It just is...

A sermon I recently heard was a cracker.

Both insightful, and not!

How could this be?

The insight was the relation of God and creation, on creation being part of God's self-definition in relation to us in our space-time-causal world.

The 'not' was that creation as set out in Genesis 1, etc. was, we were boldly told, not about origins at all (despite it being God's foundational credential for our worship and knowledge of him, Roms 1:20 springs to mind, along with Hebs 4:3f and 11:3 ); indeed, that the Hebrews had no interest in origins per se (despite the credential popping up time and again throughout the OT and particularly pointedly in Acts 17:24ff) but were interested in the relationship that it indicated.

Now we start to play with category errors: the claim above notwithstanding that it only indicated a relationship, not because it is some purist 'form' in isolation, but because it was set out as a time-space event in our continguous objective causality. This is how it shows relationship. It is able to speak to such by demonstration of the fellowship between God and man particularly, but extending to creation in general. The fellowship is shown in the common space-time-event domain of God's action (by speaking, with immediacy as the scriptures insist), and our responses.

It went on. We were told that because God created we all need to be environmentalists, while not guarding against the environmental religion we are now beset by, or the need to balance benefits to people with our stewardship of the creation, it being our home, the place of our fellowship with God, the subject of his future redemption (which was touched upon, but not in this sense) and, in travail, although that was mentioned, and so no purist end state is available.

More significantly, we were told that things in creation 'just are' and didn't matter beyond this mute given-ness...yoga, tai chi, evolution...they just were, and didn't matter. This makes sense if you in fact, or implicitly, separate creation as a doctrine from creation in fact in the real world, denying that the use of real world terms because that's where it happened are telling us anything real.

Au contraire. Because of creation these things do matter, in a contra-positive way. Yoga is not merely body positions; it is represented that way to we dumb westerners, but it is an integral part of a pantheistic conception of the universe that is at root impersonal, its perception by us illusory. Tai chi is possibly the same but I don't know of it.

But even more 'contraire': nothing 'just is' but all is created by intention, in love, and is full the wisdom of God. As Rorty wistfully once sought a joining of justice and beauty that is denied in his random 'just is' materialist world, this provides it: everything comes together in the loving intention of God.

Evolution I do know about.

A few days after the sermon I was browsing in a bookshop (a time-space-event one, not an electronic one, as handy as they are). I came across a book published by the New Scientist: How Evolution Explains Everything about Life (although a recent book claims that it doesn't, with typcial journalistic shrillness).

This clearly asserted a dominating, total world view; not a mere technicality within God's creation-not-about-origins-which-just-is!

The idea that creation 'just is' was presented in terms that nothing in the creation is to be afraid of. And with this I emphatically agree; but the things cited are not 'in' the creation; they are intellectual (or  spiritual in a demon sense) artifacts of human (or demonic) endeavour.

To put evolution in the 'don't matter' box, takes us to the edge of not one, but two cliffs.

The first is that evolution, not being a 'thing' but a set of ideas, comes from somewhere: it comes from a human desire to conceive the universe as 'just is' in materialist terms. How ironic. I would aver that this view was part of the ancient Greek's lack of interest in science as we know it today. Aristotle typifies this in that he attempted to deduce things about the world, rather than examine it. His legacy remains dominant in theology, despite its unbiblical premis (evolution). It was also the very contrary view of the universe by mainly what today we would call creationist investigators (scientists) that led to the flowering of modern science. Thus, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, rather it is the essential prolegomenon to any science.

The second cliff is that it either puts God logically within a materialist frame, evolution being a materialist, not a scientific conception of reality, or implies that he must be pushed off away from us. This is contrary, obviously, to Genesis 1 etc. where the universe is framed within and by the thinking, relating, loving being behind and through it all, who relates to us.

Genesis gives life to the relationship by demonstrating God's creation is a 'concrete-realist' set of sequenced events, in contiguous objective space-time causality with us; these events form the creation and are definitively placed in time and sequence. The time and sequence that we know and use. If they don't really tell of the creation, then something else, of which we have no historic knowledge, does. This inevitably plays out as undercutting the 'creation' as God's chief relational credential for our worship and demonstration of his work in fellowship with us as it can then do neither.

It undercuts because it renders the actual action of God unknown and perhaps unknowable and thus meaningless in the space-time-event deliminted universe we are in, shades of the category error again: that some sort of symbolism can be connected to real meaning, in the real world, even though its real-world-terms description is denied and said to be about something else (and how would one know, one wonderes) for which we have no reference).

The real-world-terms it is communicated in; and no other could have meaning, show us realist categories (not neoplatonic imaginative ones), the show that our ideas and actions have real meaning and our relationships have consequences because our relationship with God is real and has consequences. Oh, and they also start our knowledge, thereby, of the creation that we are to steward, and show that we have time-space-event objective, shared continuity with it and God's act in creation, and participatory being with him (the only way to have connection) to come full circle.

Some who take a second temple view of Genesis 1 have considered the six days of creation as a rationale for the Jewish week. But not so. The Sabbath pattern and God's using that very pattern is at the core of his demonstration of fellowship. Both he and his people fellowship in a common ordred pattern of the use of time.


To some extent, as a result of all this, Genesis 1 is a science text. John Buridan treated it as such, conceptually, to much profit.

As a footnote, the reign of Barth in the sermon was clearly evident; as was the influence of the Buddha, regretably, even if unconscious.

Theologians quoted were Brueggemann and Goldingay; both of whom miss the realist point of Genesis, and invite us into an Hegelian frolic. This direction is not helpful, although they do have plenty to provoke profitable thought.

The Everlasting God

Comment to Matthias Media on this book

Just reading Knox's The Everlasting God. What a wonderful accessible book. And, rarely for Sydney these days, one that sticks to the biblical teaching on creation and distinguishes it from evolution. A pity that the idea of chance has overridded the biblical implication of purpose in creation. But then, with Genesis 1 regarded as figurative (it would do Barth proud), the fallback positon is that evolution is the real explanation of life the universe and everything, with the revelation of God a mere chance event within that paradigm.

How to be pagan

A few prize quotes, for those who deny a link between evolutionary doctrine and Christian theology:

"...I myself have little doubt that in England it was geology and the theory of evolution that changed us from a Christian to a pagan nation."

F. Sherwood Taylor, ‘Geology changes the outlook’, in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, Sylvan Press Ltd, London, p. 195, 1949.

"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."

Provine, W. B., "Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life." from 1998 Darwin Day address.

"Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the indoctinees (by Chinese  communists)?...The first, the fundamental, lesson given was  man's descent from the ape---Darwinism! Darwin negates God, the human soul, the after-life. Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and end-all of the intellecdtual slavery it has created"

O'Gara, C. M., The Surrender to Secularism, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, 1967.

O'Gara witnessed the communists in China running indoctrination 'education'.

Playing games

Often I find evangelicals playing games with the first half of Genesis. But if you remove a true, historic, space-time Fall, the answers do not exist. It is not only that historic, biblical Christianity as it stands in the stream of history is gone, but every answer we possess in the area of man and his moral dilemma is also gone.

Schaeffer, F. A. 1972 He Is There and He Is Not Silent

Escape from absurdity

Reading Schaeffer: The God Who Is There. (Crossway Complete Works)

p 164

FS lists the brokenness of man as: man separated [himself] from God, man separated from himself [no longer an integrated being], man separated from himself [no longer in integrated community], and “Fourthly, man was separated from nature”.

I came to a halt with the fourth separation. The word ‘nature’ suggests an independent ‘natural’ reality. But, not so. The non-human world is not ‘nature’, with its hint of autonomy from the creative acts of God, but The Creation, fallen as it is, due to the first separation. This makes the pain of our position even more sharp: we separated ourselves from God and as a result...we are separated from his creation which we were to be stewards of and live in in enjoyment and God’s company.

