A letter sent to Peter Jensen, many years ago:
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Dear Dr Jensen,
I would have loved to have
been at the lecture by yourself and Dr Hubble. I read the report in the Herald,
which while it probably was but a pale reflection of the event, nevertheless, I
take indicated the lines of argument used by yourself and the other gentleman.
If you permit, I would like
to 'weigh in' on your side.
Firstly, Dr Hubble's four
points are very simple to deal with:
The Earth was no longer considered the centre of
the heavens
Whether the earth is 'considered' to be the
centre of the universe or not is beside the point. The earth is, by assumption,
taken to be not the centre because the universe is assumed to be isotropic
(that is the same everywhere). This is an assumption of convenience. But there
is nothing in the scripture, as far as I know, that requires the earth to be
geometrically centred in the universe. All we are told is that the earth was
created first: big insult to the cosmological 'principles' which themselves,
are mere ideas. Hubble is probably referring to the Ptolemaic astronomy taken
up by the medieval church; but there is nothing scriptural about that.
The discovery of mammoth fossils proved
extinctions
I don't see how this is relevant to Hubble's
view. He appears to think that the Bible requires fixity and permanence of species
(a misunderstanding emerging from the church's long infatuation with
Aristotle). It does not. Genesis tells us that creatures reproduce 'after their
kind' which is exactly what we see. This says nothing about our particular
intellectual construct of 'species'. We know species emerge and sucumb to
extinction; the latter of which we expect given the fall and the calamity it
was for all life; bringing death to this universe. I wonder what answer Hubble
had to the problem or the fact of death? What does he offer his fellow humans
who face death and, in his terms, are mere arrangements of matter of no
particular 'real' signifciance.
Rock sedimentation shows the planet is millions
of years old rather than a few thousand
Naturally, rock sedimentation shows nothing of
the sort, but sediments are interpreted on the basis of naturalistic
assumptions to give this view. This approach to geology commenced in the 19th
Century with geologists who intentionally put aside the history we have in the
Bible on the basis of naturalism being their operating cosmogony. Of course,
cosmogony derived from human assumptions (or fallen predilictions) that seeks
to cut itself off from what history we have (and I take it that we have such
history from the Holy Spirit in Genesis, for the very reason of providing us
with the basis for a true, godly and ultimately salvific cosmogony) will be off
the rails from the 'get go'. It is interesting to consider that we have
examples of strata build up were we know multiple strata over tens of metres
depth to have been laid down in a few hours, throwing into question the
conventional view of strata as necessitating great periods of time. The
examples are at the Mt St Helen's volcano explosion of the 1980s where we saw
gross geological transformations occuring within seconds, hours and days. One
of these was a mudflow which cut a rock canyon in a number of hours!
No credible proof has been found of the Great
Flood.
It is amusing that he
refers to rock sedimentation in the 'breath' before he denies evidence of the
flood. Sedimentary rock is rock laid down under water. There are thousands of
feet thickness of this around the world, full of water bourne and other
fossils. I think this is astonishing evidence for the flood. Only the
conventional (naturalist) view inserts vast periods of time between strata.
There is no independent evidence for these time periods, incidently, only an
elaborate circular argument, with the unspoken naturalist basis underlying it
and needing rebuttal.
I applaud what you are
reported as saying about Genesis, but I would go further. Much that is said
about Genesis by modern theologians is said in commission of the error that the
medieaval church committed. That is, it takes the lens of Greek philosophy (in
practical terms, neo-platonic idealism with an admix of Stoicism) and reads the
Bible through this. In Genesis this means that what God reveals as a succession
of events in time (thus in obstinately anti-mythic terms) gets converted to
'ideas' about the cosmos or God's relation to the cosmos. This usually results
in the vacuous claim that evolution is God's method of creation and leads to
neo-gnostic 'theories' of Genesis such as the 'framework' hypothesis, 'days of
revelation' and the like.
But to substitute 'ideas'
for events, one has to set aside the worldview of the Bible: that concrete
events in time are substantial and real, to instead utilise a species of Greek
idealism, where the concrete reality is set aside or substituted by an
overarching idealist fancy. This is something we must guard against with all
our vigour. And it is the challenge the church has always faced: gnostics have
always wanted to make the concrete non-real, or less real, than abstractions,
ideas, or intellectual figments. The Bible stands squarely against this. Our
salvation is real, because of real events in a real world, brought about in
real time, and quite recently, in which there was a real fall which had real
consequences. As soon as we reject the Bible's realism and the chronology which
underpins it we walk away from the biblical 'world-view'. The very purpose of
the Biblical chronology is to make sure we understand the concrete realism of
the revelation: only myths rely on dateless vagueness. To toy with idealism in
gnostic fashion, we join the classic 'liberals' on their Kirkegaardean slope of
paganising Christ and endorsing the materialist explanation of reality.
The unhappy amalgam of
'theistic evolution' is grease on the slope. The 'hypothesis of God' in this
construction is unnecessary in evolutionary terms. Occam's 'razor' would cut it
out without a second thought. Its superfluousness denigrates God and his
revelation. Going the other way, the notion of evolution adds nothing to our
knowledge of God, but detracts from it. It is moreover contradicted by the
clear words of Scripture, as I imagine you appreciate.
It surprises me that the
philosophical and kerygmatic riches to be found in Genesian realism have not
been tapped by Christian theologians. These have ramifications for our
approaches to ontology, epistemology, ethics, soteriology and theodicy, giving
to these studies a rigour, a realism and a substantialness which makes their
idealistic counterparts appear to be hand-waving sophistry which help keep men
bound and under subjection to evil principalities and powers. Paul on Mars Hill
gives the great illustration of a scriptural realist reaching out to idealists
with a gospel of concrete salvation in a concrete world given credibility by
the God who saves being the creator of this world. It occurs to me that the
very point of God revealing that he created in 6 definite dateable days in
recent time, is to eliminate all the alternative cosmogonies by which people
cut themselves off from him. We see people using their cosmology to cut themselves
off from God, today, in spades: the New Age movement, the last gasps of
modernist humanism (of which Hubble appears to be a devotee) and in so much
theology and evangelising which unconsciously adopts pagan constructs to deny
the Scripture's embarrasing discord with our contemporary paganism.
In your talk at the
Engineering school, I would look forward to your tracing the revolution in
thinking that the reformation brought in. True, it was tinged with elements of
Grecian approaches to thinking, but Luther's great revolution was that we can
think for ourselves, without 'authorities' because the Bible gave us insights
into what truly is. The whole ediface of modern science is built on this.
Engineering rides the wave of the success of Luther's revolution which comes
from his taking the Bible's challenge, the challenge of the real world, of
which the Bible tells us against the unrealism of the authoritarian idealism of
his day. Everything in the modern West starts from this.
