Sorry for the late response to this, but I've been pretty much away from any and all computers for the past week. I'm trying to get caught up now, and this is one I particularly wanted to comment on:
Originally posted by LightSon
You just described me, so I thought I would "ring in".
There is a panoply of worldviews and modes of thinking from which to choose. How do I make a decision? One of the values in my faith is that I have it on "good authority" that my worldview is arguably from God. God shows himself in nature. God shows himself in His Word. The Word of God is Christ. The Word of God is scripture. How do I know about God? I look to the Bible, those truths that God himself reveals. To the degree I believe it comes from God, I can have confidence in it.
First, I'm going to have to say up front that much of my response here could be taken as disrepectful to this belief system; I do not intend such - I most certainly wish to respect your right to believe in whatever manner you choose, but at the same time I want to explain in some detail why I do not, and could not, believe the same way. With that said, I hope you will take the following in the manner it is intended.
I can certainly understand this position, as summed up in your last sentence - "to the degree I believe it comes from God, I can have confidence in it." But at least to me, such a stance does not require that the entire Bible stand or fall as a single entity. I do not understand, for instance, why it would be impossible to judge the earliest stories in the Bible - the Genesis accounts being the most obvious example - to be merely a collection of Hebrew myths, allegorical at best, while still believing and trusting in the truth of the other lessons of a moral and spiritual nature that the Bible has to offer. The Bible itself makes the claim that it is, in its entirety, "directly inspired by God" and therefore assumed to be inerrant. However, it should be clear that if it is not in fact so inspired, at least in its entirety, it could still make such a claim. The claim would just happen to be one of those parts which is not from God, and thus a human-induced error. In short, the validty of any given piece of the Bible says very, very little about whether or not God exists, or whether the moral and spiritual values given in this text are correct. To believe otherwise - to insist that either the entire Bible MUST be true, or else none of it could possibly be trusted - seems to me to be setting up one's faith as a house of cards. Should any one piece be removed, the entire structure falls for lack of support.
That the entire Bible might NOT be literally true in fact says only one thing about the nature of God - that he does not reveal himself quite as explictly or clearly as might otherwise be the case. In simpler terms, that accepting a good deal of what one believes about God is going to require faith - which doesn't strike me as all that much of a change from what the situation is otherwise. It already seems apparent that if the God of the Bible exists, he does NOT choose to reveal himself as explicitly as could be. Jesus never wrote any books; we don't even have an account of his life, in the Bible, that was written by any of those contemporaries closest to him. So why should we
necessarily think that everything else in the Bible
must have effectively been penned directly by God?
Consequently, I draw my views of morality from the Bible. "Thus saith the Lord,” means a great deal to me. This separates me from those who do whatever is right in their own eyes. The word of God limits my choices between boundaries, not of my own choosing.
Fundamentally, though, your choices are still that - your choices. You are the one who decides to restrict your actions to those within the boundaries set forth by God (or Allah or Vishnu or whatever external source any given individual chooses to follow). That's the essence of free will. The only distinguishing feature is that you didn't have to puzzle out what the boundaries should be on your own - but it's still YOUR choice to follow them.
And oddly enough, those "boundaries" seem to be drawn pretty much the same by all of man's religions. There are clearly differences in what one "should" do in order to be personally saved or exempted from whatever punishment a given religion describes, but the basic codes of behavior - the fundamental morality in each system - seem to be very much the same. Killing is wrong, stealing is wrong, and so forth. Why is that?
The reason this "works" for me is the presumption that the Bible is, in fact, from God and hence "true". If the flood is never happened or if the Genesis account is false, then I should not believe those accounts as being "true". If scripture has any error, then scripture might be lying to me about an array of issues, which heretofore I have accepted.
