I want to be as kind as i can here…I would like to just summarise some basic but very relevant information about Trinitarianism as its extremely important in responding to your statement above.
Trinitarianism is the foundational belief to the majority of the Christian church (via council of Nicea)
There are quite a number of Christians who do not believe that Christ is God, rather they believe He is the Son of God…subordinate to the Father. One religious group who are quite well known for this Arian belief are the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Arianism is opposed to Trinitarianism.
Before going further a caveat…
I use the name for The Son (Christ) very loosely because there are some Christians who do not believe he was called that prior to the incarnation.
Focusing a little on JW’s beliefs concerning Christ, a little peek into that organisation will quickly show, they publish a lot of research on their beliefs and have extensive material in support of Arianism. I do not agree with their conclusions on the belief, but that is not relevant in response at this time.
Now the interesting thing is this, despite the Jehovah’s Witnesses statement that Christ is not Jehovah (the Father), they do believe that Jehovah passed on His power to the Son (Christ) and that Christ created this world using the power given to Him by the Father!
Ok, now we have that out of the way…
If all Christians believe that we are saved by the redemptive power of Christ and almost all Christians believe Christ created this world…
how then do you manage to conclude that a rejection of Christ as the Son of God who created this world is not a total rejection of Christianity and therefore a statement of atheism?
this begs the question, are you influenced by Jewish faith? If so, i would point out that there are over 1/4 of a million messianic Jews worldwide now who believe in the gospel.
None of which had anything to do with my question.
Darwin’s letter was a rejection of Christianity, at least in its orthodox forms. But rejection of Christianity is not the same as rejection of theism (as hundreds of millions of Muslims, for example, can testify to), nor is it in itself a rejection of a creator.
It’s not outrageous; I observed it happen repeatedly in university, and had the privilege of helping a few students past the fallacious logic their YEC churches had inflicted on them.
It’s easy to see: among students brought up YEC who were science majors, the portion who abandoned their faith was large, while among students brought up as regular Christians the portion was small – I can only think of a couple out of hundreds, whereas among YEC students it was a majority out of hundreds. So we have Christian + YEC + science → lots of lost faith but Christian + (no YEC) + science → little loss of faith. The difference between the two is YEC, and therefore YEC leads to lots of loss of faith.
That is utterly contrary to scripture. Nowhere does it say, “Belief all the things the scriptures say about the Creator and you shall be saved”, it only says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved”.
Your version adds a second unforgivable sin when Jesus said there is only one.
Darwin in that letter didn’t mention “Creator” or even “creator”. How you are doing with Darwin’s letter the same thing you do to scripture: you are adding to it.
We even know that when it says “all the streams run to the sea” that’s not true – it isn’t even true in Israel.
The Bible doesn’t say anything about corruption of the animal kingdom or non-living creation. Please stop reading things into the text that aren’t there!
Biblically, ascribing power to a being is worship. So why are you ascribing power to Satan?
You are inventing power for Satan, thus exalting him.
No, it isn’t, not unless you’re someone who was alive at the time the section was written.
It baffles me how you can fail to see how arrogant it is to assert that God had the ancient writers write not for the people back then but for you, using literary genres and a worldview that was alien to them just so you would be able to read in English and not have to apply yourself to actually study the scriptures!
Besides the fact that there’s no such thing as “secular uniformitarianism”, uniformitarianism is exactly what we should expect from a Creator Who is rational and faithful rather than random and capricious. All that uniformitarianism boils down to is that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever – i.e., He can be trusted to not go around changing the way things work.
Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
YEC likes to say that science is only possible because God ordered creation, and then proceed to decry science for perceived uniformitarianism. Pick a lane guys!
No… the letter does not say that he is an atheist. So no it does not prove any such thing.
…just that like most people in the world he was not a Christian.
The only words we have by Darwin on whether he was an atheist was a clear denial – that he was not an atheist. By the end of his life he was very likely agnostic. But when he wrote “Origin of the Species” we have clear statements that he was in fact theist.
Setting aside the fact that theism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive, we can ask whether his discovery of evolution made him doubt the existence of God? …that just makes me laugh, because many many things in life make even the most religious of us doubt the existence of God.
But the plain fact is that there are not only more people (more than the people who stop believing because of evolution) who continue to believe in God even though they accept evolution as fact, but there are many who come to a believe in God while never questioning the truth of evolution. …and then there are those like me who would never believe in a Biblical God without evolution. The god of the anti-science creationists, being more like the god of the Deists than the God of the Bible is neither credible nor even worth believing in.
I think i can safely say that principally, most Christians do not believe either of the above are saved because neither of the above accept the gospel. If one does not accept the gospel (when one has knowledge of it), then one is automatically rejecting Christ as saviour. If the only way to heaven is to be clothed in the cloak of christs righteousness, one must believe that his death on the cross is sufficient for salvation!
Therefore the answer to your first two lines quoted above is found in the famous memory verse (highlighted in bold bellow):
25And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. 26And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed. 27And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. 28But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here. 29Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, 30And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
31And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
To answer line 3 of the quoted post you wrote above…
What is your theological understanding of Revelation 3:14&15.
If you were to study and answer my question…then that is also the response to your statement which i have quoted above regarding agnostics and agnosticism.
