The big 5

On the Christianity Today site an article was run the other day on questions Christians need to face about creation.

I'll summarize:

1. Are we willing for the Bible to change our minds?

OR are we content to ride with the materialism that denies God's communication and seeks to deploy its mythology of evolution?

2. Does the timeline really matter?

OR should I deny the import of the coordinated chronology markers in the text and refer instead to a materialist dogma, noting that pagans have always sought long ages to disconnect themselves from any primary causal event.

3. Is your view a compromise to the spirit of the age?

OR does the creation account just not matter in its inspired detail?

4. Am I allowing the text to speak for itself?

OR am I retrospectively filling it with the documentary hypothesis and all this entails for its facticity?

5. Is there more to agree on that disagree on?

OR do I want to supress argument (in the good sense) so I won't have to explain how modern humanist-materialism is consistent with Adam's rejection of relationship with God?

If I get to it, I'll summarise the argument and comment over coming weeks (as I get time).

Evolution in business

In their book Competing for the Future, Hamel and Prahalad write:

Palace coups make great press copy, but the real objective is a transformation that is revolutionary in result  and evolutionary in execution.

Great! I wonder how many businesses would succeed following an evolutionary path:

• random changes that might or might not produce a useful result
• meandering adaptation, most of which are discarded by the environment,
• large numbers of which have no discernable benefit or detriment and one or two that might be good, but we won't know if they are good until other changes make them good: so energy expended into features that may not, probably won't be of ultimate benefit, and no particular end result in view...

That's evolution for you.

Hubble

A letter sent to Peter Jensen, many years ago:

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Dear Dr Jensen,

I would have loved to have been at the lecture by yourself and Dr Hubble. I read the report in the Herald, which while it probably was but a pale reflection of the event, nevertheless, I take indicated the lines of argument used by yourself and the other gentleman.

If you permit, I would like to 'weigh in' on your side.

Firstly, Dr Hubble's four points are very simple to deal with:

The Earth was no longer considered the centre of the heavens

Whether the earth is 'considered' to be the centre of the universe or not is beside the point. The earth is, by assumption, taken to be not the centre because the universe is assumed to be isotropic (that is the same everywhere). This is an assumption of convenience. But there is nothing in the scripture, as far as I know, that requires the earth to be geometrically centred in the universe. All we are told is that the earth was created first: big insult to the cosmological 'principles' which themselves, are mere ideas. Hubble is probably referring to the Ptolemaic astronomy taken up by the medieval church; but there is nothing scriptural about that.

The discovery of mammoth fossils proved extinctions

I don't see how this is relevant to Hubble's view. He appears to think that the Bible requires fixity and permanence of species (a misunderstanding emerging from the church's long infatuation with Aristotle). It does not. Genesis tells us that creatures reproduce 'after their kind' which is exactly what we see. This says nothing about our particular intellectual construct of 'species'. We know species emerge and sucumb to extinction; the latter of which we expect given the fall and the calamity it was for all life; bringing death to this universe. I wonder what answer Hubble had to the problem or the fact of death? What does he offer his fellow humans who face death and, in his terms, are mere arrangements of matter of no particular 'real' signifciance.

Rock sedimentation shows the planet is millions of years old rather than a few thousand

Naturally, rock sedimentation shows nothing of the sort, but sediments are interpreted on the basis of naturalistic assumptions to give this view. This approach to geology commenced in the 19th Century with geologists who intentionally put aside the history we have in the Bible on the basis of naturalism being their operating cosmogony. Of course, cosmogony derived from human assumptions (or fallen predilictions) that seeks to cut itself off from what history we have (and I take it that we have such history from the Holy Spirit in Genesis, for the very reason of providing us with the basis for a true, godly and ultimately salvific cosmogony) will be off the rails from the 'get go'. It is interesting to consider that we have examples of strata build up were we know multiple strata over tens of metres depth to have been laid down in a few hours, throwing into question the conventional view of strata as necessitating great periods of time. The examples are at the Mt St Helen's volcano explosion of the 1980s where we saw gross geological transformations occuring within seconds, hours and days. One of these was a mudflow which cut a rock canyon in a number of hours!

