Re: [asa] Time: God vs. Science

 
 I think Mark Twain used a similar argument, that the duration of the earth and its biological record compared to the duration of man shows that man is totally negligible in the big picture. I think it was he who also said that the thin layer of paint on top of the Eiffel Tower isn't the reason the entire tower exists. But one of the fallacies in these arguments is that they presume to know how long man will endure. If man lasts eternally, then everything reverses: it is the duration of biology on the Earth that becomes negligible relative to the duration of man, and not vice versa.
 
Of course an even better answer is that God certainly have any need to measure the value of something by how long it endures in time. That is simply reflecting human limitations upon God.
 
Phil Metzger
Orlando
 
-----Original Message-----
From: dfsiemensjr@juno.com
To: rjschn39@bellsouth.net
Cc: pimvanmeurs@yahoo.com; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 11:22 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] Time: God vs. Science

Bob,
Taking a cue from Augustine, God wouldn't have taken 6 days either. One alternative to instant creation is that God's salvific purpose in creation is best met through a long development. Otherwise, he created the world in such a way as to deliberately mislead honest investigators, or he couldn't get if right at the start and had to experiment (like the automotive engineers during the 70s, for example), or, as in process theology, he is limited in power or tied to the universe and has to try to persuade the "physical" creation to come along.
Dave
 
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006 22:42:30 -0500 "Robert Schneider" <rjschn39@bellsouth.net> writes:
Pim quotes Dawkins, as follows:
 
<quote>DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.</quote>

Bob: Oddly, this sounds a lot like an argument that Henry Morris used against evolution: God would not wait around for billions of years for human beings to evolve. I'm confident that God has already answered Morris's. Perhaps some day Dawkins will hear it too, after he has gotten over the shock of meeting God.
 
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL. Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Nov 6 05:34:42 2006