The tree of life

I recently watched a re-run of Attenborough's Tree of Life documentary. A paean to evolution.

It provided a great summary of doctrinaire evolutionary boosting, which I had expected. In so doing it provided a wonderful succession of conflation of fact and presumption, misinformation, intellectual slight of hand and fallacious logic, which was a bonus.

If I was to run a Saturday seminar for high school students (now there's an idea), clips from this video would be part of it!

I'll summarise.

Early on we are given the estimate of the number of species: just to dazzle. The range is from a few million to many times that: so large as to indicate it is pure guesswork and so not worth mentioning. This sets the scene for the staggering complexity and variety of life being claimed as unavoidably the result of evolution.

Next we are rightly introduced to biblical belief, with a reading from Genesis 1; well, lampooning really. DA fails to express any wonder at the identification of broad ecological and coupled zoological categories that the account contains, the orderly progression of the creation of ecological divisions, and the continuity of those categories with what is evident to us today. Pretty remarkable for a book by 'ignorant ancients'.

We are treated to a pop history of Darwin's adventures completely cut off from the intellectual history of the time he lived in and the atmosphere pregnant with evolutionary ideas (including early description of 'natural selection' by Edward Blyth, a creationist). He also fails to mention the tendentiousness of the 'long age/slow process' project of the time to unseat Moses' credibility.

A whole lot of non-evidence of evolution is presented in commission of the fallacy of 'affirming the consequent' (of the form: 'when it rains puddles of water form...oh look, there's a puddle of water, it has rained' neglecting other causes for puddles of water) on the question begging presumption of evolution occuring being the proof of evolution having occured (and still occuring presumably).

DA makes much of Darwin destroying the idea of 'fixity of the the species' erronously conflating 'species' with the genesian 'kinds', failing to unlink the two ideas, falling for the Aristotelian influenced idea of fixed species! Not biblical at all. He didn't bother pointing out that bibilical 'kinds' are broad observational categories, not narrow genetic ones and one could well extend from this that the concept of 'kind' was not concordant with rigid fixed species...whatever 'species' might mean in reality. Thus from the biblical data we need not be surprised by the proliferation of sub-types of creatures within broad 'kinds'. So DA deceitfully plays the straw man game.

Next stop is genetics: the discovery of the double helix, and the evidence this provides for genetic continuity between 'species'. This comes as no surprise given the looseness of 'kind' and that everything in a biosphere should have similar biology to exist in said biosphere. No surprise here either.

We get the full bottle on Natural Selection as 'survival of the fittest'. I know that's its epigraph, but survival of the fittest is not required...only survival of the least unfit in any particular ecological setting at any particular time. But reality doesn't sound as good as propaganda, even in biology and it is not explained how this is the 'engine' of evolution instead of what we observe: resistance to degenerative change.

Close to the end we are taken through Darwins 'fear' of the eye as an evolved thing. DA glibly explains that there are all sorts of organs that sense light...so one could have evolved into the other. No shred of evidence is offered for the vast functional differences, and the coordinated development of interlocking systems and sub-systems required for vision to occur, let alone the meaning of vision for organisms.

Lastly of my summary, we sweat with Darwin over his long and painstaking work with species studies...no critique of Darwin's un-self-critical question begging mission here either, nor of the obvious critique that he was describing a plausable analysis of speciation within kinds....of which we see evidence, but driving this beyond evidence to a total materialist history of biology.

DA ends with Paley's watch...but fails again to deal with the true implications of the analogy, particularly for evolution which remains a set of footnotes that attempt to save a Victorian era gross morphology fiction as making any contribution to anything, concocted in complete ignorance of the vast complexity of even the 'simplest' life forms.

My conclusion: the film is a great discussion starter for a seminar on biblical creation.

Transcendence

God is transcendent. We know from Isaiah 55:9, or we might think that we do!

This must be read in the light of Gen 1:2, 27, Gen 2:15-17 and Gen 3:8-11.

