Two Different Stories About the Creation - Faith and Moose only

I think to head off any others who might not see the Great Debate header for some reason, I'll put a message on my own posts to say:
***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).*****
===========================================================I will probably have to take long breaks on this thread due to the holiday season, having a guest and being a guest and all that, but to start:After giving it some thought, I think the title you came up with is about the best that can be found for this purpose myself.I would have you reword this, though: The "study" of anything can't be an authority. The Bible IS the authority, and the parallel would be the creation itself as authority unless you have a better way of stating this.=============================================================
AbE: I hope it is taken for granted for purposes of this discussion that the Bible IS the word of God. Then we are comparing God's revelation in His written word with His revelation in His creation.
============================================================= I think that human beings are incapable of properly reading the rocks or anything in nature, yes. I do believe that the true story is contained in those rocks but without The Manufacturer's Manual we could never figure out what they are saying. I won't go so far as to say the Bible IS such a manual, as it does not address scientific questions as such, but I would say that whatever you think the rocks are telling you may not be allowed to contradict anything that God has said directly in His word as He does not lie and He cannot contradict Himself. Because the written word is far less ambiguous than the rocks. The rocks are utterly inscrutable in themselves.A. It took a few millennia to come up with the theory about the creation based on the rocks that you apparently consider to be authoritative, but we are all capable of understanding the written (or spoken) word, all of us from at least the time of Moses to the present.B. The creation story you get from the rocks, that you take to be authoritative, is also by definition open to falsification is it not? That means a completely new theory about the creation COULD come along and completely discredit the current one. How then can it claim higher authority than the unchangeable written word from God about how it happened?==============================================================
***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).***** This message has been edited by Faith, 11-23-2005 06:50 PM

***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).***** ============================================================= Then I think this debate is probably not going to be about the Creation stories so much as about our basic premises, Science versus God/Bible, as usual, and the authority to define Creation. Geology is the product of human thinking, Moose, there's nothing pure about it.The Bible is the only written record on earth purported to be the direct communication of God to mankind. Yes, it was mediated through humanity, of course, God didn't just boom His message out from heaven to all ears, except in one notable case. It came by the Spirit into the human spirit of men chosen by God for the purpose, prophets who heard directly from God Himself, and there were many of them, and they relayed His message in their own words through their own personalities. I have faith in a particular written word that I know through my own regenerated spirit is God's own revelation.What can be seen in the creation itself is subject to an enormous variety of interpretations through the fallen mind of humanity. An incredible array of explanations of the physical world have occurred to humanity over the millennia. Until the advent of modern science there was very little you could hold onto in the explanations of the physical universe humanity came up with, and what is modern science but an improvement and refinement but still nothing but the product of the human mind? And its tenets are in fact ON PRINCIPLE rightly declared to be subject to modification and falsification.The Bible on the other hand, being the revelation of the God who made it all, is unchanging and true forever.A proper geology would start with God's revelation. No, we are comparing the content of a God-inspired communication about His own creation, to the content of a strictly human-inspired and admittedly fallible study of the creation. I pray that by the end of it you will be a Biblical creationist.==============================================================
***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).***** This message has been edited by Faith, 11-25-2005 08:04 PM

