au contraire mon ami. Consider a person who has devastating bone cancer.
The doctor tells him that he has only a few weeks to live. People pray and
he is healed. Can we prove that God healed him? No. But we can examine
the physical evidence, the x-rays, bone scans etc from before and now after
the healing and find out that the evidence is consistent with supernatural
activity. This is what we can do. It is a test to see if something
happened. If the x-rays still show tumors then we can say that the
evidence is contrary to the hypothesis that God caused a healing.
When it comes to early Genesis, we can examine the data and see if it is
consistent with the stories told there or if it is inconsistent. Once
again it is a test NOT of supernatural but of consistency. In the case
above, the guy could have had a naturalistic spontaneous remission rather
than a healing. But one can test the consistency of the observational
facts against the story told to us.
>My chief criticism of my more conservative brethren is that they (you)
>seem sometimes to strive more after a "certainty based on human
>reasoning" than on a certainty based on what God is trying to do.
>
Interesting criticism. I would prefer, as noted above, to say we strive,
or at least I strive, for consistency between the facts of science and the
facts of scripture.
As I have said many times, I don't believe the Book of Mormon (in spite of
having a brother in law who is or was Mormon) because the events it relates
are totally inconsistent with history and archaeology. To be consistent, I
must apply the same standard to my own religion as well.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm