Woodward Norm Civ WRALC/TIEDM wrote:
..............................
[George}
>
> Of course the teaching of creation in the church should be
> distinctively Christian. I.e., it should speak about the world _as_
> creation & talk about evolution in terms of the providential action of
> the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ. But that means putting
> evolution in a theological context, not trying to present some
> alternative to it as a scientific theory.
>
> [Norm]
>
> The problem with presenting “evolution in a theological context” is
> that it comes across to most casual observers as Deism.There is
> nothing wrong with that , mind you…some of my favorite patriots were
> deists.Just “Not in my church…”
>
> If this happens it's because the theological context is bad.
> Evolution should be discussed theologically as part of the doctrine of
> providence & specifically of God's concurrence with natural process.
> This can be understood as deism only by those who sleep through class.
>
> I am surprised that everyone here seems to have forgotten (or never
> learned) that throughout the period between the observation of the
> "red shift" in the cosmos, and the confirmation of Gamow's predictions
> by the Bell Labs radio engineers, it was the Humanists who had
> resisted, and, to some extent, continue to resist, the Big Bang Theory
> the strongest, due to the theological implications of a finite
> universe.
> [George]
>
> This is misleading. Sure, the desire to get rid of a suggestion
> of a creation moment was one of the motives of the steady state
> theory, but there were plenty of "humanists" who never bought into
> that - Gamow, e.g. Moreover, the idea that big bang theory has
> "theological implications" about creation is belied by the fact that
> somebody like Weinberg can be quite comfortable with it. & on the
> other hand, the steady state theory could be reconciled with belief in
> God as the ultimate ground of being of the universe - the same kind of
> approach that would be necessary if the Hartle-Hawking model turned
> out to be true.
>
> [Me again]
>
> Note that I capitalized “Humanists,” as in the signers of the Humanist
> Manifesto.I know not of Gamow’s philosophical background, other than
> he was one of my favorite writers in my teens, but I am sure he was
> not invited to many Humanist functions after his ardent support of
> BBT.
>
> I was also stronly influenced by Gamow in high school. I don't
> know a lot about his religious beliefs but am pretty sure he wasn't a
> Christian (though he was probably baptized in the Orthodox church).
> Hoyle probably wasn't too popular with Humanists either because of his
> statements, oft-quoted by creationists, on the origin of life.
>
>
> [George] & having said that, the relevance of this to teaching
> about evolution in the church is unclear.
>
> [In my grand finale]
>
> Ah, but that is the $64-question, yet it is mentioned extensively in
> the (former) subject news accounts of Creationism in the UK:
>
> (1)Some how, to convince one that Universe/Earth/Life is much older
> than a few millennia is sufficient to turn one into a card-carrying
> Evolutionist.
>
> And I guess there is some (il)logic in that…”If I can’t trust the
> Bible/church about the age of the earth, then how can I trust them
> about the origins of life?”And that spin seems to work, or at least
> the more secular evolutionists seem to think so.But, in their
> heart-of-heart, they are REALLY not comfortable with this Big Bang
> scenario.Thus the creeping (galloping?) revisionism that we see in the
> physical science literature which I have alluded to in a previous
> post.Also…
>
> But, as I noted, cosmologists just aren't that uncomfortable with
> the BB. They generally don't just accept simple Roberston-Lemaitre
> models with their singularity as the last word & sre trying to develop
> covering theories that include the classical big bang, but that's not
> the same things as trying to develop a completely different paradigm
> like the steady state.
>
>
>
> (2)Somehow accepting the evolution of the universe from “Chaos to
> Cosmos” is supposed to be the doorway of acceptance of “from the Goo
> to you, by way of the zoo.”
>
> But there is little comparison.The scenario of the early universe
> forming stars and planets seem quite acceptable in the most elementary
> laws of physics and ballistics.In space, amorphous matter will
> collapse into their center of mass, and form better formed
> bodies.Nothing much going on under the table there.
>
> If only it were that simple! The formation of galaxies in an
> expanding universe is a non-trivial problem. Density contrasts don't
> grow exponentially just from gravity, as with classical Jeans
> instability, but only as a power law, which isn't fast enough.
>
>
> Shalom,
>
> George
>
> George L. Murphy
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
> "The Science-Theology Interface"
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 08 2002 - 22:52:00 EDT