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."
Is God eternally creating or did he, in his eternity, not always create? If you believe the latter, which is the First Cause argument, then the we have the paradox that an unchanging God would have had to change in order to begin creating!
On the other hand, if the ever-changing universe existed forever, then nothing had to change for the universe to exist and repeat itself eternally.
ping
Exactly.
It is easier to grasp the fundamental truth that change implies time than it is to assign arbitrary starting points that mark dramatic change, and then say that the processes that lead to it were independent of change (time).
Prove your exegesis or admit you are on the same foundation that you are seeking to disabuse. You might draw a clue from what Jesus said regarding the young man who pled he had to wait to follow Jesus until his father died ...
You need to open a dictonary and learn the meaning of words. There is nothing temporal in the term eternal. Fror Dicitonar. com:
InvictusAre you not the master of your own soul? We captains also in the armada of humanity see wisdom from our positions on the deck of life. You do too, surely.
William Ernest Henley, 1875Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Can I tell you what you see, or think? Of course! But what of it? For in the end YOU are the master of that ship.
You know the word "quality" enough to use it grammatically, but that very grammar as used says you are unable to admit what "quality" means if it means not which you wish to see it mean.
Do you see a memory? Is that seeing?
Do you see what can only be imagined? Is that seeing?
What is seeing, how do you see something 3-d?
Is there a cone for purple in the retina?
Simply put: Adam lived on the day after he ate the fruit.
And besides you would do well to read the Wells’ story. You can skip the long introduction and go right to the climber’s fall off the mountain, and continue thereon to discover he, in order to live at Peace in the Country of the Blind, came to the point where he had agreed to and was ready to have his eyes removed. In the Country of the Blind eyes that see are an affliction, and make a man to be at odds with all others.
Of course, Wells’ story was fiction.
You used the term in a temporal sense trying to juxtapose the universe with ‘eteranally existing dimensions time and space, as if these come ‘before’ (a temporal term) the god you wish to disabuse as creator of time and space. You are clever, but not as clever as you presume to be. Again, you assume the assertion that god is not eternal, then assume that space and time are eternal, then you try to draw a conclusion that god cannot create ex nihilo because soemthing must pre-exist the creation of this universe. Your whirling dervish act is amusing, but rather transparent. Have a nice day
I think we run into the same problem here as before when using eternal to mean "neverending" instead of "outside time."
The argument for the cause of time being outside time means words such as "always" are nonsensical. If there is no time, there's no notions such as always or the contrary "for a limited period of time."
On the other hand, if the ever-changing universe existed forever
It surprises me to see you refer to this theory since the current scientific evidence is against it. This was the view prior. The debate now is over a closed versus open universe, with the current - not to be confused with firmly proven - view that it is open; the end state therefore being something akin to a Big Freeze.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
By William Ernest Henley, 1875
This poem that you posted, is an Atheist’s poem. You knew that, right?
W. E. Henley (1849-1903)
William Ernest Henley was born in Gloucester and was crippled from boyhood with tuberculosis. This necessitated his having a leg amputated in Edinburgh where he began writing his “In Hospital” poems.
He was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he was to write four plays. He held a number of literary posts in Scotland and England during his career as an editor.
His published poetical works include Book of Verses (1888), The Song of the Sword (1892), London Voluntaries (1893), For England’s Sake (1900), and Hawthorn and Lavender (1901).
His best known poem is Invictus, a deathbed affirmation of his atheism.
http://www.englishverse.com/poets/henley_william_ernest
In which category would you put the Big Bang Theory?
I think the confusion is pertaining to what whether the reference is to this present Universe or any other. The finite origin of this present Universe is what is agreed upon by many. However, nothing is known of what existed prior to the Big Bang, and that is the point which can accommodate a cyclic model.
You are clever, I'll grant you that. But your efforts are crumbling even as you try to shore them up. Now, if you want to assert that you do not agree that there is Life at a spirit level, and wish to operate only on the premise that life is equal to the physiological nature, so be it. But don't try to play deceitful circular games and expect folks to afford you respect.
So you claim to be a medium who speaks to the dead?
I read the poem for what it says. It has a spiritual wisdom, as I see.
Memory is a term we use for the ability to recollect things, to retrieve data, if you wish. There is no such "entity" per say called Memory. It is a collective term for a specific ability.
Do you see what can only be imagined? Is that seeing?
Yes, because our fancy makes it into something that has physical characteristics. It doesn't mean it exists except as an idea.
Is there a cone for purple in the retina?
What we call purple corresponds to a wavelenght of radiomagnetic radiation, a continuous variation of which is called the spectrum. Human cones can see only a small section of it. The same can be said of hearing.
There is no "wisdom" in "purple". Wisdom is collective term suggesting someone's ability to discern. It's not a "thing" to be seen.
Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/qa_turok
For decades, physicists have accepted the notion that the universe started with the Big Bang, an explosive event at the literal beginning of time. Now, computational physicist Neil Turok is challenging that model — and some scientists are taking him seriously.
According to Turok, who teaches at Cambridge University, the Big Bang represents just one stage in an infinitely repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction. Turok theorizes that neither time nor the universe has a beginning or end.
It’s a strange idea, though Turok would say it’s no stranger than the standard explanation of the Big Bang: a singular point that defies our laws of physics, where all equations go to infinity and “all the properties we normally use to describe the universe and its contents just fail.” That inconsistency led Turok to see if the Big Bang could be explained within the framework of string theory, a controversial and so-far untested explanation of the universe as existing in at least 10 dimensions and being formed from one-dimensional building blocks called strings. Within a school of string theory known as m-theory, Turok said, “the seventh extra dimension of space is the gap between two parallel objects called branes. It’s like the gap between two parallel mirrors. We thought, What happens if these two mirrors collide? Maybe that was the Big Bang.”
Turok’s proposition has drawn condemnation from string theory’s many critics and even opposition from the Catholic Church. But it’s provoked acclaim and wonder, too: He and Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt published Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang last year, and Turok — also the founder of the South Africa-based African Institute for Mathematical Sciences — won 2008’s first annual TED Prize, awarded to the world’s most innovative thinkers.
Turok spoke with Wired.com about the Big Bang, the intellectual benefits of cosmology and his bet with Stephen Hawking.
No such claims made.
The only presumption is you presuming that I am presuming to be clever (that's mind-reading). I write the way I see things.
Again, you assume the assertion that god is not eternal, then assume that space and time are eternal
No, I asked why should I assume that A is eternal, but B and C are not? I am not the one who insists than anything is eternal. I am simply asking why A can be eternal, but B and C can not.
then you try to draw a conclusion that god cannot create ex nihilo because soemthing must pre-exist the creation of this universe
I never said such a thing.
Your whirling dervish act is amusing, but rather transparent.
I suppose when arguments run out, insults and mind-reading come in handy.
Just answer my question.
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