Good point, @gbob, but I would hold that the Bible not addressing evolution is not the same as “divorcing God” from creation, but rather is saying that it does not address it in the same way. Certainly, theology impacts evolution secondarily as we apply Biblical principles to our lives, so it speaks greatly to the ethical issues and how we respond to such things as creation care, gene editing, and health issues, so it is not separated from evolution in that sense. However, it does not address scientific truth claims associated with evolution any more than it does quantum physics.
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17 posts were split to a new topic: Another tangent thread where gbob re-explains his Gen 1-11 view for all the liberal accomodationists here
This is exactly why the original story from Rhett and Link bothers me so much. If someone says “atheists can’t prove the supernatural so of course they can’t disprove Christianity.” My immediate thought is “why isn’t Hinduism true then?”
Hinduism is not a statement that can be assigned a true or false value. It is not only much more highly varied than Christianity (even including the pseudo-Christian groups) but it is so inclusive that it can and has to a large degree included Christianity. Do you know, for example, that not all Hindu groups believe in reincarnation?
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I could agree with that. All my life, I’ve been told about how Christianity is based on historical evidence, testimony from witnesses, accurate textual history, etc. and I still believe that. A Hindu looks at that and says this is where you went wrong. By even putting yourself in the same arena as atheists and allowing falsifiability, you are losing the argument. Hinduism is definitely polytheistic, but it isn’t inconsistent in the sense that it teaches “all religions lead to truth.” It’s not that each one is true because that’s impossible when many claim exclusivity. They believe in a Supreme Being (ultimate objective truth) and all other religions and even atheism work under a part of that in their system.
You’re not theologically liberal until you give up the authority and inspiration of Scripture. Inerrancy is debatable among theological conservatives. The resurrection of Christ is debatable among theological liberals. See the difference?
I sincerely doubt such a thing exists. Can you prove it?
Good point. Who called Hinduism “the embrace that smothers”? William James, maybe?
Some arguments are just bad arguments. I also would point out that other religions need not be 100% false for Christianity to be true. I think it was C.S. Lewis who compared it to a math problem. Only one answer may be true, but some wrong answers are closer to being correct than others.
Yes, but we believe the bodily resurrection of Jesus on the testimony of the witnesses. That’s where the comparison with Genesis and the “slippery slope” argument both end. Denying the historical nature of Gen. 1-11 doesn’t entail denying the historical nature of the gospels. That’s a false equivalency.
But you and I will probably always disagree about that. Hope you’re doing well today!
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Church of the Resurrection, Wheaton. Check out the third S of the 5 S’s in their core values. 
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Since the vast majority of Hindus are not polytheistic, I am not sure this claim even makes sense. Again it is all about its extremely inclusive nature and so most Hindus would simply say that it includes many different visions, conceptions, or even incarnations of one God. It is hard to see how Hinduism is any more polytheistic than Christianity with its doctrine of the Trinity… and indeed many Muslims would say that Christianity is polytheistic as they insist that the Hindus are polytheistic.
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Yes, fair point. Polytheistic probably isn’t the best term for it. I watched a conversation between Dr. James White and a prominent Muslim Imam the other day. They were discussing the Bible vs the Qur’an being inspired and such. The concept of “shirk” came up and the Muslim had to say it was up to Allah to decide if Christians were violating that or not.
Last night I listened to that podcast on Rhett’s conversion from Christian to hopeful agnostic. I found it painful, mainly because it seemed so unecessary. Young-earth anti-evolution teaching led him to see the transition to accepting an old earth and evolution as letting go of the truth of Scripture. But maybe it didn’t matter, so set that part of the Bible aside and move on. While he wasn’t entirely clear on what he saw as the second option to taking Adam and Eve literally, it seemed that the alternative he chose was erasing them from his faith as well. Then with Israel’s history, the challenges again caused him to drop that part of the Bible, but keep Jesus. And when he realized even the gospels don’t proceed in a straight-forward just-the-facts way without mixing in artistry and rhetoric, even Jesus started slipping through his hands.
