Two questions about how central the question of origins is to your core beliefs

Faith & Science Conversation
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When I was a teenager I read a book called Creation and Evolution, I don’t remember the author and have long since lost the book but it started my view on theistic Evolution which has continued.

I do not see how any change in the current Evolutionary theory could possibly affect my beliefs in God as I see science as one of the visible hands of God. You cannot shut God out, it is only a matter of how much you “need” Him to be a part of it. I have said elsewhere that I do not like the “light the blue touch paper and retire immediately " viewpoint”. I am closer to the notion of fixed parameters within which Evolution has a free reign.

Richard

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never heard that expression before and find it difficult to understand…

If someone lights the touch paper or lights the blue touch paper, they do something which causes anger or excitement .

perhaps this is a better one

Make a controversial statement and then retire immediately from the ensuing discussion.

not sure how this fits the context???

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It is the instructions on a firework.

The principle is that you set it off and then that is the last thing you have to do with it.

In this case, God ignites the big bang…

Richard

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Since it seems this thread is open again, and people are responding, I’ll join in. I am quite sure nothing I write will be a surprise to anyone I’ve interacted with, since I’ve been interacting here.

1a) How fundamental to my belief system is the question of creation?
It’s not. Period.
I fully grasp that this position may/may not create enormous/no messes regarding Christian doctrine. I expect that my belief system correspond to reality. If it can’t do that, then I’m not sure what it can tell me at all. I have no interest in deconstructing (in a formal way, using tools of critical theory) anything. I simply have a high view of reality as well as Scripture. They must correspond.

1b) Which events are more essential to Christian belief and practice: Creation or Resurrection?

Absolutely the Resurrection of Jesus. I’m glad you brought this one out, Mark. We Christians (maybe Christians in the West) make so little of THE most central event of our faith. This topic alone deserves a separate discussion; it’s the key.

2 ) I’m soundly a 4 on the @MarkD Scale of Origins Beliefs. Has this changed? Now that’s an interesting question…depends on what you mean by “change.”

4a) 3rd grade, standing in the hall outside Andrea Wiebelhaus’s classroom at Community Free Will Baptist Church after getting off the Sunday school bus, puzzling over a poster. Ya’ll know the one, the ape progression to man: “Image of God?” I think that was the caption. Weird poster. No clue what that was about. I must have asked someone, though. Question shifted to “What’s evolution?” Question slept for about 7 years.

4b) 10th grade, sitting in Advanced Biology. (I’m sure we’d talked about evolution in Jr. High, but I just don’t remember anything outstanding.) Dear Mr. Camp began the first lecture on evolution, and some kid had something to say about it not being true. I had a lot of Sunday school under my belt. It had not been made a big deal of, but I knew there were folks with doubts. “Thank goodness that kid’s not from my church. Shhh! Quiet. I have to know this for the test.”

4c) 12th grade, watching some presentation or video from Henry Morris, talking about how giraffes willed themselves to evolve longer necks. “That’s not how it works. You’re lying, and most the people here believe you.” I was done with any of the “origins stuff” that had to rely on straw men and deception.
In the many decades since, oddments of support for my growing distrust have just piled up here and there. They sealed their own fate.

4d) After a few decades of blissful distance from the world of creationism, and living fine with a full (basic) intellectual acceptance of evolution, the fires of controversy have been refueled (with cash) and stoked (with the fervor of the faithful who live in fear of heresy). My desire to keep my distrance from it has simply been thwarted at every turn. Additionally, I see the pressure on hermeneutics and doctrine that is resulting from the hotter fires. Fundi churches (or congregations, which is a huge deal in churches with congregational rule) are lining up with (if you can believe) even more tightly fundi groups like AIG, and using their materials in Sunday schools. I can’t express what a big deal this last part is for me. It’s a very large part of why I left the church I had gone to for the last 21 years, and will probably never return to what had been “my denomination” again.

4 a-d) Summing up: What has changed is my understanding of evolution, my willingness to speak freely about my position and my willingness to accept doctrinal uncertainties, which will eventually (I hope) be clarified in a faithful way, but maybe not even in my lifetime. Additionally, I am UNwilling to be bullied, manipulated, lied to, brain-washed.

Bravo, if you endured to the end of this.

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If only that were true. Unfortunately What I think of as giving rise to God belief is the fact that we are entirely capable of mistaking our finite capacity for reason and narrow focused attention for the totality or at least the most essential part of what we are. But it is only a shiny, newly evolved tool at the disposal of who we really are … and we’re confused about that. This capacity for self estrangement, I think, is what is fallen about our nature. Humility and a disposition toward service to what is greater is a good way forward for creatures such as ourselves.

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Okay so I am talking from a theistic viewpoint. A theist can incorporate God into science without a problem. If you do not accept the existence of God then you will have no problem shutting Him out as Dawkins (et al) seem happy to do.

Is not restricted to atheism. The whole notion of us being made in God’s image is vanity to the extreme. The fact that it is part of Genesis 1-4 does not enamour it to me.

Richard

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Why in the world would I want to shut out out what is greater? I just conceptualize what that is differently. I just don’t think the what-is-greater is a being in its own right, apart from every living being who somehow maintains psychic communication with every human being. It’s true that the creative thrust of being-ness predates hominids and will go on finding a way even if, in our fallenness, we bring it all down around us on this planet. But what-is-greater is everywhere and already onboard each of us too. In our fallenness we think we are just our limited focused attention and that everything depends on what we do with it. But our capacity for self assessment is effected by our fallenness. People should spend more time doing things that don’t depend on analysis. Just refocusing that capacity into theology will just spread the contagion. Instead of seeking a management role we should keep in mind that all our splendid mental capacities are to serve what is greater. Even if we are so estranged that we could swear there is nothing else to who we are we should have faith that is not true. It is always there but you’ve got to be quiet enough and patient enough and humble enough not to keep taking over.

