Posted on 11/05/2015 2:03:48 AM PST by WhiskeyX
I think Gerald Schroeder nailed it with his time dilation observations.
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I have nearly worn my copy of Schroeder out! :-) He and I are in close agreement -- until he gets into the numerology bit using Hebrew letters.
But, on relativistic time, we're pretty much in lockstep...
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As both a scientist and a believer, my take is that Scripture is correct and true!
When we find Scripture to be in apparent disagreement with observed reality, it must be our interpretation of Scripture that is at fault. That's why I work continually, testing and seeking ways to refine my own interpretation of God's Word.
However, that effort also includes taking into consideration the conditions under which Scripture was revealed and recorded -- including the levels of language and knowledge (and aids to observation) available at the time.
That's why I don't expect Genesis to be a complete science textbook -- and, why I ask odd questions like, "How many Galaxies could Moses see?" -- which leads to my acceptance of the fact that Scripture doesn't mention the billions of galaxies that we can see with the Hubble Space Telescope. The same applies to things like fossils... Scripture doesn't mention them, but, they are undeniably here.
It is up to us -- in good faith and with much prayer -- to make sure our interpretation does not dishonor God by either ignoring the facts of his Creation or disregarding what was recorded for us as revealed by Him.
I'm not interested in "proving" anything to anyone! But, although I am beginning my 79th orbit about our local thermonuclesr source of heat & light, I still feel compelled by His calling of me as a scientist to do whatever I can -- to understand and share the story of His Creation that he provided for us through both His Creation and His Word..
A significant part of that effort is seeking to learn about and considering the insights He has given other mature believers -- even here on FR!
Thank you for sharing your insight about Schroeder!
Jeepers, dear brother in Christ, I would think Neanderthals' "obviously rudimentary hand-eye motor skills and lack of pre-plannning and visualization mentation evident in their artifact assemblage" is the least of their problem, if we are to conclude, with reason, that they were capable of successfully interbreeding with humans.
But this would be an interbreeding of two entirely different species (which Darwin advises is highly unlikely). For Humans, unlike Neanderthals, are "ensouled by God"; Man is the only creature bearing a soul made in the image and likeness of God [Genesis 1]. Man's physical body -- with all its capabilities and limitations -- is, by comparison, simply the reification of the Logos laid down in in the spiritual creation of Genesis 1. [Genesis 2].
Or at least that's how I grasp the fundamental problem here. So, on both spiritual and scientific grounds, I conclude that there was no such interbreeding of Human and Neanderthal. JMHO FWIW
You wrote:
But, I honestly don't understand many folks' hangup with believing that God physically looks just like them -- except for having been misled by erroneous teaching and artifice like that of Michaelangelo ... that belittles God by reducing him to human form, frailty and scale....Well, of course it is untruthful to "reduce" God down to the level of the categories of finite human understanding. Yet Michelangelo surely did that; and arguably, you also, dear brother, have done likewise. Though in different ways, both of you deal with the problem of "representation of the ineffable," the visualization of the unvisualizable.
You suggest that Michelangelo perpetrated a deliberate fraud on viewers of his art, by representing God in human form -- that is, by reducing God to familiar forms of human perception, by which He might be understood by even unacculturated or uneducated mankind.
Put yourself in Michelangelo's shoes. He was a very great, inordinately powerful visual artist, IMHO the greatest of all time. He was a genius of both painting and sculpture. He had received a commission for a painting of "the creation of Adam" to be conceived by him and executed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It seems to me the first problem he needed to solve was how to visualize the completely unvisualizable; that is, God Himself. Yet the story of the creation of Adam clearly requires the necessary presence of God for its telling.
So, how to portray God? I suppose Michelangelo might, in his creative work, have depicted God as a point of light, like a star or something. But that would have been visually uninteresting, and devoid of rational content. (Unless you're a Buddhist or a Hindu.)
Like any great artist of whatever artistic genre -- the visual, musical, or literary arts -- I think Michelangelo understood himself as being in the communications business. The corollary is that the communicator, in order to successfully communicate, has to make his appeal at the level of understanding of the recipient of the communication. Perhaps he realized that a "point of Light" description would not cut any ice with his audience. Though it was erroneous for him to depict God in a human body, that was for him a better alternative than presenting Him as any kind of "point of Light." What his artistic decision achieved, though not exactly true, was the preservation of the ideas of God as Father, and God as Personality. Even the most unacculturated or uneducated humans naturally associate these ideas from their experience with other humans who, like them, have physical bodies. All the "fathers" we humans know and experience are incarnate.
So Michelangelo fudged a bit on details, but only to communicate a higher spiritual truth to his fellow man, the Truth that transcends the artistic work itself.
I see him doing this, particularly in his sculpture. When I view La Pieta, or the David, I am overwhelmed by the sense of divine Grace being mediated, radiated through these works. They are themselves ineffably beautiful as human works. But above all and finally, they point directly to God, the Source of their artistic inspiration....
Earlier in this post, I suggested that you are faced with the same problems that confronted Michelangelo, in conveying the truths of divine-human reality, to one's self and to the wider public. His "tools" were artistic imagination, pigment, and the surface of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Your "tools" come from state-of-the-art natural science. BOTH approaches necessarily fail to reach to God Himself, as He is in His fundamental "nature." For the Mind and Will of God necessarily are beyond the reach of the human mind. That being the case, the best a human can do is to try to make God "understandable" to himself.
And I imagine God does not object to this. Perhaps He sees such human striving as perfectly acceptable, to the extent that it is aimed at giving Him the Glory for all that He has made. I can think of several great scientists who were at least in part inspired by this motivation. (E.g., Newton; Einstein; LeMaitre, others.)
But in the end, there is no description of God, Man, and the Creation imaginable by the human mind that can possibly account for the fullness and majesty of our and creation's very ground of Being, which is God Himself.
In conclusion, I feel sure God is glad that human beings are drawn to the understanding of His creative Order. But that is not to say that His Order is capable of being fully explicated by the categories of the human mind on the basis of finite, human knowledge and experience.
That would be to "reduce" God down to, as if He were fully reducible to, the level of human understanding. That, to me, is to commit the ultimate "category error" of which the human mind is capable....
God utterly transcends what human imagination can conceive. All thanks and praise and glory be unto Him!
Thank you ever so much, dear brother in Christ, and others who find this thread as thought-provoking as I do, for your splendid contributions to this discussion!
Well said, betty boop.
[26] And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. [27] And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.
Prehistoric tooth reveals surprising details about long-lost human 'cousins'
Folks, I don't know where information like this fits into our discussion of Adam and Eve. But, I do know that it would be dishonest of us (and dishonoring of God and his Creation) to ignore it in favor of saying that our particular interpretation of Genesis makes such evidence in the Creation record a lie.
When the evidence God left of his Creation and our interpretations of Scripture clash, it is we who are under the burden of examining our interpretations of Scripture -- AND of the scientific record -- to resolve the disparity.
Or, are some of us ready to call God a liar, because he left such evidence for us to find?
Dr. Kent Hovind Endorses Hillary Clinton for President
You Tube | Nov 17, 2015
Posted on 11/18/2015 8:29:59 AM PST by US Navy Vet
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3361983/posts
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