But FS goes on to some great analysis.

Page 168-9

“The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but cannot find it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.”

Page 183

“...The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it  robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance.”

The final sentence caps it all very well.

The alternative to being made and that through the purposeful love of the infinite-personal God is the ironic ‘autonomy’ of chance where purpose is absent, and we live a perceived absurdity of being people full or purpose and intent, and indeed, love, but in a universe, a reality, we imagine has none of this as basic. This man looks back to his roots in meaningless (purposeless) chance and sees a black absence of personality, love and purpose.

To joint the two, as theistic evolution does, for example, compounds the absurdity and evacuates the gospel of credibility. It would tell us that God 'used' purposelessness/chance on purpose, to produce a world of purposeful beings (in his image) that gave no evidence of his purpose! More than absurd because it destroys the fellowship of beings founded in the creation as described in Genesis 1 where God's acts and our being share contiguous objective space-time causality as persons in communion.

Its all continuous

This morning at  church we had a rather wonderful sermon with this quote from Barth:

‘The goal of creation, and at the same time the beginning of all that follows, is the event of God’s Sabbath rest and Sabbath joy, in which man, too, has been summoned to participate.  It is the event of divine rest in the face of the cosmos completed with the creation of man – a rest which takes precedence over all of man’s eagerness and zeal to enter upon his task.  Man is created to participate in this rest.’ Karl Barth, Dogmatics III/I, 98.

It reads wonderfully well. It reads as though Barth could be an author on this blog.

But not so.

Barth is famous for putting into different compartments scripture and the contiguous objective space-time causality that we inhabit, that scripture seems to speak to and in which terms scripture is delineated; making nonsense of one or the other!

Because: the creation account is presented in terms of the categories and the contiguous causality that we live in. Recursively, this makes the account congruent with the world that it describes and the world whose terms we share in our existential experience. So,  we can make sense of it and take real meaning from it. It gives us a confidence that God has revealed truth to us, and we are not left to the winds of chance.

The world of the account is reflected in a world that has identicial causality with no break in the objective causal continuity between the two, otherwise, one would not make sense in terms of the other and the account would not tell us anything real about this world or God. Which is where Barth is.

The end result would be that the account would have no Real meaning in this world and we would have to seek elsewhere to know not only what really happened, but what is really real, in a basic sense, and how this world, us and god (whose identity is now obscured from us with no place for fellowship...more like Allah than Jehovah) inter-relate. And where would we go? Barth, Dawkins, Enuma Elish? Then, who would we be?

Or, in short:

The nub of it is: if the creation account is not about events (objective causality) in this space-time world, then it is about something else, and the real time-space world is otherly denominated...for which info we have to go elsewhere...where?

ESV Study Bible

A review that I am much in agreement with, although in enthusiastic disagrement regarding a few points.

My big 'likes':

Compromising the Creation Account

In the “Introduction to Genesis” there is an inexcusable compromise with evolutionary chronology. It is alleged that “faithful interpreters” have explained the days of the creation week in a variety of ways. For example, there is the “ordinary days” view that sees the creation days as six periods of twenty-four hours. Others argue that the days represent “geological ages.” Then there is the “work week” of so-called “God days” (whatever those are).
Additionally, a possible “gap period” is supposed to exist between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, during which a Satanic rebellion occurred. The gap generally is perceived as possibly lasting millions of years, thus accommodating uniformitarian geology. Amazingly, it is argued: “None of these views requires denying that Genesis 1 is historical.” Supposedly, “each of these readings can be squared with other biblical passages that reflect on creation” (2008, 44). How in the name of common logic can the mutually exclusive views of “literal days” and “non-literal days” be harmonized with a biblical narrative that professes to be the inspired word of God?
The author of the introduction is careful to point out that some of the Bible’s genealogical records do not contain strict father-son relationships, and that is true. But if this is intended to suggest that a human longevity of possibly several million years can be accommodated by an elastic genealogy, then the hint is nefarious. Evolutionary chronology flagrantly contradicts Jesus’ statement that humanity existed “from the beginning of the creation” (Mark 10:6), and Paul’s declaration that God’s magnificent universe has been humanly perceived “since the creation of the world” (Romans 1:20). Scripture must not be twisted to conform to pseudo-science.

The Flood Narrative

The Bible is perfectly clear that the great flood of Noah’s day was universal in its devastation. The Mosaic language could not be plainer concerning the extent of the deluge: “[A]ll the high mountains, that were under the whole heaven were covered. . . . And all flesh died that moved upon the earth” (Genesis 7:19, 21). While it is true that occasionally comprehensive terms are employed in a more limited sense, the context must demand such, and that factor does not obtain in the flood case. For a further discussion of this matter, see Questions About the Genesis Flood.
The ESVSB contends that the biblical text “does not necessarily mean that the flood had to cover the whole earth” (62). The author supposes that it is “questionable” that the flood explains the geological strata, the fossils, etc. (44). This leaves the matter wide open for evolutionary uniformitarianism as opposed to biblical catastrophism.

Philosophical homosexuality

From Schaeffer's The God Who Is There:

Frittering creation

I’m re-reading Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There. It’s wonderful to run through his fast and furious (pace, not manner) ride through the history of ideas, and the drift down of influence from philosophy to theology.

As I was reading it, and reflecting on the frittering of culture as chance, I drew a line from the work of the early evolutionists and their supporters in long age geologists who chorused for random chemical action, chance, as causal of the world we have today.

This instantly invites Rorty’s despair (based on a quote from Yates yearning for justice and truth to be drawn into a single vision, something inevitably absent in a material world defined (?) by randomness).

If this long line sprang from an evolutionary conceptualisation of the Real, then what is the disjunction with Creation? What light does Genesis 1 thrown onto it?
Why, it contradicts it at the first step.

The account tells us not of a universe where chance interactions deliver order, thought and love, but where these come from one who orders in love and wisdom, by his very nature. From one who is person (in community) and who has made us to bear that image.

Creation does not allow room for a chance impersonal universe, but reveals a universe of purpose internally, and intention externally: out of wisdom and love. Two very personal attributes of action.
But, this is thrown over of we hold that the words of purpose and wisdom obscure the reality of chance. Something that figurative views of Genesis 1 invite, and theistic evolutions, their typical end result, entails.

This must be the case, this overthrowing, if the words of purpose and wisdom are not congruent with the acts (events in contiguous time-space) that make sense in the world we inhabit, as image bearers of the creator, and relate the purposeful move of the creator in creating.  This is so because if the creation is sensible in terms that have meaning for the image-bearer in their relationship to the image-maker, in terms that are real within and to the creation in which is set their fellowship in meaningful terms (giving life in the relationship of love and purpose), then something else is really true, and really sets the structure of the Real.

The frittering of epistemology into chance events reflected in contemporary culture presumes the chance structure of an evolutionary reality. The Creation is fundamentally not like this and so the run of chance will push us further from the real world in though and action, with the end result being some form of intellectual, if not political tyranny.

The two are not joinable. Thus Rorty’s despair, Paul’s warnings and the imperative to rely on the creation account as being grounded in events dimensioned as are any event sequence that we, the image-bearers, have existential familiarity with (‘existential’ as congruent existence, not mid 20C philosophy).

I blame Aristotle

Here ends the popular modern misattribution of terracentricity and fixity of the species to the Bible. No, it was Aristotle.
Below a relevant page from Copleston's History of Philosophy.