There is an intimacy here: communication, fellowship (reinforced in God's creating in our time setting), love. God is of course above as as per Isaiah, but he is also with us. The creation tells us that he is with us with an intensity and closeness that goes beyond mere pagan transcendence.

Fish

In an episode of Rick Stein in Asia, he commented on his love of fish that we came from fish...obviously one doesn't go to a cook for information on origins, and I note that he's gone even deeper into mythological past to get to fish, rather than stop at the shared precusor to modern apes and humanity!

Yes, man came after fish, and indeed, man was made from dust...but that's only half the truth. 

Satan's deception is always subtle. As his 'temptations' of Yeshua, he distorts rather than outrageously fabricate.


Thus we go from Adam made from dust and enlived by God (Gen 1:27, with the method God used explained in Gen 2:7) in the Bible, to moderns disregarding God's word, indeed, the method he used to create man, saying that sure, we are made of the dust of the ground, but not with any intention, purpose, design or intelligent objective, rather it was the meandering of chemical accidents that led to us. Presumably the same random accidents led to ideas...which can be no more reliable on that basis than any other random accident.

Praise

Nice piece on why we praise our creator.

How many species are there?

In
How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, Boris Worm
Published: August 23, 2011
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127
From the abstract:

[The] approach was validated against well-known taxa, and when applied to all domains of life, it predicts ∼8.7 million (±1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species globally, of which ∼2.2 million (±0.18 million SE) are marine. In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description.

Thus, between 7.4 and 10 million species! We've catalogued 1.2m. So, we know next to nothing about species!

How many pre-historic species are there? Wikipedia has a few pages of them. Nothing, compared to  the current estimate, so it would appear that we know nothing about them as well!

Natural Selection = a spin of the wheel.

You've heard Natural Selection described as 'the survival of the fittest'? Of course! But it ain't so.

The fittest! The fittest, the very bestest fit of all the fits there could be?  How do you measure that? It is completely unparameterised and given the variability of ecological communities and their change over time, is unparameterisable. The fitest is the most fit possible in all relevant circumstances. Not even the second most fit which is one 'fitette' less fit than the most fit gets a guernsey.

Rubbish.

The roulette wheel of natural selection means at worst survival of the luckiest (but even that contains an implicit teleology and is a hindsight evaluation), and at best, the survival of the least unfit at the time and place in the conditions that prevail on the day.

In the end, all one can say is that what survives is that which has survived. It is a meaningless 'go nowhere' concept.

It only means that the characteristics that only and expressely benefit bare survival are important...so fruit could be slightly less delicious to an animal, and it would probably have insufficient selectability to be selected out; this might or might not relate to survival fitness, but we find that fruit is just so delicious! And so on. For everything. What about human thought, art, technology? Not essentail for bare survival, so comparatively not selected for: all are the mere result of the least best fit surviving. Its like public works: the least costly gets the job with the lowest tender.

Adam. Was he real?

Yes. Isaiah 43:27.

Genesis vs myth

When you are challenged, usually by an evolution booster (whom you can refer to Mary Midgley's book Evolution as Religion), that the Genesis account is merely another ancient 'creation myth'. Here's fuel for your reply.

It is nothing like myth (read Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return), rather:

1. it is personal and personally involved in the creation sequence
2. it is ex nihilio and makes no implict assumption that a cosmos 'just is'.
3. it has specific timing and place that is continuous with our real world experience
4. it uses concrete defined time units, the ones we live by and dominate our lives
5. it uses real-world categories for the results of the creative words
6. its creation episodes are ecologially patent
7. it communicates in terms that make sense in the real world
8. it identifies the critical difference between man and animals: rationality.

If you want the three big ones, for an easy rebuttal:

1. it is personal: God has a clear identity, will and purpose
2. it is particular: no vague generalities or symbols
3. it is real: its set here and then, continuous with our world-experience here and now.

Either way, nothing like myth.

