Ted,
Thanks. Are you saying that one needs to be a Christian for one to know why there is something rather than nothing?
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This is a bit off-topic, but you don’t consider John Polkinghorne to be a heretic, do you?
Certainly not, but one does have to go well beyond science to attempt a decent answer.
I’m not sure that you are directing that question specifically at me, beaglelady, since you didn’t send it to my in box, but perhaps you are. Otherwise you must be directed it to BioLogos as a whole. Either, way, my answer is to refer you to the several columns I did, introducing readers to Polkinghorne and editing chapters from two of his books for an electronic audience: https://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/series/searching-for-motivated-belief
Personally I’m a big fan of John Polkinghorne–the person as well as the writer. IMO, he’s the best living writer about Christianity and science, although not necessarily the most important thinker on that important topic (I could name a few other candidates for that role, but none of them IMO write as eloquently as John writes while keeping the kind of depth and breadth he displays). My colleagues at BioLogos might have their own favorites, but we don’t consider John a “heretic,” not at all. In my view, he’s mostly classical in his thinking, getting all of the “big 3” (in terms of the intersection of science and Christian theology) exactly right: creation, resurrection, and eschatology.
Why did you ask this particular question? I know you’ve followed BL for a long time, longer than I’ve been writing for BL, so I’m actually surprised you asked this. Did you miss seeing my columns about John?
The long- and almost universally-utilized word “fall” is difficult for me to embrace because it derives from a literal Adam and Eve mindset, which is what the blog addresses. I realize Pelagianism is considered heretical, but rather like the notion that each person has their own “fall” and entrance into an experience of sin. Isn’t sin a concomitant of our natural descent and its associated struggles? Of course we inherit that background. But isn’t God’s provision of law and the Saviour nothing less than His continuing work of conforming us to His vision of what we are meant to be? If this is so, I think we should focus less on the notion of “falling” and more on embracing God’s plan to bring us to the glory He has willed to share with us. This would not prevent us from addressing the problem of sin, for it is a real and universal issue.
i allways find it entertaining to see how people struggle with the concept of adam and eve. It is a poetic description of puberty, the rejection of the authority over the self following the eating from the tree of realisation of the self. However, to be a self separated from the eternal God makes you mortal as a logical consequence of that separation from the immaterial eternity. If you eat from that tree you will surely die is the same as me telling my son that if he touches the high voltage cable he will surely die. It is not a threat as than I would say if you touch the cable I will surely let you die but stating the obvious. That you discover your nakedness as a consequence of your self realisation is the desire to control your private parts e.g. creative power.
So Adam and Eve can be seen as the level of puberty on a grander scale of the puberty of life forms that reject the authority over their self thus being in conflict with the greater self. However, growing up is the process of giving up that self again for the love of thy neighbour. After all, that is what evolution is all about
I like that description!
George
@TedDavis, Thanks for your reply. (Yes, I was addressing my question to you.) I really love John Polkinghorne. He came to my church in the city to speak, and later we had dinner with him. He is a great, intellectual man of faith, but also quite humble. (I can provide a link to his talk if you like.) The reason I ask is that Eddie calls him a heretic, so I wondered how widespread this sentiment was. (Of course, Eddie has called me a heretic also, so at least I’m in good company!!!)
As a Christian I’m encouraged to apply what I read in the Bible to my life. And when I read about Adam and Eve their are too many connections going on in my head that say, “That sounds like, well… just about everyone I know!” Disobedience to God … hiding from him … blaming others for your own transgression. And on top of that many analogies can be made of similar situations: A father can say to his son, “Don’t cross the street”, in a similar fashion to God who commands Adam “Don’t eat of that tree!” — for me, it’s not even really about the Tree — it had no qualities, within itself, that gave you anything. It was an object-lesson, and the reason why fruit trees were involved was because it was natural — the setting was a Garden.
I’ve never heard of the “puberty analogy” — this is new to me. I know the Jewish called it the “inclination towards evil” the “yetzer hara”. I’ve heard some claim that it’s really talking about sexual euphemisms — the “forbidden fruit” is really talking about sex. I don’t agree with that, personally.
A major question, one might ask, is Adam and Eve telling a story of what became or what is? We treat it as an historical event (a domino effect essentially that affected all humans) — but would anyone get that impression that Adam’s sinfulness spread to all humanity (or through their offspring) just by reading the text? Or is it Paul’s commentary that has influenced us? Not saying anything against Paul — just trying to understand the root of this controversy.
-Tim
I basically realised that when suddenly a lot of things started to make sense to me. It is when you go into the bathroom ans suddenly your son think his private parts fall of after all those years that you wonder if he has eaten from that tree.
A lot of people refer to it as the tree of knowledge but in the German translation it calls it the tree of realisation of good and evil. God wanted humans to have sex and he wanted them to have knowledge but as a lowing father, what is the moment you dread most about your children? Becoming a self - because now you cannot any more sort out the problems for them but they have to do it them selves. Being a self they have to take on their own responsibility and their own suffering - and they start blaming others for things not going their way. It should be bloody obvious and if we teach it at the age of 10 it might help them to realize what they will go through.
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I thought science was supposed to bring us closer to the answer of how things work based on the assumption that there is a reason for everything and that it can operate in the quantifiable reality. Without postulating that reality is ultimately reasonable at it’s foundation and that this reason most exist infinite in space time the whole system of science crumbles.
