This week we are taking another step forward in our journey through understanding more fully the kind of people we want to be if Jesus really is coming back one day. We’ve talked about being better for the world. This week we are turning things around a bit to talk about being better for God’s kingdom. If we really are citizens first of the kingdom of God as follower of Jesus, then the priorities of that kingdom need to define how we pursue life in our present kingdoms. Not only is this right on its face, it brings some added benefits that are pretty handy. Let’s talk about how all of this works and why in part four of Who Do You Want to Be.
Getting Priorities in Order
One of my favorite observations about how much time we have in our lives is also one of the most challenging and uncomfortable I’ve ever heard. Are you ready for this? Are you sure? You might want to tuck your toes in just in case. Here goes: You have time to do everything you most want to do. Whenever you hear someone complain about how little time they have to do this or that, if you really want to get under their skin, gently offer this observation back to them. Then take a step back because they might take a swing at you. Better yet, the next time you start to complain about how little time you have to do this or that, bring this observation to mind. Trust me: You won’t like it. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
We have time to do everything we most want to do. If we aren’t doing something, the reason is not that we don’t have time for it, but that we don’t make or take time for it. Those are two different things. For instance, you may be tempted to complain that you don’t ever have time to take a real vacation. How silly. Of course you have time for that. You simply like eating food and living indoors more than you like going on vacation. As a result, you work hard to make sure you have those things before you think about making time for vacations. Or perhaps you don’t like telling your kids no when it comes to the activities they want to do more than you don’t like not being able to do something else you tell yourself you would rather be doing. The truth is that you wouldn’t rather be doing it at all. You would rather not tell your kids no.
For some of you, this next part may be the thing you came today to hear. (That doesn’t mean you can tune out the rest of the sermon, though!) Our lives, such as they are, are largely determined by our priorities. If you don’t like the outcomes you are experiencing in life, the solution is fairly simple: change your priorities. Of course, not all priorities are equal to one another. And the opinions of the culture around us aren’t always very reliable in terms of pointing us to the best priorities to prioritize. This morning, I’d like to reflect with you for a few minutes on which priorities are the best priorities.
Today we are in the fourth part of our teaching series, Who Do You Want to Be? For the last few weeks and with one more to go after this we have been talking about what our lives here and now should look like in light of the fact that Jesus is going to return one day to bring this world to a conclusion before ushering in a brand new world. As we put this tension in the first part of our journey, if this world really is going to end one day and give way to a new one, and if the choices we make now will have an impact on our experience with this new world, then how we live matters. Or, as the apostle Peter more directly worded the challenge: “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?” His answer was just as direct: “You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” Or, as we put it then, if Jesus is coming back, how we live matters. So, who do you want to be?
Over the last couple of weeks we have been talking about different lifestyle choices that we are wise and right to make as followers of Jesus in light of His forthcoming return. The first is that we need to be a people who are for our communities. Borrowing on some of the wisdom Jeremiah shared with the people of Israel living in exile in Babylon, we talked about the fact that even though we aren’t yet in our final home, our best bet is not to simply wait idly for the end to come. It is to commit ourselves to making our present communities as good as they can possibly be. Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
As we saw last week through the lens of Jesus’ tense conversation with the Pharisees and Herodians, though, this duty goes beyond simply making our local communities better. We need to be committed to making our present kingdoms better by being the best citizens we can possibly be. We do this through a variety of means, but they are all variations on properly loving our country. Living with the end in mind means being the best citizens we can be.
Well, if the last couple of weeks have had us looking at earth from the standpoint of heaven, for the final couple of weeks of this journey we are going to turn things around a bit and look at heaven from the standpoint of earth. As much as it matters a great deal for us to be properly committed to our present kingdoms wherever those happen to be, we cannot forget that we are nonetheless citizens first of a different kingdom. It is not a kingdom of this earth. Jesus Himself made as much clear when He told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. And because we are citizens first of that holy kingdom, we must abide by the rules and expectations that come part and parcel with membership in it. Far from being a burden or something that will take away from our being good citizens who are profoundly for our communities, though, remembering whose we are first will make us better at doing those things. More even than that, remembering which kingdom comes first will keep us ready for Jesus’ return at all times.
The reason this matters so much isn’t just focused on such large-scale concerns, though. It gets entirely more personal than that. When we remember where our real and eternal home lies, afflictions that are a regular feature of life in this world lose the great power they would otherwise have over us. This becomes clear in something Jesus said in His most famous sermon. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to Matthew 6, and let’s take a look at what Jesus had to say about our priorities and getting first things first.