Genre

You've probably been in a discussion in a Bible study group, where one of the sage ones, patiently explains that understanding Genesis 1 starts with its 'genre'. A fancy word for literary type. Why they don't say 'type' I don't know.

But what is the 'genre' of Genesis 1?

It's not peotry...we can look at the psalms and see what Hebrew poetry is.

It's not symbolic...we get that lesson in Ezekiel...and a bit more in  Revelation.

It's not quite history either: compare to the later pentateuch or Acts...a little different.

What are we left with?

Chronicle!

That is, a time-ordered list of events.

The writer has driven the point of 'time' and 'sequence' home in every possible way while retaining literary elegance.

Time markers are prominent:

We start with 'in the beginning', then after a set of events: set with chronoligical grammar (the 'waw' consecutive: 'then this happened' recurs through out the creation passage.

Each day is numbered and delineated so that we know what type of day is meant: an evening-morning type day, of course!

Numbers 7 has a similar structure, and it is clearly a chronicle as well.

Compare this with a snippet from Enuma Elish; a pagan theogony that some have the gall to compare to Genesis 1.

Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being...
Ages increased,...
Then Ansar and Kisar were created, and over them....
Long were the days, then there came forth.....

 Here and throughout EE uses the chronological imprecession of pagan myth: time markers are not important to myth, in fact, not having them is the important thing to de-historicise the myth and place it beyond enquiry.

Quite the opposite to Genesis 1.

On history: despite this, there are clear historical elements in Gen 1. History compared to chronicle adds meaning, if not analysis. It is not only 'that' something happened, but 'why' and the consequences. It puts events into an existential coherence that Gen 1 certainly does.

The point I want to drive, tho' is that the objective chronological markers of sequence frame this narrative with unmistakable self-conscious precision.

The Gumbel Error

My previous post on Nikki Gumbel's removal of 'when' from history and giving it to science (he means, of course physical science, as history is a 'science' in that it seeks knowledge) left a gap: the gap was about time itself and its place in the Genesis narrative. I've already dealt with this from one perspective, but there is another I want to bring here.

The presumption that the time markers in Genesis are not germane to the revelation derives from an implicit physicalism: an ontological error that parts company with both the dualism of the Bible, and its concrete realism. Because it presumes that time is a 'given' its action within creation is not recognised and thus the error also parts company with time's existential dependence: that 'word' has priority. Moreover, 'word' strictly in the John 1:1-3 sense. Not a logos of the Greek kind, but the word as going out from the love of God as triune communion of unified will.

Time is integral to the revelation as a created thing, and the markers of time in the creation passage show not only that God orders within time, but uses time to bring order; he using time as the domain of fellowship within the creation (I don't know how the new creation will work in this connection...we'll have to wait and see) where it provides a shared constraint-space definitional of event sequence. Time forms the event-space in which we can join in relationship. Indeed, in which we are shown that the event-space is God's and is where he joins us in relationship.

To put this to one side is firstly a hermeneutical arrogance, then it treats time as an 'accident' of material, almost putting it behind God and not an essential part of the revelation. If God use the time markers as simply symbolic of something else ('what' is never canvassed), one would have to wonder at the specificity of the markers, the deliberation of the pace of creation, the connection formed by his people Israel reflecting his creation and use of time having their life pattern reflect God's.

But, time has to be signficant, and more than symbolic theologically (because the language denies a symbolic role and requires a concrete role for it), as time is our universal constraint: it dominates everything that we do and think; it is inescapable.

Physicalism evacuates time of its theological significance. The proponents fall back to the implicit materialism. Their reference to a paganised framework of understanding (that there are universal givens apart from God) this entails is a theological embarrasment.

Alpha boob

I saw the second video of the new Alpha course where Gumbel tells us that Jesus is the creator walking on earth. Good. Then, opps, 'I've mentioned creation, I'd better hose down that one straight away'. So he moves onto science and assets its non-connection with history (the Bible).

He tells us that science is about how and when, but the Bible tells us about who and why. He gives us the analogy of a birthday cake.

Now, when did 'when' slip into the domain of science? I don't remember that happening!

Nikki clearly wants to offset any recourse to the timing of early history in Genesis 1-11, and let us slip comfortably into the idea that Genesis' timing is something to do with 'who and why' isolated from science and its 'how and when'. Thus letting science appear to take the lead when it comes to the understanding of time in ancient texts, Genesis in particular.

But 'when' is always history, my friend, and in early Genesis (1-11) reaches far more into our relationship with God, and God's relationship with his creation than a bare 'scientific' fact. It carries profound implications for who God is in relation to us, and how the Bible positions itself as revelation.

Gumbel fails to tease out the ontological issues that Genesis 1-11 deals with and the setting that God thereby delineates for his fellowship with us, his creation-in-his-image.

Gumbel also fails to deal with the evidence in the text (a fail for an ex-barrister, let alone a theologian): its form of language (consecutive narrative), its time references (natural days delineated in two ways, just to make sure we follow), its style (unadorned fact), its reference by other parts of Scripture (Exodus 20:11, for example, and note God's direct speech in this passage), its parallel with other passages of historical narrative (Numbers 7 springs to mind), and its 'first philosophy' of word, not matter (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 11:3).

So Alpha carefully places the train of developing belief on tracks that lead through the dark tunnel of pagan confusion before it ends at the precipice of materialism's emptiness.

Thus The Gumbel Error.

How to start a conversation.

Many years ago in a Bible study I was asked for my thoughts on Genesis 1. I gave the direct non-pagan view, which seemed to evoke some surprise.

Now I would start in one of two ways:

In an essay on Wittgenstein, the writer points out the split in Wittgenstein's work of the use of langauge to talk about a chair: a brute fact; and a subjective 'event'. He has to say that these are different; but cannot live as though they are...

Or

In a wonderful essay by Richard Rorty, he approvingly quotes Yates' yearning to be able to capture reality and justice in a single vision. He cannot. He cannot see how to, he cannot integrate his delight in the beauty of orchids with his desire for justice. His world, which he experiences as an integral continuity, fails his own explanatory program...

The only place these seemingly disparate (but only because of entrenched philosophical mistakes endemic in modern thought) elements of the world are brought together is in Genesis 1, and its elaboration in John 1:1.

I leave the rest to you, dear reader.

The eye!

Dick Dawkins is well known in some circles for his story of the evolution of sight, or 'the eye'. It starts with a light sensitive spot on a worm, and goes from there.
His story is what I call a Victorian gross morphology fantasy. It considers only the macroscopic anatomy, has some vague inferences about underlying bio-chemical processes, and that's it.

Now let's think about the human eye and its orchestration of quasi independent sub-systems that all had to come together to give us what we have today.

Let's start with the eye itself.

Its shape, various membranes, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, chemical supplies (to maintain light sensitivity) and differentiated rods and cones all had to come together to work together. Any single element by itself would have been eliminated as biologically useless.

The eye-brain system would have to be functional. Nervous connections to the appropraite part of the brain would have to form in step with the formation of the eye as an anatomical component. The 'software' would have to keep step with the 'hardware'. All the eye does is create an image optically on the retina. This then gets decomposed into electric impulses that go to a part of the brain that then assembles these impulses into something that is mentally meaningful for the organism (us). Each step requires substantial 'evolution': optical accuracy and control, translation to electrical impulses, transmission to the brain, some form of re-coding, formation of the mental impression of an image, and then this impression's meaningfulness to us! The orchestrated systems then keep track of the images as they change, smoothing them into a stable continuous image of the scene around us. None of this complex processesing, no use for the eye. No eye.

Now this system has to coordinate information that comes from the eye muscles, that point the eye, and those that focus it. They also have to coordinate with the amount of light coming in as the pupil changes size due to movement of the iris.

