Posted on 06/17/2014 6:17:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Whenever I engage in conversation with people I meet for the first time I try to avoid being asked the question, “What do you do for a living?” But if I am asked I say, “I am a minister.” Generally, the one who asks then inquires, “What denomination?” or “What kind of church?”
Here is where I always have to clarify, depending on the most recent news headline involving Christian leaders: “I am a Baptist minister, but I am not a science-denying Baptist minister who thinks that dinosaurs lived alongside humans a few thousand years ago.”
What a strange irony that a 30-foot-long fossil of an Allosaurus will be on display at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., where museum founder, Ken Ham, recently debated science educator Bill Nye. Ken Ham and his colleagues think it defends the book of Genesis and supplies evidence of Noah’s flood. Good grief.
Unfortunately, this is real life, not a Charlie Brown cartoon. According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, 77 percent of people who claim to be born again or evangelical say they have little or no confidence that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang. And 76 percent of evangelicals doubt that life on Earth, including human beings, evolved through a process of natural selection.
Educated evangelicals know better. According to Newsweek 99 percent of America’s earth and life scientists hold to some form of evolution. Darrel Falk, a biology professor at evangelical Point Loma Nazarene University, told Cathy Grossman of the Religion News Service, that many biblical (evangelical) scholars do not see a conflict between religion and science. He noted: “The story of the cosmos and the Big Bang of creation is not inconsistent with the message of Genesis 1.”
I suspect that many (if not most) educated evangelical biblical scholars who subscribe to some form of biblical inerrancy (and sign faith statements testifying to that fact) believe what professor Falk believes.
They know there are different kinds (genres) of biblical literature which call for different approaches other than a literal interpretation of the text. They know that the creation stories are parabolic in nature and are not chronicles of history or reports conveying scientific data. They know that these stories are spiritual, metaphorical and theological stories and, while not factual, they certainly teach truth about God and God’s relationship to the world.
They know Ken Ham’s claim that “no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record” is utter foolishness.
Harvard theologian Harvey Cox tells about the time the student leader of Harvard’s atheist group on campus took one of his theology classes. This otherwise bright student wrote a very weak paper in which he sought to discredit the God of the Christian and Jewish faiths by attacking and dismantling a literal interpretation of the Genesis flood story. He thought that by proving the story could not have happened the way the story says it happened, he would thus disprove the reality of God.
Dr. Cox said to the student, “Don’t you know a story when you read one?”
Educated evangelicals know that the creation stories were never intended to be history lessons or science reports, because the Bible is not a history or science book.
Educated evangelicals also know:
• That evangelical Christians need not fear or deny the enormous amount of scientific data supporting evolution.
• That the story of evolution and the biblical story are not mutually exclusive.
• That a healthy faith welcomes and is informed by science.
So why do so many evangelicals deny evolution and believe in a literal interpretation of the creation stories in Genesis?
Apparently what educated evangelical professors know and believe is not getting down to the people in the pew.
Why aren’t educated evangelical pastors teaching their churches these things? Are they afraid of being shunned or looked down upon by their peers? Are they afraid to rock the evangelical boat? Are they afraid of facing conflict in their churches or losing their jobs? Are the professors actually teaching what they believe and know to their students?
Whatever the reasons, it’s time for evangelicals who know the truth to come out and proclaim the truth. If the truth sets us free, as Jesus said, then many of our evangelical sisters and brothers need to hear a liberating word from their pastors.
OPINION: Views expressed in ABPnews/Herald columns and commentaries are solely those of the authors.
Chuck Queen is pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Frankfort, Ky., and author of Being a Progressive Christian (is not) for Dummies (nor for know-it-alls): An Evolution of Faith.
“Only the fool, fixed in his folly, thinks he turns the wheel on which he himself turns.” — T. S. Eliot
Amazing the depths of truth and even logic that can be contained in a quote from a truely wise person..
Or in the mystery and clap-trap in a quote from one unwise..
like; Maya Angelou.. as an example..
Excellent quote, dearest sister in Christ! Thank you!
It’s time for scientists to prove the theory. That, after all, is what science is supposed to do.
In the last ten years or so science has become faith-based. You are a climate change believer or denier. You an evolution believer or denier.
It’s simple - science is about what you can prove. You come up with a theory, devise an experiment that proves the theory, perform the experiment, and evaluate the results.
If your experiment worked, you publish it so that other scientists in other places can perform the same experiment. Scientists conduct the experiment, record the results and analyze them.
If they get the same results you did, and they concur that it proves the theory, then you’ve made science.
The bar for evolution is simple. Provide one example of a species, say a frog, becoming a lizard.
The question has never been about process but about the “God created” part! The use of Evolution to bolster the Atheistic arguments always comes out in any debate between atheists and theologians.
The “warming” scientists have already been caught fiddling with the data to support a luddite population and technology reduction position. Evolution supporting atheists do the same thing with biological theory to support their shaky suppositions about the absence of God.
