Re: [asa] Wells and traditional Christianity

On 9/1/06, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 12:55:45 +0100 "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
> writes:
>
> >I guess it does. I'm just working through these ideas myself.
>
> >I find the "literal" interpretation to be something that is way too hard
> to stomach; namely that everything was perfect and there was no death and
> suffering. Then Adam & Eve go and eat a piece of fruit that they were told
> not to. As a result God puts the most appalling curse on the whole of
> creation, not just Adam and his progeny, and animals start eating each other
> and inflicting suffering on each other. I have sympathy with Darwin, who
> said:
>
> >I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
> designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their
> feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars
> >
>
> Iain (and Merv),
> This strikes me as an "I'm smarter than God" approach based on "what I
> don't like is bad and should never be." It also involves an illegitimate
> transference, assuming that the caterpillar has the same feeling as humans
> do.
>

But equally, you can't assume that they don't suffer. I take it you
wouldn't think it was right to suck the insides out of a paralysed
caterpillar, or slowly pull the legs off a spider, or to toy with a mouse as
a cat does ( something Darwin also mentioned in the letter the above quote
was taken from) ? I'm not arguing that I'm smarter than God - more pointing
out the absurdity of treating this as a literal historical account - God
causing _everything_ to suffer just because Adam disobeyed him over a piece
of fruit. The account clearly means much more than a literal historical
account would imply.

A little thought, rather than emotional reaction, should quickly demonstrate
> that a world with life but without death is an impossibility, unless it is
> strictly static.
>
> On the other hand, I might argue in a form parallel to Darwin's that I
> find offal offensive, so there should not be any. But it is a
> necessary consequence of the nutrition of mammals, so a good God would not
> have allowed any in his creation. So our existence has just disproved the
> goodness of God, if not his very existence.
>

Sorry, but I can't see the parallel here. You don't like offal ... but it
doesn't do anything that you'd consider morally bad. You might just as well
say that because I don't particularly like the colour yellow that God is
bad.

But what the YECs would have you believe is that these wasps flew around
innocently living off flowers and never touching caterpillars & then just
because of Adam's disobedience, that God turned them into savage predators.
It seems to me this is a whole different situation - animals doing to each
other what the vast majority of us would consider morally repugnant.

Iain

It's easy to "fix" something if everything else can be ignored, a human
> specialty wonderfully practiced by Vernon and other YECs.
> Dave
>

-- 
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