Posted on 07/05/2005 7:20:18 PM PDT by curiosity
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That pretty well sums up my view on the matter...
Mine too.
Placemarker Bump
Most articles I've read on the subject are by Catholcis of mainline protestants, so this is a bit different.
BB, You may find this one to be of interest. (See my #1...)
The first rule of trying to convince someone of your point of view is not to insult them.
But the natural world does contain a reliable record of past history. It's called the Bible. Ignore it and there will be an unlimited amount of guesses as to history of mankind.
Thank you both so much for the pings!
Jeepers, TXinMA, what do you think Alamo-Girl has been doing around here all this while??? (See bolds for the main point here.)
Forgive me for saying it, but it seems to me that the folks that mainly have it "all wrong" are the very folks who see things through a strict doctrinal point of view -- and it doesn't matter really what the particular "doctrinal filter," might happen to be -- whether neo-Darwinist, Marxist, or an explicitly Christian exegetical perspective.
Any doctrine is a "reduction of reality." It wants to substitute its "certainty-giving" mission for the messy problems of human day-to-day contingent and finite existence, in which all too often "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray."
Humans don't like to be compared with mice. That's where mighty Doctrine steps in to "show our superiority" to the rest of the natural world.
All the same, we are still "part and parcel" of the natural world. Maybe the brightest, most creative part; BUT PART NONETHELESS.
God Himself invites us to live with Him in communion, and also in the wider community of our neighborly human existence: Love God, then Neighbor.
Instead, so often these days it seems we prefer to propound doctrines and theories with which we may beat each other endlessly over the head, so hopefully to secure (at the end of an interminable day) our own "certainties" in life by "the blood of our neighbor," which apparently allows us to promulgate our own existence in a state of unbelief that can serve only death in the long run....
That is to say, the human race in our contemporary world seems to have achieved a state in which human reason depends upon God for exactly nothing. Which to me personally makes absolutely no sense at all. Truth must rest on something that is not itself in order to be Truth in the first place.... That is, truth is rational -- and therefore truth depends on its correspondence to a ratio not of its own making.
At first blush, it hardly seems reasonable that our Lord would condescend to sacrifice Himself for people who imagine themselves to be happy citizens of such an "alternative reality." But then again, maybe that is precisely why Jesus' sacrifice had to be proferred and accepted in the first place.
God knows the details. I do not. All I know is that the Kingdom of God is the work of love and light and grace, all holy. We humans are all invited to participate in its construction...by means of our personal daily acts, choices, and decisions....
Well, FWIW dear TXinMA. Thank you so much for the ping!
p.s.: BTW, where in MA be you???
Jeepers, TXinMA, what do you think Alamo-Girl has been doing around here all this while??? (See bolds for the main point here.)
Forgive me for saying it, but it seems to me that the folks that mainly have it "all wrong" are the very folks who see things through a strict doctrinal point of view -- and it doesn't matter really what the particular "doctrinal filter," might happen to be -- whether neo-Darwinist, Marxist, or an explicitly Christian exegetical perspective.
Any doctrine is a "reduction of reality." It wants to substitute its "certainty-giving" mission for the messy problems of human day-to-day contingent and finite existence, in which all too often "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray."
Humans don't like to be compared with mice. That's where mighty Doctrine steps in to "show our superiority" to the rest of the natural world.
All the same, we are still "part and parcel" of the natural world. Maybe the brightest, most creative part; BUT PART NONETHELESS.
God Himself invites us to live with Him in communion, and also in the wider community of our neighborly human existence: Love God, then Neighbor.
Instead, so often these days it seems we prefer to propound doctrines and theories with which we may beat each other endlessly over the head, so hopefully to secure (at the end of an interminable day) our own "certainties" in life by "the blood of our neighbor," which apparently allows us to promulgate our own existence in a state of unbelief that can serve only death in the long run....
That is to say, the human race in our contemporary world seems to have achieved a state in which human reason depends upon God for exactly nothing. Which to me personally makes absolutely no sense at all. Truth must rest on something that is not itself in order to be Truth in the first place.... That is, truth is rational -- and therefore truth depends on its correspondence to a ratio not of its own making.
At first blush, it hardly seems reasonable that our Lord would condescend to sacrifice Himself for people who imagine themselves to be happy citizens of such an "alternative reality." But then again, maybe that is precisely why Jesus' sacrifice had to be proferred and accepted in the first place.
God knows the details. I do not. All I know is that the Kingdom of God is the work of love and light and grace, all holy. We humans are all invited to participate in its construction...by means of our personal daily acts, choices, and decisions....
Well, FWIW dear TXinMA. Thank you so much for the ping!
p.s.: BTW, where in MA be you???
Yeeps!!!! to all. sorry for the pesky redundacy. Itchy trigger finger and all that....
Instead, so often these days it seems we prefer to propound doctrines and theories with which we may beat each other endlessly over the head, so hopefully to secure (at the end of an interminable day) our own "certainties" in life by "the blood of our neighbor," which apparently allows us to promulgate our own existence in a state of unbelief that can serve only death in the long run....
The most salient of which is that the Jewish creation narrative answers a question which Nordic legend could not formulate and which contemporary atheist cosmology cannot resolve: where does matter come from?
