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."
Spoken like a true sophist, kosta50! LOLOL!
Doxa was the main line of the sophists' business. They were traveling teachers who, for money, would teach your kid how to present himself to the public in ways that cultivate their "good opinion, praise, and glory" of your kid.... They were essentially traveling schools of political education and grooming. In the shallowest sense.
Socrates definitely took a dim view of such, which has nothing to do with aletheia logos, or "truthful word." There is no truth in the sophists' teachings and methods, and that is why what they were selling is called doxa, "opinion."
And not just in the sense of one man's opinion as against the opinions of other men, but also of the reigning public opinion of the time, the "spirit of the age." Zeitgeist.... collective consciousness. Whatever you want to call it.
Truth does not change. But doxa does....
I appreciate you two so much, and both my sisters in Christ. How wonderful that God has given me such a strengthening family!
And any “piece” of creation cannot the Creator be, and because of being the Creator of it, the Creator is not subject to it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Now, A-G, to leave the sidebar you must leave the thread. I would suggest waiting for another worthy one to pop up. This one has run its course. I think we all can see that.
When it comes to debate with God-deniers, it is pointless except as a means of evangelizing them.
Thank God for you, dear brother in Christ! And thank you for your encouragements!
I'll be leaving now. See you on a new thread!
snip: So for the lurkers following the claim that by having created, the Creator is then therefore subject to time – here goes
Spirited: This claim is like saying: “he who blows up a balloon must be part of the balloon and therefore subject to the balloon.”
“The balloon spontaneously self-created from nothing,” Haeckel. “The balloon is all there is.”...Carl Sagan (materialism). “Get in touch with your inner balloon”...Swami Vivekananda (pantheism) “Balloon memes,” idiot Dawkins.
Of course this is pagan monistic reasoning, such as it is. And it is why Scripture says that the pagan’s idols have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, and those who worship them are like them.
It hasn’t occurred to pagan monists that just as the guy blowing up the balloon stands outside of the balloon while he fills it and sustains it with his breath, so too does our supernatural Creator exist “outside” of (in another dimension) His creation while simultaneously sustaining it.
Great analogy, dear spirited. Thank you oh so very much!
I don't think so. You don't have to conceptualize infinity in order to deduce that dependent cause/effects going on without end never reach an independent cause; and that without it, nothing dependent can exist. I.e., contingent events cannot exist without a necessary cause and the set defined as only contingents does not contain the necessary cause.
There are objections to the first cause argument that focus on the infinite regress; however, I'm not aware of any that use the idea of conceptualizing the infinite as a problem. I don't think it's an effect approach because the first cause argument does not rely on a concept of of infinity.
thanks for your reply.
But even that is pointless.
The point is they don't want to be evangelized. What they want is to sow seeds of doubt into Christian souls.
They have deliberately shut themselves off from God. And I gather they demand the rest of us do the same.
Until such time, they will continue to spin around inside their little gerbil wheels with furious energy....
Or to put it another way, there have been times when I've just wanted to ask a correspondent: "Hey, what are we doing here — growing mushrooms?"
As you know, mushrooms thrive in the dark, especially when enabled by injections of liberal amounts of "manure" on a regular basis....
In any case, the exchange reliably proves to be an exercise in futility — for lack of a common language and a common world view.
Evidently reason itself cannot bridge that gap.
Thank you so very much, dear Padre, for your very kind words of support and encouragement!
That you must have an uncaused cause is the point of the first cause argument. So, your presumption would validate the first cause argument rather than object to it.
Space, time, energy would be a problematic first cause without some elaboration or theory or logic that frees them from the observational problem of existing in the contingent cause world.
As for chaos, I'll stick to the scientific use as in chaos theory. Here, chaos is not exempt from cause and effect. Chaos theory's primary contribution is in seeing nature not as fully described in linear equations but as logarithmic ones with a feedback loop. [An intersting conclusion is that the "universe" moves toward the edge of chaos - not too much stasis nor too much change.)
so that everything that we say "is" or "exists" had to be caused to exist. Therefore the first cause cannot exist, cannot "be".
