Clete said:
How do you know that it is unrealistic to think that things cannot be proven?
I guess you meant to ask: "How do you know that it is unrealistic to think that things can be proven?" HA HA HA. Obviously I cannot. But that is my subjective impression based on my experience of the world.
Clete said:
If things cannot be proven, how do you even know that the presumption that things can be proven is a presumption that you do not accept?
I did not say that nothing can be proven. But so few things can in fact be proven that I consider this a poor presumption upon which to base human communication. Proofs work well in a few things like mathematics. But the funny thing is, that one of the things that you can prove, is that you cannot prove that mathematics is consistent.
Another thing that I can prove is that I exist, but your existence is another matter entirely. My acceptance is a matter of my own choice, and my choices are who I am. There is perhaps a great deal about myself which I do not know or understand, but my choices are not among those things.
Clete said:
Are you saying that theology is just a subjective matter of opinion?
How shall I answer this? ... Yes. As a matter of faith, I accept that the Bible is authoritative as the word of God to all mankind. However it is the only authority that I accept that has been given into the hands of men for the determination of the truth. I do not, for example, believe that any persons interpretation of scripture has any greater authority than any other persons.
But there are so many interpretations! What then, is God a God of confusion? Sometimes, He is indeed just that! Human beings like to build a single monolithic structure of power and "truth". But when they do this, individual freedom and responsibility vanishes. And so God has always found goodness among human beings in the singular individual like Noah who is different from all the rest. Therefore is it any wonder, that in order to preserve goodness in the world and humanity, God must destroy such structures of power and "truth" as the tower of Babel and the pre-Reformation Catholic church, to encourage a plurality of languages, culture, denominations and understandings of the world?
In a world of diversity God not only encourages individual responsibility but He also encourages us trust in Him alone as our one true Lord and king, for He would have us look to Him alone, that He may rule in our lives. Consider the following:
Samuel 8:5-10 said:
Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, "Look, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations." Bu the thing displeased Samuel when they said, "Give us a king to Judge us." So Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, "Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day--with which they have have forsaken Me and served other gods--so they are doing to you also. Now therefore, heed their voice. However, you shall solemnly forewarn them, and who them the behavior of the king who will reign over them." So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king.
God saw Israel's demand for a human authority over them as a rejection of His rule over them.
Clete said:
If not, then by what means do you establish objective truth?
Objective truth? What do you think that you mean by that? If you would base the truth on objective observations then what you get is science. I think the idea that science is the sum total of truth is absurd. Our experience of reality is primarily subjective not objective, therefore the objective is pure abstraction. Science has an extreme sort of tunnel vision in order to limit its apprehension of the truth to that abstraction. I have a much wider field of vision than that.
But God is clearly something which is apprehended subjectively NOT objectively. Where you and I see God, the atheist does not. This is a basic reality which you must understand and accept.
godrulz said:
Open Theist Clarke Pinnock (I do not agree with all of his ideas) shows the differences between Process Thought and Open Theism. The former leads to finite godism, the latter to biblical truth free from philosophical trappings.
Wikipedia is popular, but not the most credible source for definitive information.
Of course. But Wikipedia is at our finger tips. Ho hum... so much to read.... I am afraid I must ask you to digest and present what wish me to read of his, for certainly if you make the effort to write it (even quoted) then I shall make the effort to read it.
godrulz said:
Time is not a created thing like matter. It is simply duration/succession/sequence. A personal being, even an uncreated eternal one, must experience time as an aspect of His experience to act, feel, think. Time is not a line that God can exist outside of. The biblical narrative shows him experiencing and endless duration of time, not incoherent timelessness (Ps. 90:2; Rev. 1:4, 8 tensed expressions). Time is not space (distinction blurred by relativity THEORY). The unique MEASURE (subjective) of time did have a beginning (Gen. 1:1 sun, moon, stars), but time itself does not have a beginning (eternal is endless time, not timelessness).
Upon this we obviously and utterly disagree. Only the physical is ruled by mathematical relationships!
godrulz said:
The future is not there yet to 'see'. It does not exist. The potential future becomes the fixed past through the present. Contingenies (freedom) precludes exhaustive foreknowledge (determinism).
