Posted on 01/16/2011 4:09:10 PM PST by balch3
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- A Southern Baptist seminary president and evolution opponent has turned sights on "theistic evolution," the idea that evolutionary forces are somehow guided by God. Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote an article in the Winter 2011 issue of the seminary magazine labeling attempts by Christians to accommodate Darwinism "a biblical and theological disaster."
Mohler said being able to find middle ground between a young-earth creationism that believes God created the world in six 24-hour days and naturalism that regards evolution the product of random chance "would resolve a great cultural and intellectual conflict."
The problem, however, is that it is not evolutionary theory that gives way, but rather the Bible and Christian theology.
Mohler said acceptance of evolutionary theory requires reading the first two chapters of Genesis as a literary rendering and not historical fact, but it doesn't end there. It also requires rethinking the claim that sin and death entered the human race through the Fall of Adam. That in turn, Mohler contended, raises questions about New Testament passages like First Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."
"The New Testament clearly establishes the Gospel of Jesus Christ upon the foundation of the Bible's account of creation," Mohler wrote. "If there was no historical Adam and no historical Fall, the Gospel is no longer understood in biblical terms."
Mohler said that after trying to reconcile their reading of Genesis with science, proponents of theistic evolution are now publicly rejecting biblical inerrancy, the doctrine that the Bible is totally free from error.
"We now face the undeniable truth that the most basic and fundamental questions of biblical authority and Gospel integrity are at stake," Mohler concluded. "Are you ready for this debate?"
In a separate article in the same issue, Gregory Wills, professor of church history at Southern Seminary, said attempts to affirm both creation and evolution in the 19th and 20th century produced Christian liberalism, which attracted large numbers of Americans, including the clerical and academic leadership of most denominations.
After establishing the concept that Genesis is true from a religious but not a historical standpoint, Wills said, liberalism went on to apply naturalistic criteria to accounts of miracles and prophecy as well. The result, he says, was a Bible "with little functional authority."
"Liberalism in America began with the rejection of the Bible's creation account," Wills wrote. "It culminated with a broad rejection of the beliefs of historic Christianity. Yet many Christians today wish to repeat the experiment. We should not expect different results."
Mohler, who in the last year became involved in public debate about evolution with the BioLogos Foundation, a conservative evangelical group that promotes integrating faith and science, has long maintained the most natural reading of the Bible is that God created the world in six 24-hour days just a few thousand years ago.
Writing in Time magazine in 2005, Mohler rejected the idea of human "descent."
"Evangelicals must absolutely affirm the special creation of humans in God's image, with no physical evolution from any nonhuman species," he wrote. "Just as important, the Bible clearly teaches that God is involved in every aspect and moment in the life of His creation and the universe. That rules out the image of a kind of divine watchmaker."
A very good reason not to swallow epistemological fantasies hook, line and sinker.
The essence of gnosticism as I’ve always understood it, Kolo, is not that they posited man as a spiritual being, but that they insisted that God would not become an earthly being. Thus, John’s words about God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Also, John’s words about those denying that Jesus (the Christ) has come in the flesh.
Therefore, to suggest that the original human lived in a spiritual realm that we no longer inhabit is to ignore the angel with the flaming sword guarding Eden.
To suggest that a human is both spirit and body is to ignore the entire testimony of the bible, but especially of Romans 7. Such a belief is not gnostic; it is thoroughly Christian.
They work hard everyday to deny the very foundational principle of our nation.
They all hate the American foundational assumption that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights"
They will lie and spin and deny, but in the end they will all come out of the closet to admit they reject that foundational principle just as they reject our Constitution.
I have been watching the left slowly become bolder in this admission for decades, always hedging their bets in case admission of their guilt would not yet be palatable.
The closet leftist revisionists on Free Republic will join them in their coming out of the closet, always painting historic American views on such things as the greatest of evils.
"In the beginning" is a box, and those inside that box cannot think outside of it, unless they free themselves of the confines of the box they are in and realize that if we can assume an eternal deity, we can just as easily assume an eternal universe with eternal "beginnings" repeated eternally.
A presumed eternal deity creating the world presents a paradox precisely, as you said, because that unchanging deity has change. It's an oxymoron. On the other hand, an eternal, recycling, self-contained, pepertuum mobile universe doesn't pose that paradox because cyclical change is its very nature, or essence. The problem to many, however, is that one cannot feel a personal "fellowship" and likeness with the universe as much as with an imaginary personal deity, who "hears" us and "answers" us.
An eternal recycling universe poses a perceptual problem in some. It makes us no different than the leaves on a tree that are recycled every season. This seriously affects our need for purpose and worth, or even a reason to live; it clashes with our narcissistic need to be gods of sorts, and although we have no choice but to admit we lack immortality, we at least like to "know" that we are connected most closely to the "Force" that will make us immortal one day. That's nothing new; it's been around longer than most people realize (see my new tag line).
Subject K: Gave up in denial.How this experiment works:
Subjects are posed a question that spans multiple modes of perception and results are measured by the subject's ability to join the modes of perception into one to give the proper answer.The experiment method is an adaption of the Stroop Test.
yes, the leftists can’t help outing themselves on these threads.
Thanks very much for your reply and rambling with me on potential energy. It’s a particular curiosity for me and I appreciate the company.
