At 11:58 AM 2/15/00 -0700, dfsiemensjr@juno.com wrote:
>
>It's like Glenn to describe himself as an idolater and then try to
>wriggle out of it.
Don't you understand facetiousness? And in this entire response you have
not once addressed the issue that we were addressing when I wrote the piece
on worshipping an oil company. That is, that your definition of religion
leads to the absurd conclusion that an employee is worshipping his company.
Which is silly. Working, is not worshipping.
It won't work. Indeed, the situation is far worse than
>indicated so far because of what the medievals called _consequentia
>mirabilis_, the amazing conclusion, namely, that every statement follows
>validly from a contradiction. Unless he now denies both being an idolater
>and a theist in favor of strict pantheism, his every statement is true,
>including all impossibilities. The problem arises through his claim that
>the days of Genesis 1:1-2:3 are days of divine announcement before the
>creation, that is, the announcement of the _UrIPO_. This requires time
>before there could be time, measurement of time in the timeless.
It requires not time before time but merely the only description of
timeless events which could be understood by a temporal being. That is all.
Unless you believe that God was created at the same instance as this
universe and thus himself subject to time, God must have existed before
time. Was he not doing anything 'then' [note the use of a temporal term to
describe a timeless state]? Was he merely existence itself with no change?
If so, how did God come to call the universe into existence which must have
been done somehow Prior to the actual birth of time. Calling the universe
into existence is a CHANGE in the timeless state of affairs. So activity
can't be disallowed to God prior to our creation.
You totally miss the problem of a temporal being describing events that
occur prior to time. And God most assuredly was doing something prior to
time.
The only
>way out that I see, in the contemporary understanding of creation, is
>requiring that this announcement occurred sometime in the eternal
>mass-energy before the Big Bang bubble began to develop. This requires
>the deity to be within the pre-universe (or whatever one may call the
>state before our universe began), which is a form of pantheism. This
>might be rendered consistent and avoid the otherwise inexorable
>_consequentia mirabilis_.
Yes God was pre-existent to the universe, but he was not part of the
universe. God is TRANSCENDANT!!! He was not 'in the eternal mass-energy'.
God created the mass-energy. God is PRIOR to this universe and is the CAUSE
of this universe. If he didn't exist in the pre-universe, then He
couldn't create the universe. And prior to the creation, in my opinion,
there was no pre-existing mass energy. Mass, time and energy were all
created at the Big Bang. And for those who want to say that the universe
was a vacuum fluctuation on a pre-existing manifold which ran amok, we must
realize that someone had to create the manifold.
Now because God existed prior to the Big Bang, and because he was doing
things, we have little way to describe what he was doing except in temporal
terms. It is like the square in Flatland trying to tell the circle what a
3d object looked like to him as it passed through the plane of the square's
existence. His description was highly flawed.
Now, there is no reason to identify the preuniverse with matter. A
pantheist makes matter part of God and god part of the universe. THat is
not what I am advocating at all. You have really not done a sufficient
research job on my beliefs if this is what you think I am advocating.
>
>IMO, Glenn is right in denying that the days of Genesis are the schedule
>of production. But his remedy is worse than 144-hour creationism. It only
>denies science, but he makes reason impossible.
I think you need to listen a bit more about what the view is actually
saying rather than drawing conclusions first, and then having the
investigation later.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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