For by him [Jesus Christ] were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible . . . he is before all things, and by him all things consist (Colossians 1:16-17).
Scientists are the current version of priests and science is their religion. Scientists are good at hiding their failures, like the mini-Ice Age they believed was coming in the 1970s. Just as now, when "global warming" was mocked, the word salad was changed to "climate change," never mind the climate is always changing. At least scientists don't demand moral and righteous living or condemn sin and thus their popularity.
Many people do believe that science is the only real truth, and that anything that is not scientific is by definition untrue. However, there is a vast range of human experience that science does not extend to. And, you are right, they have made seriously wrong predictions - and let's not forget when "follow the science" meant blind obedienceto government bureaucrats and experts with financial ties to Big Pharma.
There's a longer response, but I'm going to start with this, because I really think it's the crux of our disagreement:
"Do you think the truth of the resurrection from the dead followed by a day of judgment is essentially the same as the truth of Newton’s gravitational laws?" Newton's laws were thought to be definitive until the end of the 19th Century. They are still not incorrect, mostly, just incomplete. It's actually a good illustration of my overall point.
Yes, I think the higher spiritual truths are part of the same divinely created system. We don't know them all, but that's because our understand is incomplete, not incorrect. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be able to understand them all without divine assistance.
"Or do you see a difference between physical and spiritual realities?" Honestly, not really, God created the whole system, it hangs together. There's some logic to it that may simply be beyond us, but he's made an order that includes everything in it.
" Darwinism does not explain the first origin of life. It does not explain how unicellular organisms split into masculine and feminine genders" Explains with the definitiveness of 2+2= 4? You're right, no. It has made observations and theories that are consistent with what has been materially observed. Again, we are drawing what we can from something that you admit, unlike Genesis, comes to us directly from the hand of God, without a person having to write it down, translate it, etc.
Both of your objections have been answered, as have every objection that comes from Intelligent Design. Honestly, I don't see where ID people get off with their micro vs. macro evolution distinction. Once you've admitted a bit of natural selection, you're drawing arbitrary distinctions. Also, again I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?
"Do you say God’s narrative trumps humanistic objections, or do the humanistic objections trump God’s word?"
God's handmade products trump an interpretation of human-intermediated accounts of God's word and require that we take them into consideration in that interpretation. The theory of the Big Bang is not made as a product of armchair philosophy. It's careful weighing of evidence supported by logic and borne out experiments.
"Your faith in human reason unaided is a direct denial of many biblical teachings about the fallenness and the sinfulness of man." I consider your dismissal of it a denial that we're made in the image of God. Our reason is a diminished reflection of his, but it's not alien to him.
"logic and reason often lie" this is where we disagree. I think you're confusing reason about the material with reason about the moral. Of course, our minds are corrupt and biased when it comes to morality, how we should and shouldn't act. Conflicts of interest alone would make that the case.
When we are drawing conclusions regarding abstract scientific phenomenon on the other hand, we have a much better record, especially over the long term as errors are corrected. It has results both positive and negative, some of which, for instance, are the reason I and my mother didn't die at my birth. (A very difficult labor, I'm told, we both would have died if it had happened even 50 years before it did).
When you look at the universe, you draw certain conclusions from it. Those conclusions lead to others, and eventually, yes, you get to the Big Bang and Evolution. The only way you can start the process and not finish it is to engage in what Orwell called Crimestop:
I don't mean anything about you personally or people who believe differently than I do but I find these ways of thinking simply detestable. I consider it a form of taking the Lord's name in vain, he is behind all logic and reason and to deny them arbitrarily and dishonestly is to deny him.
No need for concern about the delay, I have somehow gotten involved in a number of conversations and am somewhat behind, but should be able to attempt a response within the week.
1/2 I don’t know if we have reached a stopping point or not. Perhaps we have, but as a rule I don’t like to leave comments unanswered. Moreover, you made a very serious allegation at the end about my taking God’s name in vain, which I feel obligated to respond to.
You say that the crux of our disagreement is that there is no fundamental difference between physical and spiritual realities, that God made the whole system and it all hangs together.
I don’t think that is the real crux of the disagreement.
I agree that God made the whole system, but there is something very important that you are forgetting. Anyone can see that Paris is the capital of France or that 5 x 9 = 45, or that if you touch a hot stove you will get burned, and so on. There is a vast and rich physical creation which is accessible to all whose minds and sense are functioning normally no matter what their beliefs.
When it comes to the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth, or the deity of Christ, or the life of the soul after death followed by a day of judgment and heaven and hell for all mankind, Christ’s death and resurrection, and other subjects, those areas of knowledge and belief on a different plane entirely.
Those and many other spiritual truths are not accessible to the senses or to the natural mind unaided in the way that secular knowledge is. In fact Paul plainly teaches that the human mind by itself cannot accept the truths of God: “But the natural man receiveth (receives) not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (2 Corinthians 2).
I don’t know if you believe that Paul was divinely inspired when he wrote his letters, perhaps you do. But he talks a lot about the barrier that prevents the natural mind from seeing the things of God. It is sin, the fallenness of human nature. This is why two of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, Plato and Aristotle, with all of their undoubted brilliance, could not come even remotely close to the spiritual realities of sin and forgiveness that are foundational to Christianity.
The real crux of the disagreement between us as I see it is sin, caused by the historic fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden, which Paul refers to in Romans 5:12: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”
It is this power and blindness and spiritual death of sin which prevent people from accepting the basic truths of God in Christ, and the reality of a spiritual afterlife in heaven or in hell.
Writing to Christians, Paul says in Ephesians 2: "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;
"Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:
"Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.
We also see in Ephesians 4:
"This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
"Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:"
People in their natural state are blind. Their understanding is darkened. They are alienated from the inner spiritual life of God. Their thoughts and minds are vain, when it comes to the things of God, although they may write great symphonies and make scientific discoveries.
This is why Paul says in Romans that “There is none righteous, no, not one,” and “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” This is confirmed in Genesis 8 where we read “the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.”
This is why Jesus said in John “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Without the Spirit of God we cannot perceive and live spiritual realities.
Thus, all of God’s creation is one great system, yet the physical creation is open to all whose minds and sense are working normally, but the spiritual truths of God must be apprehended in an entirely different way.
Thus you say:
"I think the higher spiritual truths are part of the same divinely created system. We don't know them all, but that's because our understand is incomplete, not incorrect. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be able to understand them all without divine assistance."
Our understanding is not only incomplete – it is corrupted and blinded by sin. And when someone says “There is no God at all,” or “There are many gods,” or “God created the world but he is so great and we are so small that it is foolish to think that he cares about us” – when someone holds these and yet other ideas, do you really want to maintain that there views are “incomplete, not incorrect”? That is not the view of the New Testament. It says people are not only wrong about God but actively hostile to God, and desirous of avoiding him.
About Darwinism, the next point in your comments, I denied your assertion that Darwinism deals with life as it finds it. In fact, Darwin’s theory leaves out and cannot deal with many important aspects of life (including the mystery of human consciousness, the first origins of life, the emergence of masculine and feminine genders from unicellular organisms etc). You respond by saying that Darwinism’s theories in these areas may not be definitive, as 2+2=4, but they are consistent with what is materially observed.
I deny that and think it is entirely wrong. Darwinism has no plausible scenario for the first emergence of life. Even an atheist like Thomas Nagel can see that the simplest forms of life are so fantastically complex as to make an accidental assemblage a logical impossibility. As to the division of one celled organisms into masculine feminine, there is no credible Darwinian scenario for that at all. How did highly complex and fully functioning masculine and feminine reproductive systems just emerge at the same time, in the same place, by accident and by coincidence.
You say that you are drawing from physical creation that comes directly from the hand of God, without considering the fallibility of human reason that has often been wrong about many things, especially when it is driven by a hidden spiritual agenda, to avoid God. Scientists are not detached and impartial thinking machines.
I am puzzled by this statement: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You have said more than once that God created the heavens and the earth. In the previous paragraph you said that the physical creation “comes to us directly from the hand of God.” And what is that if not intelligent design?
You say my objections to Darwinism have been answered – and they have been answered: with conjectures, assertions, and speculations. And there are no plausible assertions about how the masculine and feminine reproductive systems just emerged somehow by accident, at the same time and place, as fully operational systems of great complexity.
I am surprised you do not see the difference between macroevolution and microevolution. Proving that finch beaks vary in size does not explain how finches originated in the first place.
God's handmade products trump an interpretation of human-intermediated accounts of God's word and require that we take them into consideration in that interpretation. The theory of the Big Bang is not made as a product of armchair philosophy. It's careful weighing of evidence supported by logic and borne out experiments.
2/2 Saying that evolution or a big bang explain the cosmos and life as we know it is a human interpretation. The Genesis account is God’s explanation of what was done. You say it was human intermediated and therefore unreliable? Human theories are also human intermediated. Einstein’s theory of relativity does not come directly from God or from creation, but was articulated by human mediation.
That there was some sort of strange initial occurrence instead of an eternal universe does have evidence, logic and experiments. But what if the Big Bang was the direct result of God’s creating something out of nothing? And who can tell at this distance what phases or stages the Big Bang might have gone through? But for me the word of God to Moses has more credibility when it comes to origins which have never been seen in a laboratory. Of course, in the ordinary workings of physical science – the speed of light, the mass of an electron, whatever, Moses did not discuss those things and science can provide useful information.
You consider my concern about the limitations of reason because of human sinfulness to be “a denial that we're made in the image of God. Our reason is a diminished reflection of his, but it's not alien to him.”
