Hi gluadys,
So, it is your understanding that God tells us of events that didn't happen to get us to 'understand' some deeper doctrinal point.
If you are asking if I believe God told stories to convey important information to people about himself, about human nature, about his intentions for humanity and the rest of creation, sure, why not? Story-telling was the form of instruction humans first developed and was most natural in a predominantly oral culture. There are a lot of advantages in conveying truth through storytelling and I know of no reason why God would not use it.
Yes, Jesus spoke in parables, but the Scriptures are quite clear to explain to us that Jesus is speaking in parables and gives the reason why.
Not always. In fact, there are debates sometimes as to whether the parables are really fictional. Another point is that while the evangelists sometimes tell their readers that a story is a parable, there is no indication that Jesus informed his listeners that the story is a parable. Did Jesus tell the lawyer that the parable of the Good Samaritan was fictional?
Or take an Old Testament parable. When Nathan presented the case of the rich man who stole the poor man's lamb to feed a guest, he did not tell David it was fictional. Nor did David think it was fictional. That was only revealed to him after he had pronounced judgement on the rich man.
So the notion that the scriptures make clear what is and is not parable is simply not always true. Is the Song of Solomon history or parable?
Others will say that because there are metaphorical statements in the Scriptures that these must also be metaphors. But metaphors have contextual clues that identify them as such.
Unlike similes, which have the distinctive "like" or "as" metaphors often don't have contextual clues. Further, when Biblical scholars refer to these accounts as metaphorical. They don't mean it is a text chock-full of metaphors, but that the whole text taken as a unity is a metaphor.
Well, you are also making assumptions on facts not in evidence. Yes, one can say that a reference doesn't mean something is historical, but the opposite could also be just as true.
And that, of course, cannot be determined by further study of the text in question, but by other means.
Well, that would depend on whether you and God are in agreement as to what constitutes 'essential doctrine'.
Well, to clarify, I follow Christian Forums definition of essential doctrine, namely that set out in the Nicene Creed. If it is not in the Nicene Creed, I don't consider it essential. Does God agree? Who knows?
While He did give us that ability [rational understanding], we don't always use our God given abilities in ways that are pleasing to Him.
Indeed we don't, but we don't always use them in ways displeasing to him either, so that is not a solid basis for rejecting any or all knowledge discovered through these abilities.
gluadys said:
Can a farmer care for the corn in his field if he does not understand its need for good soil, nutrients, sunshine and rain and protection from pests?
I don't see why not. Farmers have cared for crops ever since the days of Cain and Able. Are you also saying that that must not be true since they didn't understand about how a plant actually uses the water and nutrients to grow.
Even Cain would understand that plants need water and sun and that they grow better when mulched with manure. His knowledge was real if incomplete and the modern farmer still uses Cain's knowledge along with more detail as to why these things benefit plants. Jacob didn't have modern knowledge about the way genes determine character traits and how heredity works, but he had sufficient knowledge to mate animals in a way that profited him. That comes from study of nature. It is not only modern knowledge that comes from observation and reason. People have been using their eyes and ears and other senses in conjunction with their brains for millennia. It is a way of learning that works, and it works because God provided us with these means of learning about the rest of creation.
I'm not necessarily in agreement that our having greater knowledge of the 'mechanics' of how things work, makes us more godly.
Neither am I. Please don't attribute that notion to me. Increase of information is certainly not correlated with an increase in holiness. One can be very knowledgeable, and still be very foolish, for wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing.
However, the point about knowledge is not whether it makes us good, but whether it is accurate.
Remember that the desire for greater knowledge was what God was keeping Adam and Eve from in His command that they not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I disagree that God put us on this earth to gain knowledge. God put us on this earth to have a relationship with Him. To be satisfied with what He provided. Adam and Eve were not satisfied to rest in the knowledge that God had given them all that they needed.
There was a bit more to it than that. First the tree was not simply a tree of knowledge, but of a specific kind of knowledge: the knowledge of good and evil. So the disobedience in relation to this tree is not a condemnation of factual knowledge per se or of increasing our knowledge of nature. Second, the serpent did not offer knowledge, but wisdom. And that is more appropriate to the nature of the tree. Knowledge of facts does not lead to knowledge of the wise use of what we know; it does not automatically lead to understanding of what is good to do and what is not. Finally, and probably definitively, the serpent promised they would be like God--having the wisdom of God to know good from evil, right from wrong.
So this story is really a moral story with the emphasis on human moral knowledge and not really about descriptive knowledge about the world around us at all. That sort of knowledge is never condemned in scripture---though becoming puffed up in pride because one has learned much is.
Well, I'm not in agreement with all of your conclusions in this. And I'm not sure that God agrees either. After all, it was Paul who warned us of adopting and accepting explanations based on the natural world.
Did he? I would like a citation on that.
Because the telescope does not produce hallucinations.
How do you know they don't? That would be a good explanation for why the information gleaned through telescopes gives us an age of the universe in billions of years when the earth is (according to some people's reading of scripture) only a few thousand years old
The conclusions drawn by what we see through a telescope are the work of man. The telescope is not at fault, man is.
