Of course not. Most of them will probably end up on my list as well for some reason or another. I’ll read through the split thread and use that as a jumping point to research–I was just making sure you didn’t have good references to their theology off the top of your head.
There has been an interesting convergence in recent months between the young earth proponents, the anti-CRT crowd, the ESS/women are subordinate to men for all eternity crowd, the COVID deniers, and the Christian nationalists. I’m just trying to understand if there’s anything behind it other than uniting to oppose their common enemy, the “woke” people.
Um . . . not really; it’s used in Ezekiel to refer to a choice between two paths, or to the splitting of a path into two depending on how you read it. In the rest of the OT though it seems to always reference a human mother.
The term can be rendered as “shining one”, which manages to bridge the two aspects due to its use to mean heavenly beings.
Repetition does not indicate the start of a process, it makes the meaning emphatic. Thus “Holy, holy” should be rendered as “truly holy”, and “die you shall die” becomes “you shall certainly die”.
Oh – and you got the Hebrew wrong anyway; it’s “mowt tamut”, though “dying you shall die” is a perfectly good rendition.
This is VERY bad thinking! When discussing a common issue the common meaning of terms are used. I once saw a debate team in the quarter-finals for state championship lose because they used a non-standard definition and the other team caught it – and that rule of debate is the usual one for any communication. If you want to mean something else, invent a different term because no one is going to bother with talking to someone who uses personal meanings for words.
That is acceptable generally but usually is only done when your definition is only slightly different from the established usage. Read a few hundred research papers where such definitions are given and you’ll see the pattern.
That’s silly – using a term with its standard meaning doesn’t entail accepting the ideas, it only entails speaking of the ideas as they exist.
You left out the part he’s referencing, where Paul says “they knew God”. This “they” reaches back to the start of the argument, thus Paul is talking about people who knew God.
Except that you’re offering those points as assertions, which means making statements without backing them up. Since you’re making the statements, it’s up to you to back them up – which Christy indirectly invited you to do.
Nope – the Holy Spirit reduced the entire set of instructions from the Old Testament to four items. That’s in Acts 15, and there’s no way around it because the laws of Moses were explicitly included in the discussions.
Now the problem comes out: that is an element of a modern worldview that did not apply to the thinking of the ancient near east. Back then, if something came from a deity it had authority, and it was the authority that mattered, not the type of material. So if God inspired something, it made no difference if it was “literally” true or not because it came from God. The division was between things with divine authority and things lacking them.
Total failure to understand the quote you used! There’s no reference to “fiction”, broad or speculative or otherwise, but you jump to that as though the quote has any relevance to it.
The text doesn’t say that. Take thorns; they must have existed or Adam & Eve wouldn’t have known what God was talking about – but what God is saying is that those plants will now get in the way of raising food. The same is true of death.
With disease and cancer you might have a point, but there’s nothing in the text to hang that idea on.
It should also be noted that they were being booted from the Garden, and God could have just been telling them what they were stuck with due to that.
No, it doesn’t – any notion of sin is purely imported.
“If the proofs of separation existed” is a phrase that imports an a priori notion, which is always a fallacious argument.
And just by the way, we know that predators killing prey for food is “good”, because the Psalmist tells us so – even says that God provides the prey!
This indicates that the meaning of “good” is not the one imported from twenty-first century Western culture.
Not quite: death of humans is the result of sin, and it flows from spiritual death. Animals aren’t spiritual beings, so this doesn’t apply to them.
Bad Christology: Jesus’ resurrected body belongs to the New Creation – and Paul puts it, Jesus is the first fruits.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
The first I learned as “royal chronicle”, though it seems that term is used differently today. It is a genre that aims to set forth a mighty accomplishment of a great king, doing so in memorable terms that can be poetic and can use chronology as an organizing means not meant to be literal. The second has been called “temple inauguration”, which is a type that starts with the construction of the temple, proceeds with filling it, and ends up with the deity coming to “rest” in the temple, which means not the cessation of activity but rather a change in activity based on enjoying the proper functioning of the building and filling. We know this is the case because Jesus Himself told the Pharisees that “My Father is working till now”.
