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."
Oh. Then..
Nevermind. :)
I must have OCD on this. Now I'm wondering: "what is the location of potential energy?
Are you referring to two-body gravitational potential energy or total gravitational binding energy?
I was referring to the total potential energy in the rock - whatever is stored in it on account of its configuration and position.
Isn’t it relative to the frame of reference?
In reply to #380:
Yes, and that’s the paradox that cannot allow a timeless entity to suddenly perform an act at a particular, finite moment in time.
What a goofball this guy is.
These inerrancy types love to throw around the terms liberal and conservative. But they consider you a “liberal” if you don’t believe their centralized authority (in direct opposition to baptist tradition) and a 4000 year old earth,,,you are a “liberal”.
People would be surprised at some of the old school Texas baptists that woke up to find they were actually liberals. SB Seminary used to be respected.
You’re trying to say this is a transitional between fish and amphibian.
But it doesn’t help your case.
The supposed linear progression of species, if true, would have to be immensely complicated. It’s not just a matter of gills changing to lungs, or fins to feet.
The total number of transitional forms, if evolution were true, would be vastly greater than the total number of species. Because for any two species, there are countless necessary genotypic and phenotypic changes necessary to make the change from one to the other. It seems the number of discrete species between a fish and a salamander would be in the hundreds, or maybe thousands or even more.
The number of transitional forms, if evolution were true, would be far greater than the total number of species. Even if there were only a hundred transitional forms between two known species, we would expect produce at least a few if not a couple dozen fossils evenly distributed along the linear progression.
There are none. We have only discrete species separated by vast morphological, and thus genotypic, differences.
Again—the number of transitional forms, if evolution were true, would be far greater than the total number of species.
What is the chemical and atomic composition and what is the charge?
Even if you knew it, could you have determined it? Even position matters.
Multidimensional sense and sensuality:
Hearing Colors And Seeing Sounds: How Real Is Synesthesia?
ScienceDaily (July 26, 2007) — In the psychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia," individuals' sensory systems are a bit more intertwined than usual. Some people, for example, report seeing colors when musical notes are played.
"Changeless"? How did you determine that?
I don't follow the First Cause argument that way. It argues for the necessity of something uncaused to begin the chain of causation. Though causation and time are intertwined, perhaps I'm wrong in associating the First Cause argument to your point.
Nevertheless, your statement:
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?is not self-evident in my opinion. It would be more sensical to state that only something outside time could cause time. This (being outside time) also avoids the infinite regresses of "what was before..." and "what caused the cause before that one.."
It is precisely by being outside time, change, cause that avoids "the paradox that cannot allow a timeless entity to suddenly perform an act at a particular, finite moment in time."
If I may but in: the logic is that change requires time.
Exactly, change cannot happen without time.
Therefore, the First Cause argument comes up short.
Being outside of time implies a “forever-ness”. Any change in that state that causes the creation of something, requires time to have been operative even before the change in the situation occurred, so that change could occur.
Confusing, I know, but that is the paradox.
You do know that synesthesia is not an ordinary condition, right? It’s a problem with the brain wrongly interpreting signals that it receives from various parts of the body.
Nice to see you’re doing the research, though. Look it up in YouTube, there are some good videos there.
Timeless implies changeless.
How can anything change without being under the realm of time?
If you do not have time, one microsecond and a million years wont feel much different.
You can experience this in approximation, when you’re in deep sleep and don’t feel the passage of time.
Being outside of time implies a “forever-ness”
No, no, no. Not in this use of eternal. Eternal in this use does not mean never-ending. It means outside time - no beginning, middle, end comes into play. Nothing dealing with time applies. Outside time. Transcending time might be an easier term to grasp.
Like I mentioned, without time, you can’t have change. If there is no change, that’s forever.
Thank you, but don’t be so quick to call it out-of-the-ordinary. Research in these areas — including perception of colors — is new. What imaging technology allows. I suspect — just speculating at this point — that everyone has some degree of synesthesia, and it’s more subtly entangled than can be appreciated in today’s culture.
James,
That’s a lot of words about religion from a guy who’s supposed to be talking about science.
I came to dislike Darwinism for the same reason one of my compatriots here did. I read Darwin’s The Descent of Man.
Why have religious reasons for genocide when there are perfectly good scientific ones?
I always wondered why Australians were so enamored of Darwin and his ideas of white superiority. It’s the best scientific reason to shove some aboriginals off the planet.
Just like it will be the best reason for the Marxists to shove the Christians off the planet.
After all, if sexual preferences are genetic, so are practically all other preferences, including religious ones. Why else bother hypothesizing a “God gene”? Tie religion to genetics, declare the Christians incapable of deconversion because theism is inborn, and start eliminating them so they stop using up undeserved finite resources. The fit survive, the slovenly unfit stupid God botherers don’t.
Right?
>>the first day, the beginning of time.
I like it.
It’s consistent with my view that time is a derivative function of state change that progresses relative to E within the inertial frames in which it’s being observed.
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