Beyond the Pahl 1

In a post on his blog, Pahl set out his mini-manifesto of creation theology. It forms a suitable representative of the typical 'have it both ways' beliefs of most theistic evolutionists and so, I think, is worth commenting on. I'm setting out to do it over four or so parts.

Here, part 1:

Pahl

When it comes to origins, I have held to the same basic perspectives for quite a while now. I have stated, taught, preached, blogged, or published all of these points in various ways and in diverse venues for at least fifteen years.

First, God created all things—God himself and not merely some impersonal forces or natural laws. God created the heavens and the earth, and made humans in God’s image. Through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the very image of God, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible; without him nothing was made that has been made. Thus, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Thoughts

One becomes instantly suspicious, I think, when a theologian has to declare his orthodoxy in this way; it seems to me that he must do so only because his position on these matters is not clear from his other writings. Indeed, I think we will see over this short series of discussions that most of Pahl's writing on the matter of origins would question every point of the statement he makes in such assertive tones. As if to say, "of course I believe what you believe, I just don't believe that it happened!" So he has to shore up his orthodoxy by denying that words have stable meanings and can be reliably tracked to 'this world' referents, across time and cultures. One thinks, in some matters, that a little too much is made of culture, and not enough made of words. Their range of intent seems to be mystifyingly rubbery and they thus can mean whatever one wants them to mean, except of course, what they actually say!

And thus, I wonder why Pahl believes as he states? He undoes the credibility of his belief at every turn, as later posts will show. To that extent he makes of belief the sort of nonsense that one might hear from a Mormon 'elder' so called, who urges belief because, well, he 'really-really' believes himself; nothing to do with the warranted belief that runs through the Bible.

 In Hebrews we are told that “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”. “By faith” does not mean, ‘unrealistic  hope against the facts’ but, because we weren’t there, we apprehend this information and accept its reliabiltiy and veracity by virtue of the word of God. The writer speaks to this in the preceding verse. The only information to which the writer could be pointing is the genesian account of creation; and this because it is the only information there is about our origin...anywhere. The locus of faith in the Bible is never counterfactual, but always predicated on actualities: in someone to be truthful to their word, or in things about which we are told, pinned to events that participated in this world's causality and whether events in a mind, or events in space.

Moreover, when the Bible refers to the creation, you can bet that the reference directs us to the Genesis account. The base creation account upon which all other references depending. So God is not the creator in some vague ethereal terms, or author of some general creation that cannot be pinned down, but of a 'creation' with specific biblical reference, and specific meaning in this world. The same terms that make sense in and circumscribe our existance in the space-time frame we inhabit and are constrained by are those terms that give the creation meaning and make a specific connection  to us by the common reference frame applying to both (deny this and the connection gets vague to the point of vanishing).

Later, confusingly, Pahl tells us that the only account we have of the creation doesn't represent things that happened. It just didn’t occur: something else occurred, presumably (which claim has its Monty Pythonesque aspect, I must suggest), but we are not told about it! How we know, I can't fathom (oh...science...we'll get to that in a later post).

So I have to wonder from whence he obtains his belief that God is creator if he denies the terms by which God represents himself as creator. He sets aside the only source of information which could underpin his belief as not in fact having happened in the terms of 'the real' that frames our lives and experiences; the information by virtue of which, in detail, we understand God as creator.

And it is the detail that is important here: the detail demonstrates God as creator by the actions he did with time and space effects. These tell us how the creation is constituted. Presumably, if this was not important, and not just 'important' in some vacuous rhetorical sense, but really important in the world we stub our toes in, it wouldn’t be provided. So if the detail is not about events, but about something else, firstly, how would we know, but then, how could we establish that God is creator? The only information he can give us, it is asserted or implied by Pahl, doesn’t actually relate to creation events, but, evidently, some other thing? What other thing this might be, we are not told. Perhaps, just a verbal flourish to 'out-flourish' the competitor accounts? But, if none of it happened, it is hard to see how it can even hope to sustain this rhetorical function.

And it's not just that 'something else' must have happened, but it's Pahl's language game that fascinates me. He takes it that words have meaning, and that meaning conveys content in the world that we are in. Presumably the content is related to some substance within the world, or the content, and the words that convey the content, would have no meaning that delineates anything within the common causality in which we live; they would be un-grounded in one sense, empty in every other. These words would merely ascend in a futile arc never landing in the world in which they were uttered to make meaning in that world in that world's terms.

