Nothing could pre-exist with God; this is a gnostic concept. Evil was by the Evil Doer. God created angels and some fallen and became the evil doer. These evil doers were there before man and tempted man to commit sin.
I wonder if swearing or insulting in a foreign language makes it any less offensive.
Shall we try?
HoS lI’ Dalo’Ha’chu’!
Richard
Of course the Young-Earth creationists have no trouble with the theological side of this. There was no degradation until man sinned. But this leads to conflict with the consensus scientific account of origins.
On the other hand, accepting the scientific account, especially deep time and evolution, leads to theological difficulties, as we see folk trying to deal with them here.
Michael Lloyd, in his book, ‘Cafe Theology’, suggests that the death and destruction on Earth before there were ever humans is a result of angelic disobedience. It’s an intriguing theory, and I would ask you not to dismiss it without reading his book.
I have pondered some of these ideas and have to say that my understanding of the natural order, though limited, exceeds my understanding of the supernatural order. So, I stick with the scientific consensus, and say about the theology, “I just don’t know”, at least for now.
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Perhaps this is not a theological question at all? From a purely scientific perspective decay is inevitable. Once something comes into existence it will come into contact with other things and any contact can, and probably does damage it. (regenerative or healing properties notwithstanding)This is just part of the workings of creation. Whether they are necessary or intended is a mute point at best. I do not see how it could be otherwise.(Other than the idealism of the Biblical New Earth)
Perhaps we can overthink?
Richard
No, it isn’t; this has been explained to you repeatedly.
Not even all atheists would make that claim.
No, my position is based on the text. For the rest I just keep trying to correct your misunderstandings.
You just don’t get that God really is GOD. He creates every little particle and wave and force and field new every moment, which means He is most certainly in control. Even if you go with a weaker view of sovereignty He sustains every little particle and wave and force and field from moment to moment, so that as the scripture says nothing happens apart from His will.
Since it’s plain that you don’t understand the science, this assertion is meaningless.
Richard, your understanding of evolution was outdated thirty years ago when I was still taking science courses; it’s completely out of touch now. Please, go learn some actual science, because you make Christians look like idiots with the things you say!
As for YEC, they don’t even do science, by their own declaration that has been quoted here frequently. I have a science degree with honors. If you can;t recognize the difference then you really do need to go back to school – though you show that you have no interest in learning either science or theology from anyone, it’s always that you are always right and no one understands you.
Christianity rests on dogma, seven ecumenical councils’ worth (or four, or three, depending on how far east you go). As the council Fathers confessed every time, those who will not hold to the teachings of those councils are anathema.
I see no reason to call the text into question as you do.
Science has nothing to do with interpreting the text. You don’t seem to be able, or care, to keep them distinct.
Why not? My God isn’t so small as to exclude such a thing, and the text is written in a way that could very well intend to be something close to history as we know it – and if it isn’t, it would still be a literary type where the details cn be taken literally for the purpose of understanding the theological message.
I don’t know, and I’m not terribly interested in guessing because theologically it makes no difference – though from the text I have to question your notion of God “taking” one man anywhere; the imagery of creating Adam from the dust of the earth could be poetic imagery or it could be literal. My friend who calculated that God only needed seven interventions along the course of evolution might say that Adam was the one where God added the final intervention.
It gets very tiring reading your mangling of the text – it doesn’t say there was no female human, it only said there wasn’t any suitable companion found.
I don’t have a theory, I have the text. I defend science against ignorance, and am willing to venture what is compatible with the scriptures, but I have not theory that can collapse – or for that matter one that can be sustained.
You make that claim but it has no basis. Evolutionary theory specifically says that there are mutations, and when it comes to sources of those mutations science does not have the ability to rule out divine intervention because science has no measure for God. The number of mutations along the way is sufficiently large that substantial intervention could have taken place along the line every few generations and science would not be able to tell; that tiny portion vanishes into the background of all the other mutations.
No, that’s just the failure of your imagination. After all, nowhere does the scripture tell us that God made all things in order to demonstrate how to be rational (as Richard defines it), it tells us that He made all thing for His own pleasure – and being as He is the Ancient of Days, it may well have pleased Him to let evolution flow except for a nudge here and there.
I thought you were Anglican – the Anglican church does not take a stance on the matter, and leading Anglicans have declared that evolution and Genesis are not in conflict, notably at least one Archbishop of Canterbury.
You assert this but give no foundation other than your opinion. You don’t seem capable of embracing that God might create via a process initiated by the command, “Bring forth!” with perhaps some tweaks along the way – or, for that matter, that He so understands chaos (He did invent it, after all) that there is an attractor built in to the system that guaranteed that the process would lead to a creature suitable to be His representative on earth.
Only for those with, as my older brother the mathematician put it, deficient understanding of mathematics.
