Bully's Blog

I recently found a quote that deals wonderfully with the argument that Genesis was just a story written to refute the errors in the paganism of the time, not to describe the actual biological history of the world:

“…while it’s quite unlikely that Moses was thinking, “Take that, Darwin!” when he set pen to papyrus, it will turn out that by refuting Enuma Elish, Genesis also refutes Darwin, because Darwinism, at bottom, is nothing but Enuma Elish baptized in post-Enlightenment balloon juice. Anyone with Longman’s literary expertise ought to see this very clearly.

Enuma Elish says the world as we know it today was born in an orgy of chaos, sex, and death, and these three forces are the engine from which all life springs. Darwin explains that the various species arise from a combination of random mutation (chaos) and natural selection (sex and death). The big difference is that Darwin said it in a way that post-Enlightenment man wouldn’t laugh at. Hawking likewise has nothing to add that Enuma Elish hasn’t already offered to the world, only to have Genesis soundly refute it.”

You can read Tim Nichols’ full article here:

How Not To Read Genesis

Is Genesis 1 history or myth?

“The expositor [of the creation narratives] must move knowingly between two temptations. On the one hand, there is the temptation to treat this material as historical, as a report of what happened…. On the other hand, there is the temptation to treat these materials as myth, as statements which announce what has always been and will always be true of the world…. Our exposition will insist that these texts be taken neither as history nor as myth. Rather, we insist that the text is a proclamation of God’s decisive dealing with his creation.

The word “creation” is controlling for such a view. The whole cluster of words—creator/ creation/ create/ creature—are confessional words freighted with peculiar meaning. Terms such as “cosmos” and “nature” should never be carelessly used as equivalents, for these words do not touch the theocentric, covenantal relational affirmation being made…. The text, then, is a proclamation of covenanting as the shape of reality…. This theological affirmation permits every scientific view that is genuinely scientific and not a theological claim in disguise.”

—Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation Commentary), pp. 16-17.

I agree that the Creation narrative sets the foundation for the structure of later Covenants, and also of the construction of the Tabernacle and Temple, but the explanation above is just a fancy dance to avoid the unavoidable bullet that is Genesis 1. So it’s a proclamation that affirms theological truth but not historical truth? No wonder the western church is in a pickle!

When faced with an issue in which you wish to fence-sit, REDEFINE the terminology:

“In the last analysis, the Old Testament doctrine of creation expresses a sense of the present situation of man. He is hedged in by the incomprehensible power of Almighty God. The real purpose of the creation story is to inculcate what God is doing all the time…. Thus the doctrine of creation expresses man’s sense of utter dependence on God.”

—Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, p. 18.

If Genesis 1 is not history, and it is not myth, it is ideology. Which makes this plain old boring gnosticism. These smart guys just don’t get it, do they?

As one of my old Bible teachers used to say, “If someone’s taking an odd position, there’s a bee in his pocket.”

Whether we wear a cross around our neck and/or a white lab coat, whether we carry a Koran and/or a microscope we’re all wearing glasses called “what we think and what we think we know up to this point”. Some of those help us see more clearly and some obscure things badly. But, if I can put it like this, our eyeballs are attached to the glasses – the moment we take off the glasses then we see nothing at all. We all have our pre-commitments. We’re all standing somewhere.

Sometimes you’ll hear a “scientist-in-epistemological-denial” or a “campaigning-anti-Christian-scientist” argue as though religious people are the ones with presuppositions and a subjective standpoint whereas scientists are neutral and objective. Real scientists know better: you can’t get out of your own mind in order to think about things.

The Christian version of recognizing this is cheerfully to acknowledge our pre-commitments and renounce all claims to neutrality. We are breathing God’s air as we talk about him, using his gift of sight as we observe things, and spending time which he has given us as we get on with life. The whole earth belongs to Jesus Christ and those who deny that are still walking on his property and breathing his air as they do so.

The anti-Christian version of recognizing this is harder to find. Statements such as, “I realize that I am not neutral; I am already committed to disbelieving the Christian account of things; that is the territory I occupy as I go about my observing and hypothesizing; and I am more than comfortable with the thought that my rejection of God colours everything I see.”

David P. Field, Science and Christianity 6/8, http://davidpfield.blogspot.com

Here is a comment I posted on another blog. The blog accuses God (and the Bible) of cruelty as a basis to reject the Scriptures:

And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. 2 Kings 2:23-24

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Atheists reduce Religion/Theology to a chapter within anthropology. This, of course, removes any claim to validity for Christianity. It just gets lumped together with other ‘superstitions.’

In response, theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg claims that the Godness of God and not human religious experience must have first place in theology. (Quoted in Michael Jensen’s post Pannenberg on Anthropology at mpjensen.blogspot.com)

‘Theologians will be able to defend the truth precisely of their talk about God only if they first respond to the atheistic critique of religion on the terrain of anthropology. Otherwise all their assertions, however impressive, about the primacy of the Godness of God will remain purely subjective assurances without any serious claim to universal validity.’1

Jensen summarises, ‘He maintains, furthermore, that rejecting this anthropological ground is in fact conceding the ground to anthropological suppositions – by reducing theology to mere subjectivity.’