This enables the eye-brain system to maintain its stability of orientation, focus and illumination as it assembles moving images.

The body also moves on its axes. The eye-brain-ocular feedback system needs to coordinate with the balance mechanism and its whole system: detection organs and a processing centre in the brain. This helps to maintain a stable image as we move, lean over, turn around...

While the eye as a sense organ is 'evolving' its controlling muscles, blood supply and ancilliary nervous network need to keep up with it.

The eye's housing and accessories need to 'evolve' in line with this: facial bone structure, eye socket, skin, and surrounding (non-occular) muscles and their control system have to keep in step. The external apparatus, and eye lubricant system needs to be there: tear ducts, detector and triggering  mechanisms, eyebrows, eye lashes, the lids and blinking system have to happen.

This doesn't even touch on the complexity of the eye's internal anatomy and its fine visual control features.

Then there's hand-eye, foot-eye coordination where major systems of systems interact to enable us to write, play tennis, produce sculptures and do the washing.

I've not mentioned the integration of the eye's lubrication system with another meta-system: emotions. The connection between feelings of supreme joy or suffering, or pain (physical or emotional) and the production of tears!

Genetic information drives all this, and not a simple change in DNA 'letters' here and there, randomly. Because the genetic information system is multiplexed several 'letters' have to change in concord. And groups of multiplexed letter sets need to change in 'super-concord' to bring chemical, nervous, interpretive facility and musculo-skeletal anatomy to the party.

As Dawkins might assert: 'simple'!

Time is the hero

‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot … given so much time the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable and the probably virtually certainly certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.'

Wald, G., The origin of life; in: Physics and Chemistry of Life, p. 12, 1955

Of course, this is nonsense, and Wald probably knew it. Stochastic chemistry does not make the impossible possible. That which is impossible will not happen. All it does is allow the less likely to occur. No matter how long we wait, people will not grow younger and water will not flow up hill.

However, this view does up the ante for Theistic-evolution. Time is given agency, and Wald gives it the honour of creating, in effect.

Contrast this with Paul in Colossians: 1:6 For by him [Christ] all things were created...2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.

Time as agent could well be one of those principles.

And consider this in the light of Hebrews 11:3:

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

The primacy of word and not time, ‘chance’ or ‘the “impossible” becoming possible! What are theistic evolutionists doing? Implicitly they are placing the material outcome prior to the creating word of God who is love!

The timing of creation in Genesis 1, etc. obstructs pagan conceptualisations of ‘creation’ or ‘origins’ more generally. There is inevitably a timelessness to these conceptualisations, with what Eliade (in The Myth of the Eternal Return) refers to as a sacralised, or mythologised use of time, to disconnect us and the world of gods; time here is vague, allusive, cannot be pinned down...read Enuma Elish carefully. Its time references avoid being pinned down, and are unclear...like a liar in a police interview, attempting to make a case by being unclear. Of course, it does not and cannot work. We see through it immediately.

In the creation account, many things are being done theologically that don’t often get explored. One of them is that the use of concrete time references brings the creation into the existential frame that we occupy. God in making concrete time the one that he acts in, sharing his domain of action with us: he forms fellowship between us and himself, and starts the long process of establishing his credential for being worshipped by his successive acts in history (in the history that defines our worship of him). Denials that mutate the timing of Genesis 1 into something other than concrete timing that we understand destroys this: symbolic time, a 'framework' of events, the general theistic evolutionary reconfigurations of creation destroy the primary credential that God presents to us: that he created, and in terms that are congruent with our experience of time, space and 'extension'. What 'god' then does this leave us with? How is his action giving sense to our experiental engagement with history?

In this context it is critical to note that the Jewish sense of time was different from the symbolic or mythically indeterminate time, or the ‘sacred’ time of paganism that has to keep its ‘gods’ away from the real world, because they in fact have no place there. Theistic evolution takes us to this empty room. But for Jews time was unilinear rather than pagan cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall movement with and orchestration in events. Had he not led his people to the promised land, and saved them repeatedly?

The Jewish God expressed himself in time. Nothing would ever be the same as before. That was the nature of time, and it starts with God embarking on creation by working in the flow of history as we do: forming a common experience, a common existential ground in the common days of working then rest. It is the start of God’s tabernacling with those he created in his image...in concrete acts that occurred in real time with real extension, as the word as prime went out to form the material world, the setting of our fellowship with our creator.

If we reject this: that the word was God and with God...etc, then we are left with Wald's time that can do anything...and an unworshipable ‘god’ who has left us for a vague untimed ‘sacred’ world...the world we are not in and cannot be in, the world where we have no fellowship with our creator.

6 days...really?

In The Economist:

1. In the beginning they destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and knocked out the planes of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. That was Monday.
2. Then they broke Egypt’s massive defences in Sinai. That was Tuesday.
3. Next, they took the old city of Jerusalem and prayed. That was Wednesday.
4. Then they reached the Suez Canal. That was Thursday.
5. They ascended the Golan Heights. That was Friday.
6. Then they took the peaks overlooking the plain of Damascus. In the evening the world declared a ceasefire. That was Saturday.
7. And on the seventh day the soldiers of Israel rested.

Now, I'm not sure what this refers to. Perhaps it is a framework about something we don't know, to teach us the capability of the Israeli Defense Force.

Or, perhaps it is a counter-story to rebut the stories of Islamic supremacy that abound in the Islamic fairy story, the Koran

No, perhaps it is a type of the Temple Theology that points to Jewish wishful thinking for the old days...

Or, perhaps it is the account of something that happened.

If I believe an Israeli solder about this, I believe God about his 6-day story.

Doing so I can resist the pressure around me to start with a materially framed reality and proceed with a God-first ontology.

Could have...

I love the way people claim that God 'could have' 'used' evolution.

I don't know what 'used' is supposed to mean;do we posit a mechanism, and what is it; how are the links made in absence of God telling us...but what are we to do with 'could have'?

He either did or didn't; if he 'could have' show us how; give us an argument that understands evolution's historic contempt for the idea of a relating god from Epicurus onwards; let's see how the modern development of the idea intersects with a concrete actual God in a concrete actual world...'could have'?

I could have bought out BHP...if I had the money...I could have swum naked to Chile...if I could have...this phrase is an embarrasment of absence in argument and stands for nothing but an intellectual black hole: everything enters, and nothing comes out.

If this is merely a logical 'could have' it gets us nowhere, particularly as it pretends that the logic is patent, which it is not, and leaves it to the listener to imagine what the proponent's logic is and insert it. Its a bluff; God could not have used evolution, because he told us that he didn't. God doesn't deal in hypotheticals.

But there's more to it:

God 'could have' used evolution, but only if we rob both of their meaning. An easy error that is made is to think that 'evolution' is a real thing in the world; it is not! It is a theory that exists in the human mind. It was made up expressly to eliminate God. So 'evolution' and 'creation' (or 'design') are only 'compatible' if we talk about two things that didn't happen, two things that seem to float in an ill-considered make believe.

In the real world Evolution = not by God; creation = by God. So to put them together is to claim that  God used 'not by God' to create, celebrating Epicurus' separation of the 'gods' and the world in a most peculiar fashion.

Why would we follow a pagan?

Moreover, the small changes have to be 'evolutions' small changes from ooze to humans; there is no way this has been, or seemingly could be, explained in the real world (not the imagination of materialists who seem to think that it could have happened...).

So God could not have 'used' 'not by God' as the idea evaporates in a puff of meaninglessness.

An atheist tells us

Theistic evolutionists wax lyrical about the compatibility of the biblical doctrine of creation, and materialist ontology.