The Sermon on the Mount is easily Jesus’ most famous block of teaching in any of the Gospels. Yet while it is perfectly acceptable to think that Jesus presented this whole sermon in one sitting up on a hillside in Galilee somewhere like Matthew presents it for us, this was by no means the only time Jesus said all of this. The Sermon on the Mount was like a collection of Jesus’ greatest hits. These were the ideas and themes He came back to again and again throughout His ministry. What we get in the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ most comprehensive vision of what life in the kingdom of God looks like and how it works. It opens with an ethical vision for God’s kingdom, and closes with an encouragement and exhortation to enter it, but right in the middle offers a remarkable picture of what it looks like to be a part of it. Right near the end of this middle part is where we are going to pick up this morning.
Starting in Matthew 6:25, Jesus helps us see why life in God’s kingdom is just so different from life in this one. Check this out with me: “Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life-span by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. . . .Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Now, if you’ve been around the church for very long, I suspect you’ve heard these verses before. This is pretty remarkable stuff. Worry and anxiety have been problems plaguing humanity since time immemorial. We live in a culture now where we have all but eliminated even the language of hunger. We talk about food insecurity. Now, are there still people who struggle to find enough food to feed themselves each day? Unquestionably so. But that kind of a situation is a far rarer thing than it once was, and where those situations exist, they often exist in spite of plentiful and readily available sources of help to alleviate the problem. The problem of hunger today stems more from governmental mismanagement or corruption than a lack of resources. This global abundance of food, though, is a fairly recent historical invention thanks to electricity and the miracle of refrigeration. Before then, making sure you had the food you needed to eat each day was a daily task that came with few guarantees for most people. The same goes with access to clean drinking water. And the idea of closets full of so many clothes we can’t even wear them all was utterly unheard of when most people made their own clothes, and you had maybe one or two sets that you wore for years. How ironic it is that we are a society experiencing an epidemic of anxiety when we live in the midst of such abundance. Our worries and anxieties have not been alleviated by modernism and its luxuries. They have merely migrated and taken on different forms.
And if you think about it, in a world with no gods or gods who are untrustworthy, worrying about basic needs makes sense. If your daily sustenance is going to be comprised of whatever you can manage to grow or kill, most of us are going to be in trouble. Even if you assume a skill set necessary to acquire and process all the relevant resources, there’s still only so much you can do. You are going to wind up having to spend significant portions of each day focused solely on that one task. All the more so if you have a family to house and clothe and feed as well. And then there’s the added element of forces that are entirely outside your control. If the rains don’t fall or if animal populations migrate out of your area or if bugs or blight kill off your crops, you’re toast. The pressure of making sure you have what you need when having it entirely depends on you is immense.
What Jesus introduced here was a radically different way of thinking about all of these things. This actually falls in two different ways—one for Jesus’ original audience, and one for us. For Jesus’ original audience, they brokered no illusions that they could somehow make it on their own. The broader culture of His day was intensely aware that they couldn’t make it on their own. They were desperately in need of the help of the gods to get through life in some semblance of intact. The trouble was, the gods weren’t trustworthy. They were super powerful, yes, but they didn’t really care about the people. And they were capricious. Maybe they were having a good day and your sacrifice would be accepted, but maybe they weren’t and too bad for you. Of course, when you are really offering sacrifices to nobody and actually just playing the odds, that’s how things go. Sometimes they fall out in your favor; sometimes they don’t. You don’t know. Thus you worry about it—that is, you try to grab control of something over which you don’t actually have any control, which is what worry is in the first place.
Today, we generally don’t imagine that the success or failure of our lives are dependent on a divine being of any kind. At least in the cultural West, we are pretty thoroughly secularized. Even where we claim a religious identity or some level of religious devotion, we still think largely in secular terms. Our pantries are large enough, our freezers are stocked enough, our closets are full enough, and our houses are sturdy enough, that we easily and understandably operate from the standpoint that we are just fine on our own to get through life. That’s wrong on two fronts, of course. First, most of us are possessed of frighteningly few of the skills we would need to actually get by with anything like the standards of living to which we are accustomed. Take away the enormous and complex social web supporting us, and we would be in real trouble in a real hurry. Second, while the actual and metaphorical walls we erect to block out the literal and existential storms are much firmer than those of our ancestors, a big enough storm can still blow down our castles. I suspect that our inherent awareness of this plays into the anxiety plaguing us. On the other hand, the very strength of our walls has allowed us to find all sorts of new things to worry about that weren’t even on the radar of our forebears.