Again, this is a restatement of the problem that the first cause argument was derived as a solution to. If your first premise is true, nothing exists (even the first cause). Since the first cause argument describes contingent and necessary causes differently, the necessary first cause is not subject to "everything that exists has to be caused." The argument is that the first cause (as described) is a necessary cause for anything to exist. As you have illustrated above.
Then what is "Let there be light!"? That "unchanging" First Cause has just changed!
Still sticking to the logic and scientific perspective, no, it really is unchanging - that's a necessary condition in the first cause argument. Here's an analogy (with all the limitations analogies have):
Imagine a small area of the universe where absolutely no matter or energy exists. No contingent cause/effect chains.
What does exist there is Physics, the laws of the universe. These are unchanging.
Now introduce into this space some matter, some elemental particles, several different elements, a bunch of molecules, etc.
They will change according to Physics. They change, time exists for them, they react, reform, combust, whatever. But Physics that caused theses changes didn't change.
thanks for your reply.
I think you might not realize the obligation to provide answers rests on your shoulders.
This is due to the fact that you have made the central claim here—that a quantifiable amount of genetic change will occur in a continuous manner over a specific period.
However, your only support is a mathematical equation derived from observation of change in discrete instances.
So the only true assertion you have made is: if d x 20,000 = 0.01, then d x 2,000,000 = 1. But this does not in any way support the claim that genetic change will occur in a continuous fashion over 2 million years. The statement is provable universally only as a mathematical statement, not as a biological one.
Wow. What a wonderful observation, D-fendr!
Don't know if you've read anything by the late, great physicist/mathematician and theoretical biologist Robert Rosen (RIP), though somehow I imagine you'd find him interesting.
Rosen's main interest is complex systems theory. So he has a keen eye for "feedback loops." On the basis of his models [largely informed by the number and category theories] he finds that all four Aristotelian causes are fully operative in Nature at all times.
According to my reading of Rosen, the peculiar thing about "complex" systems — and here we are speaking of biological systems, which are not "simple" systems of the mechanical [Newtonian] type — is that efficient cause is always constrained, confined within the causal system. Putting it crudely, efficient cause is not allowed to wander "outside" the system into the wider environment for the source of its efficacy.
I can barely suggest the richness of Rosen's thought here. I find his Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself amazingly thought-provocative.
And that would be an understatement!!! LOL!
I dunno. Maybe you'd like him, too. :^)
Whatever the case, if you ever do actually read him, please do share your thoughts with me?
Thank you ever so much, dear D-fendr, for your elegant, lapidary essay/post!
p.s.: Was just about to hit the "Post" button, when the shade of another great mathematician, Bertrand Russell, descended upon me....
He evidently absolutely detested "feedback loops!" He called them "impredicativities," and hated them for their relentless self-reference.
Of course, what he was complaining about must have been the axiom form itself. "I think, therefore I am" is an example of an axiom stated in in human language. You cannot separate the two terms, for they "feed" on each other. :^)
Of course, if you're trying to "digitize" this situation, you've got your work cut out for you — because in the first place, self-reference is deemed to be illegitimate by the keepers of the holy scientific writ; and in the second place, the "loop" caused by the mutual "feeding" is essentially unanalyzable.
Well, just some random thoughts.
Again, thanks so much for writing D-fendr!
What you have failed at, time and time again, is to provide any answer at all to what is going to STOP the inevitable genetic change in a population that is a result of the absolute impossibility for a living system to copy DNA with 100% fidelity.
DNA change in a population will occur continuously over 2 years, 20 years, 200 years, 2,000 years, or 20,000 years, 200,000 years or 2,000,000. DNA change in a population never ceases, because DNA cannot be copied with 100% fidelity.
