God’s interventions?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Would it help understand the Ezekiel passage to say that torah never formed the formal legal code of Israel, any more than Hammurabi’s code did that of Babylon? Both were in the genre of codes of legal principles showing the wisdom and justice of the ruler.

As such they informed and underpinned legal statutes, but weren’t themselves the day-to-day legal framework that decided how much you got punished for what. It’s just the same as the Anglo-Saxon law which had as its basis the 10 commandments etc, but which did not stone adulterers, had property laws which Israel wouldn’t even have understood, etc.

By Ezekiel’s time Judah had had a succession of bad kings during several centuries of political and social change - including the rampant idolatry that, according to the prophets, was its downfall. Even Josiah, famously, found the book of the covenant buried, forgotten, in a storeroom of the Temple.

So it’s entirely consistent for Ezekiel to condemn the statutes then in place, which no doubt were as tolerant of Moloch as the State of Israel now is of atheists.

Whether that will change anybody’s mind here is another matter - we’re all Popes when it comes to the Bible, though bowing to expertise in the sciences.

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If you submit to a logic God you would have to deny the existence of miracles as incoherent with logic. In fact if you look at God and at Jesus as logicians instead of magicians the messages become much stronger,
If a law set above the material world exists it will intervene with evolution if it is not law compliant. That does not require a miracle but just logic. Why one would think the freewill not to have been in the planning of God I don’t know as you would imply it was not forseen to happen which would deny God omniscience.
Now every christian would clearly accept the appearance of Jesus as an “intervention” of God into the process of evolution, only that a lot of people struggle with the concept of Jesus not being a miracle, but to me it is all logic

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Eddie,
Why do you talk about Darwinism, Neo-darwinism, and other terms. Isn’t the proper term “2015 scientific knowledge”

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Eddie

cf Walton and Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture, p218:

The current view is that the collection of legal sayings in the ANE documents constitutes expressions of legal wisdom assembled under the king's sponsorship (and attributed to him) to provide evidence of his wisdom and justice to the gods and to provide instruction in judicial wisdom in his realm. These are not laws that have been enacted, nor necessarily rulings that have actually been given...

And a page or two later, re torah:

It pertains first to the realm of prophecy, second to the realm of wisdom and only third to the legal realm (and that premised on the first two).

The authors go on to say that there is no evidence that any ANE country had what we would call a formal law code, but primarily oral customs/statutes updated as rulers saw fit. Those enlightened states that had something like Hammurabi’s Code or the biblical torah would derive their daily practices from them to a greater or lesser extent. That explains why Moses is so impracticable as a purely legislative text: some key daily areas not covered at all, some covered in moral terms one could never enforce, etc. They are exemplary in terms of “setting the Yahwist tone” even for what they don’t cover, and hence the changes between the earlier codes for wilderness life, and Deuteronomy on the borders of Canaan and settlement.

That seems the situation regarding the ANE generally: of course, by Ezekiel’s time application would need to be updated, just as later (and since) the rabbis did (only in the latter case, with no state to run torah becomes purely religious.) And under the later kings, that updating was going to have very little to do with Moses.

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Hey Eddie.

Thanks for discussing more in depth — awhile ago I posted a topic called Multiple Theories of Evolution, but it largely went unnoticed. I think BioLogos would be more fruitful to make the harmonization of “creation through a process” with Christianity, rather than speaking specifically of a particular mechanism of that process, with Christianity. And then discussion can proceed from there.

While I don’t know much about Darwin, as I’ve never read his book. But there was a post awhile back that discussed a letter discourse between Darwin and his colleague Asa Gray. From various quotes of his, his theological position seems rather confused … In some cases he insists he a Theist … Other times a devout agnostic … And then eventually a non-believer entirely.

I wonder if some of his views could have been influenced by the prevailing view at the time, of “something wrong with Nature”. Starting in the 1500s, it seems, Christianity started to blame that “evil in nature” with sin and Satan. And other naturalists, agnostics, atheists, seemed to all have absorbed the idea that something is wrong with nature, and thus would be easier to attribute to “randomness” and “chance” rather than by the work of a good Creator God.

But in any case (it seems to me) that there isn’t ONE thing or even one theory that drives evolution. There’s a multitude of factors going on, and they could all play a part, collectively, ordained by God, to produce the world we see today. When discussing evolution of particular members of organisms, it seems that more attention is spent on looking at this or that appendage in isolation, and less attention of perceiving the organism as a WHOLE — as well as that WHOLE relates to the rest of Nature. This same attitude seems reflected in our examination of a single unpleasant feature in any creature — sharp teeth, talons, parasites — or any bad thing that’s comes our way.

If we are Christians that believe is God orchestrating the show, then surely we can easily be misguide by staring at a tree, rather than the whole forest. The most beautiful face can look ugly when put under a magnifying glass — as Jonathan Swift’s famous satire puts it.

-Tim

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Hmm. There are one or two men (or a lot more) in their 60s and 70s who are actively embracing the EES (newer evolutionary theory), and one even has a publication on it in Press in the ASA journal PSCF. While not a leading TE, he is someone who comments quite a bit on Biologos. Can you guess who?

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Eddie

My main impression from Scripture about torah is the stress on reading it to your kids, discussing it in the pub, writing it on the doorpost, etc - in other words, it is principallly to be used as the foundation of the Hebrew worldview. That’s how it was to be kept - and that would, in theory, also apply to how society would be run. I certainly wouldn’t advise the citizens of any modern state to download the Statute Book and read it to the kids at bedtime every night!

