Thanks. I admire you for compassion and diligence.
I sometimes think…doesn’t this all come back to the nature of God and justice? Only He knows our hearts. He knows our frame…He remembers that we are dust. He alone knows the struggle each of us goes through, and I have to believe He will not blame us for ignorance. Sometimes our sincere search for truth leads us to doubt and atheism…but He, being ultimately Just, will accept our fumbling as a father. Bless you in your efforts.
We should absolutely therefore respect each other’s struggles with as much forbearance as our Father would. Heaven forbid we should look down on our YEC brothers or those of other variations, as you say. Have you read “The Fool and the Heretic,” by Falk and Wood? I just finished listening to it recently…I thought it was a good example of each side learning to interact respectfully.
That is a problem. But a “solution” that caters to their false dichotomy (a face value interpretation of the Bible is 100% historically and scientifically accurate or the whole thing is lies) is just setting them up for problems down the road, and not just with faith/science issues. It is problematic if your view of the Bible requires that a rigid interpretive framework must always work or you have to chuck the whole thing.
Personally, I would prefer to encourage people to develop a more agile, reflective faith than pander to a perspective that I think will ultimately let people down when it comes to the biggest questions about life and faith. I think it’s better to do the wrestling even if it means they have to struggle through a dark time of doubt and unbelief.
Also, in my experience, when people lose their faith, there are a lot of other complex factors at work that are not purely rational and don’t involve intellectual exercises. So I think it’s kind of naive to believe that preserving a certain view of the Bible is going to preserve all these people’s faith in the face of challenges. Humans are complex. People (and the churches they form) are often disappointing and hurtful. Sure, some people latch on to “the Bible isn’t reliable” as a way of rationalizing or explaining why they are walking away from God, but the real story usually has a few more chapters.
I note several hings about this. First, I don’t think the dichotomy is false. I struggled for 12 years about whether to become an atheist. The problems you see in the Scripture, atheists see as well, and they do what I view as the logical thing when faced with those problem, become an atheist. Yall think it is ok to hold that a book so full of holes tells us about eternity with certainty. I can’t go there.
I also note in your reply that you seem to want a faith that can’t be tested. It reminds me of what Frank Tipler said about this escape from verification.
“Of course, the real reason modern theologians want to keep science divorced from religion is to retain some intellectual territory forever protected from the advance of science. This can only be done if the possibility of scientific investigation of the subject matter is ruled out a priori. Theologians were badly burned in the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Such a strategy seriously underestimates the power of science, which is continually solving problems philosophers and theologians have decreed forever beyond the ability of science to solve.” ~ Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 7
From my perspective escaping verification shows a lack of faith in God. I know you won’t agree, but there are definitely statements in Genesis 1 claimed to be quotes of God. If God didn’t say them, then who did? If a human said them, why should I care what he says about creation?–he wasn’t there! If God did say them and he ‘accommodated’ to falsehood, then why should I believe God when he says “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”? If God lied in the Genesis statements, why should I take seriously that he isn’t lying in the NT?
I have often asked accommodationalists if there is any nonsense that could be claimed by the Bible that would make them disbelieve? If one says no, then I would contend that one has acceptance of a religion that they won’t trust by trying to verify the religion. If our religion is so wrong on everything we see, does anyone think that maybe just maybe this is not the true religion? I would. That is why having historicity in Scripture is important.
As I see what you are advocating, you are saying God isn’t trustworthy in his statements but I will believe other claims He makes anyway. I can’t do that. While people often say we spend too much time on creation because it isn’t important, it is very important to the trustworthiness of God and the statements he makes.
Just out of curiosity, is there anything so ridiculous that Scripture could say that would make you disbelieve? If not, I wouldn’t say that is a vibrant faith. Christianity AND God’s communications to us must be true if we are to actually go to heaven.
I don’t see the Bible as “full of holes.” I see the Bible as a beautiful, fascinating, deeply moving, not totally fathomable story of God involving himself in the mess of humanity to restore and redeem. If when you look at the Bible, all you see is “holes” you have been taught to read it in a very unfortunate, unproductive way that shouldn’t be humored.
