I believe that evolution is the system whereby God directs Creation. Evolution is not a denial of divine creation, anymore than climate theory is. The argument about the law of thermodynamics is potentially moot, since God is running the show.
I also think it’s intellectually dishonest for Creationists to say “Evolution is wrong because it violates this law of science,” while at the same time pointing out that scientists are constantly finding exceptions to their “laws” and fine-tuning them in ways which leave room for Creationism. And, of course, the “laws” of thermodynamics are more properly called the “current theories of thermodynamics.”
While I believe in divine creation, I also believe that the evidence is in favour of an old Earth. I believe that Genesis is presented as a parable which contains the basic facts – for example, the order of creation roughly matches the order of appearance in the fossil record. You can leave aside or dispute the observations of astrophysics and paleontology and still come to the conclusion that the Earth is older than 10,000 years. Indeed, it was the simple study of human history that led philosophers to come to that conclusion long before Darwin existed.
I believe that the Scriptures are, taken overall, divinely inspired, but obviously filtered through a human lens. We see as through a glass, darkly.
As an example of what I mean, consider the history of the Bible. As you know, the books of the Bible were largely settled on during the Nicean Council. The Bishops and elders examined the disparate bits and pieces, argued about them, and said “This is divinely inspired. This isn’t. This the word of God. This isn’t.” By and large, they agree, though several very large branches of the faith (such as the Orthodox and Ethiopian churches) continue to use books of the Bible that are not recognized by the Catholic or Protestant faiths.
Now, the traditional idea among Christians, especially Protestants, is that those ancient worthies were guided by God to make the right choices. Fine so far.
Curiously, 1500 some odd years later, these divinely inspired choices changed, at least for Protestants, when Martin Luther decided that the books of the Apocrypha were false. This has led many poorly informed Protestants to tell their Catholic friends that there is, for example, no scriptural evidence for Purgatory… when there IS evidence. It’s just not in the Protestant Bible. We can also take the example of the Book of Enoch, which is quoted in Jude, but not accepted as a true book of the Bible by all but a very few churches.
So, who was wrong? Did God divinely inspire the original church fathers to select the real books of the Bible? Or was Martin Luther divinely inspired to make the right choices, despite the warning in Revelations about taking from or adding to the Gospel? Had God allowed Christians to have an inaccurate Bible for the majority of the church’s history?
This questions become moot if you believe that humans just tend to screw up anything they’re involved in. It wasn’t God making the selections. It was a group of fallible humans attempting to identify the Divine will… and we’ve never been very good at that.
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Date: 2005-01-13 03:47 pm (UTC)I believe that evolution is the system whereby God directs Creation. Evolution is not a denial of divine creation, anymore than climate theory is. The argument about the law of thermodynamics is potentially moot, since God is running the show.
I also think it’s intellectually dishonest for Creationists to say “Evolution is wrong because it violates this law of science,” while at the same time pointing out that scientists are constantly finding exceptions to their “laws” and fine-tuning them in ways which leave room for Creationism. And, of course, the “laws” of thermodynamics are more properly called the “current theories of thermodynamics.”
While I believe in divine creation, I also believe that the evidence is in favour of an old Earth. I believe that Genesis is presented as a parable which contains the basic facts – for example, the order of creation roughly matches the order of appearance in the fossil record. You can leave aside or dispute the observations of astrophysics and paleontology and still come to the conclusion that the Earth is older than 10,000 years. Indeed, it was the simple study of human history that led philosophers to come to that conclusion long before Darwin existed.
I believe that the Scriptures are, taken overall, divinely inspired, but obviously filtered through a human lens. We see as through a glass, darkly.
As an example of what I mean, consider the history of the Bible. As you know, the books of the Bible were largely settled on during the Nicean Council. The Bishops and elders examined the disparate bits and pieces, argued about them, and said “This is divinely inspired. This isn’t. This the word of God. This isn’t.” By and large, they agree, though several very large branches of the faith (such as the Orthodox and Ethiopian churches) continue to use books of the Bible that are not recognized by the Catholic or Protestant faiths.
Now, the traditional idea among Christians, especially Protestants, is that those ancient worthies were guided by God to make the right choices. Fine so far.
Curiously, 1500 some odd years later, these divinely inspired choices changed, at least for Protestants, when Martin Luther decided that the books of the Apocrypha were false. This has led many poorly informed Protestants to tell their Catholic friends that there is, for example, no scriptural evidence for Purgatory… when there IS evidence. It’s just not in the Protestant Bible. We can also take the example of the Book of Enoch, which is quoted in Jude, but not accepted as a true book of the Bible by all but a very few churches.
So, who was wrong? Did God divinely inspire the original church fathers to select the real books of the Bible? Or was Martin Luther divinely inspired to make the right choices, despite the warning in Revelations about taking from or adding to the Gospel? Had God allowed Christians to have an inaccurate Bible for the majority of the church’s history?
This questions become moot if you believe that humans just tend to screw up anything they’re involved in. It wasn’t God making the selections. It was a group of fallible humans attempting to identify the Divine will… and we’ve never been very good at that.