That seems most reasonable … but to whom are you writing this post?
Post deleted
Post deleted
Where you going with this Randy?
The whole thing seemed similar to Hartnett’s model based on the legendary unworkable 5D Cosmology, but what a nice surprise to find that you’ve chatted quite a bit with him:
http://www.setterfield.org/challenge_to_hartnett.html#update1114
By all means keep posting though as I am intrigued, but if you’ve written all of what you’re about to say elsewhere already you can save yourself the trouble and share with us a link!
Hello Joshua,
With all due respect, I’m going to have to say that I disagree. The whole point is that, IMO, it certainly is not lying to allow belief in Santa Clause, the stork or any other physical metaphor that we tell our kids or let them believe. A lie is a morally deficient act that is sinful in God’s eyes. I don’t think God thinks parents are liars at Christmas time, or when they leave a dollar (it was a quarter in my day!) under the pillow of their child whose tooth had just fallen out.
Or what about the teacher or principle who threatens a student with the old, “spanking machine” when they are not being obedient to them. Is that teacher, “lying” in God’s eyes? Is the mom in central or southern New Jersey a biblical liar when she tells her son not to wander off too far or the, “Jersey Devil will get you”, like my friend’s mother did?
You could think of other scenarios as well. Like a woman telling her friend to come to meet them for lunch when it was a ploy for her boyfriend to propose to her. Are the perpetrators, “liars”? Do they need to confess and repent of their sins? Some might say yes, but, and maybe I’m wrong, I’d imagine most of us would say no. I think that claiming that using Santa or any of the other things I mentioned are lying trivializes biblical dishonesty.
Almost as importantly, do our kids think that we lied to them when they found out that Santa wasn’t real? I think in all of these types of things kids intrinsically understand that their parents or authority figures used things that didn’t exist in reality to help them understand concepts that were maybe a little too much for them to fully grasp at the time. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I don’t know of any kids from any spiritual background that thought their parents or teachers lied to them with those things or suffered from any emotional anguish from them.
In relation to the bible, comparing the concept of Santa to early Genesis isn’t a perfect analogy since, for many of us here, early Genesis isn’t trying to teach us the reality of the physical origins of the universe/earth/biological life but used the physical attributes mentioned incidentally to teach the theology, so in that sense I agree with you that my response isn’t the best answer. To be more specific, Neal posted:
“I don’t think you can just say that Genesis is not meant to be scientifically true, and it is only an ancient story to communicate that God created the heavens and the earth. If your child asks you a question about something complex, you explain it in a way they would understand but without lying.”
Neal is making the case that God, if using an origins tradition that doesn’t match the findings of 21st century science, would be, “lying”. My response is appropriate because parents and authority figures, while not, at least IMO, lying, constantly use entities that don’t match with reality to drive home a point for obedience or comprehension.
Digging deeper, Neal in the above post states that the point of Genesis 1 (and maybe 2 as well) is merely that God created the heavens and the earth. If that were the case, then one could reasonably expect that He might try to explain to us material origins, in some shape or form. But of course the theology is much deeper than that, and as such the message-incident principle becomes a reality, where God used the world view of the day, the 3-tiered universe, as a substrate to express ideas about God being the creator and sustainer of life, the Sabbath, the earth being God’s temple, etc. In doing so, I don’t believe that God lied to us, even if the physical descriptions used don’t match with our knowledge of nature.
Summarizing, I do think my answer is appropriate since God’s relation to us is similar to that of a parent to a child, and in life parents everywhere have found a need to explain things to people in ways that don’t 100% represent, “reality” for the purpose of comprehension.
Post deleted
By all means keep going, I haven’t read any of your stuff personally. Was just trying to save you the trouble if you’ve written it up elsewhere
What is your purpose in taking an adversarial position here? Although not all frequent posters here are Christian, a large percentage of us are, and are therefore your brothers and sisters in Christ. If you have “found trouble” professionally, was it due to the actions of fellow Christians?
I should point out that even if your astrophysics does actually provide a reasonable refutation against the astronomy (I’m certainly not capable of worthwhile astrophysics discussions) supporting a universe billions of years old, there is still geological, biological, anthropological, and probably a few other lines of evidence supporting billions of years of age.
The Social Dimension
Amen! May I add that if this search turns out with my holding to a supernatural six-day creation of the universe, including the historicity of Adam and Noah’s Flood, I, too, would counsel others who believe the same to be discreet. I would call this an “Esther strategy.” That is, be private with your view until and unless the Lord shows you how it advances His kingdom for you to disclose it. And even then I would counsel the person to seek the Lord for wisdom about how to disclose, how much to disclose, to whom one should disclose it, and so on.
