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."
Very interesting insight there Betty B. Your one, two, three loop says it well...and I think many people today are their own measure of reality, much of which are the imaginations of their mind.
Good post...enjoyed as always. Same with Alamo Girl’s. Always love the reads....though much goes over my head when you get to deep! HA! You both s-t-r-e-t-c-h ones mind til it hurts! But it’s a good hurt.
But when I'm done and wanting to reply I often find myself frustrated because her posts are so thorough there's nothing to add - just something that bears repeating. LOLOL!
Thank you so much for your encouragements, dear caww!
They put absolute faith in it without really thinking it through.
Which is to say that physical causation requires both space and time because in the absence of space, things cannot exist and in the absence of time, events cannot occur. And that is a poison pill because the CMB measurements from the 1960s forward affirm that the universe is expanding which means that there was a beginning of real space and real time and that space/time does not pre-exist but is created as the universe expands.
Willful blindness perhaps?
Near-sightedness, really. They think in terms of probability. The DNA says that the person I know to be my mother is 99.*% certain. Their best measurements prevent them from knowing truth.
Could you not have made it more apparent what believers are expected to do? that you may do it ~ that is, preach the word of faith.
Read verses 12-14 again.
Just curious...but doesn't memory also have to do with time? ......point A. to B. and most measurable things require the memory to discern time.
What use is the prayer for the sick...if you are already "saved"? Why go through the motions and not just let God's "will be done"?
Isn’t it amazing how a weak case is first made for a deity, and then fantastically self-contradictory bridges are built around that case to their deity of choice? All the while keeping the paradox of their “unchanging” deity causing spectacular change at a finite moment, unresolved.
As was said earlier, it’s theology of the fringes, and with that, we’re full-circle back to where this whole debate began.
Sure, I agree. However scientists don;t know what's ahead, so they keep searching. The people of faith have the answers supposedly revealed to them. They "know" God, they have the "mind of Chest". They are lead by the Holy Spirit; they know they are "saved" and destined to heaven. What further purpose could be behind their inquiry?
I love when they resort to scary tactics...like it's safer to believe so I will make sure I believe, just in case...
Chest=Christ
What, in your mind is faith? and also belief?
Come on! What are the chances that two independent lines of life would form genetic DNA that is 98% the same?
There is a great deal of evidence of our ancestors from the last few million years.
There are only two explanations for why we and chimps are so similar, related by DNA changes that would correlate to us having a recent common ancestor some six to seven million years ago, and lo and behold three million years ago we find a very human like bipedal ape.
Just coincidence?
How would you explain the similar pattern of ERV insertions shared between humans and chimps, more similar between those two than chimps and gorillas.
Do you think chimps and gorillas shared a common ancestor? Or were they too extraterrestrials?
I just want to know what was God doing when he wasn't creating. I doubt I will get an answer.
Faith is trust. Belief is an assumption.
The moment something changes what it was doing (or not doing) is the moment it ceases being changeless, and therefore ceases being timeless.
The moment of creation is such a moment. For the creator and the created. This is the unresolved paradox.
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