Though I should first note that it has been pointed out repeatedly here that evolution is not random! Mutations appear to be random (there is no way science can tell if God or even aliens intervened here and there since minor interventions would be indistinguishable from randomness), and that is all that science can really say – but selection is not random.
The only folks here who have this issue are . . . oh, just you. The rest note that God could have intervened and we have no way of telling, and point out that since science has no way to measure or even detect divine activity there’s no point in asking the question. Whether God intervened is as useless a question in science as whether the red coloring in the red pencil I used to use grading papers was manufactured in the the United States: looking at the product is insufficient to provide any meaningful statement, nor would knowing the answer make a difference.
Odd you should say that since you spend so much effort in insisting that there cannot be such a marriage!
Possibly – we aren’t actually told when Lucifer first diverged from loyalty to YHWH. I’ve noted somewhere here that one view holds that Lucifer’s rebellion began when he realized that YHWH had made creatures that would be ‘above’ him in the divine plan, and so he set about trying to ruin that plan.
And there’s a fair argument that can be made that the rebellion in heaven didn’t happen till the birth or conception of Christ.
Or it could be viewed as some mystics have, that since the rebellion was in heaven trying to pin it down to a specific spot on the timeline within Creation is futile.
The point is that Martin Luther used the term in theological circumstances in response to foolishness.
I will repeat what I put in the now closed thread About talking to aYEC (perhaps you never saw it)
You appear to be setting the bible against reality. Which is what you accues of YECs.
Chance exists. That is not my opinion it is fact. Here are some Scientific papers on the subject
The science of chance and randomness
The science of chance
And there just so happens to be a BBC 4 program on the subject (what are the chances!)
Tails you win
One Biblical side note. When Jesus recounted the story of the Good Samaritan both the Levire and the Priest “happened” to be passing. There was no guidance from God just a collision of two events that was not planned (As near chance as the Bible gets)
I should not need to go any further. Just to say that either
The Bible is wrong and chance exists
or
You have misinterpreted what the bible means.
Richard
Here is he start of a New Scientist article Is Evolution random
No and yes. Natural selection is a rigorous testing process that filters out what works from what doesn’t, driving organisms to evolve in particular directions. However, chance events play a big role too.
So you are jumping on the wrong wagon and deliberately answering the wrong question.
Deviations are random. The counter mechanism for survival is not. . (But you refuse to believe in chance)
Here is another quote from What are the most common misconceptions about evolution
Is Evolution Totally Random?
This is a difficult argument to counter, because there are both random and non-random elements to evolution. For example, when you talk about natural selection, it is a process that is based on survival of the fittest; those with better traits survive and pass on their genetic information, including the genes for that beneficial trait. However, the manner in which they developed that trait – namely mutation – is random.
If you read that article you will see many of my arguments discussed.
However, you are actually arguingScripture!. And that is my domain
Yor whole argument is based on the literal view of Genesis 2-4 which is the height of irony as you mock the same view of Genesis 1-2.
So get off your high horse and compare the details of the garden with science.
A tree of knowledge and life?
God creating a woman because there was no such thing
A talking snake
Man being able to see every single organism (without moving) and give it a name (ncludng microscopic?)
There is more but that should be enough.
That is ignoring the Theological view of God as incompetent and vindictive.
The Garden is no more fact than 7 day creation. And if that is your main argument then…
(I am not going to sink to your taunt)
Richard
You have no right to call me a fool.
As you like the Bible you might look up what it has to say on the subject (although it will take you a while)
I will leave you with one from Proverbs 12 (Bible Gateway NIV)
Fool s show their annoyance at once, but the prudent overlook an insult.
Richard
Why read anything that you don’t even read. Just because we humans can’t always be sure what will happen doesn’t mean anything can happen.
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In the context of evolution, the only thing we can be sure of is that it did happen.
Obviously there are some things that cannot happen. You cannot walk to the moon.
But I fail to see why this is significant here.
Richard
- My mistake. I should have realized you would fail to see why, and not bothered to say anything in this thread.
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Your superiority aside. I am humble enough to ask you to explain instead of insult.
Richard
I am out of patience with you making things up about people here! It shows a total lack of respect especially when you have been corrected more than once. So does what others have pointed out is your basic method, which boils down to (I may be getting the exact words wrong since I couldn’t track down the post I’m referencing) “Richard is always right”.
You claim so, but you show a lack of knowledge of the basics and an attitude that you get to make passages mean what you want them to. There are rules about interpreting ancient literature, rules that honor ancient literature as what it is and guide the interpreter towards grasping the meaning intended by the original writer, and ignoring those results not in understanding the message but in replacing the actual message with your own opinion.
Wrong on both counts – but even if your first clause was correct, the second one still fails because it rests on a refusal to engage the text as it is, instead forcing on it an artificial and false framework that treats it as being all the same thing instead of the ancient literature it is.