So what is going to STOP this inevitable and inexorable change?
And again, the big question you have failed to provide any answer for time and time again.....
Why would bacteria have an lower fidelity DNA polymerase that is expressed during times of high stress?
I understand photons just fine.
" So for the lurkers following the claim that by having created, the Creator is then therefore subject to time – here goes.
Time is a quantitative inverse measure of energy. To repeat, in order for something to exist, including a person to exist, it/they must be composed of energy. Also, for any person to perform any act energy must be involved and it must be conserved.
"To repeat, for the photon traveling a worldline through space/time, no time elapses. That is called a “null path.”
Photons don't read clocks and they are not self aware. They and the field in this world that gives rise to them are clocks themselves. Do you understand clocks? What does a clock do?
"But the photon and its velocity and the space/time it travels are all finite.
The photon is a particular amount of energy that arises out of a field in this world, a world which are embedded in a sea of energy called the vacuum, which is essentially infinite. The photon's propagation velocity has a particular value that depends on it's interaction with the energy of the vacuum.
Note that the sea of energy called the vacuum is not space. Space is an inverse measure of the energy density of this world and appears as gravity. Note that as a photon flies and the field that gives rise to it expands, it loses energy to space, which is the gravitational field.
"More importantly, the photon - which has no mass and for which no time elapses - itself causes things to happen – something that our correspondents claim God the Creator cannot do without being subject to time.
Action involves energy which is always conserved and is always accompanied by a corresponding inverse measure thereof which is a time. A photon is energy. It is not only the facilitator, it is an element of the action which is always a transformation of energy. If the action is performed by a person, that person must be composed of the energy that provides for the machinery that provides the functions of an actor. like anything that acts, including persons, require energy. Note that action is a transformation of energy, which can not be created, or destroyed.
" When a photon goes into a black hole, that black hole is physically “informed” – that is cause>effect. Information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver or molecular machine as it goes from a before state to an after state (Shannon, successful communication, the foundation for the field of Mathematics called “Information Theory.”) “Physical information” refers to the information content of a physical system (the message received).
A reciever is a machine which is always composed of energy and which also has a fixed number of ways that it's energy can be arranged. Any real instance of information is always physical, which means the instance must have been a result of an energy transformation.
"And when that photon meets your eye, you physically sense it and then become aware of it, you are physically “informed.” When the photon meets a plant's molecule, it becomes “informed” – the effect in this case cascades as the photon is absorbed in photosynthesis.
Enrgy is transferred. IOWs it's transformed and in this case multiple times in systems which are functional machines.
"And not only that, we are informed by ricochet as the light is reflected by the moon, the water in a lake, etc. We are “informed” by the photon’s deflection.
The determination that the photon was deflected requires requires the sentience and rational processing functions of a sentient rational machine. Of course any real instance of such a machine must be composed of energy.
"So the photon does all of this, all the while being massless and timeless and yet our correspondents cannot perceive of God the Creator causing anything to happen without Himself being subject to time."
Massless simply means the photon and the electromagnetic field which it arises from have no interaction with the Higgs field, an interaction, which is an energy transformation, which results in mass. Note also, as per above, the photon is a packet of energy with a partcularly quantified value, which is given as inverse time. A clock is still a clock, even if it is not self aware. In order to tick, energy must transform in a periodic way. The tick is an action and in order for an action to occur, energy must be transformed and never created, or destroyed.
" And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. - Genesis 1:3"
The law of conservation of energy requires that energy be conserved in any real instance of an action. That means that any causative action must arise from an energetic body and most importantly- no action can cause the qualities, properties and laws of energy itself retroactively.
"And now we have yet another correspondent who would subject God to energy. It’s the same tune, new verse. Energy is part of the creation, not a restriction on or property of the Creator of it.
Creation is a transformation of energy; it was not "created". Every real instance of a sentient rational being requires the machinery, which must be composed of energy, to provide for the functions of sentience, rational processing and action.
