Hello Cpxxx,
Originally posted by cpxxx
Seagoon I ask again
Seagoon, what I want from you is this, without sophistry or waffle.
Just how can you with all your intelligence give so much credence to a story which quite obviously was written as a fable by someone who had absolutely no idea how the Earth or the universe came into being?
Would God cease to exist if only one chapter of the bible is proved to be inaccurate?
I'm not sure how my belief in the bible has anything to do, even tangentially, with someone who rejects biblical creationism getting pushed out of the Smithsonian for daring to publish a peer-reviewed article questioning Darwinian evolution's ability to explain the Cambrian explosion. But I'm happy to try to comply with your request.
First off, how did the authors of the bible view what they were writing? Was this all "once upon a time..." as your question implies? Not at all, as a matter of fact, the apostle Peter was extremely zealous to make sure that people understood that scripture was an absolutely reliable record of facts:
"Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease. For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." (2 Peter 1:14-21)Peter speaks of himself and his fellow apostles as eyewitnesses to the events recorded in the gospel, and most especially to the divinity of Christ. He also wants them to understand, that this is not merely based upon possibly faulty observations. He comments on the transfiguration (Mat. 17, Mat. 9, Luke 9) and the fact that they not only
saw with their own eyes the divine glory of Jesus, they heard the voice of God the Father from the cloud declaring Jesus to be his beloved Son who was doing his Wiil. They note that these events were in fact a confirmation of what was written previously in the Old Testament regarding the coming of the Messiah and how he would be "Immanuel" (which translated means "God with Us"). He then goes on to state that no scripture was "created" out of whole cloth by men, or even that it was a combination of the words of men and the words of God, but rather that all scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit. "They wrote as they were moved."
This concept of scripture as "God breathed" is further reinforced by the Apostle Paul when, for instance, he wrote:
"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (2 Tim 3:16)
All, not some, Scripture is
Theopneustos literally God breathed and therefore without error.
Jesus, the very man whose Deity was asserted by Peter above, continually, quotes the scriptures as absolutely reliable, authentic, and unchangeable, and speaks of them as recording actual events. This includes the creation account. Christ confirms that in several places, for instance:
"And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate."" (Matt. 19:3-5)
This attitude towards the creation account is reinforced throughout the Old and New Testament, and indeed several Christian doctrines including the fall of man and the initial proclamation of the gospel (Gen. 3:15), the imputation of Adam's Sin, the advent of sin and death, and the idea of the eternal Sabbath rest (Heb. 4) and so on depend upon the creation account. If Genesis is not an accurate account, biblical theology collapses and indeed Christ and His Apostles are liars and nothing that they said can be trusted.
However, I firmly believe from the internal evidence, and external confirmation, that the entire canon of scripture can be trusted. And regarding the formation of that canon, you are wrong to assert that the canon was created by committee, the lists of scripture cited by the early church fathers and those drawn up by men such as Iraneaus, Clement, and Athanasius prior to Nicaea are essentially the same as the ones we have now. For more on the creation of the canon, check out:
The Formation of the New Testament Canon In any event, the fact that explanations for the origins of life that contradicted the word are being shown to be full of holes, doesn't serve to "confirm" my faith, I expect them to rise and fall one by one simply because they aren't true. But equally, I expect new falsehoods to rise in their place and for this process to go on till the second coming when the last of them will be vanquished forever.
As R.L. Dabney put it:
"Materialism and atheism will never win a permanent victory over the human mind. The most they can do is to betray a multitude of unstable souls to their own perdition by flattering them with future impunity in sin; and to visit upon Christendom occasional spasms of anarchy and crime. With masses of men, the latter result will always compel these schemes to work their own speedy cure. For, on their basis, there can be no moral distinction, no right, no wrong, no rational, obligatory motive, no rational end save immediate, selfish and animal good, and no rational restraints on human wickedness. The consistent working of materialism would turn all men into beasts of prey, and earth into pandemonium. The partial establishment of the doctrine immediately produces mischiefs so intolerable, that human society refuses to endure them. Besides this, the soul of man is incapable of persistent materialism and atheism, because of the inevitable action of those original, constitutive laws of thought and feeling, which qualify it as a rational spirit. These regulative laws of thought cannot be abolished by any conclusions which result from themselves, for the same reason that streams cannot change their own fountains. The sentiment of religion is omnipotent in the end. We may rest in assurance of its triumph, even without appealing to the work of the Holy Spirit, whom Christianity promises as the omnipotent attendant of the truth. While irreligious men explore the facts of natural history for fancied proofs of a creation by evolution which omits a Creator, the heralds of Christ will continue to lay their hands upon the heart strings of immortal men, and find there always the forces to overwhelm unbelief. Does the materialist say that the divine deals only with things spiritual? But spiritual consciousness are more stable than all his material masses; than his primitive granite. Centuries from now, (if man shall continue in his present state so long) when these current theories of unbelief shall have been consigned to that limbus, where Polytheism, the Ptolemaic astronomy, Alchemy and Judicial Astrology lie condemned, Christianity will hold on its beneficent way."- SEAGOON
