False: it is claimed not to be science because it ignores, misrepresents, distorts, and otherwise lies about the data.
The scriptures do not say that Adam and Eve “were created on the 6th day”. That is an assumption that cannot be argued from the text.
Big “oops” here: TE doesn’t “interpret Adam and Eve” at all!
Other than that point, I have to applaud ChatGPT on this one.
I am sure this will be an interesting post. But what is your objective here? When “choosing between miracles and what’s in the Bible”–do you mean "choosing whether or not to believe in the miracles in the Bible (where stated, that is) and between the search for a rationalist explanation?
Where does the Bible say the earth is flat? I don’t think that there is something amiss with saying that Genesis 1-11 has a polemic in it against Babylonian (or ANE ) anthropology (or theology)". What else would it be describing? Charles Darwin and his ideas were millennia in the future anyway.
If you know “miracle workers,” then this is downright lucky for you --especially with the stock market doing the dive it is currently doing. Not being snarky…just trying to figure out what you exactly mean to discuss. I am sure I will read on and see what others have to say. Thanks.
Great memory, Adam! In my case it was a car radio, but it did not involve me doing more than turning the dial. This was back in the day when radios had dials. And it only got two stations, both of them sports stations. I hate sports, could care less…but for some reason one day I turned the dial – just to hear “snow” for a bit, since (as I said) I hate sports…and I ended up listening to a man say “God knows about that thing that happened that made you the way you are”—and then the radion went dead. Never worked again, don’t know the station, was not trying to find a religious station…BUT I knew what was referred to in the man’s remark. And I have no skills in radio repair, so “go figure.”
JPM I think you may have referenced the wrong post of mine, however, I think I follow your point here.
My answer to the above…hang on… a white cockatoo is knocking on my front door for me to feed it breakfast…
I call this one “peeping Tom”…he does this every day when Im at the property in Sydney. He/she taps on the glass with his beak then looks in to see if im coming out or not. He wont stop until i do 
anyway, now where was I?
Oh yes…
You believe that Christ was the incarnate God right?
So doesn’t God understand science considering he created the very notion of it?
Therefore if that is true, then your point I would suggest does not address that dilemma. These are Christian forums…Christianity comes only from the Bible. That is a fundamental theological fact!
The Berean Jews in Acts 17 proved that point…Paul (well Luke actually for he wrote Acts) says of them they were “noble minded” beecause they studies the scriptures to see if what they were being taught was true biblically. Its very clear that Christians must use the bible as their standard on anything they are being taught…if there is contradiction, its not a fault/failure of the bible to interpret itself.
My understanding from other posts on these forums is that the Biologos answer to this (same as TEisms answers in general) is a literary argument…ie genre, poor understanding of ancient language, metaphor, allegory…any of those.
The trouble with the literary arguments:
the same historical claims across a 1000 year period in different languages by different individuals (one of who was Christ himself) totally destroys that argument.
I think you have a serious theological dilemma there and the statement “broken record” is highly deficient as it relies on not a shred of credible theological evidence to support that statement. If you had credible theological evidence from the bible, you would repeat it to me, however, that is not what happens on these forums. That should be very concerning for anyone seeking help here…they are not being presented with solid, well supported biblical Christian arguments.
World of the Bible by Robin A. Parry](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780718843953_A24814536/preview-9780718843953_A24814536.pdf)
This is the cosmology visualized.
Terry Sampson, I read the first link you posted there and it’s the beginning of a book about Biblical cosmology. In it, it says something about creation being alive. This is a fascinating concept to me. Do you have any more scholarly resources on this concept?
The Biblical Cosmos: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible
When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible’s characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God’s heaven–the heart of the universe.
This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God’s word afresh into our own modern worlds.
I was positively surprised by this analysis. ChatGPT seems to be able to do a better critique than I assumed. The analysis sounded almost like made by an intelligent being.
ChatGPT is a language model that was trained by using a massive amounts of texts. Maybe this kind of text analyses are a strength of such AI models.
“That’s a fascinating thought experiment—let’s dig into it. If Jesus and the New Testament authors had not appealed to the Old Testament scriptures literally to make their points, but still tried to deliver the same theological messages, a number of consequences would ripple out—both theological and interpretive:
In Summary:
Without New Testament authors citing the Old Testament literally:
• Christianity might have leaned more mystical, allegorical, or existential.
• Doctrines like original sin might look different.
• Fundamentalism might never have gained its modern traction.
• Scholarship and faith might have gotten along better.
• The idea of “biblical truth” might mean something richer and more layered than simply “what happened exactly.”
Miracles can - by God’s sovereign permission - be worked by others than God, so miracles by themselves prove nothing; they certainly do not prove that the miracle-worker has a Divine commission. Men can feign them, as can demons.
Critical Biblical scholarship is a service to the Biblical texts, with the intent to make sense of them. I cannot think of any undertaking that is more authentically Protestant, more faithful to the highest priorities of the Reformation, more perfectly in agreement with the efforts of the Protestant Reformers to uncover and elucidate the true meaning of Scripture, than that. That the results of such scholarship may be very disconcerting, is not in the least surprising. Theologically and religiously, it is immaterial whether the Book of Isaiah has 1 human author, or 2 or 3 or 12 or 20; or whether St Paul wrote 14 NT Epistles, or 13, or 10, or 7, or 4; for God alone remains the Primary Author of all Scripture.