This is your "right track" again. Things are not so one dimensional. Sometimes the truth can only be apprehended by seeing them from different points of view. Light is a particle and yet light is a wave. These are two utterly contradictory ways of looking at the same thing and yet we must look at it in both ways in order to begin to understand it. God in particular, being infinite, is something we cannot even begin to understand in such a simple one-dimensional manner.
What I am trying to say is that we are really saying the same thing from two different perspectives. You say the future does not exist, I say that God has not read that part yet. What you call the potential future, I have called God's aesthic integrity. God's integrity is the essence of reality just as His decisions are the laws of the universe. The result is the same. Exhaustive forknowledge is precluded.
godrulz said:
Revelation > reason. We should not believe incoherent things about God and His reality just to allow for Him to be unbound. What we know about God is true, but not exhaustive. Logically contradictory things like creating a rock too big to lift are absurd, not possibilities or limitations for an omnipotent God.
When someone says something like revelation > reason, what they are really saying is "my interpretation of scripture is more authoritative than yours". I repudiate this utterly and say, shame on you. The word of God is given to me to read and understand and Christ is the only mediator between me and God. What is logically contradictory about a rock to heavy to lift? Do mean the question about whether God can create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? The only contradiction in this is a contradiction with insistence by human beings to reduce God to a definition of omnipotence. It is that reduction which is absurd. God can indeed create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it. His decisions are the laws of the universe. If He decides that He will never lift a rock then that decision become the nature of the rock. The point is that you cannot use your definitions to limit God. God is quite capable of risk, sacrifice, and self-limitation.
godrulz said:
Your physics may apply to the created order, but I am getting at the root of fundamental issues: the uncreated Creator's existence before material creation.
But if that is the case, then you are speaking about things which are infinitely dimensional, and for which human language is utterly inadequate. Therefore you must excercise extreme caution when speaking about such things to others, for human communication about them must be difficult in the greatest extreme.
godrulz said:
Do you attend a church (denomination)?
What are your views on creationism vs evolution (theistic, Young earth, etc.)?
An internet denominational quiz puts "Assembly of God" on the top of my list. I could not understand this at first. But when I looked at the bottom of the list and found the Mormons, Unitarians, Unity, and Catholics, it began to make much more sense. Then I realized that Assembly of God was in fact the closest thing on their list to the Church which I attend: Calvary Chapel. It is a group of churches orgininating in California which strives for a balance between charismatic and fundamentalist. And yet if you look into what they believe you find nothing like what I believe. They, for example, accept three of the five points of Calvinism, while I reject them all.
In addition they are YEC and I am not. I am a theistic evolutionist or evolutionary creationist who believes in a literal Adam and Eve. I take the first chapters of Genesis to be historical but not literal or scientific. Genesis is not a "creation for dummies" book. Its purpose is not to explain how God created the universe or mankind but to explain the nature of man's essential relationship to God. To treat Genesis as if it where a science book brings it down from lofty heights of deep fundamental spritual truth to the most demeaning trivialization, making it into some kind of fantasy comic book.
So no, I do not believe that we were created by God by means of some kind of necromancy. Adam was not an animated golem of dust and Eve was not the reanimation of someones body part. These are mythic elements in a story that was passed down in an oral tradition for a very very long time. The real point of the story of their creation is that they were created in the image of God for that is essentially what all children are, created in the image of their parents. In some sense all life is created in the image of God and life is itself His "child" but in a more abstract manner that we not would usually identify as a parent-child relationship. But in Adam and Eve, the abstract becomes concrete, for here was a form of life with whom God could communicate directly.
But in this higher sense, we are not the children of God in the creation of our bodies, but in the creation of our minds. Our bodies are just primates, but as minds we are forms of life of a totally different nature, a higher form of life than the animals more so than the animals are a higher form of life than viruses. Inheritance is a basic fact of all life. In biological life that inheritance is passed on by the means of a molecule called Deoxy-ribonucleic acid. But our mental life is passed by means of communication from parent to child that originally comes directly from God Himself to Adam and Eve. To put it simply the means of inheritance that makes us the children of God is the word of God.
godrulz said:
We do not expect detailed responses.
Only that which is said clearly and well (thoroughly) is worth saying at all. I am sorry that it is a lot to read, but real human communication is a very very difficult task, especially on these topics about which we speak. I would rather make a sincere attempt at communication than merely pretend.