How does saying that reason has limits, that it is fallible and often wrong, a denial that God made us in his image? We have powers of reason, will and emotion like no other creature on earth because we did not evolve from the lower animals but were created in the image of God. Hence we can understand something of God (though not completely) and have communication with him.
But, our reason is in many ways alien to God, and the Bible even uses a related word, saying that we have been alienated from God by sin. Adam and Eve in the Garden could speak to God directly and see and know him without doubt, but they lost that in the fall, and we have lost it.
“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4).
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you do not believe this. This is why you have such confidence in human reason to explain mysteries that have never been seen by the human eye and are not subject to controlled observation and experiment. Those who say “There is no God, and the universe and all that is in it came into being without God, we have no need of God” – such people are blind, their understanding is darkened, and their ignorance has alienated them from God. As Paul says elsewhere, “Professing to be wise, they became fools,” and, in the Psalms, “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” Now, they can design buildings, compose music, discover life saving medicines, be kind to their neighbors – but on the deepest spiritual level they are separated from God and only Christ can reunite them.
You say “I think you're confusing reason about the material with reason about the moral. Of course, our minds are corrupt and biased when it comes to morality, how we should and shouldn't act. Conflicts of interest alone would make that the case.” But people can be wrong about the material as well. A doctor can be wrong and misdiagnose an illness. The courts can be wrong about the evidence and condemn an innocent man. An airplane pilot can make a navigational error. And when it comes to the emergence of the cosmos out of nothing, that has never been seen and all speculations about it by secular science are exactly that – speculations. And even if there was a big bang, did nothingness just explode or was there some pre-existent matter? If the latter, what was it and where did it come from? And how could a mindless, undirected explosion create such fantastic intricacy, rationality and beauty? Even the theory of a big bang with some supporting evidence leaves many questions unanswered.
About “drawing conclusions regarding abstract scientific phenomenon on the other hand, we have a much better record, especially over the long term as errors are corrected. It has results both positive and negative, some of which, for instance, are the reason I and my mother didn't die at my birth . . . “
The procedures by which a woman gives birth to a child are not abstract phenomena. They have been studied and observed countless times, over and over again. That is a very far cry from speculations about the origins of the universe, which is on a completely different level altogether. It does not follow that because we can study and come to a good understanding of normal, everyday events that we can constantly observe, therefore all of our imaginary speculations about things that have never been seen are equally valid. I don’t accept your argument that science has done a good job of explaining everyday material reality, and so all of its wild guesses and speculations are therefore equally valid.
“When you look at the universe, you draw certain conclusions from it.” Yes, and what if those conclusions are wrong? For many centuries educated men of science and philosophers looked at the universe and drew the conclusion that the sun revolved around the earth. They were wrong. Your faith in science is misplaced. Science has limits. And even the Big Bang theory raises a lot of explanations as I just mentioned, and is very far from being an end-of-discussion development.
You say “The only way you can start the process [of making observations and drawing conclusions] and not finish it is to engage in what Orwell called Crimestop and Doublethink.”
I think those things as Orwell described them do not apply here. Science has limits. It is limited to what can be known and observed and experimented on and speculated on in controlled conditions. We can know a lot using scientific methods, but science cannot tell you if God exists, or if the soul lives after death, or how the earth was first positioned at exactly the right distance from the sun with its delicate and sophisticated biosphere.
I could say that atheistic scientists are guilty of Crimestop in refusing to concede that God spoke the created universe into existence out of nothingness, and that they deny the existence of God not because of reason, facts, logic or evidence, but because they have an innate hatred of God and fear of him because of their guilty consciences, or because they prefer to imagine that they are fully autonomous, accountable to no one – as if their preferences equaled the secret foundations of the universe.
And about Doublethink, the link you gave includes this from Orwell: “to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.” Here he is plainly talking on a social and a political level, not a metaphysical or a scientific one. This is people believing what they are told to believe even when they know it is not true, like Communists saying in the Soviet Union that Marx was an infallible social scientist because it was required of them, when they knew deep down that his bogus theories would never bring prosperity and freedom to the Soviet Union.
Also, I have read that Orwell was an agnostic. If so, he was blind and dead in sin, and his books have political relevance because politics is a reality accessible to us all, but when it comes to questions of God and the ultimate meaning of life or the first origins of the cosmos his opinions are completely irrelevant.
You find those ways of thinking detestable – but they have nothing to do with belief in the literal truth of the Bible. And, don’t forget, every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell.
Then you say God is behind all logic and reason – but surely you meant to say he is behind all true logic and reason. Surely God is not behind false reason and logic, as in saying “So and so cheated me in a drug deal, so I am going to drive by his house and spray it with machine gun bullets.” That is very definitely logic, but it is sinful logic, because Christ said “Do not return evil for evil.” Or, if someone says “The cosmos came into being because of random and natural processes only, because there is no God,” that also is a form of logic. But it is false logic, because the premises “there is no God” and “material reality is the only reality” are lies, such as were taught by the liar Marx and his disciples Lenin and Stalin.
God is not behind all reason and logic. There is false reason and logic, which come from sin and spiritual blindness.
Finally, you say “I consider it a form of taking the Lord's name in vain, he is behind all logic and reason and to deny them arbitrarily and dishonestly is to deny him.”
To deny lies and mistaken philosophies is not to deny God or take God’s name in vain, because Christ teaches that Satan is the father of lies. It does not deny God to deny the false and illogical pseudo-philosophies by which Satan deceived people and keeps them into darkness. To deny National Socialism, for example, is not to deny God, even though there was logic and reason behind it. “If the blond, blue-eyed Aryans are the master race then lesser races should be made to serve them.” That is logic, but based on a false premise.
Similarly, saying that “The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge” is a sort of logic, but it is based on the false premise that there are no other modes of knowing beyond science. Hence, it is a lie, and denying it is not denying God.
Would you like to discuss what you actually believe about the New Testament and Christ?
Sorry, I've been busy for the last few weeks, and I also must apologize if I came off as caustic before. I don't think you're trying to gaslight me, but I have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, and I have felt that certain other YEC people are trying to do it, so I may have over reacted.
"When it comes to the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth, or the deity of Christ, or the life of the soul after death followed by a day of judgment and heaven and hell for all mankind, Christ’s death and resurrection, and other subjects, those areas of knowledge and belief on a different plane entirely."
Again, I actually do think that this is the Crux of our disagreement. I don't agree that these areas of knowledge and belief are on any sort of different plane. I believe that at the end of it all, God will bring a final reconciliation between science and revelation. Revelation 22, I think, speaks not only of the end of the curse but the end of the separation between the spiritual and the material. "They need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light."
"But, our reason is in many ways alien to God." How? All we are, the good, the bad, and the ugly is a product of his will. It's true that he's cut us off in a spiritual sense from himself, which is what the passage from Ephesians that you citied means, but he did not cut us off in any sense from his creation that we inhabit. If anything, he threw us into it. Saying that any aspect of us is alien to him is Gnosticism again. Even Satan is God's creation.
“I am puzzled by this statement: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You have said more than once that God created the heavens and the earth. In the previous paragraph you said that the physical creation “comes to us directly from the hand of God.” And what is that if not intelligent design?”
Guided evolution is what I was gesturing at there, I can’t prove or disprove it, but it’s certainly a possibility.
"You find those ways of thinking detestable – but they have nothing to do with belief in the literal truth of the Bible. And, don’t forget, every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell."
I'm sorry, but this entire paragraph is simply false. There is no way not to be blunt here. Genesis 1 has no eyewitness, all of the New Testament does. We have considerable physical evidence that speaks against a literal reading of Genesis, for the Gospels we have nothing that gives any indication that they didn't happen other than objections from people who say such events aren't possible. We've seen the effect of all of the events of the New Testament on History, even if you're a non-believer, you clearly have to admit something rather significant happened around those events. The epistemic status of the Gospels compared to Genesis aren't close, they just aren't and if you won't admit that we can stop right here because there's nothing more to say. As for the Resurrection of the Dead, Judgement Day, etc. those haven't happened yet, Creation undeniably has, so saying that the same objections can be raised to these than to a literal reading of Genesis is just completely nonsensical.
"explain mysteries that have never been seen by the human eye"
That we’ve seen things so far away that, knowing what the speed of light is, we can surmise that the universe in much older than YEC’s say it is, but you demand we refuse to draw that very simple conclusion.
We've observed natural selection at work and you demand that we don't draw the conclusions about life in general that naturally follow.
This is a demand that I engage in Crimestop and Doublethink and I’m sorry, but it’s one that I really must try very hard to not be angry about. To make my Orwell example clear here, in my view YEC Christians are the Party, they are demanding I deny what is remarkably clear for purposes that are clearly more political than spiritual. You’ve admitted that Christianity doesn’t require a literal reading of Genesis, so what am I supposed to draw from the fact that it keeps being pushed as part of Christianity?
(As for Orwell, a nonbeliever can still say things that are obviously true about the nature of truth, so him being an agnostic doesn't bother me when I judge his words. Also, he died too young, there were many intelligent men of his background, time, and country that had a journey similar to his that ended in Christianity, so who knows? One thing that I hold Orwell in high regard for is his absolute insistence that there can't be any sort of integrity, liberty, compassion, or courage without first insisting on one's right to think and speak truthfully. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.")
You point out questions that science hasn’t answered definitively and/or not to your personal satisfaction as if that’s proof that the overall theory is wrong and yours is correct. For one, thing, having unanswered questions about is how science works every question answered, will also bring forth another question; and for another, if you wish to come up with a better answer you must have a theory better supported by evidence. I’ve looked at the attempts to do that, to prove YEC through the scientific method; and I’m sorry, but they’re a joke. The same level of scrutiny you put evolution under using scientific objections would shatter YEC like a bomb inside a watermelon if you dared subject YEC to the same process.
