Posted on 01/16/2011 4:09:10 PM PST by balch3
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- A Southern Baptist seminary president and evolution opponent has turned sights on "theistic evolution," the idea that evolutionary forces are somehow guided by God. Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote an article in the Winter 2011 issue of the seminary magazine labeling attempts by Christians to accommodate Darwinism "a biblical and theological disaster."
Mohler said being able to find middle ground between a young-earth creationism that believes God created the world in six 24-hour days and naturalism that regards evolution the product of random chance "would resolve a great cultural and intellectual conflict."
The problem, however, is that it is not evolutionary theory that gives way, but rather the Bible and Christian theology.
Mohler said acceptance of evolutionary theory requires reading the first two chapters of Genesis as a literary rendering and not historical fact, but it doesn't end there. It also requires rethinking the claim that sin and death entered the human race through the Fall of Adam. That in turn, Mohler contended, raises questions about New Testament passages like First Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."
"The New Testament clearly establishes the Gospel of Jesus Christ upon the foundation of the Bible's account of creation," Mohler wrote. "If there was no historical Adam and no historical Fall, the Gospel is no longer understood in biblical terms."
Mohler said that after trying to reconcile their reading of Genesis with science, proponents of theistic evolution are now publicly rejecting biblical inerrancy, the doctrine that the Bible is totally free from error.
"We now face the undeniable truth that the most basic and fundamental questions of biblical authority and Gospel integrity are at stake," Mohler concluded. "Are you ready for this debate?"
In a separate article in the same issue, Gregory Wills, professor of church history at Southern Seminary, said attempts to affirm both creation and evolution in the 19th and 20th century produced Christian liberalism, which attracted large numbers of Americans, including the clerical and academic leadership of most denominations.
After establishing the concept that Genesis is true from a religious but not a historical standpoint, Wills said, liberalism went on to apply naturalistic criteria to accounts of miracles and prophecy as well. The result, he says, was a Bible "with little functional authority."
"Liberalism in America began with the rejection of the Bible's creation account," Wills wrote. "It culminated with a broad rejection of the beliefs of historic Christianity. Yet many Christians today wish to repeat the experiment. We should not expect different results."
Mohler, who in the last year became involved in public debate about evolution with the BioLogos Foundation, a conservative evangelical group that promotes integrating faith and science, has long maintained the most natural reading of the Bible is that God created the world in six 24-hour days just a few thousand years ago.
Writing in Time magazine in 2005, Mohler rejected the idea of human "descent."
"Evangelicals must absolutely affirm the special creation of humans in God's image, with no physical evolution from any nonhuman species," he wrote. "Just as important, the Bible clearly teaches that God is involved in every aspect and moment in the life of His creation and the universe. That rules out the image of a kind of divine watchmaker."
[To be specific, that is primarily higher potential energy, (due to height and gravity) — right? ]
Correct.
if you have some quality research to add to these matters of astrophysics, there are various journals that would publish new insights.
It is hard to be taken seriously when you are not in the field. Just as people do not really care what I think about the tax code, or Bach’s 5th, or my review of local restaurants because I am not in those field.
In your “fallable” [sic] fashion, are you claiming that God could not employ electrocution to punish a transgression?
Off topic, but...
Potential energy strikes me as a different kind of scientific attribute.
The snow that has higher potential energy has no measurable quantity any different from snow with less. I believe it is correct to say that potential energy is impossible to detect with the senses or their extensions.
One of the most consistent things I've observed about our dear Sister, A-G, is that she usually makes excellent sense...
OTOH, she may be a step ahead of me, here: I'm going to have to "mull over" her "(equiv earth days)" in terms of our Creator's space-time reference frame... '-)
(Muttering to self..) "Now, where did I leave my copy of Schroeder?" <grin...>
Why? Because you believe it is? That's like me saying pink unicorns on Jupiter are a fact because I believe in them! I think we have an example of conflating one's own belief with facts.
