ type views are ‘anti-exegetical’: in that they deny the intersection of the text and the real world of sin and relationship, rather than prophetically position us within it.

So, what is happening here?

I think we must reach back into the Enlightenment “project” to tease this out.

In your remark you seem to have bought the Enlightenment story, without acknowledging that it starts with a complete disjunct between rationality inherited from its biblically inspired forebears, and the Bible itself, attempting instead to find a rational ground in humanist terms: the biblical basis is removed, but its effects are forlornly held on to.

To save its scheme, the Enlightenment needed to find a substitute basis for the real and us in it that was independent of a creator, or at least a creator-person. It found this, after not to much searching, in rehabilitating the ancient Greek notion of a universe that is truly ontologically independent and that necessarily, made itself. Thus is the evolutionary principle around which the modern world turns.


For you to then express a concern that the modern world wants evolution to be more than a minor mechanical detail of biological change and adaptation could only evoke puzzled looks from its proponents: that’s the very point of it! Evolution is a totalising world view that explains, and is relied upon to explain, the origin and nature of the universe purely in terms of the universe itself. It has reduced God, if he is to be given any place at all, to a result of matter (brain activity), completely captured within the bounds of the cosmos and entailed by it, at best. Certainly not separate from it, not holy, not to be glorified and worshipped, from whom there can have been no separation, against whom death is neither a breach nor the last enemy, and to whom is owed nothing at all.

In the end, your remarks betray two mistakes about evolution.

Firstly, you think that it is just the mechanical detail of life within a basically Christian conception of the world. Not so, as it proposes completely different things about the real world from those in Genesis 1, in the main.

Secondly, you seem to confine evolution to science alone, cutting it off from wider questions. In fact, it starts as a metaphysical principle and ends, not as science, which it never was, but as a metaphysical setting for all experience that pursues the material (“now, let’s suppose that the universe is not the result of intention, but is completely explained by naturalistic processes”), and rejects the personal, let alone the supernatural, as basic to being. Evolution is an overarching materialist conceptualisation of the world, counter at every point to the Christian one.

Post the Enlightenment; it is a methodologically pagan program that is, as Mary Midgley, the British philosopher, pointed out in ‘Evolution as a Religion’, the creation myth of the modern Western mind. It is the idea that now provides the cultural and intellectual reference point for art, literature, intellectual enquiry (including theology, I must add; yours being an example), and human relations. It has nothing to do with anything that the creator God reveals about himself, the world or our redemption.

Also on creation and the Christian starting point.

Ancient Error

This appeared in the SMH letters: John Dickson is a member of the Centre for Public Christianity and a Sydney Anglican clergyperson. He is probably most well known here for his heterodox views of Genesis 1; yet in his own field:

Not-so-ancient error
Having also waded in ancient literature on ethics, I must advise John Dickson (''And the last shall be first - why leaders thrive on humble pie'', October 7) that the Athenian statesman Pericles certainly never lamented how little influence he had compared with Demosthenes. Pericles died nearly half a century before Demosthenes was born.

Back in fourth century BC Athens, Demosthenes and Aeschines were the Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott of their day, and it was the modern advertising executive David Ogilvy who observed: ''When Aeschines spoke they said 'How well he speaks'; but when Demosthenes spoke they said 'Let us march'.'' As an academic in the department of ancient history at one of our prominent universities, it is Dr Dickson who will be eating the humble pie, I'm afraid.

Julian Holden Turramurra


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/pity-were-not-as-concerned-for-foreign-children-20111009-1lfmg.html#ixzz1aLW6nivy

Where do we go now?

As I was reading back through Al Mohler's blog, I came to this article on a recent Templeton Prize winner. It illustrates the end game of the opening canvassed by Peter Jensen in a recent debate: Peter starts by thinking that the evolutionary speculations can somehow be isolated from an evolutionary world view (well, they can, in a unreflective denial of their mutually exclusive bases). He thinks this will end in the glory of God. Al's blog illustrates that in fact, it goes the other way; unwittingly and ironically paving the road to perdition.

Is that all that is at stake?