Thanks for the thoughts on Darwin. There is also a very interesting article on the subject of Darwin’s religious beliefs. You can find it by Nick Spencer on faraday.com.
And interesting to read, in that same Spencer article, about Darwin financially supporting a missionary and also crediting Christian evangelism for tidying up the moral problems of a particular region.
It’s hard to imagine, TODAY, someone of a skeptical bent making such admissions, and donating money.
I thought I read, somewhere, that the death of Darwin’s little girl, at some point, stressed his faith. That would anyone, actually. Events of that sort are more brutal to one’s “reading of the Bible” than any scientific concept could be because they are closer and more personal.
Yet many Christians (the real deal not some “cultural” version of Christians) of the 19th century were able to adapt --in some ways – to the concept of an older earth and older universe and to keep a belief in the Bible and God. I think it is impossible for one not to be challenged, one way or another, in studying any subject, not just science. In the end, it should make one’s faith deeper or stronger.
I have always liked Darwin’s comments in a letter to Asa Gray. (It was written 20 years before the letter quoted above, so it’s possible that his views changed in between.)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—
Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws,—a child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by action of even more complex laws,—and I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.
But somehow your interpretation of the Bible is immune to the Devil’s corruption?
I can’t think of a better way for the Devil to drive people away from Christianity than to trick people into a YEC interpretation that proves the Bible false. It is no different than the Devil tricking people into believing that Geocentrism is a central part of Christian theology, thereby driving people away from a faith that defies logic, reason, and facts.
You even tacitly admit that the evidence supports evolution, an old Earth, and a lack of a recent global flood. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need the Devil to change the evidence. I will point this out once again. This is why YEC is religion, not science. In science, we don’t keep a theory that has so much evidence against it by evoking the Devil who happens to falsely create the falsifying evidence.
Nothing more? You depend on theoretical interpretations every day. When you go to a doctor you will get a diagnosis based on theoretical interpretations. The efficacy of antibiotics is based on theoretical interpretations. Weather forecasts are theoretical interpretations. Almost everything you depend on in your day to day life is based on theoretical interpretations.
So you accept the true Biblical claim of Geocentrism as espoused by Cardinal Bellarmine?
So Geocentrism then?
I’ve witnessed you using uniformitarianism all of the time. When you have argued for certain geologic formations being the product of a recent flood you use uniformitarianism.
Uniformitarianism is the view that the same laws and processes we see operating now were also operating in the past and will operate in the same way in the future. That’s it. If you get a PET scan, you are depending on the properties of anti-matter to operate the same now as it has in the past. Nuclear bombs depend on decay rates not changing. If those rates speed up, things will go boom. You expect that a drug will work today like it has in the past. Everything you do every day assumes uniformitarianism.
Just the opposite. Darwin used the Biblical interpretation you are using. He concluded that Genesis was meant as a literal history. Therefore, when he saw mountains of evidence that contradicted that interpretation he concluded that the Bible had to be false. This is the very same path that YEC has forced so many down.
I didn’t say they were saved. They may not be saved, but that doesn’t make them atheists. They still believe in a God.
Which doesn’t address my statement. Words have a generally accepted meaning which appears to be different from your meaning. Your theology doesn’t trump the accepted meaning.
atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.
agnostic: a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.
theist: a person who believes in the existence of a god or gods, specifically of a creator who intervenes in the universe.
I prefer the way the American Atheists handle these definitions.
“Agnostic isn’t just a “weaker” version of being an atheist. It answers a different question. Atheism is about what you believe. Agnosticism is about what you know.”
–American Atheists
So you can be an agnostic atheist. That’s where I am at. There are also agnostic general theists, agnostic Christians, and agnostic Buddhists (and even atheist Buddhists). One is about what we know separate from faith, and one is about what we believe.
I also think it is helpful to break down the roots of the words:
theism: belief in gods
gnosis: knowledge
a- : without, lacking
I was just reading yesterday about the subtle distinctions theologians work to make between theism, monotheism, henotheism, and so on, trying to describe just what Israel believed at different stages in history. One thing I kept seeing was how starkly some scholars want to draw the lines and would never consider that theism and agnosticism could overlap while others strove to use whatever terms actually describe the situation.
And those who come to believe in God because of evolution.
I hadn’t known that he supported a missionary! That puts an interesting light on things.
No kidding! And if someone did, the vitriol they would likely be subject to would be amazing.
Very much so. Though I’ve observed people driven closer to God by such tragedy the reverse is perhaps more common. What I recall from when that student of my in a swimming class hanged himself was demanding of God to know why He didn’t make me see the kid’s issues so I could have helped, and thinking, “What good are You if you don’t at least give me a chance to do such good?”
And some found a deeper faith at the thought of the grandeur of such a sweeping panorama of God overseeing such vast stretches of time.
It is a slick piece of deception. I used to think that legalism was the most dangerous force by which Christians drove others from Christ, but YEC is definitely more potent because it makes Christianity look not merely mean but mean and foolish.
And what a weak sort of God it would be to let the Adversary cheat so!
The warnings that persuaded authorities to close off the area around Mount St. Helens before it erupted were based on theoretical interpretations – saving hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.
Nice and clearly stated. It gets tiresome to hear someone arguing that uniformitarianism means there can’t be catastrophes.
Good point! That should be pointed out to YECists repeatedly.
