What a lot of non sense comments; maybe egos would be a better word.

For me, the last line says it all.

Peter, I strongly agree with the general thrust of your argument. I also suggest there are many people reading your article who secretly – perhaps even unconsciously – want to agree but are afraid to deviate from the prevailing faith of our age. The blind faith in rational-empiricism so aggressively promulgated by many in influential positions dictates that to live with imagination is infantile, or effeminate, or dangerous, simply weak. This leaves no room for thinking in symbols (rather than signs) nor for conceiving of alternative realities.

Tebbutt: Demands for evidence are utterly misplaced when it comes to drawing spiritual sustenance from narratives. There need be no clash between science and story. The challenge for our age is to learn to grant each its own validity in its own realm.

Jon J: It seems quite erroneous to assert that if a narrative is not literally true it is therefore necessarily false. How meaningful is it to declare a novel “false”? Analogical and imaginative thinking are reliable avenues for nourishment of the soul. The “truth” that they can provide is of a very different category from the “truth” of a sensory perception or scientific theory.

Yes, I enjoyed the article also.
The distinction between dogma and metaphysics is blurred, though. I go along with Kant, who recognised that we cannot know for sure. I find it astonishing that a person can claim definitively that God actually does or not not exist- which claim is more preposterous than the other?
Therefore, I go along with the notion that we must follow our nous, if you like. I say this because I also find parts of the bible, such as the parables and the sermon on the mount striking a chord within me. And the crucifixion, my sense of it as a powerful parable discussing guilt and complicity as conditional to the human condition and additionally, plausible precondition to redemption, in a unified theory ascibing a role for ethic and natural justice constantly intriguing. A God that is prepared to live by the same rules s his creations- there's a new one and one of the few theologies that progresses to a moral and experiential rather than control freak identification of god.
I do find creation theology obnoxious, tho; certainly in the way it has been presented and used in parts of America (eg in pursuit of politicised hobby horses).
Keep religion, at least of the US fundammentalist sort, out of (science) education but let's try to encourage more philosophy and metaphysics in the education system so young people can think objectively about the truth claims of dfferent philosophies and dogmas- if only too many parents wouldn't oppose this in case their attempted exclusive role in the brainwashing of their kids to their exclusive personal biases is challenged.
In other words, keep science out of religious instruction and church and recognise that science may not have all of the answers either, but also keep theological dogmatism as the criteria for what can be fitted into a course out of science classroom teaching, since science is about specific skills concerning the physical world, rather than metaphysics, let alone religion, which is surely only a speculative attempt at an answer to more generalised metaphysical inquiry.

PAUL WALTER...not a bad post there mate.. "Obnoxious" is not quite the adjective I'd choose for describing Creation Science though.

Creation Theology in a nutshell is found in Genesis 1:1

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"

Now..given your other statements about not being able to know with absolute certainty one way or the other.. I'd feel better if you used adjectives like 'Unproven' or something less inciteful :)

I don't have a problem with keeping Theology and Science a happy few meters apart in the classroom.

PERICLES.. I blame myself.. your tone has radicalized more in your last post..and seems to hold distinct echo's of our conversational transactions in the Song from the 60 thread.

<<Sells, you are clearly getting closer than you know to the most exhilarating experience life can offer.
Which is that nothing, absolutely nothing, can compete with the sheer vital, gut-grabbing moment of realization, that this is, in fact, all there is. Life is about living, that's all. In the real, corporeal, material world.>>

Peggy Lee would be proud of you.. but her publishers might scold you for plageurism :)

Now.. for other posters.. you won't find dear Pericles admitting this, but the obvious outcome of his newly firmed up personal philosophy are cleary demonstrated in this clip which I've posted in another thread.

Edgler Foreman Vess.. aaah..what a character (Scrubs fans listen up..its Dr Cox as a psycho)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6lGZRBpDc

"People don't realize just how HAPPY they could be, if they..could just.. understand...that the value of any experience is not in it's positive or negative effect..no, THAT'S NOT IT....the value of any experience is in the inTENsity of the charge that you get from it"

What viewers will not realize in looking at that clip..is that Vess is speaking down to a man he has just blasted with a shotgun, and who is bleeding to death in front of him.. this is 'Vessology 101' from Edgler.. to a dying man regarding why he did it.

How unsettlingly close are Pericles words to Vess's!

There are a couple of things that need to be said in my article that were not spelled out. Firstly, the historicity of the second person of the Trinity, the Son, is the objective substrate of faith. All is lost if Jesus did not “die under Pontius Pilate”, all is lost if the Word did not become flesh and live among us “full of grace and truth.” However, that does not allow us to dispense with imagination, we still have to stretch ourselves to understand that “through him all things were created” as much as we need to stretch ourselves in understanding that the resurrection is infinitely more than the resuscitation of a dead man.

Experience is almost as troubling a category as transcendence. As Polycarp has indicated via the youtube clip we live in a society in which experience and the intensity of it has become all. This has the danger of leaving us as creatures of the moment, hooked on the adrenalin rush. But a quiet meditative engagement with God is also an experience. That does not mean that the experience of God is entirely subjective, the object of that experience is Jesus Christ and his pre-figuration in the history of Israel. The modern understanding of experience has the self at the centre, the experience of God in biblical narrative is decentering to the extent that the self dies and rises again.

It is fundamental that Jesus is the creator, it is by his life, death and resurrection that he creates a new world. This is subverted by the common PC version of the names of the Trinity as creator, redeemer, sanctifier. God does not create a thing, he creates a history and a future. The problem with much creation theology is that it is not Trinitarian, all three persons are engaged in this fundamental divine activity.

By the way, I thought Polycarp’s first post in this thread one of the best I have read, thank you.

Peter Sellick

At last the author comes out of the closet!
It now seems that factual accuracy - ie scientific truth - is irrelevent whilst a formal narrative as distilled from any number of fairy-tales and works of fiction reigns supreme as the blueprint of the human condition! Wow! Post modern nihilism at its very best!