George

You are right!
Theology can help one to be a better Christian but it can also become a distraction. Ive known some very special people who exemplified par excellence the Christian way without any sophisticated theological reflection.

Dont get me wrong. I look for explanations too but Ive realised that they are models rather than answers. For the most part Jesus responded to demands for explanation with questions and parables.

Jesus did offer one explanation when He said "I came to give life and to give abundantly."
When you see children laughing, when you see mothers raising their children with confidence and hope, when you see the sick being cared for with skill and compassion and when you see a society that cares for the 'least' of its number then you see life being lived abundantly. When you see that society rejoicing in its abundant life and celebrating with God (call it worship) then you see the Kingdom being made a reality.

Priests, theologians and Churches won't be required in the Kingdom!

waterboy,
>> they are models rather than answers. <<
Models (in the language of mathematics) are the closest you can get to an answer in theoretical physics so for all practical purposes they are the answer, at least until a better, usually meaning (mathematically) more sophisticated, models become available. I think this is also the case where the divine, the subject matter of religion, is concerned - models are the answer - except that here there is no such clear-cut separation between the objective and the subjective as in, say, physics. (Also, the “objective” models are more culturally determined than in the case of scientific models).

>>When you see children laughing ... then you see the Kingdom being made a reality.<<
This reminds me of a beautiful quote from Khalil Gibran that I copied years ago from a graffiti on the walls of the Maths building at UC Berkeley:

“If you would know TRUTH be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you will see HIM playing with your children.”

As I understand it, it points to the limits of philosophical sophistication in theology, not to its uselessness.

>>Priests, theologians and Churches won't be required in the Kingdom!<<
True. Neither will there be doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers or politicians. This, however does not imply that they are not required in the world we live in now.

AJ,
You accuse creationists of being a joke. We respond by saying evolutionary ideas are laughable. In the argy-bargy of ardent debate, it’s understandable that this kind of thing is said. Yet we’d probably gain more in debate by showing due respect to an adversary.

Since you are continually attacking me personally, calling me dishonest, etc. and now making guesses about my upbringing, I thought I might open up a little and say something about my history. I made it through State primary and high school without my teachers ever addressing any view of origins, neither a creationist nor Darwinian view. (This in itself is a bit odd). I remember my Year 7 English/history teacher telling us the earth was billions of years old. And I remember my Year 10 science teacher teaching us about Mendel’s discoveries in genetics. (Since Mendel was a creationist, perhaps this is what you mean by me having creationism drummed into me). Through sporadic Sunday school attendance, I learned the basics about Bible characters such as Adam, Eve and Noah, among others. However, I pretty much arrived at University a blank slate, without ever having spoken to anyone with even minimal scienctific qualifications about creation or evolution. Just prior to arriving at University, I became infected with quite a strong case of Christian faith. I was still pretty green, but this faith was to be refined and tested, especially with the help of the Philosophy 101 course. The following year a visiting creationist, Dr Gary Parker, who had written text books on evolution before his conversion, challenged one of the university’s biology lecturers to a public debate, which he accepted, and which caused quite a stir amongst the student population. This debate sparked my interest in the subject and I’ve been following it keenly ever since.

Now if you think me going on about my life story is pretty boring (and it no doubt is), just think how boring it is to have you continually calling me and creationists dishonest and liars, as if your argument vitally depends on it.

Waterboy,
In regard to information bearing DNA, the way you set it out was a pretty good summary of what I was arguing. So no, you didn’t miss anything. Materialists will probably argue against the first line. They will argue that in DNA we have finally arrived at an exception to everything we have observed and experienced before. Here in nature we have found an unintelligent source of information. Though this runs counter to generally accepted information theory, they’ll argue that natural selection aided by mutation is a process capable of arranging the DNA in such manner. Though demonstrating such a process has been less than clear. This is one place the debate fumes.

Your fourth line, naming the intelligent designer as God is quite a jump. This is why intelligent design theorists are not so bothered about making that jump. For the moment they’ll settle for any name, believing that they have already unhinged the materialistic neo-Darwinism.

As I said when I first mentioned it on August 5, I never claimed that this argument was complete. I only say that the evidence is consistent with what we might expect after a straight forward reading of Genesis and other Biblical references to creation. God not only created the world purposefully and intelligently, but left enough clues behind to point to who did it (reference, Romans 1:20).

George, Relda and Waterboy have all claimed that Biblical literalism is poor theology. The Bible is literature (true) of a certain kind (not quite true). The Bible is collection of many books of differing genres including: songs, poetry, prophecy, personal letters, history, etc. Yet documenting their history (starting with Genesis) was very important to the Jewish nation. And identifying literary genre is not terribly difficult. Why would the story of Noah be so long and filled with minute detail if it wasn’t simply recounting the facts as they occurred, as in historical narrative?

What is good theology? Perhaps many things, but the church can never divorce itself from the central themes and teachings of Jesus which have been emphasised in Scripture

Dan

I find your "life story" interesting, and I have known a few others like you. I would venture to say that most creationists have been imbued with that doctrine since their early childhood, and hence find it difficult to change the view, and continue to rationalise. So your case is reasonably unusual in my experience.

But the creationists (I guess I really mean those that convert to a religious faith) that I know, who have not had religion drummed into them have always had reasons for the conversion, though not always acknowledged. They have usually suffered from an unhappy emotional experience - unemployment, death of a loved one, suffering of a loved one - and they gain solace from sharing their sadness with an invisible friend.

You say that you "became infected with quite a strong case of Christian faith", but you don't say how or why. Can you explain it? Did you suffer a loss? Did you meet some people who were "young Christians" and you thought one of them was a bit spunky? Did you hear some charismatic speaker? Or did you somehow deduce that there was a god sitting around with nothing to do, and then decided to create the universe?

I apologise if I sound disrespectful, because I am trying not to be, but I find it difficult to respect the thought processes of a creationist. But I would really like to understand.

... continued from previous post ...

I am a reluctant determinist. Whilst I like to believe in the concept of a free will, I really do believe that every action is the result of other actions, so there must be a reason for your conversion.

I was born of an atheist father and a Catholic mother. I was often asked if god could build a rock so big he could not roll it, and what was god doing all that time before he decided to create the world. Yet, I was agnostic until my twenties, and now, of course, atheist. I was only agnostic, I believe, because the concepts of evolution were difficult for me to understand, and all around me were churches and an establishment acceptance of a god (e.g. prayers before parliament)