I don’t recall ever making that claim you refer to, or being of that position.
Of course I beleive that those things are outside of known science. I even said that:
Yes, an absolute necessity for life in general.
Actually, a lack of suffering is pathological and associated with disease, like leprosy for example. It destroys nerves so you cannot feel pain in your extremities and thus your body is unable to respond to injuries.
But I think it is even more essential than this implies. For I think life is a process of development in response to environmental challenges and “suffering” is just how the nervous system encodes the more important ones to grab our attention. I think this frankly implies that without suffering life doesn’t develop at all. It has no reason to.
But can’t God just “poof” those things? Sure but then it isn’t life. That would be the difference between us and an npc in a game or a character in a novel which are and do only what they are designed to. And I think this gets at the very root of consciousness as well. Because I think consciousness in essence is a sense of ownership of events in the world which we call our actions because they are the response we are making to these challenges. But for the game npc and character in a novel there is no reason for a sense of ownership because they are not their actions but the actions of the writer and designer.
And finally I would mention the eloi of H.G. Wells “Time Machine” which suggest that conditions which too idyllic and suffering free would result in creatures without any sense of responsibility – more like sheep than people. And so I wonder about the fact that the only two species known to carry own warfare are humans and chimps. Is that also an important part of our makeup without which we couldn’t even be human?
I think it is more a matter of the ends never being independent of the means. Another way of accomplishing something always produces different results.
I have many reasons, but I have come up with a philosophical one I am developing
see if you can follow the logic.
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Rationalism? Oh brother!
No.
This notion that you can derive all truth from reason alone only means you are hiding all the premises of your reasoning. In this case these premises multiply more and more rapidly as the video progresses, until it becomes an alien unintelligible landscape of terminology you can only guess the meaning of. Thus it requires such an increasing suspension of skepticism that you cannot help but feel you have been caught in the rhetoric of a scam artist and must stop listening. I got to 4:38 before I gave up.
It is a platonic sort of argument. the regress ends at the singularity (actual infinity, aka unified force) as physics suggests, the singularity contains most of the classical God qualities, spacless, timeless, complete . Then is offered a Christian explanation for creation to avoid pantheism. The self negation of God (cross of Christ) necessary for anything else to exist. The final image pictures a darkened cross within the infinite light. This is the symbolism of the Circumpunct. A void at the center of the One.
Actually what you said was…
we haven’t any way to know what God is capable of doing, as he is directly unobservable. It may indeed be the case that he has no other way of accomplishing his ends
To which my claim is that he obviously does because science cannot explain demons/angels or miracles as these are outside of scientific knowledge.
The point is youve contradicted yourself.
I still have no idea where you get these ideas from. Or why you think that including God in Evolution more than just starting it off, impinges on freedom.
Evolution is cruel. It supports the strong by trampling on the weak and helpless. It is the antipathy of God. If God occasionally intervened on behalf of the weak to encourage diversity would that be too much control for you? If God set parameters within which deviations could occur would that be too much control? If God imbued intelligence or the knowledge of good and evil would that be too much control? If God guided development to make humans what they are is that shepherding or control?
It would seem that your carte blanche approach to exclude God from evolutionary development is counterproductive
Richard
PS The use of the term magic is unhelpful when dealing with a being who is not limited to the restrictions of our Universe and reality.
Why should you read the New Testament when it was written by ordinary people? So were all the other scriptures. So what? What difference does it make who wrote them? Do you expect them to fall from the sky on golden plates?
The OT and NT were written (mostly) by ordinary people because those are the people God wants to redeem, so they are the people he contacted. They are the record of those contacts with God and the relationship he offers to us.
Write to me at roy.a.clouser@gmail.com
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I have no idea where you get these ideas about me from. I don’t think any such thing. I said the opposite.
The Bible is cruel.
Evolution supports those who learn from their mistakes. It supports those who learn to cooperate and work together.
The Bible tells us to worship a God who slaughters all the people of the world. The Bible supports those who murder men, women and children at the command of some god they believe in.
It is exactly like the God of the Bible.
God created for a relationship – to be a part of our lives, not to stand back and watch.
For God to insert such things in us as God did with the angels, then yes, God obviously thought that was too much. He wanted more than what He had in the angels. He wanted those who choose and learn things for themselves.