"Man is not the measure of God."
Irrelevant. The important fact to remember is that Man is a sentient rational being in the Image of God -male and female they are. "I do not wish to continue a futile sidebar debate with posters whose sense of reality is so greatly reduced that they believe the Creator must be subordinate to the creation. The egocentricity of such a worldview boggles the mind - it is literally irrational (one-sided, there is no "ratio" there.)
Whatever. No where did I say that God was subordinate to His creation. Rational in reference to beings refers to logical processing, not sidedness, and not the theory of rational numbers.
Betty boop: Spoken like a true sophist, kosta50! LOLOL! Doxa was the main line of the sophists' business
Pathetic. Do you honestly presume I don't know what I am talking about, or is your horizon so limited that you actually believe it?
According to your measure, which unfortunately seems very small, the Mother Church is a sophist pit where God is just an opinion. And you call yourself Catholic?
By the same token, you must consider the New Testament laced with sophism, for doxa appears no less than 150 times in it, such as John 1:14
"And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth."
In the words of the Greek lexicon, in the New Testament it means "always a good opinion concerning one, resulting in praise, honour, and glory, splendour, brightness...majesty...a thing belonging to God."
I suppose the writers of the New Testament were hopeless Sophists! And the Eastern Church, by calling itself Orthodox (i.e. orthodoxa), calls itself the "right opinion"!?
Socrates definitely took a dim view of such,...
Well, Socrates lived 500 years before Christ, so his language was different from the language of the first century AD. If you are going to say something at least try to put it in a proper perspective, lest people be misinformed.
Truth does not change. But doxa does....
Funny, the Christian Church holds doxa synonymous with God's glory, and unchanging. What do they know anyway, right? They should have asked you, to teach them right...Pathetic.
Thanks very much for your reply, er, feedback.
The feedback loop is of course what makes the complex possible from the simple, makes it all work and, speaking efficiently, makes it alive. It is all so… elegant.
I have to interject something that occurs to me in the first cause argument and your post, at the risk of cliché: Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Can’t quite tie it all up, but something about self-referencing and creation needing something outside creation to explain it.
Thanks very much for the Rosenr reference. Your recommendation is enough for me to look it up.
No, that's not the point I was making. If we can assume that something (i.e. "deity", whatever that may be) can exist without cause, why not the stuff from which the world is made? The imagination is the limit. The first cause argument is merely one of many possible arguments.
First cause is a mental box in which many are trapped. The fact is that we don't know what was or wasn't before the Big Bang. We are merely speculating and hypothesizing. Which—I hate to say this because it seems to irk some—makes even God a hypothesis, just like everything else, even though some people choose to believe it isn't.
Chaos theory's primary contribution is in seeing nature not as fully described in linear equations but as logarithmic ones with a feedback loop
And your point is?
Still sticking to the logic and scientific perspective, no, it really is unchanging - that's a necessary condition in the first cause argument.
D, I understand what the first cause argument says. I am saying is has holes.
Imagine a small area of the universe where absolutely no matter or energy exists. No contingent cause/effect chains.
What does exist there is Physics, the laws of the universe. These are unchanging.
That's a little too "Platonic" for me. "Physics" doesn't exist independent of matter and energy. Gravity doesn't "exist" in vacuum; it is a property of mass. Where there is mass, there is gravity. Science calls it a "natural phenomenon" which is a physicist's equivalent of doctors' "idiopathic," or just "clueless" in everyday English. We don't know why.
They will change according to Physics. They change, time exists for them, they react, reform, combust, whatever. But Physics that caused theses changes didn't change.
Wait right here, are you calling God Physics?!? The fact is nature is nature, and every form of natural existence has properties that are common to it which cannot change, such as being thee-dimentional. This is has nothing to do with some "Platonic" self-existence called Physics, that "lives" in a vacuum "waiting" for unsuspecting matter and energy to arrive, so it can exert itself on them.