One atheist is unmoved (a comment on the Andrew Bolt Herald Sun blog):

Atheist1 8 hours ago

@ERNEST @Atheist1 @Dean Yes...I cured it by removing religions from being at all necessary and looking at the wonders of the Universe and the advances of science with open eyes,open ears and an open mind.How amazing that the genome project finally CONFIRMED Evolution,how incredible that the Universe is only recently discovered to be far larger than previously thought,etc,etc. 

Within a materialist framing, of course, I don't see where 'incredible' fits in though.

La La Land

Theistic evolutionists live in a different world to you and I. They live in La La Land. A world where belief about what is basic has no influence on all derivitive beliefs.

You and I and Peter Singer live in the real world. Singer is mistaken...he accepts evolution as explanatory of the real world. I do not. My belief springs from the word of God and leads where God lays out the path; Singer's belief leads elsewhere, as shows the quote below from his book Writings on an Ethical Life (Fourth Estate, 2000). TE-ers attempt to combine these 'worlds' into one; but it doesn't work, and leads (ill)logically to Singer's position. If the world truly is as Darwin (and Singer) believe, then it is so; if not, they are mistaken. There is no bridge between them.

Singer is mistaken about Coperncius and Galileo, who overturned not the biblical world, but the Aristotelian one...and good thing too; trouble is, TE-ers have their feet stuck in Aristotle, and not Moses.

Ken's ark

Driving the point of the real world that the Bible is in:
(Life Sized Noah's Ark)

KAK

I'm sure you are as turned off as I am by the routine of many American media award winners who want to 'thank Jesus' for their gong. Now, I don't want to decry their faith, but it sometimes seems like hollow sloganeering.

We do it differently in Australia. Here's the ending of Kerrie-Anne Kennerely's 2017 Logies acceptance speech:

"Darwin said it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that will survive, it is the most adaptable to change. So thank you TV WEEK, thank you mum, thank you audience."

Not only no mention of God, but, our theistic evolutionist friends might note that her reference to Darwin does not conduct any hint of the creation being out of love and by God using a 'method' that is congenial to modern materialism.

Indeed, being completely oblivious to any hint of a loving creator it didn't lead her to praise her him in any way, nor did it suggest that the final reality is nevertheless persons in fellowship; nup, it was self centred (she is the one 'adaptable to change') built on random physical events that seem to presume a reality where the material is final.

I think the theistic-evolution project is a dead end idea running off the main street of materialism, and too weak to mount any criticism of said materialism.

What's the chance?

Often we talk about the probability of things in evolution, of life forming by natural processes, for example. Murray Eden put the nail in this with a paper he gave at the Wistar Institute many decades ago on the mathematical challenges to evolution.

But, what does it mean to have a probability of a 'one-off' event?

Some quotes from the very much  pro-evolutionist book A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried (pp. 206-7). Emphasis mine.

So here's a clue about what to do when you know nothing about the probabilities in the system you want to study. Choose a probability distribution that maximizes the entropy! Maximum entropy means maximum ignroance, and if you know nothing, ignorance is by definition at a maximum. Assuming maximum entropy/ignorance then is not just an assumption; it's a factual statement about your situation.
...
But what, exactly, does it mean to 'maximize the entropy'? It simply means choosing the probability distribution that would result from adding up all the possibilities permited by the laws of nature (since you know nothing you cannot leave out anything that's possible).

And, there's the rub. When we talk about the 'probability' of life evolving by chance, it must be a type of 'blunt instrument' probability because it remains to be established that there is anything possible in the story of life evolving by known processes. Life is a very low entropy phenomenon and needs a mechanism to overcome the comparitively high entropy equilibrium of the environment and then to keep it there as it 'evolves' the components, inter-dependent sub-systems and dependent machinery to do the job.

Paley's watch

Paley's watch remains one of the most famous arguments for design being produced by a designer. Of course the world and creationist discourse has moved on, but there are those who keep running the arguments of previous centuries and thinking they are cool in so doing.

The typical pro discussion runs this way.

But there's more:

I wonder if a watch is truly complex. It is ordered, no doubt, but it is fairly simple even as machines go: cogs and springs, essentially. Although the dependency chains from any component would be staggering, let alone the interactions between the chains to produce a watch.

However, I think the issue is that coming across a watch in a field we come across something that is not in equilibrium with its environment and that could not be produced by any local equilibrating process. It has very low entropy and very high specified information producing a radical disequilibrium in an artifact with strongly specified function. A mechanism/s is required to achieve this state in the absence of disequilibrating process.

The heart of Paley's argument is that this state is typically and reasonably achieved by a designer; that is, one who applies intelligence to the organisation of materials and processes, rather than the stochastic interplay of 'natural' factors which produce equilibrium even in the short run.

Creation by God...or was it Hayden?

I was amused to hear the announcer on ABC FM intro The Creation by Haydn, explaining that the problem for the librettist was that there was no story!

Unlike those who would have us believe that the creation account is (merely) a story, an arts person can see the blinding obvious: there's no story here folks, just facts; move along now.

Thus, of course, Haydn's librettist had to use his imagination to make a story out of the bare account he had to work from.

Scientist-satirising sense of humour

Creation issues pop up everywhere.

I came across this reference in Wheels Magazine from late 2015, by Stephen Corby (reviewing the Lamborghini Huracan; nice car too).

He even had a graphic of some fossils on the page too, just so we would remember what he was talking about.



Aside from getting it wrong (his view quotes an idea that was around centuries ago), and not understanding that fossils are evidence of rapid flood-like burial, he did have one observation, bottom, that shows how the average person views the history of death that evolution requires.

How do I tell my minister #2?

Using an illustration can be helpful.
Eg. Anyone could build a suspension bridge, but an engineer will do it quickly, efficiently, economically, safely and fit for purpose. Or would you prefer an evolutionary approach: almost endless mistakes, dead ends, death and disaster?

Perhaps you'd like to take your car to an evolutionary mechanic? He'd use any old part on any old location, may try water in the petrol tank...just trial an error for a couple of years, instead of an expert service that would have your car back in a day.

Contrast Proverbs 3:19-20: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, By understanding He established the heavens.

People will talk of using 'evolutionary' processes: I quip "oh, full of waste, frustration, dead ends, delay and mistakes; how is that good?"

Compare Romans 4:17b: there's no foolish delay here, but God creating through his call.

Creation is full of purpose; evolution is devoid of it.

How do I tell my evolutionist minister about creation?

Firstly, I'd ask why he or she sees a difference in the Scriptures between God's action in respect of the physical world, and his action in the spiritual world when God integrates the two from the start.

If God can't tell us what really happened and the factual basis for relationship with him (and each other) and what his love 'really' did, then how can we have any faith, given that God as creator is the basis and starting point of faith? The creation account demonstrates our link with God, it doesn't merely assert it in story-book fashion, or as an illustration with a tenuous link with the real world, but tells us how it came about, with objective clarity and detail that dismisses any attempt to 'paganise' it.

Many ministers split the two, in a move that has more to do with philosophical Idealism than the 'concrete realism' of the Bible. This allows them to follow pagan philosophy and split the 'world' into a 'really real' spiritual world, and an unimportant physical world, where God is not as serious as he is in the spiritual world. But, they have to tell us what the real really is: is it as per evolution, where material is the final basis for reality, and love, relationship, and moral meaning are just stuck onto it for no particular reason, or is it as per creation, where the personal God: wisdom acting in loving relationship is the starting point of all being and the one in whom all being makes sense and coheres together.

The Scriptures belie any attempt to graft the personal onto the material, but turn this over and make the material reliant on the personal God. The Genesis creation account, aside from anything else, puts God's creative intention in the very physical world where his spiritual intent plays out. The two are intertwined.