God and David Attenborough

David Attenborough's work is uniformly wonderful. The photography and locations amazing and the portrayal of the creation sometimes almost brings welling tears of joy and the greatness of God.

But DA himself doesn't see cause to glorify God, in whom I doubt he believes, rather his words are an almost constant paean to Evolution!

I wonder at this when Christians in the typical reflexive fit of ill-considered (usually) opining, regard evolution as God's method of creation. DA certainly doesn't see it this way, indeed his belief in evolution bolsters his denial of God. Evolution never points to God. Always away, always displacing him as creator, which is his chief office in our world.

I was reflecting on these thoughts as I read Isaiah 42:8, today:

I am the Lord, that is my name;
I will not give my glory to another,
Nor my praise to graven images.

And then read vss 5-7 preceeding: God once again lays down his trump card: creator and lover of his creation.

Thus says God the Lord,

Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread out the earth and its offspring,
Who gives breath to the people on it
And spirit to those who walk in it,
⁶ “I am the Lord, I have called You in righteousness,
I will also hold You by the hand and watch over You,
And I will appoint You as a covenant to the people,
As a light to the nations,
⁷ To open blind eyes,
To bring out prisoners from the dungeon
And those who dwell in darkness from the prison.

I don't believe in God

Jake and Jerry

Maxwell

Time as agent

It's even hit TV documentaries:

Michael Portillo in his Irish railway series, in commenting on the Irish v British troubles in the early 20th c. commented on Q. Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland:

The beauty of time passing is that the makes the impossible possible.

Now, where have I heard that error before?

To be accurate: the beauty of time passing is that the actors change, circumstances change, peoples' perceptions and motivations change and what was impossible in the past becomes, because of these social and political changes, possible.

Bible is not a science book?

Jake and Jerry

Genesis a science text?

In a post on science in Genesis,  there is a link to Eric Snow's article on www.rae.org: “Christianity a Cause of Modern Science?: The Duhem-Jaki and Merton Theses Explained”. In this is a fascinating quote from a 14th century scholar, John Buridan.

The remarkable thing here is that, as I read it, Buridan [Perhaps the most influential Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy] starts his reflections on the created world with God’s revelation: he therefore uses Genesis 1 directly as a ‘scientific’ textbook. By this Buridan made the great break away from paganism and opened the path to the development of modern ‘natural’ sciences. Note, the Bible is directly used to illuminate this break and make the created world intellectually available for rational examination!

““The first key steps in totally discarding Aristotle's physics were done by…the medieval Christian Catholic [Jean/John] Buridan, [who] in a crucial passage, anticipated the idea of inertia...through his discussion of impetus. Notice the reference to God not directly making the laws of nature operate:

Also, since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move the celestial bodies, it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of this kind, because it would be answered that God, when He created the world, moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them He impressed in them impetuses which moved them without His having to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby He concurs as a co-agent in all things which take place; 'for thus on the seventh day He rested for all work . . .' [Gen. 2:2] And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was not inclination of the celestial bodies for movements.

Also note this additional statement as a nascent form of the idea of inertia:

But because of the resistance which results from the weight of the [waterwheel of the] mill, the impetus would continually diminish until the mill ceased to turn. And perhaps, if the mill should last forever without any diminution or change, and there were no other resistance to corrupt the impetus, the mill would move forever because of its perpetual impetus.

While these passages are only halting steps on a long road to repealing Aristotle's physics, they do show a move to break out of his conceptions of how moving bodies move. These men show that the Church never uncritically accepted the Greek classics as many in the Islamic world had done earlier. True, it tied itself and lent its authority to the Greek classics excessively, which set the stage for its eventual disaster resulting from it using force that made Galileo recant his belief that the earth moved. With the later discoveries of Galileo, Hooke, Kepler, Torricelli, Boyle, Newton, and others, Europe's science took a vast qualitative leap, but we should not overlook its origins and these men's predecessors in the Middle Ages.””

Are we pagans or what?

