Curious… I am aware of this view… but saying you believe this only seems to reinforce Adam’s underlying belief
This was a breathtaking admission. But it is probably why I’ve noticed more often an acceptance of an eternal universe around here.
I’d rather not make any digs, but I have to say I don’t see how a post-modernist can make a super far reaching claim like this. It makes me very uncomfortable when someone says the Bible and science are operating in seperate domains. Either those domains overlap or you are literally going to fall off the edge of one map or the other.
HIs underlying belief that we have completely incompatible perspectives and approaches to the Bible and mine is unacceptable to him? Yeah, I know. That’s been my point. I’m not going to be able to “convince” him of anything or “explain” my perspective in a way he finds compelling because we fundamentally do not share the same approach to Scripture interpretation in particular and knowledge in general.
I’m speaking of domains of discourse, not domains of reality. If you want two disciplines to be in conversation, they need to share a discourse domain. We do have domains of discourse related to some intersections of faith and science, like the application of Christian ethics to technology use or how the biblical mandate to steward creation motivates people to participate in ecological justice initiatives informed by ecology and climate science or how understanding of stochastic processes related to divine sovereignty.
What we should not do is cut and paste Bible verses into psychology or biology discussions as if their discourse domains use the same vocabulary and concepts. They don’t. The way the Bible talks about human spiritual flourishing should not be placed “over” the way psychology or biology talks about human flourishing, they should be placed alongside each other. Both can be used to inform our views of reality, but that doesn’t make them automatically conversant with each other. We have to create new discourse domains of intersection, which is kind of the point of this forum.
Wow! You still surprise me! I agree with this and can also appreciate the difficulty of the task and would also warn against oversimplification of the way in which psychology or biology intersect with the story of the Bible. Just because they may appear to be conversant, doesn’t necessarily mean they are or that they cannot be.
I remember trying to engage Adam about death before the fall, and I wish he would have pursued the conversation with me.
I couldn’t help but laugh here because the argument being made is one that forty years ago was decried by conservatives as a liberal fallacy: “debate both sides” was justifiably seen as an effort to drag in irrational arguments justifying them as a way to achieve “balance”.
This illustrates another of what was once regarded as a liberal fallacy: defining an argument in terms that purposely exclude any but two views.
This isn’t a matter of “both sides”, it’s a matter of at least four, possibly five sides. Defining it as YEC v TE is a rhetorical device meant to exclude anything not covered in the YEC talking points . . . and its employment merely points to validity in the ideas of the OP.
Except that artificially restricting it to just two views as selected by one party is actually about excluding educated choice.
While you insist on excluding the millennia of belief in an ancient Earth and more ancient universe.
Nor is the theological position of the Bible one that teaches that the Earth is young. Indeed, there are no biblical arguments in favor of that!
But you’re the only one saying that – and you’ve been corrected in it several times.
That statement is not consistent with what the Bible itself says; believing it requires maintaining that Jesus lied and Paul was in error.
That is an extreme oversimplification! Selfishness can’t class as a personality disorder because all such disorders have different spectra of symptoms, one of which might be selfishness. An interesting illustration can be made with Tolkien’s character Gollum: there a huge difference between having a favorite piece of jewelry one wants to keep and having a “precious” one is willing to kill in order to keep or regain.
But that’s a false dichotomy. I’ve worked with people who have violated moral standards not because they chose to ignore those standards but because prior mental trauma left them not in control of their own behavior – not as in justifying immoral behavior but as in opposing it with all their will even as their bodies engaged in said behavior, effectively becoming passengers in their own bodies with the ability to observe but not change course.
And when brain scans of different types can actually show physical differences in brains of people in such straits, dismissing it as “not a health battle” is just badly uninformed.
I think it was an article in Christianity Today this last year that referred to this as a modern type of gnosticism.
A psychologist I knew stated one day that out of ten people you meet on the street, four are fighting mental health problems . . . and half of the rest have given up fighting.
