From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 19:13:58 EDT
richard@biblewheel.com wrote:
>
> George wrote:
>
> >
> > With the topic at issue, the question is whether the emergence of life
> on earth ~3.5 x 10^9 yrs ago can plausibly be understood as the _effect_ of
> natural processes. Now I admit that we don't know what those natural
> processes may have been - whether it was simply a complex combination of
> processes we now know, or whether some radically new breakthrough akin to
> the development of QM might be required. But explaining the Lamb shift
> required new ideas too - e.g., renormalization.
> >
> > I would briefly assess the 2 basically different approaches to the
> origin of life as follows:
> >
> > Natural processes
> > Pro: Science has an excellent track record of explaining puzzling
> phenomena.
> > There are many detailed relationships & analogies between
> living & non-living systems.
> > Various theological approaches, including chiasmic
> cosmology, suggest that God works
> > in the world through natural processes.
> >
> > Con: We don't have any kind of detailed understanding of how this
> might have happened.
> >
> > Immediate divine action:
> > Pro: Miracle provides a simple and unambiguous explanation of the
> origin of life.
> >
> > Con: Miracle can provide a simple and unambiguous explanation of
> _anything_ but this
> > approach has no predictive power.
> > There is no good theological reason to think that life
> originated miraculously: The Bible
> > never says this and the imagery of Genesis 1 points
> in the other direction.
> >
> >
>
> I don't understand the last line. The word yatzar, used in the sentence "And
> God formed man from the dust of the ground," seems very clearly to imply
> direct form confering action, . Could you elaborate?
In Genesis 1 God creates living things by commanding the materials of the world
- earth & water - to "bring forth" life. This clearly seems to be a picture of
_mediated_ creation (expressly using the verb bara' in v.21), & a number of the church
father so understood it. But this is a picture, not an historical report. We shouldn't
think of God commanding the earth to bring forth plants & then having full-grown trees
go "sproing" out of the ground.
The problematic word in your statement is "direct." Certainly Genesis 2:7
pictures God making the first human from the materials of the world but again this is
a picture, not an historical report. So there is no reason to see this as a statement
of unmediated divine action.
Shalom,
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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