I'm glad you dug up your old post on theological reasons for TE/EC. I read
it when you first posted it, but I must have read it too quickly.
One point jumped out at me (probably because it's one I've labored before
in several forums):
>Given our natural-processes
>interpretation of "... let dry ground appear," it seems arbritrary to
>interpret, "Let the earth bring forth..." as REQUIRING detectable
>supernatural intervention for the formation of first life, higher taxa,
>and novel features.
I might say it even more strongly: God is commanding that _the earth_
should bring forth [x's] after its kind. Note that I have substituted
"its" where most translations use "their". NASB uses "their" but has a
footnote that the word used is literally "its". Now you could interpret it
to mean "bring forth each [x] after its kind," but you could also consider
the earth itself to be the antecedant of "its". Then the x's that are
being brought forth are the earth's kind -- IOW they are made out of the
same material components the earth is. But then when God makes man He does
something different: He announces that man is going to be in His image and
likeness, and He breathes the breath of life into the man, and the man
becomes a living being. This could be viewed as a solution of the problem
of what the "kinds" mean: there are only three kinds: material, spiritual,
and material beings who carry the image and likeness of God. In any case
it is not in any way saying that God directly made any of the living plants
or creatures. It is saying that the _earth_, under God's providential
direction, made the living things. But again, man is an exception. God
intervened in making man. Possibly the intervention was purely spiritual,
but not necessarily.
Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
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