The order of events is relevant because the Israelites would have known the Egyptian story and recognized that the Genesis writer was following it but also was changing things. The account takes each element of the Egyptian story but instead of something being a god (for instance the sea) it is presented as merely a creation of YHWH-Elohim; in fact two primary gods of Egypt, the sun and moon, are slammed heavily because they don’t even get named by the Hebrew writer!
Without knowing the first genre the message that God is king over Creation is lost; it can be drawn from elsewhere but to the ancient Israelites it would have been blaringly obvious. Without knowing the second the message that Creation is God’s temple is lost; again, that can be drawn from elsewhere but also again to the original audience it would have been obvious. And without knowing that the writer copied the order of events from the Egyptian story the point that every Egpytian god of importance was reduced to just a tool made by YHWH-Elohim to serve His purpose is completely lost – a message that in modern slang terms might be summed up as “All your gods are belong to YHWH!”
Actually I didn’t fail; the prime criterion is the effort to have understood the ancient worldview, the ancient literary type, and the cultural context. YEC advocates operate on the assumption that they don’t need to study, that they can read in English and the words mean what they look like to them. That’s the same arrogance the pope had that led to the Reformation and the same arrogance of false teachers down through history.
And get pounced on by others – it happens rather often, really. But the positions that are argued and accepted by the majority of scholars can generally be trusted.
With reference to that, the information about genres that I’ve related was known over twenty-five years ago and has only been made more sure since then.
What, that they don’t deal with the text honestly? I have yet to find one that does, because they all operate on the unrecognized assumption that their basic premise is taken from scientific materialism, without a trace of it being found in the scriptures.
Basic physics – if the hydroplate conjecture happened, there would be a large blob of vapor instead of a planet since the heat produced would vaporize the planet.
Physics isn’t generally much use for evolution.
Shifting the goalposts – another fallacious argument.
What we know from the text is that the first mention of sin is in Genesis 3 – and that it started before humans rebelled.
I refuted that: Genesis is not necessary for the Gospel to be “stable” for the simple reason that people already know they are broken.
Yes, I read it, and it is not the entire point of the Old Testament.
If you think those requirements are “unsubstantiated” you have no business in any serious conversation but need to go back to school.
And the rest is my story or common knowledge among scholars.
No, “fairytales” is the key word because it shows that you have no concept that there is any position but yours and the caricature you hold of anything else.
As I learned them, royal chronicle, temple inauguration, myth (the technical term), and . . . drat it, I can’t recall the fourth I was thinking of.
Because if you don’t know the genre of the literature you’re reading you can’t possibly understand what the writer was talking about or what the audience understood from the writing.
Two genres in the Creation account, at least four in Genesis 1 - 11.
The train ticket is new. Without it you walked. Walking was good, but now you’ve moved on and get to ride the train.
What was “very good” for an Earthly existence may well be superseded by something as much different as riding a train is to walking.
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I have no problem at all in restricting discussion of evolution to large-scale changes. My problem is that your definitions are inconsistent and contain claims about reality that are incorrect. You’re talking about evolution that involves gain of functional genetic information and causes organisms to change in radical ways ('getting better overall is hopelessly subjective, so I’ll avoid that description). You’re also claiming that natural selection doesn’t do these things. The reality is, however, that evolution does do these things but it almost always does them through the mechanism of natural selection. So either you don’t understand how evolution works, or you’re making a false claim that evolution can’t do the things you’re talking about because NS can’t do them. Either way there’s an error here, but your language is making it hard to determine what that is. (And no, ‘certain traits are more likely to survive than others’ is not synonymous with ‘Variation within the expressed genes of a certain pool, driven primarily by environmental circumstances’, but the differences are not important to my main point.)
True and completely irrelevant. I didn’t say anything about transferring genetic information between organisms. I’m talking about the transfer of information from the environment into a population’s genomes. Any organism that is adapted to its environment had incorporated information about that environment into its genetic material. How do you think that happens other than through natural selection?
You did not read my statement correctly. What I said was that the mutation occur with or without natural selection, but it is only through NS that they spread through the population. Mutations change a genome; natural selection changes a species.