When it is like what the shepherd does with sheep then that is a relationship and participating in the lives of the sheep. How can it be control when he often has to go chasing a lost lamb? When it is like an engineer making a clockwork sheep then that most certainly is control.
There would appear to be a difference between planning and intent and actions then.
One wonders how you ended up a Christian then. Or at least you are a “New Testament Christian”.
You said above that our beliefs were not that different. The net result maybe, but the foundations that built them are poles apart.
I see little point in arguing Old Testament theology with you, any more than Evolution. We appear to “see things differently”.
I have no problem with that
Richard
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That’s based on our intellect, there is a spiritual (Biblical) version also -
Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
You can use that to justify any belief based on faith rather than tangible proof.
It does not prove the removal of all humans from the presence of God (who are not Christian). Reality might prove otherwise, though
Richard
Then you seem to suffer from the same. Though I think we both just have a tendency to get on are own particular soapboxes and forget who we are talking to.
Well it certainly wasn’t by ignoring realities and living in a dream world.
On the contrary, that would be a better description of you. You complain about evolution even though your complaints apply to the OT as well. This and your attitude about other things in the OT particularly Genesis suggest that you simply discount the OT to some degree. Meanwhile I embrace both evolution and the OT (though I definitely read the OT through the lens of the NT and particularly through the teaching of Jesus). Yes evolution and the OT are harsh, and this is why I say I am only a Christian BECAUSE of evolution – for evolution forces us to accept that this harshness is an unavoidable reality of life at its very essence. Yes God can do anything, BUT logical consistency is the difference between reality and a dream. Creationists basically reduce God to nothing more than a dreamer in order to fulfill there own wishful thinking in making the world He created into a dream world.
YES! Definitely. (Though what I actually said was the we are not as opposed as we often seem.) And I think our different origins have a lot to do with that. I wasn’t raised Christian but entirely opposed. And I didn’t find that these criticisms were wrong. I simply found that Christianity had value in spite of those criticisms. I started with science first and I remain a scientist. I frequently link my reasons for belief in a reality beyond science and in Christianity in particular, because it is important to remember those reasons in what I post. So of course it is very important to me to share the message that Christianity is NOT opposed to science and one can embrace Christianity without rejecting science – one simply has to discard a few of things which are not actually in the Bible.
If only you can remember that the next time I trigger your anti-evolution defenses. LOL
You can believe what you like, that doesn’t mean I can’t argue the toss. I think ToE is wrong, And I will continue to do so until or unless there is undeniable proof to the contrary, which will never happen without the proverbial time travel.
Science cannot, or will not ever identify the hand of God so it will never include Him in ToE. The result is a flawed heory (not fact)
You are, of course, free to disagree.
Richard
Just one more blurb, Cog!! This is from a promo to a biblical archaeology-related publication…you will have to check this for yourself sometime if you want to know more…OK, excerpt (not whole quote) below
Lawrence Mykytiuk’s popular BAR feature “Archaeology Confirms 50 Real People in the Bible” describes 50 Hebrew Bible figures that have been identified archaeologically. His subsequent follow-up articles have increased the number of figures that can be identified archaeologically to 83
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The reason I am a Christian, different from the reason I am a theist, centers around the Resurrection. I find the historical case for the Resurrection to be compelling and fit the evidence at least as well as alternative theories. Furthermore, I find the Christian narrative of redemption and hope to be compelling. I would rather in live a cosmos defined by hope of the Resurrection and new creation than in one where that hope was not present. As far as the accuracy of the Bible, I think that the Bible is only problematic if you try to use it for things for which it wasn’t intended in the first place. The Bible was never meant to be a science textbook and the Genesis creation account makes more sense and is a lot more meaningful if you read it more as a literary device to emphasize that God is creator using imagery and ideas familiar to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Also, I would say that although the Bible doesn’t answer the question of how life evolved, or other scientific questions, it does provide answers which science cannot provide, such as why the universe was exists and if there is personal God and whether you matter to him. I could make this post a lot longer, but I will end there. Thanks for the question.
