Posted on 12/25/2005 11:16:00 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Ford?
My understanding is that Ford is now placing ads in magazines which are designed for homosexuals. {And thus comes an end to my 20 year practice of buying naught save Mustangs.]
The important difference is that only the IDers claim that their belief is scientific. Providential theism, like ID, *may* be true, and is a perfectly legitimate belief, but it doesn't try to worm its way out of religion/philosophy classes and into the science classroom. ID is trying to get into the science classroom before being accepted by science in general. I cannot think of another area of scientific study where the *first* publication was a school textbook.
betty boop, as you say, you and I are polar opposites of "new agers" - we are "old agers".
Jeepers, I laughed so hard that I now must take a break from the keyboard. Thank you so much for the ping - I'll see you around this evening perhaps.
Darn. I can't find the reference just now. I think it was a letter. But IIRC even the evangelical thinker C.S. Lewis once remarked, in the context of the the genocides that God orders against the Canaanites, that if Biblical inerrancy conflicts with the Goodness of God that possibly it's the former doctrine that must give way.
IOW even with God in the universe Man must often judge for himself what is right and wrong, and in the extreme case might even judge God himself, or rather God's purported word. If you simply say that whatever God commands is morally good without question, then you've not only created a system of "might makes right," but (worse) you've projected it into heaven where it is beyond criticism or review. If you hold what God commands is good because he commands it (rather than that He commands it because it is good) then you're obligated to obey a God who says, "Thou shalt rape thrice daily."
Besides, I don't remember the Bible well enough to turn to a passage off the cuff, but it seems to me that, even in direct dialogs, God often presumes that Man does have the ability to independently judge right and wrong. That He says things like, "you know yourself...," and sometimes even invites Man to judge his own actions.
20 Then the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. [e] 23 Then Abraham approached him and said: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare [f] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge [g Genesis 18:25 Or Ruler ] of all the earth do right?"
26 The LORD said, "If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake."
27 Then Abraham spoke up again: "Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, 28 what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?"
"If I find forty-five there," he said, "I will not destroy it."29 Once again he spoke to him, "What if only forty are found there?"
He said, "For the sake of forty, I will not do it."30 Then he said, "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?"
He answered, "I will not do it if I find thirty there."31 Abraham said, "Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?"
He said, "For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it."32 Then he said, "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?"
He answered, "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."
Exodus:
32:11 And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?
[snip]
32:14 And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.
For all I know, God pulled a Ron Popeil - He Set it and Forgot it and let things evolve. There, problem solved. Now let's fix social security, get a coherent energy program, adopt tort reform, and solve immigration and health insurance issues in 'o6.
And that's the KJVersion, so you know it's totally accurate! ;-)
Exactly. So they cling in palpable desperation to the inerrancy of scripture, afraid that if one chink is allowed the dam will burst asunder. There can be no balancing of inerrancy against other worthy considerations.
Or rather there can be, and certainly is, such balancing, but it can never be admitted to occur. It has to be resisted specifically in the most visibly prominent instances (e.g. Genesis) even though it is qualified away or ignored in many other cases (e.g. Biblical claims that God creates individuals as well as species, ignored prohibitions against women wearing jewelry or fancy hats in church, Paul claiming the gospel has gone out to the whole earth circa 100 A.D., suffering witches to live, etc, etc, etc).
By the same token, just as creationists are afraid that postmoderinists are right, they are also afraid that scientific atheists are right. They share with this crowd the central common presupposition that, if a naive "common sense" literalist understanding of biblical cosmic history is incorrect, one must immediately (or at least logically should) plummet down a slippery slope to atheism.
In both cases creationists share a radical either-or-ism, and accept far too may presuppositions foisted by, those who should be and are their intellectual enemies. It's rather odd really, if you get to thinking about it. It seems almost impossible to even BE a creationist unless you've uncritically (or tacitly) accepted a great many assumptions that historically come straight from modern anti-theistic or secularist sources!
However, we can not observe, or find evidence of, a HOX gene mutation (the evolutionist's alleged biological mechanism) causing the lobe-finned fish's fins to turn into arms with hands and digits.
And, moreover, HOX gene mutations have not been known to be advantageous.
I have never seen the theory of gravity, and/or proponents thereof, used in an attack against God, the Bible, Jesus, and Christians/Christianity...but I have certainly seen the theory of evolution and the so-called related "science" used in attacks against the forementioned.
