A question for accommodationalists

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Mark,
I will agree God was not writing a science book, but the reason to believe that where it impinges on nature it best be true can be summarized as below.

  1. If inspiration means God can’t communicate true things to us, then inspiration is worthless.
  2. Bible says it is impossible for God to lie

Numbers 23:19
God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

1 Samuel 15:29
“Also the Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.”

Hebrews 6:18

so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to l

Because of this, when God speaks or inspires a man to write about nature, it best be true.

  1. I again go back to my Book of Mormon example in my post above this. I don’t believe the Book of Mormon because there is not a shred of evidence that the described events happened, so why would I believe their theology? If there is nothing observationally true about scripture, then it is little more than another, better-written Book of Mormon

  2. Christianity is an observational religion, based upon the observation of the scientific/historical fact of the resurrection. If that isn’t a historical fact then Christianity is garbage. We depend on the disciples observations to believe. This means we have a God who does miracles in history, so why not think that the other miracles are also possible? But if the other miracles are impossible, miracles like creation, then why would we believe in the resurrection? Are we to believe a God who can’t perform simple miracles can actually raise a man from the dead after 3 days? That is illogical.

5 since it is impossible for God to lie, and our Scripture has God telling a false tale about creation where God is the only person speaking, or the Flood where God says he is bringing a massive flood, then there are two possibilities, A. it IS possible for God to lie and if that is the case, is God lying about the plan of salvation? At the least the writers of those verses above lied to us. B. Inspiration is useless as a means of communication in which case we can’t know that we have the plan of salvation down right at all! Both cases lead to doubt about whether or not the plan of salvation has really gotten to us.

  1. Intent of God. Everyone here thinks they know the intent of God in writing this or that. I think that is hubris. God didn’t say what His intent was in Scripture, so unless you are hearing the voice of God in your head, I find the claim that we know what Gods intent is to be equivalent to what Percival Lowell did with the Canals of Mars, He looked in the telescope and probably saw the veins in his retina and thought they were Canals on Mars. God’s intent is more in the mind of the individual than an objective fact. It says more about the thinking process of the individual’s world view than it does about God.
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And our faith is based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, not on science or the creation stories of Genesis 1-2. Thus, no need to fret about our faith being solely on Genesis 1. This is the huge stumbling block AiG and other YEC groups always get on.

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Who says it’s God telling the story? What if it was people who were inspired by the Holy Spirit to tell of a story that went against the grain of typical ANE creation stories and told a one that was Yahweh centered and had humans as being co-rulers with Him? God allowed the general audience to make a series of stories to make sense of reality but guided them in proper thinking such as 1. No god but Yahweh alone. 2. Yahweh was the only creator of the universe. 3. Yahweh had no struggle in creation and hadn’t need to fight other gods. 4. Humans are made to reflect His Image and co-rule the earth with Him.

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I don’t think anyone is saying God can’t communicate true things while communicating whatever it is He really thinks is important for us to know. But is there a reason to think He must do so or that doing so would be deemed by Him to be as essential as it seems to you. But as you say everyone is pretty sure of His real agenda.

And hi again. You’ve been working hard in this thread. Thanks for considering my comment.

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Thanks for clarifying. So you would they are just plans of what he will make but not necessarily in any particular order. But how you might differ from many here is that you would hold that these were specific scientific events. Some can be taken straightforwardly (like God made the sun, moon and stars at some point) and others are not as straightforward (the expanse/firmament actually means maybe the expansion of space, the tearing apart of galaxies or the collapse of matter to form solar systems). In the case of the latter, it seems as if you are just grabbing all kinds of random things that kind of sound like your interpretation of some of the Hebrew words. I think that’s part of the issue here. Anyone can take random events from natural history and cherry pick things that can sound like the things in Genesis. Some go a step further than you do and also pick events that are in order.

