Because an atheist doesn’t believe in the Creator and because you believe that the Sovereign God of the universe cannot control atoms and molecules, therefore you’ve disproven evolution and proven the earth is only 6 ka old. Did I get that right?
I evidence to the contrary otherwise. Personally. A case in point.
Trying to understand what you meant.
The hope was that you would explain more about what you meant by this. I was having trouble fitting it into the context of the discussion.
I was saying that skeptical theism was about the problem of evil and not about justifying the idea that God is sensitive to insults.
And I am not understanding these questions – not what they mean or why you are asking them.
Essentially blaming God for evil would be offensive to Him so historically everyone blames Adam for evil. By suggesting God created a negative initial condition that needed to be improved also may be offensive to God. But I’m suggesting the opposite. The negative nature of gen1v1,2 highlights who God is thru juxtaposition.
GOD VS initial Creation
Light--------------------Dark
Ordered (law) --------Chaos
Alive --------------------Desolation
What “negative state”?
God didn’t make a “negative state”, He started as He wished to. There was not yet anything negative about darkness or even about chaos – that only came later when the Deceiver brought sin to the Earth.
That was correctly deemed a heresy long ago. God didn’t create the universe within Himself, so there was no need to create “space within Himself”, nor is that actually possible.
You’re playing the same sort of logic games that led the medieval church astray so often.
Maybe you should learn to read the scriptures.
The Holy Spirit Himself, as recorded in Acts 15, reduced the entire Old Testament instruction to just four items.
The Sabbath is not on His list.
The Ten Words are off-topic because this is a discussion about the New Covenant, for which the Holy Spirit reduced the entire Torah to four items.
The Ten are not on His list.
Now you’re accusing the Holy Spirit of taking away the relevance and importance of His own scripture.
In this you are correct: when He reduced the entire Torah to just four items, He did not include Exodus 20 in His list.
That was Stephen Hawking speaking as an atheist first and a scientist second.
Adam, if you want to argue against a scientific theory, you need to understand how to do it properly. You do not argue against a scientific theory by quote mining famous scientists for broad, sweeping statements about subjects that the theory does not address. If you want to argue that scientific theories such as evolution and deep geological time are not a fact, you must do one of the following two things:
I covered the first point here:
And the second point here:
Read both of these articles carefully before you continue with the debate, Adam. Because if you aren’t doing what they say, you are just wasting everyone’s time.
You were talking about attributing evil to God. I noted that at the very least it was attributing inadequacy to God.
No – that’s an opinion that you have done very badly at defending, primarily because you keep misrepresenting the scriptures, though more importantly you fail to understand the work and centrality of Christ. EVERYTHING in the scriptures is subordinate to Him and His word and is there only to point to Him.
So the Sabbath rest is just a shadow pointing to the one Who brings the true Rest of God, Jesus. Merely His incarnation in Mary’s womb was greater than the Sabbath because the Sabbath could and did never rise to the the holiness of God Himself becoming a tiny piece of material Creation!
Jesus Himself set aside the Sabbath when He declared, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”! Rest is not a day or something pertaining to a day, rest is a Person – rest is JESUS!
Every day that He, our rest, walked on this Earth was greater than the Sabbath and more holy than the Sabbath, and all days of the week were made equal because HEAVEN walked among us! The Sabbath was holy as an echo of God’s work, but the echo is always less than the sound, and Jesus is the sound. When you have the sound, the echo fades to unimportance.
But then came a day more holy still, holy beyond a million Sabbaths: God died, showing us what it meant to be God thereby, and His blood falling to the Earth made that day holy as no day ever was or could have been. If the story had ended there, that would have been the holiest day of the week, and the Sabbath would have been shoved aside by the Lord of the Sabbath.
But that wasn’t the end of the story; the end, the other end of the Crucifixion where our Christ embraced death, came on the third day later when the Lord of the Sabbath declared that He had finished His work, that He had not only borne our sins and weaknesses to the grave but that He had come back from the grave since death could not hold this Man – and while the Cross was victory, it was the Resurrection which write that Victory into the fabric of history. The day of the Cross was both the center and the true beginning of history; the day of the Resurrection was the confirmation and the celebration; the True Adam had come and all things started becoming new.
To cling to the Sabbath is to deny that the work of Christ is the center of history; to deny that His work is the center of history is to deny Who He IS. To insist that the echo is greater than the sound is foolishness; to insist that the signpost is greater than that to which it points is insanity – to insist that the Sabbath is greater than the Son is idolatry.