My faith is tested every day. I find God to be incredibly faithful to me personally and to his people corporately. But it’s not because I spend hours fact-checking the Bible against history and science. It’s because I’m out in the world, trying to live the Jesus way in the already/not yet coming Kingdom.
My faith isn’t built on the Bible. It’s in Jesus Christ, crucified, resurrected, and exalted. The Bible reveals truth about the God I relate to through Christ in the power of the Spirit. Making faith about logic and proof makes it about something other than being united with God through Christ. I don’t think the Bible has any magical power of its own. Its truth is apprehended in relationship with the God it reveals. We don’t stand over the Bible and declare it truthful based on our objective standards of proof or rationality. When we do, it will always come up lacking because that is not the proper way to approach the God the Bible reveals.
thanks for the kind words. I have not read that book but will look it up. I listen to books now, too. It is like being a kid in kindergarten where the teacher reads to you. lol
I know everyone struggles with these issues. I want something that people can believe is TRUE because that firms up faith in other areas. Last July was when I realized how to demonstrate the existence of the soul from quantum, I had, the week before learned that the cancer had finally moved to my bones, which is the last terminal stage.It really strengthened my faith; it was like God was cheering me up; saying, “It will be alright”. I had toyed with the quantum soul idea off and on for years, but couldn’t ever get the last puzzle piece until last July. I brought Gordie in to cowrite quantum soul because he read an early draft and said no one would understand it. Gordie did a great job.
But my point is KNOWING that the soul exists; KNOWING that a scientifically accurate account of early Genesis exists means, I can trust more, and believe me trust never came easy to me given the childhood experiences I had. I don’t have to doubt the veracity of scripture because it full of factless nonsense. Instead of a fact free Bible, I now have a fact FULL Bible. Knowing some of the Biblical story is true or can be true, is faith enhancing.
I’m really bad at hypotheticals. We have the Bible. It says it what it says. We have to work out our faith in the world we live in. I don’t believe “because of the Bible,” I believe because of Jesus.
Ok, Jay, as promised I read your paper. Took a few days for me to find the time. Basically these guys say that Ruhlen’s results are due to chance. What fascinates me is their methodology, if applied to Indoeuropean might end up with the same problem. They define their term
“The number of different phonetic forms for the same root (Ndiff) in a given family seems to us to be an essential lexical parameter. This number gives us an idea of the cohesiveness and even the existence of families. The value of Ndiff must of course be greater than 1; otherwise there would only be a single language per family. But on the other hand, Ndiff cannot be as great as the number of languages in the same family; otherwise, the very existence of the family would be called into question. Ndiff is therefore an important piece of information about linguistic typology that has led the experts to classify languages by family: a compromise between the homogeneity of the family and the existence of different languages for the same family.” Louis-Jean Boë, Pierre Bessiere, Nadia Ladjili, Nicolas Audibert Simple combinatorial considerations challenge Ruhlen’s mother tongue theory" p 12-13 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01884400/document
I went to Wiki to be sure of the precise definition of phonetic form: "Phonetic form is the level of representation wherein expressions, or sentences, are assigned a phonetic representation, which is then pronounced by the speaker. "
What they are saying is that cognates that don’t have similar phonetic forms are evidence of no relationship and cognates that have similar forms are evidence of common family. So, if the cognate is different in each language in a suggested family one then would doubt that there is a family.
Thinking of this issue I went to https://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/ie-wordlist-07.pdf and took the word for animal, because my cat was bothering me at that moment. Here is the full list of cognates in IndoEuropean in that list, I did my best to keep the spelling but the oomlats etc are not included.