In this post by Al Mohler, he talks about the importance of the historical place of actual Adam and Eve, something fast eroding in even evangelical circles; or likely be the next on the list of 'it aint history' in Genesis 1-11. The results are illustrated in Al's quotes in the article

Science and Religion

Survey at Rice University: they do mix!

Consensus

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled ... the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world ... Consensus is invoked only where the science is not solid enough ... Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Michael Crichton, 2003 Caltech lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming"

Archbishop off the rails

At the “Intelligence Squared” public debate held a little while ago in Sydney there were six speakers; 3 spoke for the motion “Atheists are wrong”; 3 against, but this Peter Jensen quote from his presentation followed by an extract from Russell Blackford’s later address highlights the strategic vulnerability of Jensen’s agnosticsm-based doctrine of creation.

Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen: Thus, it is not with evolution as science that I have a problem; it is with evolution as an idolatrous explanation of all things; it confuses mechanism with agency; science with theology.

Now, the AB clearly has a content-less doctrine of creation here; not seemingly aware of this aspect of the doctrine, that reality; or all that created; is ontologically isotropic; and congruently exhibits a uniformity of causal transactions. He seems to think that the one reality is open to different basic descriptions, or different natures: that is, one is like God (in the Bible) and the other is not like God. Blackford, below, picks this up (and interestingly, his evolutionary way does not result in God's being glorified, which tends to rule it out as having any part of the creation) noting that evolutionary doctrines are disjunctive with the world having been very good before man's fall. He regards the fall as fictional, of course; so he is left with a world that is temporally replete with suffering. Jensen is left in this place too, with no connection between the real world and a history that does not embed enmity between creation and God.

And its not even that he needs to discuss science: he's committed the error of the two magisteria here; playing right into the atheist trap; pity he doesn't have sufficient confidence in the revelation of God to set his revelation in the history of his actions in relation to us to whom he reveals himself and out of that bring a critique of atheist nonsense and its self refuting implications.

Dr Russell Blackford [part-way into his presentation]: As we survey all the world's horrible circumstances, the endlessly varied kinds of excruciating pain, the deep suffering and sheer misery, inflicted on so many human beings and other vulnerable living things, it is not believable that a God of Love would have remotely adequate reasons to permit it all.
And it's no use responding to such questions with talk of free will. If free will means anything, it means being able to act in accordance with your own nature and values.
God is supposed to have free will, and yet we are assured by theologians that God will never act malevolently because it is not in his nature to do so. God will always freely choose to do good.
Well, why wouldn't God create other beings with benevolent natures who will also freely choose to do good? Heaven is supposed to be like that, so why isn't Earth?
And anyway, only a relatively small amount of the suffering there has been in the world over hundreds of millions of years could possibly have anything to do with the free choices of human beings.
Why has an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love brought about the world's current life forms through the process of biological evolution, which has, as God could have foreseen, led to untold misery in the animal world? Why would God choose this as the process to bring about beings like us?
Biologists tell us that the evolutionary process inevitably produces design flaws - often painful or debilitating for the creatures concerned. These are present everywhere in the natural world, and in fact in the human genome itself.
These flaws are just part of the evidence that life on Earth has diversified over time through the blind process of evolution, rather than being the product of a guiding intelligence.
So why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose a process that foreseeably produces so many atrocious outcomes for the creatures involved?
Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose the cruel, brutal operation of evolution, in which species supersede each other? You can't reconcile the process of evolution with the existence of such a god.

Indeed, in Blackford’s comments introducing the above extract he scornfully taunted his Christian opponents’ lack of faith:

Russell Blackford: In fact, though, they [Peter Jensen, Tracey Rowland, Scott Stephens] seem to have shown a lack of faith. None of the traditional arguments for the existence of God have been relied upon - they seem to have no faith in those arguments.
Indeed, no argument of any kind for the existence of a god was developed by them in any concerted way.

The transcripts: Jensen's and Blackford’s.
,

Rocks in mud

In a recent promo on TV for a series on the cosmos, it was claimed that the series told us who we were and how we fitted into the universe.

That is, physical sciences, or the materialist interpretation of the physical world, is looked to for basic ontology and this as the foundation for human existential affirmations.