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Absolutely and utterly false! I’ve read everything about Socrates in the Greek, and I’ve read the Gospels in the Greek, and I can tell you that nothing in the Old Testament is necessary to know that the gap between Jesus and Socrates is vast.
Christ came to redeem the world and rescue sinners. We don’t need the Old Testament to understand that; in fact Jesus agrees – He doesn’t mention anything from the Old Testament when He says, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-burdened, and I will give you rest”; He affirms that people recognize that they are broken and (to use modern terms) trapped in the rat-race of life.
You have your epistemology backwards: we don’t believe in Jesus because of what the Old Testament says, we believe what the Old Testament says because of Jesus. It is because the Resurrected One endorses the authority of the Hebrew scriptures that we find them helpful.
If that was all that was needed, there was no point to the thirty-some year of Jesus’s life as a mortal man. Making atonement was just part of the mission. Jesus defined His mission as coming to seek and save the lost, of which atonement is just one piece.
Would you please abandon the habit of making stuff up about people?
Only for those who don’t actually understand the Gospel.
Paul tells us that the Torah/Law was a tutor to lead to Christ. That does not suggest that one cannot meet Christ without the tutor any more than a Roman lad couldn’t meet the head of his household without his tutor.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
It might interest you to know that long before any modern science was off to a decent start Hebrew scholars reading Genesis 1 concluded that the Earth must be:
- a “million million” years old
- old beyond counting
- at least thousands of thousands (i.e. millions) of years old
An interesting one was a rabbi who argued that the “days” of Genesis 1 were “divine days” and that each one had to be at least a thousand human years long and probably a “thousand thousand”. He may have also been one who used the argument that since God is called “Ancient of Days” then each day had to be long enough to qualify as “ancient”.
My favorite is from some rabbis from the eighth through twelfth centuries who purely on the basis if the Hebrew text concluded that:
- the universe is old beyond human imagining
- the universe started out “smaller than a grain of mustard”, i.e. th smallest possible thing
- at its start the universe was filled with fluid
- the universe expanded incredibly rapidly,
- which made the fluid get thinner and thinner
- until light could flow, at which point God commanded light into existence
Their conclusions from about a millennium ago read like a layman’s summary of the Big Bang!
Not in the least – that’s a misimpression that comes from not knowing what kind of literature is actually involved.
For example, the first Genesis Creation account follows the structure and order of the Egyptian creation story, something not commonly known except among ANE scholars. It is shaped to be two kinds of literature – ‘royal chronicle’ and temple inauguration – at the same time while having a third purpose; it is polemic that systematically demotes every significant Egyptian deity to the status of a created servant of YHWH.
Or as I put it elsewhere (are Paraleptopecten quoted me above):
The writer brilliantly took the Egyptian creation story and changed it to be ‘royal chronicle’ where king Yahweh established His realm, to temple inauguration where Yahweh Himself built and filled His own temple, and a polemic that systematically demotes every Egyptian deity to the status of something that YHWH-Elohim made to serve His purposes.
Also a misimpression that comes from not knowing what kinds of ancient literature are involved. It’s a natural one because our common impulse on encountering something is to put it into a category we already hold and understand, but regardless of the piece of ancient literature involved is almost certain to result in misunderstanding.
I’m not terribly good at explaining the difference, but “fulfilled” meant something different back in biblical times than it does today. We think of “fulfilled” as meaning something very much like the right bus arriving at the right time with the right people on it, but the ancient concept was much closer to “giving its fuller meaning”. So like with “Out of Egypt I called My son”, which plainly was not meant as a prediction of any sort but it was “fulfilled” in that the parallel between Jesus coming back from Egypt and Israel being brought out of Egypt makes both events richer with meaning.
Just BTW, the Koran was to a large extent plagiarized from Jewish and Christian poetry, mythology, and heretica writings.
Editing does not preclude/exclude inspiration. “Inspiration” is Greek “θεόπνευστος” (thay-AWE-p’noo-tohs), which is “θεός” (thay-OHS) + “πνεύστος” (P’NOO-stohs), and is in modern times badly understood. No one in New Testament times would have had any problem seeing editing as being just as “inspired” as writing, which the other NT description shows: “men moved by God wrote”.
