I think I would have read about it if Ryugu had collided with us.
That’s like saying that the existence of a paint brush means there’s no painter, or the existence of a cake means there’s no baker.
all good points Marvin.
It seems to me that perhaps ive given the impression that all Christians must have the same doctrine. Theology and doctrine are different are they not?
Isnt theology kinda like the framework by which we study and develop doctrine? Wouldnt that be more universal? This is probably my fault in not ensuring i dont inadvertainly conflate the two in this environment as i would be misleading in doing that.
I agree with most of what you said St Roymond…i am suspicious of your last statement but generally, yes i agree with your response.
However, it still presents a problem for Christians and needs answering does it not? How do Christians answer the secularists who would use this to claim there is no God, we came from asteroids?
BTW i ask this becauser i wonder if Biologos is better able to answer it than my world view?
Yes – and it all depends on where the foundation is put. Every time the foundation has been selected on the basis of how to make a logical argument the church has gotten into trouble; the foundation is and ever shall be Jesus and the Incarnation.
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Im trying to understand why your doctrine is so heavily focused on the incarnation?
Tell me something…what is the purpose of Christs incarnation? Ultimately, for what reason?
It only takes a little thought: God made a universe where the basic laws and constants result in what we cal the Periodic Table, and the natures of the elements (including the relative amounts) result in chemicals that turn out to be the building blocks of life, such that these chemicals occur in abundance all across the universe in every galaxy – indeed given the laws and constants it is impossible for a galaxy to exist where these do not eventually occur! And so in every galaxy where third-generation stars have formed the pieces for making life are found in every cloud from which those stars formed, and thus when a planet massive enough to hold an atmosphere for a few eons forms at the right distance from a star for water to exist in all three phases on its surface, tilted just right to provide seasons, and with a moon large enough to slosh oceans back and forth in what we call tides, all the building blocks for life will be present and will freely mix. Having a molten core and thus a magnetic field helps, as does the resultant volcanism, of course since it spreads a mix of elements across the surface, and enough water to make the aforementioned oceans, but when all this happens then whatever trigger is necessary will result in what is expressed in Genesis by the words, “Bring forth!”
Tell them they’re making a category error. I like John Lennox’ illustration of this: if he puts fifty dollars into the drawer in his motel room in Boston and comes back to find only twenty dollars, he does not conclude that the laws of arithmetic were broken, he concludes that the laws of the state of Masschussetts were! In other words, the atheists are trying to pretend that physical laws can exclude personal action. My own favorite illustration, as the family member who got roped into baking for family holidays, is that secularists are claiming that the existence of an apple pie on the table for Christmas means that there was no baker in the kitchen!
Honestly, in my experience the YEC response is almost certain to drive people away, whereas the Biologos version will make them sit up and think.
Indeed the ‘recipe’ above for a life-sustaining planet is part of what drove some of my fellow intelligent-design club members to conclude that there must be a Designer: the universe gives the appearance of something set up to result in life, specifically carbon-based life, because like a LEGO set with lots of pieces everything necessary for life is right at hand just from the unfolding of the basic laws and constants – often referred to as “fine-tuning”. And that is – as even Richard Dawkins once admitted – is awe-inspiring at the very least, since as Carl Sagan once observed it makes the occurrence of life seem inevitable.
I think of this every time I read the statement that the Spirit of God hovered/meditated over the “face of the deep”. I’ll borrow the words of one of those fellow students, a former atheist who in his search for somewhere that the Designer had attempted communicating with us His intelligent creatures compared it to the story of Goldilocks, that this particular lump of matter in a sea of chemicals and energy was “just right”, and all it needed was photons – which show up when God commanded light to be. He imagined – and I with him – that the Spirit was contemplating this particular part of “the deep”, seeing all the elements and the chemicals delivered as designed by the interstellar cloud that formed our solar system and anticipating the life to come.
And yes, that’s treating the text a bit more literally than its literary genre might require, but it doesn’t at all surprise me that when the person God chose say down to write a Creation story to challenge all the ones that had gotten it wrong then more truth than he was aware of shone through.