The scientific method, if properly followed can make no logical conclusions as to the presence or absence of God in and of the method itself. Only pre-biased suppositions can look at the evidence and say yea or nay. Science can’t test the untestable but science can’t say that “that which is untestable is also untrue and has no existence”. Biased men can say yea or nay...but a true scientist can’t and won’t!
Another truly wise man....
I agree with your assessment of the late Maya Angelou. It seems she was a master of counter-cultural jibberish.... Not a drop of wisdom there.
Thanks so much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
I was over half way through it, when I realized that I just wasn't "getting it." So....I went back to the beginning, and started all over again from square one.
In my experience, if you can figure out what Bohm is doing with the "rheomode," then anything subsequent to that discussion is easier to grasp.
Oh, the rheomode, and what it is: It is Bohm's reconceptualization of language in terms of flow. He notes that ordinary language tends to reinforce the idea of the independence and autonomy of the object intended. IOW, a word denotes an object in a fixed and consistent way, while the intended object really doesn't possess those characteristics in nature. To use an analogy from quantum mechanics, ordinary language is like the preference for observing particles rather than waveforms. The rheomode is an attempt to reconceive language in terms of flow, or waveform.
To me, what Bohm has done is a tour de force that helps one to understand natural processes in a radically new way. Quoting from its back cover:
David Bohm [1917–1992] was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and philosophers of our time. Although deeply influenced by Einstein, he was also, more unusually for a scientist, inspired by mysticism.... In both science and philosophy, Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular. In this classic work he develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole.... Renowned physicist and theorist [he] was one of the most original thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century.I found Rosen's work enormously influential. I consider Bohm another truly "BIG" thinker who helps one see the universe in a whole, new, fresh way.
I do hope you'll enjoy the book, dearest sister in Christ!
Thank you again, so very much!
I was over half way through it, when I realized that I just wasn’t “getting it.” So....I went back to the beginning, and started all over again from square one.
The search for truth takes persistence...
Which IMO far outshines talent or brains..
Same thing happened to me with the Bible...
I read it and re-read it THEN.. I admitted to myself.. I wasn’t getting it..
Instead of throwing it the pile in my book trash corner..
I did a reassesment of my motives and agenda..
And tried to read it in the “spirit” it was given..
As some writers saw things beyond, their(the) situation..
Whether bible lore, spiritual fairy tales or actual history..
it was indeed their opinions.. whoever “they” were..
Whether true or fancy it told a story.. with multiple stories..
Stories told that reached for truth.. stretched for answers, called out to grasping for a base..
Cause every agenda has a base.. for motives..
Only then did I see the Bible could stretch me, beyond where I could reach..
Only thing then was I willing to be stretched..
Reminds me of a verse of scripture..
” After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things “.....
And Oh! My.. the things I have been shown..
When the “coming up hither stops”.. the stretching stops..
Me, too. And also to Schrödinger; evidently to Bohm as well.
What is fascinating to me, even eerie, is that I cannot but think that what we nowadays refer to as quantum field theory had already been articulated in the ancient world — by two eminent pre-Socratic thinkers, Anaximander [c. 610 B.C. – 546 B.C.], and Heraclitus [c. 535 B.C. – 475 B.C.] — and also by Plato himself [c. 429 B.C. – 347 B.C.], who seems clearly familiar with the ideas of his pre-Socratic predecessors (see: Plato's creation myth in Timaeus).
Bohm specifically references Heraclitus (p. 61ff), but not Anaximander — though one expects that the former's thinking was substantially influenced by the latter's.
As Eric Voegelin put it [in Order and History, Vol. 4, p. 174],
Reality was experienced by Anaximander ... as a cosmic process in which things emerge from, and disappear into, the non-existence of the Apeiron. Things do not exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they exist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In the Apeiron as the timeless arche [lawful origin] of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestation of the Apeiron in time.And Kenneth Keulman elaborates on Voegelin's insight, thusly:
Voegelin contends that the Anaximandrian Apeiron — which he calls the `Ionian truth of the process' — is 'present in the background of consciousness when the later thinkers explore specific structures for the case of societies in history.' ... The symbol of the Apeiron as the Boundless, the Depth, serves as a polarity both of the cosmos and the psyche. The opposite polarity, the One of Plato [a/k/a, the God "Beyond," or Epikeina], stands as the noetically discoverable antipode of the Apeiron. It is the height as the Apeiron is the depth."Anaximander's Apeiron is defined as "the unlimited, indefinite, unbounded; it is the 'unlimited' source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable." (Sounds like a "quantum field" to me!)
Evidently picking up from there, it seems Heraclitus recognized that the essential nature of all existents in the natural world, including humans, was that of participation in a holonomic "flow" — holonomic from the Greek roots, holos, meaning "whole," and nomos, meaning "lawful" — as participants in an eternal process.