And how did we come to this from the first cause speculation being a paradox? When I said "Let there be light" was a moment of change for the presumed "changless" Creator of light, a change from non-cretaing to creating.
That's pure speculation, implying motives, mind-reading, and mud-slinigng, betty boop, just as it would be if I were to say Evagelicals are superstitious manipulators who want to control the world by deceit.
They have deliberately shut themselves off from God. And I gather they demand the rest of us do the same.
How do you know that they deliberately shut themselves from God (whatever God is)? Doesn't this God of your choice have some say in who believes and who doesn't? Not even the Christians know! They are deeply divided on that issue.
No one demands that you change your beliefs. perhaps you fear that a more reasonable argument might do that in your own mind, so it makes you nervous. In which case don't participate in these open debates. Everyone states what they think. There is no coercive effort to convert anyone that I see. Persecution ideations are not a good sign.
Until such time, they will continue to spin around inside their little gerbil wheels with furious energy....
Just as the Evangelicals will inside their little gerbil wheels...
Or to put it another way, there have been times when I've just wanted to ask a correspondent: "Hey, what are we doing here — growing mushrooms?" As you know, mushrooms thrive in the dark, especially when enabled by injections of liberal amounts of "manure" on a regular basis..
Strange we should meet in such places, don't you think? However your agitation, if not intolerance, with dissenting opinions tells me it's more than just about "mushrooms".
In any case, the exchange reliably proves to be an exercise in futility — for lack of a common language and a common world view.
So why are you here?
Evidently reason itself cannot bridge that gap.
No it doesn't. That's why we have convenient gap-fillling god-of-the-gaps. If you don't know why, just fill the gap with some god of your choice, right?
Heh heh!
Great replies all along, Kosta!
I was caught up with a lot of work until a while ago, and couldn’t find time to participate here.
Ever notice how the proponents of these gods-of-the-gaps make it all a matter of binary choice, even when such discretised “us vs. thems” don’t exist in the real world? I mean, “believe or burn for eternity” would be a great reason to adopt a particular brand of superstition now, wouldn’t it? When other lures fail, that’s the threat they resort to, and Pascal’s “wager” is pulled out of the magic hat like it was earlier on in this thread. Now back to the problem of the non-existence of strict bipolar choices - what’s a stillborn child, the mentally challenged, and other human beings without the capacity to make free choices to do? Creation was finite, but punishment has to be eternal. How inspiring!
Amazing to see how no one was able to pull themselves out of the paradox that prevents their deities from being incapable of separating themselves from the shackles of time. As simple a concept as change necessitating time is now impossible for them to grasp.
Capable.
It is known as false dichotomy or false dilemma (i.e. "either you are with us or against us"). It is extreme (black/white, nothing in between), and it seems to appeal to extreme-minded people.
I mean, “believe or burn for eternity” would be a great reason to adopt a particular brand of superstition now, wouldn’t it?
Don't forget the "rich rewards in heaven." Carrot and stick approach. Take away the fear and the lure, and life everlasting, and see how many come to church next Sunday for no reason other than the glory of God. I'd say not many.
and Pascal’s “wager” is pulled out of the magic hat like it was earlier on in this thread
Oh yes, what-do-you-have-to-lose approach. All the wrong reasons to believe. Especially the what's-in-it-for-me crowd (like the Joel Osteen groupies).
Creation was finite, but punishment has to be eternal. How inspiring!
You mean like: man is incapable of keeping the law so I will give him the law anyway just so he can fail?
I look forward to learning more from the two of you on a future thread.
I agree with you, BB, that evanglizing God-deniers is pointless after a time. Initially, it is a requirement from Jesus, and then on each new thread it is important to offer again, if for no other reason than to be above reproach. There comes a time, though, when it clearly is no more than adding the same message on top of the already delivered message.
Jesus used a metaphor about pearls to teach us that there is such a thing as a point of futility. Thank you for your wise insight.
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