So, I think Pannenberg says:

1 Anthropology is actually a chapter within theology, not the other way around.

2 Christians must debate the issue on anthropological grounds, or there is no common ground upon which to engage the atheists in debate. In other words, they have won the boxing match by default because we won’t enter the boxing ring.

Jensen asks, ‘Which way are evangelicals going to swing on this?’

To mix metaphors, don’t swing in a boxing ring that doesn’t exist! The foundation of the atheists’ anthropology is fiction.

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“There are “clocks” all over the universe, like supernova, that show us the universe really is 13.7 billion years old.”

What does a young earth creationist say to this? Is there a simple answer?

The best way I could distill Dr Humphreys’ theory was to understand that a clock on Mt Everest moves faster than one at sea level. If the universe has a centre of gravity as he postulates, then time moves faster as one moves from its centre. Apparently the only major variation he makes to modern cosmology is that the universe is finite and therefore has a centre.

Sounds just as plausible to me as anything the old earthers postulate.

Starlight and time—a further breakthrough

A stunning new book by a physics professor purports to show more firmly than ever how light from the most distant stars would have reached Earth in a very short time.

Some new developments here.

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and evolutionists are celebrating worldwide that they are nothing more than bags of meat and bone with electricity running through them. “Praise Darwin from whom all matter flows!,” their doxology goes. The religious character of Darwin is evident in the way those from the Freedom From Religion Foundation are commemorating his birth. Their billboards look like stained glass windows! Soon we’ll be seeing signs pointing us to First Church of Charles Darwin. Oh, wait, it’s the local public schools.

Gary DeMar  12 February 2009

Excerpt from “A Knight of the Mind” — Dawkins, Darwin, and the Battle of Worldviews

http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=1189

Dawkins is characteristically helpful in exposing the real worldview of evolution. In his words, evolution disproves “the religious theory of intelligent design by God.”

In other words, Dawkins has as little respect for “theistic evolutionists” as he has for creationists. Continue reading

If you only see one movie this year…

“The only panelist who really scored big points, in my opinion, was Doug Wilson. Rather than echoing the evidential arguments that his colleagues set forth, he argued at the presuppositional level. Hitchens never really answered him. In fact, I don’t think he knew quite what to do with his arguments.”

Previews at www.collisionmovie.com

Mike Bull | 3 July 2007

In one sense, giving Richard Dawkins two weeks of air time on ABC TV’s Compass is like putting the tobacco companies in charge of lung cancer research.

In another sense, however, it is quite right that atheism is seen as just another faith. Dawkins’ ‘mount improbable’ illustration of evolutionary theory is really ‘mount impossible’, but he chooses to have faith in it, and admits elsewhere that it cannot be proven. (So much for the mountains of evidence he claims to have.) Evolutionary theory is just another of Dawkins’ ‘orbiting teapots’ that men choose to believe in.

Dawkins also wants us to believe that religious faith is intolerant and leads inevitably to killing. Yet he neglects to mention that his own faith gave us the most bloodthirsty century in history, the death toll estimated at around 100 million, many of them Christians, which is more than the deaths from all the ‘religious’ wars put together. The arbitrary human ‘Reason’ he extolls brought us the guillotine and unprecedented genocide. The hypothesis of evolution brought us eugenics and amplified racism. Christianity, however, brought us an end to slavery, the first hospitals, orphanages and social welfare, and not just because the founders happened to be Christian. These were and still are a direct result of a biblical worldview. Is it any wonder people are turning back to faith? Perhaps we have longer memories than Richard does. He’s like a doctor extolling the benefits of thalidomide to a pregnant woman in 2007. Is he ignorant or deceitful?

Richard argues from a supposed position of compassion and concern for those he ridicules, yet this is inconsistent with his materialistic worldview, and is simply borrowed capital from the Christian worldview he has turned his back on. The only reason he can slap God in the face is because he is standing in His lap. There is no basis in Richard’s worldview for any moral stand whatsoever. Remember, natural selection boils down to ‘might is right’. If we are all just biological accidents, or ‘nature’s way of keeping meat fresh’, perhaps religious killing is merely evolution in action.

Richard is also crafty in his lumping together of Islamic terrorists with Bible Christianity. I am sure he is aware that Baptists don’t fly planes into buildings or Presbyterians strap dynamite to themselves. Both Islam and Christianity have a mandate to dominate the world, but unlike the Koran the New Testament limits the weapons to proclamation, charity and self-sacrifice. Dawkins must know this.

It struck me as ironic that Richard thinks that teaching faith to our children is a form of child abuse, which includes neglect, black eyes, incest and being locked in the cupboard. However, his one-eyed little film displays many obviously happy Christian families, and the bitter ‘free-thinkers’ holed up in the woods appeared to be childless. A politically incorrect but undeniable biological fact is that his beloved secular west is becoming extinct through birth control, abortion and sodomy. If this is natural selection in action, it seems the meek will inherit the earth after all.