RE: Days of Proclamation

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
> Behalf Of Don Winterstein
> Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2004 5:40 AM
>
snip

> It has become impossible for me to seriously entertain YEC
> views, and
> to argue against them seems mostly like a waste of breath. (But I'm glad
> that you and others are making the effort, and I strongly encourage you to
> continue as long as you are moved to do so. This is partly because I
> recognize that I'm likely to be irrelevant to any YEC.)
>

They are winning the battle and we are losing. Somebody has to try.

> Now, unlike you, I can't not believe in God. For me to discover that the
> Bible was largely fairytale would have little effect on my faith in God.

That is exactly what I could not do. The best apologetic any religion could
have is that it told the true story of creation, not in scientific language
but in a simplified version. And that could be done regardless of what
anyone thinks. But if one can say that the documents upon which a given
faith is based could be totally false and still there would be a belief in
God, then the faith is not based upon anything inside those documents.

It is only in the area of religion that we humans decide that concordism
isn't important. If we did that in Geophysics or physics, we would be
considered cranks. If we claimed that there really weren't seismic waves
but that they were a metaphor for man's struggle for existence, we would be
dismissed as an idiot. But we make claims like that about the Bible when
it speaks to areas of reality about which we think it speaks falsely. I
suspect we do this so that we can have a heads I win; tails you lose
situation. We don't want verification because we fear it won't be verified.

> Your relationship to the Bible now is very different from mine. You make
> strong demands of it. I don't demand much of the Bible, although I highly
> value the gems it contains.

Of course I do. And I don't understand why people don't make strong demands
of it. There are lots of mutually incompatible religions out there. They
all can't be correct at the same time. Given the importance of the
religious claims, Pascal's wager would remind us that the wrong choice could
be costly. So making strong demands is a way to tell if the claims are from
God or from David Koresh. Remember, there are lots of people claiming to
know what God thinks out there who clearly have no idea. So, yes, making
strong demands, to me, seems to be the only reasonable course of action.

I don't know whether God is able to give us a
> scientific description of the creation or not; and even if he
> could not, I'd
> not respect him less.

I have a variation on Lactantius' argument (attributed to Epicurus) for
atheism. He argued from the problem of evil. I alter this to God giving us
a true message.

Would God convey to us a true message in Genesis 1-11? There are only 4
possibilities.
1. He is willing and able. Then it is a true/historical message.

2. He is unwilling and able. God lies. He is telling us something He knows
is untrue. Very unGodlike; very scary.

3. He is willing and unable. Very unGodlike. He is impotent

4. He is unwilling and unable. -really bad option. He wants us to not have
the true story and he is impotent

Of course this argument can be applied to any issue in which God is
communicating to us. Most powerfully it is used with the problem of evil.
Are god and evil incompatible? Only 1 of 4 options leaves me feeling like
we have a powerful and truthful god.

>My relationship with God has nothing to do with
> whether or not he can perform certain tricks.

Does it have anything to do with him being able to tell the truth????? From
what you said above about the bible could be a fairy tale, I would not
deduce from that that a truth telling god is very important in your theology

What I'm confident
> of is that
> a scientific description of creation does not appear in the Bible.

I am to, but I do think the bible teaches or to satisfy George, allows
evolution. God let the land and water create the life.

>
> Your comment on "delusion" is interesting. I think history would have
> judged Jesus to be delusional had it not been for his miracles.

That wasn't the context. All sorts of people from David Koresh to Joseph
Smith, to the Siyyid 'Ali-Muhammad have proclaimed their views of god. But
the real question is whether or not their followers have been sold a
delusion.
Received on Sat Feb 14 11:08:58 2004