What's it all about?

I've just finished reading Evolution's Achilles' Heels (Robert Carter, ed.); much there of interest, of course (with the usual detractor websites springing up). The last chapter was the most interesting for me, but the least well done. It is entitled "Ethics and Morality" and gives a fair tour of that topic, but one that ends up, despite a disclaimer, tending to make Christianity look like a system of ethics; back to the past of 'do this...don't do that' Christian life.

It is far more, of course: the challenge of the Bible to the modern world is that of how one structures the world. The World's basic or first philosophy could be characterised as simple materialism, which courts the naturalistic fallacy: that one can somehow derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (the world is thus, so therefore you ought to do 'x'), and must contend with not only a biological information code (whence 'information' in a materialist world?), but an immaterial language that makes the code meaningful as a crucial constituent of it materialism. The Bible's first philosophy is what might be called 'theistic personism'. Basic to it all is that God in community of persons (the trinity) is, loves, and acts with wisdom. This makes our shared echo of his personhood unavoidably basic to being (i.e. ontologically basic).

This feature of the Real drives all else. It gives the person significance over and above material; whereas the materialist world makes the person derivative of an arbitrary material assemblage with no claim to any particular value, status or substance.

Love between persons is therefore the fundamental aspect of us as persons in community (and in existence) and 'information', wisdom and communication are sourced in this: not 'epiphenomena' of matter, but real in their own right.

The 'ethics and morality' chapter should have built on this, with the point made of us not being able to live consistently humanly (and raising the question of the source of that value) being isolated by our own will from basic being (God) and needing to rejoin community with him through his extension in love towards us to become whole.

Wisdom

The smarties of this theological world seem to wonder as to God's method of creation (I know, this is meant as a rhetorical question to we biblical creationists to challenge our view with an implied lack of method in the Bible). Reading right past Genesis 1, they grasp putative evolution as The Method. Odd, because they elect to defer to a method asserted to destroy God's relation to his creation, denying God's own statement of his 'method'. It is detailed in Proverbs 3:19-20.

Of course, it is very difficult for a fellow traveler with philosophical materialism's nostrums to understand that in a creation produced by a person of spirit (in love and by wisdom) this is The Method.

Locked into materialism, perhaps unwittingly, and certainly uncritically, they loose their Christian grasp and think that a method is necessarily a physicalist sequence. But where God is basic, not so. QV most of the NT miracles. Where there is 'method' it is set out. Mark 7:33 is an example of this.

Mike the robot

In Heinlein's book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mike the robot is asked "What do you know?" Being a logical robot he starts with the beginning of what he knows, saying:

"In the beginning was the heaven (sic) and the earth. And the earth was without form and void: and darkness was on the face of the deep"...

On the other side of the world, and at another time, Kirsty Birkett teaches in her book The Essence of Darwinism, that it wouldn't really matter how God actually created, but that at least we know that he did create.

Idealist tosh from a Christian academic (with a PhD in history of science, mind you).

The only information that we have that tells us God created is that by which he steps us through his actions in creation, in definitive terms; in effect, showing us his creative process and not just 'telling'.

Set this aside as having concrete meaning in the one and only real world (I think of Putnam), and we know nothing in fact about God and his creative relation to the same real world. Set aside the ' method' and one sets aside the proposition and the rug is pulled from under the epistemological and ontological foundation God gives us as the formative basis of our being-in-relationship with him!

Heinlein demonstrates this exact thing. In his book the quote from Genesis 1 is an ontological dead end. It is irrelvant in the philosophical materialism, and the existential loneliness of his book. Its basic proposition, that God who is love extended his love in creation as he set it out (and if we set aside the significance of the word of God, we turn our back on his love) has no part of Heinlein's world. It is void of God in practical terms.

So, it would seem, in Birkett's.

Heinlein on creation

Also from Stranger in an Strange Land

Heinlein on the universe

From Stranger in a Strange Land

When Gaia leads

Theistic evolutions entertain the naive view that somehow the unmixable can be mixed: a personal creator and a random material process.

This is where it gets you:

As soon as we look carefully, nature is neither nurturant nor benign. She is immensely indifferent to suffering and immensely profligate in the expenditure of individual existences. Vast numbers of sperms are wasted so that one ovum may be fertilized. Countless weaker animals are sacrificed to feed the few stronger ones. The evolutionary process as a whole wastes thousands of species as it selects the very few who will survive. It is this understanding of nature that we must appropriate. We will then also understand that, in the final analysis, life and death are one and the same, and nothing matters beyond the endless thrusting of the (Gaia) divine energy.

Gaia has another face. It has been revealed most fully in India. It is there given the name of Kali-Durga, consort of Shiva, the goddess who both gives and destroys life. She manifests herself naked, four-armed, her mouth gaping to show bloody fangs. In her four hands she holds a noose, a skull-topped staff, a sword, and a severed head. She is dancing on a mountain of corpses. Many people, perhaps even you, think they are not yet ready for this vision. But I assure you it is the future to which she calls us; it is the future that we have already embraced.

Peter Berger, "The Other Face of Gaia" First Things, Aug-Sep 1994

Big universe...small me...

One of my nephews sagely advised me "When you have worries, just think of how big the universe is and how small we are and your worries will go away."

I later told him that I prefered to think how wonderfully powerful and loving God is that he made all that we see and know, and that makes my worries go away.

This is not just a cute bit of theologising, but betrays an unarticulated and probably unconsciously absorbed materialism in the first statement; the second deals with it, but I'm concerned that we've so disconnected God and creation (now its God and 'the universe') that he drifts out of our framing of our experience; thus the importance of allowing the words of Genesis 1, etc. to confront us, discomforting our incipient materialism.

Eyes wide shut!

A friend directed me to an essay by Richard Rorty from 1992: "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids".

Read with a little thought it is scary. Not for its content, but for its indicators of a church that collectively fails to bring to a questioning mind the answers that only come in the Bible: not the John 3:16 answers...we have to get to that. But the philosophical answers that can only be formed from a sound and responsive theology of creation: of a God who made all in a loving immediacy, who is directly involved with a concrete reality and communicates in terms of that reality; who shows in his acts the primacy of personhood in community, of love, and of relationship; all of which evaporates when the church leans over to philosophical and ethical materialism, no longer able to answer anyone.

Some quotes:

I wanted to find some intellectual ... framework that would let me ... hold reality and justice in a single vision.

To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good -- like the God of St Thomas, or the 'nature of human beings' described by Aristotle -- would permit one to answer the Nazis...

 ...even if there were no such thing as 'understanding the world' in the Platonic sense -- an understanding from a position outside of (sic) time and history...

Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously.

...the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake...I decided that only religion .. only a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike my real parent, embodied love, power and justice in equal measure -- could do the trick Plato wanted done.

The two will, for some people, coincide -- as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable. 

Interesting to note that Dewey was not attracted by the theistic-evolutionist artifice...he saw no need for it's 'god' at all.

Also interesting that love power and justice come together in equal measure in God who created (setting the parameters of our approach to being, ethics and knowledge), loved and redeemed.

In avoiding a real time creation account, and fussing about obscure readings of 'days' instead of taking Moses' lead and building an assertive philosophy on this ground, the church talks to no issue of moment for any thinking person.