In that sense the doing torah of Jesus’s time, with its emphasis on maintaining their distinctiveness from the Gentiles, rather than “circumcision of the heart” was a degenerate form of what it meant. So Jesus’s emphasis on what was at the heart of the law was not “new”, but what had been intended all along. Understand that, and you’d know how to interact with Roman occupiers in the way that pleased God (never anticipated in the torah).

OT scholar John Salehamer has concluded that the multiplication of laws to 613 (or whatever you said it was!) was itself God’s response to Israel’s failure to develop a proper faith-relationship from the start, at Sinai. It was fathlessness that necessitated putting it all in writing. And certainly the holiness code was far more effective at demonstrating ones unholiness than making one holy - I think that was the intention, for it would lead to repentance and faith, rather than self-righteousness.

Be that as it may, there was clearly a cultural context for the law - it was never intended to be “Platonic”, complete or timeless, for Jesus said that the speicific ruling on divorce and remarriage was included “because of their hardness of heart. From the beginning it was not so.”

But your suggestion that modern ANE scholarship should not take precedence over the text could be countered by saying that modern ideas of “formal legal codes” shouldn’t be imposed on the text either. If they didn’t exist back then, it’s anachronistic to treat the Pentateuch as one.I wouldn’t really want to make a modern analogy - because then I’d be imposing modern categories again. But it’s more like the European Declaration of Human Rights (general prinnciples on which UK governments are legally bound to base legislation) than the Statute Book.

You might just decide to read something like that to your kids (if you were a card-carrying European!)

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It think you stated it correctly that evolutionary biology has moved on. All of science is moving rapidly in all fields. Look at genetics. We are comparing human genomes with worms, Neanderthals and Australians in today’s research that was impossible a few years ago. A fossil tooth is found and the genome of a whole human species is discovered. Mountains on Pluto are examined in more detail than the Himalayas were 100 years ago. The genes for high altitude survival for fruit fly’s and humans are compared. Science is moving so fast in so many directions, how is it even possible for any theology to keep up? All that seems possible is for theology just to nod and say the science is true and our theology accepts it -pretty much like the Catholic Church has done.

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I wholeheartedly agree with you as I find the idea of God sitting at the riverbank forming mudpie humans and animals a bit of a naive point of view - as the idea of a talking snake - that surely spoke oxford english :smile: It is to me the limited thinking of religious fundamentalists, be it theistic or atheiststic, that insist on the literal translation of scripture lacking the holy spirit as a transcription factor. If you go by the rule on which all the law and the prophet hangs than it is the requirement to love thy neighbour like thyself. Evolution following that will is the only surviving element, thus ut looks like it is finetuned for our existence whilst really the emergence of what is in the image of its creator is the logical outcome of this rule.

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@Eddie

So you don’t think Collins would admit that God intervened in the development of Humanity?

You think Collins thinks the humanity emerged purely through random processes?

George

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I don’t necessarily disagree with you. But what do you do with James 5:13-16? It sure seems to me to say that prayer can change the course of nature. I have known people who have been inexplicably healed by the laying on of hands and prayer. One time I was in a charismatic church (that’s not really my background) and I had a migraine (I get them frequently) and a woman I did not know came up to me and said “God told me to come pray for your headache, may I?” So of course I said, sure have at it, with not even one mustard seed of faith it was going to do any good. That woman touched my forehead and that headache left instantly. I had never experienced anything like that before or since.

Honestly the frequent exhortations in Scripture to pray as if it changes things are why I can’t quite wrap my mind around the Calvinistic view of sovereignty. The idea that prayer is nothing more than aligning our will with God’s doesn’t seem to do justice to how prayer is portrayed in the Gospels or Acts, or how I have seen prayer answered in my own experience. I think we are told to ask God to intervene and I think God actually does, because we asked, and he delights in giving good gifts to his children.

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@Eddie,

You really need to control your rage a little better. Just because Collins doesn’t use the same terminology as I do, doesn’t mean you should make such extreme accusations. Here is a text right out of one of his books:

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
By Francis Collins

Page 205

"But how could God take such changes? If evolution is random, how could He reallly be in charge, and how could He be certain of an outcome that included intelligent beings at all?

“The solution is actually readily at hand, once one ceases to apply human limitations to God. If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, andd galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans, right to the moment of your reading this book - - and beyond.”

“In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified Thus God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.”

I’m pretty certain you are going to say what Collins writes is not about God intervening in the outcome of Humanity. Frankly, I think it is “spot on”. God is in charge of creation. God knows exactly how creation works out. Wherever there is “chaos” or “randomness” … God spans the randomness as he needs to.

If you can’t accept these words of Collins… then I think you need to start your own organization.

And finally: Yes, I see that he didn’t use the word “intervene”. Nor did I expect that he would use that exact word. But there is no doubt in my mind that he is talking about God guiding the outcome for the emergence of Humanity. He has INTERVENED in creation - - to make sure Humans came out exactly the way he planned… or expected.

As I wrote in my immediately prior posting:

"@Eddie So you don’t think Collins would admit that God intervened in the development of Humanity?
You think Collins thinks the humanity emerged purely through random processes?"

As we can all see … Collins does NOT think humanity was created through random processes from God’s viewpoint!

Have a wonderful evening.

George

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…Or… as I’ve heard it put before; God is “intervening” in creation like a musician is “intervening” to make music on his instrument. Which is to show why so many think that word doesn’t capture what is happening.

Of course, don’t ask me how free will (which I also adamantly believe exists) works in that analogy! I have no idea --which is to say any analogy does have points of failure.

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