Revelation 4:11Intelligent Design
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Posted on 09/20/2005 5:35:52 PM PDT by curiosity
Most adult Sunday school classes don't raise eyebrows, but my church is planning to hold one that's sure to. It's called "Evolution for Christians," and it will be taught this winter by David Bush, a member of the church I lead, Fairfax Presbyterian. David is an articulate government retiree who has been interested in this topic for nearly two decades, teaches a class on theories of the origins of life every five years or so, and once again has really done his homework. His view is that science and religion answer two different sets of questions about creation, with science answering the "how" questions, and religion answering the "why" ones. "With a little bit of wisdom and tolerance on each side," he tells me, "I think they can complement rather than contradict each other."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
You are most welcome. :-)
It took me some time to write.
Excellent post. I'm going to reformat your list of links a bit and then give them back to you. They're well worth preserving.
I don't think I used the word, "exactly."
At any rate, my point remains the same as it has always been. From the beginning, man has known what a "day" is. It is the period from one sunrise to the next. It's the sum of a waking period and a sleeping period, the full cycle. It's how he counts his days, how he measures the passage of time.
I must be missing your point, because I fail to understand how or why that can or must be argued. It's a given. The Bible was written by God through man for man. There is no valid reason to decide a day is anything other than a day.
Like the rest of creation, we exist to demonstrate His glory.
So, it's hard to imagine a Bible-believing Christian could take a position of insisting are NOT special in His creation, given that (1) earth and man are the focus of His creation account, (2) we are made in His image, (3) He breathed life into us, and (4) He gave His only begotten Son for us.
IOW, God sent his Son here because mankind sinned -- not because this planet or its inhabitants were created any more "special to Him" than any of the rest of his mighty works.
And, He could have simply allowed us to spend eternity apart from Him in hell. But, that's not who He is.
Being saved by God's grace most certainly does [make me "special".]
I'm glad you finally came around to agreeing with what I've been saying all along.
And do you believe that green plants and animals came first, before God made man.
Or do you think that God made Adam from the clay, before he made the green plants and animals.
The Bible is full of contradictions.
That doesn't mean it wasn't inspired by God.
It does mean that it is not a statute book that you can read according to you own lights and be certain of.
Are works necessary to faith?
Paul says no.
James says yes.
Which is it?
Is God confused?
Or is the truth that the books of the Bible were written by men, inspired by God, yes, but writing according to their own understanding of the inspiration?
That is actually the case, that is why the Bible conflicts in its different parts.
And that is why God took care, when he walked the earth, to not leave a Bible Dispensary nor one written word for posterity. He left a Church, not a Bible.
He inspired the Bible, but he left a Church.
The Bible COULD mean a lot of things.
It DOES mean what God thinks it means.
And God left a Church to tell us what he thinks, into which He invested the Holy Spirit to guide us infallibly.
The Bible interpreted without the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in the Church can lead men far astray, because the Devil can quote Scripture to serve his purposes.
Search the Scriptures, please, and cite for us where it says to rely upon the Bible, or tells us what the books of the Bible are supposed to be, as opposed to the Church which Jesus created?
That quote from Thessalonians would be the Bible directly saying "God lied" (sending delusions is lying).
Elsewhere, someone quoted a different passage of the Bible, from Hebrews, by the same author even (probably) that says "God cannot lie".
So apparently, according to the Bible, God cannot lie, except when He does.
Revelation 4:11Intelligent Design
See my profile for info
Perhaps you have an excuse in three of the first four links in that post being to T.O. If that's it, your desire for evidence shows up as pretty thin.
There are also many other sources cited directly in that linked post by Ichneumon. You do not even bother to wave them away in irritation, perhaps not having even bothered to notice that the post did not end with the 29+ Evidences link.
So we have you in post 101 demanding to know what the evidence for evolution is. That was just posturing. You were hoping, hoping, hoping you wouldn't get a response.