Given he had multiple PhD-level degrees, I don’t think it was just him having a cynical day; either way it’s a frightening thought/observation.
Yeah. My first thought was about PTSD flashbacks; I can’t think of anything related anywhere in the scriptures.
A friend the year before last, going through some serious issues, one day said to me, “I know I’m probably wrong, but I just don’t have the energy to think about it”.
Thanks to what I’ve been dealing with for the last two years, I can now understand that concept.
They are in different domains in a very important sense because science is “view from below” by necessity and cannot be otherwise, while the Bible endeavors to communicate the view from above.
They’re also in different domains because they operate with different definitions of truth, and that not just because of the difference between VFA and VFB; science is propositional in nature whereas the scriptures quite frequently are not – parable, allegory, temple dedication, royal chronicle, teaching by contradiction, and more have very little overlap with propositional assertions [my favorite example, as people here probably already know, being how Jesus so frequently asserted His identity as being YHWH without ever quite stating it as a proposition].
Excellent clarification!
One of these days I have to revisit it. That was a topic that a number of my grad school professors were very uncomfortable with despite how important it is, some of them because it borders on the topic of the limitation of human language in the first place for describing anything transcendental.
how can it drift offtopic…the topic is that YEC are mental case conspiracy theorists who are indoctrinating unsuspecting individuals with lies.
Everything i have said above is addressing that false claim.I am not the one who decided to introduce a question with such a broad range of ontopic responses…whoever posted the question should have thought more carefully before posting it in the first place!
Let me add, the reason why i have generally have long answers in posts on forums is because i like to cross link my theology…its not one of “sliced and diced” unrelated snippets from all over the place that are in constant conflict.
Uh, by getting into esoteric arguments about whether or not satan can create things, or how much he knows about science?
Therein lies the problem, because that is a recipe for drifting off topic.
To be fair, Adam, some of the points that you make do have some merit, but you do need to remain focused. You may think you’re viewing theology as an integrated whole, but to the rest of us, your arguments come across as disjointed and rambling—a hodgepodge of theological claims whose relevance to the topic at hand and even to each other is unclear at best. It sounds more like you’re just trying to throw as much as possible at the wall in the hope of finding something that sticks than anything else. Or like you believe that you can win an argument by shouting and throwing accusations around.
I’m not saying this to attack you or anything here, I’m saying this to try to help you. If you want people to take you seriously—especially scientifically educated people—one of the most important things you need is clear communication. You can’t expect people to understand you properly, let alone agree with you, if your posts aren’t clear, focused, coherent, and straight to the point.
I think we’re still being shown examples of why the OP asked useful questions.
For example–
Exactly – though you’re more polite where I would tend to be blunt, but then I have a hard time thinking about YECism due to all the people I knew in my university days who abandoned their faith because they followed the YEC logic just as Ehrman did, and while I managed to help a few through the crisis I can’t help but wonder if I could have helped more.
Sometimes an image can contain more than one picture. Or how some images trick the eye into seeing one thing, when something else is there. Which one is real? Aquinas said something about how the Bible helps guide our understanding. That in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And when science looks at the world and sees an eternal universe, we can rest assured that science is seeing something incorrectly. For on this issue, there is no way around it.
Ironically, science may be looking at the world as I once looked at philosophy. That’d be something, and a real hard one to admit. How could we appear to be at the center of the universe, and that it can’t be confirmed or denied?
Something that I just read in Waltom’s book Wisdom for Faithful Reading might apply to how we are to read Job as well as other scripture. He is speaking of how the writer is showing us a literary view or veiled view of an event or topic, and writes:
“We cannot see the events or the characters; we can only see the veil. Furthermore, and most importantly, the veil represents the interpretation of events offered by the narrator, which we believe has been given him by God. That means the veil is what is inspired- not the events themselves. To understand the message from God, we need to understand the veil - not reconstruct the events.”
exactly!