Re: miracles (was answeringenesis)

From: gordon brown (gbrown@euclid.Colorado.EDU)
Date: Mon Apr 09 2001 - 19:50:49 EDT

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    Chuck,

    Often so-called literal interpretations of the Bible turn out to be
    literal interpretations of English translations or of children's Bible
    story books. If we avoid these and go back to the Hebrew or Greek if
    necessary, then literal interpretations do not have the ark landing on top
    of Mt. Ararat, Jesus being born the very night that his parents arrived in
    Bethlehem, or the events of Joshua 10 taking place just before the normal
    time of sunset.

    As I tried to point out in my previous post, there are interpretations of
    Joshua 10 that neither treat it as fiction nor require God to suspend any
    physical laws.

    YECs invent miracles not recorded in Scripture in order to try to dig
    themselves out of deep holes they have gotten themselves into by their
    claims. Some have even been willing to have a God who deceives us.

    Some of the Bible's accounts of miracles mention natural means involved in
    accomplishing the miracle, e. g. the role of the strong wind in parting
    the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21) and the stick in recovering the axe head (II
    Kings 6:6). This should not make these events less worthy of being
    considered miraculous.

    Gordon Brown
    Department of Mathematics
    University of Colorado
    Boulder, CO 80309-0395

    On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, Vandergraaf, Chuck wrote:

    > How did we get to this discussion? It originated in the YEC-OEC link
    > (answeingenesis). My point is that, if OEC's criticize YECs because the
    > latter come up with (to me), for example, some strange explanations to
    > reconcile tectonic plate movement within the time frame necessitated by a
    > recent flood and a young earth, OECs have to reconcile
    > an-earth-standing-still event with the physical repercussions. If they
    > cannot, they have to either interpret the story as "fiction," (and I use
    > this term with some trepidation) or postulate that God suspended all
    > physical laws during the miracle (which He can, of course, do). However, if
    > God suspended the physical laws when He listened to Joshua, why could He not
    > have suspended to same laws of physics when He arranged the tectonic plates
    > in record time? If that's the case, we're back in the box where we cannot
    > extrapolate back in time.



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