You also continue to reference claims by atheists that I haven't made, and I don't understand why.
“The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge”
I've never said that, and in fact, only a few scientists would say that. Even if they believe that the universe came into being by purely naturalistic means, they often agree that these means might simply be beyond any Human understanding. Even many of the ones who say they believe that actually sort of don’t. Ask them how they know that they love their kids or something like that and they won’t point to science.
The fact that some (and by no means all) scientists are atheists is meaningless. The fact is that evidence that the Big Bang and Evolution happened, simply doesn't have any bearing on the question of God's existence or his causation of creation. They've made a lot of progress answering the questions of “What?” and “How?” but their opinion of “Who? “ and “Why?” is a sperate matter entirely.
Honestly, it's hard not to blame YECs, at least partially, for many scientists being atheists. Could you listen to anything, even the Gospels, from people who insisted that you were wrong and malicious about something you had studied extensively and were also dead right about?
Assume for a second that my position is correct: God created the universe by the Big Bang theory and man through Evolution: if so, where would what YECs have done put them spiritually? IN a very precarious place, I would think. God knows our hearts, but some of them, who had honest doubts about what they were pushing, would have a lot to answer for.
"But people can be wrong about the material as well." A person can be mistaken about the material, they're only wrong about the material if they stick to their mistake despite dispositive evidence to the contrary, which is what you're demanding I do here, this is precisely Orwellian and quite frankly, tyrannical. I'm telling you that for someone who has studied the issue, what you demand is impossible unless I refuse to draw a logical conclusion because I don't wish to, not out of any sense of honest inquiry.
You just keep demanding that, despite having no eyewitnesses (as the Gospel did), despite having considerable evidence to the contrary, and despite having at least a plausible theory as to why God would reveal the creation to the Old Testament prophets as allegory; we disregard all of that. I seriously can't understand YEC people about this. We are talking only about God's means and methods, not his existence or the fact that he is the uncaused cause, the Alpha and the Omega, and the creator. You keep erecting and maintaining this considerable barrier to bringing intelligent people into the faith and I just don't get why. I'm forced to conclude it's some sort of clerical power grab because that's all that's left. This is the consequence when you deny truth revealed by God's creation, it is denying God in some sense. God knows your heart, so I'm not your judge; but the effects of YEC, even when it's a sincerely held belief cause so much harm to our culture and Christianity.
Your last comment was 1636 words. My reply is over 4,000, and I am not finished yet. Perhaps I should edit it and try and cut it down, but I have spent a lot of time on it already, and have not even gotten to your last five paragraphs, which I want to finish tomorrow. So, I will go ahead and post what I have so far, 3 posts tonight, and the 4th tomorrow. Maybe I could have been more brief if I had started with some of the main ideas at the end, but I just worked through it in order and so was not as concise as I might have been. ********************
(1/4) No, I am really not trying to gaslight anyone. I am a true believer that God exists, and that he created the world. But, some Creationist approaches that are weak and unconvincing. There are different approaches.
Some will try to prove that biblical creation is consistent with modern science, but I maintain that it is a phenomenon completely outside the range of science. This leads to conversations about the nature and limitations of science. This applies of course not only to the creation but to the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, the final resurrection form the dead, and many other such questions.
You say “this is the crux of our disagreement,” and assert these areas of knowledge and belief are on the same plane, and that God will bring about a final reconciliation between science and revelation.
Actually, I believe there is not conflict at all between divine revelation and pure science. There is no contradiction between “God created the heavens and the earth by his spoken word alone” on the one hand, and Newton’s law of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, biological knowledge about the workings of the body, and many other basic, undisputed facts.
The perceived conflict comes from those who adopt materialism and naturalism as a starting point. They do this as a matter of will and personal choice, not because they are compelled to it by unanswerable logic or scientific evidence. So, when they say “God did not create the world, it came about by strictly natural causes,” this appears to be a conflict between science and religion, but in fact it is a conflict between religion and materialist philosophy, which is very different.
So part of the apparent conflict is caused by those who think that because they are scientists, ergo all of their opinions about religion and philosophy are necessarily scientific. But the opinions of secular scientists about art, literature, and politics are not “science” at all, but just the personal opinions of those speaking outside of their fields of expertise. The same is true of religion.
Another source of confusion is claiming things to be true when in fact they are not. There is no conflict between religion and the established theories of Newton, Einstein, Copernicus, etc. but there is a conflict between religion and Darwin because the Darwinists insist on making metaphysical claims that go far beyond their theories. “The human race came into being by an impersonal, purely materialistic process that had no definite end in mind” – again, that is not scientifically proven, it is not a scientific fact.
Even if Darwinism were true, which I don’t believe it is, there are some theistic Darwinists who claim that Darwinism is true, a scientific fact, but it was started and is directed by God, who is guiding mankind to a certain end. There is no scientific evidence against this.
I won’t go into all the arguments here, but Darwinism conflicts with revelation in a way that proven theories do not, because it is not yet a proven theory and in fact has many holes in it. It is also commonly used as an argument for atheism, and is a serious weapon against Christianity.
You refer to Revelation 22. That passage, as I understand it, does not necessarily mean the end of the separation between the material and the spiritual. Admittedly, this is obscure, so I don’t want to be too dogmatic, but it does say in Revelation 21 there will be a new heavens and a new earth. That might be a real physical place, with mountains, valleys, birds, flowers and animals (“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb”).
If there is some kind of material reality, it will certainly be very different from anything we can imagine, it might be much more clearly separated from the spiritual, and not blurred as it is in our earthly existence. Maybe the distinction between God and his creation will be sharper and clearer.
It says in chapt. 22 that there will be no more night. So, there will be no need of a sun or of a candle, but there will still be some kind of light, only emanating directly from God. Also, the human bodies of those in heaven will be glorified and shine like the sun (Matthew 13:43). So there will be aspects to reality there we do not comprehend.
About our reason being alien to God, you ask how that can be, if we are the product of his will. If parents bring a new child into the world, that child is their creation, but he still may grow up and do things contrary to their will. Of course, my comparison falls short in that God is omnipotent and has much more power in a way parents do not, but Christ often used that comparison (as in the parable of the prodigal son, or of the man who had two sons, one of which obeyed him while the other did not).
So, the traditional interpretation, which I think is the right one, is that God created the first man and the first woman in a state or perfection. They had no need of theology or bible study, they could communicate with God directly. But, they were not created as robots who had no choice but to worship and believe and obey God forever. He gave them a real power of choice and a simple test. They exercised that power, disobeyed God, and this severed the former relationship.
Now we as their descendants share that same separation and are in our natural state alienated from God by sin, by ignorance, and by all of the negative emotions described in Romans 1.
Two verses that refer to that alienation are Ephesians 4:17-18: “as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:” and Colossians 1:21: “And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled.”
So, we are still God’s creation and we inhabit his creation, and he still has a concern for us and interest in us, but we are alienated because of our sin and ignorance. Christ referred to the evil that comes out of our hearts (Matthew 5:19).
Gnosticism asserted there was some kind of alienation also, but they described the alienation differently and also presented a different means of overcoming it (their own secret knowledge instead of the teachings, work and life of Christ). So Gnosticism did use some Christian terms but in a different way.
True, Satan is God’s creation as you say, and here we have to simply say that it is a mystery. God, though good himself, in some way allowed evil to come into being and allowed it to come into the world, when he could have prevented it. Paul suggests in Romans 9, only raising the possibility, “What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.”
And we don’t need to be embarrassed by the word “mystery.” Until the age of modern physics how the sun worked was a complete mystery, and still is to those who have not studied nuclear physics. The workings of our own minds are mysteries. It says in Romans 11, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?”
Next – I am following your comments in order – you explained one of your comments that puzzled me: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You said it referred to guided evolution, which I mentioned earlier. That would still be some sort of intelligent design, as you say, and people do believe in it. There is no scientific proof against it. The only problem from the Christian point of view is that it contradicts the Genesis account.
As you probably know, there are some Christians who believe the Genesis account is not literal historical fact, but still believe in the Christ of the New Testament. To me, that is a bad mistake, and opens the door to many problems.
In connection with this, I asserted that “every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell."
I don’t believe that is a false comparison at all. First of all, many people deny that the New Testament was written by eyewitnesses, and assert it was written long after the fact. Also, Luke and Mark got their information from eyewitnesses, Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, but still they needed the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to write an infallible message – otherwise there would have been human errors, which would call all the Gospel narratives into question because we could never know where all the errors were.
(2/4) Moses got his information directly from God himself. It was by direct revelation that he was able to write what had occurred. Thus, he got his information from a reliable source, just as many history books today are written long after the fact by people who were not eyewitnesses themselves but rely on reliable sources.
And, you are right, the events of the New Testament are more clearly fixed in a time of recorded human history, so even the atheists are compelled to admit something must have happened there and then. But then in unbelief they proceed to assign completely false versions of and explanations for what happened. The miracles never happened, the apostles made them up, it was a superstitious age, many other religions had some of the same ideas, people were hungry for meaning and classical philosophy was inadequate, etc. etc.
So, the fact is clear that something happened, but a real understanding of what that was is revealed only to faith. Even eyewitness testimony is denied by those who refuse to believe it. And, is it not also evident that something significant happened at the creation of the world?
