All this talk about origins is fine: the back and forth of discussion is great, but what is the connection with our work for the gospel?
We read of the die-hard Sydney Diocese boosters downplaying the significance, and indeed, the evangelical efficacy of anything to do, really to do, with origins.
So, in this context, the morning tea discussion at church today.
I joined the conversation of an elderly Christian man and a younger fellow (a professional engineer). They were chatting about atheists and their reliance on 'random evolution' to produce language, disdaining the atheist assertion that language arose from apes by a few mutations.
My minor contribution was that it wasn't just a few mutations, but a huge number of coordinated mutations across a number of systems. They agreed but waived the comment aside as being so obvious as to not warrant further discussion, and got on with the conversation about atheists pushing God aside by their reliance on evolution.
This was endorsed by the elderly fellow who related his journey from atheism to repentance, referring to the older belief, his materialism, being displaced by knowledge of the Creator-God.
Evolution drives atheism. Might not in the etheral world of Anglican theologising, but just like the Howard government's 'Workchoices' was really good for all of us, we just didn't know it , so in the real world, no atheists thinks that evolution can be neatly explained as God's way of working.
Simply put, the difference in the real world between 'evolution' as dogmatised by the atheist, and 'evolution as the method God used' is absent. There is no difference, in the real world, between the two. But Paul tells us that the real world is different.
In Romans 1:20ff:
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing to be wise, they became fools,
and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
But, I guess the SAHs know better.
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5 comments:
What if you don't believe in evolution, but believe in a really old Earth? Is that possible?
Belief in an old earth means accepting geological evolution (uniformitarianism), a logical and historical forerunner to Darwin's biological evolutionism.
Geoff, where do you derive a a "really old Earth' from in Scripture?
I find the chronologies contained therein giving an age something in the thousands.
Sam
Nowhere
Ktisophilos hit the nail, I think Geoffc. The only source of the idea of the earth being v. old; that is, billions of years, is that somehow 'natural machinery' caused it, over that period. This need is driven by the philosophico-religious need to rely only on material: that is, 'materialism'. If we reviewed the biblical data, we could only come to a very young age for the earth.
The question comes around, then to 'why would the Bible, being a book about 'spiritual' things, include information that is apparently not 'spiritual'.
I think the mistake we in the West easily make, is to split the 'spiritual' or religious off from the rest of the real world. This means that somewhere back along the historical time line we stop talking 'events' and start talking analogy, or metaphor or illusion. The quote from Kay's article I posted earlier touches on this: the Bible extends its historical 'chain of events' back to the dawn of time, and for good reason, because the act of creation is the beginning of that creation and its coming into being at God's fiat. There is no alternative 'history' which makes the continuity of God's relation with the creation change at different epochs, which I think is a necessary implication of any evolutionary view.
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