Todd Wood: A Call for Being Reasonable

[John_Harshman]

@deuteroKJ

he says, “Yeah, that’s a problem and we (YECs) don’t have a good answer yet.”

It’s in that last word that all the faith is invested. He’s sure there will be an answer some day, while most of us are quite convinced that there will not, because there really should have been one by now, given the state of our knowledge. (Not just starlight, but all the rest.)

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@thoughtful

…so far no one in this forum in various discussions about belief in the past weeks who is an atheist has admitted there’s good evidence for God and they’re just making an assumption against it.

Right. I think this is where we have to discuss what evidence actually is.

[AllenWitmerMiller (Retired Professor & Minister.)]

In regards to “a call for being reasonable”, some didn’t get that call—and some ignored the call and let it go to voicemail.

[Faizal_Ali]

@thoughtful

All I got was - we don’t have to defend against positive evidence; you have to prove it to us.

Positive evidence? Such as…?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@PDPrice

@T_aquaticus

It seems that you are asking them to submit to you.

No, that is not a fair assessment in any way. I am asking them to submit to God’s clear revelation first and foremost.

I do submit to God’s clear revelation first and foremost. I don’t submit to your idiosyncratic interpretation of it, because your interpretation is just man’s word. I trust God’s Word over man’s word.

The puzzle to me is why that isn’t enough for you. Why would you so often ask me to submit to your word first and foremost, rather than God’s Word? I’m just not comfortable giving you that sort of worship.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@r_speir

I am going to guess have not properly spent the time 1. to research evolution’s claims which I view as weak, and 2. to fully consider how their embrace runs directly counter to Scripture and 3. to fully consider how their embrace/acceptance will be instrumental in eroding the purity of belief in God and the holy Text in the next generation of believers.

Or maybe otherwise. You’d find something different with many of us.

[T_aquaticus]

@AllenWitmerMiller

Of course, many of the Reformers were pronounced not only heretics but atheists . (At the time the word atheist was primarily used for one who is in defiant opposition against God.)

If some Christians are worried about divisiveness being a PR problem, then the divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics would seem to be higher up the agenda than creationists and theistic evolutionists.

[Chris_Falter]

@PDPrice

Evolutionism is nature worship as well, including the belief that unaided natural processes can generate life from scratch and cause it to grow in complexity and design over time.

And physicists claim the planets can orbit the sun without being guided by angels. Utter blasphemy!

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@PDPrice

Evolutionism is nature worship as well, including the belief that unaided natural processes can generate life from scratch and cause it to grow in complexity and design over time.

@Chris_Falter

And physicists claim the planets can orbit the sun without being guided by angels. Utter blasphemy!

I think there’s a disconnect here between Christians who have very different conceptions of how to approach the question of God’s relationship with the world. I presume @Chris_Falter, despite his agreements with Paul Price, also affirms that the motion of the planets and the evolution of living things would not have been possible without God creating and sustaining the laws of nature that makes these events happen. The question then becomes, how exactly does God sustain the laws of nature? Does he move the planets directly in a way such that it accords with what we call gravity and general relativity? Or is he “one causal step away” by endowing the planets (or spacetime) with causal powers that allow them to independently behave in that way?

Furthermore, if one is sympathetic to Michael Heiser’s Divine Council Worldview that the Bible speaks of the existence of multiple divine beings as part of the divine council and that God has delegated some of his authority in the universe to these beings, then the idea that immaterial angels guide the motion of the planets isn’t that far-fetched for even a modern Christian physicist to believe, even if nowadays we call these angels “the gravitational field”. The difference with something like Paul Price’s view is that we think such a view is not in conflict with the mainstream scientific explanation of the motions of the planets or the evolution of living things.