Because the Incarnation is the solution to all the problems of the Old Testament, from separation from God to the Nephilim to reclaiming all the nations – it is the center of the entire story. Jesus in His earthly life was human as we should have been and in His Resurrection is what we were always supposed to be. He is the fulfillment of every covenant and their foundation, the first true human, the key to re-opening Eden and picking up where things left off when the Serpent/Nachash tipped things off the rails.
Everything else in the scriptures is secondary to “Repent and believe”, and that rests on Jesus. Everything in all the texts is about Him, as He showed the two disciples on the way to Emmaus; as Paul put it, He is all in all, all things are for Him.
The scriptures are stories about YHWH-Elohim and His desire for a family made of matter, and Jesus is the pinacle of that because as the Firstborn/Way-Opener He shaped it all and forged a path where we will get shaped again into His likeness.
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To live among the creatures He loved in their world.
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Pretty much the same way that we might answer a ‘secularist’ who asks why I think I was created by God when it’s obvious that I came from my mother.
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To finish that thought with an actual answer…
The creation of life is not by watchmakers and engineers but by farmers and shepherds. Living things are not machines – not tools made for an end but and end in themselves doing things for their own reasons. Thus living organisms are created by relationships rather than design – parent and child creating this new life together.
Thus while it is obvious I came from my mother, this does not preclude the involvement of God. Nobody controls what happens – not God, not my mother and not me as an embryo. All work together for the result. Likewise, whatever the contribution of asteroids may be, this does not preclude the involvement of God.
I’d say living things are a different kind of machine, a cross between the ultimate freedom of the divine and the clockwork action of the merely material. We are constrained in our actions by our machine nature while freed from mechanical determinism by our divine image.
I will answer this too because I am the same. I was thinking about this earlier this week. Out of three, incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, it is the incarnation which is the most important for me – the fact that God became a man to live among us. It connects directly to the idea that love rather than power is the essence of God – as a matter of choice. Choosing love and freedom over power control, God created life and then set aside all power and knowledge to become a helpless human infant. That more than these others tell us about God.
I particularly don’t like the emphasis on the crucifixion as if Jesus were some kind of human sacrifice magic spell to enable God to forgive. That is ridiculous to me. Why would God need such a thing to forgive any more than I do? Yes Jesus died for our salvation and yes it shows how far God will go for our us. But the need/requirement for this tells us more about us than about God. In other words, the demand for Jesus’ death ultimately came from us and our sin and not from God. Yes God/Jesus saw it coming. We are self-destructive and kill the prophets God sends to help us, so it was not very surprising that we did the same to Jesus.
As for the resurrection, there is no doubt this played a key role in giving birth to Christianity. It showed us evil need not be the victor and death is not the end.
Firstly, before respnding to this i want to acknowledge i have read all of the other reepnses in full and value your thoughts guys.
My thoughts, or beliefs on the incarnation i suppose would be a better way to put it, are as follows:
Satan charged God in heaven with the claim He is selfish (simply put)
Satan rebelled and was cast out
Satan was cast to this earth i believe because it is the creation of this planet that somehow brought up the heavenly conflict in the first place
Wheb Adam and Eve fell into sin, at the behest of Satans temptations, it was Satan who demanded blood…he demanded the law be fulfilled.
God had already decided on another plan…to show mercy whilst still fulfilling “the wages of sin is death”
God gave His own life for the short comings of His own creation in order to prove satans charge in heaven was indeed wrong.
After doing that, what about us? Well, thats where the resurrection and ascention into heaven takes centre stage…Christ demonstrates that this is all about redemption and restoration.
The Gospel goes far further than just Christ was born…it clearly illustrates redemption and restoration. We find this doctrine by studying Nebuchadnezzars dream in Daniel 2, and obviously the book of Revelation written by the apostle John whilst imprisoned on the isle of Patmos in the early A.D 90s.
I just dont see that the incarnation focus explains the gospel. What the incarnation does do is prove the promise to Adam and Eve in Genesis chapter 3.15 “your seed will crush his head”.
