<<At the risk of making you charge me with misrepresenting your position
again, I think you have muddied the waters again.>>
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it
were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
Sometimes I feel like I'm behind the looking glass with you, my friend. You're
contantly writing things like: "Gee, this sounds like you mean X, but Denis
clearly believes non-X, therefore you cannot agree with Denis, and thus you
agree with me..." etc. etc.
That either/or mind keeps knocking about, eh? Are you really trying to
understand, or is this more of the "devil's advocate" sort of thing? I'm
starting to wonder. Because this keeps happening. I write:
<<I submit these are the WRONG questions. They are wrong, because the genre is
NOT history, NOT science text. It is not primarily intended to convey a) VCR
details; b) scientific details. If it were, it would be a different kind of
literature.>>
And you reply:
<<The first quote seems to imply that there is no history>>
Only an advocate (believe me, I know) would use that nefarious "seems to
imply" language when he knows the writer has written scads making it clear
before. It's like you're playing a cross-examiner's game in front of some
jury. Who do you think you are, Columbo?
<<OK. You believe that the only historical thing is that God created the
world. No details are in the account at all. This is what I get from the
above quotation. So what exactly is it that we believe? Without details all
I can see is that we believe that God created the world. But is that detail
itself wrong?>>
Of course it's not wrong, because we all agree with the theological integrity
of Scripture. I submit also that you denegrate Genesis 1 with this "synopsis."
Part of the role of this genre is to get you to FEEL, poetically, the grandeur
of it. (Now don't start that Tweedle going: Gee Jim, now you say it's poetry,
but poetry ain't saga, so you don't believe what you believe, do you? That's
logic!) Just accept the fact that the genre works on a number of levels, one
of which is NOT journal keeping.
<<With your view, why do you jump on Denis and I when we say we believe God
created by means of evolution. If there are NO details in the record and we
can't know which detail is right and which has been "elevated" (to use your
term), then for all we know, God might have created the world by means of a
chicken laying an egg! >>
But what about your vaunted obervable data, Glenn? Now it's irrelevant because
it doesn't serve your purposes? I jump on you because the record shows
evolution DIDN'T happen (an opinion of mine, as you may have guessed).
Nothing about eggs anywhere in the text, as far as I can see. There is
something about "dust" however, and man. How do we deal with it? We deal with
it, using hermeneutics. But we don't make stuff up.
<<More seriously, you have no basis upon which to condemn evolution with this
viewpoint. By your own admission you have no biblical details.>>
God did it, the Bible says. He didn't do it by way of evolution, the physical
world says. Therefore God created man special.
That's logic. *
Jim
*[The above is an opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the views of this
station]