Throughout, his guiding conviction seemed to be that the Bible’s value equalled how well it preserved records of the past. I agree that some things need to be historical truth for Christianity to make sense. But I think the reason none of his areas of tension led to a faith crisis for me is that I gained a different view of the Bible’s purpose before I gave up those various concordisms.
Before I let go of creation in six literal days, I saw the artistic beauty in the two triads of days where God first forms and then fills three realms, conveyed in human terms of six days of work with the nights and seventh day off. That God tells the earth to produce creatures – something evocative of a natural process like evolution – was gravy, not all that remained of the main course. Before I gave up on an individual Adam, I saw how Adam is defined as humanity, male and female, in both the end of Genesis 1 and beginning of Genesis 5, so the story between should be read in that light. When Adam’s story is humanity’s story, its importance no longer depends on whether we can trace our ancestry to a real man named Adam or articulate how we inherited his sin.
Before I gave up on a straightforward take on the conquest of Canaan, I was confronted with how ancient interpreters read the conquest accounts as speaking of killing your inner Canaanite, how different biblical accounts are all over the map in how they describe the historical details of the conquest, and how Joshua was likely compiled while exiled Israelites were coming to terms with life under a foreign power. Once I rid myself of the expectation for these stories to reveal God’s omniscient perspective of events that no human alive at the time of their writing had witnessed, their diversity made sense, and I could see how they would encourage exiles under Babylon’s thumb to resist syncretism. Whether the stories showed them successfully eradicating the Canaanites or resisting the seductive pull of the Canaanites all around them or seeing that some Canaanites are Israelites (Rahab’s household) and some Israelites are Canaanites (Achan’s household), the stories all seemed to use spotty historical knowledge spun in different forms to picture how present exiles needed to kill their inner Canaanite if they were to remain as God’s people. And when I finally learned that the Hebrews are actually a Canaanite splinter group – that they really did begin as Canaanites – then the stories came full circle to revealing some historical truth, but with so much else besides, such as the power to inspire exiles under an imperial thumb wherever they may be, even picking cotton in the USA.
The gospels weren’t much different. I was confronted with so much more in the stories before I had to let go of one way of reducing them to snapshots of physical reality. I doubt I read more than Rhett or studied more or prayed more, but somehow I stumbled into seeing all these different facets of beauty and truth throughout Scripture: in the poetry, the symbolism, the piling together of physically conflicting but personally convicting narratives. I continue to believe that Jesus shows us God in our flesh and he really died and really rose, but not because the gospels tell the story without any mixture of artistic license or theologizing. (One of my favourite stories in the gospels, where Jesus heals a woman’s daughter after she shows herself to be more clued in about the abundance of Jesus’ kingdom than disciples who had picked up baskets of leftovers from stuffed crowds, rises to a higher level due to Matthew’s artistic license of labelling her as one of those people Moses had said to exterminate along with their children.) I believe because the same historical truth that inspired their art and reasoning and compelled them to trace connections, probe impacts, delight in counterintuitive upsets – because that same truth inspires me too.
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Just picked a random quote to say I’d give you two “likes” if I could. Great answer.
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That’s very encouraging to hear Marshall. I’m glad you listened to the podcast and could share so much about your wrestling with the text. I guess the big takeaway from this forum isn’t really any scientific evidence which I will certainly be studying in the near future. It’s the general idea of everyone here not simply disagreeing with parts of the Bible and cutting them out like Jefferson. It’s not even people judging God for slavery, hell, or whatever other thing you want to mention. I don’t see people looking to disprove every last verse of the Bible and trying to tear down inerrancy. I don’t see people who “just didn’t have enough faith in God to believe the Scripture.” I don’t see people who had one particular disagreement and sought ways they could repackage the Bible and make it more palatable to a 21st century audience. Overall, I see people reconciling faith and science. I see people who realize cartesian certainty is impossible in this life. I see people who actively wrestle with all of their doubts instead of bury them deep inside their psyches. It’s certainly not the impression my parents gave me of Christians in this camp.