One of the challenges faced by attempts to regard both evolution and the biblical creation account in Genesis 1-2 as explanatory as to origins, and thus, the nature of the world and its ontological basis, is that the heart of the creation account is removed.

It was encapsulated in a sermon I recently heard where the speaker claimed that the cosmos 'just is' while endorsing its creation by God.

So, it is not 'just is', but created! One cannot have it both ways or Paganism is given a toe in the door.

Above all else the creation account in Genesis is personal. It starts with the personal as being basic to all that is (both Genesis 1 and Colossians 1 treat this) and emphasises this in the G1 account firstly, in God's real personal agency in creating by speaking and it having immediate effect: no long, nebulous, impersonal processes (the hallmarks of paganism with its determinedly impersonal or a-personal framing).

Secondly the personal is demonstrated in God working in our 'time-space'; thus the reason for the delimination of effort by days. This represents the first move of fellowship between creator and his image-bearer creature: that we share agency in discrete time. God knows what our work is like, and we reflect his in our work. This is the first move of fellowship, and enshrines our image-bearer-ness in the very good creation, not in the disaster that followed in the degredation of creation, which we now suffer from.

Other origin proposals are diffuse, nebulous, as I've said above, and fundamentally de-personalised. The personal in itself, and in our possible connection with it, is lost in their unlocatable and ill defined event that occures in a discontiguity with our experience of the Creation. The door is opened by taking such a framing to Genesis to deism: the remote God. God in Genesis 1 is the highly involved, engaged one in concrete relationship with the very concrete cosmos and its events in time and space.

And there's the clue. It is strikingly odd that our experience of the creation would not be the terms in which creation is explicable to us. In G1 it is very much this. The tangibility of our lives in contiguous objectively causal time-space is the very tangibilty of the creation and the terms in which it is communicated to us. Thus we don't live in a pagan or an idealist (paganism converted to the complicated words of philosophy) denominated world/cosmos/existence. Rather we live in a personal, concrete, discrete things happen in explainable time type of cosmos, denominated in direct connection between actor and event, in time and space locations that are communicable and that establish the event existentially.

The evolutionary plumber at work.

How things look when evolution is the culprit.

Where are we?

Comment on a creation web article about theologians who de-reify Genesis 1 etc.:

If theologians want to cut God's creating out of real communicable history, then where do we go to find the framing of relationship between God and humanity that occurs in real history? If the creation account in Genesis doesn't tell us what did happen in space and time, and therefore what really is, we have to ask then, what is 'really' there? What tells us how reality works? Plato, Aristotle, Darwin? If these people define what really is; then reality is other than the scriptures tell us and we have a faith not planted in this world that we experience, but some other world that we don't know...the world of platonic fantasy, of nature red in tooth and claw?

Catholics and creationism

An old press clipping from years ago:

Walking the dog

While my nephew and I were walking my dog, I noticed a small statue in a neigbour's front garden. A piece of paper with "Penelope" written on it along with an apple and other fruit were lying in front of the statue, which was decorated with feathers where the head would have been.

A woman and childwere in the garden and the woman noticed me looking at the scene.

She came over, asking, 'lovely, isn't it?" I asked what it was. She told me that it was 'Maisy's offering to peace'. I asked about the statue. She said that it was an Indian god [it looked like a headless Buddha to me] that would bring peace.

I replied, nicely, that it wasn't a god, it was a piece of shaped stone. She smiled, and said, we like to say it’s a god because it’s a nice story, and peace is something I want to teach Maisy.

A story and a piece of stone can bring peace, really?

If we regard Genesis 1 as just another story, we are at the level of the latter day heathen who think that a made up story about a piece of stone can have some real connection with actual lived lives. But it can't. It's a fantasy.

Despite all the fuss about 'genre', asserted 'compatibility with science', which I first heard from a friend in year 4 of primary school, and symbolism displacing realism, if this is all Genesis 1 is, just a story, then we make God no more than a piece of stone: an invention in our minds and not related to us in the real world where we grow apples and limes.