True, the physical events in Genesis are more fantastic and incredible to the natural mind than the stories of a man walking around in Roman Palestine. However, that Christ was born without a human father seems completely incredible and impossible to many. So do his miracles, his sacrificial death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and the claim that he was God in the flesh (“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Colossians 2:9).
To assert that all of those aspects of Christ’s life and work are incredible and impossible, is the same sort of unbelief that states God creating the entire universe and all that is in it by his spoken word alone is impossible.
And surely the God who could simply speak the galaxies and the solar system into existence could do all sorts of things in a manner and an order that might not be agreeable to us.
About the evidence that speaks against a literal reading of Genesis, that is all reading backwards from the known into the unknown. It is based on the supposed uniformity of causes in a closed system. It assumes that the forces we see today must have been the same forces that were operative them. But all speculations about the origins of the earth on that assumption are inherently flawed.
Thus, saying "Christ could not have done those miracle because miracles do not happen" is exactly the same sort of argument used to say “God could not have created the world because only material causes known to science are operative in the world.” So, I think the epistemic status of the creation account in Genesis is closer to the epistemic status of Christ walking on water or rising from the dead than you think. After all, Christ walking on water is contrary to scientific law and a direct contradiction of all our experience.
You say that “the Resurrection of the Dead, Judgement Day, etc. those haven't happened yet, Creation undeniably has, so saying that the same objections can be raised to these than to a literal reading of Genesis is just completely nonsensical.”
The virgin birth of Christ and his miracles and his resurrection have happened. His return in glory as God manifest and his sitting on a throne of judgment have not yet happened. Yet, atheists deny both those past and future propositions at the same time and for the same reasons – “Material causes known to science are the only reality, and nothing outside of them is possible.”
If someone says “X lied repeatedly in the past so he cannot be trusted in the future either” they are applying the same reasoning to past and future events.
People who say “The world could not have been created in the manner described in Genesis because there is no God and matter and energy are the only realities” can and do apply exactly the same logic to the events of the New Testament. “Christ could not be God come to earth born of a virgin and conceived by the Holy Spirit because the materialistic scientific worldview is the only reality and anything outside of that is impossible.”
But we have seen stars being formed, so I can’t insist the sun was created differently?
I looked at the link, and noticed a few problems with it. First, the narrator expressed some doubt when she said “How stars are born and how they interact with their environments are two big questions in astronomy today.” So their appears to be an element of doubt. And, we did not see a star being formed in the video, we saw what might be a star someday in a few million years according to current theories.
But what is really significant is that the formation of stars in a system that has been created by God to run according to scientific law is completely different from the manner in which the first stars emerged into being out of non-being. It is easy to explain how a tree develops from a seed, but how the first trees were formed is an entirely different question. The first emergence of the sun and of the galaxies out of nothing is a process that has never been observed in a laboratory, never been repeated in controlled experiment and hence is completely outside of the realm of real science.
As to the appearances of the age of the universe based on the speed of light, I say that applies to a created system, but what factors and forces might have been operative when the universe was first created or come into being no one knows. Assuming Adam was created as an adult, and not as a helpless little baby - if someone could have interviewed Adam five years after the day of his creation, and if they had asked him “How old are you?”, and if he had said “I am five years old,” and if they had responded “that is scientifically impossible, it is clear that you are older than five,” he would have said “Your scientific calculations are totally irrelevant and completely wrong because I was created in a manner completely unknown to science. I appear to be much older than I am.”
About natural selection at work, I suppose you are talking about variations in the size of finch beaks or different breed of dogs due to selective breeding. Those are variations within existing species, which occur all of the time and no one denies it. But it does not explain how the first birds were created, how new species appeared, which is not microevolution but macroevolution. And variations within existing species does not demonstrate how the species came into being in the first place.
This is not crimestop or double think at all – and how do you think the stars and the world and the universe and the first human beings came into existence? Did God create them? If so, he surely must have created them in ways unknown to you and to anyone of us. But if God did not create them, but they are only the results of natural causes, then what becomes of God?
About comparing YEC to an Orwellian political party, that is very different. It is people who demand that scientific criteria are the only valid criteria and everything must fit into a humanistic paradigm that are pushing a false view of reality and insisting people deny that God that has made them.
I am not demanding that you deny what is remarkably clear, because the origins of the earth and the universe are hidden from science. Find a video on how the first star came into being and it will be purely speculative and entirely imaginative.
And, my reasons are spiritual, not political. I am not trying to save America or increase the size of my church. I am saying God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and that he did it in ways beyond science and unknown to science. How can you deny that and believe in God at all? Or do you believe in a God that can only work within the materialistic universe that he created and is bound to his own laws?
I admitted that Christianity does not require a literal reading of Genesis because someone can be saved without having read Genesis at all. When I first read the four gospels at the age of 24 I was convinced of their truth and of the deity of Christ and Genesis did not even cross my mind. So, it is not part of the essential salvation message, but that does not mean it is not important. Much of the Christian worldview depends on it, and people who subject to faith in science at that point are subordinating faith to human reason, and subordinating God to human reason, as if he may only do what the scientists allow, as if science is the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is true - but it is not the ultimate arbiter. Neither is human reason.
Paul and Christ refer to Genesis as the true word of God. Paul uses the fall of Adam and Eve to explain how sin entered the world, and if his explanation of the origins of sin is clear, how can we have any confidence in his remedy?
I am not pushing it as essential to salvation, but I am pushing it as essential to a stronger and deeper faith in God and in his word, and as essential to transcending the false secular humanist paradigm that makes exaggerated claims about areas beyond its comprehension.
About Orwell, as you say an agnostic can say true things, but he was ignorant of God in Christ, did not really understand the meaning or the end of life, and did not know God. Have you ever heard it said that “Orwell was a one-eyed man in the land of the blind”? Compared to all of the stupidity around him he was in some ways very insightful, but he was spiritually blind and alienated from Christ by the darkness that was in his mind. So, he has some political insights, but the truths of God in Christ were completely unknown to him.
(3/4) True, Orwell might have come to Christianity as you said, who knows? He maybe even had a real revelation of Christ shortly before he died. But 1984 and Animal Farm and his essays show nothing of Christ.
True, we do need to have the right to speak truthfully – and when it comes to Christianity people should be able to freely express their doubts. I don’t advocate anyone being thrown in jail for denying Genesis, and we should be open and honest with God. After all, he knows all of our doubts and thoughts anyway. Job said some very hard things about God (“He laughs at the destruction of the innocent”) but in the end he was commended for his honesty.
About attempts to prove YEC by the scientific method being a joke, I agree. At least I agree they are false and unconvincing. But that has never been my approach. I do not need to subject YEC to the same process I apply to Darwin because I have rejected scientific creationism form the outset and so never bothered about it. But at least YEC is correct in its basic assertion, that “God created the heavens and the earth” whereas Darwin is false from the start. All of the varieties of life on earth did not come about in the manner he described.
Do you know about the problem of the genetic mechanism? Physical variations require sophisticated alterations of highly complex genetic codes, all by accident and blind chance. This is a scientific impossibility. Modern genetics destroys Darwinism. Imagine all of the highly complex changes in genetic coding required to change the nerves, skin, muscles, and bones of a fish’s fin to turn it into an amphibian’s leg- all happening at the same time, and all happening by blind chance. Impossible, unless you believe in theistically guided evolution.
About questions science hasn't answered definitely, you need to be more mindful of the limitations of science. Science cannot even tell you whether or not it is wrong to put poison in the coffee of your rich uncle who has made you his sole heir.
The scientific process works well for the material creation. When it comes to God and his hidden working science has nothing to say.
About my quoting claims made by atheists that you yourself haven’t made, my purpose in doing that was to show that the same objections that are made to Genesis are also made to Matthew, Mark Luke and John. You say that is different because the content of the Old and New Testaments is different, but the underlying motivation is the same – that any spiritual reality is unreal and all spiritual narratives, Old Testament or New are false, and for the same reasons.
I present the common secularist claim that “The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge.”
You did not say it, but it is implied in your assertion that the creation of the world and the universe can only have come about in a manner agreeable to science. Is my inference wrong? Do you admit that the world and the universe might have come into being in a manner completely unknown to science?
Not many scientists are so direct about these things, maybe for personal reasons, but here is an example of what I mean from a prominent scientist:
The following quote is from biologist Richard Lewontin in his review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, published in the New York Review OF Books, January 9, 1997:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Also, anyone who says that the universe came into being by purely naturalistic means, but those means are at the same time beyond any human understanding, is being ridiculous. How can they take anything beyond human understanding and then say God could not have been involved in it? They say that NOT because of scientific facts, reason, logic or evidence, but ONLY because of their a priori philosophical commitment to materialism. They do not want there to be a God and build a towering edifice upon that foundation of sand.
The fact that they do not point to science when it comes to loving their kids shows the inapplicability and the irrelevance of science to the most basic aspects of everyday life – so how can it claim to limit the creation of the universe to scientific principles that cannot even explain human love?
Surely a philosophy that is inadequate to explain such a basic manifestation of life as love can't be used to explain the cosmos as a whole. Thomas Nagel, a secular philosopher, makes that point in his book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False." He wants to find some way to account for non-material aspects of human consciousness without giving up the secular paradigm. But we read the explanation for human consciousness in Genesis: "God breathed into Adam the breath of life."
Scientists are the current version of priests and science is their religion. Scientists are good at hiding their failures, like the mini-Ice Age they believed was coming in the 1970s. Just as now, when "global warming" was mocked, the word salad was changed to "climate change," never mind the climate is always changing. At least scientists don't demand moral and righteous living or condemn sin and thus their popularity.
