There is something in his words however. You are so badly mistaken (but not as badly as the Sadducees thankfully, for your sake). It wouldn’t take a lot to convince me that you have never read a Bible.
You cannot claim that. You can believe it but you cannot claim it.
So is the 7-day creation
So is Jacob making speckeld sheep by getting them to drink speckled water
So is the belief that mental illness is from demon possession
So is the belief that ecstatic speaking is prophecy
So is Jonah getting swallowed by a whale and not getting digested
And this passage from Proverbs 6
There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
17haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
18a heart that devises wicked schemes**,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
19a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
Richard
You weren’t watching? I just did. 
I know you aren’t getting as much honor here as you might, from me or anyone else, because of your badly flawed thinking and selectively ignored scripture, not to mention your being very opinionated. And I could be wrong (I don’t think so), but you won’t be in the future either.
The reward for humility and fear of the LORD is… honor…
Proverbs 22:4
But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
James 4:6
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Just proves you do not read your own citations
humility is not your strong suit and you mock mine
I have never insisted you agree with me. You, on the other hand lay down your words as if they are the law.
Richard
I tried to defer to someone more giftedly kind and gracious than myself, but you were not having anything from him either. Not being alone in this I’m sure, but we beg you to read and heed.
A diplomat par excellence:
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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Science looks at cause and effect. Does that apply to grace?
A bit from the Wikipedia article on open theism is, I think, helpful here:
“Nothing that exists or occurs falls outside God’s ordaining will. Nothing, including no evil person or thing or event or deed.”
This fits with how Richard the word “control”, which he has called “heavy handed”. But that is not what I mean by the word; to rephrase the above:
“Nothing that exists or occurs fall outside God’s maintaining will…”
I don’t see any way that the scriptures support the quoted view – which is to say that Calvin was plain wrong. But I also don’t see any way from the scriptures to escape the modified quote, which asserts only that God controls Creation according to the rules He selected, rules that we generally refer to as “natural law”. That is the opposite of “heavy-handed” because it rests on the principle that God is faithful, in this case meaning that He will not (lightly) depart from controlling things according to the rules He chose.
[Of course that leads directly to the old distinction between God’s prescriptive will and His permissive will, i.e. what He mandates and what He allows.]
I had a mathematician brother who could expound on this, though it’s one of those things that I understand while listening carefully but fades away afterwards. Yet he postulated not just “two dimensions of time” but two dimensions each of height, width, and length, and those weren’t absolute but were minimums.
He wouldn’t have to know “the precise trajectory of evolution”, only its constraints (of course this is really VFB). If my university biology-major friend was right that only seven interventions were needed in the course of evolution to guarantee humans then the constraints model is sufficient.
I would characterize this as similar to having a stream flow across a near-level plain consisting all of silt and sand, which results in what’s called a braided stream; a big aspect of a braided stream is that the only thing predictable about its course is that it will be tangled.
Another option is, as above, constraints: Take that near-level plain and add an additional 1° tilt, and then some hills protruding into the plain such that they leave gaps that the river has to flow through, and the result is that while the course of the river in the spaces between those gaps is still chaotic, it can be firmly predicted that the river will flow through the gaps – and if a gap is narrow enough, the prediction can be made that the river will flow through that very specific spot.
To illustrate, we have the Incarnation occurring at what is referred to as “the fullness of time”. In this model, “the fullness of time” would be a narrow gap that the river of events has to flow through – or at least the “river” that is God’s chosen people, since what was happening in China or Australia or the Americas would presumably not be relevant (of course the “fullness of time” concept goes farther than just the Incarnation; it includes the Incarnation occurring in a situation where communication/travel across large distances is reasonably easy along with a scattering of God’s people across those large distances).
Given that “the image of God” is relational, i.e. it designates being the representative(s) of God among Creation, I suspect that any such lifeform would have qualified.
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Hi. Yes, I agree (I think) with what you are explaining here. I think God, by his will, desired a universe in which other agents could act in free will but this necessitated God allowing (via his permissive will) those agents to potentially act in ways that go against God, i.e., God willingly gives up his complete control over certain events. God’s will is to limit his (deterministic) control. In other words, God willingly created a universe with the potential for evil, but it was the choices of other free will agents (angels, humans) that actualized that evil.
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Something that the ‘fanatics’ seem to have thrown out is the ancient principle that scripture is, as the written word, like the living Word: both human and divine. It is human in its literature, its worldviews, its ‘cosmology’, and it is those things in every part, but it is also divine in every part, being sufficient to convey the lessons God intended. So it can’t be divided into human bits and divine bits, it is both all the time.
The error of the ‘fanatics’, then, is regarding it as all divine and only very grudgingly admitting that any of it is at all human.
All of it, just as all of it is divine. As one of my professors reminded us regularly, it is more than human literature but it is never less than that.
