Posted on 03/20/2009 7:59:40 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
In a recent book review, Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, admitted that the secular worldview of macroevolution (the development of complex life from “simpler” forms) is at odds with Christian faith...
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
Pure crap; just like the “all evolutionists are atheists” argument. You are free in this country to hold any religious tenants you desire; or not. I can say that in my heart God has spoken to me and revealed to me that evolution is his plan for the universe and that the writings of man through the centuries are man’s interpretations of nature, God and man’s relationship to it presented as His will.
No. Your starting assumption is wrong.
My position is that we (confined to this ball of mud and its ever-lengthening rotational timeframe) have no way of determining the length of time that our eternal, omnipresent, (everywhere in His vast creation simultaneously), omniscient, omnipotent Creator God (who may even be completely outside our universe's timeframe) decides to call a "day".
Further, any claim by us to insist that His "day" must be of some specified duration that comports with our personal (mis)interpretation of a few sentences in Genesis is risky -- if not, even, damnably, sinfully hubristic.
"Ya picks your time and ya takes yer risk" -- if you insist on dictating I AM's timescale...
You seem to be confusing faith in religious doctrine written by man with faith in God. The muslims have faith in their doctrine of hate and destruction rather than pure faith in God. Doctrine does not validate faith in God, faith alone establishes our bond with God.
Not a lie but a collection of interpretations of historical events.
Why does one have to believe the literal interpretation of nature and historical events brought down from the ancients rather than in the lessons for living and life presented in the teachings of both the bible and Christ? The historical events related in the bible are sometimes true to one degree or another but they are base context upon which the life lessons (point of the story) are presented. Belief and faith in doctrine dicatated by man is not belief in God.
The Hebrew language itself, obviously chosen by God for this revelation, is special. It is mechanical, poetic, mathematical and allows for layers of meaning.
It seems to me we are free to speculate; but the fact is, we can never really know about such matters for a certainty at all.
I gather the view that "God created both physical and spiritual reality within Himself (i.e. neither apart nor by withdrawing)" basically sums up the position of panentheism. Interesting, but not my cup of tea!
I also very strongly agree with MHGinTN's beautiful insight that physical reality is subordinated to spiritual reality.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your insightful, beautiful essay/post!
Indeed, TXnMA; the "observer problem" has ever been with us! But man is not the measure, never the measure....
I'm looking forward to seeing your "illustrated webpage" when it's done!!!
I thought these lines were well worth repeating, dear brother in Christ! I share your view in this matter.
Thank you so very much for your excellent essay/post!
bkmk
Truth is in God's Name, I AM.
I want a party made up of fiscal conservatives and people who believe in limited government. Recent history shows that when those principles are abandoned in favor of more “social conservatism” Republicans lose. Or are you not aware that Democrats control both houses of congress and the presidency?
Social conservatives by themselves do not bring enough votes to the table to win elections. So if you want to win elections, you need to find a way to reformulate your social agenda in terms of the principle that win elections.
I have offered a few suggestions on how to do that, but people seem more interested in losing “pure” than winning and getting at least some of the things they want.
True... “the Spirit” can say more in spirit than can be said with any mixture of words, in any dialect.. Words can be nebulous in spirit and intent.. Words are colored by “observation”..
A picture/allegory/metaphor is worth 10,000 words.. literal words are tempered by quales.. and observation.. A picture is less inclined to that..
The observer problem is the fly in the soup..
The maggot in the grammar..
“More like a boundary!” Now there’s an interesting idea! I wonder if that was the sort of thing Isaac Newton had in mind with his conception of the sensorium Dei; e.g., a boundary [firmament?] demarcating and separating heaven and earth while at the same time constituting the means of their abiding relations, a sort of “membrane” between the spiritual and the physical, enabling the relations that Newton summed up as “the Lord of Life with His creatures” to manifest in creation.
The thought has struck me that Newton was more a Jewish thinker than a Christian one. But then, Leibniz suspected he was a pantheist. Yet other than our Lord and Newton himself, who really can say?
You wrote: “That understanding of space and time (General Relativity, warped space/time) certainly was not in currency at the time the book of Genesis was scribed — which goes to the true authorship of the Torah, i.e. Scriptures are not diminished by the passing of time, man’s advances in science and math.”
The authoritative early Jewish thinkers or “mystics” also made extraordinary breakthroughs in the understanding of time that arguably modern science utterly depends on for its own methodology. Certainly they made extraordinary "improvements" compared to the classical Greek conception of time as the “eternity of changeless existence,” wherein “eternity” is opposed to “time and change.” The Israelite understanding of time and eternity is that “eternity [is] unlimited duration throughout time,” as Wolfhart Pannenberg, professor of systematic theology at Munich, has observed. In this model, eternity comprehends all “time and change” in itself.