Many people do believe that science is the only real truth, and that anything that is not scientific is by definition untrue. However, there is a vast range of human experience that science does not extend to. And, you are right, they have made seriously wrong predictions - and let's not forget when "follow the science" meant blind obedienceto government bureaucrats and experts with financial ties to Big Pharma.
There's a longer response, but I'm going to start with this, because I really think it's the crux of our disagreement:
"Do you think the truth of the resurrection from the dead followed by a day of judgment is essentially the same as the truth of Newton’s gravitational laws?" Newton's laws were thought to be definitive until the end of the 19th Century. They are still not incorrect, mostly, just incomplete. It's actually a good illustration of my overall point.
Yes, I think the higher spiritual truths are part of the same divinely created system. We don't know them all, but that's because our understand is incomplete, not incorrect. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be able to understand them all without divine assistance.
"Or do you see a difference between physical and spiritual realities?" Honestly, not really, God created the whole system, it hangs together. There's some logic to it that may simply be beyond us, but he's made an order that includes everything in it.
" Darwinism does not explain the first origin of life. It does not explain how unicellular organisms split into masculine and feminine genders" Explains with the definitiveness of 2+2= 4? You're right, no. It has made observations and theories that are consistent with what has been materially observed. Again, we are drawing what we can from something that you admit, unlike Genesis, comes to us directly from the hand of God, without a person having to write it down, translate it, etc.
Both of your objections have been answered, as have every objection that comes from Intelligent Design. Honestly, I don't see where ID people get off with their micro vs. macro evolution distinction. Once you've admitted a bit of natural selection, you're drawing arbitrary distinctions. Also, again I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?
"Do you say God’s narrative trumps humanistic objections, or do the humanistic objections trump God’s word?"
God's handmade products trump an interpretation of human-intermediated accounts of God's word and require that we take them into consideration in that interpretation. The theory of the Big Bang is not made as a product of armchair philosophy. It's careful weighing of evidence supported by logic and borne out experiments.
"Your faith in human reason unaided is a direct denial of many biblical teachings about the fallenness and the sinfulness of man." I consider your dismissal of it a denial that we're made in the image of God. Our reason is a diminished reflection of his, but it's not alien to him.
"logic and reason often lie" this is where we disagree. I think you're confusing reason about the material with reason about the moral. Of course, our minds are corrupt and biased when it comes to morality, how we should and shouldn't act. Conflicts of interest alone would make that the case.
When we are drawing conclusions regarding abstract scientific phenomenon on the other hand, we have a much better record, especially over the long term as errors are corrected. It has results both positive and negative, some of which, for instance, are the reason I and my mother didn't die at my birth. (A very difficult labor, I'm told, we both would have died if it had happened even 50 years before it did).
When you look at the universe, you draw certain conclusions from it. Those conclusions lead to others, and eventually, yes, you get to the Big Bang and Evolution. The only way you can start the process and not finish it is to engage in what Orwell called Crimestop:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-faculty-of-stopping-short-as-though-by
and Doublethink:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/164965-to-know-and-not-to-know-to-be-conscious-of
I don't mean anything about you personally or people who believe differently than I do but I find these ways of thinking simply detestable. I consider it a form of taking the Lord's name in vain, he is behind all logic and reason and to deny them arbitrarily and dishonestly is to deny him.
No need for concern about the delay, I have somehow gotten involved in a number of conversations and am somewhat behind, but should be able to attempt a response within the week.
1/2 I don’t know if we have reached a stopping point or not. Perhaps we have, but as a rule I don’t like to leave comments unanswered. Moreover, you made a very serious allegation at the end about my taking God’s name in vain, which I feel obligated to respond to.
You say that the crux of our disagreement is that there is no fundamental difference between physical and spiritual realities, that God made the whole system and it all hangs together.
I don’t think that is the real crux of the disagreement.
I agree that God made the whole system, but there is something very important that you are forgetting. Anyone can see that Paris is the capital of France or that 5 x 9 = 45, or that if you touch a hot stove you will get burned, and so on. There is a vast and rich physical creation which is accessible to all whose minds and sense are functioning normally no matter what their beliefs.
When it comes to the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth, or the deity of Christ, or the life of the soul after death followed by a day of judgment and heaven and hell for all mankind, Christ’s death and resurrection, and other subjects, those areas of knowledge and belief on a different plane entirely.
Those and many other spiritual truths are not accessible to the senses or to the natural mind unaided in the way that secular knowledge is. In fact Paul plainly teaches that the human mind by itself cannot accept the truths of God: “But the natural man receiveth (receives) not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (2 Corinthians 2).
I don’t know if you believe that Paul was divinely inspired when he wrote his letters, perhaps you do. But he talks a lot about the barrier that prevents the natural mind from seeing the things of God. It is sin, the fallenness of human nature. This is why two of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, Plato and Aristotle, with all of their undoubted brilliance, could not come even remotely close to the spiritual realities of sin and forgiveness that are foundational to Christianity.
The real crux of the disagreement between us as I see it is sin, caused by the historic fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden, which Paul refers to in Romans 5:12: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”
It is this power and blindness and spiritual death of sin which prevent people from accepting the basic truths of God in Christ, and the reality of a spiritual afterlife in heaven or in hell.
Writing to Christians, Paul says in Ephesians 2: "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;
"Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:
"Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.
We also see in Ephesians 4:
"This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
"Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:"
People in their natural state are blind. Their understanding is darkened. They are alienated from the inner spiritual life of God. Their thoughts and minds are vain, when it comes to the things of God, although they may write great symphonies and make scientific discoveries.
This is why Paul says in Romans that “There is none righteous, no, not one,” and “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” This is confirmed in Genesis 8 where we read “the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.”
This is why Jesus said in John “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Without the Spirit of God we cannot perceive and live spiritual realities.
Thus, all of God’s creation is one great system, yet the physical creation is open to all whose minds and sense are working normally, but the spiritual truths of God must be apprehended in an entirely different way.
Thus you say:
"I think the higher spiritual truths are part of the same divinely created system. We don't know them all, but that's because our understand is incomplete, not incorrect. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll be able to understand them all without divine assistance."
Our understanding is not only incomplete – it is corrupted and blinded by sin. And when someone says “There is no God at all,” or “There are many gods,” or “God created the world but he is so great and we are so small that it is foolish to think that he cares about us” – when someone holds these and yet other ideas, do you really want to maintain that there views are “incomplete, not incorrect”? That is not the view of the New Testament. It says people are not only wrong about God but actively hostile to God, and desirous of avoiding him.
About Darwinism, the next point in your comments, I denied your assertion that Darwinism deals with life as it finds it. In fact, Darwin’s theory leaves out and cannot deal with many important aspects of life (including the mystery of human consciousness, the first origins of life, the emergence of masculine and feminine genders from unicellular organisms etc). You respond by saying that Darwinism’s theories in these areas may not be definitive, as 2+2=4, but they are consistent with what is materially observed.
I deny that and think it is entirely wrong. Darwinism has no plausible scenario for the first emergence of life. Even an atheist like Thomas Nagel can see that the simplest forms of life are so fantastically complex as to make an accidental assemblage a logical impossibility. As to the division of one celled organisms into masculine feminine, there is no credible Darwinian scenario for that at all. How did highly complex and fully functioning masculine and feminine reproductive systems just emerge at the same time, in the same place, by accident and by coincidence.
You say that you are drawing from physical creation that comes directly from the hand of God, without considering the fallibility of human reason that has often been wrong about many things, especially when it is driven by a hidden spiritual agenda, to avoid God. Scientists are not detached and impartial thinking machines.
I am puzzled by this statement: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You have said more than once that God created the heavens and the earth. In the previous paragraph you said that the physical creation “comes to us directly from the hand of God.” And what is that if not intelligent design?
You say my objections to Darwinism have been answered – and they have been answered: with conjectures, assertions, and speculations. And there are no plausible assertions about how the masculine and feminine reproductive systems just emerged somehow by accident, at the same time and place, as fully operational systems of great complexity.
I am surprised you do not see the difference between macroevolution and microevolution. Proving that finch beaks vary in size does not explain how finches originated in the first place.
God's handmade products trump an interpretation of human-intermediated accounts of God's word and require that we take them into consideration in that interpretation. The theory of the Big Bang is not made as a product of armchair philosophy. It's careful weighing of evidence supported by logic and borne out experiments.
2/2 Saying that evolution or a big bang explain the cosmos and life as we know it is a human interpretation. The Genesis account is God’s explanation of what was done. You say it was human intermediated and therefore unreliable? Human theories are also human intermediated. Einstein’s theory of relativity does not come directly from God or from creation, but was articulated by human mediation.
That there was some sort of strange initial occurrence instead of an eternal universe does have evidence, logic and experiments. But what if the Big Bang was the direct result of God’s creating something out of nothing? And who can tell at this distance what phases or stages the Big Bang might have gone through? But for me the word of God to Moses has more credibility when it comes to origins which have never been seen in a laboratory. Of course, in the ordinary workings of physical science – the speed of light, the mass of an electron, whatever, Moses did not discuss those things and science can provide useful information.
You consider my concern about the limitations of reason because of human sinfulness to be “a denial that we're made in the image of God. Our reason is a diminished reflection of his, but it's not alien to him.”
How does saying that reason has limits, that it is fallible and often wrong, a denial that God made us in his image? We have powers of reason, will and emotion like no other creature on earth because we did not evolve from the lower animals but were created in the image of God. Hence we can understand something of God (though not completely) and have communication with him.
