Count me on the side of Truth. If I die, I die...which is also gain.
That WAS a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?
Hell here on FR if you're a Catholic then you're called a pagan statue worshiper.
If you're a Mormon you're a cultist.
If you're a Presbyterian, Methodist or ELCA Lutheran you're a Godless socialist in league with gays.
So what if you're called a fundamentalist?
Say it LOUD!
I’m a fundie and PROUD!
ht James Bond
Maybe people who deny the truth of God’s word should be the embarrassed ones!
There are five fundamentals of the faith which are essential for Christianity, and upon which we agree:
1. The Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:1; John 20:28; Hebrews 1:8-9).
2. The Virgin Birth (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23; Luke 1:27).
3. The Blood Atonement (Acts 20:28; Romans 3:25, 5:9; Ephesians 1:7; Hebrews 9:12-14).
4. The Bodily Resurrection (Luke 24:36-46; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 15:14-15).
5. The inerrancy of the scriptures themselves (Psalms 12:6-7; Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:20). [1]
And those who disagree with any of the above doctrines are not Christians at all. Rather, they are the true heretics.
Amen!
Seems like this is very, very similar to the problem of predestination (and/or Divine foreknowledge) versus free will.
Even "fundamentalist" Christians will grant wide latitude to chance in history, based both in purely natural contingencies, and in human choice, whim and folly. Yet they believe God is able to work His will through history nevertheless. How much more opportunity is there for God to "tweak" (in whatever fashion) changes spanning hundreds of thousands, to millions, to billions of years, than to deftly drive the relatively rapid rush and tumble of human history?
Or think about the general Christian doctrine of creation.
Christians, as theists, of course reject pantheism: the claim that the world is the same thing as (or is a part of) God. Therefore, even if the world is contingent on God -- depends radically on God for it's being -- it is nevertheless completely distinct from Him. It is a separate thing from God, a thing made by him.
At the same time Christians virtually all reject the radical absolutism which some theists (e.g. many Muslims) attribute to God's direct will in governing Creation. For instance the claim that natural law, and even simple cause and effect, don't actually exist, but God only makes them appear to exist: A fire doesn't generate heat. God just makes it to be hot around fires. In principle He could make an ordinary wood fire "burn" cold. What's more, the cold fire would be no more "miraculous" than the hot one, nor less natural, for there is no "natural," no inherent nature of things, only God's Will.
IOW, Christian theists not only insist that the creation is separate from God, but also insist that it has real autonomy. The Creation, and each and all of it's components and inhabitants, are not mere puppets manipulated by God.
So, although being is -- in the orthodox Christian theist's view -- entirely a gift from God, it is an unstinting gift. There are no hidden (puppet) strings attached. Each thing made by God is authentically itself, and therefore free to be itself, and therefore free to act according to it's own nature.
Clearly chance and contingency exist throughout creation. Not just, or even especially, in biology. The authenticity of Divinely gifted being mean that chance and contingency are not mere appearances, but are real.
So why does chance become a special problem for theism in biology, when the same problem exists in almost every other aspect of creation?
If God can (in whatever fashion) master chance and contingency across the entire universe (or the multiverse, or even multitudes of multiverses, whatever may be the case) -- while yet maintaining the authenticity and autonomy of creaturely being -- then why would God's mastering the biology of one small planet, with chance and contingency nevertheless remaining likewise real, be a special concern for creationists?
Granted, it's a mystery how God manages this. That the creation is separate and autonomous from God, but that God works His will through it; that God works miracles, seemingly "violating" natural law, but that natural law remains real; that even volitional beings cannot help but do God's will, but that the freedom of their will is real: all of these things are as "contradictory" as biblical literalism versus scientifically inferred earth history and evolution.
Presumably Olasky thinks that these problems are soluble throughout the remainder of reality, else he wouldn't be an orthodox Christian theist, but declares the same problems insoluble in the particular case of biology alone. I think that's contradictory.