Dawkins hates the why question and calls it silly or childish as he knows that he falls at this question. It is the one that can drive you mad as a parent, particular if you run out of explanations that make sense to the target audience when the explanations get rather complicated, yet the ultimate reason remains always the same and it does not reduce to nothing but something. Only that that some"thing" has a rather abstract “thinginess” as it is not thing with regards to material existence but is outside the material dimension in the emotional dimension. To a materialist it is correct that the universe came from not-thing e.g. not-matter as matter came into existence in creation. But then you cannot escape the question what “thing” there was prior to space time. We know that in our mind we can escape the space time limits so we can “think outside the box”. In Jesus you can learn to “live outside the box”
@beaglelady and @Eddie,
It would be lovely if I could devote a good part of the day to a careful explanation of Polkinghorne’s understanding of open theism, a view that Eddie rightly says is a significant break with Christian tradition. Unfortunately I’m traveling without access to my library (and will be for much of the next two weeks), and with many other things needing attention in the intervals it won’t happen. Furthermore that topic is certainly peripheral to this thread, as beaglelady indicated in her question, though not at all peripheral to the concerns of BL, since it does have some bearing on how P and others understand God’s relationship to nature and humanity–topics at the core of the doctrine of creation, which is central to BL’s mission. So, I’ll offer a one-off reply without being able to check details (thus I hope they are all correct) and (for my part) leave it there.
There are multiple forms of open theism. For example, process theologians teach that God simply cannot know the future, b/c God just does not have omniscience; nor does God have omnipotence. Both would be contrary to the divine nature as they understand it. God has no choice about this. But, P is absolutely not a process theist; he’s criticized it often and very explicitly, including for some of the same reasons I would give: a God who simply cannot overwhelm the natures of created things cannot have raised Jesus bodily from the grave; nor could such a God determine the nature of nature itself or (no less significantly) create someday a new heaven and earth with a different nature than the present universe. P’s classical views on creation, resurrection, and eschatology (classical in the sense of saying that God actually caused and causes creation to exist, God actually raised the genuinely dead Jesus from the dead, and God will create a new world in which the faithful will be re-embodied to enjoy God and one another forever) are utterly inconsistent with process theism. So, that type of open theism is not what he embraces.
On the other hand, if God freely chooses not to “foreknow” absolutely every single event “prior” to its occurrence in time, b/c God wants humans to have genuine freedom to love or reject God and one another, then God could do that in this particular creation. There’s more to it than this, but at least this much. For P (whether or not he’s correct), it’s logically contradictory to maintain both genuine human freedom and exhaustive divine foreknowledge. The classical view would have said both are true, but (let’s be honest) the details have long been matters of disagreement among theologians. For P, free will is crucial; he rejects any picture in which God pulls all the strings. So, he takes a third way, in which God freely chooses not to pull every single string, and therefore (in his view) not to know every single detail about the future.
Is that “heresy”? Calvin and Luther would probably have answered in the affirmative, but they aren’t the only ones entitled to an opinion. A recent issue of Christianity Today urged caution on throwing the “heresy” flag too freely (Heresy | Topics | Christianity Today) and so would I. P’s emphasis on the Incarnation and the Trinity, including a strong affirmation of the Virgin Birth, are absolutely classical, and (as I’ve already said) so are his views on the “big 3” of creation, resurrection, and eschatology. I’m more than a little hesitant to throw the heresy flag for most other things. Especially when his reasons for taking a different theological road grow out of a long-recognized area of major controversy–the degree to which God allows genuine freedom in this creation.
Exactly. The claim by some New Atheists that quantum cosmology “explains” scientifically how the universe could have been created from “nothing” without a Creator, is utter nonsense. For more on this, see https://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/getting-some-thing-from-no-thing
David
I’ll be interested to read how you’ve developed this thinking over the last few years. To me something along these lines seems consistent with the overall pattern of biblical narrative, consistent with Genesis’s role in the biblical narrative (ie, originally, Israel’s torah or Law), and it accounts for Adam within the historical setting in which Genesis actually places him.
The hardest task seems to me to demonstrate such an approach to be consistent with authorial intent, more than with either traditional assumptions or the modern allegorisations.
But if the Second Adam can be called “The Son of Man”, when he was born amongst many million “sons of man” it doesn’t seem impossible for the First Adam to be considered “The Man” within history, rather than before it begins.
Tim’s “exile” point below your post shows, I’m sure, a genuine parallel with the key biblical theme of exile: the question is whether the archetype for that is, say, the Baylonian exile read back to a purely symbolic figure of Adam, or whether a foundational event in the world’s troubles was echoed in the history of God’s solution to it.
I like the translation “Tree of Realization”. It seems to me that Adam already had some inkling of good and evil, when God told him the command, “You may eat anything you want - except that tree.” He knew that some things were bad and other things were good based on what his Father told him. When he disobeyed he experienced guilt — rather than just as a vague concept in the back of their minds. That’s what I get out of it anyway.
I’m not sure if it’s what YOU’RE saying or not (I could be mistaken, and if so, I apologize). But I reject the idea that the Tree of Knowledge (the forbidden fruit) had anything to do with sex. They became “one flesh” before they even ate of the tree and it was a good thing, not a bad thing.
-Tim
Is Polkinghorne’s view interesting because he worked on quantum theory of the strong and weak forces? What makes his theological views so interesting to both of you? Are they novel in some way?
Do they harmonize physics and theology in some way?
John, I have a book coming out on this, probably sometime next year! On your question of authorial intent, I think I’m more in tune with Patristic insights that there is not a single “intent,” but that there are layers to scripture, and that ultimately all of it points towards Christ.