No credible proof has been found of the Great Flood.

It is amusing that he refers to rock sedimentation in the 'breath' before he denies evidence of the flood. Sedimentary rock is rock laid down under water. There are thousands of feet thickness of this around the world, full of water bourne and other fossils. I think this is astonishing evidence for the flood. Only the conventional (naturalist) view inserts vast periods of time between strata. There is no independent evidence for these time periods, incidently, only an elaborate circular argument, with the unspoken naturalist basis underlying it and needing rebuttal.

I applaud what you are reported as saying about Genesis, but I would go further. Much that is said about Genesis by modern theologians is said in commission of the error that the medieaval church committed. That is, it takes the lens of Greek philosophy (in practical terms, neo-platonic idealism with an admix of Stoicism) and reads the Bible through this. In Genesis this means that what God reveals as a succession of events in time (thus in obstinately anti-mythic terms) gets converted to 'ideas' about the cosmos or God's relation to the cosmos. This usually results in the vacuous claim that evolution is God's method of creation and leads to neo-gnostic 'theories' of Genesis such as the 'framework' hypothesis, 'days of revelation' and the like.

But to substitute 'ideas' for events, one has to set aside the worldview of the Bible: that concrete events in time are substantial and real, to instead utilise a species of Greek idealism, where the concrete reality is set aside or substituted by an overarching idealist fancy. This is something we must guard against with all our vigour. And it is the challenge the church has always faced: gnostics have always wanted to make the concrete non-real, or less real, than abstractions, ideas, or intellectual figments. The Bible stands squarely against this. Our salvation is real, because of real events in a real world, brought about in real time, and quite recently, in which there was a real fall which had real consequences. As soon as we reject the Bible's realism and the chronology which underpins it we walk away from the biblical 'world-view'. The very purpose of the Biblical chronology is to make sure we understand the concrete realism of the revelation: only myths rely on dateless vagueness. To toy with idealism in gnostic fashion, we join the classic 'liberals' on their Kirkegaardean slope of paganising Christ and endorsing the materialist explanation of reality.

The unhappy amalgam of 'theistic evolution' is grease on the slope. The 'hypothesis of God' in this construction is unnecessary in evolutionary terms. Occam's 'razor' would cut it out without a second thought. Its superfluousness denigrates God and his revelation. Going the other way, the notion of evolution adds nothing to our knowledge of God, but detracts from it. It is moreover contradicted by the clear words of Scripture, as I imagine you appreciate.

It surprises me that the philosophical and kerygmatic riches to be found in Genesian realism have not been tapped by Christian theologians. These have ramifications for our approaches to ontology, epistemology, ethics, soteriology and theodicy, giving to these studies a rigour, a realism and a substantialness which makes their idealistic counterparts appear to be hand-waving sophistry which help keep men bound and under subjection to evil principalities and powers. Paul on Mars Hill gives the great illustration of a scriptural realist reaching out to idealists with a gospel of concrete salvation in a concrete world given credibility by the God who saves being the creator of this world. It occurs to me that the very point of God revealing that he created in 6 definite dateable days in recent time, is to eliminate all the alternative cosmogonies by which people cut themselves off from him. We see people using their cosmology to cut themselves off from God, today, in spades: the New Age movement, the last gasps of modernist humanism (of which Hubble appears to be a devotee) and in so much theology and evangelising which unconsciously adopts pagan constructs to deny the Scripture's embarrasing discord with our contemporary paganism.

In your talk at the Engineering school, I would look forward to your tracing the revolution in thinking that the reformation brought in. True, it was tinged with elements of Grecian approaches to thinking, but Luther's great revolution was that we can think for ourselves, without 'authorities' because the Bible gave us insights into what truly is. The whole ediface of modern science is built on this. Engineering rides the wave of the success of Luther's revolution which comes from his taking the Bible's challenge, the challenge of the real world, of which the Bible tells us against the unrealism of the authoritarian idealism of his day. Everything in the modern West starts from this.

