Waterboy,
I agree with Relda’s suggestion that we need to try and integrate good science with good theology, however lofty that is as a goal. (If that’s a fair summary of Relda’s first paragraph (15/8)).

Now creationists are not above criticism, but if you are going to accuse them of bad theology, you need to find a proper reason for saying that. Saying something like this is not enough, “The Genesis creation myths are not primarily about cosmogenesis.”

If Genesis is not speaking directly about cosmogenesis, I’d better go back and read the first page of that book again. (Here’s a clue – read the book title.) Let me see, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation … Let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night … Let us make human beings in our image. … etc.’

There’s nothing stolid about it. It’s majestic.

While it seems you don’t have a high view of Scripture, I don’t see how believing in evolution allows us to escape the horrors of life and death that you speak of (post Eden). Evolution depends upon death and the struggle of life for the process to advance; in the god-eat-dog struggle, the strong survive while the weak are eliminated. It’s not exactly Jesus’ words, ‘Blessed are the meek’.

When you speak of the church disappearing from the Western world, I’m not sure if you mean the Catholic Church or the wider church. Yet you said it in the context of creationism being bad for church vitality. Can I ask you, which parts of the church are growing faster or stronger, the Catholic Church (where the Vatican usually doesn’t encourage creationism) or the fundamentalist churches with their ‘simple childlike’ faith?

You speak of evolution offending Christian sensibilities. What’s more offensive, the idea that man and ape are one in essence, or that credentialed scientists dare stand up and challenge today’s ruling orthodoxy?

Dan

You said
I’m glad you noted that a written message like “HELP” would be meaningless to a non-human or someone unfamiliar with the code. Therein lays (sic) the strength of this creationist argument.

If I understand you correctly, you agree that the HELP pattern in the sand would be meaningless to me if I had no prior knowledge of the Roman alphabet. I originally thought that you intended an argument by analogy but since the analogy is now shown to be inappropriate I am at a loss to see the point of the pattern recognition story.

You now seem to be profferring a syllogism along these lines:

Coded information implies an intelligent ‘coder’ of the information.
DNA contains coded information.
Therefore there was an intelligent ‘coder’ of the information contained in the DNA.
God is that ‘intelligent coder’.

Have I missed anything?

I find it so sad that this sort of debate has to rage, but it seems there will always be people who believe in the para-normal (though I am not really sure what that means). But I see that Bigfoot is going to finally be exposed this weekend. Oh, wow!

But what prompted me to post again was my viewing of what was on Compass this week on ABC TV. I had just read the Friday evening posts and see that poor old Dan and Runner are still at it.

Compass this Sunday (from ABC web site): The story of John Fawcett, who has restored sight to 25,000 Balinese. His biggest challenge is convincing them that blindness isn't God's punishment.

Good luck, John. Once people think that there is an almighty omnipotent god that created the universe in one fell swoop (OK, over six days) they will believe their blindness is a punishment from the God who loves them.

Relations of mine deny climate change - God looks after this, it is not up to man, they say. Hence these religious freaks wreak their havoc on the world.

So sad.

Dan,
An integration of theology and science gives us something closely relating to “creation-science” and this isn’t my intended meaning – my second paragraph clearly clarifies this. My point is that one essentially informs the other but to combine them causes a ‘muddying of the waters’, so to speak, where both lose their integrity.

Good theology has led to good science, in the emergence of Darwinism from the mainstream of a Christian civilisation, and bad theology has led to bad science in the 'creation scientists' material interpretation of Genesis and their consequent torturing of the scientific facts to construct crazy scientific theories like the 6000 year old earth. The root cause of the dispute lies in the ‘creation scientists' claim that the Bible is 'literally true'. Via this view, the Bible naturally contradicts itself. But taken as stories, fables or parables, used to make theological points, there is no predicament. The problem is the untenability of an exclusively material interpretation of Scripture

The rightful contention for many is, faith and reason are not opposed. For a start, you have to have faith in reason, and secondly, reasoning enables you to demonstrate one thing from another. From a survey taken in Nature magazine, 1997, almost all the Christians who actually understand the theory of evolution and what it says, find there is no clash between the Biblical account and the account due to natural selection. The clash is made up of atheists on one side, and Christians who hold a particular interpretation of the Biblical account on the other. Social Darwinism, however, is not only obnoxious, it has nothing to do with actual Darwinism – where all compete and the weak go to the wall. The fact of competition or co-operation is a long way from being proven to be genetic; much of it may be learned – perhaps a good, if not vital part of any religious tradition.

Dan

The constraints imposed by OLO on length and number of posts precludes one from offering any lengthy discourse on subjects as interesting as literary criticism or systematic theology.

It shall have to suffice to say that in literature ‘plot’ serves to maintain interest and continuity but does not necessarily, or even usually, convey the real purpose of the work.

In the Genesis ‘account’ of creation cosmogenesis is the ‘plot’ but it is not the ‘point’ of the stories.

The whole body of mythological literature illustrates this point. Yes! I regard the creation stories as mythological in nature and we obviously differ on this point. I think I have made it quite clear what I understand to be the ‘point’ of the creation stories.

You ask..Why is Biblical literalism bad theology?
It is bad theology because it fails to recognise the nature of the Bible as literature and consequently ‘misses the whole point’.

Lets illustrate with a familiar story.
A child ‘believes’ in Santa Claus ‘literally’ because she saw it on television and she gets presents at Christmas. It is not until she grows a little older and with maturity and experience comes to see that although Santa is not ‘real’, the story has a real point that is not about receiving gifts at all.

waterboy,
I am afraid that it is easier to agree on what is good or bad science than on what is good or bad theology. Genesis, as I think everybody understands it, is about God creating the world, i.e. being the Creator. There is an immediate, naive understanding of the concepts of world, God and creation, and there are various interpretations of what these concepts might actually mean. Both are needed since not everybody is a philosopher, and “simple” people might also look for the purpose and meaning of their existence. However, I think, that even very sophisticated interpretations (c.f. Mircea Eliade on myths and mythology) should explain but not contradict the immediate ones understandable to the “simple” believer.

There is some confusion about the use of terms creationism and evolutionism: You do not have to subscribe to the pseudo-scientific theory of creationism if you believe in a God-Creator, and you do not have to agree with the ideology of evolutionism if you accept a scientific theory of evolution like neo-darwinism. The same as you do not have to agree with historicism (e.g. in the Popperian sense) if you accepts the findings of some historical studies, or be a socialist if you believe in social justice.

Even the Pope uses these unfortunate terms, although he makes this distinction clear (he calls “doctrine of evolution“ what I called “the ideology of evolutionism with its metaphysical presuppositions“):

“I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a very bitter debate between so called creationism and evolutionism, presented as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator cannot consider evolution and those who affirm evolution must exclude God. This juxtaposition is an absurdity, because there are many scientific proofs supporting evolution as a reality, which we must recognize and which enrich our understanding of life. But the doctrine of evolution does not answer all questions, and above all does not answer the greatest philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how is it that it took a path that arrived ultimately at man? ” (http://www.idnet.com.au/files/pdf/Pope%20juxtaposition%20absurd.pdf).