Do I “mock” a literal view of the first two Creation stories? No – and you would know that if you were actually paying attention to what I’ve written. I assert that the first Creation account was never meant to be taken literally because the two forms of ancient literature it qualifies as are not meant literally, and treating it literally in its details throws away the actual three different meanings it holds. I assert that the second Creation story may be meant literally because it is cast in a common form used by many ancient near eastern creation stories where it is difficult to tell if they are meant literally or not.
But regardless of which literary type a portion happens to be, they share one characteristic of ancient creation literature: the details may be treated as literal in order to expound on the point of the narrative. That means in the case of the Genesis writer(s) that the message about the relationship between God and man can and must be in accord with a literal reading.
No – I refuse to follow the path of imposing human philosophy onto the scriptures since that has led to heresy upon heresy over the centuries, from Arianism on down the line. Science as science has nothing to say about the Garden for the simple reason that science cannot even determine if the Garden even existed!
None of those come from the text, they have to be inserted from outside.
If you’re only reading the story in English that may seem unrealistic, but the problem only arises if you insist on ignoring the fact that this is ancient literature and not a diary entry of someone’s great-grandfather reporting events he witnessed.
You insist that the scriptures call God incompetent and vindictive, but that is calling good evil.
Sorry, but those stories are very different literary genres and cannot be treated the same, which anyone who claims scripture as their domain would know.
I’m tired of you misreading things and taking things personally which weren’t meant that way.
But if you say foolish things about the scriptures, I have a solemn duty to point them out.
With as much science as you’ve studied, it’s more than ironic you get accused of not understanding science.
Richard
A fair point.
Mark
In my university days the accusation was more than once leveled at me that I didn’t know what science I wanted to study. The first time that was said I responded without thinking, “All of it!”
So I ended up a few handsful of credits short of getting a bachelor’s in geology, in astronomy, in botany, in physics, and a bit more in chemistry, finally just settling for getting done by grabbing a degree in General Science / Earth Sciences (due to a big foray into geography) with honors . . . and I noted that “summa cum laude” can also be translated “with immense thanks”, as in being thankful I was done.
Though my fondness was for geology, and I managed to weasel my way into advanced courses such as hydraulics and coastal geology despite having skipped out on crystallography (when I learned that those who managed to pass it tended to sleep just four nights a week). And doing conservation work in dunes has required picking up a lot of that where I left off and make use of the principles of the few courses on ecology I managed since restoring an area dominated by invasive species requires grasping the dynamics of dunes as those interact with botany and chemistry and soil ecology…
Though I think what I really miss, deeper down, is grad school with nights spent wrestling with the Masoretic Hebrew alongside the Septuagint and dragging in Aramaic and Akkadian and Sumerian and even Egyptian (did you know that Egyptian writing had no preferred direction for the lines? it all depended on the scribe, and to make it worse some of them went back and forth on a page!). And daily chapel services where the scripture readings were done in the original languages . . . .
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Not nearly so much if one as read seriously in the Fathers! I wish I could remember which said what (my sister said if I could remember all the sources to all the information I’ve stored away in my head I could have been a millionaire by thirty), but I recall at least one discussing whether there was animal death before the Fall because the declaration God made about death was plainly only meant for the humans. As for deep time, my thoughts jump back to later scholars who grew up reading Hebrew and who on the basis of the Hebrew concluded that the universe started off smaller than a grain of mustard and expanded inconceivably rapidly, beginning as a fluid that wouldn’t let light flow until God commanded light into existence (at the right time), that the universe was ancient beyond comprehension and the Earth also ancient beyond counting – and the shiver that hit my spine as I recognized how closely that fits modern cosmology, and they got it just from the Hebrew!!!
One thing that helped was a sermon series called “Your God Is Too Small” by a college professor & pastor, four sermons each banging away at our modern worldview’s preconceptions about what is possible, and another lone sermon called something like “The God in Your Box” that I remember as making a very good case for being very careful about ascribing things to God that the inspired writers didn’t.
Now I REALLY wish I could remember who wrote what all those centuries ago because that rings a bell! Does he reference any of the church Fathers at all?
Of course this circles back to the question of just when the first rebellion simmered in heaven. I kind of like the notion that links it to Lucifer, a.k.a. “The Shining One”/serpent of Genesis 3, highest of the angels, realizing that God had made creatures that were intended to stand higher than he did, but that falls into what we used to call “conjectural theology”.
LOL
That takes me back to a course on Romans where the professor had just finished diagramming one of Paul’s run-on sentences by writing on the classroom wall (that man was oblivious to anything but the text/Word quite often), and one student asked, “Are we over-thinking this?” and our professor responded, “You can’t over-think Paul”.
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You do not have the authority to tell me how to read or understand the bible. You have the right to disagree with me but you do not have the right to over rule me.
Richard