Some of us are wondering about issues of time and eternity — asking questions such as, “How long was a “Day” in Genesis?” “How does the eternal LORD God ‘experience’ or ‘think about’ time? “Did He create in time, or out of time?” Etc., etc. Indeed, “What is time?” and “What is eternity?”
Regarding such questions, today I found some lovely passages in Pannenberg’s Toward a Theology of Nature (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993, p. 100f) that look like highly valuable musings to share:
Through the modern insight that time and matter belong together, the old problem, already discussed profoundly by Augustine, has become more transparent: the problem of how the temporal beginning of the world is related to time itself. Because of the connections of time and matter, the conclusion becomes invalid that the beginning of the world in time would have been preceded already by a time. Then it becomes meaningless to speak of a world before the origin of the world. However, this means that the act of creation itself also must not be conceived as a temporal act. This suggests to theology a new formulation of the idea of creation: the divine act does not occur in time — rather, it constitutes an eternal act, contemporaneous with all time, that is, with the entire world process. Yet this world process itself has a temporal beginning, because it takes place in time.Seems like really great “grist for the mill” of musing to me!In this sentence, I assert that eternity is contemporaneous with all time. With that, the concept of eternity itself is described by statements of time. With a musical parable one might speak of eternity as the sounding together of all time in a sole present. Elsewhere I have developed this concept of eternity from the human experience of time, from the relativity of the distinction of past, present, and future corresponding to the relativity of the directions in space. In view of the relativity of the modes of time to the aspect of the human being experiencing time, this resulted in the assumption that all time, if it could be, so to speak, surveyed from a “place” outside the course of time, would have to appear as contemporaneous. This assumption is confirmed by a unique phenomenon of the human experience of time through the experience of an “expanded” present in which not only the punctiliar now but everything on which a position may be taken still or already is considered as present. The concept of eternity as the sounding together of all time, achieved in this way, is distinguished from the Greek idea of eternity of changeless existence, formulated on Parmenides and Plato. There the idea of eternity is constituted by the contrast to the world of the senses, to time and change. Understood in the sense of the suggestions above, the concept of eternity comprehends all time and everything temporal in itself — a conception of the relationship of time and eternity that goes back to Augustine and is connected to the Israelite understanding of eternity as unlimited duration throughout time.
The worldview of the theory of relativity also can be understood in the sense of a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence. The four-dimensional continuum of space and time can be represented symbolically — projected on a three-dimensional image — as a cylinder or (under consideration of the progressive expansion of the world) as a cone or sphere. In these images, the entire world process is conceived as a single present. However, it could appear in this manner only from a point of view that would not coincide with any position in the world process.
Eternity so described must not be viewed as the mere sum of that which is scattered in time. Eternity can also be thought of as the production of the content of time which at the same time remains contained in it — in eternity. On this basis the creation of the world would be identical with the creation of the total process of time, and this act could be described as the moment of the independent confronting of the finite moments of the space-time continuum. Thus, creation can be conceived, on the ground of the theory of relativity, as an eternal act that comprises the total process of finite reality, while that which is created, whose experience happens in time, originates and passes away temporally. [all emphases bold and italic added]
Thank you ever so much for mentioning a recent post I put up. It has “gone to crickets” dearest sister in Christ. I had been hoping to inspire a spirited debate with our evo friends on the merits; but alas, evidently, that was not to be.
Thank you so very much for your ever-kindly support, dearest sister in Christ, and for your glorious essay-post!
They treat it like some kind of gotcha thing. They act like it's a Catch 22 that disproves the creation account.
IWO, you can't answer it to their satisfaction, so the creation account is invalid.
Even if God had explained concepts like genetics and used a Hebrew word for it, how would it be translated? There'd be no equivalent word in virtually all languages for millennia and so no way to translate it. It would be like the word *Selah* that's used in the Psalms. A word that has meaning but no one knows exactly what.
And we couldn't look at it even from this time period and say *Oh, yeah, that should be translated "genes" or "DNA"*.
You can't just grab an unknown word from the past and assign a random meaning to it.
That's a perfect example. The term *General Relativity* would be completely meaningless, as would something like *time dilation*.
But to say a day as is a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day, gets the meaning across plenty clearly and is still true, not allegory or metaphor.
It's an explanation, not a definition.
Indeed, dear brother in Christ!
And so I was hoping that you might be able to help me with a remark from Goethe that I find deeply troubling:
The God to whom a man proves devoutI find the statement troubling because, for all that it may be a valid observation under certain conditions, a philosopher like Feuerbach would seize on it like a dog his bone, to "universalize" it in order to argue that all ideas of God whatsoever are nothing but unlimited human psychological projections of whatever the then-constituted human race finds most worthy and estimable about its own experience. Which, when you boil it all down, "makes man the measure of God."
That is his own soul turned inside out.
You already know I hate that sort of reduction. What I need your help with: In your experience, on what basis, by what criterion, could I prove Feuerbach's theory fundamentally wrong?
LOLOL!!! But this is an open-book test and anybody can join in! :^)
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