As I heard this promo, my mind went to the oft repeated phrase that religion (meaining biblical Christianity) and 'science' have two different domains of reference. The implication is that science deals with the real world; what actually is or actually happened, and is thus the real (material) basis for who we are and what significance we have (or don't), but religion deals within the real world about values, morals and other affective ethical aspects of life. But the important thing to note is that science is definitional and real, religion is derivative and encompased by the real defined by science. Science (in the sense of religions materialism and its cognates) then is the ultimate reference point, and religion is not.

Science, of course, is contextualised here by the materialist evolutionary world view, which sets out a comprehensive view of life, yet oddly introduces teleological concepts left right and centre contrary to its premis (see for instance the very notion of meaning: if there is in fact no 'meaning', or rather significance, meaning being a property of propositions, not phenomena, then science tells us nothing and any whiff of intentionality in any mind is a chimera).

Then, of course we have those theologians who, riding the wave of religion materialism's boosting, agree that the biblical informaiton about creation and contemporary scientific (materialist) claims about evolution treat different things, and are brought into compatibility in the notion of theistic evolution. Theistic evolution means that evolution is accepted, and any thing that God might have done is made consistent with the current materialist story.

Yet, this leaves one in great perplexity, because each has over-arching ontological claims with completely different epistemic and existential outworkings, which do not permit the glib compatibilist formulation that we have in theistic evolution.

Either the one is right: and intention is real because person-ness is basic in the structure of reality (that is God is and everything is a result of his intention, intention in love, moreover); or the other is, and if so, bibilical Christianity, and the spiritual matters it explicates are captured within the over-arching materialist ontology, and are not only finally, but are totally empty. The alternative, which theistic evolution seems to want to entertain, is that there is a functional dualism, with the real world we inhabit having a dualist character; at once created and un-created; with the incarnation being then inexplicable as there being no clear ontological relation between the dual ontologies. But this is simply unworkable because we can only live life as a unity, not monadically, but existentially and therefore ontologically unified with relations operating in consistent causality across time, space and domains of being.

What ends up is that we come straight round to material being basic, provding the root ontology, and intention (loving intention: our existential rootedness) being a (mere) epiphenomenon of matter and thus reflecting an arbitrary, or random, set of mechanical interactions at the atomic level with as much purpose and significanance as rocks caught in a mud slide!

Self Organisation

A self-organizing garden is called a weed patch.

Courtesy of this post on organising in IT projects using the 'agile' methodology.

Earth...Light...Action

In response to this Creation item; the following comment:

Thinking that the existence of light prior to the sun is problematic is, I think, an example of trying to project a naive observer view of the cosmos back into Genesis. While it is true that Genesis 1 has naive observer aspects, and some theologians think that this is the dominating characteristic of Genesis 1; I don't think that this is a necessary conclusion.
From a naive observor viewpoint is would seem peculiar if light, which seems to be made by the sun, existed before its source; but this misunderstands the physics of light. In fact, if there was no light: no photons emitted by sub-atomic excitement, there would be nothing coming out of the sun at all. Further, as light is but a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, one would reasonably surmise that the creation of light signified the creation of the entire spectrum, if not the entire energy field of the cosmos.
Could the lack of light be related to the formlessness and voidness of the 'stuff' of the cosmos: the heavens and earth as summary of all that was made, as inert 'stuff' un-energised occupant of space; add energy, and things really get going.
On these grounds, of course light would have to be 'made'. Without it the sun would be just sitting there, a mass of inert unproductive not-quite-matter.
Then this goes on to light being involved in the marking of evening and morning. I don't think that this occurs before day 4 when the marking of time is done by the heavenly bodies. Thus this marking was not occurring prior. So the evening and morning are set as nominal signifiers of the passing of time congruent with the later defined days now timed by the astronomical markers: same days by duration, different signification, but the same period of time elapsing on the basis of the equivalence of names.
I recall traveling in the arctic circle where my fellow travelers and I entertained each other playing with the fact that the light was the same at evening and morning: the light really didn't vary that much, but time still did pass, and the names gave meaning to the course of diurnal time. So with the days prior to day 4; I think is possible.

