gluadys said:
That is a strength which theology can learn from science---not to be bound by traditional theories and interpretations when the evidence shows them to be wrong.
{You see, here is where a major problem lies. I do not hold a YEC theology because of tradition, but because of an honest, straightforward reading, study and understanding of the text.
And you are assuming that those who don't hold to a YEC theology are not reading it honestly or straightforwardly.
But that is not the case. Most of us are reading and studying the text in the most honest way we know how. Keep that in mind.
To me, a literary, rather than a historical, reading of Genesis 1-3 IS the most honest and straightforward way I can read it.
Scientific ideas must be interpreted,
Science is not unique in that. All ideas must be interpreted. For that matter all experience must be interpreted. Interpretation is what makes sense of experience, gives it coherence and meaning.
and many times this interpretation is skewed in an anti-biblical way because some do not want God to "get a foot in the door" so to speak. (We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin, "Billions and billions of demons," The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31
In the first place, that is a commonly used and misrepresented mined quote.
In the second place, Lewontin is enunciating a personal philosophy here.
In the third place, Lewontin is only one voice in the scientific community and not to be treated as necessarily representative of that community.
Science is fundamentally a game. It is a game with one overriding and defining rule: Rule #1: Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural.
R.E. Dickerson, J. Molecular Evolution, 34:277, 1992; Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith 44:137-138, 1992) }
That is the role of science. Science, qua science, cannot explain anything at all on the basis of miraculous causation. Miraculous causation gives a scientist no hypothesis, no plan of research, no possible experiment, no potential understanding of the regularities of nature--precisely because miracles lie outside the regularities of nature. So, though it may sound irreverent, the miraculous is useless to a scientist.
However, here we are coming back to the issue that most interests me.
How do you see the non-miraculous flow of natural events, which science describes so well, in relation to God.
When God is not producing those exceptional miracles, what is God doing in relation to the natural world?
You see, one of the things Christians have allowed certain atheists to assert is that "nature" and "God" are mutually exclusive. So when we learn that a rainbow is produced by the sun's rays hitting raindrops in the air at a certain angle, we seem to take the same stand as atheists and say "I guess it is not God who makes rainbows after all; it's a natural event."
I think this is the most profound theological error the church has made in the last 300 years. To say that because something is a natural event, it is not God's doing is a lie we have swallowed. And that is why we have developed a fear of acknowledging any explanation that is not a miracle.
Up until the early modern era, no one in Christendom would have thought "natural" meant "God did not do it." If anything their attitude was the reverse. Nature was that part of creation untouched by human activity where ONLY God was ruler. That is why they could see the natural world in its naturalness as revealing the presence of God.
Now, many Christians find it almost impossible to see God in what is natural, because they have assimilated the lie that God and nature are divorced and to call something "natural" means to exclude God from it.
This is a great harm we have inflicted on recent generations of Christian youth, and IMO we must find a way to reverse it. We must no longer accept the lie that "natural" excludes God, but return to the faith of our ancestors that the "natural" is expressly the place where we can find God.
As far as the rapist part you'll have to enlighten me. I'm not aware of a verse that forces a woman to marry her rapist.
Exodus 22:16. Notice that the father can refuse to marry his daughter to the rapist, but the daughter herself cannot. The law is repeated in Deuteronomy 22:28-29 without the proviso that the father may refuse. The language in Deuteronomy makes clear that this provision applies to rape.
btw, the persecution of raped women is just as pervasive today as ever. Right now a petition is circling asking Afghanistan authorities to arrest and prosecute four policemen who raped a young Afghani woman. If the rapists are not duly charged, culture expectations are that the young woman is so dishonoured that only suicide will redeem her good name.
Slavery, when looked at in the bible is not condoned by God.
Unfortunately, it is not condemned either. Did you see the recent news report of the 5000 bodies of slaves discovered in St. Helena Island?
Archaeologists find graves containing bodies of 5,000 slaves on remote island | World news | The Guardian
He does allow for type of indentured servitude, but during the times of the OT this was often offered by the servant. It was far safer for a person to be a part of a large, strong Jewish family, because God made specific provisions for their care. Also, if one reads Eph 5:22-33 in its proper context, and understands Genesis as it is written, it shows that women were never meant to be treated as property, but to be honored. Yes, women were said to be "ruled" by men, but if you look at what Adam did for Eve, we can see what it really means. Adam died and sacrificed all of mankinds future to protect Eve from the full of God's wrath. True, he did kind of pass the buck a little, but if he had simply not eaten the fruit, Eve would have been the only one to suffer the fall. If we read 1 Tim 2:14 we see this is the case.
You almost sound like you are still trying to justify slavery.
The point here is that there is not one word in scripture that condemns slavery.
You asked me a few posts back to list the top three verses that support evolution. In that case, there are none, because no biblical writer knew anything about evolution.
But a hundred years ago, proponents of slavery could & did challenge abolitionists to produce scripture verses that say slavery is wrong--knowing that there are none. Meanwhile pro-slavery literature at the time, (which included many sermons and lectures by Christan clergy) was crammed with scriptural references.