Tribalism has infected every aspect of modern life. As a result, too many people think “If I believe X, I should hang out with X people; if I change to Y, I need to stop hanging out with the X people and start wearing my Y label.” Thus YEC’s hang out with YEC’s, while OEC’s hang out with OEC’s and so on. This is stifling to a life of individual faith. It seems that the best science is taking place where it is proceeding unfettered by religious arguments. Therefore, why not worship God in your heart while practicing the best science you can with His eyes constantly upon you. Whether the persons to your right and left are doing the same thing is beside the point.
Persons searching for the truth are so often diverted in their search because they become too mindful of the social implications of a given position, as in “But if I arrive at that conclusion I’ll lose my…” If we want to find the truth, especially as it pertains to God, we must set aside such concerns while we search for that truth. Yes, we should count the cost at some point to make sure we have the will to endure high social cost, but it should not be allowed to shade or shape the view we ultimately take.
When we take our new view, whatever it is, we should seek to walk with the Lord in it - not seek a new “fraternity” to walk with. Too many people have their faith in Christians - or in a particular group of Christians - rather than in Christ. Christ walks closest with those whose consciences are the clearest. Those human beings with whom you fellowship, by contrast, have no visibility to your conscience.
Thus there is a social dimension to the answers we seek, but we must keep its consideration in its proper place. Far more important is the social dimension between a human being and his Creator. And the measure of a human being is in the price he is willing to pay in order to continue trusting and obeying his Lord. I do not believe Jesus wants to sacrifice all adherents to His truth in their infancy. " A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind" Prov 18:2. Therefore, if you are sensing a change in your position, be slow to reveal it. We should always seek to understand a truth, then practice it, and only after that seek to proclaim it.
Mordecai loved Esther and counseled her wisely about when to speak and when to be silent. Jesus will do no less for you. @r_speir has counseled wisely.
Okay you guys. You’re not alone in that it turns out if you actually tell people you think Evolution is the best model we have to explain how species arose… at a church… you can be untribalized. If you even say that gee whiz, the Earth definitely looks old by every way we can possibly imagine to measure it… you can be untribalized. Much can be at stake especially for admitting you think Evolution is true, like your job (if you are employed by a church, Christian university, etc.). Yes, on these forums you are not immediately tribalized, though I am glad you two formed a small tribe together. Glad you feel there is wisdom is proclaiming what you hold to be true, especially before you’ve worked it out too much.
So let’s hear his ideas. Should we on these forums reject your ideas because you are a YEC? No, but the ideas will be scrutinized and they also must account for other all the data from other disciplines too as @cwhenderson mentioned. That’s a tall order, but hey if you have a piece of the puzzle I’d love to hear.
I am imagining your ideas to be similar to Hartnett’s model in philosophy at least where clocks tick much faster ‘out there’ than here on Earth. So in one sense, both billions of years and 6,000 can be true but this doesn’t work out well in practice in that for every year that passes on Earth, 20 million years pass elsewhere- i.e. lots of stellar processes come towards us- get condensed into a short time frame and we receive millions of years worth of information from a distant star in a single year.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding this, and your math and reason I am looking forward to though am skeptical as I’m imagining this is still a problem:
I wrote what I did with all migrations in mind - whether, for example, from YEC to OEC or from OEC to YEC - and with all tribes in mind. It is disappointing, therefore, to see that you read me as oblivious to the pain of the situation you describe.
What an irony, @pevaquark! You made two individuals a tribe when they weren’t even seeking to be one!
This is equally disappointing. I have commended a number of people in this forum when I was particularly struck with the wisdom in something they wrote. Most of these people do not share my views. For all I know @r_speir does not share my views either as I could not tell from his comments if he is a current YEC or a former one.
I don’t even like the labels YEC and OEC, but they are helpful shorthand in discussions like these. Even so, I don’t think of myself as a YEC. My views are similar enough to theirs that I can understand why someone would call me that, and therefore, don’t complain when they do. But social labels can be so very distracting. This was the main evil I was decrying. If I can be this misunderstood on that fundamental point, I am surely misunderstood on other points I try to make here.
When I said, "@r_speir has counseled wisely, I was speaking of the specific statement of his I was quoting. Most of the rest of the stuff he writes is so far over my head I couldn’t see it with a pair of binoculars.
