On Sat, 7 Apr 2001 18:49:05 -0400 "Vandergraaf, Chuck"
<vandergraaft@aecl.ca> writes:
in small part:
> Incidentally, in my e-mail of 31 March, I posed the following
> question, "how
> many of "you out there" grew up with a literal interpretation of
> the
> Biblical narrative and when, and what caused you to change your
> views to
> your current view?" I have not had any reply.
>
> Shalom!
When I went to high school, evolution was no big thing. I didn't think
much about it. But my folks were committed to gap theory. I got Pember's
Earth's Earliest Ages from Dad. At Bible school I was taught that
geological dating was faulty and that there was good scientific evidence
against evolution. I spent a lot of time with George McCready Price and
similar material, and on a search for "evidence" in the writings of
evolutionists -- like Goldschmidt. I was in grad school when I first read
the journal articles on radioactive dating and discovered that it was
impossible for it to be off by enough orders of magnitude to accommodate
an earth no more than 20,000 years old. I was a sort of OEC as a result.
As I have followed developments (especially genomics and biochemistry)
since, I have been forced to a TE position.
To describe my current belief, I understand that God intervened
miraculously in human affairs in the incarnation, so that faith produces
in normal human beings a new kind of life whose fullness is yet to be
seen. But it is "natural" in this new creation for faith to transform
natural persons into something different. At the other end of time, I
hold that the Big Bang was God's miraculous production of something out
of nothing, The possibility of multiple universes is a far-out
speculative attempt to avoid creation at virtually any cost by those who
are determined to defend atheism and materialism. With these two creative
acts pretty well necessary, I suspect that there were two others: (1) the
introduction of life into a prepared world to evolve into the multiple
forms we find historically and currently; (2) the introduction of
God-consciousness and other special characteristics into one of the
evolved forms to make human beings. I note that only the transformation
through the incarnation is theologically essential, but the rest seems to
me the most likely explanation. There are too many similarities in all
living things for them to be separate creations, and too much continuity.
But there seems to be too wide a gap between the rest of the mammals and
Homo sapiens, mentally and spiritually, but not physically, for "natural"
development.
Paul Seely has demonstrated that the scriptures are not totally inerrant.
Of course, he has not examined the autograph copies, and so may be wrong
about them ;-) Still, I have to believe that not only are there errors in
interpretation, but that the text is not to be held to be error free in
all particulars. It is nevertheless the valid source for faith and
practice.
This is probably more than you really wanted to know,
Dave
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