[_ Old Earth _] Debate 4 of 6

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This is 4 of 6 final articles I have written, through incomplete and just excerpts, that I feel I need to post before I move on to wikigodsword.org to help them build there site. I'll still be a member but, I won't be posting or replying that much anymore. You can debate this but don't expect a response from me. I believe this is information everyone should be aware of!

This one is especially for you moderators who abuse your power to edit and control posts of mine on matters of Creation!

 

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Primordial events in theology and science support a life & death ethic
Martin Rice (Ph.D.) has written and taught in science and theology, including teaching at Christian Heritage College School of Ministries in
Brisbane, Australia where he completed his Graduate Diploma in Ministry Studies.
http://www.pastornet.net.au/renewal/journal20/20e.htm

Several remarkable coincidences between primordial events described in the Bible and, independently uncovered through science, facilitate the derivation of basic ethical principles. While the time-scales of these events are always likely to always be contentious, the biblical and scientific events themselves are strikingly similar, and generally not contentious. Although it could be argued that the coincidences are artificial, the Bible has influenced the scientists’ interpretation of their data. An even stronger argument can be made for independence of the two sets data. Such coincidences, therefore, suggest nature itself advertises a grand context; a life/death context, that conditions ethical thought and behavior. Common principles, derived from the science and the theology of primordial events, clearly maintain that ethics are an entirely culturally-determined, social constructs.

Arthur Peacocke writes, “But to pray and to worship and to act we need supportable and believable models and images of the One to whom prayer, worship and action are to be directed.†Dr. Hugh Ross says, “Rather than elevating human beings and demoting God, scientific discoveries do just the opposite. Reality allows less room than ever for glorifying humans and more and than ever for glorifying God.â€Â

Scientifically trained people ask challenging questions. For example, among believers it is not usual to ask, “What is the connection between the invisible God and our visible space/time reality?†If asked, they are usually answered with general purpose truths, like, “It is to give God gloryâ€Â, or, “Because God is a loving, creator Godâ€Â, or, “Because God’s Word says so and I believe itâ€Â. However, most contemporary thinkers seek more technically specific answers. Failing that, they are likely to turn off from hearing the Gospel. In addition, ethical relativism thrives in situations where the connection between God and man is perceived as distant, tenuous, or imaginary. Such negative outcomes make it pertinent for students of the Bible to be aware of the actual questions being asked, and to work at addressing specific issues. (Though I might add in the forum, many times the subject gets diverted by evolutionists also.)

Mark Ramsey, a well-known preacher, puts it, “The Bible says you are transformed by the renewing of your mind, not by the removal of your mind!â€Â. This means transformed cerebration but also standing out, being different, being a loving community of ‘resident aliens’ in an over-individualised world.

Substantial contributions of intellectuals who submitted to God, such as Isaiah, Saul of Tarsus, Luke the physician, Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, etc., demonstrates that evangelizing thinkers could be worth while. Great minds are created by God to do great good but, without Christ, they may do great harm. Might our society be reaping a bitter harvest from its earlier neglect of sowing well reasoned seed, and its failure to cultivate the fields of academia with the Gospel? Did Jesus ever say to steer clear of academia and the intellectual enterprises? Matthew 13:52 would suggest otherwise; here the learned of God’s Kingdom are told to become wise in applying knowledge. Matthew 6:33 emphasises, that for those who are submitted to God’s rule, everything else follows. Pearcey and Thaxton (1994), and Murphy (2003), provide excellent philosophical underpinning for the harmonizing of science and theology.

Philosophers of science such as A.F. Chalmers are thoroughly cognant with the apparent impossibility of finding a truly objective foundation for the scientific endeavour. That is not to say that science isn’t largely objective. It does mean, however, that any opinions that science expresses on why its products work, or what the larger context is, are fraught with contradictions. Science on its own is able to tell us how things work (within limits), but it is unable to say why they work, nor what the overall grand story is. The “why†question is intimately linked to questions about the origin and destiny of all things, and it is here that science becomes inarticulate. In fact, as this paper moves to demonstrate, science needs Christian revelation to support its major world-view, and to complete its contextual integrity. Science and Christianity are great partners but awful opponents. The common view that they are separate and irreconcilable ways of knowing. Stephen J. Gould’s in Rocks of Ages termed theaxiom NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria. In contrast, Richard H. Bube has derived a taxonomy of the variety of possible productive relationships between the Christian faith and science.