Leftist cartoonists rarely know what they're talking about. As a FReeper, you should know better.
Thanks for calling my attention to this article. We've had this discussion before, this piece pretty accurately reflects my understanding of creation and our place in it.
I don’t see creation as limited to a Big Bang at some point remote in time, but rather I understand Creation as continuous and on-going. I don’t see God as a clockmaker who set gears in motion eons ago, and then went into hibernation only to arouse himself on the final day. In the Genesis description of creation, where the world is created in six days, whether you accept those as literal earth/solar days or as epochs or steps, there is nothing that should make us imagine that the process has ended. Granted, God rested on the seventh day, as should we, but the presumption in our case is that on the eighth we’ll be right back at our task come Monday morning. The work never stops, and I believe its apparent to anyone paying attention that Creation is not an event, but continuous.
This is not clearly so when we view the physical universe, which to me looks like a colossal debris field, but it is certainly so when we view “life”.
If you believe that God created life one week long ago, and then went away, it might be disturbing to find evidence that it has not stayed put, that it keeps changing, that old species die out and others spring to life, but I don’t see it that way. The hallmark of a very good design would be the ability for that design to adapt as circumstances change. We see that has happened, there is almost no argument that species adapt and develop unique characteristics according to their environment. The only question is the “how”.
Our Creationist friends, and maybe our Evolutionist friends as well, seem to believe that if a physical mechanism could be shown by which an animal developed some unique ability or changed over time, if a process could be shown by which its code was modified and one species emerged from another, that somehow God has been dismissed from the picture. If you really believe that, then you can understand why the argument gets so heated, with God’s fate resting in our hands, some of us trying to expose him for a myth, and others struggling mightily to save him from this humiliation at the hands of the Unbeliever.
But if a design has the ability to adapt to local circumstance, that’s just good design.
As for man himself, we are told that we are made in the image of God, which to me means that we share in his Essence. God is a Creator God, and we are agents of Creation. This right away suggests a rather messy approach to creation. We don’t have a central design office imposing its plans from eons away, we have a central design office laying out a few principles, and billions and billions of little Agents of Creation taking it from there, winging it, sometimes colliding into one another and stepping on one another’s toes. It looks chaotic and it is.
But still, the project moves forward because we can’t help ourselves, really, this is how we are. Give the dimmest among us the most mundane of tasks, and we’ll find a better way to do it, we’ll paint it, decorate it, we’ll make a game of it. And then we’ll find a way to make it unnecessary, and so on we go to the next task, where we do it all again. And so over time we build our world, we build our families, our businesses, our homes, write our music, launch our toys into orbit around distant planets, and start the process of leveraging ourselves off this planet and onto the next.
We work and build and love and then at some point we falter and hand off our work to someone else. Its his turn.
God’s work of creation did not end after the first few paragraphs of Genesis, my gosh, look around us, we’re in the middle of a construction site, the construction noise is deafening. We’ve just learned to take it all for granted and hardly notice it. For some reason we’ve been taught to look for God in the pristine and the perfect, and we don’t realize that the chaos and toil and turmoil that surrounds us is God’s element. Its our element, too.
When you consider that Genesis was given by the Creator to mankind right at the dawn of written language, it is amazing that He was able to capture all that IS in so succinct and precise a manner. And when you realize that He made the creation of the vast universe that Hubble reveals comprehensible to primitive, nomadic peoples -- whose concept of that universe reached no farther than their unaided eyes could see -- His authorship in Genesis is truly awesome!
My problem is with today's believers who (as you point out) insist in freezing their doctrine at that same primitive level -- and who expend (waste) vast resources on trying go foist their rudimentary conceptual limitations on a world that has managed to look outward to the Hubble limit, and inward to the infinitesimals of subatomic structure.
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BTW, check my FRProfile to see where I'm not in MA... '-)
Maybe one of these days, I can figure out how to update my screen name (as shown in my profile) -- without losing the links to all of "TXnMA's" FR life up to this point...
Excellent post. I particularly like the last part:
For some reason we’ve been taught to look for God in the pristine and the perfect, and we don’t realize that the chaos and toil and turmoil that surrounds us is God’s element. Its our element, too.
A lot of Christians have a problem with Darwinian evolution becuase it is driven, in part, by a random phenomenon: genetic mutation. Of course, there is also the non-random aspect of natural selection, but there is a random element to it nevertheless. This random element is a submbling block, for many people have a problem with the idea that God can work through chance. If we're the product of chance, they reason, even if only in part, then we cannot be the product of Divine Will.
Yet anyone who has a problem with God working through chance also has a problem with the doctrine of Divine Providence. To quote the Catholic Encylopedia, God "so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be realized." Yet we know many events in the universe are random, irrespective of evolution. A simlar paradox exists with the doctrine that we have free will and yet are saved by grace.
If you can accept the latter doctrines, than you should have no problem accepting the notion that God worked through chance to create man in his own image.
Kenneth Miller does an excellent job tying together the concepts of chance and free will in his book on religion and darwinism.
It just occurred to me from this analysis that evolution would be most difficult for Calvinists to accept, since they deny free will. Perhaps Calvinist influence on American Protestantism has something to do with such strong resistence by American Christians to evolution?
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