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."
I was talking about how God might be known. I don't believe it is necessarily a cognitive function. I don't believe you can "figure out God." I believe it is both simpler and more subtle than that.
Salvation is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish that I may have conflated with knowing. I'd need to understand what you mean by salvation to attempt even a lame response.
But this is not mere 'effect' we're talking about. This is the deity's mode of operation as well - which spans time - 7 days of "creation", etc. - the span of time at a time when there is no one to be concerned about "effects". This is a distinction that should not be downplayed.
Resting itself is a time-based activity. You don't rest unless time has an influence on you.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I put it this way: Since most religions require faith as a principal component of salvation - what do those who are incapable of it, do? Parasitic twins, the unborn foetus, etc.
Again, effects of the eternal in the temporal are experienced in time. And the changes in the temporal world do not necessarily mean the eternal has changed. For a somewhat analog, consider the laws of physics. They don’t “rest” when a reaction stops.
It depends on how you define faith doesn’t it? There are of course numerous scriptural definitional texts, but it’s a lot like ‘love’. You can’t really know it by someone else’s description.
Whatever it is, again, it’s not a cognitive function, IMHO.
As for someone dead or brain dead, I dunno. It seems to me that whatever rule/law/effect applies has already applied.
Equilibrium requires that the physical laws are obeyed at every instant. Regardless, the question is that how is a deity that acts over a time-frame (7 days), free from it? Not only that, why does such a timeless entity need to perform a time-based act? Namely, resting.
how is a deity that acts over a time-frame (7 days), free from it?
Are the laws of physics bound by reactions in time? Do they change when there is a chemical reaction in one part of space, none in another?
Do they rest after a reaction is complete?
No one does. And this is a serious deficiency in those modes of "salvation". All of them assume a more-or-less normal, cognitively-capable humans to make those "free will" choices. Parasitic twins, the unborn embryo with undeveloped cognitive capabilities, don't have that ability to choose.
Time being a fundamental physical dimension, the laws of physics inevitably end up being influenced / governed by it.
However, a deity that "creates" over a time-span, is not free from time. In other words, why a 7-day "creation"? A timeless entity can only do so in a flash during which no time can creep.
Your particular religion specifically goes into the details of this drawn-out process of "creation" - detailing how this divinity worked on it - each day is counted out to describe the deity's actions over a time-frame, and not that of a single act's multiple effects over a time-frame. In other words, the deity required the time. If there is a time separation between "letting there be light" and "creating water" - it means that the two acts did not originate at a single moment - and this is important to show that even the deity has time separating its particular actions.
This is just the consequence of assuming the convenience of a timeless frame in juxtaposition with time-based reality.
Parasitic twins, the unborn embryo with undeveloped cognitive capabilities, don't have that ability to choose… a serious deficiency in those modes of "salvation"…
If the religion teaches there is no other mode that can apply. Not knowing it and claiming it doesn't exist are different teachings.
I don't get this. Time is relative to speed, the laws of physics of time/motion are the same for any timeframe. In this analog, they govern what happens in time not the other way around.
In other words, why a 7-day "creation"?
Why a seven-second chemical reaction? That's how long it takes - in time.
I should add that reading Genesis as a literal physics text is an error, IMHO. But the general proposition that time passes in the temporal but not in the eternal I accept.
If you accept the a priori assumption that infinite regress is not possible.
By equating existence to causation, Aquinas should have also concluded that first cause does not exist, suggesting the premise is wrong.
A chemical reaction occurs between "created" entities. Time has an influence. When the "creator" of these entities itself takes time to perform a series of separate acts, then this "creator" is also under the realm of time. This "creator" didn't act once and stay put (Deism) but acts over a span of time, performing multiple acts.
But the eternal had to change (become temporal) in order to create the temporal. If the eternal is creating then it is not resting. That's why I said the world would have to exist eternally for the eternal to remain unchanging.
For a somewhat analog, consider the laws of physics. They don’t “rest” when a reaction stops
Gravity did not pre-exist matter. It "rests" when the matter is gone.
But the laws of physics do not. And they do not change when matter exists or doesn't.
I conceive of this as the infinite causing in the finite - time is in the finite effect, not in the infinite cause. There's no logical necessity for it.
Do we know what "love" is? Every human being has his own definition of it, just like what God is. This is why the Bible doesn't tell you what God is, but simply "I will be what I will be" (commonly translated as "I am"). It lets your fancy do the rest.
It's all just words. That's why with words we can create castles in the sky and pretend they are real. That's why we can speak of "God" as if it were some well defined entity and not really know what it is.
Whatever it is, again, it’s not a cognitive function IMHO
This goes back to the essence versus form. Unless you know what the essence is (which requires cognitive function) you can't recognize the form. To illustrate: we know that an old man and an infant are "human". How do we know that given that they have very little in common physically? Because we have a set number of "identifiers" of the "human nature," i.e. of qualities that define humans.
Thus, even though man, woman, child, boy, girl, black, white, etc. don't look the same we recognize them as being one (in nature), regardless of form, size, color, etc. Without knowing the qualities that make humans human we could not recognize humans by shape alone.
But with God or love, or justice, or truth, there are no well defined sets of identifiers. There are practically as many as there are people on earth. So how can we "know" what they are except what we make them out to be?
We use these concepts as if they were clearly and unequivocally defined realities, when in fact they are what I call "Platonic species" defined in our own fancy. So, God can be Allah to some and Shiva, Jesus, Sun, etc. to others, or love can me a tall blond to you or a short brunette to me, and other may go even further...and I won't even go there!
So, we use the same "Platonic species" that mean many different things to each individual, and dress them with the same words, pretending the same words mean the same thing!
Thus, we don't say that God is just but Justice (even though "justice" means many different things to many different people). We don't say that God is loving, but Love (even though "love" is many different things to many different people)...etc. How self-deceiving!
Based on these individually created "qualifiers" we pretend to "know" God and what is from God. Thus, a Colombian drug cartel boss may think his fortune is God sent, and thank God every day for his "blessings", while a Mother Teresa may think that life of poverty is showing God's favor, or that suffering is "purification" of one's soul that leads to sainthood.
It's all words games. I love Craig Lee Duckett's take on this.
I’ll reply to the earlier comment of yours in a while (time is a fundamental dimension of reality, and therefore affects the fundamental forces), but for the time (sigh) I have right now, do you believe that your god’s act of creation was a momentary event - as in, one initiation, and the rest followed without additional divine input until everything was created?
Without a time separation, your god cannot have multiple actions. With separation between actions, this god is not timeless.
God did not just create the world (in one instant), according to the Bible, but he did that over a 7-day period. If that is truly God's own testimony, then he himself does not say he is timeless.
That's why St. Augustine, faced with this dilemma, insisted God created omnia simul (everything at once), but insisted (to make sense of Genesis) that God repeated the same day six times because six is a "sacred number"!
Beautiful explanation and quote!
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