Sample of 1

A local newspaper reported a new allegedly candidate transitional ape-to-man fossil.
Well, it might be an intermediate between two species, but I don't know how this could be determined. From a fossil, ancestry and progination are just not determinable either in general or the particular; so its a mountain of speculation: if people financed their businesses this way, we'd all be broke overnight.
But its also impossible to determine what we are dealing with with a sample size of just 1.
Nevertheless, much trumpeted!
Also of interest is the volume of comments attracted (see below). For a matter that is largely neglected by the church, it has obvious attraction, usually far outweighing the attraction of many other topics.
Paul was right.

The article mentioned the supposed age of the find; but, true to a newspaper, without mentioning the range of results, their error bands and the physical calibration that applied (as opposed to the guesswork calibration of fossil order).

From (the) Kitchen, K. A. on ANE tales.

Re-posted from the Gairney Bridge blog:

K.A. Kitchen, in On the Reliability of the Old Testament, writes the following in response of frequent assertion of commonality between the biblical creation story and those of other early cultures:

The individual themes of creation and flood … recur in other writings. Thus the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish (called “Babylonian Creation” in most books), completed circa 1000 from older sources, has been repeatedly compared with Genesis 1-2. But despite the reinterated claims of an older generation of biblical scholars, Enuma Elish and Gen. 1-2 share no direct relationship. … In terms of theme, creation is the massively central concern of Gen. 1-2, but it is mere tailpiece in Enuma Elish, which is dedicated to portraying the supremacy of the god Marduk of Babylon. The only clear comparisons between the two are the inevitable banalities: creation of earth and sky before the plants are put on the earth, and of plants before animals (that need to eat them) and humans; it could hardly have been otherwise! The creation of light before the luminaries is the pecularity that might indicate any link between the Hebrew and Eunma Elish narrative; but where did it earlier come from? Not known, as yet. Thus most Assyriologists have long since rejected the idea of any direct link between Gen. 1-11 and Enuma Elish, and nothing else better can be found between Gen. 1-11 and any other Mesopotamian fragments. (pp. 424-425, emphasis added)

Kitchen goes on to describe various similarities and massive differences between the different flood accounts:

Here the basic contents are common to both the Mesopotamian and Genesis accounts. So we have in both: a flood sent as divine punishment; one man enjoined to build an “ark”; he taking family and living creatures; and his survival. In detail the differences are so numerous as to preclude either the Mesopotamian or Genesis accounts having been copied directly from the other. We may list the following: (1) The Mesopotamian gods sent the flood simply becausee they could not stand the noise made by humanity … . (2) The Mesopotamian gods hid their plan from all humanity … . (3) The respective boats differ totally; … the Mesopotamian one was a cube! (4) The lengths of duration of the respective floods differ … . (5) A much greater range of folk people the Mesopotamian craft (pilot, craftsmen, etc.) … . (6) The details of sending out birds differ entirely between the two accounts. (7) The Mesopotamian hero leaves the ark on his own initiative, then offers a sacrifice to appease the gods [who were angry at his escape] … . (8) The land of Mesopotamia was replenished by direct divine activity …; but in Gen. 9 it is left to Noah, family and surviving creatures to get on the job by natural means. So, an epochally important flood in far antiquity has come down in a tradition shared by both early Mesopotamian culture and Gen. 6-9, but which found clearly separate and distinct expression in the written forms left us by the two cultures. (p. 425, emphasis added).

Kitchen goes on to state in lengths of the various accounts are considered, “Genesis … offers a more concise, simpler account, and not an eloboration of a Mesopotamian composition” (p. 425, emphasis in the original). He also notes, “Floods per se were a commonplace in the ‘Land of the Two Rivers,’ so why this fuss about a flood? Presumably because, in folk memory, there had been a particularly massive one, far more fatal than most, and the memory stuck ever after, until finally it entered the written tradition. Assyriologists have no problem on this score” (p. 426).

Lucretius

From Chesteron's The Everlasting Man: on evolution and its ontological predicate!

There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the
first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. What became of this great truth in the background of men's minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the
first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.

Pagans, poets and myth

From Chesterton's Everlasting Man

Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology.

Chesterton reverses the logic of those who claim that Genesis as other than factual can tell us anything. Claims that poetry produces the rational realism of Christian thesim are simply wrong: poetry is bundled with myth to keep us from understanding, not to introduce us to it!