Migrations can be painful no matter which direction they go. Nor do they require a large tribe to be involved for there to be great pain, for even the single estrangement of a spouse or a parent can bring enormous pain.
1 Like
Post deleted
1 Like
I agree that it not worthwhile to try to convince you of the science supporting the theory of evolution. What I hope to facilitate is an understanding that it is completely possible for people of my viewpoint (I believe God created THROUGH evolution) to still love our Savior, Jesus Christ and believe that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God, certainly without any bashing. In my conversations with @Mike_Gantt, he has affirmed this possibility. Yet, by your professed “hatred” of evolution, I suspect you might see my viewpoint differently.
2 Likes
I personally keep asking you to finish or share the rest of your idea. So that’s not true 
Sometimes that can happen. But at the same time, I’ve learned a lot of very good science by chatting with folks on these forums so far as well as been challenged in uncomfortable ways that’s been a big blessing.
Yeah we kind of go there due to loads of scientific evidence but by all means, a Christian doesn’t have to go there and many don’t. I’ve met many Christians who also hate evolution yet have no idea what it’s even about, what evidence we have, etc (not saying this is you, just anecdotal evidence that many don’t). Shucks I used to hate evolution too as if it was evil or something.
Geez, nice way to belittle others by claiming you obey your Apostle and other apparently don’t. I would press that you do go beyond what is written quite a bit, even in Genesis 1-3. Shucks even probably further in Genesis. Anytime you read Scriptures that were written from a geocentric point of you, you go beyond what was plainly written.
Can you share it again? I keep asking you to share it here.
Buying into a liberal theologian or historian? Gee whiz. How about someone who looks at real data and artifacts and interprets them objectively? I do appreciate your desire to await further archaeological clarification (like with Battle of Jericho - Wikipedia), but the question is… when should we wait out for more data to vindicate or viewpoint or when should we rethink our interpretation of Scripture in light of the data?
And BioLogos does this? That’s a pretty ridiculous claim. Especially on the main site… People on the forums have a wide view of how to look at the Scriptures, but all take it seriously.
It’s perhaps good to take a presuppositionalist approach to some thing, but I wouldn’t be so dogmatic about it.
3 Likes
In the marketplace of ideas, it is ideas that that command interest. I strongly doubt that the reception of your ideas here on these pages was influenced at all by who posted them!
Are you really sure, Mike, that your question is about proving (or hoping to prove) God’s lack of deceitfulness? Perhaps the question you’re unable to ask yourself involves human deceitfulness – specifically, the ability of the human brain to become so addicted to status and so addicted to “the right to be right” that there’s nothing to be said and nothing to be done to overcome the brain’s ability to choose denial over faith?
One of the things I find so interesting about the Gospel of Mark is the almost complete absence of any interest in the Book of Genesis, although Genesis was certainly known to Mark’s author. It’s referred only once in Mark 10:5-9, and even that short passage is mediated through the words of Moses. The Markan passage teaches us that God is more interested in committed, loyal, heart-based relationships than in legal oaths that bind us to each other without heart, fidelity, or faith.
If, as you believe, the world is only a few thousand years old, then Jesus himself was even “closer” to the date of Earth’s origin than we are, and presumably closer to the “true” timeline you think is hidden out there somewhere. Yet, according to Mark, Jesus isn’t remotely interested in either the timeline of Earth’s creation or the hidden facts that might support it. Jesus clearly trusted God enough to let go of any such worries.
As we can be quite certain that Jesus himself didn’t think it was a good idea to challenge God’s trustworthiness (which is, in fact, what you’re doing in this thread, whether you accept it or not, Mike), perhaps it’s okay for us to follow Jesus’ lead and focus on how to heal our relationships with God, each other, and ourselves in the time given to us on Planet Earth. That’s a huge challenge for any of us to do well.
It’s also quite extraordinary, from a neuroscientific perspective, what happens to the brain’s wiring when we start from the bottom-up with the questions and solutions Jesus presented to us instead of worrying first about the top-down questions you’re asking on this thread.
Jesus (brilliant physician, healer, mystic, and humble person of faith that he was) understood and taught that if you want to be able to know God during your humble human lifetime, there are many big questions you can’t answer and will never be able to answer even if you have all the knowledge of all the human beings who have ever lived. One of these big questions involves the creation of the universe. Although we, as humans, are naturally curious about this creation (because we intuit a powerful backstory that tells us more about the amazing and wondrous Mother Father God who love us), it’s simply pure hubris for human beings to believe they have the right to know all the intricacies of this process, let alone the “right to be right” about our assumptions and conclusions about said process.