Real world effects only result from real world causes; if the creation account is not accurate to the real world of event and order, then it doesn't tell us what really happened and it is something else that really happened. It is this something else, then, and not the creation account, that is the real cause of the effect we experience and can only be the real basis for our approach to being, ethics and knowledge. This fact de-basing what would be built on a real-time creation as Moses has taught us, and been affirmed by the word of God in Exodus 20:1 and 11. So, what would this 'something else' be? As far as we could tell, it is akin to Dewey's position, leaving us in Rorty's dilemma, or equally in Sartre's...where nothing finally hangs together, no integration point, no final relationship, no final love, but everything an outworking of random material interactions: all that we have is...power. Not love, not hope, existentially alone in the universe and adrift.

8 years old

If an eight year old read Genesis 1, he or she would understand that the world was created in 6 days; or at least would agree that the text said that.

A typical Christian adult, one who read books, would hum and har, and say maybe this, or maybe that, or 'it could be read that way' or 'you have to understand the genre', and so on.

So, what happened between 8 and 28?

Genesis: the text.

There's an interesting section in Ladd's A Theology of the New Testament, in the chapter on Eternal Life (regarding the fourth gospel), called "Truth in the Old Testament."

It deals with the difference between the Greek idea of truth: basically the correspondence theory, which is, to my mind easily Platonised, and the Hebrew idea: trustworthiness and reliability.

Now, take this dichotomy to Genesis 1, noting its being the source of many points of reference throughout the Bible, and consider the difference between a Greek, (neo)Platonic view of truth; which allows the easy Idealist slide into all sorts of non-truth variations: the framework hypothesis, Genesis 1 as 'impression', rhetorical counter to ANE myths (meaning Enuma Elish, invariably). Could a Hebrew think in that fashion?

I think not. Truth as trustworthy conduct, or words: seems to sit with Genesis 1 being an event narrative, immune to the pressure of Western thought that would undermine it; words God has spoken to Moses, and God saying as much (see below).

This makes arguments about 'genre' trivial in their missing of the point so egregiously. Particularly the point reinforced in those reliable people: Jehovah and Moses! The question of taking the Bible 'seriously' without taking it as proceeding from the mouth of God in the detail that we are given undoes the seriousness instantly.

Particularly as one considers God speaking directly to Moses in Exodus 20, attempting, for the cool crowd, to put aside the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis and its kin, and consider the text in terms of the Hebraic understanding of truth as relational, not as something apart from the God who authors it, apart from people (creator and creature) in loving (and therefore trusted) relationship (which is one of the major implications of the text, in grand recursive fashion). From Exodus 20:1 

Then God spake all these words, saying...for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Ending with Exodus 20:11.

And that's it for Bird.

Bird's hermeneutical frame

Having looked briefly at the results of Bird's thinking about the Doctrine of Creation and its source in scripture, let's touch on his hermeneutical policy.

Its a great confusion.

Not only does it introduce the arbitrary into the practice (so which bits of Genesis 1 are to be taken seriously? the days? Clearly not; God speaking? Maybe; God doing? Don't know; God?), but it assassinates the perspicuity of scripture; one needs to be a specialist to read and understand it. You need the Bible, but you need other books.

Should we take that seriously? I know the JWs do: they must have their 'other books' to gain their bizarre understanding of scripture. Mormons similarly.

And so theistic evolutionists, or interpretive readers, or framework hypothesists, or scriptural impressionists, like Bird, must also do.

And what guides the metaframe of though that compels this take on Genesis? Nothing in the Bible, but only what comes from outside the Bible: at root materialist ideas that have everything in the Bible as a mere epiphenomenon of matter; and not, 'so to speak' the other way around. And there goes their ability to confront a lost world with a comprehensive gospel of God's comprehensive totalising love at work in his son, our Lord.

Seriously?

My (almost) last piece on Bird on taking the Bible seriously, not literally (in the case of Genesis 1, etc.).

What is it to take this passage seriously?

For a start, it is to take it literally; taking it seriously without taking it literally substitutes for its account of creation, and the ontological context it provides, an alternative account, and an alternative ontology: perilous.

If the passage does not set out what happened, then clearly something else that we don't know from the text happened. How, then is it possible for the text to convey anything to us about the theological implications of creation, if all we have is an impression of what we know not.

A substitute will spring up instantly, the current substitute displaces God; not only in the popular mind, but in the critical mind too. It is only in the minds of some theologians that the displacement is innocuous.

So, what is the creation account, theologically?

The centripetal significance starts with it being God's credential for our worship. As with passages that remind Israel of historical events that signpost God's relationship with them, so the reminders of who God is, being creator.

These passages point only to one place: Genesis 1. God's chief credential in relation to us is this passage. That the passage sets out an ontological basis for real life, is fundamentally important; and this is, contrary to the pagan speculation from Plato on (arcing out in Hegel, most recently); we are told that the world is basically communicable and God's relation to it is in concrete acts that have effect in the world that we know. The framework of our existence is set out in these terms. Thus is provided our metaphysical bearings, our ethical epistemology, and our existential location. Sweep this aside and we look to, for instance Mr Darwin and his 'neo' followers for these; and they then start not with the God who communicates, loves and draws relationship, but with mute matter; all else being a random chemical epiphenomenon.

The trace that starts in Genesis 1 (and with a profound physical fact in light being created first: light...energy, then arguably, the expanse of space), tours through the huge milestones of our relationship with God: the fall: another actual real event; the dispersion of Babel, the flood; and the trajectory of redemption that is grounded with Abram. Indeed, Christ points back, centripetally to the cluster of events of creation in some of his basic teaching. He speaks as though the account refers to something that happened and is meaningful for our understanding of who we are.

To reiterate; absent that grounded (concrete) location; we drift...and mostly, we drift away from  our Creator.

Seriously?

My last piece on Bird on taking the Bible seriously, not literally (in the case of Genesis 1, etc.).

What is it to take this passage seriously?

For a start, it is to take it literally; taking it seriously without taking it literally substitutes for its account of creation, and the ontological context it provides, an alternative account, and an alternative ontology: perilous.

If the passage does not set out what happened, then clearly something else that we don't know from the text happened. How, then is it possible for the text to convey anything to us about the theological implications of creation, if all we have is an impression of what we know not.

A substitute will spring up instantly, the current substitute displaces God; not only in the popular mind, but in the critical mind too. It is only in the minds of some theologians that the displacement is innocuous.

So, what is the creation account, theologically?

The centripetal significance starts with it being God's credential for our worship. As with passages that remind Israel of historical events that signpost God's relationship with them, so the reminders of who God is, being creator.

These passages point only to one place: Genesis 1. God's chief credential in relation to us is this passage. That the passage sets out an ontological basis for real life, is fundamentally important; and this is, contrary to the pagan speculation from Plato on (arcing out in Hegel, most recently); we are told that the world is basically communicable and God's relation to it is in concrete acts that have effect in the world that we know. The framework of our existence is set out in these terms. Thus is provided our metaphysical bearings, our ethical epistemology, and our existential location. Sweep this aside and we look to, for instance Mr Darwin and his 'neo' followers for these; and they then start not with the God who communicates, loves and draws relationship, but with mute matter; all else being a random chemical epiphenomenon.

The trace that starts in Genesis 1 (and with a profound physical fact in light being created first: light...energy, then arguably, the expanse of space), tours through the huge milestones of our relationship with God: the fall: another actual real event; the dispersion of Babel, the flood; and the trajectory of redemption that is grounded with Abram. Indeed, Christ points back, centripetally to the cluster of events of creation in some of his basic teaching. He speaks as though the account refers to something that happened and is meaningful for our understanding of who we are.

To reiterate; absent that grounded (concrete) location; we drift...and mostly, we drift away from  our Creator.

Genre, seriously now.

Bird, like most who want to engineer a heterodox view of Genesis 1 so as not to offend the rampant materialism of our time (I mean philosophical materialism: the view, world view, to borrow Bird's label, that dust is all there is), tell us that on the basis of 'genre analysis' we don't need to take the text as conveying objective information; back to impressionism.