What Jesus offered us here was a way through all of this. He assured us that we aren’t on our own. There is a God who is sovereign over this world. The evidence of both His ability and willingness to provide for His creation is all over the place. We can see from the Genesis account of creation that God values us most of all out of everything He made. Well, if He so splendidly cares for the rest of creation, it is an entirely logical and rational conclusion to make that He will take even better care of us if we will let Him. Indeed, He knows what we need before we even ask about it. All the various things that cause us to worry don’t have to play that role in our lives any longer. We can simply trust in Him. Of course, this trust isn’t a passive one. It is one marked by our actively obeying His commands by fulfilling the mandate He gave us in creation to steward His creation carefully and well. When we are willing to accept Him for who He is and us for who He made us to be, He will take care of the rest.
But there’s a catch here. That thing I just said about accepting Him for who He is and us for who we are points toward this catch. If we are going to benefit from God’s ability and willingness to provide for us such that we can focus our attention on enjoying His creation rather than worrying over how we can get our hands on the most of it possible, we have to be willing to take Him on His own terms, not ours. We have to be willing to accept Him for who He is. Or, as Jesus put it in the verse we skipped earlier when reading through the passage, we have to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for [us].”
Okay, but what does it mean to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness? Much ink has been spilled over that phrase, but let me see if I can put it very simply for us. It means we need to be willing to put His priorities ahead of our own. Not only is this a good and necessary thing to do if we want to experience the kind of abundant life He desires for us, it is a thing that makes perfect sense to do. If God is who the Scriptures, rightly understood, proclaim Him to be, then this world is really His. He made it to work a certain way—a way defined by His character. When we are willing to operate on those terms, then we get to enjoy the world as He designed it. When we don’t…well…we don’t. Instead of enjoying the abundance of His majesty, we are stuck trying to get by on our own with whatever we can accomplish. As compared with what He can do, our efforts are rather meager.
Let me add one more element here. While it is undeniably true that the world doesn’t often operate on God’s terms and suffers through all the attendant consequences of such a state of affairs, there is a day coming when God is going to restore things to their rightful design and operation. If we are going to be a part of that world when it arrives, then we need to start preparing for it now. We need to begin living now as if that day were already here. Actually, let me put that a bit more positively: We get to start living now as if that day had already arrived. We can start living with God’s priorities now. When we do that, we’ll be ready to receive Him both now and in the end. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Let’s talk about what that means. This means, first and foremost, that we prioritize God’s priorities over and above our own. It’s perfectly okay to have priorities. These can even be strong priorities. But we can make these higher than God’s priorities. If we do, then we’re not working with Him to advance His kingdom any longer. We are working against Him to advance our own. Given that His kingdom will be realized in the end, this is always and only a losing proposition on our part. Not only is it a total waste of time, it sets us on a path for judgment because in working against God’s priorities, we are pursuing an end that is ultimately not good however it may seem to us in a given moment.
Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first. Well, the priorities of God, His kingdom, and His righteousness aren’t always ours. They aren’t always the interests of our present kingdom. Because of this, putting God’s priorities first will occasionally—and even often—put us at odds with the world around us. It will even put us at odds with ourselves. It was not for no reason that Jesus warned that those who desired to follow Him would have to be prepared to deny themselves and take up their crosses before getting to the following part of that equation. If we are going to put God’s priorities first, we have to be prepared for the pushback and even persecution that will come from those who don’t understand what or why we are doing what we are doing. Talking about our pursuit of God’s priorities in contrast to the world’s pursuit of its own priorities, the apostle Peter said that “they are surprised that you don’t join them in the same flood of wild living—and they slander you.” Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said we are blessed when we are persecuted because of His name. As a ministry whose work I follow pretty closely likes to say, we need to develop a theology of getting fired. As our culture continues to pursue God’s priorities less, our stubborn pursuit of them anyway will make us stand out more and more in a culture that doesn’t reward different. Yet we do this because we know that in the end, God’s priorities will win out. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Putting God’s priorities first means fundamentally that we trust in Him for our daily needs and not in ourselves and what we can accomplish on our own. Now, this doesn’t mean we don’t still work. We do. We must. God designed us to work and work hard in our role as stewards over His creation. Rather, we work with the recognition that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it. He is the one who sustains it. Creation holds together in Him, not because of something we do or don’t do. Our provision ultimately comes from Him because even our ability to work comes from Him. This is part of the wisdom Paul shared with the Philippian believers in Philippians 2:12-13. He told them to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which sounds very much like we’re the ones who have to do everything, until you read the next part: “For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.” We don’t even want to do it unless He helps us want it in the first place. Because of this, it’s always best to seek Him first. