Bill Powers 2008-06-13
From Summa Bergania
Date: Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:00 am
From: Bill Powers
To: David Bergan
Subject: Re: My take on evolution
David:
Thank you for your kind and lengthy response. I really do appreciate another's struggle and journey in this regard.
In reading your reply, I get the sense that the conflict consisted in whether to believe evolution or not. Since you never took anything like a Six Day Creation seriously, you already accepted some form of evolution, it would seem, perhaps some form of theistic evolution.
If that is the case, the step from theistic evolution to an evolutionary theism (where God is not directly involved), is not a large step and one commonly made by those who have already accepted some form of evolution (e.g., Howard Van Till).
That, however, is not the step that confronts me. To understand something of my perspective you must consider men like Bultmann and Barth, both ultimately rejecting an historical Christianity, both rejecting a natural theology. I consider both to have folded under the onslaught of a scientism, aiding in the establishment of modern subjective Christianity.
Bultmann believed that modern man could not believe or accept the Bible as factual. He is right. I can readily believe that Genesis 1-3 is mythical. It sounds like ancient myth to my modern ears. I know better than to think otherwise. And then there's this Noah guy to builds a huge boat and has animals of many kinds coming onto the boat. Then there's this great flood, whether the flood is local or global the story is fantastic. Then we have this guy Abraham hearing God tell him to abandon his life in a great city and go to a land he's never been. God keeps giving him this promise. This promise that is so important for all the patriarchs. This guy is even about to sacrifice his son exactly where the temple mount will be a 1000 years later. And then there's Moses and all this stuff about plagues and waters being parted and being led for 40 years by a pillar of smoke, etc., etc., etc.
Every bit of it up through the New Testament, all fantastic. Who could believe it? Better to rely upon what we can get our hands around, touch and smell.
And all of this would make complete sense to us moderns if only God did not exist. It's this existence of God, I mean not a scientist's God or an Aristotelian one, but a personal, willful, and intentional God, one like us. It just the existence of such a God that throws a huge monkey wrench into all my Cartesian mental manipulations.
No one, of course, can believe in such a God. Science would not permit it. It will allow perhaps a force, or eternal Platonic law, but not a free, personal God. Who could believe it?
So, I hope you see that at least for me (and I would like to try to convince you too) that the tension is not over merely a Six Day Creation, or even the first 11 books of Genesis, it is over the entire Scripture. If we, Jeffersonian like, would expunge the first 11 chapters of Scripture, we would not solve the problem. Scripture is rife with impossible events, including the Incarnation itself. All of it the product of a primitive culture (a la Hume), unscientific bozos.
There must be a point where God's Faith and man's reason come into direct conflict. Do we go about deciding where to draw the line? Is it really up to us?
What worries me the most (and then I will stop the hour getting late) is that one generation accepts what seems to them a simple change, but it is up to later generations to work out the implications. I am certain (and I have proof) that accepting evolution is not merely accepting a theory of origins (whether designed or not), it is accepting a methodology, aims, and presumptions. Having once done that, much will follow. Since the methodology presumes naturalism, what can possibly follow but naturalism. It is one thing to accept this as a methodology, but quite another to accept its derivative as truth. That is what you have done.
I'll stop here. It might be useful in later posts to say something of this methodology and its derivatives, but not now.
Thank you.
bill
