The Count

According to the Bible Methuselah lived to 969 years. In fact he drowned in The Flood, or at least in the same year :). Creationists, holding to the Bible as the word of God, would indeed refute this 968 business.

I am not well read on matters of evolution v creationism, but I have a few questions. You appear to be trying to have your cake and eat it, espousing some kind of theistic evolution.

i)God created Adam and Eve without sin and the ability to live forever. And live forever they would have, if not for... (you know the story). Is this something you believe?
ii)You write, 'The important change is the use of language, and a change in structure in the brain.' Whither the soul? I suppose God could have found an animal that was almost 'in our image, in our likeness' (Genesis 1:26) and put a soul in it. Is this what you think?
iii)You also talk about 'animals coming out of the sea' - but 'God said, Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds.... God made the wild animals....' (Genesis 1:24,25). The Hebrew word for 'make' here is 'asah' - check out the definition (make, do, produce...). Was the word used because the Hebrews had little understanding of the evolutionary process? Or was it because when God speaks, it happens?
Also 'the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being' (Genesis 2:7). What is this dust? Some kind of mutant sea-land-soulless creature?
iiii)Eve was created out of one of Adam's ribs, yes? No? Do you doubt the word of God?

These are a few points that occurred to me - they may be nonsense - I may be hung up on the whole issue of the soul.
Oh, and the following verse is in no way directed at you ;)

~~~ Elijah went before the people and said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." -- 1 Kings 18:21 ~~~

Thank you for some stimulating questions. It will take me some time to produce answers worthy of them, so I'm replying to let you know I'm thinking about it! Hope you are well btw.

The idea of the Interventionist God is interesting, but seems to somewhat contradict your ideas on our freedom of choice. It is often argued in defence of the existence of sin (and I believe I could quote you on this) that in order for us to maintain our free will God chooses not to intervene in the workings of the world. The mere idea of an Interventionist God contradicts this does it not? But if God has been nurturing our evolution then why has he allowed the development for the potential (and existence) of sin in humans? And does his intervention have a final aim or purpose? If it were not for that fact that humans are now experience a stage of moral and intellectual devolution then it would be possible to believe that God is attempting to foster us to a state of intellectual or spiritual enlightenment. Is God’s intervention constant and if not then what triggers this intervention. I hope you can provide some answers!

www.simonwalker.net --Blatant Plug

Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!

I would dispute that the concept of an Interventionist God automatically removes all free will. 'Intervene' implies on specific occasions - not constant meddling.

I was just searching the internet to research this subjuct and found something quite interesting. If you read the first few chapters of Genesis, you'll notice something quite strange. God creates the universe just as you said above and thats fine. Then he does it again, in a differnet order! We get to chapter 2.3 "And God blessed the seventh day....And that is how the universe was created", but then it starts again. It says that there are no plants on the Earth and no seed had sprouted, and that God took some soil and formed man and breathed life into his nostrils and he began to live. Then God plants the garden of Eden and he made trees and plants, He put man in the garden. Then He made animals and birds, and then He made woman out of mans ribs. But thats not the only strange thing, in the first story God is referred to simple as God, however in the second story he is referred to as Lord God or Jehovah God(depending on what version you read). This leads you to believe that they come from two different sources and then were combined. This continues for the first five books of the Bible(the books of Moses), with many thing repeated and many contradictions. Anyway just wondered what you thought about it. The address of the page i found it on is http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/bible.html just in case your interested.

Why may I ask is it 'entirely possible that God created the universe(but not in 144 hours)'. God is omnipotent- he can do anything.do you doubt his power?

In response to your point Lord Roger I presented that idea only because the Count insists that free will is to be absolute or not at all. I myself believe in degrees of freedom. I will add a much more developed post on this topic when I have time.

Thanks

Just as an extension to this topic I would be interested to hear some peoples views of how they believe God interacts with the world. Does he have pyhysical power, does he act through the actions of people or by some other means?

