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."
Sorry to be blunt, but is this another reductio ad absurdum, à la uncaused cause?
Oh boy!
No but it is, as alluded some time back, similar to the problem of infinite regress of dependent causes. It's the problem of infinite regress of be-causes. Without inherent value (no because needed), some axiom, self-evident truth, assumed to be true, etc., you have an infinite logical regress.
It's the limit of logic's conditionality.
Not that you have to reach it, but if you claim your values are all *purely* logic based...
Now, how did I know that would peg your meter? :)
Of course one can also conclude or act as though life (one's own and life in general) has no meaning; or, as perhaps describes your view, that if it does have meaning, we can't know what it is.
In all cases, I think it a universal question for humans fortunate enough to be able to consider it - beyond mere survival.
So, what's an inherent value of a Paramecium?
Or we can assume that is has...and spend a whole life making up feel-good reasons why.
I agree with you that we are fortunate that we can consider these things. However, One of the reasons I think there are more cases of depression and or mental illness in humans is because we have so much time to just think.
Over the course of our species evolution I don't think there was as much time to just sit and think. It was a day to day struggle just to live.
I'd say "life."
Certainly another possibility.
I think if we examine closely, almost everyone either knows, think they know or assumes that their life has meaning and purpose - the reason they get out of bed in the morning.
Life can have meaning because you choose for it to have meaning.
There's a lot to think about in that statement.
Some people may believe that a deity has spoken to them, but this is an unprovable statement.
For me, when I hear a preacher, for example, say, "God told me that.." my BS meter goes up.
But I do think we have a relationship to or with something that transcends; there's an interaction and communication of a kind. Of course, that's an unprovable statement too. :)
In general, do you think something can be true but unprovable?
How would you know?
How about a leaf? It's alive, right?
Yep. All life.
Or maybe it's a habit. What's the purpose of running red lights? Or of dinosaurs? Nothing so far you mentioned proves the "intrinsic value" of anything except what we personally or as a society make up. I love that program "Life after People" that shows how the world and even our pets would do just fine if suddenly the humans were to disappear.
The world existed before us and could continue existing after us just fine. The entire human history is a series of scenarios with faceless players trying to make this world, indeed all of existence, about us.
On a tiny spec of dust in space, a blue dot no one is near enough to even notice, about as notorious as an ant that was hatched last week in my back yard.
Purpose and "intrinsic values" are feel-good constructs.
And the purpose (or is it just a consequence) is?
What possible purpose could you have for saying that?
If I'm understanding the question correctly:
It means that all other conditions being equal, we shouldn't destroy life. That it's not a coin-flip decision to destroy or not destroy life (all other conditions being equal).
I should add the corollary: All other conditions being equal, we ought act in ways that further life.
I think we're looping back to "what is knowing" here. And what is considered sufficient proof.
The way I see it, the only way to know the truth, i.e. to know the way the world truly is, and why it is, is to know everything there is to know, and we can't know that.
In very broad terms, I'm in broad agreement. :)
But can't we know the truth more accurately or less accurately?
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