-steps down from soapbox-

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Forgive me, it was not specifically you I was referring to.

I appreciate your interesting take on a greater force but there are many who would dismiss even that notion.

Richard

PS I thought that the whole forum was just one glorious soapbox

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One mo’ tarm. 6 is contingent. The rest aren’t even wrong. Even and especially 4, the most specious.

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Does it take humility to accept objective facts? I think it must – YECs don’t.

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Veuillez me faire une traduction. :slight_smile: Please interpret for me

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You try so hard, Martin.
From other things you’ve written, I’m assuming your intent is good, at least rational.
I do thank you for new ideas, challenges, fresh forms of expression. I usually learn something worth while from your posts.
Can’t join you at 6. But I doubt that you expected that, either. To me it feels a triumph just to have made it out of Miss Wiebelhaus’s class with some ability to process, even if it leaves me at a specious, underevolved 4.
But thanks for tolerating us 5-1s.

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Mark,
Can you flesh these out more or differently? I’m trying to follow your “Soapbox Moments” but coming up short. Thanks

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It’s a trip to read Heidegger and see straight through the text and wonder how in the world he so perfectly described solipsism without apparently knowing it.

(the plural pronouns so often hide the real truth in the words)

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@Randy, @Kendel

6 - Belief that physical origins and that of life is entirely undirected by any intentionality.

In saying it was contingent I was saying it may or may not be true. Which is too generous as the origin of life, let alone its evolution, is entirely undirected. As for physical, direction is not necessary either. The glimmer of a candle of flickering hope across the pitch black gulf, only dubiously seen in peripheral rod vision (as you actually can see from over ten miles), or so the brain aptly imagines from random neuronic noise firing, is that quantum noise in absolutely nothing is so meaninglessly strange yet ordered, therefore intentionality below, around that is hardly more strange.

4 - Belief that, barring errors, everything science can discover about origins is true and all of it is a record of how God has brought about creation and that our minds are an important achievement in that design. but theology not science is where you will find God’s plan for man and just what participation He desires from his image bearers.

There is no design. Although God, Love has them. Designs. And Love’s designs on man are implicit.

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Thanks. I like this contemplative poem about our struggle, by Tennyson:
Poem In Memoriam A. H. H.: 54. Oh, yet we Trust that somehow Goo Lyrics — PoetAndPoem.com

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final end of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
I shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last–far off–at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

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Well the first is a characterization of the nature of our subjective experience and the second a characterization of the Christian notion of how God stands in relation to ourselves. Both of these are hard to examine explicitly with dispassionate rigor as we can the subjects which the hard sciences examine, though even there we come to recognize at the extremes that what we find is somehow effected by the presence of an observer. In both cases we are too close to them to get them properly into focus and, if observation has a discernible effect in physics, how very much greater that must be in psychology.

Self estrangement is what I think happens when we try to examine and understand ourselves objectively. But really it has already begun to happen when we began to examine our world that way. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone down that path. Of course we should have and many of the results have been wondrous. Our perspective from atop “the shoulders of giants” is as useful as it is breathtaking. But we have paid a price. This is where we exited the garden in biblical terms, how our fallenness began.

Before we began to peel back the curtain and map out what we found there, we lived as other creatures do entirely immersed in the embodied world. Before, what we knew we knew viscerally from experience, we weren’t so much “in our heads”. We’ve created a thousand maps to u

[Here I inadvertently posted this before finishing it because I’m writing on my phone. I’ll just finish this one thought for now and step away.].

I was saying we’ve created all these re-presentations (‘maps’) to help us understsnd how the world works. We have, in essence, moved into those maps. We experience the world conceptually more than immediately by way of those maps. When we left the biblical garden this is where we went. Our physical bodies still link us to the embodied world but mostly we inhabit those useful substitutes which have given us si much power over the physical world. But our whole beings are not able to find peace this way. There is a lot lost living in maps instead of the real world. I think it is our souls which languish being confined to our heads. This is our estrangement, our fallenness.

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Ah you had to edit it… I took what you had written and wanted to read it in it’s pure form:

Well the first is a characterization of the nature of the subjective nature and the second a characterization of the Christian notion of how God stands in relation to the self. Both of these are hard to examine explicitly with dispassionate rigor as can the subjects which the hard sciences examine, though even there, it is recognized at the extremes what are somehow effected by the presence of an observer. In both cases the observer(?) is too close to them to get them properly into focus and, if observation has a discernible effect in physics, how very much greater that must be in psychology.

Self estrangement is what I think happens when one tries to examine and understand the self objectively. But really it has already begun to happen when examining the world that way. That doesn’t mean a person shouldn’t have gone down that path. Of course I’ve should have and many of the results have been wondrous. My perspective from atop “the shoulders of giants” is as useful as it is breathtaking. But I have paid a price. This is where I exited the garden in biblical terms, how my fallenness began.

Before beginning to peel back the curtain and map out what is found there, I lived as other creatures do entirely immersed in the embodied world. Before, what I knew I knew viscerally from experience, I wasn’t so much “in our heads”. I created a thousand maps to u

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I have a writing process which became interrupted by my inadvertent, premature posting.

Why have you posted the rest of what I originally posted without attributing it to me?

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No condemnation from me… if I had more time I would have worked with the fuller text to remove the plural pronouns.

You have to admit that it has a clever effect on the meaning of the text.