Mysteries

We are often told by theistic evolutionists, or 'head-in-sand-proto-creationists' that creation is 'a mystery'.

Here's what Jeremiah has to say about mysteries:

17:5

Thus says the Lord,
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his ^[a]strength,
And whose heart turns away from the Lord

And 33:2,

Thus says the Lord who made ^[a]the earth, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name, call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know. ['great and mighty' is translated 'mysteries' in some versions].

Dear Seth

A recent letter to Seth Godin, of 'Seth Godin' fame.

Dear Seth,

There was an error on your post. You wrote:

"The world is not flat. Gullible actually is a word. The ice is melting. The world is not 5,000 years old. Stevie Wonder, is, unfortunately, blind."

I don't know if anyone thinks that the world is 5,000 years old, but plenty think that it is 6,000 years old. You don't clearly, along with many people, but truth is not established by vote (nor should it be silenced by opinion).

The point that you don't explore is that very long ages of 'earth life' have a long tradition stemming back to the dead hand of pagan beliefs; those who cannot locate mind as a reality in the world have to resort to great age in the hope that THAT will give mind a place. It doesn't however, because time plus material just gives us material. You will have to look elsewhere for mind.

OTOH, those who hold a short age for the world (indeed, the universe) do have a place for mind and hold that mind is the source of creative power...so the improbability of a short age disappears. Of course, once a long age is held to, conclusions will be constrained to that belief as proponents merrily question beg their way to deeper error.

One amongst many

In the film 'Superman v Batman', one of the protagonists...it might have been Lex Lother, or even Alfred (Jeremy Irons) said:

Since Darwinian evolution, we are not special, just one life form amongst many.

In the context of the indecisive good v evil of this singularly religious movie, we are dumped into the metaphysical materialism that the church fails to understand and therefore cannot bring the gospel against. The film deals clumsily with some classic topics in the philsophy of religion on the good v evil line but is hoist with its own petard; having no possible resolution, but a hopeless universe where there is no compass, and none possible; just where most Christians are as they trudge through the mire of theistic evolution, unwittingly intellectually equipped by Darwin to Dawkins.

Who's time?

From Siedentrop, Inventing the Individual, p. 54 (Penguin edition):

The Jewish sense of time was different. It was unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of 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. Is it fanciful to trace this sense back to the experiences of a nomadic people in the desert, aware that wind blowing across the sand transformed their landscape from one day to the next?

The critical idea for my purpose is in bold: The Jewish God expressed himself in time.

Today we are immersed in the Jewish concept of time and it is very difficult to step outside it and feel what a contrast it would be to pagan concepts, so we miss the importance of the chronology markers in Genesis 1: these are profoundly significant for the sense of Genesis 1 and for its implications for our understanding of creation as God's acts in time to found his relationship with his creation.

To defer to other time-concepts, or to radically set them aside with the pretence that they merge with pagan concepts is to turn one's back on the Biblical conception of time (that is, how time really works) and with it the Biblical information about creation. Creation founds worldview, another concept of 'creation' founds another world view.

Today the worldview of choice is metaphysical physicalism (even though physicalism itself cannot give rise to a metaphysic, meaning tha the metaphysic produced falls victim to post-modern accusations of (mere) narrative).

Shamans of the day

The question of time and the tempo of events often pops up in discussions about Genesis 1. Should we take seriously the timing of events, the tempo of action, that is ostensibly in the text, or should we sideline it as irrelevant?

Those who want to make room for materialist dogma and confer credibility on the idea of evolution will typically vote to sideline the timing as irrelevant.

This is a mistake. If we take our lead from Paul, all scripture is profitable...so, where is the profit in the tempo of creation.

To answer let’s look at it the other way around. Where is the detriment in denying that the tempo is in any way related to what has really happened in our time-space domain?