We back ourselves into a corner where a story about God's action in some 'story world', becomes the basis for our worship of God here in the real world. But, there can be no real connection, if it is merely a story.

Broughton Knox on origins

The doctrine of God the Creator is vivid throughout the pages of Scripture. The gods of the nations are not creator gods and, as the interesting little Aramaic insertion in Jeremiah puts it, the gods that did not create the world will perish, as indeed they have (Jeremiah 10:11). In our own times idolatry, which was a universal substitute for the Creator God, has been replaced by the widely held theory of evolution. Both the ancients and the heathen today deified and worshipped the creature as the creator, modelling images of man, or birds or animals or reptiles and worshipping these, so for Western secular people the modern theory of evolution deifies nature and acknowledges it as creator of all we see around us. All the beauty and intricacy and all the marvellous arrangements of the natural world are supposed to have been evolved by a thoughtless, purposeless mechanical operation of nature, and in this way the God who made the world is as effectively shutout of the minds of those who are enjoying the blessings of his creation as he was by the false religious of idolatry. Just as the idolaters could not see the foolishness, indeed the stupidity, of worshipping gods of wood and stone, which have no life nor purpose nor mind, so modern believers in the theory of evolution cannot see the foolishness of that theory, which not only lacks evidence to support it, but also runs counter to such evidence of origins as is available.

(Knox, The Everlasting God, p. 32, MatthiasMedia 2009)

 Creation implies purpose. In contrast, impersonal evolution is purposeless—things happening by accident without plan. But creation is a personal activity of an almighty, supreme God. Personal action implies purpose, and this in turn implies assessment. The doctrine of judgement is closely related to that of creation. The Scripture are full of the truth of the judgement of God. One of the oldest passages of the Old Testament, the song of Deborah, proclaims how turning away from the true God brought inevitable judgement: “New gods were chosen; then war was in the gates” (Judges 5:8).

(Knox, The Everlasting God, p. 36, MatthiasMedia 2009)

Knox was principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia 1959-85. The book these quotes come from is based on a series of lectures he gave at Moore College in 1979.

Darwin on theistic evolution

Evolution?

No!

No mechanism, no time and no evidence.

Simple.

Could God have used Evolution? #2

Evolution supposes, no, relies upon onward and upward: progress, because it was produced by the late Victorian idea of 'progress' (along with its late Victorian gross morphology phantasies).

Now, what does the Bible tell us about 'progress' in the created world (or 'nature' as materialists call it)?

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, ^[a]in hope ²¹ that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. ²³ And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. ²⁴ For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees?

 [Romans 8:20-24]


Or, in the Amplified version:

For the creation was subjected to frustration and futility, not willingly [because of some intentional fault on its part], but by the will of Him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will also be freed from its bondage to decay [and gain entrance] into the glorious freedom of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been moaning together as in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³ And not only this, but we too, who have the first fruits of the Spirit [a joyful indication of the blessings to come], even we groan inwardly, as we wait eagerly for [the sign of] our adoption as sons—the redemption and transformation of our body [at the resurrection]. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved [by faith]. But hope [the object of] which is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he already sees?

From the fall, the creation has been going down hill: falling apart, collapsing, decaying, deteriorating...evolution would claim that it is going the other way.

The TE has to explain how this is possible in the unitary world that God created...even a Deist has to explain how all we see is falling apart, but on a longer time scale, it is not.

God could have used evolution!

No! The creation was finished and declared by its author to be 'very good'. Evolution is not finished and never will be (in terms of the hypothetical construction that it is).

Where did you go to school?

A friend struck up a conversation with a fellow of about 30 who lived near his country property. Friend asked if the fellow had gone to school locally: yes; a parish school, then an Anglican college...asked 'and do you still go to church'...answer: ''no, everything, evolution" was the uncrafted reply.

Which religion?

Tim Ball in his 2014 talk at Skagit Education Outreach The Climate, Science Based on Evidence, Mt Vernon Washington. From the 15 minute mark.