To Sandy: no, I don't doubt God's omnipotence, he COULD have created the universe in 144 hours, had he chosen so to do. It is simply the case that the overwhelming body of evidence is that he took rather longer than that, and there is only one bit of evidence that he did. That is Genesis 1, which it seems to me is quite self evident as an allegory of God's creating power rather than as a strict timetable of events - after all as Mr Pether has pointed out, Genesis 2 presents a quite different account, making it clear that the book was not written by one person (ie Moses) but is an accretion of accounts that were in oral circulation at the time. With the exception of extreme fundamentalists, theologians recognise three different main sources for the Pentateuch, distinguished in the main by the name they use for the Almighty. Rather like the Gospels they were using different source material for different purposes and audiences within the same overall tradition. It is the essence of what is said that matters: that God simply said what was to happen and it happened, demonstrating his omnipotence, rather than the full detail. Those who see the Bible as word for word literal truth miss most of the real messages it conveys; God does not write in literal truth - one only has to look at the words of Jesus to see that - but requires that His Word (not His words) has to be interpreted - that's the whole point of having the Holy Spirit.

To Simon and Lord Roger: I have never said that free will has to be absolute. That would totally contradict my entire thesis! Mankind was given free will so that a choice could be made to do good (and whether knowingly or not to serve God in the process), or to do evil. Free will is essential to prevent man from becoming a mindless automaton. However it must not at the same time limit God's omnipotence, therefore it cannot be absolute. If there is a point where it part of the divine plan to intervene, then that plan must take priority at that point in time. But God does not meddle constantly, or this would leave freewill open to floccinaucinihilpilification, and that would never do! Rather His interventions are necessarily rare and of great importance. This is why for example people die in floods: He doesn't stop them from being completely stupid and building masses of houses on river floodplains as they have free will to choose this particular inanity; and I suspect He finds our rather puny attempts at climate control amusing as it is a battle we cannot win - the natural forces of the Universe will always follow the laws set up by God, except for those specific moments when he does intervene.

Oh and Sandy I forgot to mention that the six day thing is an astonishingly earth-centred approach to the creation. Most people these days do believe that the earth goes round the sun, and that the planets aren't attached to glass discs (necessary to explain their most peculiar orbits if they all go round the earth). The vastness of the Universe is much more impressive imho if it wasn't designed especially for a little watery planet orbiting a very average smallish star, one of 100,000 million others in an average sized galaxy, itself one of about 10,000 million other galaxies, the vast majority of which are now too faint to be seen from earth even with the Hubble. Or perhaps all the other myriad stars were merely put there to make pretty patterns and to stop human navigators from getting lost for a few thousand years until GPS was invented?

I would like to point out that it wouldn't matter how long God took to create the universe, as there would be nothing alive for him to delay or be late for.

Surely to paraphrase Gandalf: God is never late, nor is he early; he does things precisely when he means to! Perhaps the fact that the flow of time itself was created by God obviates the necessity for further discussion of the temporal issues.

I do agree with what you said about needing the Holy Spirit to interpret the Word of God, but everyone needs this even if they believe literally in the Word.I guess there will always be people who take it literally and those who don't.

I just saw your other comment--
Is it not possible that he made it for His glory as he did man?

i see that our present has come in handy sir (what the hell does floccinaucinihilpilification mean?)
also i think gandalf said a wizard is never late, not God (unless they changed it for the film).
One other thing - if God was willing to kill everyone in a flood before, why doesn't he do it again? surely there is more bad in the world today than there was back then, when guns and A bombs haddened been invented!

there's a monkey that can count to 9

It is I suppose possible that the Universe was created for His glory (or even just for the fun of it) but it seems much more likely that the current Universe is the magnificent result of 20,000 million years of activity since the Creation, rather than just 6,008 years.

The Flood story (for that is what it is - there are similar but not identical stories in most cultures of the time) is intended as an allegory for God's vengeance upon egregiously sinful man, and to explain the fact that His followers who should have included all humans throughout the world were in fact all in the same place. If this is literal truth, where did all the other people come from afterwards? Noah and his sons meet lots of other people after the Flood (otherwise the whole world would be descended from them and clearly the Bible does not suggest this). Also a boat that big made from wood would either sinnk or collapse under its own weight with the technology of the time - we are barely able to create one now. Where did they get fresh water from for the time they were afloat? This would have needed another several arks just to hold the water. Not to mention the several thousand years it would take to load the animals onto it with two of every species (and if it wasn't every species, and there's no evolution, where did all the others come from?).