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Your faith may be based on the life and teachings of Jesus, my faith is based upon his resurrection. The life and teachings are believed and applied because the resurrection shows that Jesus was the Son of God. If the resurrection didn’t happen, then Christianity is just a philosophical system, like that of August Comte, or Daoism. It makes Christianity just something to do while we pass the time here on earth, like playing Golf, except for playing at prayer, but not necessarily anything of significance.

But with the resurrection, Christianity becomes something of significance, something that says many important things about life, the afterlife and the requirements of God.

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The resurrection is bundled in with the life of Jesus Christ as in He never really died but rose from the grave on the third day. The resurrection out of all the events in His life is what showed that He was Lord and Savior.

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Au contraire, I think in my time here, several people have said or indicated that inspiration doesn’t affect what the human writer wrote–and that implies strongly that either inspiration doesn’t exist, Inspiration is meaningless, or the Bible is just another human document.

I have been working hard because I don’t have a lot of time left and my experience with my years of doubt gave me a deep look at the logical structure of Christianity, and what is important for Christianity vs what isn’t, and whether and how it can be true. What I see is the primary views espoused today have a very weak logical foundation.

If God lies, all bets are off, yet, I am told that God inspired writers to write nonsense things like Gen 1, the Fall, God walking in the garden, talking snakes, etc. All of this still is claimed by those people to be inspired. I ask, inspired by who? A clueless God or a lying God? That is my issue. Doing what accommodationalism does affects the nature of who we think God is, yet one person said that Yec views make God a deceiver. I fail to see how accommodation escapes the same charge, given that God inspires factually false junk.

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You might want to take another stab at that sentence. do you really mean the bolded part?

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He did die, but He is alive forever more, forgive me if it was confusing in how I worded it. I feel that while His death and resurrection are important, His life and teachings are often neglected and left on the side as we tend to overemphasis the death and resurrection. Don’t get me wrong, those where two important events, but I feel we overcast them over the life and teachings of Jesus.

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Of course it need not be nonsense if it succeeds in communicating that which He would want us to know. Allegory isn’t necessarily any more an inferior form of communication than is poetry. Story telling reaches us on a number of levels at the same time. But I won’t add anymore to your workload here. We just disagree on what forms of communication are worthy or useful.

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The Bible is a product of human work that records people’s encounters with God. It isn’t like God wrote the whole thing down and in 90 AD God dropped it down and gave it to the church. While God did give inspiration to the writers; He allowed them to have freedom in how they interpreted what was being given and they understood it from how they understood everything within an ANE environment. The Bible is unique as it gives us the revelation of Jesus Christ and His ministry and mission He gave to the church.

How about a God who was willing to go down to their level and communicate ideas in a way that the people of that time would have understood. As much as Jesus came down to our level in the Incarnation to be among us, God did a similar thing when in the OT and communicating to the Hebrew people.

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I do think they reflect the reality of the structure of the universe. But I don’t think they all reflect specific events. For instance

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth

This isn’t an event so much as a plan for the structure of the solar system

Where it says 3 times that something other than God would create living things, it was 3 statements I believe of the process of how life would evolve. It was mediate creation as the early Church fathers believed, search the thread for Augustine or Chrysostom for relevant quotes:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree

Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life

Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle

God clearly delegated the creation of grass fish and land animals to the earth and water. This is a simple statement of evolution, but because we don’t accept that, because we claim that there is nothing scientifically true in Genesis 1, we help the atheist critics in their claim that Christianity is just nonsense. In other words, we are agreeing with our atheist critics, why, I don’t know unless we want to join them.

Some can be taken straightforwardly (like God made the sun, moon and stars at some point ) and others are not as straightforward (the expanse/firmament actually means maybe the expansion of space, the tearing apart of galaxies or the collapse of matter to form solar systems). In the case of the latter, it seems as if you are just grabbing all kinds of random things that kind of sound like your interpretation of some of the Hebrew words. I think that’s part of the issue here. Anyone can take random events from natural history and cherry pick things that can sound like the things in Genesis. Some go a step further than you do and also pick events that are in order.