In my view I don’t see that there can be that much debate: the ‘fanatics’ want the scriptures to be holier than Jesus, excluding the human factor. To use a rather earthy analogy, even Jesus got pimples and flatulence, and we should thus expect the scriptures also to have very human aspects. Though the flip side of that is that even Jesus’ pimples were not apart from His divine nature, so it isn’t legitimate to dismiss parts of the scriptures as not divine. As another of my grad school professors noted, inspiration is incarnational.
“You are a God Who hides Himself”, it says somewhere.
And that is probably the level on which interventions would be made – not so much the decay aspect as vector quantities.
Given the origin of living things in Genesis 1, from God’s command to “Bring forth!”, I would consider the evolutionary process to be mostly undirected. If my university friend’s figure of only seven interventions between the first cell and homo sapiens is right, needing just seven interventions, then it wouldn’t take many interventions at all to guide the entire “family tree” of life.
Though that’s a point at which the OTV strikes me as fitting, that God commanded, “Bring forth!” but what was brought forth was not determined other than by the rules of chemistry.
The development of brain capacity seems to overshoot the bare essentials for survival, not just in humans but in dogs, crows, elephants, dolphins, and a lot more. It may just be that what really marks humans apart from those other species that appear to be self-aware is having opposable thumbs and then having had to make a shift from original environment to a new, more demanding one – or to put it another way, the need for problem-solving and the ability to manipulate tools for solving those problems. Given that, I would think that “complex, intelligent, social, self-conscious” life forms should be expected.
I always think of my friend’s claim that only seven interventions would have been necessary to achieve humans.
And meanwhile the rest of the living world could develop naturally.
So there would be just one teleological strand and the rest would be ‘free’.
Grace is like water from a drinking fountain: you have to open your mouth to drink; the open mouth is faith.
How about “Apart from Me you can do nothing”?
Or “Anything that is not of faith is sin”.
In Dale’s metaphor, faith is the hand that grasps the older brother’s hand.
“But to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the power to become children of God.”
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Yes. And that fits with God controlling everything according to the rules He selected, not arbitrarily, not whimsically, in other words not like"the gods of the nations" who can be bought off by the right ceremonies or rituals. I think it was Gerhard Forde who emphasized that God cannot be bought, which is a way of saying that following the Law or other rules cannot earn His favor – a point set against the natural human impulse to want to trade promises for favors.
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…is a very good thing if you’re hospitalized with an SBO.
I like this on that:
Ah, yes – motivated reasoning:
…the smarter we are, the better we are at motivated reasoning, because we’re better at finding and marshaling and presenting the arguments that show that we’re right.
No you don’t.
By grace you have to first be raised from your spiritually dead condition so that you even can open your mouth.
That does not preclude those who do not from having their sins forgiven. It just gives those who acknowledge Him a privilege.
That is the problem with interpreting Scitprue to suit your viewpoint. You read what is not there.
Richard
Hi Ciara. Your article seems like a description of how to indoctrinate young minds into a religious belief system without ever dealing with any actual evidence that common descent evolution ever took place. For example, how are lizards who were much more likely designed to mimic their environmental colors evidence for common descent?
And the gummy bears… Yes, if a population dwells on a volcanic mountain that explodes, that population will die while the one living in the forest 1000 miles away will live on. How is that common descent?
And if one person (and his wife) is immune to a deadly disease that kills everyone else, that man might just produce offspring who have the same immunity. But remember, everyone else must die, or there will still be many more without the immunity who nevertheless survived the outbreak than those with the immunity. And who’s to say this immunity wasn’t passed down from ancient times (Adam himself even), and the rest of the population has lost this trait over time (like dogs having only bits and pieces of wolf traits)?
Do you offer your students any actual evidence that common descent ever took place? If so, can you give an example here?
Yeah, it’s fairly braided in the lower Platte:
Then there’s this one:
That’s the Rakaia River in New Zealand.
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Well that was quite the brain-blooper typo! Now I’m wondering what I was trying to do at the same time I was typing . . .
Anyway I went back and fixed it.
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My stating “God controls everything “ is really a mis-statement, somewhat hyperbole for effect, when what I really meant was that God has providence over everything, and sustains all creation, so his control is that he could potentially control everything being omnipotent, but I am in agreement with you that he chooses not to do so but rather takes pleasure, and perhaps at times regret at what we do under free will. And evolution takes place under that same providence and permissive will. Not unlike how we can control our children when they are under our care, but choose to give them freedom to make mistakes so that they can grow in wisdom as well as stature.
the later part of my statement refers to how AIG and similar voices tend to say that “If Genesis is not true, then the Bible is not true” to which the new atheists say, “That’s right.”
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Since He sustains everything from moment to moment He has ultimate control – it’s just that for the most part He controls everything according to the rules He chose.
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And if you try and think of all the necessary precursors for some events (or independent sets of events linked ‘only’ by their meaning to a particular individual) to come about the way they do in his providence…