Hm, I don't see that you answered me really. The rocks remain the inscrutable rocks, the science that collects knowledge about them remains subject to correction and falsification, and human intelligence remains seriously flawed. But the origin and structure of rocks, as I also said, aren't easy to know, certainly not without taking pains to study them, and anything scientists now know about them didn't come about for millennia so it's hard to see how you can compare them to a written revelation that is understandable to anyone who can read. [AbE: Or hear it when it is preached, as reading isn't essential to it; we're talking about ordinary human communication through language which is universal to all, as versus the physical universe which hardly discloses its secrets except to its most committed students]No concession at all. The direct revelation of God to the human spirit was given and relayed in words that are understandable by our human spirit. We are word-understanders. Rocks are, again, inscrutable and hard to read in themselves. The people who heard God's word as read to them by Moses understood it straight and we can still hear or read and understand it as they did. Nobody understood anything about the rocks until quite recently and what IS known is still open to correction. But if we can't understand them the way we understand words they're not much of a revelation. Again, nobody knew how to "read" them until the last couple of centuries? Words can be read by anyone who can read. Not so the physical universe. It has been the subject of all kinds of superstitions and untenable theories and weird ideas through the millennia. It's not much of a revelation if nobody can read it except modern scientists. I must definitely object to this idea, Moose. Uniformitarianism is simply a human-originated concept, as all science is. And as all scientific concepts are officially defined to be, it is subject to modification and correction and even complete falsification. Uniformitarianism is challenged by creationists, you know. There is simply no evidence that the way things are now is the way they always have been. Uniformitarianism is a presupposition, not a proven fact. If the Bible is true and the Flood occurred as it describes and the world before and after were as drastically different from each other as it appears to imply, then uniformitarianism is falsified. Scripture tells us that the physical creation IS a revelation and it DOES speak -- but not so much about itself, rather about the nature of God:Psalm 19:1-2: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech and night unto night shows knowledge. There are no words nor language where their voice is not heard..."And Romans 1:20-21: "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse; because even when they knew God they did not glorify him as God..."The idea being that what should be learned first from the Creation, what is most evident in the Creation, how it really IS a revelation, what it DOES speak about, is God Himself. It shows His eternal power, it says, and His glory. We can infer pretty readily that it also shows His immensity by the vastness of the universe, His wisdom in the incredible complexity and harmony and interaction of the whole, His goodness too, in His provision for all living things, His invisibility in that His works are all that our senses are able to appreciate at all. From our own consciences we can infer His perfect holiness and righteousness too.In other words, knowledge about the nature of the physical universe is a much lesser knowledge than what we COULD learn from it about God Himself.But that's a bit of a digression in a way. The main point is that the physical universe is not at all a legible revelation to the poor fallen mind of man, even if God originally intended it to be. The Fall interfered with our ability to know the creation and to know the Creator both. He had to give us a revelation in words for us even to begin to understand any of it. (Real science did not really get going until Christians began applying the inference of a lawful universe made by a rational God to the study of the physical creation).This message has been edited by Faith, 11-27-2005 06:35 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 11-27-2005 06:36 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 11-27-2005 06:38 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 11-27-2005 07:07 PM

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***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).***** ============================================================= No, I meant it as written, as I showed in the post itself from the Bible: what the Creation reveals to the discerning eye is God Himself, His nature, more than {AbE: or at least as much as} it reveals the nature of the Creation. Yes, but my point was that modern geology is a very new thing, and if you are going to say that the rocks reveal the mind of God you have to account for the fact that for the vast majority of human history they didn't reveal one explanatory thing to humanity, who remained deaf and blind to any supposed message in the rocks. Who do the rocks speak to? Only a very few very recent scientists? How can that be said to be any kind of communication from God to humanity? Well, no, that wasn't the subject, but the answer nevertheless is that you can't supercede the eternal word of the eternal omniscient God. Yes, again, "for someone trained in geology." Not much communicating going on there overall, as the great majority of humanity both past and present are excluded from the communication. Not so with the Bible which is written in human language which all can understand. All you mean is that you reject its meaning, but you don't have trouble reading the words. But again, to a scant minority of all human beings over all time, which makes it a pretty inferior form of communication. And not revealed reliably either, because it is always subject to revision. And at this point I'd begin to suggest that WHAT it reveals is of minor importance compared to what the Word of God reveals as well. Certainly I agree completely that science has a lot to say. But it is science that is saying it, not the rocks. The rocks are the mute objects of science, and science is a hard-won discipline that only in the last few hundred years has become of real use to humanity. You simply cannot compare it to a book that speaks to all humanity all over the world in all times and places, and about matters quite a bit more important than the composition of rocks. Yes, there is the testimony of the Bible that is evidence against this idea. That's simply explained by the presuppositions of contemporary science that insist on interpreting the evidence against the Flood. But most of it can just as easily be interpreted for it. Would you limit knowledge to an elite? But as a matter of fact NOBODY can read the creation in the sense it was meant to be read, as a revelation of the character of God. You are extolling the mere ability of a small elite to understand a few things about the nature of the creation itself, but the Creator remains opaque to these "readers." They are missing the main message. But that message is in the printed book which was given to help us see Him because of our blindness. Oh humanity has much intelligence, which only shows how much greater it would have been if there had been no Fall. But human intelligence as it is misses all the things that matter. Rom 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.... That is why we needed revelation from God Himself.Faith.=============================================================
***** Great Debate thread. Only Moose may answer (until further notice).***** =============================================================This message has been edited by Faith, 12-06-2005 03:55 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 12-11-2005 05:01 PM

No problem. Take your time.

