I've been rereading Lee Strobel's book The Case for a Creator, and am finally going to start a multi-part review of it. I've been reluctant to start though, mainly because I feel so ignorant about so much of the creation / evolution / intelligent design discussion.
Rather than jumping right into the book, I'm going to talk a little about how my beliefs have changed. I've always respected science, believing that honest inquiry will always find the truth. The key word there is honest, of course. The search must be conducted without bias, and where bias is found it must be questioned. There was a time in my life where my beliefs caused me to doubt God's role in creation. There was a later time where I reevaluated that doubt and believed in God again. When I renewed my faith, evolution wasn't an issue. I came back to faith because I saw that faith in God strengthens the family. I was soon confronted with the evolution issue however. Since I believe in God - should I also believe in His testimony? in His works? If I believe the Bible, do I have to believe in a literal six-day creation process, or can it be six ages and a very old earth? Can I believe in both the process of natural selection and God? My beliefs have slowly been changing, and I am definitely being led away from the attitude that I can believe in natural selection and God, though I still believe in an old earth and that the days are actually long periods of time. The main reason for that is what naturalists claim - to paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, there is no morality in natural selection. If that is the foundation for natural selection, I've got to reject it out of hand, because I believe in a God who created something He called "good", indicating a process with a goal, not random. I also find the argument for a natural origin of life to be very weak. Whether natural selection may be valid for explaining some changes to existing life, it does not explain how life was first formed.
(to be continued)
I just thought you might find this site interesting. http://www.drdino.com
There is nothing in the Bible that should lead one to believe that the 6 days of creation were long periods of time. I challenge you to try to disprove the idea that God literally created the Earth in 6 days of 24 hours each. I guarantee you will not be able to come up with any empirical or observable evidence to the contrary. In fact, God's word guarantees this. God is the one obligated to back up his word, not man, so I am positive there will never be evidence found anywhere in his creation that proves his word wrong. God is not called Almighty without good reason. There is nothing he is unable to do, except act unrighteously, or remember our sins. (which he so graciously forgave when we believed on his son Jesus, asked forgiveness, and repented of our sins) So why couldn't he create the world in 6 days? It's a bad idea to ever put a limit on God and what he is capable of doing. That is called unbelief, and is exactly what prevented the children of Israel from coming into God's Rest.
May God bless you and clear your mind of all the lies that Satan has spent years putting in your thoughts as supposed fact.
Posted by: Lonnie Johnson at July 6, 2004 02:41 AMThis issue used to be a big stumbling point for me in my views on Christianity because I was told (by such as Ms. Johnson) that if one did not believe in a literal 6-day creation process/young earth view the entire Bible was invalidated. I had a hard time accepting the young earth view (and still do) and you can imagine my personal struggle when one says, well, I don't think it is necessary to believe in a young earth and people respond with a, "oh, let me just pray for you..."
Anyway, for an intriguing article on the subject, please read Michael Spencer, aka the Internet Monk, at http://www.internetmonk.com/creation.html If you have time i recommend you to read his many other articles as well. He is an intriguing man, and agree/disagree, has much to say that I personally feel needs to be said.
please continue with your book review!
Posted by: Jonathan Devers at July 8, 2004 01:17 PMLonnie,
You may very well be right; God can indeed do anything. Another question I might ask though is, given that, does the evidence He left for us to sift through attest to that? I'm not sure that it does, and I don't think it's a requirement for being a Christian to believe so. In any case, the age of the earth is not covered by Lee Strobel's work, nor will it be by my book review.
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Jonathan,
Thanks for the Internet Monk link. I read the piece and found it very helpful. I like the way he treats Scripture as true as long as it's interpreted according to its genre. I've had similar experience to yours (and Mr. Spencer's). For instance, I've heard some preachers consider the parables of Jesus to be stories that were actually true, as if they were lifted out of a (if there were such a thing back then) newspaper. I don't think so. I think He made them up to tell us important spiritual truths. For instance, (heard this in a sermon at our church) in the parable of the sower, any farmer who sowed seed on rocky ground is a very bad farmer! Yet God does so - why I don't know - and Jesus describes God as a farmer to make His point. Similar rules for other parts: poetry, proverbs, the Law, historical acts of man, gospel, parable, and epistle all have to be interpreted according to the literary techniques employed by the authors. This isn't to say that I think the Bible is only a symbolic book - no I don't believe that. God is real, our Fall is real, and Jesus really died on a cross that if I touched, I would get a splinter, and He really rose from the dead. Some may say that by treating one passage as metaphor, I'm throwing the whole book out, but I disagree, and mainly for the same reasons that the Internet Monk does.