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Speaking of those priorities, since we have been for a while, what are they anyway? Well, they are first and foremost for the advancement of His kingdom. That’s always His top priority. That, though, just begs the question as to what exactly is His kingdom. God’s kingdom is present anywhere His rule and reign are recognized and received. Okay, but what does that look like? Well, God’s kingdom is defined by His character, so it looks like His character’s being reflected through the lives of people who have placed their faith in Him. It looks like love being extended through us to those around us. It looks like compassion being shown to the hurting and the vulnerable. It looks like kindness being lavished on the broken. It looks like justice being achieved for the oppressed. It looks like mercy being shown to the suffering and the grieving. It looks like selflessness and gentleness and humility flourishing. It looks like joy and peace and hope blooming. It looks like forgiveness being sought and granted and relationships that were once broken being restored. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Seeking God’s priorities first means pursuing all of these things and more not only in our own lives, but through our lives into the lives of those around us. It means pursuing them in our families. It means pursuing them in our communities. It means pursuing them for our nation as a whole, and even in the world around us to the extent we are able. The world won’t always understand this, and we won’t always want it. But it will always be right. It will always make the world around us better and us better for the world. And, when the day finally arrives that Jesus returns to restore all things, we’ll be ready. We’ll be well-practiced. We’ll be already accustomed to life there, and the transition from here to there will be seamless and easy. This is really a no-lose prospect. We make this world better, and get ourselves more ready for the next. What’s not to like? This is the kind of people we want to be. This is living in a way that matters. This is living with the end in mind. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
The Nexus 
“…. if Jesus really is coming back one day.”
Yes, well, that “if” is the big question. Sounds as if you are not fully convinced.
And tlthen there is the question ofnl of several billion non Christians to consider.
“If God is who the Scriptures, rightly understood, proclaim Him to be, then this world is really His. He made it…”
And yet, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest this is the case. Notwithstanding the fact your god, Yahweh is a former Canaanite deity, of course.
Although your sermons are not really directed at me you might consider less blather and more on point.
I say this so you don’t get distracted by any potential snoring from the pews.
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Good morning (from my time anyway).
If we’ve been going back and forth as long as we have, and you haven’t yet picked up on the fact that I am entirely convinced of the truthfulness of the arguments I make, you really haven’t been paying very much attention.
I used that “if” in the same sense as a Greek first-class conditional statement. I could have used “since” to express the same sentiment.
We have considered the question of the billions of non-Christians. You didn’t like my response then. I don’t suspect that has changed now.
Interestingly, there’s no evidence to suggest that God didn’t create the world. Which means, as I have explained to you many, many times, we are dealing with an inherently non-empirical question. Thus, your insistence on accepting only empirical evidence combined with your unwillingness to accept the worth of philosophical arguments continues to leave you sounding most unreasonable in your approach.
I would direct you back to the evidence of fine-tuning. Naturalistic explanations for the existence of a variety of almost unimaginably fine-tuned physical constants fail in terms of explaining how and why they are the way they are. There are really only three possible explanations: chance, necessity, and a Creator. With the first two failing so profoundly to offer a reasonable explanation, we are left in the position of the reasonability of exploring the third option which includes a reexamination of whether naturalism is even a workable philosophical approach to understanding the world (spoiler alert: I think it is not).
As for the last part, when you preach for enough years, you get to the point where you become rather hard to distract. I’ve preached through far more potentially distracting things than a bit of snoring. I appreciate your concern, tongue-in-cheek though it may be.
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The fine tuning argument has been refuted, which has been pointed out to you on a number of occasions.
To assert you know who or what is responsible for the universe without presenting evidence is the height of arrogance.
In fact anyone asserting they know simply makes them a liar.
Are you a liar?
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I guess that depends on who you ask. You’ve made that accusation of me numerous times.
The fine tuning argument has not even remotely been refuted. It is rooted in the known physical facts of the universe. These constants are what they are. The question is why. And I know you like to hide behind a cover of ignorance, lobbing accusations of dishonesty and arrogance at anyone who might venture a guess as to why, but that doesn’t change the fact that humans have always been driven to ask the why questions and seek answers.
Philosophically speaking, the available explanations for these finely tuned physical constants are that they exist by chance, by necessity, or by design. Those are the options unless you know of another. Do you know of another?
Since those are the options, it is entirely appropriate to use the same scientific reasoning used by Darwin himself (unless you think Darwin was wrong in how he went about formulating his theory) to hypothesize which of them is the most likely to be correct. The only source we know that has ever been capable of producing the kind of information represented by these extraordinarily finely tuned physical constants is a mind. Chance and necessity fail to adequately explain how they could exist as they do.