If the tempo is disconnected from the real world, then there are gaps in the flow of God’s relationship with us. If evolution is deferred to as describing what *really* happened, then the gaps are immense, and the very flow of creation bears no relation to reality. On these grounds it can teach nothing: it is empty, or at least entails vast stretches of emptiness where the touch of God is absent. If the one who is love is absent, what takes his place?

The vacuum gets filled pretty quickly (which is one of the motives of materialism in ousting the supernatural): not with the one who is love and acts in love, but with myths and tales of demons who are not love in action, but the reverse. These gap fillers pave the way for the shamans of the day to use the power thus given to them against us, keeping us from knowing ourselves in relation to God.

Rowan?

A friend sent me this comment on Rowan's article:

1. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.”

“And Satan said to the woman, “Has God indeed said,…”

Coincidence or what?

2. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not 
occur precisely as they are described to us.”

However, the Spirit of God says, “And they HEARD the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I HEARD your voice in the garden”

The scientific explanation? Two possibilities: a. It never happened the way Satan's,  I mean, Rowan’s thought bubble said it did, or b. The forbidden fruit was actually psilocybin fungi and Adam and Eve (or maybe it really was Steve!) just hallucinated it all. Why not?

3. “What Peter has helpfully done is show how there is space within the (ultimately authoritative) Scriptures themselves for the integration of science and God’s revealed truth.”

Yes, yes, of course…but only after science, so-called, has first managed to salvage as much as it could for its valuable contribution.

We're now officially **cool**

As we approach CMS Summer School Season, I was browsing past articles on this venerable Sydney tradition, and came to a piece by Rowan Kemp.

He gushes for Peter in this piece, and distressingly, his general comments betray some huge lacunae in the education of Christians. That questions of the relation of the word of God to the world could elude a paid Christian for so long are shown in this paragraph:

Bible-honouring Christians can feel boxed in. If I embrace science and its findings I’m sometimes made to feel I’m betraying Christian belief in creation and respect for God’s Word. On another front if I suggest that there is intrinsic value in the arts, science, culture or work I run the risk of being told I’ve inappropriately elevated the merely temporal—the only thing of real value is evangelism and ministry.

 What?

This was not covered in Old Testament 1? Surely!!

But worse is to come:

Moreover, careful attention to the detail and nature of these chapters shows that we are not obliged to adopt a literal ‘six days’ or ‘young earth’ position in order to be faithful to Scripture. As Peter Jensen observed these opening chapters contain hints within them that suggest God is revealing truths selectively and sometimes symbolically. We’re not told everything that is going on everywhere: the old question of from where did Cain find a wife? Maybe there were other humans around—the text does not preclude it. Sometimes it seems the truth is being communicated to us in ‘parable-like’ form: was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden? Maybe the communication of truth in these chapters is like Jesus’ parables or the prophet Nathan’s parable to King David: it’s true, it concerns real events, but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.

 The damage done in this passage to the Biblical doctrine of creation is lived out every time a paid Christian does similar homage to the dominating materialism of our day: that is, God is, in effect, within the 'creation' and not the external author. This occurs because what really happened at creation is left to materialism: modern evolution is touted as the real 'creation' account. After all, if Genesis is not real events temporally located, then it is about nothing and can teach nothing, because its references are void. The vanity of this type of exegesis is astounding.

Careful attention to detail in Genesis 1 indicates that we are being provided a summary of events, but of events; actual real space-time events delineated by the repeated cross-referencing temporal references: I wonder how more clearly could an author communicate the passage and pace of time.

The most amusing comment is on Cain's wife. Of course there were other humans. The text does not merely preclude it; it states it: Genesis 5:4 does the job. I also refer to an article on the topic.

However, the greatest mash up is the 'parable-like' form. We have a word for this: metaphor!

