Re: The wee people

Glen,
I take just two of your statements to Charles, namely:

I like H. G. Well's take on this issue:
 
"If all the animals and man have been evolved in this ascendant
manner, then there would have been no first parents, no Eden,
and no Fall. And if there had been no Fall, the entire
historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin
and the reason for an atonement, upon which current teaching
bases Christian emotion and morality, collapses like a house of
cards."~H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1961), p. 776-777
 
My rejoinder to this is, and I am waiting for someone to tell me why "In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth' is not meant to be
taken as real history, as a real event in the space-time diagram. It
seems the height of ad hocery to claim that Genesis 1:1 must be taken as
a statement of true history but the rest of it is merely poetic mush.
 
First, Wells' first sentence is obviously true. The second is not
necessarily true. A need for redemption springs just as surely from human
finitude, egoism and selfishness, poorly controlled anger, the whole list
of works of the flesh, etc., as it does from a literal Fall. Whether the
Fall is historical or no more than an explanation for the human state,
atonement is necessary. It is also necessary unless our ultimate
aspirations are no more than a cruel hoax. Why must an explanation that
could be understood by the ancients be historically and scientifically
true? If it has not "entered into the heart of man" (I Corinthians 2:9),
why assume that we have it all pinned down?

Second, although you express the common view, you are involved in the
fallacy of many questions when you ask about creation. I don't think
there is any other passage where /bara/ is taken as /creatio ex nihilo/.
Walton's lecture at
http://www.wheaton.edu/physics/conferences03/Sci_Sym.html and, I
understand, his Genesis commentary, carefully argue that /ex nihilo/ does
not fit the ancient mindset, which expects purposeful organization rather
than initiation when the term is used.

Finally, why is the alternative to "true history" be "mush"? Seems to me
that there is also literalist mush among the products of human thought.
Dave
Received on Fri Oct 29 17:14:44 2004