And since you fall into that idolatry, your have no possibility of understanding the rest of the scriptures. To understand the scriptures you first have to do what is written, to “come out from among them”, to come to the light of Christ.
The reason for the existence of aethistic views in mainstream science, from where evolutionary thought came, the reason for the need of probability in science timelines, is because they do not believe a God can or will create miraculously in an instant.
I do not believe anything of the sort relating to a sovereign God being unable to control energy and matter. In fact i believe the complete opposite.
I believe in creation exactly as written by those inspired by God to write…ie "God speaking everything (except Adam and Eve) into existence instantaneously. Adam and Eve were made by our creator with his own hands and God physically breathed the breath of life into their nostrils…“thus they both became living souls”.
I put it to you that it is outrageous to claim that an all-knowing and all-powerful God would not have the capacity to explain at length to his creation the evolutionary alternative if it were true.
The fact is, God did not explain it that way, and the reasons why should be as obvious to you as it is to us YECers.
The only real claim i have consistently heard in apparent support of TEism is that man didn’t have the capacity to understand, so God told them, via a great number of face-to-face discussions with Moses over more than 40 years, a porky. Therefore the creation story of Genesis chapter 1 is basically a myth…along with the flood account and everything in between.
Some TEists don’t even believe the Exodus was a real event…or the conquest of the promised land. Therefore Abraham is also a myth…therefore the entire covenant given to Abraham, a covenant that promises a messiah who will save His people from their sins, sins that were initiated by the fall of man (ie the sins of Adam and Eve resulting in their banishment from the Garden of Eden)…all of that is a complete mythical lie.
It is at this point i put it to any TEist that Christianity is a complete lie.
You see where the allegory of the books of Moses leads us…we are led to atheism. There is no alternative given the above problems.
Now you know why i choose to ignore any secular scientific claim of Old age earth. I believe in the miracle of creation (and the punishment of the flood approx 1500 years later) exactly as written in the bible. I believe this as written because the bible is so theologically linked with the creation account and the flood narrative, our salvation hinges on it so intimately, it is essentially un-christian to not believe YECism … especially given the statement in Rev 14:12 “patience of the saints are those who keep the commandments of God (incl the 4th) AND have the testimony of Jesus”
If all you were doing here, Adam, was rejecting the “secular” bits of science, then that would be one thing. But you’re not. You are repeatedly making demonstrably false and misleading claims about aspects of science that have nothing whatsoever to do with secularism. Furthermore, you are repeating these falsehoods over and over again despite having been told repeatedly that they are falsehoods. An old earth is not based on secularism. It is based on measurement.
I don’t understand why the resistance to my suggestion. You would agree in a privation definition of Evil? Also all things created by and for him. So Gen 1 ,2 also created by privation (creation from silence), for Gods Good purposes. Isaiah 45 says the same thing.
Also I’ve split sin into two categories, ontological and moral. Adam can only be judged for moral not ontological. By doing this Gods honor is preserved as I’m not suggesting God is responsible for Adams sin directly, but that God is responsible for a creation that allows sin to occur. I know of no Christian position that avoids or escapes this claim.
Mabey you haven’t understood my suggestion that the act of privation created something with the qualities dark, void, chaos. We cannot call these things Good and neither does God. Now remember this is ontological goodness not moral goodness its Ontological evil not moral evil and like your suggesting is a tool, the canvas, substance. For example entropy is not a moral evil but it is an ontological evil, meaning it misses the mark compared to Gods perfection. In that sense Creation eternally will always be less than God as we reject pantheism now and eternally.
Chrisentheism is the Christianisation and clarification of panentheism (IN not OF). This position has never been labeled a heresy (to my limited knowledge) nor can it be as I made up the term last week. 
You are promoting my position well here! The privation (forsaking) of the Father on Christ was the necessary cause of creation.
If we want to elevate Jesus to the highest position Chrisentheism is unavoidable. He is both the beginning gen 1vs1,2 and the end rev 22:21
I’m asking you to lay this presupposition aside and examine this from a fresh perspective with better explanatory power. Its a hypothesis. You believe science can advance, why not theology?
So he is sovereign over molecular mutations, including and especially DNA? Evolution is such an impossibility and a lie. 