Edit: I would add too that it’s not an inevitable domino effect to atheism either. Atheists are mad at YEC for rejecting science. They are also mad that people in the biologos EC community aren’t atheists. They view this as a preposterous marriage of faith and science and that everyone here is just holding onto a religion that nobody will believe in 100 years. In YEC, fear is a primary motivator. Fear that if God didn’t reveal his perfect Word in the Bible, why would he bother at all? I’d rather have a nuanced and slightly less simple view of Christianity then a black and white one.
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This is precisely what I said in post 42 happens. Once one starts cutting out inconvenient pieces of the Bible one slowly but surely keeps cutting and one realizes that there is no basis for Christian theology when all the cutting is finished. H. G. Well’s quotation I cited above, applies to this guy.
I have over the years asked liberals how much of the Bible can be false before you will say the rest of it is false. Often they don’t understand or like the question, but to me it is key. In science when we find a fact out of place or a falsification of some view, we must at the least rejuggle the logical structure of our science or give up on a preferred view. This seems not to happen in theology where Genesis 1-11 can be false, the exodus can be false, the miracles can be false, yet somehow it is claimed that the resurrection is true. That seems utterly illogical to me. It is why I came up with the views I did. If I had failed to arrive at those views, I would have chucked Christianity for being false. period.
Having been on some private atheist lists when I was in my doubting stage, I absolutely agree with what you describe as the atheist view of liberal theology and its adherents. If people think they gain respect from the atheist for holding to accommodation and for proclaiming parts of the Bible to be historically false, they are very very wrong. In some sense I felt that they respected the YECS more than the liberal Christians who knew science well but held onto a God who was a useless appendage to the cosmos. One guy said it was like having Caspar the ghost on their shoulders; no one could see Caspar and Caspar made no difference in their science.
I know this, I presented my concordistic views to atheists when I published my books. I wanted to know what their scientific objections would be. I picked 5 atheists and 5 YECs to review my book before I published. I didn’t get the reviews back from YECS, but the atheists did review it and picked up a few issues I needed to fix, but not many. They didn’t object to my science; they just didn’t think that my view was what actually happened. And of course, no one can absolutely prove what happened in the geologic past, but they never went after me like they do the Yecs. But I know they don’t think the liberal view is logically coherent.
Some of them. Some atheists/agnostics hang out here with us EC folks because they like science and we do too, and they don’t mind that we keep Jesus in our lives. Not everyone is threatened by people who see the world differently, and that goes for people on both “sides” of the God/no god(s) debate.
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The atheist channel (Doug) Pinecreek hosted Mike Winger, an evangelical pastor who holds to YEC as well as someone associated with Biologos for a video. Doug says Mike should study evolution but simultaneously condemns the EC guy for his beliefs. He is more anti-theist than some though.
If one starts from certainty in total darkness about reality that is not based on any of the laws of nature outside ones unknown (i.e. one isn’t aware of being in it) cave of unknowing and one lets in a glimmer of light, one can’t help but want more.
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The problem is NOT the Bible. The problem is not that the Old Testament/Covenant has been outdated by the New Testament. The problem is YEC theology is faulty, because it believes the Bible and not Jesus is God’s Word, and follows the false dualism of atheism.
The Gospel says In the Beginning was the Word, Jesus Christ. Salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and not through faith in the Bible. God created the universe through the rational Word/Jesus Christ, so the is no actual contradiction through good Christian theology and good science, including evolution.
YEC theology is not good Christian theology. Darwinian evolution is not good science, because it is based on Malthusian Survival of the fittest. We need to reconcile the two to make both whole, real, and good, which is why I wrote the book, Darwin’s MYTH, Malthus, Ecology, and the Meaning of Life.
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I hope I’m not the only one who sees that as a strength rather than a weakness at least to some degree.