Bully's Blog » Theistic Evolution

True Scholarship is Humble

Mike Bull — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:02:04 +0000

James Jordan is never afraid to throw a new idea on the table. As he says, “that’s my job.” But he’s also ever quick to remind his audience that what he has said is never the last word on a subject.

Brian Mattson writes:

Honest-to-goodness scholars are people who think, analyze, teach, and write in good faith.

Honest-to-goodness scholars are, by virtue of their own expertise, acutely aware of their limitations. Bono is absolutely right when he and U2 sing:

“The more you learn the less you know / the less you find out as you go / I knew much more then than I do now.”

The deeper one gets into a subject, the more one learns, the more difficult and mysterious the subject matter seems. This is because we are finite creatures trying to get a grip on a vast universe built by an infinite God. We “see through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul so aptly put it.

I often like to say that when I was 20 I was omniscient; it has been a long, downhill slide from there. Learning is a funny thing: we do accumulate knowledge; yet, at the same time, the amount of things to know, as well as the complexities of how our knowledge interrelates to other things, vastly increases.

This means that an honest-to-goodness scholar is, above all, humble. They are quick to acknowledge their shortcomings. They have an attitude that welcomes correction. They do not pretend that all their views are beyond challenge.

This also means that honest-to-goodness scholars are in short supply.

Brian then contrasts this observation with the career of another well-known biblical scholar.

Chicken and Egg

Mike Bull — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:11:55 +0000

or The Invention of non-Adamites

“But your dad will not
know about that,”
Said the cat.
“He will never find out,”
Laughed the Cat in the Hat.

A popular argument among theistic evolutionists and hyperpreterists (and theistic evolutionary hyperpreterists) is that Adam wasn’t the first actual man, just the first man “in Covenant” with God. [1]

This is a means of keeping Genesis 1 as some sort of history (not a physical Creation, but a Delegation of “Temple purpose” to the physical Creation already in existence) and also maintaining the long ages asserted by modern naturalists. However, what this boils down to is simply a game of “kick the can.” The problem isn’t resolved. Rather, like the ring around the bath in The Cat-in-the-Hat Comes Back, it simply moves the problem elsewhere. In fact, it spreads its mess through the rest of the Bible.

Oh, the things that they did!
And they did them so hard,
It was all one big spot now
All over the yard.

For the separation of Adam from other “now-evolved” humans to occur, it had to be Covenantal. Most theistic evolutionists are too compromised to believe anything before Genesis 12, so they see no Covenants before Abraham (I mean, the actual word Covenant isn’t mentioned until Genesis 6, so the fact that all the preceding history has the same shape at many levels can’t possibly be significant in any way!) At least the hyperpreterists see Genesis 1 as Covenantal, but this poses a few conundrums for their theory.

Firstly, if an “Adamite” Adam (a genealogy divided by Covenant before Abram) was the first man in Covenant, then salvation is only of the Adamites. All the other people supposedly living at the time were not considered “human” by God. They were just part of a Creation that had known suffering and death for millions of years already, and God could somehow call this process “good.” [2] That’s an old Creationist argument, but there is also a Covenantal aspect to it. These non-Adamites died without hope under the Sanctions of a Covenant they were never given.

This assertion doesn’t follow the processes in the Bible at all. God chose Israel and then whittled Israel down to Christ. Each “new Covenant” in the Old Testament was founded within the previous one (Noah within Adam, Abram within Noah, etc.) God cut into Adam until He got to the foundation for the Bride. [3] At each point there was a division, a disinheriting of the unfaithful from the faithful.

For there to have been a Covenantal “disinheriting” of the non-Adamites at the beginning of the Adamic Covenant, then the previous race must have been under some sort of Covenant from their physical Creation that has not been recorded for us. Unless this first era was nothing like any later era, why were they disinherited? Were they “not-quite-human-enough”? If this were the case, they would have been physically close enough to Adam (in evolutionary terms), yet we are not told anything about them. We don’t need to invent non-Adamites to have an intermarriage between Covenant people and people outside the Covenant. The “daughters of men” in Genesis 6 were descendants of Cain, [1] who was cursed, but shown mercy, because he was unfaithful under Covenant.

This is a chicken-and-egg dilemma for the compromisers. An actual, physical, historical “Construction of Creation” Covenant can’t be escaped, any more than the special creation of the first chicken, so they might as well settle for Adam being the first actual man. Any other view violates the universal Covenant process, which originates in the Trinity.

And it removes the need for such highbrow primeval fiction. All of this discussion is merely an accommodation to people who do not respect the actual text of the Bible. Genesis 1 is certainly “Temple-structured,” but it’s not merely an inauguration service, and Adam is not chosen from among his brothers. The text says he was created from the dust in a Creation unmarred by sin. There’s not a non-Adamite to be seen anywhere. We are all Adamites. They ride roughshod over the text to accommodate the biggest flaw in modern science.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man,
and death through sin,
and so death spread to all men because all sinned…” (Romans 5:12)

“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Cor 15:22)

___________________________
[1] See BioLogos’ Jenga Bible.
[2] See Hugh Ross and a Shotgun.
[3] See my diagram in The Covenant Key, p. 236.