Put away. It wasn’t important and in fact trivial compared to the spiritual truths that needed to be imparted. (And could you have handled algebra in first grade? Can you handle it now, I wonder.) It wasn’t important enough for him to explain that the sky wasn’t a solid firmament over our heads, was it? That’s a little more basic than how life was created, and he didn’t bother to do that, in his infinite, all-knowing and all-powerful capacity. (He left the fun and the joy of figuring out how he made things to work for us to discover – every little child is a scientist, and good scientists are childlike, enjoying what they discover.)
There you go, putting again. (Golf much? 
) You need to put some good thinking on display. That has been an utter failure. And I believe Christianity is a complete lie based on what? Your belief in falsehoods about reality? Sure.
Both the Greek there and the Hebrew in Psalm 34:3 have a root that means “be/make great”, so while translations like to go with “extol” or “exalt” the basic meaning is to make great(er).
Now in first century Palestine, how would one go about making someone or the someone’s name “greater”? Quite simply by acting on their behalf in ways that cause others who see to praise the someone.
Yes, the passage where Mary uses the word it apparently has the metaphorical meaning as the regular meaning of “enlarge” or “make great” just doesn’t really work.
OTOH, the ancient near eastern mind conceived of praise given to a deity to actually add strength to that deity, so this isn’t purely metaphorical.
Science can’t even comment on theistic evolution because it has no way to measure divine activity, or even to detect it. The genetic record seems to show that mutations are not planned but are accidents, yet would God leave His tracks if He stepped in and imposed a mutation here or there?
A friend in university, studying biology and computer science, calculated that to start with a single cell and arrive at humans only seven interventions would have been needed (after the initial intervention to get life started, which makes eight). With all the plenitude of mutations in the human family tree, seven would not even be noticeable; indeed – as I commented to him – seventy times seven would not be noticeable; there is just no way to look at any specific mutation and say, “Yep, God did that one!” [Or as got tossed out for comparison, there would be no way for biologists to detect meddling in our genome by bored grad students from Galactic U – the source isn’t important, only the ability to look at a gene and deduce whether it was natural or supernatural.
So science doesn’t say it’s wrong because it lacks the capacity to determine that.
As for the scriptures, the same holds true assuming we are talking about the YEC trickster God; there is no way to distinguish a universe made last Tuesday with the appearance of immense age from a universe that actually has immense age.
From reading all your posts on this topic for a year or so back, I conclude that what you actually believe in is creation as your imagination can grasp it because you show no effort at all to understand that the two Genesis Creation accounts are ancient literature, and if you fail to take seriously that they are ancient literature then you are not reading what the writer(s) meant, you are reading your opinion into the scripture.
The reason is simple: God didn’t care one whit what someone’s cosmology and earth sciences would say a couple millennia down the line, and He doesn’t care now, either. God’s sole concern in the scriptures is to get across a series of messages about how things are between Him and us, and to do that He humbles Himself and meets His writers and His people where they were/are when the Spirit moved men to write. He does not correct anyone’s cosmology or other understanding of the world, He speaks in concepts the intended audience will understand so that they can go directly to the point about where things are between YHWH-Elohim and His people.
Some people like to think that the Creation and other accounts were written to us, but they were not: they were written to the audience at the time of the writing – we just happen to be honored by being allowed to read His mail to someone else and learn from it . . . something we can never achieve so long as we treat it as though it was our mail and not that of all those generations when He spoke.
God would not insult His audience at any given time by imposing an alien worldview on the writers and saying, “Yes, I want you all to end up in My Heaven, but first you have to get your science right”. Correct science is not a prerequisite for salvation, nor is it even a prerequisite for the message of the scriptures to be true: we do not come to God because we have examined the scriptures and found them correct in every point (which isn’t even possible because what science is confident of one day can be overturned by the weekend), we come to God because we have encountered God the Incarnate Word and trusted in His birth and life and death and resurrection – and we trust the scriptures to give us truth because He is Truth and He says that those scriptures are about Him.
You know I was referring to the top quote here.
No – the Incarnation is the “necessary cause of creation”. Christ’s death was the rescue of creation, not the cause. The Cross is center to history because history is about humans, and it was on the Cross that Christ showed us what God was/is like while setting things straight, getting the universe back on center. But Creation is not just about humans, so Christ’s death is not the center of Creation, His conception was.
Somewhere I wrote at length about Christ as firstborn, the Way-Opener, and how that is what makes Him first and last – up above in this thread, I think.