Is that harsh? Let us look at your rebuttal to Ichneumon's post in it's entirety:
Like I said, I've already been to talkorigins and have a slight problem with some of their "science".
How does you having a slight problem make anything go away, especially the volume of evidence you were given? Apparently, you wish to be excused. OK, you may leave the room, but don't let me catch you making a chest-thumping show of demanding evidence on the next thread.
There's 150 years worth of evidence. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -- Theodosius Dobzhansky.
That site loaded the first time I rolled onto it but never worked again after that. It might be some interaction with my PC-cillin AV and firewall.
Views like yours are always interesting to read.
Thanks for posting.
I disagree. While everyone jumps at the chance for the clever "sound-bite" zinger, one side here presents factual evidence, lots of it, and reasonable inference from same. The evos rather scrupulously avoid deliberate falsehood and fallacy. The creo posts are a riotous festival of these attributes, complete with lots and lots of brazen dancing about the exposure of same by the evo side.
Evolution is easy for Fundamental Baptists as well.
God created everything in seven days and evolution is wrong.
If only I could get my Sunday School class to make national news. I guess the topic of God's almighty grace capable of life transformation for anyone just doesn't have the same appeal as "don't upset the scientists because they're smarter than you".
Indeed, I would go much farther than you did in discussing the relationship between faith and science.
I observe that modern science and the scientific method began in the West, specifically in the Catholic West (Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Copernicus, etc.). The mindset that would allow men to look at nature, which is very hard to understand and comes with no road map, and yet be CERTAIN that, somewhere in it, was a rational design and plan, which only needed to be looked for to be found: THAT is a very monotheistic thought. It requires a deep and abiding faith that God is THERE to have the patience to spend 20 years looking for his handiwork and being frustrated at every step along the way. When Galileo and Kepler and their contemporaries started their work, there was of course no great towering edifice of empirical science to build upon. There were some complicated geometric models of the motions of the planets, which didn't work very well. There were some magical concepts in alchemy. There was a lot of astrology. But all of that was common to the whole world.
It was a peculiarity of the Christian religion of the West, organizated and disciplined at the time in the universities of the Catholic Church, that men who were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN there was God, set about looking to find what they KNEW simply HAD to be there, if they only looked. Knowing even where to START looking took a century. Bacon had the idea of somehow testing things to look for rules, and looking at a lot of nature, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what to test.
Interestingly, the same thought occurred elsewhere in the world, of course. It was most succinctly put in the writings of a Chinese scholar and philosopher whose name I do not remember, but whose thoughts on the subject I do. He considered that there were two things he might study: the ways of nature, or the laws and ways of man (under the Confucian code and principles). The latter having already been done, he decided to attempt the former. So he sat for a whole week staring at bamboo and other plants, observing what he could observe, trying to learn from nature. He concluded that nature was simply TOO HARD and TOO CONFUSING for there to be any profit spent in learning it. That a whole lifetime could be spent trying to figure out even bamboo, without learning much. Since it was TOO HARD TO DO, he said that the focus should properly be upon man and his ways and the Confucian law.
And that rather beautifully summarizes the problem.
A related inspiration, of a different order, occurred in Ireland sometime in the pagan era before Christianity set foot there. There was a king at Tara named Cormac Mac Art, a pagan king (of course). He was very intensely interested in nature and would often go "to the green" to think and contemplate. One day, after having spent a long time pondering what he saw, he declared that he would no longer worship the rocks and the trees, the sun and the stars, but would only worship him who had made the rocks and trees and sun and stars: he alone would he worship. Thus spontaneous monotheism came to Ireland long before the Christians, and although it did not become the dominant philosophy, it was nevertheless a strong thread of higher Irish thought (given the illustrious originator of the idea, in the great King Cormac), and was probably a reason that the Irish were "ready" for Christianity when it came, and the island was such a walkover for the few missionaries who ventured there. The Irish had intuited on their own the biggest feature of the Christian religion: that one God made and ruled everything: Christians such as Patrick served to give that God a NAME and tell the Irish about Him, but they already knew Him. And they got that knowledge by looking at nature.