To be blunt, that’s what you get when relying on people who have the bizarre notion that without actually studying the ancient literature they can pick it up in translation and know what it was intended to say. In reality nothing until Abraham shows up has anything to do with history as we understand it, and as someone else correctly pointed out the ancient world didn’t even have a concept of "history’ until around the 9th century BCE.
I had the good fortune of coming at the text from, well, the text – the Hebrew in its historical context including literary and cultural and worldview, so I didn’t have that problem. When you actually apply what gets called the “historical-grammatical method” there’s no reason to regard anything before about the time of David as meant to be history as we understand it; the closest is “theo-history”, history presented in a way to impart theological truth.
This could be a good point to mention the difference between the basis of authority for a text between now and ancient times: we think that authority comes from being scientifically and historically accurate while to the ancients authority came from being from someone with authority to speak on a matter. So to many today it’s important to hold that Moses actually wrote the first five books and got all the details right, but back then the only question was “Did the writer have the authority to speak for YHWH?” To the modern view, if all the details of the Exodus aren’t 100% correct then it can’t be trusted, but to someone back then the story could have been conflated, re-arranged, exaggerated, etc. so long as the one who wrote it had the authority to speak for God. So if, as some believe, there were two (or even three) different exodus events that were woven together and there were Semites already in the land when Joshua & co. arrived and this was all spun into a single story, that doesn’t detract from the authority, it just gives us a new viewpoint on the message (e.g., “We are all one people under Yahweh”) – and it doesn’t mean we can’t treat the story as “real” as it stands, because the writer(s) who gave it to us were authorized to speak for God.
It’s a really tough worldview leap to make, but if someone wants to know what the original message was it’s an essential one!
BTW, this is the big error of YEC: without knowing it, they are demanding that this one set of ancient literature has to conform to and be read according to a certain modern worldview definition of authority (evn of “truth”!) – one they never bother to see if it can b found in the scriptures.
“Prove”? Only mathematics has proof; everything else is stuck with evidence.
What convinced me is that quite a number of time down through the centuries scholars have set out to prove that the Resurrection didn’t happen, but under a variety of different legal systems the conclusion was repeatedly reached that there was enough evidence to “convict” Jesus of having risen from the dead. What strengthened that is knowing that if you read the Bible as what it is, not trying to force it to fit a worldview alien to it, then over 99% of all the attacks on it are laughably wrong – “not even incorrect” as the phrase goes because they have nothing to do with reality.
I’ve said here before and will repeat again that if I had been raised YEC I would not know be a Christian because the YEC claims turn God into a manipulative liar. Indeed it seems to me to be a clear lack of faith to try to force the scriptures to fit science, which is what YEC is all about, rather than asking the question that Bart Ehrman tragically missed: Why would God do it this way? That applies to all the variant readings in the text as well as to all the things we know about the text such as that the writer of the opening Creation story used the Egyptian version as a template: if you stop and ask why a loving God would do it that way, the lessons can be astounding, whereas if you insist that God had to have done things the way you would prefer much, even most of the message the scripture holds is thrown out the window.
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I got a chuckle here because it brought to mind a sermon title I saw once on a church billboard:
JESUS GOT ZITS
He also certainly suffered from numerous other ailments that afflict mortals, but that dos not detract from Him being fully God.
Martin Luther was once accused of making God “earthy”. He responded that of course God is earthy; He made the earth and all the earthy things in it. That the scriptures should be “earthy” with the sort of flaws that earth-men make seems obvious.
Which hardly made them inerrant!
I don’t think either of those follows necessarily from “moved by the Holy Spirit”.
Obviously: God gives contingent/conditional prophecy to David, e.g. when He says that if David goes to a certain town the men will hand him over to Saul.
But if biologists had the tools to do so and assembled and entire human chromosome set and put it into an artificial cell, the result of that would be a human being indistinguishable from one born naturally. So the idea of two humans being assembled directly is not actually a problem – it just makes God a very good biologist.
Giving God credit is why I don’t think He made species like He had a divine Thing Maker (by Mattel) and churned out critters like pieces for a toy farm set.
Um, where does that come from? It certainly doesn’t fit either Big Bang cosmology or the theory of evolution! In both of those there was “something” happening every moment since that first instant!