The universe is approximately 7 days old (equiv earth days) at the inception space/time coordinates and the universe is approximately 15 billion years old at our space/time coordinates.. This is based on Relativity and the Inflationary Model
So what a model says is a "fact" too? I think reality here begins to take on an ill-defined quality.
I did. I am not impressed. For example he says:
There is nothing in what those two discovered (evidence of the Big Bang) that says it was the "beginning"—only the veindece of an event which could have happened billions of times before. Also, there is no God in what they discovered. People put their God of Gaps into it.
So, right from the "beginning" he starts off with an a priori assumption for which he has no proof whatsoever.
Then he goes into the Jewish belief that souls were preexistent (which is also the Gnostic belief), which is, fyi, antithetical to anything Christian.
Look at the phenomenon of the Six Days, and the development of life in the universe which is mind-boggling
Spoken like a true scientist/s. Imagine that: the world is mind-boggling! Any time someting boggles your mind, pull the God of Gaps out of the drawer to "explain" it...
Other words as well are not to be understood by their common definitions. For example, "mayim" typically means water. But Maimonides says that in the original statements of creation, the word "mayim" may also mean the building blocks of the universe
So, the universe is made up of water? Can anyone take this seriously?
The rest is no different. That's what you get when you mix science with Cabala.
veindece=evidence
Since you include "extensions", I'm not sure I completely agree. In my career, my "extensions" have included everything from SEMs (Scanning Electron Microscopes) to surveying instruments and astronomical telescopes.
One can certainly measure (sense) gravity and elevation and density and mass (as well as temperature).
I used to do R&D on solid state sensors, so I know that one can measure electrical potentials that are a function of the pressure at the bottom of a water column in a gravitational field.
Perhaps you are correct. With our human senses, we may not be able to sense energy directly. (We sense IR as a change in skin temperature when it is absorbed, for example).
But, with our extended senses, we can certainly sense all the components required to calculate potential energy.
~~~~~~~~~~
Let me look at it from a different direction: when I was on the upper slopes of Fujiyama, I was acutely conscious of the energy I was adding to the potential energy of my backpack's contents -- every step of the way up! '-)
But, when I set the pack down at the edge of the crater, I couldn't sense its (or my) increased potential energy. But, boy, as we "skated" down that loose cinder slope on our descent -- what a spectacular demonstration of the conversion of potential to kinetic energy that was!
Perhaps you're right: we can calculate potential energy from components we can sense (with our extended senses) -- and we can sense the conversion to/from kinetic energy -- but, maybe we can't sense potential energy directly...
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(Pardon the ramble -- I used your question as an excuse to "wind down my mental potential energy" before retiring... LOL!!) Thanks for the excuse to do so!
G'night...
Excellent reply there in #331, Kosta!
The distinction between the term ‘Universe’ to mean everything that exists, and everything that had existed prior to the Big Bang, of which we know nothing about, needs to be specified.
Additionally, a timeless, everlasting entity - an entity outside the realms of time, is also a changeless entity. How then did this entity, that from all eternity, suddenly rose up just prior to when the Big Bang occurred, to create it?
In other words, how did the changeless entity change, without itself being under the realm of time?
Consider the example of picking up a rock from Earth, taking it in a spacecraft to a planet much more massive than Earth, outside the Solar System, and then dropping it near where this particular planet can begin to attract this rock towards itself. Certainly there will be a change in potential energy that will manifest itself in other forms of energy due to the interaction. Now, could you have calculated how much potential energy that rock on Earth possessed, prior to it being released in the other, massive planet?
D-fendr, I will reply to your reply to my comment regarding randomness, tomorrow because there's room for elaboration and clarification.
rose = rise
Additionally, can change occur without time?
The guy put his hand on the ark to keep it from falling off a fricking wagon. How is that a transgression???
Placemark.
If you only want to discuss these matters with astrophysicists, then why are you posting to this thread on Free Republic?
Thanks for the fascinating article!
I use my foot to measure distance sometimes but I don't use it for engineering or to measure miles and I certainly don't get too dogmatic about it :-)
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