RE: [asa] Two questions...

> Right off the bat, TE forces you to pretty much jettison inerrancy,

> special creation of man, a literal Adam being the progenitor of all

> humanity and original sin to name a few. My friend who is an evangelical

> seminary professor told me in a discussion about this that I have

> already denied 95% of orthodox Christianity just by denying these
doctines.

Which is why TE (as it is currently and commonly expressed) is not and will
not work.

RTB does not completely deny evolutionary processes. I probably shouldn't be
talking about this since Bob wants us all to refrain until the
teleconference (March 5th, by the way) so please don't rat on me! J

TE does not *have* to deny special creation of man.a literal Adam begin the
progenitor of all. I can easily see pro-man's genome being worked on by Bob
Russell's Objective Special Providence (OSP) quantum fiddling by God to
generate Adam (and Eve - still not sure about the whole rib story). Even if
there were other hominids about - they could/would have died out. The
genetic evidence points back to a major bottleneck, which *could* have been
an n of 2. The general location of that bottleneck fits. How far back in
time is not a huge issue - RTB admits that this window is large, but prefers
earlier.

The original sin issue then becomes a non-issue. This is quite important
though - since the Bible fits together quite well as a whole, is integrated,
and just works, it's hard to justify Jesus death on the cross without sin,
don't you think?

Now, back to OSP. It seems to me that this mechanism in the context of
selection pressures would work quite well. I appreciate the discussion in
Miller's Perspectives about whether God is involved via OSP or via ordinary
providence at all stages. I believe it would be impossible to tell - that's
the whole point isn't it? While you could observe what happens as a result
(where there are records left to observe), the degree of God's involvement
is transparent. One could *believe* that long periods of stasis punctuated
with periods of rapid change are a natural function and describe it as
"punctuated equilibrium" (which can be published in a scientific journal),
or one could *believe* that God was busily using OSP more so than general P
to create a world to his specifications. There's no way we can know, man can
describe it naturally, and man (who has faith in God) can see the
fingerprint of God in nature.

I think that's beautiful.

James Patterson

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Received on Sun Feb 8 07:31:25 2009