At base, the escape hatch for materialism is in the philosophical idealism that allows a reality to be real in some way that is not temporally apparent. This is pagan nonsense. We need to take our philosophical bearings from the concrete realism of the Bible, with the compass being provided in the creation account as the starting point for our understanding of who God is; who we are; what the world is; and how it all relates together.

Nature...where it all starts

Quote from an article in Quadrant, quoting Camille Paglia:

Camille wrote her PhD at Yale, supervised by Harold Bloom, and in 1990 published Sexual Personae, which begins: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem.

TE-ers fall into the Paglia's observation: God from nature; nature first, nature sets the ground rules.

But, we look at Genesis 1, and we see, no, 'tis the other way; God sets the ground rules in his identity and action.

When we reject the face reading of Genesis 1, we end up party to Paglia's world; it is not the world of Christ our maker!

Story

Letter I sent to 'A Just Cause'

Dear Scott

I am studying your booklet Boundless Plains to Share? with my home group and must thank you for your work in this topic.

It was all going smoothly until I came to the phrase 'the creation stories'. I wondered what this could imply. Generally the word 'story' is used in lieu of the word 'account' to impute some lack of factuality in the subject text. If this is the case here, then the usage undoes all the good that your book seeks.

If the creation passage (I  disagree that there are two accounts) is not directly connected to the world we inhabit, and is not sufficiently explanatory of events to allow us to invest in it, then we must go elsewhere to develop an understanding and appreciation of our world, ourselves and, indeed, of who God is and what he represents to us.

Indeed, if the account is best described as a 'story' then it is not obvious that it provides a basis for anything in fact because what is finally real is elsewhere.

The basis in fact would only come from what is really factual, and this, if the creation account is set aside, defaults to the dogma of organic evolution.

A basic premise of this dogma is that the world is constituted as a field of competition and destruction (and this is basic to the world and not the result of the fall) where inevitably the strong will outdo the weak. This puts the 'real' world in direct conflict with how God calls us to think and act.

Of course, in evolutionary terms, those who seek our help (or access to our wealth and freedom) are weaker than us and it is our vital duty to outdo them; because reality is that way, and the strong will do this. There is a grand determinism that is inescapable.

Better, I think, to take the scriptures as directly congruent with the world and factually related to it, setting aside materialist stories as pagan obfuscation.

The dogma also takes us back to the ideas of eugenics and to race selection doctrine: that some people and some 'races' are inferior. Arguably those 'races' that have produced repellent cultures are inferior to those that have produced attractive cultures, and it can only be 'right' (that is, congruent with how things really are) to oppose benefiting them.

On the other hand, of course, maybe your use of the word 'story' in connection with God's revelation of the actual setting between him and us is not meant to diminish the content of the Genesis account and detach it from the world we live in.



If so, it seems odd that you would use the deprecating term 'story' when if there is a 'story' it is the materialist story of evolution that sets us in a pagan world of a random and depersonalised universe.

G.U.T

Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere; at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore, psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time.

Wilson, E.O., The Meaning of Human Existence, Liveright Publishing Corporation, NY, p. 184, 2014.)

There you have it, theistic evolutionists, Christo-materialist syncretics and their fellow travellers are in bed with the wrong crowd.

Wilson is wrong, of course...none of this can be made sense of without the revelation of God...and the history of rationality and modern science is no my side, not Wilson's.

Challenges raised by Darwin

In his Gresham College lecture Alistair McGrath shills for Darwin, it seems:

This lecture sets the scientific and religious context for Darwin’s theory of evolution, before considering this theory and the challenges this raised for traditional religious beliefs...

Why not talk about the challenges Biblical revelation has for Darwinian speculation...?

Time makes distance

In an article in Quadrant magazine was the following:

His imagery is evocative, including his invocation of expanses of time that would dazzle anyone other than paleontologists and cosmologists.

"Expanses of time that would dazzle..." The expanse to which Noel Pearson refers is the claimed 53,000 years since the current aboriginies moved to Australia (it was not called Australia then, of course).

