A Star Gone Wrong

In the quote of the day I flicked to on the net today, this came up:

"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong"
- Sir Arthur Eddington

Sometimes I wonder if the SAD (Sydney Anglican Diocese) worthies realise that under most people's beliefs, this foundation lies. I even wonder if there is an implicit materialism under the surface of most evangelicals! I recall a recent survey that showed most evangelicals did not have a biblical 'world view'; this would explain the ease with which evangelicals, even of the SAD variety, slip into a set of beliefs that is identical with that set which takes the cosmos as a given and makes the supernatural subservient to the 'natural'.

For this lot, I don't think the radical confrontation with materialism and its allied paganisms that the creation as revealed in Genesis constitutes is acknolwedged, or perhaps even can be!

The startling point of confrontation is that the cosmos is not a given, but the result of the word of God (Heb 11:3)!

I think that the notion that the cosmos is not a 'given' fails to sink in when Genesian creation is melded with materialist dogma (read 'evolution'), or when an attempt is made at such a combination (usually to the discrediting of the revelation, never materialism or naturalism). The reason I think this is that the Bible starts with creation as not a 'given' at all, but as something supernatural and of particular significance: it is not something to be pushed aside in idealist frenzy, but to be embraced and understood as lying at the heart of God's relationship with his people; and not only in covenental terms, but in in the broadest possible meaning. This is clearly important: it is at the start of it all; and is not a side show or somehow inconsequential, or mere doctrine (pace von Rad, and I suspect the SADs)