But I don’t see as that helps your assertion here – it makes the Incarnation the hinge point of Creation, not Christ’s death. The title of a collection of talks by Dietrich Bonhoeffer gets it right: Christ the Center. As Bonhoeffer wrote elsewhere, the Crucifixion and Resurrection were not the whole of the Incarnation; God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself from the moment He arrived in the virgin’s womb.
Creation scientists use exactly the same science to come up with different measurements and when they do, they are discredited (which is the usual thing for atheists to do because they cannot accept God, or that He can create in an instant).
The “its based on measurements” line is a rather startling argument, given that you are using assumptions (via the technical term hypothesis) to generate theories, and suddenly, voila these original assumptions become fact and from that you get “measurements”.
The O.P appears to claim that perhaps we can mix the two via Chrisentheism…i have showed theologically that is not possible. I will repeat why below again
The only real claim i have consistently heard in apparent support of TEism is that man didn’t have the capacity to understand, so God told them, via a great number of face-to-face discussions with Moses over more than 40 years, a porky. Therefore the creation story of Genesis chapter 1 is basically a myth…along with the flood account and everything in between.
Some TEists don’t even believe the Exodus was a real event…or the conquest of the promised land. Therefore Abraham is also a myth…therefore the entire covenant given to Abraham, a covenant that promises a messiah who will save His people from their sins, sins that were initiated by the fall of man (ie the sins of Adam and Eve resulting in their banishment from the Garden of Eden)…all of that is a complete mythical lie.
It is at this point i put it to any TEist that Christianity is a complete lie.
You see where the allegory of the books of Moses leads us…we are led to atheism. There is no alternative given the above problems.
What you ignore, as do almost all TEists, is that one must glaze over the philosophical dilemmas in TEism and develop unsound theology in order to find compromise. That is foolhardy and in all honesty, individuals who are blinded by the claim that the only way they can believe is if God fits their science…these people are not Christian anyway and are simply deluding themselves. I am sorry to say, the biblical truth is, they will not be saved and that is because fundamentally, they do not believe…they have no faith. Faith does not come from science.
Christianity is a philosophy, it is not science nor does it care about science methods put forward by the influence of wordly men…these are not Godly things. I am not discounting science, i like science, however, i do not find God by opening a science textbook…i find God by opening the Bible. If the bible and secular science theories dissagree, then one must ask where the secular science has gone wrong. Creation Ministries and Answers in Genesis have done exactly that…they take the Bible as written and then seek to find alternative theories in the science. Just because that does not agree with your interpretation (or even the majority mainstream science), that does not mean AOG are wrong in any way…its simply means their theories and your theories are reached differently and for different reasons.
TEists use science as the ultimate authority and make the Bible fit. That puts human interpretation avove the Inspired Word of God. Whether you like it or not, there are too many self evident passages within the bible that ensure its consistency. If you start to make the claim of allegory, the entire world view falls apart…if you are to take it to its conclusion, you have to conceed that there is no God. Its the only option.
It may come as a suprise, but this is the reason why I am convinced that SDA church has it right on most theological issues. If a religious denomination denies the absolute importance of 4th comandment, they have already removed the signal biggest hurdle of the creation account. If you remove Exodus 20:11, then there is no problem ignoring the line “for in six days the lord created the heavens, the earth and all that is in them”
Adam wouldn’t we be better to say
It appears to me at this time …. Which is reasonable
That should be our stance on science as well.
During the reformation it appeared to the RC church justification was one thing, then with greater insights Luther and others (Erasmus definition I believe) clarified the doctrine. The fatal mistake is to claim Infallibility around particular doctrines which is impossible. The RC made this Papal infallibility doctrinal and forever separated the church. The true church strives for unity. We hold Jesus as the foundational truth, He is the son of God. We are theologically exploring all the other facts or particulars around the foundation of this actual truth (infallible truth which Jesus claimed for himself). Or said another way Jesus is the gravitational center of our religion, all other bodies (doctrines) orbit around and are related in many ways. We can discover more potential truth over time but may see slightly different at the time. The crux is, you seem to be willing to sacrifice the unity of the body around these particulars and claim SDA infallible on these issues, consider carefully!! We can choose to have an endless debate on the migration route to the promise land, but sadly those who complained, we not allowed in when they got there!
Chrisentheism recenters Christ as the ontological foundation on which science is done.
Refer back to original post and poem and provide some of your insights to that as I’m looking to sharpen swords not duel to the death!
thanks
“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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