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.