Again you resort to lying, or perhaps you just have a poor memory – that claim is just your fantasy, it isn’t the result of anything anyone here has ever said.
More and more I am convinced that you really only have a few set answers, so you slap them in whether they really fit what you’re responding to or not.
Someone once said they have no problem with inerrancy, so long as they could define it. That seems to be the key point, and why many have tended to use the term infallible instead, though that too can be a problem. The question I would have for you, with apologies if you have previously answered it, is “How do you define inerrant?”
It’s an interesting issue. Something that is significant to the question is that Paul adheres to the model of three Heavens, which suggests he’s using Jewish mythology to some extent. Though rather than thinking of it as a three-tiered set of places, as I understand it second temple Judaism was thinking of realms; this is clearest in Essene literature where heaven is the stronghold of God, the underworld is the stronghold of the fallen powers, and the Earth is the battleground.
That’s a worldview issue, really. We define “truth” as factually-correct propositions, but that wasn’t the definition back then; truth was more about story and the ‘morals’ connected to them. So it can legitimately be argued that Jesus held the worldview of the time and spoke in accordance with it even of parts weren’t factually correct. That can also be argued from accomodation, though I find that a weaker argument in this case.
I had a prof in grad school who had a PhD in psychology and who had helped in a couple of cases of exorcism. He talked about how possession can warp the mind, and commented that in his view the primary miracle in cases of casting out demons is that the newly-freed mind comes out sane. He also talked about tests that are used to decide if there’s actually a demon or if it’s mundane, where “mundane” covers physical and/or psychological trauma/damage.
I recall some students being skeptical of the existence of demons in the first place, while on the flip side there were students who believed that more cases are actually demon possession than were being treated that way and that psychology was a weak response.
[I was in the middle, being skeptical about both psychology and demons.]
That’s the pessimist view, and it has a big flaw: it classes all the content of the scriptures as the same – because if the scriptures have different literary forms and worldviews and such, then it being “errant” in one place has no bearing on any parts written with a different literary form and/or worldview.
You trust the points being made by the writers. That’s actually the only way to treat the text, the writers, and the Holy Spirit Who chose those writers, with respect.
We actually recognize this except when it bumps into some treasured view; for example, no one with half a brain reads the opening part of Genesis as teaching that the sky is a brass dome, and hardly anyone believes that God was speaking in terms of soundwaves; we automatically recognize that the writer has an ancient worldview and that he used anthropomorphism. So we know how to do it; just trust the points of the various pieces and don’t worry about the details. And since the point of the Bible is relational between God and humans, anything extraneous to that doesn’t count as a lesson and shouldn’t be trusted as one.
The first two hours are the most important as for treating scripture “as it is”; the rest is application of that. I almost quit a third of the way through but stuck it out and was glad I did.
BTW, great video link – well, I hope so; I’m just starting to listen to it.
Process is nature’s action over time, and YEC would deny their own eyes before allowing time. Here is a picture of Wild’s Triplet - Arp 248.
In the YEC worldview, these galaxies were created 6 kya, without history, interaction, or process. As the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner would put it, "As idle as a painted ship. Upon a painted ocean "
The image tells of a much richer and dynamic process. As these galaxies passed each other, a bridge of gas and material almost 200,000 light years long has been stretched between them. The compression from their relative velocities has formed an dazzling train of young blue stars. Simple arithmetic tells that this encounter spanned millions of years, but that is nothing to an eternal God. There are hundreds of such examples.
And all that is before considering the light comprising this image has traveled two hundred million years just to reach Earth.
So no. Broadly speaking, YEC does not see God working in the processes of nature, whether that be the fossil record of whale descent or the cosmos. In the YEC worldview, it is pointless, or even heretical, to even ask.
“Given the bad decisions that lots of otherwise-sensible people make, it wouldn’t be all that surprising for demons to make a bad decision in the heat of the moment.”
Hoodwinking a demon has been a common literary theme for many centuries, and likely millennia (some of the tales seem to have extremely ancient roots). Besides being a popular folk theme, it shows up in the Faustus legend and in Dante’s Inferno, for example. The Screwtape Letters envision some incompetence.
This makes me wonder whether some of the negative symptoms associated with demon possession in the New Testament may be accidental side effects of demons attempting to manipulate humans. It seems as though someone seemingly normal giving evil advice would be more effectively harmful than someone having a fit or running amok.
It is not clear what you mean by your list of internal tests. How are those to be used as tests? For example the 70 week prophecy of Daniel and many other references to days in apocalyptic passages are commonly interpreted as being symbolic of a certain number of years. In particular, such an interpretation is prominent in Seventh-Day Adventism, which does not match well with the insistence that the days of Genesis 1 couldn’t possibly be symbolic. That would seem to be an internal test using one of the topics you cite, but unlikely to be the test that you want.
“Of course it is pretty hard to see God’s power manifested in whale evolution when that is an evolving tale rather than based on any solid evidence.”
This is slandering the work of numerous scientists. Creation science and ID frequently accuse science of fraud, with no solid evidence given in support. The reality is that there are a large number of fossils that the accepted patterns of whale evolution are based on. I’ve found a few fragmentary bits of middle to late Eocene whales myself, but it’s the extensive skeletons and the molecular data that provide significant evidence. You might try to develop an argument that the evidence has been misinterpreted, but to claim that there is no evidence is a lie.
“There is a good series of three videos on whale evolution from the Discovery Institute, the initial one and counters to the counter claims.”
The quality of claims about evolution from the DI is not good; I have no reason to think that these would be worth the time to watch. The ID movement as a whole is more variable in its views on evolution, but much of its marketing is bashing evolution. Usually, the criticisms of evolution incorporate denial that God works through the processes of nature, as do many young-earth arguments. Any claim that science implies that God is not involved is a denial that God is working through the processes of nature. Of course, it is possible for scientific claims to be mistaken or dishonest, but that doesn’t change the fact that, theologically, they are attempts to describe God’s ordinary pattern of working in the physical creation.
It is probably bad form to toss in a comment without having read the preceding discussion but I’ve just been listening to a conversation between David Bentley Hart and Iain McGilchrist in which the latter mentions the results of a poll of all the Nobel prize winners presumably who are still alive to ask. The results indicate that those in science or at least on the leading edge of the fields find no difficulty seeing God in nature and in fact have much less experience with atheism in their life than the general public or their humanities counterpart prize winners. Here is the relevant one minute clip.
What I find interesting is to reflect on how many online atheists I have met who will say science is what they believe in. Of course they don’t speak for science but only for those like themselves who think scientism will one day answer all questions and already have a pretty thorough map of the field with just a little more research needed to have it all. Real scientists would know better.
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