I wrote wrote:
> >Yes. But the heart can surely rejoice in what the mind does not
> >understand.
And you rejoined:
> I agree. This is a danger we all need to watch. If we do not study an area
> relevant to a theological issue (such as geology) it is easy to rejoice in
> how bad uniformitarian geology is and how the stupidity of the geologist
> keeps him from seeing the evidence of the global flood.
Cute. But not what I meant at all.
> When I was a YEC,
> and began to learn geology, there were many times I wished I had never gone
> into the geosciences. The pain of having to deal with the things my eyes saw
> (those things being contradictory to my views of the Bible) was sometimes
> just barely bearable.
I had the same experience when I first read the old testament.
> I agree that God will be ultimately vindicated. But that does not mean
> that my views of how to fit Genesis with Science will be vindicated,
> nor does it mean that the theistic evolutionist will be vindicated, nor
> does it mean that the YEC views will be vindicated. Our views of what
> God is trying to communicate are separate from what He is actually
> communicating. A case in point is the 1st century views of what the
> Messiah would be like and what he was actually like. While God was
> vindicated in His prophecies, a lot of diligent and dedicated,
> believing Jewish scholars were not. Why should we be different?
Yes. Exactly. But this is an argument as to why intellectual frameworks
should not be used to motivate faith. Our frameworks are unreliable.
I wrote:
> >I don't want to stand before Him one day and say that I had to stop
> >believing in Him because of all this `evidence' that I thought might
> >be true at the time. Afterall, He has warned us in advance:
And you responded:
> But God has not told "Believe NOT everything you see!" He told us not to be
> carried away by every wind of doctrine, but does that mean that we should not
> believe Copernicus's view which when it came out was viewed as
> a "wind of doctrine"?
He surely hasn't said `BELIEVE everything you see!' What He has said
is to believe in His Son. Anything we think we know or see to the contrary
is suspect. This is important to understand, as there will be a test. Our
faith will be refined.
> God created the universe and we christians often treat it as if it were an
> illusion. Nothing can be real if it contradicts what I believe?. (I know
> you don't believe this, but it seems that sometimes we approach things in
> this fashion.)
I think you are picking at the fact that we so often are stiff necked,
hardened old wineskins of well-worn cloth (to combine all the metaphors).
But to be clear, I am not suggesting that everything *we* believe is true,
but that our belief in *His Son* is true. Anything which denies the Son
is illusion, for He is the solid reality.
> If the tenets of Christianity are propositionally true, then why should we
> not try to find a set of propositions which explain things?
I don't see anything wrong in doing so. You have read some of my attempts.
However these should be exercises for the sake of curiosity, not efforts to
validate Christianity.
The problem with any propositional argument is that the underlying knowledge
upon which we base our arguments is often too incomplete to make our
conclusions reliable. My point was that the only reliable premises are
that Jesus Christ is Lord, and God has raised Him from the dead [Rom 10:9].
Merry Christmas!
--Dave