Yet today, we have came to the conclusion that no form of slavery is ever justifiable in God's eyes. How can that be if there are no verses to tell us that?
{The problem is, deep time, and macro-evolution are not 100% fact. They are theories and should be treated as such.
First they are facts. Second, theories are not immature facts. You are working with an inadequate view of what a theory, in science, is and does. A well-substantiated theory (and both deep time and macro-evolution are well-substantiated) is as close as you will get to certain knowledge in this life. Not a 100% certain, but close enough to make no practical difference.
We as humans haven't the first clue the answers to the questions of the universe, in fact we don't even know a fraction of the questions!}
True. That doesn't change the fact that we have very good answers to a small fraction of the questions.
I've seen this several times from folks, and try to help correct them if I can. The bible doesn't actually say the sun goes around the earth, but rather uses plain speech much like we do today. For instance we still use sunrise and sunset, yet these are not true scientifically. It's more a figure of speech based on observation of a person on a fixed point on the earth.
IOW it is not literal.
But there is nothing in scripture to tell us it is not literal. Or to tell us that the literal meaning is not how the writers and original listeners actually understood the actual motions/non-motion of the sun/earth.
Historically, everyone (except a few pagan Greek philosophers ignored by the church) did believe that the structure of the cosmos was accurately described by a literal reading of scripture that depicted the sun in motion and the earth fixed to foundations and not moving.
Although the bible doesn't use the very phrase "go round the earth" it does depict the sun moving across the sky in the day and hastening back to the place "to the place where it rises" Ecclesiastes 1:3. The literal meaning is clearly that the sun is in motion both day and night and that by each dawn it has come back to the same place it was the previous dawn. I don't see how you can get any other literal meaning from it.
Nor is there any dispute that the literal meaning was the accepted view of the actual situation from ancient times to the 16th century. That means that for over 1500 years, this was held to be both the biblical teaching and the scientific reality--just as YECS hold a recent creation in 6 days to be both the biblical teaching and the scientific reality.
When you get to the nub of it, is this not what YECs mean by "literally true"?
Now today, even YECs (all but a handful) agree that the literal meaning of the biblical "geocentric" phrases is not the scientific reality.
Yet, it hasn't damaged their faith or their relation to Jesus Christ. They haven't become unbelievers because they no longer couple the literal meaning with the scientifically discovered actuality. They still look to Christ as Crucified Saviour and Risen Lord. And they still read the scripture with reverence as the best guide to faith and godly life.
TEs think we should handle Genesis 1 the same way.
Why do YECs think this would be any more damaging to our faith than accepting the theory of Copernicus?
{Something to chew on as an idea I've had rattling around in my head, is another view of the "big bang". If God said let there be light, whose to say how far away that light originated from? The bible speaks of God "stretching the heavens" and current scientific theory suggest that the universe is spreading (stretching) so is it at all possible that the stars and galaxies were nearer to the earth and God stretched them at a rate of speed incalculable to us?
No, that is trying to read modern science into scripture (ironically, something TEs are often accused of in a condemnatory way). It is a form of eisegesis and is a defective mode of interpreting scripture.
We need to stick to what the words meant at the time they were written. Isaiah, for example, specifies that God stretched out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to live in. This suggests that he saw the heavens as covering the earth, not as a vast space in which the earth is one tiny planet encircling one star.
And besides, scripture also says that God spread out the earth. (Psalm 136: 6, Isaiah 42:5 & 44:24) What are you going to do with that scientifically?
Or how about the fact that even we as humans can speed up or stop light? Is it not possible that God simply sped the light up to reach us instantaneously? }
Anything is possible with God. That is why science doesn't deal in miracles. There is no telling.
But Christian theology has never taken this sort of thing seriously. It leads straight into last Thursdayism, brains-in-the-vat solipsism, IOW to the notion that God did not actually create anything real at all.
That is not where you want to go as a Christian is it?
So, we affirm the view that God really did create and that what he created is real, and therefore the evidence in creation has real meaning and is a valid witness to itself. There is nothing hidden, nothing going on behind the curtain. What you see is what you get and it is God's doing.
And that brings me back to my hobby horse. Do we not need to stop relying solely on miracles to see God in creation? Do we not need to learn again our ancestors' ability to see God in the ordinary daily wonders of nature? Do we not need to restore the harmony between the words "'God" and "nature" so that we never again treat "natural" as if it meant "God is excluded from this"?
I think this is very important. I thing atheism has done too good a job in promoting the idea that "natural" = "not God". So much so that a large part of the Christian community thinks "natural" is a cursed word, a word of denial of God and of scriptural truth.
I think we need to get cracking on reversing this attitude. It is not the biblical view. It is not the historic view of Christianity. But we can't confront atheism effectively until we ourselves are convinced that "natural" = "this is God's doing, not ours, and it is marvellous in our eyes".