Just because you might find watching a universe develop from a certain set of constants boring doesn’t mean nothing was happening – or just because you’re so arrogant as to believe there was no point to anything until humans showed up.
It does quite well. The fact that you fail to understand the ToE doesn’t change that.
How come the rest of the humans living in the Roman Empire didn’t get to enjoy the presence of Jesus?
I see a sense of entitlement happening, as though God owes it to humans to be “fair”.
Heh – “Adam” can be rendered “dirt-dude”, in which case we were named for soil.
I think that is the most mind-boggling thing to be learned from basic biology classes.
Well, it wouldn’t look like a set of evolved creatures unless you want to maintain that God is a deceiver. If critters were designed, God could have made it obvious rather than making it obvious that critters evolved.
So in Star Trek TNG you would have sided with the folks who wanted Data to be property?
You have this magical belief that there is some stark dividing line where design can’t result in freedom. Design is not contrary to “growth, learning, and adaptation”.
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That is like saying by copying a book of Tolkein you can make yourself a writer indistinguishable from Tolkien, and that you have replaced the writing process of Tolkien with something just as good but easier. This is nonsense of course. A copy is just a copy and what you get is the same book and result of evolution you had before.
Star Trek is a fantasy. The only way to meaningfully answer your question is to say how I would write myself into that story as another fantasy character in it. Besides, the whole point is not the machinery used but how it is involved and the origin of the person composed of it. And we know the majority of that origin for the person Data is his own learning quite apart from what the designer did.
Incorrect. I made it quite clear that you can do half and half and the point is that to the degree it is designed it is a machine. The living organisms we study in biology are not designed at all, showing that God was all in on the choice of love and freedom over power and control.
No, it doesn’t – that statement is deeply ignorant.
Huh? Genesis 1 has nothing to do with evolution – though it is closer to evolution than to God turning out critters for a toy farm one at a time that you seem to espouse, since it does say that God commanded the sea and land to “bring forth” and never mentions that God made any creature except a certain pair of humans individually.
Do you see that you contradicted yourself?
The algorithms come from observing nature. If they are only human, then God wasn’t the Creator
That is not an accurate description of design. If it was, then evolutionary algorithms could not work since those algorithms are designed.
Cue the protest about not being a creationist . . . .
Among the Fathers the “plan” was that things would come together to provide a suitable situation for the birth of the Messiah, and that eventually things would come together for a suitable moment for His return. All else was “in flux”.
From your definition this is a contradiction: if they were designed, then nothing could happen that wasn’t determined.
I have two engineers in the family who would vehemently disagree: one of the big goals of design is to not need to control but to allow learning and choice, especially in robotics.
It’s not nearly so laughable as many think – it only appears that way if one assumes that without the need to actually study the nature of the literature in question one can understand it in translation.
That it is inerrant depends on one’s definition – and definitions vary so widely as to make the term meaningless.
Your irrational and incorrect assumptions about what is and is not historical aren’t particularly helpful. Don’t forget, by your definition everything that Tom Clancy and John Grisham have written must be classed as history.
A life based on chemistry, anyway – with chemistry, the best food sources are other living things, at least if you want living things that are mobile.
Circular reasoning: you’re using phenomena observed about how suffering works in the system we observe to argue that the system we observe is the only possible one.
Or at least doesn’t get beyond mineral-consuming fungi.
You are limiting God, making Him less than modern engineers and programmers! I think you’re confusing things by limiting design to watchmaker mechanisms.
You missed a big one: a sense of challenge. The detrimental effects of things being idyllic comes from the lack of a concept of taking on challenges – to a sheep, a pasture with no weeds, indeed nothing but what is good to eat and comfortable to lie on, would be idyllic, but to many humans the response would be “There must be more than this”.
As Descartes realized. It’s why one of my philosophy professors called “cogito ergo sum” a statement of despair: it is an acknowledgement that reason can take us no further.
I am reminded of an argument by one of the Fathers that in order to create what is good God must have had to made something not good because you can’t start with zero and end up with a positive unless you also have a negative. I don’t recall who out it forth, only that the idea was not well received.
Since the topic was nature and not super-nature, the introduction of things from supernature is not really relevant. The question is whether there could be something of or like nature without suffering, not whether there could be something of the realm of supernature.
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