Am I Therefore...

[busterdog]

I haven't read all four pages, so this might have been said already.

The "problem" with TE is not the scientific method, naturalism, or what God can and cannot do. The problem is instead Biblical innerracy. I don't meet a lot of YEC who say God couldn't have created through evolution, but they claim that is not what He told us.

There are many portions of the Bible that we do not take literaly, and I'm sure some TEs here could list some. However, not taking the first few chapters or first 11 chapters or worse literaly is a much bigger step for most Christians. Indeed, in many contexts the very definition of liberal is attacking Biblical innerracy, and while you all may have come to peace with the Bible being innerant and yet having this huge metaphorical history which blends cotinously into real history, most (conservative) Christians have not been able to do this. Not only is there a smooth contiuum between Adam and Abraham to David to Jesus, but Jesus himself speaks of these men (such as Adam) as real.

Apart from Biblical inneracy, I think the only real philosphical hang up people have is death before the fall. They don't want to believe God created a world where death and "suffering" (namely, disease, virus, predators, etc) were created before "Adam" sinned.

I write this as someone who has been thouraglly convined that common descent is a reality, at least as far back as the first mammals, and who has yet to come to terms with this reality and the Biblical narrative. But a reality it is, and one the church will have to deal with as it moves forward. I think 200 years from now, evolution will be so common place, and everyone will finally have understood WHY scientists know common descent is a reality, that it will be accepted in the Church, just as heliocentrism is now, and those Christians will find it silly that we were so hung up over it. But what they will have that we don't is the realization that evolution is a fact and can not be denied, just as we know the earth does revolve around the sun.

I think we need more folks like you -- willing to walk through and even argue the other side's position. Its that pause in recognition of a problematic issue that is often missing in many posts here.

 

[gluadys]

I haven't read all four pages, so this might have been said already.

The "problem" with TE is not the scientific method, naturalism, or what God can and cannot do. The problem is instead Biblical innerracy. I don't meet a lot of YEC who say God couldn't have created through evolution, but they claim that is not what He told us.

There are many portions of the Bible that we do not take literaly, and I'm sure some TEs here could list some. However, not taking the first few chapters or first 11 chapters or worse literaly is a much bigger step for most Christians. Indeed, in many contexts the very definition of liberal is attacking Biblical innerracy, and while you all may have come to peace with the Bible being innerant and yet having this huge metaphorical history which blends cotinously into real history, most (conservative) Christians have not been able to do this. Not only is there a smooth contiuum between Adam and Abraham to David to Jesus, but Jesus himself speaks of these men (such as Adam) as real.

Apart from Biblical inneracy, I think the only real philosphical hang up people have is death before the fall. They don't want to believe God created a world where death and "suffering" (namely, disease, virus, predators, etc) were created before "Adam" sinned.

I write this as someone who has been thouraglly convined that common descent is a reality, at least as far back as the first mammals, and who has yet to come to terms with this reality and the Biblical narrative. But a reality it is, and one the church will have to deal with as it moves forward. I think 200 years from now, evolution will be so common place, and everyone will finally have understood WHY scientists know common descent is a reality, that it will be accepted in the Church, just as heliocentrism is now, and those Christians will find it silly that we were so hung up over it. But what they will have that we don't is the realization that evolution is a fact and can not be denied, just as we know the earth does revolve around the sun.

I think your analysis is quite accurate. Let's look at a few of the reasons this line of thinking goes astray.

The problem is instead Biblical innerracy. I don't meet a lot of YEC who say God couldn't have created through evolution, but they claim that is not what He told us.

There are many portions of the Bible that we do not take literaly, and I'm sure some TEs here could list some. However, not taking the first few chapters or first 11 chapters or worse literaly is a much bigger step for most Christians.

Actually, the problem is not inerrancy in itself. It is the connection of inerrancy with literalism. It is the assumption that the literal meaning is the inerrant meaning that poses the problem.

As you say, literalists, along with the rest of us, do not take every passage of scripture literally. They seem to have no problem with passages that interpreted literally would point to geocentrism. They interpret these figuratively and still consider them inerrant. So why not the same with Genesis 1-11?

but Jesus himself speaks of these men (such as Adam) as real.

You can't actually tell that from what Jesus said about them. To describe Jesus speaking about them as "real" comes from a basic pre-supposition that they were "real". Jesus does not speak of them any differently than he does the Good Samaritan, and the only reason we accept that he is not speaking of someone "real" in this case, is that we pre-suppose that the character is not "real" outside the story.

If Jesus was referring to Adam or Noah as characters in a well-known story, how would he speak differently than what he does? Why would his references to such "story-characters" sound any different than references to historical figures such as King David?

It is our own pre-suppositions, not the form of Jesus' speech, that identifies certain references as being to "real persons" vs. "story characters".

Apart from Biblical inneracy, I think the only real philosphical hang up people have is death before the fall.

Yes, this is a biggie. I think this article deals with it nicely.

 

[dukeofhazzard]

\

That's a good thing

With all that power, could he also have made your rocks and stars merely look old, yet be young?

Of course he *could* have, He's God. But I have to ask myself, WHY? Why would he do that? It just doesn't make sense to me why he would do that. If it's young, let it look young, why make it look old??

 

[Assyrian]

And if we trust in God, why not believe what he shows us in the rocks he created, why not believe the rocks really are old?

 

[busterdog]

And if we trust in God, why not believe what he shows us in the rocks he created, why not believe the rocks really are old?

And thank him for so hideously decieving all generations before Darwin. Like YECs, they deserved it.

No where does scripture sanction this line of questioning.

 

[Assyrian]

And thank him for so hideously decieving all generations before Darwin. Like YECs, they deserved it.

That argument might work if the bible actually said how old the world was, or if there hadn't been people, both Jews and Christians in those generations who realised that the days in Genesis weren't meant to be taken literally:

Philo: "And on the sixth day God finished his work which he had made." It would be a sign of great foolishness to think that the world was created in six days.

Origen: Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars--the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that any one eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it.

Augustine: What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!

Of course if you want to use previous generations being deceived as an argument for literal interpretation, then you need to look at the generations before Copernicus who without a single dissenting voice believed the bible taught geocentrism.

No where does scripture sanction this line of questioning.

You mean believing God