The reason I’m picking on this point is that it echoes a common creationist argument, which runs something like this: ‘Natural selection does nothing but eliminate some mutations, so it can’t create anything new or complex. But mutations are random, so they can’t create anything complex either. So large-scale evolution can’t explain the appearance of complex novelties.’ This is a really bad argument. It makes as much sense as saying that sculptors can’t create anything because all they do is remove marble, and marble itself can’t create anything, so therefore sculpture can’t exist.
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I think the antecedent to “it” is pretty clearly “all Creation” not math.
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Oooh, this is a very succinct and clear way of expressing it. As members of post-Gutenburg, literate societies we have a default expectation that authority is found in the text. But in the orality-dominant societies of the ANE and NT church, authority is found in the giver of the text.
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Scripture was more generally heard than read, but I don’t see how nontextual authority squares with 2 Timothy 3:16
You are interpreting that verse from your social location in a literate society, referencing your conceptual frames of authority, then. I don’t see how it contradicts anything we have said. The authority of the text comes God, who is referenced right there in the verse as the source of Scripture so we remember why it is authoritative. There is a lot of research that has been done on how the Scripture texts and authority functioned in the ancient Hebrew world and in the early Christian world. Walton and Sandy’s The Lost World of Scripture is a good overview.
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In the previous comment you seemed to allude to or crack the door for saying authority may not be found in the text. Did I misread something?
Is it wrong to look for authority in the text?
That is exactly what I said and it’s what the verse from Timothy says too. Authority in the ancient world came from the giver of the text. Moses had authority to speak for God, authority didn’t come from the text of the Law. The prophets had authority to speak for God, authority didn’t come from the text of their prophesies. Jesus had authority to speak for God and quoted the Penteteuch which had authority because Moses spoke for God. People have authority based on their role as bearers of God’s word/revelation, texts don’t have authority. Texts are just the backup copies that help people remember what the people with authority to speak for God said.
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Sort of goes to the statement that “The Bible is not the Word of God but is the written record of the Word of God.”
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But you and all YEC advocates in practice claim that if scripture is not literally and scientifically true – i.e. if it does not conform to a modern worldview – then it has no authority. That contradicts what you just wrote and is also contrary to how people thought back then: a story that came from a deity had authority whether it had happened or not.
No, it actually only recognizes the truth that we have no way to measure for God or His activities – we do not have a “divine-o-meter”. And that is theologically sound.
Sure – because there’s no divine-o-meter.
Though actually evolution assumes no such thing.
By the way, there are more than a few people who see God’s hand in evolution because it is such an elegant system for fulfilling the command to “Bring forth!”
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Would it be agreeable if I said the Bible is a fallible collection of inspired texts?
Not at all. Fine tuning is compatible with both methodological naturalism and a God of infinite wisdom and power. Methodological naturalism only assumes an orderly universe, with effects that ensue from causes.
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Why fallible? I would say the Bible is an infallible collection of inspired texts, but the infallibility comes from God faithfully and reliably communicating the message he intends to communicate through the texts. It’s God’s revelation that is authoritative and infallible, not the text that encodes that revelation. Texts need to be interpreted, and interpretation is a fallible process.
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Natural causes. That’s the issue when considering the possibility of miracles today or cosmic events 14 billion years ago.
Wooohi… 
depends on how you want to look at it ultimately, and reasonable people are quite capable of disagreeing about it… as long as we are honest about what we mean to say, it should be a lovely ride down this road
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btw…
Inspired texts do need to be interpreted, like creation, and yet our fallible nature still gets us to objective knowledge about the world sometimes… that is if we agree about certain premises to begin with
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So, do you have no objection to evolution and common ancestry as actually described?
There is no point in debating something nobody holds to anyways.
That is speciation.
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I agree. As long as we keep in mind that even our most objective knowledge is limited and represents our best (but incomplete) approximation of some abstract idea of “absolute truth.” But just because our knowledge is limited doesn’t make it insufficient for making truth claims or mean we can’t evaluate other people’s truth claims as better or worse depending on what we know to be true. All claims to truth are limited, but some are better than others, it’s not a free for all where everything is relative or just an individual’s perspective.
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