 

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Much of Creation Science can be seen as a form of apologetic defense and of confrontational rhetoric against science. This approach does not overtly contradict science but reaches out to encounter science where it is, and enlivens and elevates it through biblical insights, built around a philosophy that could be called ‘Invasion Theology’. At no stage does invasion theology attempt to prove science wrong by quoting scripture, but neither does it compromise God’s Word by syncretising it with un-Christian views in the context of scientific discovery. The vision is to meet an enquirer on their own scientific territory and, right there, to demonstrate that God’s Word stretches into science.

The most profound place of encounter between science and Christianity is at the primordial events that generated the observable universe we live in. To find out ‘how science thinks’ is not problematic. Science is renowned for the instability of its theories of origins, but most of the time in recent years it has considered our universe of space/time to have originated from nothing, by means of a ‘Big Bang’. In big bang theory, a non-space time ‘singularity’ becomes (against all statistical probability) unstable, and generates the commencement of our universe, in the form of a gigantic bubble of expanding space, light, heat energy, and time. The energy then produces matter. Science then proposes that (if conditions are right on the surface of a planet) microbial, plant, animal, and even human life may develop. Generations of human societies accumulate knowledge and skills to the point where they invent science and technology, and begin speculating about primordial events! This story depends upon profound cooperation (including loss of personal identity) among the diverse varieties of cosmic entities. It is this standpoint that far too much emphasis has been placed on competitive interaction.

Just as science has originated a detailed narrative to explain the birth of our universe, it also attempts to extrapolate from its data to predict how the universe may die. The earth first, scorched by an expanding red-giant sun; the universe next, as it attains maximum entropy and time ceases. Such a simplistic, atheistic cosmology is deeply unsatisfying to any thinking, feeling human being. This raw scientific vision mocks at the beauty and meaning of life and love, by chaining it between preceding and succeeding eons of darkness, life and death. Truly, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.†(Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). The very rawness of this unadorned scientific worldview cries out for the Christian ministry of wisdom, faith, encouragement and, indeed, for deliverance.

The Biblical story of primordial events is largely found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. The first part of the first chapter of John’s Gospel is crucial, and there are key verses in the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Matthew, Romans, 1 Timothy, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. The challenge for a Christian thinker is to come to such a knowledge of God’s Word, as to be able to provide a bridge from Christ to the lost world of scientism.

It is not hard to convince many scientifically educated modern or post-modern thinkers that science is inadequate to measure ethical qualities such as: faithfulness, kindness, justice, mercy, humility, righteousness, love, joy, peace, holiness, forgiveness, patience, self control, etc. This then permits the suggestion that there are entities beyond the containment of our space/time universe; a suggestion confirmed by fundamental physics in regard to the mathematical value of constants governing the forces that subtend the material universe. Our universe very clearly has inputs from outside its ‘box’. That those inputs are highly tuned to produce circumstances conducive to human existence is also demonstrable. The scientific evidence for design (and hence the Designer) grows stronger every year (e.g. Dembski and Kushiner, 2001). A scientifically-literate enquirer might then be led to consider the possibility that the God of Christians is truly the same person as the unseen designer of our universe, the originator of uniquely human persons; an inspiring, self-giving God of light, reason, life and love.

 