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GREAT DEBATE TOPIC - MESSAGES BY FAITH AND MINNEMOOSEUS ONLY
==================================================I just didn't see this thread come up Moose. If it moves down the board pretty fast I may miss it as I don't have forum emails activated (I turn it off sometimes when I get too many of them to keep track of).Now that I know it's here I'll think about what I want to do. I'll at least address your last post.Possibly the thing to do would be to open it to others. I think that was an option we considered at the beginning anyway. But I'll let you know my opinion after I've answered your post and thought about it some more.==================================================
GREAT DEBATE TOPIC - MESSAGES BY FAITH AND MINNEMOOSEUS ONLY
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****GREAT DEBATE TOPIC - MESSAGES BY FAITH AND MINNEMOOSEUS ONLY****
============================================================ I have no idea why the complexity of the Earth's geology should preclude the possibility of a worldwide flood. I'm sure the "information" is always wherever, but that doesn't mean that anybody is ever going to be able to "read" it. If a modern electronic gadget fell into the hands of an illiterate tribe on a remote island, what are the chances they'd ever figure it out? But as you say, it's full of "information" about itself. In principle it's understandable. What's the point of emphasizing this? It doesn't say anything about how much geologists really know about the rocks and the Earth, how much they have yet to learn, etc. It's not about the rocks, it's about human abilities, and a human-collected reservoir of knowledge, and humans aren't God.Maybe you need to drop all this stuff about "the book that is the Earth" and the "mind of God as seen in the Rocks" anyway, as that tends to take us off into mystical territory that's probably irrelevant to what you really want to say.If all you are saying is that the Bible doesn't talk about geology and the rocks do, there's no argument (even though talking rocks is still a bit too mystopoetical for purposes of this discussion). Then it doesn't matter how long human beings have had any ability at all to read the rocks, as it were, it is certainly true that there is more "information" about the rocks in the rocks than in the Bible. Very true. Nevertheless, that information is not readable in itself, it requires a lot of study, and it is read by fallible creatures, and the science that is trying to learn its language it is open to correction. Geology is the knowledge, not the rocks, and geology is fallible because it's a human creation. (Again, we really need to drop all this poetical hoo ha. Rocks don't talk and are not readable in any sense comparable to books.)If the Bible, regarded of course as the word of the infallible God, had said absolutely nothing at all about geology, there would be nothing to argue about, but since the Bible says there was a worldwide Flood not too many millennia ago, and geology, which is nothing but the fallible studies of rocks by fallible minds, has since come along and had the unmitigated chutzpah to declare it couldn't have happened, we are therefore in this argument.But this is only going to get us back into other arguments. Such as: just in logical terms Geology cannot possibly say the flood did not happen, since you cannot prove a negative like that. Second, EVERYTHING that is postulated about the history of the earth cannot be positively proved. History simply is not like physics or chemistry in which what you observe in the present may be repeatable thousands or millions of times, and demonstrates the working out of laws about the constant predictability of phenomena, which over the years have been discovered or formulated, however that should best be put, and continue to be discovered or formulated. Material bodies always fall down etc. Atoms obey laws that are reliable and testable. On the other hand, history is the record of a series of one-time events, and in the case of the history of geology the record of that history is a bunch of illiterate rocks. You can know a lot about the composion of the rocks or the terrain etc etc., but its history is going to be forever a matter of plausibilities and never anything more certain that that. Etc. etc. etc.Edit: Just for kicks, to paraphrase JAR:

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If the Flood happened, then the Flood happened regardless of any evidence that the Flood did not happen.

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If the Flood didn't happen, then it did not happen regardless of any evidence it did happen.

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The thing is, if it contradicts the infallible word of God, it's FALLIBLE Geology that has to rethink itself, not the INFALLIBLE word of God. OK.
I don't know if there is any future for this thread. Do you want to open it up to others, as you originally suggested in the OP is a possibility?==========================================================
****GREAT DEBATE TOPIC - MESSAGES BY FAITH AND MINNEMOOSEUS ONLY****Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : Fiddling around for the sake of clarity, assuming it will be a while before Moose gets back to it anyway.