“detect with the senses or their extensions” is a term of art in a way. As in “Science only deals with those aspects of reality that can be detected with the senses or their extensions.” This is it’s self-chosen limit in order to maintain its place as the seeker of the area of the most solid knowledge. And, yes, it includes microscopes, telescopes, IR, RF and otherwise, etc. etc. All of these eventually result in something we can detect/read with our senses and extend them in some way.
When we determine somethings attributes, we use some scientific measurement to say it emits radiation, has a reflectance of, a mass of, a hardness of, etc. etc.
My curiosity here was what is the instrument to measure potential energy?
I understand “conscious of the energy I was adding to the potential energy of my backpack” but what if I took a blindfolded, fully equipped scientist somewhere and handed him our example of a snow sample and asked -
“determine its potential energy?”
Perhaps the gravitometer is the key? Or James C. Bennett’s dropping experiment? Would the difference between potential energy of snow on the peak and snow in the valley be detectable in this manner?
No, because that is precisely what Judaism believes. The difference between Gnostcis and Jews is more than just a label. Gnostcis believe that those souls living in the flesh are souls that have sinned and were cast out of their natural spiritual existence and placed into a fleshy "dungeon." Judaism doesn't believe that at all. Judaism completely rejects the idea of the original sin having anything to do with any change in human nature.
If Gnostics were right, then man and angels were both noëtic spirits. The way Alamo Girl describes Adam, originally existing only as a spirit, makes him an angel who was given dominion over earth.
I suppose one could find biblical support for this, given that Adam is referred to as the "son of God," a title also given to angels, but it doesn't epxlain why were Adam and Eve (a female angel???) given bodily "prisons" for their sin, and the [other] fallen angels were not.
I've discussed this before with A-G. That's not what she believes, unless I'm seriously mistaken. She believed Adam had feet in both those worlds, a with their existence being a much larger footprint on the spiritual side than now. Which is quite reasonable. God walked in the garden.
I’m sorry, Subject K, I can’t raise your grade on this test.
The only one who is stuck is you. You didn't answer my question. Deflecting the issue doesn't help your either. What does "Wisdom" look like, bvw? You claim you you can "see" Wisdom. Tell us what it looks like.
The Bible says God comes "down" in order to "see" so he can "know" what's going on, too. What does that prove?
As for A-G beliefs, I have no problems with them. I merely reminded her that what she was saying is not Christian any more than, say, LDS beliefs are. Mixing Christianity with Gnosticism or Cabala is not Christianity.
If you agree that anyone who claims to follow Christ, no matter what theology, be it Unitarian, LDS, JW, etc. then I suppose Gnostic beliefs are "Christian".
To be sure, all believers are to some extent "gnostic" in that they claim esoteric knowledge. Christians who believe only the "spiritual man" can know the Truth are also echoing Gnostic beliefs, because they are the cornerstone of Gnosticism Christains adopted as their own.
Specifically, in her post, AG makes the following statements that suggest Adam's created purpose was to live in the spiritual realm:
"Indeed, I perceive the creation of Adam and the Garden of Eden in the spiritual realm and thus see no contradiction at all in Genesis 1 to 3. The tree of life is in the middle of the Garden of Eden and Paradise (see below) and therefore not strictly physical."
"I perceive Adam was created in the spiritual realm before he was banished to mortality, the physical realm, and his mortal calendar/clock began. Or to put it another way, I do not perceive Adam as strictly physical."
"Adam was not made for a mere physical existence like a bacteria, daffodil, fish or cow. He doesn’t 'belong' in the physical realm and he knows it. But because he was banished to mortality, this peculiar creature made for Paradise/Eden, having immortality at his finger tips, now is grounded in the physical universe whose life forms were his to name."
Furthermore, AG proceeds to suggest that his sin resulted in "death death", i.e. the death of the soul and the body. Christian belief is centered around the immortality of the soul.
The only problem I see with AG's translation of the Hebrew is that, according to experts who actually know the language, the verse does not read muwth muwth (i.e. "death death"), but muwth tamuwth (to-die you-shall-die).
Sorry, I’m not a cosmologist so my opinion is baseless.
you may be right.
“how can we be so certain about the origin and history of background radiation?” I doubt that you will find physicists who claim certainty on these matters. It is an ongoing study.
But some come on here and are opposed to the research because they OPPOSE PHYSICS. Anybody on here who opposes and has contempt for the scientific method as uselessly corrupt and that they know better ... these people are fools.
That is why I said:
“Through experience we have found that these threads usually leads to endless exchanges that have no impact upon each other’s beliefs. If you are a young earth creation science believer wishing to argue your cause, your post will be read, but in most cases no response will be given.”
- paraphrasing Greg Neyman, geologist, M.A., Liberty University
The supposed “missing links” that would connect a photosensitive spot, to a photosensitive spot in a cavity, to a covered with a lens photosensitive spot in a cavity (an eye); are hardly “missing” - but living among us.
In fact the evidence suggests that the eye evolved at least twice in two independent lines, and in two distinct and different ways.
dreamer, that is amazing. But I don’t have time to look into the eye issue any further right now.
The reference to "equiv earth days" was to establish the unit of measure in reference to the inception event at which point earth did not yet exist.
Schroeder explains the concept further by looking at the Hebrew roots of the terms and the Scriptural reference to "evening" and "morning" - namely, that the terms mean from "chaos" to "cosmos." He also underscores the wording of the First Day as compared to Day 3 etc. - namely, that it was the first day, the beginning of time.
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