There’s one other thing with environmentalism because if you look at the bookshelves you’ll see there’s a lot of books about Darwin, Richard Dawkins talking about Darwin and is God dead. That’s one of the debates that’s going on in the academic world about all of this and certainly with the young people. Now Darwin of course was an atheist and for the reason that most men become atheists he had a young daughter who died, and Darwin said ‘I can understand a God that tests adults, but I cannot understand a God that would test children’, and that, as I said, is why most men become atheists.

But Darwin was used by science to defeat religion and I’m not here to argue pro or for or whatever...but in defeating religion of course then you take away the reason for humans being here...we’re here because God put us here...well, you get rid of that and then, why are we here?

You know what change that makes to the world? Enormous, because if you went to the university in Darwin’s day [the library was about humanities and natural sciences] the social sciences emerged because that was the scientific world's way of trying to justify why humans are different than all the other animals...[but the distinctives sought keep disappearing] they decided that what makes people different than other apes is that we can tell lies...thus homo sapiens sapiens: the double knowledge of lies. The distinctive is we think of afterlife...but is that not religion? Back to where we started.

Once you've got rid of God and religion, for most of the young people...a student said I don’t believe you...I don’t believe you Thomas...my names isn’t Thomas...how many in the room know what I’m referring to? Two students in 150 knew the references. I believe our distinctive is that we are a moral being. We have to have a belief system of some sort, so young people are vulnerable to environment as the new religion.

What is a symbol for, and how does it symbolise?

The symbolist has to explain the real links between a symbolist view of Gen 1 and the realist purposes to which it is put.

The symbolist view of Genesis 1, etc. would have to entail a category error of the magnitude of the undergraduate 'fallacy'.

This is the 'fallacy' committed by many under-graduates who confuse possession (e.g. of a hand out, an e-book, a website address) with knowledge (produced by having read, considered and understood the given text).

The way it pans out in theology is that on the one hand we have, we are told, a 'symbolic' representation of God's creating, for various reasons to do, it would seem, not with creating, per se, but with bragging to ANE neighbours on the 'our story is better than your story' basis.

This places the creation account on the same rhetorical level as a Goon Show script where Neddie Seagoon fronts up to battle with a picture of a gun. Nice, but useless in the real world.

The fissure between a symbol of something rendered unknown by the declaration that the only information we have about it is a 'symbol' (of something else, presumably, but without any real world correlate), and real world events and relationships that are said to depend upon, or are referred to this symbol (that's like threatening your gun totting enemy with a read from your book of Kitchener's battle of Omdurman), have got to be given a connection that crosses the category boundary of 'we are in the real world' and the symbol is not. So where is the 'real world' link to the world of symbols?

Clearly they need a consulting philosopher who is up to date with Hegel, the Greek deceivers (Plato and his pupil Aristotle: a bright pair, but they made too many ontological mistakes to get full marks), and the tail enders, the Neoplatonists.

But seriously, folks, the problem is that there can be no link. God represents himself as creator at critical places in Scripture, which references can only point back to the Genesis account (note I carefully don't say, 'accounts', mainly because I don't think that Genesis is a second temple fantasy, and I can read what the text says...clearly one event, two subject matter branches). If the account is vaguely symbolic (that is, with no identifiable reference event), then it can have no meaningful connection with any of its citations.

God uses his credential as creator inescapably as being the one who created in 6 days, as he sets out in Genesis, and therefore dependable in doing what he says he will do, of being in relationship with us, and having a fellowship with us that characterises the relationship in objective and tangible terms which make sense in the continuity of time-space-event between his actions as reported, and our experience of being in the world created, on an intellectual level, defined by those actions and God's statements in relation to those actions.

Very simply the two are in different domains of meaning with no link apart from a hollow verbal one: Creation = symbol of something unknown, God's actions = thing is real space-time contiguous with the (claimed) basic reality of God-acting-with-wisdom-in-love.

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.