How do you know the conclusions are wrong? Are you not just saying they are in conflict with what you understand scripture to say? Have you ever studied astronomy? Have you ever looked at the data yourself? Have you ever found a flaw in the logic that leads from the data, through the mathematics to the conclusion about the age of the universe? I expect the answer to all of these questions is "no". But that is what it would take to convince astronomers that their conclusions are erroneous.
One more thing to add here. Ever since the days of the Sumerians, astronomers have studied the stars in order to be able to make predictions. At first, the significant predictions, in their minds, were astrological predictions of future events. But however misguided their motives, they needed accurate information of the movements of the stars; they needed to be able to predict when Sirius would rise or Jupiter would align with Leo. That factual base is still the basis of astronomy, and it is now used to do things like guide the path of rockets through space. I do not see how one can claim that conclusions that accurately guide a manufactured vehicle through the solar system or track a comet's path suddenly become inaccurate when they determine the age of the solar system or the universe. Until you can show that the measurements and the mathematics are inaccurate or that the measurements and mathematics do not lead to that conclusion and why they don't, the claim that the data is being misinterpreted is nothing but wishful hope that you are not misinterpreting the nature of the scriptural accounts.
It is simply not enough IMO to believe the astronomers have come to erroneous conclusions because I want the conclusions to match up with the way I read the bible.
Again, you are misinterpreting the data. No one denies that they see what they see, only the conclusions drawn from what they see.
This is your claim and it needs to be substantiated. You cannot simply keep claiming that other interpretations of the data are possible. You have to show how other interpretations can be logically drawn from the data.
I am not a scientist. I don't examine the data personally or directly. But I have certainly read enough about what has been discovered and why the astronomers, physicists, geologists, palaeontologists, geneticists, biochemists and ecologists have come to the conclusions they have. Given the physical evidence, I really don't think they can come to any other conclusions.
And given that creation is made by God through the Word, and is recognized in our theology as a revelation from God--a revelation Paul appeals to--I think we Christians need to take this revelation in that spirit, let the chips fall where they may so far as the interpretation of scripture is concerned.
How do you think [nature] would be different? I'm confident that it is young, and yet the physical appearance is the same to me as it is to you.
Only because you are neglecting or possibly ignorant of some factual information about nature which has implications for how old the earth and life on earth is. For example, if there had been a global flood within the last few thousand years in which most terrestrial life was destroyed, it would show up as a genetic bottleneck in all terrestrial species, both plant and animal, and including our own human species, all pointing to the same time in history. There is no such simultaneous genetic bottleneck. There was a quite recent genetic bottleneck in cheetahs, only a thousand or so years ago I believe. There was a genetic bottleneck in our own lineage about 10,000 years ago when the human population was reduced to a population of only 30 thousand or so. Some other species show genetic bottlenecks at other times, but the data to support a recent universal reduction in all terrestrial species is just not there.
Here is another for you. In some deep lakes we find millions of varves, traces left of annual events, each varve representing one year. At what point can we say the years denoted by these varves become fictitious? Why would God create varves of years that never were since they preceded creation?
So, yes, a young but mature earth would have significant differences in physical appearance from an old earth and these are just two of many of those differences.
Just your repeated use of 'hallucinating' infers to me that you don't have understanding of what you are talking about. No one is claiming that anyone is hallucinating. The claim is just that they are not coming to the correct conclusions about the data that they have.
And until you provide evidence that the conclusions are incorrect, that claim does amount to a claim that the scientists are subject to mass hallucination.
Here's a challenge for you if you think that God gave you, and desires you, to use your mental faculties to get answers to everything.
I didn't make that claim. I don't think science can tell us everything. I do think science does very well at telling us about the physical world--although it hasn't told us everything about that yet either.
And I do think that when we take adequate care to defend ourselves against our own fallibility by requiring more than one or a few witnesses, and repeatable testing of hypotheses, (which is what the methods of science are all about) we can rely on sense and rational analysis of data to give us an accurate understanding of the physical world and its operations. Indeed, we all depend every day on information discovered in just this way. So we depend on this as reliable, accurate information.
How did Mary become pregnant? Now, I'm not asking for the biblical 'story'. Give me the science behind it.
There is no science behind miracles. That is one of the ways that miracles are identified. Science can only explain what happens in nature when it is not modified by miracles.
That, by the way , was the origin of the rule called Occam's Razor. William of Ockham was a 13th century monk trying to figure out if there was a way to distinguish miracles from non-miracles. He concluded that if we assume any natural event (such as seeing an apple in a bowl on your kitchen table) can be mimicked by a miracle (the apple was directly placed there by God, not picked from a tree), the answer is "no". So, if we are to make any headway in understanding nature, we must provisionally assume that God has not acted miraculously in this instance.
Ockham, of course, was not suggesting that miracles don't happen. He was just suggesting that we not assume they are happening all the time as a methodology. It is the approach to investigationg nature we now call methodological (as opposed to philosophical) naturalism and is practiced by all scientists of all flavours of belief and unbelief.
You can basically take any scientific conclusion and phrase it as "this is the best conclusion we can come to on the basis of this data, unless the nature of the data was distorted by a miracle." But since that is a given applicable to all scientific conclusions, it is not normally stated. Just assumed.
So as to Mary's conception of Jesus, given the data of normal human gestation, scientists would come to the conclusion that Mary was not a virgin when she conceived. And Christians believe that this data is not applicable to this event, because it was a miraculous conception.