No, science itself doesn’t give us this answer. We are doing philosophy now. Philosophizing the existence of a designer here is not dishonest at all. What strikes me as dishonest is the willful commitment to pleading ignorance when we do know of a source for such information. Such a commitment comes not because of the evidence, but the worldview from out of which that evidence is being interpreted.
You limit the acceptable explanations to only naturalistic causes and accuse anyone who goes beyond that of dishonesty. That’s because of your worldview commitment. I am not so bound, and so I am able to honestly consider more explanations than you. This is not because of a greater or lesser commitment to science, but because of a different set of worldview commitments.
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Philosophizing is fine. Asserting you know your god Yahweh is responsible is a lie.
The anthropic principle is not scientific.
Explain how you know of any other cause beside naturalistic?
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No, it’s a philosophical (and theological) statement that comes as the result of thinking through the best explanation for why the world is and looks and works the way it does. There’s nothing dishonest about such a statement in the least. You simply disagree with it because of a differing set of philosophical commitments (which, by the way, cannot make rational sense out of the aspects of the world that we are talking about here other than to simply say, “yep, that’s what they are.”). Knowledge is justified true belief. Of course I believe it. From an examination of the various pieces of evidence, I find such a conclusion to be imminently reasonable and arguably true. Thus, I know it.
The anthropic principle may or may not be considered scientific depending on the particular philosophy of science you have accepted, but it is nonetheless a true observation about the nature of the universe. It exists in such a way that allows for life, and the various forces that allow for life, to the best understanding of astrophysicists, are extraordinarily finely tuned. If they were other than they are by even a small amount, life as we know it would not be possible.
Thus, to say the universe is finely tuned to allow for life is merely an accurate philosophical reflection on these scientific realities. As a committed naturalist, you can’t explain them in any way other than chance or necessity which are both woefully inadequate. As a committed theist, I can offer an entirely more cogent explanation that fits with our uniform and repeated experience: they were designed.
How I know of any other cause beyond a naturalistic one is through an application of the same type of historical scientific reasoning Darwin used called inference to the best explanation. The only known source of the kind of finely tuned physical constants that allow for life is a mind. It may be that there is another source, but we don’t know it with empirical certainty any more than we know it came from a mind with empirical certainty, and to hypothesize of one requires a faith commitment because there isn’t empirical evidence for it.
The question here then becomes: which hypothesis is the most rational to place our faith in? You can maintain a commitment to a naturalistic hypothesis here, but it is not because of scientific arguments, but rather philosophical ones, and it is unavoidably a position of faith. We aren’t all that different, as it turns out. We simply put our faith in different things.
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Cogent explanation?
Well then, let’s test this shall we?
Please explain how you arrive at this cogent explanation of how your god, Yahweh, in the form of the crucified itinnerent Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth is the creator you worship.
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You first. Explain why you think naturalism offers any kind of a cogent explanation of the existence of these finely tuned physical constants beyond chance or necessity. Explain why someone should see your position as anything other than a faith-based belief that is religious in its basic form and structure.
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For similar reasons why evolution is fact. And we, as carbon based life forms just happen to be the lucky ones( sic) to have benifitted.
Right, now you offer a cogent explanation why your Canaanite god Yahweh, in his human form as the itinnerent Rabbi and bible character Jesus of Nazareth crucified for sedition by the Romans 2000 years ago is the creator of the universe.
Oh, and you were correct it has not been refuted. I don’t know why on earth I wrote that. I think I have the Noachian Flood tale on the brain for some reason.
Sorry about that.
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No worries. You do tend to keep the Flood on your brain ;~)
That being said, your “cogent explanation” is no explanation at all. You literally didn’t offer a single word about how naturalism offers a cogent (and more cogent than theism) explanation for how and why these finely tuned physical constants came to be the way they are that goes beyond either chance or necessity. In fact, you specifically leaned into chance there in the answer you did give.
Philosophically speaking – and, honestly, scientifically speaking as well – chance is an embarrassing joke as far as explanations go. To hold to a chance-based explanation is to make a faith commitment that is absolutely religious in its form. Until you can offer an explanation more cogent than chance, I don’t feel the least bit burdened to give serious thought to your question that is almost sneering in its disdain for the Christian faith by its very formulation. Or to perhaps put that another way, if you want a serious answer from me, then give a serious answer to me. Try again.
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“This means that our universe is finely tuned not for life, but for black holes, which typically come from massive stars (although they can have other origins). It turns out that massive star formation depends on an element also “important for life on Earth: carbon.”