I think is a way bit more organized than ‘random’. I didn’t discuss cud chewing animals, or the LSU defeat of Clemson, or upcoming election. I firmly believe that it is stupid to believe theology from a book that is observationally false. I think the atheists with whom I discussed these issues for years are correct in that regard.

When you use the word ‘cherry pick’ it raises the obvious point that you have never ever built an original theory. In this instance I am constrained by what Genesis says, so I can’t cherry pick different topics than what Genesis says. Of course I am going to try to fit observation with Genesis account. Why would I stupidly try to have a theory which fit ZERO of the observational data points? Oh, that actually describes Accommodationalism–it fits Zero points of science together with the points of Scripture. So, if you are an accommodationalist then you believe a theory for which there is no observational support–that is the very definition of what accommodationalism does. Nothting fits, so believe it anyway.

Let’s take the thing someone criticized me for above, the way I have God create man from a dead ape. I didn’t want that solution. If I had randomly cherry picked I would have done anything different. Humans, chimps and humans have a broken gene, a pseudogene, found at the same location in their genome. Edward Max’s article on Talkorigins describes this thing. It means that if God created Adam from normal dust, He would have to create a gene that didn’t work in precisely the same place that non-working gene is found in gorillas and chimps. So, either God didn’t specially create man, which most of yall believe, or there has to be a way to make keep this connection but still specially create man. Thus, I chose this route. Believe me, if I were ‘cherry picking’ this is not the cherry I would have picked.

On the other hand, where I place Eden and the Flood matches the Biblical description exactly–that is something no one else has done, and apparently no one wants. The flood matches an actual geologic event in history and that flood would take about a year to be over, cause torrential rain for weeks upon end, But again, no one seems to waant truth in scripture and I think that is actually the problem, a lack of desire for the Bible to be true.

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there is no allegory of anything in Genesis 1. It is widely believed that Genesis 1 is a fraudulent false account of Creation by the God who claims to have created the world. This is like when you lose your watch and it is announced at the grocery story that someone lost a watch. You go there and have to describe your watch to prove that it is your watch. I see no reason not to make the same requirement of any God who claims to have created the universe–Basically having god show that he knows what he is talking about. \

Oh add away to my work load. I don’t mind. I will go do something else this afternoon.

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You can even say before A&E there were no human beings, only homo sapiens, if you believe as I do that humanity is more than just a biological species. Then we might have God adopting A&E to raise them as His children. And by His communication with them they have an inheritance of ideas or inspiration which gave birth to the human mind.

The testing idea is not one I like very much. What kind of data does an omniscient God require from such a test? Are you putting God into the role of tinkering scientist like the Deists or in the role of parent as I do. If the latter then we don’t usually call it testing when we tell our children not to play in the street lest they die (typical parental commandment). Instead I would say that this is a necessary part of parenting to transition them from the toddler who has to be protected from everything to the child with some responsibility for their own well being.

We have two cases here depending on what “all living” refers to.

  1. All living organisms? In that case mother of all living clearly does not refer to a genetic relationship.
  2. All human beings? In that case we can go as I suggested with the idea that humanity differs from the biological species. And as the mind creating ideas from God spread by human communication throughout the species, then Eve can still be considered the mother of all human beings since that memetic inheritance ultimately came from God through A&E.

After all there is no way to take this completely literal and biological since Eve would not be the mother of Seth’s children but their grandmother.

Doesn’t make it right. You have to understand, I wasn’t raised Christian, but rather by extreme liberals and critics. So coming from a scientific worldview I investigated the Bible and Christianity on my own to see if I could find anything of value in it – anything salvageable. Took a bit of creativity, but I managed. Surprising that I am as middlin’ orthodox as I am.

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Here’s a question in the same vein: “Since Jesus’ favourite way to convey truth was fiction, could the God who inspired Genesis be the same?”