Science is not even supposed to operate in the realm of the supernatural. So when one uses it to levy an attack against Christian beliefs, they are operating outside of scientific boundaries...That is where the "cultural and moral threat " comes from (not actual science, itself).
Your conclusion is not being reached within the referenced text or as a result of the referenced text.
And God did destroy Sodom and Gomorrah...The "exercise" was for the benefit of Abraham, not all-knowing and supremely righteous God (the Perfect Judge).
In Exodous 32, Moses had all the people that were not "on God's side" killed (verse 27). Additionally, the Lord plagued the people of Israel as punishment (verse 35). Furthermore, the majority of Israelites died wandering in the desert and did not get to enter the promised land as a result of their sin and associated punishment.
Man's knowledge of good and evil began at Adam and Eve's sin of eating from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". (Genesis 3:22)
There are many examples of man's knowledge of/ability to know good and evil after Genesis 3 and before the Ten Commandments in Exodous (Cain is one example - Genesis 4:7).
The entire conversation with Moses is "set up" with a hebrew condition in verse 10 when God says, "Now, therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. And I will make of you a great nation."
Moses did not leave God alone and instead interceded on Israel's behalf. The condition by which God would have carried out His threat was not met (which He knew in advance of the condition being made to Moses). As a result God "nachum" (relented, repented).
This dialogue was for the benefit of Moses, not God. Moses did not offer any new information or knowledge that God was unaware of.
I am a creationist and I do not accept assumptions from modern anti-theistic or secularist sources.
That betty boop and I share common interests in such things is both exciting and illuminating - but the fact that she and I share the mind of Christ is profound and as "old-agey" as any fact can be.
Science education.
You are against teaching ID but for teaching "providential theism" in the classroom?
Not in the science classroom, no. PD is a theological idea, not a scientific one. It should be taught in a philosophy class or, better yet, at Sunday school or at home by the parents.
Either way there is a Designer, is there not?
Yes, but ID makes pseudo-scientific, empirically false claims about Him, whereas PD does not and is in fact perfectly compatible with modern science.
I certainly never see you PD'ers scolding dogmatic atheist Darwinists.
You haven't been looking, then. Kennenth Miller, the author of this article, has done it repeatedly. You should read his book.
Certainly this is not my view, Stultis. I think in general postmodernists and scientific atheists have got themselves holed up in a second reality. Yet still (and quite unavoidably) they live in First Reality -- which apparently they find so repugnant that they have to flee into dream worlds of their own making.
If there were no objective Truth, the universe itself could not hold together.
I think part of the problem with such ideologues-in-denial is that they think faith and reason are wholly mutually exclusive. On this view, faith is superstition and reason "the rational mind": Nothing noteworthy in human intellectual history took place prior to the Enlightenment.
But even to speak of "the rational mind," one requires a ratio, a standard or measure that the mind itself does not create. If there were no "objective" Truth, reason itself would have nothing to know and nothing to do. And science would be a pointless exercise.
The postmodernists like to pretend not to notice such inconvenient facts, though deep-down I suspect they are acutely aware of them. Personally, I think most such folks are delusional anyway, in some degree. The question then becomes: Are the sane supposed to just stand quietly by and let the inmates run the asylum?
LoL... That had to hurt... even second world'ers..
Reminds me of the old college sophomoreism...
"You have your truth, I have mine"... thereby making truth mere "opinion"..
2) The separation of life into various compartments (such as "science" and "religion") is an extremely modern, recent, and false philosophy. Until relatively recently in human history "religion" (whichever one it was) was woven into the warp and woof of everyday life. In Judaism, for example (and Judaism is, after all, the first and oldest religion) there is no such thing as "religion." Instead the absolute truth of Torah permeates and governs every aspect of life.
3) Do you honestly believe that when Mashiach HaMelekh comes and the Holy Temple is rebuilt that these false dichotomies and philosophies will still be around?
You and I don't even live in the same "universe." Do you understand that HaShem wrote the Torah before the wold was created and that it is the "logos" that chr*stianity identifies with its Nazarene prophet? Do you claim that it is a compendium of mythology whose sole purpose is to teach ethics and abstract "religious" philosophy? Why are you and I even bothering to have a conversation?
Perhaps you should peruse my web site. Perhaps there the true "primitiveness" of my philsophy will come through and horrify you.
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