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Since God, and God’s dwelling place, are full of light, life, love, holiness, and perfect order (e.g. 1 John 1:5), the question arises as to where the disorder described in Genesis 1:2 comes from. What is the origin of the pre-existent darkness, formless emptiness, and watery depths
(perhaps a hebraism for ‘rebellion’). This question is rarely addressed theologically but, in the context of outreaching to those scientists aware of the yawning nullity proposed to precede the Big Bang, it is especially pertinent. Theologically, the answer can hardly be less than that the Genesis 1:2 situation, described by Moses, is evidence for the revolt of Satan and his rebel angels. Jesus said that he saw Satan fall like a bolt of lightening and that could well refer to an incident before the creation of our universe (Luke 10:18). It is proposed that Christ achieved this by invading that dark, chaotic pre-primordial place with our universe of light, life and love. This concept is bolstered by 1 John 3:8, when the verse is taken as a statement regarding the eternal work of the Christ, not just his earthly mission revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. In that sense, when Jesus says, “It is finished†(John 19:30), are there not overtones of his unceasing work, that started with the most primordial of events (Gn 2:2)? Whilst this may be an unusual view to theologians, it functions well as a bridge between the understanding of primordial events proposed by science and that revealed in the Bible. Invasion theology makes it almost inevitable that there would be a deceitful, death-dealing serpent loose in God’s Garden, at the start(Genesis 3:1-4) Invasion theology would view Adam, Eve and their children as delegates of God, mandated to extend the invasion throughout the earth, revealing and destroying the various levels of the princedom of darkness. As God’s people, Israel inherited the same sacred task, and Christ’s church is commissioned for similar work today. Finally, Jesus Christ appeared in the flesh and, by his life and teaching, comprehensively demonstrated the victory of life over death. The invasion was complete, empowered and now to be extended to every creature. The resurrection of Christ is, in that sense, the most important event of cosmic history. The Resurrection guaranties his words regarding the forgiveness of sin, his prophesies about end-time events and the regeneration of all things. These are processes and events beyond the direct reach of science, though the evidence for Christ’s resurrection is objectively excellent (Stroebel, 1998).

A crucial point in any scheme of ethics is the definition of GOOD (e.g. Honderich, 1995, p.587). From the invasion theological perspective, ‘good’ is seen in the invasion of negation. That is, God’s activity in creating light, logic, life, and love; bringing into being a whole cosmos of meaning, reason, beauty, and worship. This may provide a way out of the dilemma first formulated in Plato’s Euthyphro, in that good is good both because God commands it and because of what it enacts (Honderich, op. cit.). It may be thought that there could be no coincidences here between theology and science, simply on the grounds that whilst ‘good’ is a proper object of study for ethics and theology, it falls outside the boundaries of science. Surely science is concerned only with the accuracy of data and the productivity (truth) of its hypotheses, theories, and laws? However, upon reflection that judgment might have to be revised. Science simply cannot avoid conceding that those factors that enable it to exist and to operate successfully are essentially ‘good’. Science did not exist, nor could it exist, in the pre-existing darkness of negation. Such a darkness and negation are not neutral, they are inimical to, and clearly subvert, the essential foundations of science itself, and so science would not be remiss in referring to them as objectively ‘evil’.

Peacock quotes atheist, Stephen Hawking, “Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the Unified Theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a Creator, and if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?†Peacock writes that Hawking, examining the uniformity of the initial state of the Universe, concluded that, so carefully were things chosen that, “it would be very difficult to explain why the Universe should have begun this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.†Peacock writes, ‘in a letter of January 1633 . . . Galileo wrote, “Thus the world is the work and the scriptures the word of the same God.†Truth itself is one, yet lies make it into a binary system. Peacock again, describes Fred Hoyle’s attempt to dispense with the idea of a creation moment by introducing a steady-state model, based on ‘continuous creation’ at the centre of the Universe and dissipation at the edges; an effort that was criticized by Stanley Jaki as, “the most daring trick ever given a scientific veneerâ€Â! Science is full of such binary ethical judgments; and examples range from honest mistakes, through weak thinking, right up to outright fraud and corruption of the scientific process.

Scientific truth is subject to the same limitations and degrading influences as any other branch of truth and, indeed, the created universe itself. It, we, and God’s own Spirit all groan over this painful situation (Romans 8:22,23,26). The whole cosmic enterprise is attacked and harassed, being subjected to frustration and decay, living in hope of the emergence of humans who are pleasing to God (Romans 8:21,22). The whole of creation finds fulfillment in the revelation of the true followers of Christ; who are the harvest the universe is scheduled to produce (Romans 8:19). The book of Revelation is primarily concerned with the final exposure and destruction of the rebellious work of the devil, and the identification of the faithful co workers of Christ. In one sense, the whole cosmic story is summarized in those two events, both of them giving great glory to God.

It is hoped that this paper’s melding of science, theology, ethics and nature provides a useful starting point for thinking about the very foundations of life and death. Certainly the postmodern dilemmas (e.g. “The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by the enterainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality.†Zacharias) cries out for an objective reality. Perhaps science and theology, in an uncharacteristic symbiosis, are together becoming strong enough to point convincingly to the Rock of reality.