RE: Heraclitus, Bohm comments:
The notion that reality is to be understood as process is an ancient one, going back at least to Heraclitus, who said that everything flows....Revolutionary words, these. They put the fundamental claim of science — that it is possible to have "certain" knowledge of anything, thus to give human beings effective instrumental control over nature — to the severest test....
I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.
The best image of process is perhaps that of the flowing of a stream, whose substance [as Heraclitus averred] is never the same. On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances....
Of course, modern physics states that actual streams (e.g., of water) are composed of atoms, which are in turn composed of 'elementary particles,' such as electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. For a long time it was thought that these latter are the 'ultimate substance' of the whole of reality, and that all flowing movement, such as those of streams, must reduce to forms abstracted from the motions through space of collections of interacting particles. However, it has been found that even the 'elementary particles' can be created, annihilated, and transformed, and this indicates that not even these can be ultimate substances but, rather, that they too are relatively constant forms, abstracted from some deeper level of movement.
One may suppose that this deeper level of movement may be analysable into yet finer particles which will perhaps turn out to be the ultimate substance of the whole of reality. However, the notion that all is flux, into which we are inquiring here, denies such a supposition. Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement. This means that no matter how far our knowledge of the laws of physics may go, the content of these laws will still deal with such abstractions, having only a relative independence of existence and independence of behaviour. So one will not be led to suppose that all properties of collections of objects, events, etc., will have to be explainable in terms of some knowable set of ultimate substances. At any stage, further properties of such collections may arise, whose ultimate ground is to be regarded as the unknown totality of the universal flux.
Having discussed what the notion of process implies concerning the nature of reality, let us now consider how this notion should bear on the nature of knowledge. Clearly, to be consistent, one has to say that knowledge, too, is a process, an abstraction from the one total flux, which latter is therefore the ground both of reality and of knowledge of this reality. Of course, one may fairly readily verbalize such a notion, but in actual fact it is very difficult not to fall into the almost universal tendency to treat our knowledge as a set of basically fixed truths, and thus not of the nature of process (e.g., one may admit that knowledge is always changing but say that it is accumulative, thus implying that its basic elements are permanent truths which we have to discover). Indeed, even to assert any absolutely invariant element of knowledge (such as 'all is flux') is to establish in the field of knowledge something that is permanent; but if all is flux, then every part of knowledge must have its being as an abstracted form in the process of becoming, so that there can be no absolutely invariant elements of knowledge.
Anyhoot, I really like the book. :^) And hope you will too, dearest sister in Christ!
Thank you ever so much, dearest brother in Christ, for your heartfelt testimony! I see matters that way, too.
May God ever bless you! (And me.)
Since I believe Time has different variable expressions, I can conceive of a thing existing in the volume of Time and thus existing 'forever' so long as the volume exists. But that thing is of a different make-up than the physical thing which decays and returns its component parts back to the background of atoms, etc, so would we say that thing which gives up its atomic parts still exists? Yes we would, if we believe what God has given us as information regarding the spirit and soul.
So if that thing exists, even after leaving the atoms back in the background state, that thing must have some variable expression of Time and Space, even as that thing exists in spirit.
Thank you so much for sharing your testimony, dear hosepipe!
His last sentence in the excerpt caught my eye:
Yes, indeed, dearest sister in Christ!
Yet this "flux" is neither "random," nor "chaotic." Rather, it seems to me it is God's chosen process for realizing His creation, which He designed to unfold in space and time; that is, in a manner such that paltry intelligences such as we humans have could grasp, and hopefully appreciate and understand, what God hath wrought....
If we could see as He sees, we probably wouldn't notice any "flux" at all. :^)
But we don't, and we can't.
God does not "vary." His Logos — His Word, Alpha to Omega — does not "vary." Thus the "rules of the road" He laid down in the Beginning are invariant. The forms they may take in the "flux" are capable of variation. But there is a natural limit that kicks in where such forms vary too much outside the divine pattern/parameters laid down in the Beginning....
My suspicion is there is some very deep mathematics, especially of the geometrical kind, involved here....
Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
It's an intriguing subject.
Thank you so very much, dearest sister in Christ, for your keen insights!
There is deep dimensional reality, as hinted at by passages such as the fifth chapter of Daniel. Have you ever asked yourself upon reading that passage, ‘What kind of Space and what kind of Time exists the being from whom the hand reached out into Belshazzar’s where/when?’ I have, and it leads to more than two decades of wonder and processing. I’ll bet many others have also tread along that trail.
I so agree, dear brother in Christ! Yet we humans tend to see only the surface of things. Searching for the Depth of Reality is something few people ever do.
But those who are so led discover a whole lot to "wonder" about, and thus much "processing" to do....
Happy Independence Day, dear brother!
Thank you! I trust you had a marvelous day as well.
My suspicion is there is some very deep mathematics, especially of the geometrical kind, involved here....
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