The Chippewa and Iroquois and certain of the other woodland Indians had similarly intuited the One God who made nature, Gitchee Manitou, the Great Spirit, which likewise explains why those fierce and warlike peoples were such surprising pushovers for conversion by the French missionaries. They already knew, from living in and looking intently at nature, that there was one unitary force, one God, behind it all. The Christians gave that God a name and a face and a history, but the fundamental inkling was taught by Nature itself to those pagan people. Which is to say that God whispered to them from the Nature He made, and in spite of being ignorant of the happenings in the other part of the world, they were nevertheless tied to God through His handiwork.
Japheth is blessed.
What happened in Western Europe in those Catholic universities was that men who, too, knew that there was One God and One Law, figured out Bacon's dilemma. They picked up things and started to study them. They already knew (or at any rate believed they knew) the ultimate answer. And because they were SURE there was God, they were SURE that everything would be found to be orderly and linked, by a unitary Law of God. It was that certitude that allowed them to keep driving forward, through all the barren years, and to not simply give up as the great Chinese philosopher did. He had the idea, but it was TOO HARD, and he did not have the CERTITUDE that ONE MIND really lived somewhere, who had made him and the bamboo and the sun and stars, and therefore it was all CERTAINLY linked by one expressed and expressible law...if it could only be found out.
The Westerners knew it because of their religion. And it was their faith that allowed them to persist until they found it, or the first strong evidences of it at any rate.
Anyone who has studied science or mathematics has experienced that "aha" moment, when suddenly things align and a terribly difficult and confusing issue becomes very clear. It feels like divine inspiration, as if all of the jumble of facts are there, but God reaches in and throws the switch that allows for the illumination. And that is, of course, precisely what does happen. But to GET all those facts in there to BE illuminated at all, takes a long, long time and lots of hard, hard work. If they weren't certain of what they would find at the end - that nature was all ordered by a law which came from the mind of God - the fathers of science in the Catholic West never would have been able to persist to the end, and to get enough astonishing results to press farther. Nobody else ever did, in all of the other ages of the world. The Greeks came closest, but stopped with general principles. That was enough for them. They were not interested in studying the guts, only in seeing enough order in geometry to prove the order of things. The Arabs preserved the Greek knowledge, and extended it a little, but they did not seek to study nature as a sort of physical bible, indicating the masterful hand and mind of the Creator. The Catholics did that. And the daughter churches that spun off from the Catholics...some of them (Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians) persisted in that studies.
Not all did, of course, which is why Christianity is today divided between those who think science merely proves the truth of their religion (Catholics, High Church Anglicans, some Lutherans), and those who think that science is necessarily at war with their religion.
Of course science is no longer the exclusive province of very devout Catholic monks and brothers. The Keplers, Copernicuses, Mendel's and Galileo's were needed to persist in their searches until they got the first tantalizing proofs of God's math in nature. The Descartes and Paschals had to give the math to undergird it. But today there is a big enough edifice that one can enter scientific study and simply believe in the formulae and the tests without remembering that the reason they were able to be developed in the first place at all was as a devotional exercise of very Catholic men who were utterly certain that, if they looked long and hard enough, they would see God's inflexible logic holding up all of nature just as it holds up the law of mankind.
I think that if those early Catholic scientists had not already known the answer, and were just looking for the evidence to corroborate it...in other words if they had been more SCIENTIFIC in the modern sense, and less RELIGIOUS...they never would have had the persistence to spend decades of their lives looking for something that no casual observation of nature gives any strong reason to believe would be there at all. They had already made up their minds, and simply persisted until they found facts to prove it. And that is where science came from.
Today, of course, to some Science (capital "S") is an alternative religion, the antidote to religious superstition and "taking things on faith". It is useful, as an historical exercise, to remember that the greatest intellectual contribution of the Roman Catholic Church to the world is modern science.
But how do Fundamental Baptists then deal with dinosaurs?
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