But, our reason is in many ways alien to God, and the Bible even uses a related word, saying that we have been alienated from God by sin. Adam and Eve in the Garden could speak to God directly and see and know him without doubt, but they lost that in the fall, and we have lost it.
“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4).
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you do not believe this. This is why you have such confidence in human reason to explain mysteries that have never been seen by the human eye and are not subject to controlled observation and experiment. Those who say “There is no God, and the universe and all that is in it came into being without God, we have no need of God” – such people are blind, their understanding is darkened, and their ignorance has alienated them from God. As Paul says elsewhere, “Professing to be wise, they became fools,” and, in the Psalms, “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” Now, they can design buildings, compose music, discover life saving medicines, be kind to their neighbors – but on the deepest spiritual level they are separated from God and only Christ can reunite them.
You say “I think you're confusing reason about the material with reason about the moral. Of course, our minds are corrupt and biased when it comes to morality, how we should and shouldn't act. Conflicts of interest alone would make that the case.” But people can be wrong about the material as well. A doctor can be wrong and misdiagnose an illness. The courts can be wrong about the evidence and condemn an innocent man. An airplane pilot can make a navigational error. And when it comes to the emergence of the cosmos out of nothing, that has never been seen and all speculations about it by secular science are exactly that – speculations. And even if there was a big bang, did nothingness just explode or was there some pre-existent matter? If the latter, what was it and where did it come from? And how could a mindless, undirected explosion create such fantastic intricacy, rationality and beauty? Even the theory of a big bang with some supporting evidence leaves many questions unanswered.
About “drawing conclusions regarding abstract scientific phenomenon on the other hand, we have a much better record, especially over the long term as errors are corrected. It has results both positive and negative, some of which, for instance, are the reason I and my mother didn't die at my birth . . . “
The procedures by which a woman gives birth to a child are not abstract phenomena. They have been studied and observed countless times, over and over again. That is a very far cry from speculations about the origins of the universe, which is on a completely different level altogether. It does not follow that because we can study and come to a good understanding of normal, everyday events that we can constantly observe, therefore all of our imaginary speculations about things that have never been seen are equally valid. I don’t accept your argument that science has done a good job of explaining everyday material reality, and so all of its wild guesses and speculations are therefore equally valid.
“When you look at the universe, you draw certain conclusions from it.” Yes, and what if those conclusions are wrong? For many centuries educated men of science and philosophers looked at the universe and drew the conclusion that the sun revolved around the earth. They were wrong. Your faith in science is misplaced. Science has limits. And even the Big Bang theory raises a lot of explanations as I just mentioned, and is very far from being an end-of-discussion development.
You say “The only way you can start the process [of making observations and drawing conclusions] and not finish it is to engage in what Orwell called Crimestop and Doublethink.”
I think those things as Orwell described them do not apply here. Science has limits. It is limited to what can be known and observed and experimented on and speculated on in controlled conditions. We can know a lot using scientific methods, but science cannot tell you if God exists, or if the soul lives after death, or how the earth was first positioned at exactly the right distance from the sun with its delicate and sophisticated biosphere.
I could say that atheistic scientists are guilty of Crimestop in refusing to concede that God spoke the created universe into existence out of nothingness, and that they deny the existence of God not because of reason, facts, logic or evidence, but because they have an innate hatred of God and fear of him because of their guilty consciences, or because they prefer to imagine that they are fully autonomous, accountable to no one – as if their preferences equaled the secret foundations of the universe.
And about Doublethink, the link you gave includes this from Orwell: “to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.” Here he is plainly talking on a social and a political level, not a metaphysical or a scientific one. This is people believing what they are told to believe even when they know it is not true, like Communists saying in the Soviet Union that Marx was an infallible social scientist because it was required of them, when they knew deep down that his bogus theories would never bring prosperity and freedom to the Soviet Union.
Also, I have read that Orwell was an agnostic. If so, he was blind and dead in sin, and his books have political relevance because politics is a reality accessible to us all, but when it comes to questions of God and the ultimate meaning of life or the first origins of the cosmos his opinions are completely irrelevant.
You find those ways of thinking detestable – but they have nothing to do with belief in the literal truth of the Bible. And, don’t forget, every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell.
Then you say God is behind all logic and reason – but surely you meant to say he is behind all true logic and reason. Surely God is not behind false reason and logic, as in saying “So and so cheated me in a drug deal, so I am going to drive by his house and spray it with machine gun bullets.” That is very definitely logic, but it is sinful logic, because Christ said “Do not return evil for evil.” Or, if someone says “The cosmos came into being because of random and natural processes only, because there is no God,” that also is a form of logic. But it is false logic, because the premises “there is no God” and “material reality is the only reality” are lies, such as were taught by the liar Marx and his disciples Lenin and Stalin.
God is not behind all reason and logic. There is false reason and logic, which come from sin and spiritual blindness.
Finally, you say “I consider it a form of taking the Lord's name in vain, he is behind all logic and reason and to deny them arbitrarily and dishonestly is to deny him.”
To deny lies and mistaken philosophies is not to deny God or take God’s name in vain, because Christ teaches that Satan is the father of lies. It does not deny God to deny the false and illogical pseudo-philosophies by which Satan deceived people and keeps them into darkness. To deny National Socialism, for example, is not to deny God, even though there was logic and reason behind it. “If the blond, blue-eyed Aryans are the master race then lesser races should be made to serve them.” That is logic, but based on a false premise.
Similarly, saying that “The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge” is a sort of logic, but it is based on the false premise that there are no other modes of knowing beyond science. Hence, it is a lie, and denying it is not denying God.
Would you like to discuss what you actually believe about the New Testament and Christ?
Sorry, I've been busy for the last few weeks, and I also must apologize if I came off as caustic before. I don't think you're trying to gaslight me, but I have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, and I have felt that certain other YEC people are trying to do it, so I may have over reacted.
"When it comes to the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth, or the deity of Christ, or the life of the soul after death followed by a day of judgment and heaven and hell for all mankind, Christ’s death and resurrection, and other subjects, those areas of knowledge and belief on a different plane entirely."
Again, I actually do think that this is the Crux of our disagreement. I don't agree that these areas of knowledge and belief are on any sort of different plane. I believe that at the end of it all, God will bring a final reconciliation between science and revelation. Revelation 22, I think, speaks not only of the end of the curse but the end of the separation between the spiritual and the material. "They need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light."
"But, our reason is in many ways alien to God." How? All we are, the good, the bad, and the ugly is a product of his will. It's true that he's cut us off in a spiritual sense from himself, which is what the passage from Ephesians that you citied means, but he did not cut us off in any sense from his creation that we inhabit. If anything, he threw us into it. Saying that any aspect of us is alien to him is Gnosticism again. Even Satan is God's creation.
“I am puzzled by this statement: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You have said more than once that God created the heavens and the earth. In the previous paragraph you said that the physical creation “comes to us directly from the hand of God.” And what is that if not intelligent design?”
Guided evolution is what I was gesturing at there, I can’t prove or disprove it, but it’s certainly a possibility.
"You find those ways of thinking detestable – but they have nothing to do with belief in the literal truth of the Bible. And, don’t forget, every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell."
I'm sorry, but this entire paragraph is simply false. There is no way not to be blunt here. Genesis 1 has no eyewitness, all of the New Testament does. We have considerable physical evidence that speaks against a literal reading of Genesis, for the Gospels we have nothing that gives any indication that they didn't happen other than objections from people who say such events aren't possible. We've seen the effect of all of the events of the New Testament on History, even if you're a non-believer, you clearly have to admit something rather significant happened around those events. The epistemic status of the Gospels compared to Genesis aren't close, they just aren't and if you won't admit that we can stop right here because there's nothing more to say. As for the Resurrection of the Dead, Judgement Day, etc. those haven't happened yet, Creation undeniably has, so saying that the same objections can be raised to these than to a literal reading of Genesis is just completely nonsensical.
"explain mysteries that have never been seen by the human eye"
But we've literally seen stars in the process of being formed, and you're demanding that we don't believe the sun was formed in the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0wkeFmtMSE&t=3s.
We've literally seen planets in the process of being formed, and you're demanding we don't believe ours was formed in the same way:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0wkeFmtMSE&t=3s.
That we’ve seen things so far away that, knowing what the speed of light is, we can surmise that the universe in much older than YEC’s say it is, but you demand we refuse to draw that very simple conclusion.
We've observed natural selection at work and you demand that we don't draw the conclusions about life in general that naturally follow.
This is a demand that I engage in Crimestop and Doublethink and I’m sorry, but it’s one that I really must try very hard to not be angry about. To make my Orwell example clear here, in my view YEC Christians are the Party, they are demanding I deny what is remarkably clear for purposes that are clearly more political than spiritual. You’ve admitted that Christianity doesn’t require a literal reading of Genesis, so what am I supposed to draw from the fact that it keeps being pushed as part of Christianity?
(As for Orwell, a nonbeliever can still say things that are obviously true about the nature of truth, so him being an agnostic doesn't bother me when I judge his words. Also, he died too young, there were many intelligent men of his background, time, and country that had a journey similar to his that ended in Christianity, so who knows? One thing that I hold Orwell in high regard for is his absolute insistence that there can't be any sort of integrity, liberty, compassion, or courage without first insisting on one's right to think and speak truthfully. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.")
You point out questions that science hasn’t answered definitively and/or not to your personal satisfaction as if that’s proof that the overall theory is wrong and yours is correct. For one, thing, having unanswered questions about is how science works every question answered, will also bring forth another question; and for another, if you wish to come up with a better answer you must have a theory better supported by evidence. I’ve looked at the attempts to do that, to prove YEC through the scientific method; and I’m sorry, but they’re a joke. The same level of scrutiny you put evolution under using scientific objections would shatter YEC like a bomb inside a watermelon if you dared subject YEC to the same process.