In glaring contrast to that, Fundamentalist Evangelicalism is not only a betrayal of salvation by faith alone (in the sense intended by the Reformers); it is also a betrayal and a rejection of their attempts to discover the true meaning of Scripture in all its bearings. Fundamentalism has been a catastrophe for Protestantism, not least because it has led to a situation in which the errors of Fundamentalism are charged against, not Fundamentalism alone, but against all Christianity without exception. The Trumpolatry of US Evangelicalism is one of the fruits of the pathological sickness of Fundamentalism; for it was never, at bottom, a Christian movement; it has always been social conservatism masquerading - perhaps innocently, at first - as a Christian movement.
The waters in Gen 1.6 are are “the waters above the earth” that, on occasions, come down through the sluices in the solid firmament of heaven, the upper surface of which is where God is enthroned. That surface is a solid pavement, of (IIRC) lapis lazuli. The precise location of the heavenly sea, in relation to that solid pavement, is uncertain. That is what the Biblical texts say, so that is what must be accepted as the Biblical picture. Later readers, such as ourselves, have no right whatsoever to distort the texts by making them more “scientifically reasonable”, for to do that, is to pervert Scripture - which is the very crime of which critical scholars and critical scholarship have so often been accused. That Biblical cosmology does not agree with scientifically accessible cosmology, is totally irrelevant to what the Biblical texts, taken in the literal sense - that is, the sense intended by the human authors - are supposed to mean.
If the meaning of the texts, accurately interpreted, is contrary to the doctrines of either historical Christianity or of Fundamentalism, then so be it - what matters, is not that the meaning of the texts should support Christian or Jewish doctrines, but, that the texts should be interpreted as accurately as possible. If that leads to the destruction of every Christian doctrine ever taught, then so be it.
The mediaevals were well aware of the four-fold - sometimes nine-fold - sense of Scripture. In his 35-book - roughly 2000-page - commentary on Job, the Moralia, St Gregory the Great (born 540; Pope from 590 to 604) uses the four-fold sense constantly. As did Western Christendom after him. One of the innovations made by the first Protestants was, that they returned to the literal sense alone; as can be seen in Calvin’s commentaries.
That Scripture uses figures of speech (such as allegory or hyperbole) or rhetoric (such as apostrophe) are expressions of the literal sense of the books; just as they can be of the other senses. The sense of the genre of parable in Judges 9 or in Galatians 4, is the literal sense: the parables in those passages are to be “taken literally”, as the parables that they are. The recognition that they are to be “taken literally”, as the parables they are, is a precondition for interpreting those passages.
Higher criticism was a problem, not because of the literary character of the Bible, so much as because of its implications for the understanding of certain books as (trustworthy) history. Certain books of the Bible appeared to make assertions that X was historically true; men like Bishop Colenso of Natal pointed out, at length, that there were serious difficulties with treating the Exodus narrative as unalloyed history. And it is true that that narrative was never intended to be taken as a record of unalloyed historical fact; for it involves Divine action, and divine beings are not historical: for history-writing is not equipped to take account of them.
I really like this.
Why would a parent praying for the life of their child be less important? How many of those prayers go unanswered? Is God so capricious that he will start a lawnmower but not save a child from cancer?
Christians do not judge God.
We do not question His judgement.
We do not have the picture He has
We ask. The answer can be No. Ours is not to reason why.
God has “interfered” in things I consider trivial, and “ignored” tings I value or care about. That is part of the life of faith.
Richard
If we can’t judge God, then we can’t determine if God is good. If we do not question God’s judgment, then how can we know if it is good? Those are the questions that come to mind amongst those who do not share your faith.
God is good.
You do not have the authority to claim otherwise.
On what criteria? Yours? Who are you!
Which is why you do not have one/
Richard
That is a good question. To answer to it, we should define what is good.
Christian believers believe that God has informed to us what is good. That is a viewpoint that is dependent on assumptions about the existence of God, the authority of God as the Creator, and the character of God. The last one is perhaps a circular argument, at least partly - God is good, therefore what He tells us to do is good and defines what is good, and we can see that God is good through what He has said.
Those who are not believers need to find another basis and criteria for defining what is good. That is not simple because the cultural opinions have changed during the history. What has been bad and punishable in one culture can be understood as good in another culture. Even within the same culture, opinions of punishable bad and accepted good can change in a relatively short time, as the opinions in the society change and the political power shifts from one group to another. That can be seen in changing laws or interpretations about how the laws should be applied.
If the good and bad is not determined through voting, what could be an objective criteria for good or bad? How do we decide whether God is good or not good?
So because God understands science you expect Him to conform to your scientific worldview instead of speaking in terms the people of the time(s) would understand?
That statement is contrary to scripture, particularly Jesus and Paul.
The only dilemma is yours: you insist that the opening of Genesis is one type of genre, but you can’t back that up from scripture.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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