One thing Jesus was very clear about in his teachings was the need for us to have a thinking faith based on a blend of heart, mind, soul, and courage rather than a blind faith based only on the mind and the law.
It takes a lot of courage to let go of the idea that the human brain – any human brain, including the brains that wrote down the words we find today in the Bible – can or should be able to know everything in God’s book of historical facts. We can know some things – indeed, Jesus taught us to continually ask hard questions and let go of old answers when we realize that the old answers are getting in the way of our ability to build our relationships with God, each other, and ourselves – but we can’t know everything.
If you can manage, in your human lifetime, to fully understand and live by all the basic principles espoused in Jesus’ parables and Kingdom parables (which in no way reject or contradict the wonders of pure science), then, my friend, you will have lived a very full and meaningful life blessed with love, forgiveness, humbleness, joy, hope, and the peace that comes from knowing you are loved completely by God. No matter when God chose to create this poetic planet we live on.
God bless,
Jen
Edited for points of grammar.
2 Likes
Richard,
Thanks for the quote. Certainly God is stating that He created the heavens and the earth, but I might add that He does not stop with Genesis 1,1, but goes on to explain how He did it. So I am really suggesting that indeed God is using symbolism to that could be found to have meaning in modern science so as not to be lying, and symbolism had to be used because no one until the last two hundred years would have understood the scientific terms.
As such I literally get goose bumps when I read, “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, And the Holy Spirit hovered over the face of the waters.” A profound statement of quantum uncertainty waiting for God’s will to observe and create !
I know some may not find this “compelling”. But it seems to me to be the only “answer”. Do I need this answer? No. I have come to find Jesus and my personal relationship with God has proven to me His existence in a way that science never could.
Then why the discourse? Because I feel that those that hear that Christians believe that there were dinosaurs on the ark, will turn off God and Christianity, and I feel compelled to share another view that will bring them to Christ. As a Christian who is taking up his cross as a disciple, I must share this view. Perhaps at Bio Logos which is mostly Christian, I am preaching to the choir, but I do believe there are many who are curious about God that come to this web site, and maybe this view will help them see a path to Christ that they can accept.
In regard to the post about asking YEC’s to be silent so as not to do harm, I sometimes wonder if I should be silent when I talk to some of them myself. I have a friend in our small bible study growth group who is a woman of limited education, and she completely accepts the YEC view. Do I dispel this? I think of the prayer of Jabez, that I might not do harm. So why should I dispel her belief, even if she is being misled, as long as she holds Christ in her heart. I wrestle with this and hope I am being guided to share in an appropriate way.
Neal
Ok here goes a dialogue on Genesis 2.
All of Genesis 2 occurs on day 6, because Eve was created in Genesis 2, and also in Genesis 1 it says “male and female he created them.”
So why not rain yet on the surface of the earth?
My thoughts on this are still building so I offer up these views for critical feedback.
-
“No shrub on the earth and not plant of the field had yet sprouted”. God is describing the earth at the end of the last ice age in which all the moisture of the earth was captured on the polar ice fields and glaciers. From what I have read, most of the earth was a dessert, and some say only a few hundred homo sapiens survived it who lived in South Africa coast line. I am suggesting that perhaps none did. So God is describing the area in Mesopotamia where there was not moisture except that coming from rivers and deep springs. One issue with this theory is that the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, and the lineage of the bible suggests this would be 6000 years ago. We are only 4,000 years off, and so one needs to address this issue for this theory to hold up.
-
When “God formed every beast”, the past tense is meant to mean the animals were created man. Out of the ground God formed every beast and man, in essence we are all of the dirt or elements of the universe with water added in, so this is a true statement.
-
Same answer for birds of the sky order, they were already created in the order in Genesis 1, and Genesis 2 refers to past tense, meaning they were created before man and now brought before him to name them. The fact that fist are not mentioned, the bible will often not say everything that was done, but that does not mean it was not done.
Ok, there are my answers!
Neal
I correct the above.
Hi, Neal. You can even correct the original post instead of having to reprint the corrected portions in a later post. Just find the pencil that shows underneath only your own posts (since you are only allowed to edit your own!) and click on that. I know I was delighted when somebody first showed me that, and I’ve used it shamelessly ever since.
Added edit: If content has changed in some way more significant than mere grammar corrections or word omissions, you can always add a note to the end that you’ve now edited it. I sometimes change content that I later think better of. Honesty may compel an acknowledgment of this, especially if people have already “liked” your post in its original state.