BioLogos’ Jenga Bible

Mike Bull — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 02:19:38 +0000

Daniel Harrell tries to marry chalk and cheese by positing that Adam and Eve were real people, just not the first real people. They were the first people with whom God entered into a Covenant relationship.[1] The Rev. Harrell is sitting on the fence, an extremely pointy fence.

For many Christians, the biblical characters Adam and Eve can present a significant challenge to accepting evolutionary theory—that is, when they are cast as historical figures who are also the biological progenitors of the human race. …the Rev. Daniel Harrell discusses how there may be some “middle ground” in the way that Christians understand Adam and Eve. Harrell points out that the historicity of Adam and Eve does not necessarily conflict with science. Rather, the claim that conflicts with science is the idea that Adam and Eve were the first humans, who were the only original biological ancestors of all humans today.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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Herd Mentality

Mike Bull — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:41:43 +0000

“Human beings are animals whose preference for group membership is simultaneously the source of their greatest salvation and their ultimate destruction” —Xenocrates

Who has the majority of evidence to support their paradigm? Is it the Young Earth Creationists or the (mostly atheistic) Evolutionists? (Please note that as far as I am concerned, anyone else is just sitting on a very sharp fence trying to hide the pain with clever words.)

The Old Earthers, whatever their stripe (from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to certain young Sydney Anglicans I admire and the misguided mob at BioLogos), despite their bluff, rely on hearsay and circular reasoning. Creationist cosmologist Russell Humphreys writes:

There is a little-known irony in the controversy between creationists and evolutionists about the age of the world. The majority of scientists— the evolutionists—rely on a minority of the relevant data. Yet a minority of scientists—the creationists—use the majority of the relevant data. Adding to the irony is the public’s wrong impression that it is the other way around. Therefore, many ask: “If the evidence is so strongly for a young earth, why do most scientists believe otherwise?” The answer is simple: Most scientists believe the earth is old because they believe most other scientists believe the earth is old!

They trust in what’s called ‘circular reasoning’, not data. I once encountered such a clear example of this misplaced trust, that I made detailed notes immediately. It happened when I spoke with a young (in his early thirties, career-ambitious, and upwardly mobile) geochemist at Sandia National Laboratories, where I then worked as a physicist. I presented him with one piece of evidence for a young world, the rapid accumulation of sodium in the ocean. It was ideal, since much of geochemistry deals with chemicals in the ocean.

I wanted to see how he explained possible ways for sodium to get out of the sea fast enough to balance the rapid input of sodium to the sea. Creationist geologist Steve Austin and I wanted the information in order to complete a scientific paper on the topic.3 We went around and around the issue for an hour, but he finally admitted he knew of no way to remove sodium from the sea fast enough. That would mean the sea could not be billions of years old. Realizing that, he said, “Since we know from other sciences that the ocean is billions of years old, such a removal process must exist.”

I questioned whether we ‘know’ that at all and started to mention some of the other evidence for a young world. He interrupted me, agreeing that he probably didn’t know even one percent of such data, since the science journals he depended on had not pointed it out as being important. But he did not want to examine the evidence for himself, because, he said, “People I trust don’t accept creation!”

So, in reality, who are the free-thinkers now? Not the old earthers.

Read the full article here.

Communist Theology

Mike Bull — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:18:07 +0000

or A Thimbleful of Watery Bible Broth

The Modernist Bible is very thin. The Old Testament is a mix of myth and history, and Revelation is just a general picture book of the gospel’s work in the world (or a polemic against first century Rome). It boils down basically to some key statements by Jesus and the letters of Paul. And even here, there are problems. Evangelicals love Paul because he communicates like a Greek, but even evangelicals choke on some things he says.

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Hugh Ross and a Shotgun

Mike Bull — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:32:16 +0000

A brilliant thought (I think) from shotgun over at the AV forum:

I’m currently reading Gary North’s commentary on Genesis, “The Dominion Covenant.” It is probably one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read, especially in terms of economics.

Anyway, I ran across some ideas that might serve to savage any and all attempts to intertwine the Genesis account with modern theories of evolution. (Gary North doesn’t apply these conclusions in this way. This speculation is all Shotgun.)

Gary North says this:

Under covenantal dominion, cursed nature’s restraints are progressively lifted. (Pg. 84)

He claims earlier that the “Earth was never designed to be autonomous.”

It seems to me that those who would posit long periods of time before man arose (as man) are implying that the Earth (and nature without man) has some sort of autonomous purpose apart from man. Implicit then, in systems like those of Hugh Ross, is the assumption of an autonomous sphere of sovereignty allocated to nature.

This cannot be true since there is no neutrality. In seeking to critique theistic evolutionary models, then, we should be on the lookout for any implications of an autonomous wilderness.