But this, to me, is again the "house of cards" structure I mentioned. I doubt that you'd buy into the above if presented in the opposite sense - the Flood account is true, so therefore you should accept this book's pronouncements on other issues. (Try substituting any OTHER book for the Bible in this one. For instance, there are unquestionably statements in, say, the Koran which are factually correct. Would this induce you to convert to Islam?) If you're like most people, you do NOT accept EVERYTHING someone says simply because any one thing they say is correct. And conversely, you do not doubt the truth of everything they say if they get any one thing wrong. I also seriously doubt that you would, in fact, abandon your faith IF someone could show you unquestionable proof that any one Biblical account - the Flood, say, or the Tower of Babel story - was in error, even though that's implied by what you say above. I instead submit to you that, in fact, you do
not judge the truth or falsehood of the Bible as a single monolithic whole.
In short, for me to question the Genesis account is to question the resurrection of Christ. If one could be false, so could the other. Once Christ is dead, I have no compelling reason to trust the Bible or the God purportedly revealed therein.
I'm sorry, but that still strikes me as quite a leap; you are saying in effect that your status as a believing Christian is totally and utterly dependent on the literal accuracy of the Genesis account (again, pull the one card out, and watch the entire structure crumble). There are, in my experience, any number of apparently extremely devout Christians who do not have this same problem; they have accepted the notion that many of the earlier accounts in the Bible could be allegory, myth, tribal legends, whatever, and that recognizing them as such has nothing whatsoever to do with their faith in other areas. At least from my perspective, I would have to say that their faith in these other areas looks pretty strong, since it
does apparently stand on its own.
Some of these believers, I know, reconcile the two by saying that while these early accounts can be thought of as being in a sense "from God", they cannot today be taken literally; they were explanations given to a much more primitive people, who did not have the knowledge to enable them to understand more at the time. If, for example, a five-year-old asks you where electricity comes from, I doubt that you'll launch into an in-depth discussion of the workings of generators or nuclear reactors or such - even though later, that same five-year-old grows up to be a power engineer. Is it so hard to believe that mankind might be in the same situation?
As a specific aside, if evolution is true, then you must agree that man is evolved from lower life forms of life. God can no longer be said to have "breathed" into man.
Literally, no; but then, if "breathed into Man" is taken as allegorically referring to WHATEVER process God used to bring forth an intelligent species on Earth, what's the problem? Is it a greater miracle to mold a human from dust and "breathe life" into the body, or to arrange a process to operate over hundreds of millions of years? If anything, the former description reads to me just the same as any other primitive creation story - only the minor details are different. The whole thing is still on a very human scale. On the other hand, the incredible complexity of the processes implied by the simple statement "man is evolved from lower forms of life" - this to me seems far more "Godlike". God is in that case no longer portrayed a something like a tinkerer, building birds and animals and people on his equivalent of a garage workbench, but rather an entity capable of shaping the fundamental forces of the universe to bring about a desired reality as a single, cohesive whole.
Man ceases to be a special object of God's love and interest.
Why? Does God have a short attention span, such that he sees things as less interesting if he has to spend a long time in their making? (In contrast, we tend to be very impressed with human craftsmen when they spend a long time perfecting something...) Most theologists seem to consider God as being "outside" of time, anyway - a day or a billion years, what's the difference? It would seem only the fact that we humans can't really comprehend the latter. In insisting on a six-day creation, do you force God down to human scale?
Do you see how the whole Biblical theme of redemption begins to fall over? There is no reason why a man should cleave unto his wife. Marital boundaries can be deemed anachronistic. If we are merely two biological life forms, looking to procreate, I might as well spread my seed wherever I choose.
Why? Even the most atheistic of evolutionary scientists would note that there are many species that mate for life, because it has proven to be in their best interests to do so; there is no reason mankind has to be an exception. But if coming from a theistic perspective, how does the process employed to create the human species have anything to do with the behaviors expected of the final result? If you believe in God, and yet reject the literal reading of Genesis, what you're saying is that God still made it all, he just used this other process to do it - a process that until very recently mankind could not even begin to comprehend. How does that change the rules - the moral code - that God would still be presumed to have set up?