Sure the israelite nation at the time of Christ got completely mixed up in their bible theology, however given the oppression under Rome at the time, i suppose they had some delusion of another Mosaic type exodus…only in the reverse (the oppressors get driven out).
I see sin and death as a natural consequence, not necessarily an forceful punishment from God. I say thst because we know as mortals we cannot look upon the glorious face og God and live. I remember what happened to Hophni and Phineas (edit…sorry Nadab and Abihu) in the tabernacle…fire came out from the most holy place and killed them. I think that its like a science experiment where one attempts to mix potasium with water…a naturalistic but nonetheless voilent reaction is the result.
I used to use the illustration of Jesus’ death constituting a payment like writing out a check, so all we have to do is put our name there are our debt is paid. Then I got to thinking that if the Crucifixion is like writing a check doesn’t that mean that God can be bought off? That’s the direction that Roman Catholics go with their whole “treasury of merits” business, and that suffers from the question of to whom the debt is owed – is Jesus ‘writing’ this check to the devil? to the Father? to a deficiency in Creation that results from sin? To say it’s to the devil strike me as ridiculous given that Christ’s death is described as of infinite worth, unless you go with a limited atonement where while Christ’s death itself had infinite value only that portion needed to ‘pay’ for all our sins gets paid out.
I go back to the centrality of the Cross, the place Paul treats as the victory. I do this primarily because of one word:
- τετέλεσται
That’s (teh-TEH-les-tie) the one-word sentence that comes out in most English translations as “It is finished!” but means more than that; to gather more of the meaning, it can be rendered as “It is now and forever totally completed”. It wasn’t, as some rather sad commentators have suggested, a surrender because He couldn’t take it any more; no, it was a cry of victory at the point concerning which Paul says:
None of the rulers of this age understood it. If they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
I don’t regard forgiveness as the centerpiece any more, I agree with all the Fathers who said that Jesus defeated death by dying. That wasn’t evident yet – it wouldn’t be till the third day – but it was accomplished; to personify death as Paul and many of the Fathers do, Death bit down on Jesus and found it a bite that broke his jaw. As the prophet said, by dying Christ swallowed up Death.
In this we are the same also. What do we need salvation from? From God? You’ve got to be kidding! That would make God and Christianity into the biggest racketeering operation – for that is what the mobsters do, offer us protection from themselves.
No, what we need salvation from is ourselves. The greatest threat to mankind is mankind. And so for me it is all about the removal of the self-destructive habits of sin. The problem isn’t that God cannot forgive but that sin is a part of us and by itself sin will destroy us. And we cannot remove it ourselves because sin is destructive of free will along with everything else of value in us – like a creeping degenerative disease of the spirit.
This goes hand in glove with what Jesus said repeatedly, “Your sins are forgiven, so go and sin no more.” The second part is the whole point and Paul says the same in Romans 2.
I don’t buy into any of this story you are telling. The only rebellion of Satan in the Bible is in Revelation and it takes place after Christ is born.
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id just like to add a wee little bit on to this…Jesus defied the eternal punishment of death, which comes because of transgression, by being raised from the dead. His resurrection and ascention into heaven proved that His death was sufficient for paying the wages of sin and fulfilled the slaying of the lamb in the ancient Israelite Sanctuary Services.
“CSI Jerusalem, Case of the Missing Body” by Russ Breault.
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The Shroud of Turin: What is it?
Starting at 1:26:46, The Best Explanation
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I’m betting abiogenesis is a lovely pipe-dream, and all my Louisville kin are–for all their smarts–wrong.
“Defied”? “Eternal”? He defeated death in all forms by dying. A nice way to look at it is to regard death as a trap like an old bear trap–
But when it snapped shut on Him the teeth broke instead of holding Him.
This sounds like sin is a person that earned a payment from Jesus, which is just bizarre. “The wages of sin” isn’t something that could be paid because death is the wage(s) – by sinning, we earn death. He just took our wages and applied them to Himself. If you want to go with the economic model, it wasn’t a payment, it was an account transfer.
That guy is a heck of a fun speaker, so I’m listening to the whole thing.
It’s well worth the time to listen!
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