Victor

These are fun, if you get the time to read them:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5394

The first link is a review of Dawkin’s God Delusion by Terry Eagleton, and the second one is by David Bentley Hart reviewing Daniel Dennett’s latest. The D.B. Hart one is quite long, but brilliant.

Peace,

Eric

If truth is fundamentally relational, then it is so only because God is Triune and thus fundamentally the mutual exchange (perichoresis) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The point being made is that what is “relational” has a distinct bit o’ content and not just “relationality” in general.

Oh yes, language is always finite!

Peace,

Eric

My feelings are that the age thing should even be on the table but that it is reasonable to discuss (for apologetics) the strengths/weakness of design vs. random. I wistfully wish that someone like Dawkins and someone like Morris (a young earther, if i remember correctly) could talk intelligently and rationally about the whole thing of origins.

Dawkins makes some good points in his material but I notice he often departs from science to indulge in scathing sarcasm, a technique which belies inadequate empirical data.

In the end, though, (as you say), questions of meaning trump questions of process every time.

Peace to you.

Victor

Of course this immediately forces us to recognize the inadequacy of language to convey accurately ‘the mysteries of God’. So, I suppose, while a propositional statement might be accurate, it is never complete.

Thanks for thinking with me.

Traditional theology also says that God’s existence is identical with God’s essence — it is only God’s creation that has an existence not identical with its essence (i.e. our essence is that we are made in the image of God and called to fully participate in Christ by the Spirit but this differs from our actual existence because of sin). Thus, if God’s existence has any kind of objectivity, it is only known by the truth which is faith in that truth — Jesus Christ — itself. This is why people cannot begin to understand: either they have no faith in Christ at all, or they think that there is some sort of truth “higher” than the person of Christ which makes Christ just a “good example” of something “true-er”, so it’s really “all subjective” anyway.

This is why I never believe any of that modern gnostic Da Vinci Code rubbish: because they always claim to have some truth about Jesus, which I hope I have demonstrated, is a bit absurd.

It is essential that this truth is also identical with love, for God is Love. I would also argue that God is the unity of truth, goodness, and beauty which is also love, but that is another discussion…

Thanks for this post, Pastor.

Peace,

Eric

Anyway. No, I don’t think the earth’s age matters. I’m not a Creationist anymore, but nor am I a pure Evolutionist, either. The problem with Creationists is exactly what you pointed out above, Pastor: their confunded view of what revelation actually is. Both Creationism and Intelligent Design end up being the worst of both worlds: both bad theology and bad science. At least as far as the theology side of it goes, it is bad theology because they get things exactly backwards: using revelation to prove empirical facts; it’s as if God is only useful insofar as God shows us measurable things like that the earth is this many years old. Jesus becomes such an unimportant footnote to that. I remembered when I used to buy into this Creationist stuff it was (only looking back on it) as if all the invitations to accept Christ into my heart at the end of each of the creationist seminar tapes were so that Jesus could help me believe the “correct” (or are they) empirical facts about how dinosaurs and humans co-existed and that the Lochness monster is real.

I took science classes from professors here at PLNU who taught evolution, but they aren’t into scientism, and they don’t believe the earth happened by chance, but actually attempt to wrestle with some sort of theistic account of evolution in light of the continually creative hand of God. At the end of my first year, a professor summed it all up and said something like, “In the end, all this debate, doesn’t really matter. The debate is in no way salvific. You don’t get saved by believing in the right side of the debate; you get saved by believe in a person named Jesus, sent from the Father by the Spirit.”

To this day, I still know more from the Creationist “side” of things than I do from the evolutionary “side”, even though I’m mainly agnostic on the issue. I am, however, becoming increasingly aware of the fundamentalist atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, et. al. who actually are trying to persuade people with their polemical (and shoddy) books trying to tear down Christianity (or any belief at all) and argue for a kind of strict naturalism. The singer of Bad Religion is also into this, even though I still dig his tunes. Which reminds me.

This is a rather good book I read a couple of weekends ago inbetween Harry Potter novels:

Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?: A Professor And a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity

It was quite the lively and charitable discussion, considering these two guys have almost entirely different ways of viewing everything (except punk music).

Peace,

Eric

At least we can experience that love from God, even if it’s inevitable that we as humans will fail in this area. I’m gonna try though.