The vast expanse dazzles...what does this mean? Is it that a 'mere' 53,000 years is astonishingly great a period to contemplate in the span of human civilisation and relationships? Indeed it is. The vastness removes one from the period in question.

In our context, the very same effect operates when it is claimed by some Christian commentators that the world is really multiple billions of years old, and not the 6,000 odd indicated in the Bible. The vast period de-reifies both our creator God and our relationship to him. God, the person behind it all, becomes an abstract spirit, and we skirt the edge of animism, or panentheism because love with no exercise over eons is a lot like no love at all.

Art not life

Question in a study on Genesis:

5. Read Genesis 3.7-24. In these verses we see the consequences of human sin in the breakdown of relationships between people and people and God. In this highly symbolic section we see a reality that is still with us today. What area of brokenness troubles you the most?

As soon as a part of scripture is identified as symbolic, I get wary. To regard something as a symbol threatens its dereification. It makes it 'art' not 'life'. Art comments on life and relationship, it is replete with symbols and representations, but it is not, in itself real life; its a type of decorative communication about real life.

So when something in the Bible is declared to be symbolic, one first has to ask, symbolic of what? Of what concretely is it a symbol (and if we can't say, then its hard to declare it to be symbolic; maybe we should instead say that as modern Westerners we are just uncomfortable with it). Perhaps of 'a reality that is still with us today'. But if it is our reality, why would we need a symbol?

What the passage does is give to us the source of the current reality. Is the source a symbol of the source? How would we know? Has the current reality been always with us? In which case it doesn't need a source, but is inherent in the creation (as the problem only emerges when the face reading of Genesis 1-3 is denied, then the word 'creation' may be erroneous, and we should just say 'cosmos' or 'reality' as something that is unbound from God's creative acts that we've just denied).

And if it is a symbol what is the connection with our non-symbolic experience of the world as a subject? Where does symbol stop and concrete start?

I doubt that there is an independent epistemic basis for the declaration when our topic is a type of 'first philosophy' topic; that is, about the start of it all, so perhaps we are all just symbols of something else, our relationships are symbols of something else, and our concrete experience of death, pain, suffering and frustration is not due to actual estrangement from God, but is a mere symbol of some other actual thing.

No, it just doesn't wash.

So what is so symbolic about the passage? I think it is just that we have trouble with a talking snake (maybe all animals talked pre-fall...and how would we know they didn't...or did), and an actual tree being a reminder of a covenant. And what a simple gracious reminder. Nothing complicated to do, just remember the God-man relationship by your action of not taking the fruit. A fruit! Nothing to interfere with an enjoyable life, and it self demonstrating the mercy, graciousness and love of God; actually!

Theistic evolution

I was discussing with a friend the notion that God might have used evolution to complete the creation.

We were talking about Wilder-Smith’s wonderful book God: To Be or Not To Be and came to the conclusion that for God to have used evolution he would have had to make it do that which it is not able to do.

That is, he would have to use change processes not to produce chance outcomes, but purposed outcomes. He would have to inject teleology into that which is purely stochastic.

But that means he would have made a thing (chance) which could not achieve his ends (a creative purpose) and so work against the thing made (chance); which is to say, that he couldn’t have used chance at all, because chance leads to dissolution, not creation!

So God could only conceivably use chance to create by not using chance at all, but by over-riding (guiding, people might like to suggest!) it. The very notion breaks down under the weight of its own incoherence.

Chiasm

Some claim that because of the chiastic structure of Genesis 1, etc. that it cannot be history. I guess that rules out Matt 13 as being teaching, then.

Law 2

Granville Sewell has copped a lot of flack for offering this article on the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The detractors have said the usual thing: that he fails to understand that energy coming into an open system overturns the 'law'.
However, the critics beg the question and fail to explain what they assume...and fail to provide the probability-increase-engine that turns high probability states into low probability states.

What does evolution tell us?

Let Will Provine open the box:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear...There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation of ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

in Origins Research 16(1):9, 1994.