Right… Now explain how your god, the former Canaanite deity, Yahweh in the form of the bible character Jesus of Nazareth created the universe.
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If that’s the best you’ve got, then I’m going to get to stay off the hook here. That doesn’t answer anything. At all. It’s barely relevant. There are all of these physical constants whose values we know to mind-bogglingly large degrees, and whose net effect is to make life possible. If they were other than they are by even the smallest of margins, life would not exist. How, beyond chance, does naturalism account for this scientific fact? So far what you have demonstrated is that it can’t. I’m still waiting.
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This was the one I was trying find.
Mic drop.
Now.. If you please, your cogent argument that your god, Yahweh in his human form as Jesus of Nazareth is the Creator of the universe.
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I’ll watch this later, but if Sean Carroll is your go to here, you really don’t have any kind of an answer.
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And that response merely highlights your prejudice and ignorance, I’m afraid and further demonstrates why anyone who continues to believe there is evidence of the Noachian Global Flood does not get invited to sit at the grown-ups table.
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That’s pretty rich given your dismissals of various Christian apologists.
I’ll watch it hopefully tomorrow to give it a fair listen. But I’ve heard Carroll talk about fine tuning before. It was pretty unpersuasive in terms of offering a cogent naturalistic explanation that went beyond chance. Maybe this one will be different. I won’t hold my breath. The rest of your comment there is just bluster because I won’t accept your weak attempts to answer the question.
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Lol!
Of course religious apologists are dismissed!
For exactly the reason you refuse to acknowledge the Noachian Global flood has been flatly refuted.. Evidence.
And we can go back to your statement about the return of the Bible character Jesus of Nazareth…. “If”.
You always begin with a presuppositional belief based on an unsupported religious assertion.
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No, as always, you can’t see beyond your worldview blinders. You can’t seem to see that you are doing the very same thing you accuse me of. And, you have once again left the thing we were actually talking about to bring things back around to your comfort zone—the flood. You were right that you have the flood on the brain. You’re hiding from the fact that naturalism can’t answer the question I put to you. At least, it can’t in a way that is not philosophically embarrassing. On the last statement, so do you. You just can’t see it.
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The flood reference is simply to hammer home how in the complete absence of evidence just how ridiculous your incessant ‘worldview’ pleading is, and the fact you continue to be dishonest in this regard.
So, we go back to the ‘if’ , which is what kick started this thread.
And Caroll eloquently takes down the fine tuning argument.
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I have not ever been dishonest with you and don’t plan to be. You’re still avoiding the point.
The “if” is something you either misunderstood from the start or else used to take a pot shot in order to fire up another trip on this merry-go-round because you just can’t stay away for long.
And, like I said, I’ll watch the Carroll video as soon as I have the time. Hopefully tomorrow. But I’ve heard him argue against the fine tuning argument before. He was entirely unpersuasive then. Maybe this one will be different.
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To assert there is evidence of a global flood is dishonest as scientific evidence has flatly refuted such nonsense.
That you refuse to present this evidence you claim to have means your unsupported claims can be dismissed with impunity.
You used the word ‘if’ as if you were expressing doubt over the contention Jesus is supposed to return.
Don’t accuse me of missunderstanding if you don’t know how to properly convey what you mean.
If you want to rephrase you initial statement that’s fine, go ahead.
In the time you have spent trying to conjure up more lame excuses for your religious position you could probably have watched the video twice already.
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We’ve discussed that point ad nauseam. It’s like you’re a record with a skip in it.
You can defend your misunderstanding however will make you feel better about it.
And, again, I will watch the video when I have the time to sit down and give it the attention it deserves. You’ll have to wait impatiently until then.
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Discussed the Noachian Flood tale?
No sir, we have not ‘discussed’ at all.
You have made a claim and refused to support it with evidence then asserted that the fault in understanding lies with me.
That is patently dishonest.
Impatient? No. The video is only a few minutes long and as you have already suggested Caroll is unpursuassive I am surprised you feel you need to give it the attention it deserves or should I expect more apologetics?
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I’m attempting to show you the respect of meaningful engagement. You are admittedly making that a challenge. Alas, you’ll have to wait.
On the flood—because you seem incapable of not taking a conversation back here—I’ve explained my thinking on that more than once. If you forgotten it or lost the thread, so be it. As I have said many times lately, you didn’t like my answer then, and I don’t see any evidence you’ll like it any better now. Why bother doing it again?
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If you were serious about showing Caroll respect why were so openly disdainful and dismissive when I first posted the video clip?
Your answers are always apologetic in nature.