Pahl's handling of the creation account in philosphical terms is even more dramatically deracinating of its biblical purpose. In saying that all the details in a house plan are wrong; but the right house will nonetheless somehow, but inexplicably, be communicated, he is speaking nonsense. This is far from a Christian approach to epistemology; knowledge is contained in the words that constitute language and have reference to the Real World that came from the fiat of God (nicely recursively), and not in pagan fashion, where content is maleable to preconception and any specific meaning is only to obscure an asserted and contrary 'truth'.

Thus, I would contend, contrary to the Cedarville College people, that Pahl is far from othodox in that he undoes the basic ontology of the Bible, founded in Genesis 1, and supposes that in the beginning, not 'God', but 'God and something...' Like most harmonisers, he fails to appreciate the grand scope of God's creation, and what it means to be solely and comprehensively from God. Like the ANE creation myths, he by implication presupposes a universe prior to God's creation of the universe! Not Christian at all.

John Chapman Foundation

I went to John Chapman's memorial service at St Andrew's Cathedral on 24 November. I admired John for his simple humility as a man, his easy communication of biblical teaching and his genuine interest in people. For an Anglican, he was as unstuffy and unimpressed by outward show as a Baptist. Excellent.

In the service papers there was a promotion for the John Chapman Foundation. Not a bad idea to remember the man and his ministry, and raise funds for the work of evangelism (probably just like Catholics have orders, Anglicans have foundations).

When I read the biog of John, I almost gagged. It was nothing like John himself, but full of the empty vanity of outward show and panting after worldly prestige and influence, as though these things are of any importance in the outlook of a Christian. They certainly never struck me as being of any significance in the John Chapman who I knew!

So, for the first time, I learn that he's preached in London; and presumably not London, Ontario, or London, Ohio. I wonder where in London he preached? In the middle of Baker Street? In Carter Lane? Clerks Place, near Wormwood St? All pretty pointless to say that he  preached in London. Anyone can preach in London. They do it all the time in Hyde Park!

But further, I see that he preached at Oxford University and Cambridge University. All I can say is, 'so what'. Does this make him a better preacher. Should I be impressed that he's been to some old stone buildings, where, incidently, anyone can preach, or am I supposed to infer that the VC called him up and said "John, what say you come along and preach to the Council here at Oxford." I think not. Rather these references represent mere Anglican bluster and hankering after worldy adulation, which, incidently, has zip to do with preaching the gospel, and double zip to do with anything in Australia, let alone Sydney. I note that there is no mention of mission work that John did (if he did) in Sydney University; right next to Moore College, or in Newtown, a densely populated suburb, also right next to Moore College, or work with the riff raff that inhabits the Sydney University Colleges (I think of St John's particularly), or about what he did do; and that was tirelessly work as a minister of the gospel in whatever setting he had access to, with humble and prayerful perserverance. And, that is the Christian way, not puffery about prestigious locations or institutions.

Or, maybe I'm wrong, maybe  John preached at Miami University, Oxford, in the USA...

Pahl...not orthodox?

An e-pal sent me his note to Michael Pahl, of recent post on this blog:

I've heard that you and Cedarville have parted company.

Unlike Cedarville, I *would* question your othodoxy.

Your view on Genesis 1, etc. amounts to a claim that nothing in Genesis 1 actually happened, and that our ontology, as Christians, therefore cannot be framed from the Bible (ontology being about what is, and ipso facto, what really is), but has to be grafted onto Christian faith from a pagan perspective in some sort of idealist conceit. So it seems that you want to pretend that questions of origins are 'scientific' questions, when their ontological implications are such that they are always finally theological questions, mediated in some ways philosophically.

Thus, you've resigned the field, and instead of allowing the revelation of God about his creation to set the structure of our understanding of our world, our setting in it, and the relations that reticulate through it, with reference to God himself (and this can only happen if G1 recounts things that happened, not fantasies, "fameworks" emblems, signs, or 'suggestions'), we are left to start our thinking with an ontological framework premised on there being no God, or if there is one, one who doesn't communicate and doesn't matter.

This is not in any way orthodox, but a view that makes Christian faith take its philosophical underpinning from a pagan world view, and is ultimately derivative of a materialist orthodoxy and not a challenge to it.

2 churches

I couldn't help but compare two local churches that have recently letter boxed my street.

One, an Anglican church, is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of...wait for it...their building! No, not a church meeting on that site, or a church meeting in the area, or the local proclamation of the gospel, or a century of mission, no, none of those...but a darn building. As part of their celebration, they will be raising money, seeking to raise a lot of money, well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And for? Missions? Aid? Helping people?