Genre...that is the 'type' of text: is it poetry, description, narrative, and so on. Its a great escape hatch.

However, we can through some biblical light on the question. We have a poetic response to creation. It is in Psalms 8 and 19 as great examples. We also have a list of events in Numbers 7.

A quick comparison tells one which Genesis 1 is more like: the list, of course.

Bringing a modern conception of information to Genesis 1, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a structured computer file of 6 records. Each record has a record opening field, an event description field, a count field and an end of record marker.

Nothing like poetry, nothing like an impressionistic account, nothing mystical. The closed thing we have to it today is a concrete list of events.

Moreover, the grammatical signals are of historical narrative, with consecutive constructions used throughout.

Additionally, the author's driving insistence on the passage of time is remarkable. In Numbers 7 (which also, like Genesis 1 states the first day differently to the subsequent days) the announcement of the day is quite simple. In Genesis 1, it is quite elaborate, as if to make quite sure that the reader understands what 'day' means, precisely. It is counted, it is described: a 'evening and morning' type day. Not a day of indeterminate time, or a day that is detached from our everyday experience of day.

World view

So, Genesis 1 is mainly about world view!

How would we know when we are assured that the account is, at best, impressionistic? It is only about world view (and I think that notion is itself contestable: the idea of world view operates within a non-absolutist ontology that the Bible does not partake in), if it gives a world view. Now, setting aside for the moment that there is such a thing as a world view, as one in a range of options, let's think: how does the Bible give us a world view that is not as fictional as the world views of those whose world view sets the Biblical data at nought and erects a world view on that basis? Their world view is clearly wrong, but, still...its a 'world view'.

We go in circles, of course. The Bible does not present a 'world view'. It tells us how the world actually, really, and concretely is. There is no alternative that aligns with what it is. It is our god-given  duty to have our thinking conform to the Bible, not to use it to generate yet another 'world view' option!

Of course, if the Bible does not tell us how the world actually, really, concretely is; then it is hardly able to provide even a 'world view'. We only have the impressionistic picture that I've already mentioned. This does not 'refute' Darwinism (which truly is a 'world view') because it is categorically different. Darwin claims to tell us what the world is truly. But it is wrong (for lots of reasons, including human experience). This is what refutes Darwinism, and every other 'world view' that denies that we are here by the loving agency of God who brings forth from nothing by his will.

The creation account relies upon and teaches this: its detailed list of events underlines two very important things by demonstration (not mere picture painting): The personal (God) in loving relationship, is fundamental to all being, in the most profound way, and that this personal God is concretely involved in events and substance of creation: he is directly and intimately connected to its outcomes, and not remote from then due to an intervening or mediating principle that is, itself, not God (that is, not Christ, the only mediator, but some other medaitorial, impersonal principle as is proposed in darwinian evolution).

Let me tell how it is...

A lot of what I've written to discuss Pahl's views would be applicable to Bird's; but why avoid writing when writing is such fun?

Here goes:

There's an old joke, at the expense of economists that has members of three professions on a desert island with only a can of beans for food. The first two puzzle over what to do...it comes to the economist who starts by saying "let's assume we have a can opener..."

Thinking that the Genesis creation account tells us something about God and creation without actually telling us anything that really happened is similarly empty. How can telling us something that didn't happen teach us anything about what did happen? How can a 'story' of what didn't happen respond to contemporaneous (and that I'd question) ANE tales which were also of what didn't happen (even tho' this confuses theogony and cosmogony)?

The idea is nonsensical. Its a Goon Show approach ( I recal one show where Neddy Seagood thought that a picture of a gun was an adequate weapon). Just like a mountain climber setting off with a picture of a rope: no actual rope, and the picture itself not even telling what a rope could do or how it could be used....that's the divide between concrete events and an account that does not encompas concrete events being asserted to lead us to conclusions about that which it fails to reveal.

More Hegel than Hegel...and nothing like the God who is concretely involved with his creation, where it is the details that make the general, and not the other merrily Platonic way around.

Darwin does it down

The cool TE crowd love to say that evolution was God's 'method' of creation...or the creation account is a culturally situated tale to tell us that God is creator. If it is not concretely real, of course, it teaches no such thing. But atheists are also unpersuaded:
From The Australia a few days ago.

Daniel does it better

Daniel Dennet does it better, but this is more consice: a comment to an article by Bernard Salt in The Australian today:

Showing the bird!

According to Michael Bird, its not in how it reads, but in how you read it (this is called reader response theory, cooked up by one Stanley Fish):

In recent full page peaen to neo-orthodoxy (well, nothing to do with orthodoxy to my mind, so meta-orthodoxy might be a better term) in Eternity we get this:

I'll write about it later, but for the moment, let's think about Exodus 20:11, then Deuteronomy 5:32, and finally, reflect on Genesis 3:1, the serpent's words particularly.

For Bird, taking the word of God seriously means taking it not quite seriously enough and cutting it to fit the cloth of contemporary materialist ideas. Not on, as Deuteronomy 5:32 tells us, reflecting on the coupling of creation and statute in God's words in Exodus 20:11 and more emphatically in Ex 31:12-17

Now, some bright spark will tell us that God was really a Hegelian idealist when he was speaking, and was not referring to concrete acts in the actual real world, but a story about something else of which he did not reveal (as though the concrete events of creation were not in fact important to understanding God and us).

Bird courts a significant epistemological problem which he hides under the obfuscation of 'competing narrative'. Of course one cannot 'compete' against a non-truth by a factually decoupled narrative that merely paints an alternative but unsubstantiated picture; one must compete by the truth.

That's why in the army we don't use pictures of bullets, but actual real bullets.

Just not credible

Many of my Anglican friends ( I think of you, Michael Jensen) seem to want to hold two contradictory beliefs: that evolution is the proper description of the world, and that God is creator; of course with the two being divergent at every point, one of them has to give. It is always the idea of creation and its implications that gives.

Some like to think that they can proclaim a gospel split on these lines, but here's what someone outside our faith thinks:

Unger's [The Religion of the Future] view is that none of the old religions is credible any longer as regards claims about the origins of the cosmos, the nature of life, the history of humanity or the workings of the world. this is because of the findings of the modern sciences concerning the nature of the cosmos, the evolutionary realities of life and the knowledge of human evolution and archaeology acquired only in the very recent past.

Paul Monk, 'letters' Quadrant, June 2016.

Nothing in that quote points to the creator God, but away from him. Thus does the forlorn mixture of creation and evolution instantly collapse in the estimation of all but those who want to mix the two and deny the involvement of the creator in the concrete reality that he has made and described in early Genesis.

The Flood: a big 'so what'?

In a recent article I read that Greg Koukl, a US Christian talk show host, wonders what rests theologically on the extent of the flood.

Aside from the sense of the narrative and the language regarding its extent (fairly significant considerations), and the marks of the flood over the planet, there are theological issues that turn on the extent.

The flood is a counterpoint to the creation; as the creation is a total production that is 'very good' the flood is an 'unproduction' given the 'very bad' that God sees in rampant sin.

A local flood would make this literary and theological point nonsensical: the very good has become the very bad that God seeks to 'un create' at a significant level: to uncreate mankind.

This also builds the pattern of salvation: that God will and does rescue in the midst of that which rejects him, his love, and his nature (to love): despite the reaction to his love being rejected and denied (by sinful behaviour) in wanting to destroy: showing us the depth of betrayal, he acts to save, and does so. Salvation is a 'totalising' move by God and is rendered pointless by a local flood.