Alright QuantumFlux, I'll answer you from the bottom up.
You also neglect to talk about Jesus confirmation of the creation story in Mark 10:6. Don't say I am taking it out of context either, I know that Jesus was talking about marriage but he would not have said they were created in the beginning if they were not created in the beginning. He doesnt say the beginning of the creation of man, he says in the beginning of creation in general.
Well,
I didn't neglect it. You still haven't answered my (albeit simplistic and -shock!-
word-for-word literal) analysis in post #655. Arche ktisis can reasonably refer to man being the first thing created (wrong), the first / preeminent among all created (correct), created in times long ago (correct), the ruler among all created (possible - arche is translated as ruler in some other places). But you haven't shown how it specifically validates Genesis 1 in saying that man was created on the
sixth day, and not the first. The six day is neither the beginning of God's creative process nor the beginning of God's creation.
This ideal is highly simplistic considering the details presented in the first chapter. You couldn't do a commentary line by line in this chapter, because the point of making the earth on day one and hovering over the oceans is to show that the Sabbath is important.
The reason he made birds and the others on the 5th day was to show that the Sabbath is important.
O_O that's liberal theology! One school of it says that the entire Torah was written to support the application of purity rules. The implication of course is that if Genesis 1 was written to show that the Sabbath was important, then it was
not written to show us how the world was created! pwnage!
(unless, of course, you were being sarcastic. In that case my apologies.)
3. Scientifically
You're scientific evidence sucks. We have never observed a case of macro evolution in nature or in the lab but you assume it happens.
You're fossil record is worse, its misleading and horribly blown out of proportion
You said yourself that you don't know enough evolutionary science to give a detailed discussion of these alleged flaws. So I'll pass. Food for thought though:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH550.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH561_1.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH561_2.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH561_3.html
2. Philosophically
A. I have yet to see any good at all come from the evolutionary theory. It has bore no fruit at all. All it is, is mankind's attempt to explain a past that they will never know.
B. It can't be proven. Philosophy tells us that if we look out the window and see a tree when we turn our head away there is no guarantee that the tree is still there. Evolution is much like this accept that we never see it's tree, evolutionists just have to always assume that it is there.
Great. Another
maya philosopher. (Or were you the one with the video-game analogy? There are so many people I honestly can't remember.) For Christians to believe that God is rational and that God created the world rationally, then there has to be some sort of rational science governing the world that can be elucidated by man's rational mind patterned after God's. Evolution falls right out.
On the other hand, there have been several adverse philosophical consequences of creationism:
1.
Maya philosophy. Basically a philosophical idea that the entire world is simply God's mental construct and need not have any rational laws governing it; what we see to be consistent patterns of causation (i.e. science) are just coincidence. Although creationists never say this outright it lies behind many of their antiscientific conjectures. For example, radioisotopes do
not actually decay at a constant rate. The fact that we observe them doing so is just because of the fact that we didn't have Geiger counters during the Flood / Creation / any other of God's (imaginary) accelerated-nuclear-decay-to-wipe-all-evidence-of-a-young-earth episodes.
2. Body-Soul dualism. Creationists who emphasise that there was no physical death before the Fall have not thought about (or refuse to think about) the logistical problems of infinite physical populations. The idea that there is a physical death and there is a spiritual death and that both are completely and reducibly separable causes a lot of misunderstandings, most notably the hollow debate between evangelism and social justice.
3. Overliteralist-overreductionist approaches to Scripture. Or what I have recently learnt to name as the approach that "the Bible was written in 20th century English!" Because creationist arguments only acknowledge the original language when it supports them, while glossing over the parts that don't (like Mark 10:6's arche ktisis), new believers often get the sense that the original language is dispensable as long as one has the translation. The far greater danger is that they subsequently forget that the Bible was not written in a cultural vacuum, or in the context of our culture, but in the context of pre-modern culture, and this takes the bite out of much of it such as Jesus' parables that were far more revolutionary in His day than ours.
4. "Bibliolatry". Although I don't like this word, and I don't think the situation is as extreme as some others here think, I still feel that this is a problem. Christians look too much at the Bible which, although important, is supposed to point us
to Jesus Christ. An obvious example of this is that often people like to study the Epistles in-depth, learning a whole lot about what Paul thought of Jesus, yet don't take the time to examine and analyze the Gospels to understand what
Jesus Himself thought, leading to an artificial emphasis on right and meticulous knowledge of Scripture. (Not that this is not important, but the
knowledge of Scripture is not nearly as important as its
application in daily lives, for which the Gospels provide the evidence in how Jesus lived His life.)
5. Closed-minded, subjectivist approaches to hermeneutics. If the other side doesn't agree with how I read the Scriptures,
obviously there must be something wrong with how
they are hearing the Holy Spirit! This is blatant on this forum. Creationists do not see the need to understand how TEs come to a coherent understanding of the Scriptures that they can live by, and instead shut their ears and assume that TEs simply burn the pages they don't like. In essence this is a subjective judgment that only "my" (YEC) personal experience is authentic, while any personal experience that disagrees is not.
Yeah.
1. Theologically
This is number one, if evolution is true you would have to break the barrier first. If the word of God is the bible and it is inspired, then it's story of how the earth was created in Chapter 1 of Genesis is inspired. If it is inspired then it is true.
It's truth is reaffirmed with Jesus' views of when mankind was created in Mark 10:6. If it was not true that man was created in the beginning, then Jesus was being misleading and I do not believe that Jesus would be misguiding or giving half truths.
Again, just because we don't agree with you, you assume that we subconsciously burn our Bibles every time we read something we don't like. Maybe you could spend a little more time listening to how we read the Bible and arrive at a conclusion that can still support Christian living, instead of shouting that we're wrong.
Finally, a TE that admits that Genesis was written literally. Which it was and there is no reason to believe otherwise. This gets bad, you are comparing the Word of God with another religion when you compare it to chinese literature. There is a huge difference between the two.
Fine, you may not like the comparison. What about Jesus' parables? They were told literally, and yet we know from the social context of the day that they could not possibly have described actual, historical events.
If Genesis was written and was inspired and was literal, then was his inspiration false? If this was a myth written as literal then it was meant to explain the how of creation. If it was inspired then it is a lie from God about how things were created or It wasn't inspired.
God wasn't lying, God was accommodative. God saw His people stuck in the midst of a whole pantheon of idols and their worshippers and He desperately wanted to tell them that He was the Sole Creator and everything around them was merely created and not meant to be worshipped. Should He really have waited until they developed quantum physics and GR before He got His point across?