Answering “yes” doesn’t mean …

  • that God is incapable of communicating true things to us
  • that God lies
  • that the Bible contains no history
  • that Genesis can’t say anything observationally true
  • that Jesus’ life is one big parable

But it does allow Scripture to speak in many ways. It does mean we can’t compel God to speak our preferred dialect. We can’t demand that accounts of creation stick to observable facts any more than we can demand all the poetry rhyme. We can’t assume God’s intent in Genesis is to bury nuggets of information about the natural world that will convince our generation that only God could be behind the text.

Answering “yes” encourages us to ask “how is God speaking here” rather than assuming we already know.

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The stars aren’t in the solar system.

That can be a good theological way to see God’s handiwork though I think one could be hard pressed to see the theory of evolution there. It could be equally compatible with spontaneous generation that Augustine also held to.

Sorry I didn’t qualify what I imagined the probability distribution to be. I mean it in the sense of randomly chosen from a list of various phenomena that occurred throughout the history of the universe as learned through the natural sciences.

But many Christians here would hold that Genesis can only be observationally false if it claims to be teaching what we think of as modern science. But since it’s not doing that there cannot be a problem.

Yeah, I just try to use theories made by others to write scientific papers. I do know I can’t do a few things though. I don’t get to go into old papers and claim they secretly wrote about modern science, maybe even describing general relativity, the expansion of space or some quantum mechanical effect thousands of years before we discovered these things. No, those old papers engage with the best scientific ideas of their time, which is what the Bible appears to be doing.

Definitely not true. Data points for accommodationalism= knowledge of ancient science from other similarly dated texts in similar languages or other graphical depictions of the world.

Usually when you are the only one and you aren’t winning over others, there could be other reasons for that.

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Yeah calling it a plan for the solar system isn’t right – too geocentric.

Besides we now know the stuff of the earth was made by the stars so the stars came first.

Yeah I know that was made up by a bunch of atheists right? LOL And how do we know God didn’t make the stuff of the Earth special.

Problem is… here we have all these stars in the universe making the elements like little factories and so it seems absurd to think God would make them and not use them.

It is the same kind of insanity with all the evidence showing the evolution of hominids and yet people want to say that God made Adam&Eve special like with necromancy. Just how far over backward can you bend in defense of mindless literalism? Even to the point of editing the Bible itself to make such things work.

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There is a big difference between telling a parable, where everyone knows that it is a situation that occurs all the time or has occurred, even if no one was specifically named as the person in the parable, and us giving God credit for creating the world, when what He said gives no sign of Him knowing how it happened, (under normal interpretations of Genesis). In the former, everyone knows it is a morality tale but one that can happen to anyone. Jesus didn’t use Iron man or Flash as a person in his parables. 10 virgins and Flash had not trimmed their light so when the bride groom arrived Flash scrambled in a second to refill the lamps with oil and everyone went to the wedding and lived happily ever after… Wouldn’t that be a great parable? People sowed seed every spring so the idea of the parable of the sower isn’t untrue,it is just that no one is named. Really why is this hard to fathom? .

Secondly, as I have to explain often, but shouldn’t have to explain often, almost all his parables are LABELED as parables. Genesis 1 ain’t labeled as a parable and . Genesis 1 ain’t no morality tale so to conflate them, is to commit a category error. If we consider those parables as falsehoods, then can I ask why we would believe Jesus when he said “in my Father’s house there are many rooms”? Is that just a made up parable? A fanciful fiction to make us feel good? If it is, my friend, we are in deep doo doo.

I do like my Flash parable above. I am going to have to manufacture other examples of fictional parables. I think there is a lot of fun to be had there. Can’t remember what the Hindu’s call their cars that took people to other worlds (starts with a v), but there is potential there for an example of an absolutely false parable that Jesus could have used. The prodigal son left home, went to another planet, ate with their equivalent of pigs, but these beasts have propellers on their back and hover. Son became disillusioned with eating hover-pig food and came home in his space car and his dad welcomed him home. Now THAT is a false parable. lol, Marshall, you need to widen your definition of false parable.