You also continue to reference claims by atheists that I haven't made, and I don't understand why.
“The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge”
I've never said that, and in fact, only a few scientists would say that. Even if they believe that the universe came into being by purely naturalistic means, they often agree that these means might simply be beyond any Human understanding. Even many of the ones who say they believe that actually sort of don’t. Ask them how they know that they love their kids or something like that and they won’t point to science.
The fact that some (and by no means all) scientists are atheists is meaningless. The fact is that evidence that the Big Bang and Evolution happened, simply doesn't have any bearing on the question of God's existence or his causation of creation. They've made a lot of progress answering the questions of “What?” and “How?” but their opinion of “Who? “ and “Why?” is a sperate matter entirely.
Honestly, it's hard not to blame YECs, at least partially, for many scientists being atheists. Could you listen to anything, even the Gospels, from people who insisted that you were wrong and malicious about something you had studied extensively and were also dead right about?
Assume for a second that my position is correct: God created the universe by the Big Bang theory and man through Evolution: if so, where would what YECs have done put them spiritually? IN a very precarious place, I would think. God knows our hearts, but some of them, who had honest doubts about what they were pushing, would have a lot to answer for.
"But people can be wrong about the material as well." A person can be mistaken about the material, they're only wrong about the material if they stick to their mistake despite dispositive evidence to the contrary, which is what you're demanding I do here, this is precisely Orwellian and quite frankly, tyrannical. I'm telling you that for someone who has studied the issue, what you demand is impossible unless I refuse to draw a logical conclusion because I don't wish to, not out of any sense of honest inquiry.
You just keep demanding that, despite having no eyewitnesses (as the Gospel did), despite having considerable evidence to the contrary, and despite having at least a plausible theory as to why God would reveal the creation to the Old Testament prophets as allegory; we disregard all of that. I seriously can't understand YEC people about this. We are talking only about God's means and methods, not his existence or the fact that he is the uncaused cause, the Alpha and the Omega, and the creator. You keep erecting and maintaining this considerable barrier to bringing intelligent people into the faith and I just don't get why. I'm forced to conclude it's some sort of clerical power grab because that's all that's left. This is the consequence when you deny truth revealed by God's creation, it is denying God in some sense. God knows your heart, so I'm not your judge; but the effects of YEC, even when it's a sincerely held belief cause so much harm to our culture and Christianity.
Your last comment was 1636 words. My reply is over 4,000, and I am not finished yet. Perhaps I should edit it and try and cut it down, but I have spent a lot of time on it already, and have not even gotten to your last five paragraphs, which I want to finish tomorrow. So, I will go ahead and post what I have so far, 3 posts tonight, and the 4th tomorrow. Maybe I could have been more brief if I had started with some of the main ideas at the end, but I just worked through it in order and so was not as concise as I might have been. ********************
(1/4) No, I am really not trying to gaslight anyone. I am a true believer that God exists, and that he created the world. But, some Creationist approaches that are weak and unconvincing. There are different approaches.
Some will try to prove that biblical creation is consistent with modern science, but I maintain that it is a phenomenon completely outside the range of science. This leads to conversations about the nature and limitations of science. This applies of course not only to the creation but to the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, the final resurrection form the dead, and many other such questions.
You say “this is the crux of our disagreement,” and assert these areas of knowledge and belief are on the same plane, and that God will bring about a final reconciliation between science and revelation.
Actually, I believe there is not conflict at all between divine revelation and pure science. There is no contradiction between “God created the heavens and the earth by his spoken word alone” on the one hand, and Newton’s law of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, biological knowledge about the workings of the body, and many other basic, undisputed facts.
The perceived conflict comes from those who adopt materialism and naturalism as a starting point. They do this as a matter of will and personal choice, not because they are compelled to it by unanswerable logic or scientific evidence. So, when they say “God did not create the world, it came about by strictly natural causes,” this appears to be a conflict between science and religion, but in fact it is a conflict between religion and materialist philosophy, which is very different.
So part of the apparent conflict is caused by those who think that because they are scientists, ergo all of their opinions about religion and philosophy are necessarily scientific. But the opinions of secular scientists about art, literature, and politics are not “science” at all, but just the personal opinions of those speaking outside of their fields of expertise. The same is true of religion.
Another source of confusion is claiming things to be true when in fact they are not. There is no conflict between religion and the established theories of Newton, Einstein, Copernicus, etc. but there is a conflict between religion and Darwin because the Darwinists insist on making metaphysical claims that go far beyond their theories. “The human race came into being by an impersonal, purely materialistic process that had no definite end in mind” – again, that is not scientifically proven, it is not a scientific fact.
Even if Darwinism were true, which I don’t believe it is, there are some theistic Darwinists who claim that Darwinism is true, a scientific fact, but it was started and is directed by God, who is guiding mankind to a certain end. There is no scientific evidence against this.
I won’t go into all the arguments here, but Darwinism conflicts with revelation in a way that proven theories do not, because it is not yet a proven theory and in fact has many holes in it. It is also commonly used as an argument for atheism, and is a serious weapon against Christianity.
You refer to Revelation 22. That passage, as I understand it, does not necessarily mean the end of the separation between the material and the spiritual. Admittedly, this is obscure, so I don’t want to be too dogmatic, but it does say in Revelation 21 there will be a new heavens and a new earth. That might be a real physical place, with mountains, valleys, birds, flowers and animals (“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb”).
If there is some kind of material reality, it will certainly be very different from anything we can imagine, it might be much more clearly separated from the spiritual, and not blurred as it is in our earthly existence. Maybe the distinction between God and his creation will be sharper and clearer.
It says in chapt. 22 that there will be no more night. So, there will be no need of a sun or of a candle, but there will still be some kind of light, only emanating directly from God. Also, the human bodies of those in heaven will be glorified and shine like the sun (Matthew 13:43). So there will be aspects to reality there we do not comprehend.
About our reason being alien to God, you ask how that can be, if we are the product of his will. If parents bring a new child into the world, that child is their creation, but he still may grow up and do things contrary to their will. Of course, my comparison falls short in that God is omnipotent and has much more power in a way parents do not, but Christ often used that comparison (as in the parable of the prodigal son, or of the man who had two sons, one of which obeyed him while the other did not).
So, the traditional interpretation, which I think is the right one, is that God created the first man and the first woman in a state or perfection. They had no need of theology or bible study, they could communicate with God directly. But, they were not created as robots who had no choice but to worship and believe and obey God forever. He gave them a real power of choice and a simple test. They exercised that power, disobeyed God, and this severed the former relationship.
Now we as their descendants share that same separation and are in our natural state alienated from God by sin, by ignorance, and by all of the negative emotions described in Romans 1.
Two verses that refer to that alienation are Ephesians 4:17-18: “as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:” and Colossians 1:21: “And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled.”
So, we are still God’s creation and we inhabit his creation, and he still has a concern for us and interest in us, but we are alienated because of our sin and ignorance. Christ referred to the evil that comes out of our hearts (Matthew 5:19).
Gnosticism asserted there was some kind of alienation also, but they described the alienation differently and also presented a different means of overcoming it (their own secret knowledge instead of the teachings, work and life of Christ). So Gnosticism did use some Christian terms but in a different way.
True, Satan is God’s creation as you say, and here we have to simply say that it is a mystery. God, though good himself, in some way allowed evil to come into being and allowed it to come into the world, when he could have prevented it. Paul suggests in Romans 9, only raising the possibility, “What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.”
And we don’t need to be embarrassed by the word “mystery.” Until the age of modern physics how the sun worked was a complete mystery, and still is to those who have not studied nuclear physics. The workings of our own minds are mysteries. It says in Romans 11, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?”
Next – I am following your comments in order – you explained one of your comments that puzzled me: “I haven't even taken away the possibility that there was some sort of divine meddling in the process after it began, what do I know?” You said it referred to guided evolution, which I mentioned earlier. That would still be some sort of intelligent design, as you say, and people do believe in it. There is no scientific proof against it. The only problem from the Christian point of view is that it contradicts the Genesis account.
As you probably know, there are some Christians who believe the Genesis account is not literal historical fact, but still believe in the Christ of the New Testament. To me, that is a bad mistake, and opens the door to many problems.
In connection with this, I asserted that “every objection you can raise against the literal truth of Genesis 1 can be raised and has been raised against the miracles of Christ in the New Testament and against the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment followed by heaven or hell."
I don’t believe that is a false comparison at all. First of all, many people deny that the New Testament was written by eyewitnesses, and assert it was written long after the fact. Also, Luke and Mark got their information from eyewitnesses, Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, but still they needed the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to write an infallible message – otherwise there would have been human errors, which would call all the Gospel narratives into question because we could never know where all the errors were.
(2/4) Moses got his information directly from God himself. It was by direct revelation that he was able to write what had occurred. Thus, he got his information from a reliable source, just as many history books today are written long after the fact by people who were not eyewitnesses themselves but rely on reliable sources.
And, you are right, the events of the New Testament are more clearly fixed in a time of recorded human history, so even the atheists are compelled to admit something must have happened there and then. But then in unbelief they proceed to assign completely false versions of and explanations for what happened. The miracles never happened, the apostles made them up, it was a superstitious age, many other religions had some of the same ideas, people were hungry for meaning and classical philosophy was inadequate, etc. etc.
So, the fact is clear that something happened, but a real understanding of what that was is revealed only to faith. Even eyewitness testimony is denied by those who refuse to believe it. And, is it not also evident that something significant happened at the creation of the world?