No, not on your nelly. They want to do more building work!

Then the other, not an Anglican church. It will be having its annual spring market. "Proceeds going to help refugees settling in Sydney".

I know which church I'd prefer to be part of.

Leave it to science

One of my listed blogs lead me to 'rustlings in the grass' where the basic perspectives on origins is to, finally, 'leave it to science' to connect us with our origins, and, presumably, to some sort of faith in some other-world set of events that God must be talking about in Genesis 1.

If I get around to it, I'll go into this a little more, but you can see my drift.

Just theological

Another zinger of a sermon this morning, further knocking Grudem out of play, for which I'm all cheers.

The minister unfortunatley has a view of Genesis 1, etc. (hereafter G1) that is common these days: that it is 'theological' and not anything else; and not therefore factual where it comes into conflict with contemporary cosmogony, evolutionary speculation or rampant materialism. One wonders how then one is able to figure which bits are important and which bits are mere 'dressing'?

But this is not a new position. I read of it in a work by Robert S. Candlish, D.D. (1806-1873) of Scotland who succeeded Thomas Chalmers in the chair of divinity at the New College, Edinburgh in 1841.

Quoting a work on Genesis:

To clear the way, therefore, at the outset, to get rid of many perplexities, and leave the narrative unencumbered for pious and practical uses, let its limited design be fairly understood, and let certain explanations be frankly made. In the first place, the object of this inspired cosmogony, or account of the world's origin, is not scientific but religious.

So...if its only religious, on what is the religious information carried, if it is not a factual account of events...is it carried on a mere fiction? If so, then the religions information is hardly worth our attention!

Yet, by the very notion of creation as set out in G1, it only has theological significance because it is about things that have happened. Just like the resurrection only has theological content because it had historical and physcial coordinates in history, and is in the same world of general causality as the one we live in. And so the resurrection has content for us. If it were in a different 'world' it would have nothing for us. And so 'creation' which sets the scene for all that follows.

Of men and women

This morning the sermon at church started a series looking at 'gender' as it is treated in the Bible.
We started with a reading from Genesis 1, which covered this passage:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ²⁷ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ²⁸ God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply,

(NASB)

Of course, the NASB makes the same mistake as the NIV, which our church uses, and renders 'adam' as 'man'; when it should be 'mankind' at least, or preferably 'humanity' in today's usage.

The sermon series will deal with the arguments for 'male headship' put in Grudem's edited book on this topic. We dealt with the first today, and found nothing in G1 that can be construed as giving one sex primacy over another, contrary to Grudem's assertion. The notion of priority evaporates in the Bible's definition of 'man' as being created 'male and female' That is, together in the image of God, not one sex or the other so. This is further explicated in that [together] they are to be fruitful and multiply. A bloke can't do that by himself!

The sermon mentioned in passing the ANE context of Genesis 1, and I detected here, I think a verring to the idea that Genesis is a cultural work, rather than an inspired one, giving us concrete information about us and God. The minister made the point that the passage treated humanity in its relation to God completely differently from the ANE mythology. For example, humanity is not there to get food for the gods, but is fed by God. But this is not mere rhetorical point scoring by the Genesian author; it is that related thusly because that concretely corresponds to the real that the account reflects. If it is not doing this, then, of course it is without meaning and ranks only with other stories, bearing no relation to what really is and thus how our relationship to God is founded.

It ended rebutting the silly modern idea that men and women are different but equal, or are equal but have different roles. In the final analysis both versions of the rule-making error end up with a fake distinction between inequality and 'functional difference'. Its a thin language game that convinces no one outside the camp of the bluffers.

More on this, see Christians for Biblical Equality.

Let's be Buddhists

I can't see any real difference in their appraoch to 'religion' and the world between that of Theistic Evolutionists and, say, Buddhists; or Hindus, or animists, or Aboriginal dream-time story tellers.

All of them separate religion from the real world and make claims that lie outside the world we are in!

Yet the world-concept of Christianity is that the real world shares the contours of existence with the God whose speech is his actions, and his actions occur in the world of common causality that we inhabit; and its a 'real' world, not a lesser world that we can disregard, with the really real world elsewhere.

Theistic-evolution, along with Buddhism, discounts the real ness of the world we are in and has it that 'holy books' as a class (the Bible, for TEs) are about somethiing other than the real world, which therefore, must be other than the real setting for the ontological play between what is basically real, and our life-experience.

Bollocks, of course, because Christ emptied himself of God-claims to be one of us, for our sake!

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.