You reject the scientific evidence that has flatly refuted the Noachian Flood tale which, I remind you is a plagiarized version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
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See, when you make comments like that last one, you tip your hand on how little you really understand those ancient texts. Yes, they obviously share a common heritage (a heritage shared with many ancient cultures and not just those in the Middle East which raises the question of why so many different ancient cultures from different locations around the world all seem to have a collective memory of a major, seemingly global flood), but to call the one plagiarized off the other is incorrect and reflects a lack of careful study.
And I said I was showing you the respect of meaningful engagement, not Carroll. Read more carefully.
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Your reply is yet again an apologetic response.
That you simply refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence demonstrates wilfull ignorance which borders on blatent dishonesty.
There is evidence of massive localized flooding in the region in the distant past.
However, the Noachian Global Flood tale is a myth based on earlier such takes, most notable the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This is accepted history.
If you truly need me to explain why many cultures have flood tales then you really are struggling with gross ignorance and are so indoctrinated you very likely believe your own lies.
I did read carefully. The fact you were disdainful and dismissive of Caroll when I first posted the video is disresptful to me.
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Then I suppose I’ll have to bear that weight. I’ll do my best.
Still, for you to react with such huff at my dismissal of Carroll after you’ve reacted similarly to literally anyone else I’ve pointed you to is more than a little funny to me.
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Finally watched it. Quick thoughts.
1. He doesn’t address the question I put to you at all. If this was supposed to be a mic drop on the matter, I want to know who made the mic because we’re looking at ordering some new ones for the church and that one was really well built. That, or he set it down so gently that it didn’t make any noise.
2. His five reasons were profoundly uncompelling. The first one was a cop out on the question. The second one misunderstood the fine-tuning argument almost entirely. The third one offered piecemeal response that can’t possibly account for all that he wanted it to. His fifth point is just hand-waving away the issue.
3. His fourth argument against the fine-tuning argument brought into conversation the multiverse. This deserved its own bullet. That a scientist as well reputed as he is would even give the intellectual time of day to a theory that comes out of comic books should be embarrassing to him. There is absolutely zero evidence for a multiverse. It is entirely theoretical and only exists as an explanatory tool that helps to avoid the conclusions of theism. It is a position of faith, not science. What’s more, it doesn’t solve the fine-tuning question at all. It merely kicks the can down the road. Worse than that, it makes the fine-tuning problem vastly more significant than it was before introducing such pseudo-scientific nonsense.
4. None of the assumptions he makes about theism are justified. In fact, his final list of problems with theism over and against naturalism all comes as a result of looking at theism (and specifically Christian theism) through the lens of secularism. They bear all the hallmarks of someone looking at something he doesn’t really understand through a worldview lens that will leave him unable to make positive sense out of and nonetheless trying to make sense out of it. As genuine as I think his attempt is, he fails.
All told, this doesn’t answer my question to you in the least. He doesn’t even talk about the question of chance or necessity and doesn’t try to propose a third option. He just tries to handwave away the matter. He fails on that mark.
So, once again, try again. I’m still waiting for a cogent naturalistic explanation for why these physical constants are the way they are that doesn’t rely on chance.
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He explained it. But I suspect you simply don’t understand?
Therefore, if this is a choice between an indoctrinated Christian fundamentalist who is convinced he is a sinner and needed a 2000 year old narrative construct, the claimed creator of the universe, and as this deity in human form was compelled to die as a bloody, barbaric human sacrifice only to rise from the dead providing the key to eternal happiness in a man made paradise called Heaven or a highly qualified, highly respected theoretical physicist who is also an atheist, well guess which one I am going to choose?
So tell me, how exactly did the deity described above create the universe?
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Oh, I understood his arguments just fine. He was very clear. He was just wrong. Once again: he hypothesized the multiverse as a more-credible alternate explanation for the existence of these finely tuned physical constants than theism offers. That’s as bad as Francis Crick embracing panspermia to avoid the need for theism to explain the origins of the first life. If you’re willing to choose comic books over the Scriptures for your understanding of why the world is the way it is, that’s up to you. But don’t keep claiming some kind of dedication to science as your driving force. Just acknowledge that you’re making things up just as much as you accuse me of doing the same.
And he didn’t answer the question I put to you. So, I’m still waiting on that answer. When you are ready and able to give it, we can move forward.
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Wrong?
You, a fundamentalist Christian, are accusing a highly qualified theoretical physicist of being “wrong ”
Oh, well. In that case will you write and tell him or should we contact his place of employment that he is falsely representing science and reality abd should be smacked over the knuckles or removed?
