The distinction between knowing right and wrong and living by those standards should be on the surface here. We are not robots despite the design and programming. We are prgorammed with free will. Christ asked us to come followâŚthe point being, he asks.
âBehold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, i will come into him.â (I suggest you google the reference if it really matters to you)
I would refute any programming. Free will is just that. It is a pat of how God is. The idea that God either needs or imposes worship goes against everything I believe about God.
Worship is our response, not an obligation. The idea that God would be so vein as to punish anyone for not worshipping Him is abhorrent.
When only one out of ten lepers came back to say thank you, do you think the other nine were reinfected? (I would say not)
Forced worship is empty and meaningless. That includes worship to obtain a place in Heaven
If you want to carry on an actual conversation, yes. If youâre going to set up subjective thought alongside rational thought as just as valid, then there is no way to actually communicate â as Iâve noted, it becomes just as valid to call the King of England a rabid hamster as to recognize that he is a human being.
To return to the original question, theistic evolution doesnât particularly say anything about inclusivism or exclusivism. Similarly, TE/EC is compatible with varied views on determinism and free will. Although some claim that an open theology position fits more with evolution, this is untrue. God could predestine every detail of how evolution works - evolution simply doesnât tell us anything one way or another about such questions; itâs merely a biological pattern.
Again, the claim that the view of the church up until the 1700âs was that of modern young-earth creationism is not true. Besides the fact that varied ideas about the age of the earth existed from the earliest documentation that we have (broadly divisible into âeternal, as a creator always has a creationâ, âancient but not eternalâ, ânot that long since Genesis 1 but who knows about the chaos before the 7 daysâ, and âyoungâ), the historical positions were much more a case of âhereâs all that we have historical data forâ rather than the legalistic dogma that modern young-earth creationism has been corrupted into. The creation science model buys into the modernistic error of claiming everything must be scientific to really be authoritative, and misinterprets the Bible as a modern scientific text. Old-earth, not young-earth positions, are faithful to historical understanding of Scripture. Ironically, it was the Greco-Roman atheists who had the young-earth position in that culture.
Something the steady-state folks loved. I donât recall ever reading any who held it, though â maybe because itâs more philosophy than exegesis.
Not a bad way to put it!
It baffles me how they fail to see that!
I wish I could remember sources for the middle ages folks who were confident that early Genesis fit their science; reading some of that might wake some YECers up â when you see how they argued that Genesis fit the idea of a motionless Earth, the existence of just four elements making up everything, and were confident that their science was right, itâs kind of eye-opening.
Or at least âWe donât know how old it isâ. When you read the text as the ancient literature it is, it becomes clear that there is no trace at all of an attempt to put an age on Creation or the Earth, which is why a very common position was âancient beyond counting, but unknownâ (something often linked to the description of God as âthe Ancient of Daysâ).
You mean pagans? I donât recall any actual atheists from back then.