Animal
Hittite----------------suppalas
Armenian-----------anasown
Greek---------------ζωιον
Albanian-----------Kafshe, shatze
Tocharian B-------Luwo
Vedic Sanskrit----pasus
Old Ch. Slavonic zuvitu
Lithuanian---------Gyvolis
Old English--------deor
Old Irish------------anmandae
Latin-----------------animal
Luvian--------------Huitarsa
Tocharian A------- lu
Old Prussian------swirins
Latvian-------------dzivnieks
Gothic--------------dius
Old Norse---------dyr
OldHighGerman-tior
Welsh--------------anifail https://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/ie-wordlist-07.pdf
Looking at this list, it certainly doesn’t look like Ndiff is very low. Indeed, looking at this through what I see as the eyes of their method, I would say that there is no IndoEuropean language. lol Their case would be much stronger if they had shown that it works with this language family. It seems to me that if one is to claim Ruhlen is due to chance by a particular methodology they should prove an existing language family is NOTdue to chance by their methodology. That way we know the method works. As it is, they don’t show that their method works to unite known language families
I will tell you, I looked over the list if IE words and wow, they are quite different, so "animal’ doesn’t seem to be a weird outlier.
@gbob, I have this concern too. It’s the same problem that the Apostle Paul spoke about in 1 Corinthians 8. For some people, evolution, no-Adam theology, or identifications of Genesis 1-11 as “myth” (irrespective of what one believes the word “myth” to mean) are like food sacrificed to idols. That’s why although I accept the scientific consensus on the age of the earth and although I have had to admit that the evidence for common ancestry is strong, I am very uncomfortable with any kind of attitude of “evolution is a fact, get over it.” It’s why I remind people that there are aspects of the theory of evolution that we can and should reject, even if in some people’s minds those aspects don’t fit entirely within the scope of “changes in allele frequencies in biological populations over successive generations.” It’s why I am comfortable with the ministry of Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe. It’s why I refuse to write off ID in its entirety even if some aspects of ID are problematic. It’s why I explicitly avoid discussions of methodological naturalism when talking about subjects such as the age of the earth. None of us should ever forget that whether we like it or not, there is a lot of cultural baggage attached to evolution, and in discussing the subject we do need to be sensitive to those cultural implications.
You should read Ronald Numbers, both for his scholarly contributions and for his account of moving from YECism to acceptance of evolution. Surely you know Davis Young? There are many more. Your story is interesting but it’s not unique.
Yep, I think one reason YECs don’t like my view is because of evolution. Those I define as liberal, who don’t believe in historicity in Scripture, don’t like my views precisely because they are concordistic. I couldn’t have found a better place to be shot at by both sides if I had tried. lol. But yeah, whether we like YEC/antievolutionary views or not, their souls are worth very much to our God. Disdaining them because they chose to ignore data does not do us any good. In full disclosure, I have been guilty of that many times in the past. I have also been guilty of that towards liberals many times too. lol We are all human and do what we can amidst our sinfulness.
I used the adjective PUBLISHED creationist. I don’t think Davis or Numbers ever published as YECs. If they did, I have never seen it or heard of it. I published 30 YEC articles. I communicated with both these men years ago, and while I was a YEC, I met every YEC big wig of the early 80s, from Henry Morris, John Morris, Gish, Austin, Slusher, Jan Peckzis (can’t bring myself to use his pseudonym, he should be proud of what he writes rather than hiding behind a false name) and many more. etc. In 2004 or 5, I debated Henry Morris Junior at LeTourneau University and surprised him by doing a theology talk rather than a geology talk, and it is a long story but they deep sixed that debate video tape. I set up my computer in the room went to dinner and came back to find my computer blue screen. I was suspicious, but I always carry backups and had a cd with my talk. Morris was introduced by the President of the university as a man in his Sunday school class whose heart he knew was good. I was introduced as being good friends with Beelzebub himself. lol
So, the reason you are such a Big Deal is not that you changed your mind but that you changed your mind after writing stuff? Could it be, instead, that you’re not such a Big Deal, that you’re just a guy with some opinions, and that your ideas should stand or fall by themselves?
I just discovered that Celtic and Cushitic languages use a similar word (Gall/Galla) to describe foreigners. What might the implications of this be? Coincidence?