So God didn't actually kill everyone in a Flood, and he isn't going to do so again either, except possibly in the Last Days, when one wouldn't have to worry about what comes afterwards. I have to say that I am truly astonished and rather saddened that people who are otherwise highly intelligent actually believe that any of Genesis 1-11 is literal truth.

Flocci&c. means 'the act of estimating something to be worthless'. Read the post again and you'll see that I have used it correctly! Oh, and I did say I was paraphrasing Gandalf, not quoting him verbatim - he was of course referring to wizards, but I thought the quote was apposite.

your problem with the water, couldn't they have just distilled sea water to get rid of the salt, or they could have drunk rain water or on the film waterworld he lives at sea and he has a machine that turns his urine into something drinkable. as for the animals, God could have just put new ones on the earth after the flood, so they only needed to take enough to eat.

On a completely differnt subjuct, do you remember the debate we had about the pronunciation of the hyperbolic functions. well i was looking in my P5 book (cos we had the exam today and it was very hard!) and it actually tells you sinh should be said "shine" and cosh "cosh". so glen was right, just thought you'd like to know.

Distillation requires enormous amounts of energy, so another few arks full of some sort of fuel would do instead. KC had a machine in Waterworld but this was post-apocalyptic and therefore far more advanced than the antediluvian technology Noah had to suffice with, so I think we can discount recylcling of urine except in extremis. If God re-populated the earth with new animals post deluvium surely the Bible would have recorded this 'new creation'.

I never said that shine was wrong; I merely said that it was inconsistent: you should either have shine, chos and than, or sinsh, cosh and tansh, not amixture of the two. As two of the 'accepted' pronunciations come from the latter set, and make far more sense with the position of the letter h, I have therefore rejected the first set altogether, hence sinsh and not shine, which to my mind is just plain silly as a way of pronouncing sinh. How wodul it be if we codul just move lertest arnoud for proncuniantio any way we flet like dongi?

If God wants us to have free will then why punish us with a place in hell if we choose not to believe in him? This does not sound like the actions of an all loving god?

First if you live a good life then you are necessarily doing God's will even if you don't believe that you are doing so (see Abou Ben Adhem). So you wouldn't necessarily go to Hell just for not believing in God.

But you have hit upon a small conundrum here: if God is infinitely just, then Hell must exist; if God is infinitely merciful, then it is empty. I personally don't believe in a God who would send souls to a place of eternal conscious punishment - it could have either of those attributes but not both. I guess I go along with the Papists here and believe in purgatory, though not for believers who have repented (as Christ has paid the price for their sins), but in order that the unrepentant and the non-believer may come to God in due course.

Of course speculation about the afterlife in detail is at best fruitless and at worst wholly arrogant so I'll stop there.

Its rather unlike you to stop when your being worthless or arrogant sir! Have we turned over a new leaf?

Going back to the idea of an Interventionist God how can you justify the existance of hereditary disases or dangerous mutations such as cancer? Why has God allowed the potential for diseases that can evolve through no fault of the individual to exist? Would an all, loving all powerful God not have forseen the suffering that such mutations could cause and tweaked a gene during the early stages of evolution to provide immununity? It could of course be argued that overcoming such problems allows us to develop and evolve as a race. This however then introduces the question of when God is to intervene and when we must solve a problem for ourselves. I would have thought that something with the potential for such great suffering would have been prevented if God was indeed able or inclined to interven in our world.

Our bodies DO prevent cancer. A lot. Most cells with a genetic defect are destroyed before they have any chance to become cancerous and dangerous. There's only so much tweaking you could do before you'd end up with indestructible robots, which wouldn't really be any fun.

Also, why do heaven and hell have to be discrete? Surely you could have a whole spectrum of heaven-ness and hell-ness? The one fault a God could have would be to be unable to control himself, so the afterlife could be an expression of God's personality, rather than a set of rules and rooms.

I still don't admit anything exists at all, though. Not even this website.

i > e