True, the physical events in Genesis are more fantastic and incredible to the natural mind than the stories of a man walking around in Roman Palestine. However, that Christ was born without a human father seems completely incredible and impossible to many. So do his miracles, his sacrificial death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and the claim that he was God in the flesh (“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Colossians 2:9).
To assert that all of those aspects of Christ’s life and work are incredible and impossible, is the same sort of unbelief that states God creating the entire universe and all that is in it by his spoken word alone is impossible.
And surely the God who could simply speak the galaxies and the solar system into existence could do all sorts of things in a manner and an order that might not be agreeable to us.
About the evidence that speaks against a literal reading of Genesis, that is all reading backwards from the known into the unknown. It is based on the supposed uniformity of causes in a closed system. It assumes that the forces we see today must have been the same forces that were operative them. But all speculations about the origins of the earth on that assumption are inherently flawed.
Thus, saying "Christ could not have done those miracle because miracles do not happen" is exactly the same sort of argument used to say “God could not have created the world because only material causes known to science are operative in the world.” So, I think the epistemic status of the creation account in Genesis is closer to the epistemic status of Christ walking on water or rising from the dead than you think. After all, Christ walking on water is contrary to scientific law and a direct contradiction of all our experience.
You say that “the Resurrection of the Dead, Judgement Day, etc. those haven't happened yet, Creation undeniably has, so saying that the same objections can be raised to these than to a literal reading of Genesis is just completely nonsensical.”
The virgin birth of Christ and his miracles and his resurrection have happened. His return in glory as God manifest and his sitting on a throne of judgment have not yet happened. Yet, atheists deny both those past and future propositions at the same time and for the same reasons – “Material causes known to science are the only reality, and nothing outside of them is possible.”
If someone says “X lied repeatedly in the past so he cannot be trusted in the future either” they are applying the same reasoning to past and future events.
People who say “The world could not have been created in the manner described in Genesis because there is no God and matter and energy are the only realities” can and do apply exactly the same logic to the events of the New Testament. “Christ could not be God come to earth born of a virgin and conceived by the Holy Spirit because the materialistic scientific worldview is the only reality and anything outside of that is impossible.”
But we have seen stars being formed, so I can’t insist the sun was created differently?
I looked at the link, and noticed a few problems with it. First, the narrator expressed some doubt when she said “How stars are born and how they interact with their environments are two big questions in astronomy today.” So their appears to be an element of doubt. And, we did not see a star being formed in the video, we saw what might be a star someday in a few million years according to current theories.
But what is really significant is that the formation of stars in a system that has been created by God to run according to scientific law is completely different from the manner in which the first stars emerged into being out of non-being. It is easy to explain how a tree develops from a seed, but how the first trees were formed is an entirely different question. The first emergence of the sun and of the galaxies out of nothing is a process that has never been observed in a laboratory, never been repeated in controlled experiment and hence is completely outside of the realm of real science.
As to the appearances of the age of the universe based on the speed of light, I say that applies to a created system, but what factors and forces might have been operative when the universe was first created or come into being no one knows. Assuming Adam was created as an adult, and not as a helpless little baby - if someone could have interviewed Adam five years after the day of his creation, and if they had asked him “How old are you?”, and if he had said “I am five years old,” and if they had responded “that is scientifically impossible, it is clear that you are older than five,” he would have said “Your scientific calculations are totally irrelevant and completely wrong because I was created in a manner completely unknown to science. I appear to be much older than I am.”
About natural selection at work, I suppose you are talking about variations in the size of finch beaks or different breed of dogs due to selective breeding. Those are variations within existing species, which occur all of the time and no one denies it. But it does not explain how the first birds were created, how new species appeared, which is not microevolution but macroevolution. And variations within existing species does not demonstrate how the species came into being in the first place.
This is not crimestop or double think at all – and how do you think the stars and the world and the universe and the first human beings came into existence? Did God create them? If so, he surely must have created them in ways unknown to you and to anyone of us. But if God did not create them, but they are only the results of natural causes, then what becomes of God?
About comparing YEC to an Orwellian political party, that is very different. It is people who demand that scientific criteria are the only valid criteria and everything must fit into a humanistic paradigm that are pushing a false view of reality and insisting people deny that God that has made them.
I am not demanding that you deny what is remarkably clear, because the origins of the earth and the universe are hidden from science. Find a video on how the first star came into being and it will be purely speculative and entirely imaginative.
And, my reasons are spiritual, not political. I am not trying to save America or increase the size of my church. I am saying God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and that he did it in ways beyond science and unknown to science. How can you deny that and believe in God at all? Or do you believe in a God that can only work within the materialistic universe that he created and is bound to his own laws?
I admitted that Christianity does not require a literal reading of Genesis because someone can be saved without having read Genesis at all. When I first read the four gospels at the age of 24 I was convinced of their truth and of the deity of Christ and Genesis did not even cross my mind. So, it is not part of the essential salvation message, but that does not mean it is not important. Much of the Christian worldview depends on it, and people who subject to faith in science at that point are subordinating faith to human reason, and subordinating God to human reason, as if he may only do what the scientists allow, as if science is the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is true - but it is not the ultimate arbiter. Neither is human reason.
Paul and Christ refer to Genesis as the true word of God. Paul uses the fall of Adam and Eve to explain how sin entered the world, and if his explanation of the origins of sin is clear, how can we have any confidence in his remedy?
I am not pushing it as essential to salvation, but I am pushing it as essential to a stronger and deeper faith in God and in his word, and as essential to transcending the false secular humanist paradigm that makes exaggerated claims about areas beyond its comprehension.
About Orwell, as you say an agnostic can say true things, but he was ignorant of God in Christ, did not really understand the meaning or the end of life, and did not know God. Have you ever heard it said that “Orwell was a one-eyed man in the land of the blind”? Compared to all of the stupidity around him he was in some ways very insightful, but he was spiritually blind and alienated from Christ by the darkness that was in his mind. So, he has some political insights, but the truths of God in Christ were completely unknown to him.
(3/4) True, Orwell might have come to Christianity as you said, who knows? He maybe even had a real revelation of Christ shortly before he died. But 1984 and Animal Farm and his essays show nothing of Christ.
True, we do need to have the right to speak truthfully – and when it comes to Christianity people should be able to freely express their doubts. I don’t advocate anyone being thrown in jail for denying Genesis, and we should be open and honest with God. After all, he knows all of our doubts and thoughts anyway. Job said some very hard things about God (“He laughs at the destruction of the innocent”) but in the end he was commended for his honesty.
About attempts to prove YEC by the scientific method being a joke, I agree. At least I agree they are false and unconvincing. But that has never been my approach. I do not need to subject YEC to the same process I apply to Darwin because I have rejected scientific creationism form the outset and so never bothered about it. But at least YEC is correct in its basic assertion, that “God created the heavens and the earth” whereas Darwin is false from the start. All of the varieties of life on earth did not come about in the manner he described.
Do you know about the problem of the genetic mechanism? Physical variations require sophisticated alterations of highly complex genetic codes, all by accident and blind chance. This is a scientific impossibility. Modern genetics destroys Darwinism. Imagine all of the highly complex changes in genetic coding required to change the nerves, skin, muscles, and bones of a fish’s fin to turn it into an amphibian’s leg- all happening at the same time, and all happening by blind chance. Impossible, unless you believe in theistically guided evolution.
About questions science hasn't answered definitely, you need to be more mindful of the limitations of science. Science cannot even tell you whether or not it is wrong to put poison in the coffee of your rich uncle who has made you his sole heir.
The scientific process works well for the material creation. When it comes to God and his hidden working science has nothing to say.
About my quoting claims made by atheists that you yourself haven’t made, my purpose in doing that was to show that the same objections that are made to Genesis are also made to Matthew, Mark Luke and John. You say that is different because the content of the Old and New Testaments is different, but the underlying motivation is the same – that any spiritual reality is unreal and all spiritual narratives, Old Testament or New are false, and for the same reasons.
I present the common secularist claim that “The world can only have come into being by processes accessible to secular science because scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge.”
You did not say it, but it is implied in your assertion that the creation of the world and the universe can only have come about in a manner agreeable to science. Is my inference wrong? Do you admit that the world and the universe might have come into being in a manner completely unknown to science?
Not many scientists are so direct about these things, maybe for personal reasons, but here is an example of what I mean from a prominent scientist:
The following quote is from biologist Richard Lewontin in his review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, published in the New York Review OF Books, January 9, 1997:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
https://hoasrc.com/2023/07/31/we-cannot-allow-a-divine-foot-in-the-door/
Also, anyone who says that the universe came into being by purely naturalistic means, but those means are at the same time beyond any human understanding, is being ridiculous. How can they take anything beyond human understanding and then say God could not have been involved in it? They say that NOT because of scientific facts, reason, logic or evidence, but ONLY because of their a priori philosophical commitment to materialism. They do not want there to be a God and build a towering edifice upon that foundation of sand.
The fact that they do not point to science when it comes to loving their kids shows the inapplicability and the irrelevance of science to the most basic aspects of everyday life – so how can it claim to limit the creation of the universe to scientific principles that cannot even explain human love?
Surely a philosophy that is inadequate to explain such a basic manifestation of life as love can't be used to explain the cosmos as a whole. Thomas Nagel, a secular philosopher, makes that point in his book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False." He wants to find some way to account for non-material aspects of human consciousness without giving up the secular paradigm. But we read the explanation for human consciousness in Genesis: "God breathed into Adam the breath of life."