On second thoughts, perhaps it might be best if before drastic measures are taken you explain exactly why he is wrong, which, by implication suggests you know the correct answer, yes?
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You can bluster all you want. It doesn’t change the fact that he hypothesized a multiverse in apparently all seriousness as a “highly qualified theoretical physicist.” Are you going on record with your belief that the multiverse is a totally valid, evidence-supported, scientific fact that explains the fine tuning of our universe?
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Oh, the response to. Your question.
Let me drill down to the very basics to make is as simple ( for me at any rate) as possible.
As ffar as I am aware there are two choices
And
2. Supernatural.
There is evidence for 1 but no evidence for 2.
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I’ll combine the two comments into one for simplicity sake.
You’re changing the subject to avoid answering the question. Do you think the multiverse theory is a scientifically credible explanation for the fine tuning of the universe?
Enjoy the rest of your day. Hurricane is approaching here. That’ll make for a wet and wild Thursday.
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Yes.
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So, evidence for the supernatural?. Ergo…. Your god , Yahweh a la the narrative Bible construct Jesus of Nazareth iresponsible for the creation of the universe…
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I greatly appreciate your honesty, but with that, “Yes,” you have now officially lost any credibility to criticize me or the Christian worldview for being a position of faith. Not legitimately anyway. Your willingness to accept the multiverse as a credible scientific theory is a position of faith. You have revealed yourselves to be a person of faith just like I am with equally religious convictions. You simply choose to put your faith in something different than I do.
In the entire history of humanity, nothing like the multiverse has ever had even the slightest bit of evidence in favor of its actual existence, nor do we have any kind of experience with such a thing’s being a cause for the kind of specified and complex information we find in the world around us.
We do, however, have a great deal of experience with a mind’s being the source of such specificity and complexity. Using Darwin’s own method of scientific reasoning, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that a mind was behind the creation of the world as we know it. That is a conclusion that falls fully within the purview of science. From there we can hand things off to the philosophers and theologians to work out exactly who this mind belongs to and what this being is like.
Your willingness to declare your belief in a comic book idea for which we have neither evidence nor experience reveals that your primary commitment is to naturalism, not science. The reason for that is not scientific, but philosophical. That is, it is your chosen worldview. This is the reason I keep bringing things back to worldview. It is the reason I have said over and over and over again that your worldview forces you to make certain conclusions while leaving you unable to accept, much less understand, others.
We can go on to talk about other things now, but don’t you dare tell me that I’m wrong on this or that point because of a lack of evidence anymore. Your willingness to accept the multiverse hypothesis reveals that you don’t really care about evidence unless it suits your purposes.
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While the multiverse is simply a theory it’s discovery, should it happen is still a natural phenomenon.
Because the natural world is all we have.
Just as the discovery of the poorly named Big Bang, the spherical earth not being the center of the universe, evolution and the fact the earth never experienced a global flood as per the plagiarized fictional tale of Noah and his big boat.
So, to put it in terms you may find easier to grasp.
Until you can provide evidence of the supernatural everything, whether real or currently theorized has /will have a naturalistic origin/ explanation.
Now as you flat out reject this I will ask you once again, please provide the evidence that ( you claim to possess) your god, Yahweh/Jesus of Nazareth is the creator deity you claim is responsible for the universe
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It would be a natural phenomenon that doesn’t answer the question at all, but kicks the can down the road to be answered later. It is a comic book cop out faith position designed from the ground up to avoid the conclusion of the rationalism of theism.
We’ve talked about the evidence for the existence of the supernatural before. Your worldview limitations resulted in your rejecting it. I’m not interested in going back over it again.
You’re asking once again for empirical evidence unless you’ve updated your definition. I’ve told you over and over again that empirical evidence of the kind you regularly insist upon doesn’t exist for a position that is supernatural. I’m not interested in having any more of that conversation with you.
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There is NO rationalism of theism, and certainly not the barbaric, revolting religion of Christianity. And you are yet to present any evidence of your god, Yahweh!/Jesus of Nazareth.
While the multiverse hypothesis is currently just a theory, it does have physicists working on the possibility of its existence. And again, whatever is resolved the answer will be naturalistic.
However, you have absolutely nothing to support your claim that Yahweh/Jesus of Nazareth is responsible.
In fact, the mere notion a 2000 year old victim of crucifiction could be the creator of everything we know is simply risible.
Therefore, the only possible way for one to accept such a notion is through active and passive indoctrination, a fact that is borne out with evidence.
You don’t even have the integrity to acknowledge the Noachian Global Flood is a plagiarized work of fiction so how dare you assert it is ‘my worldview’ that prevents me from understanding.
Your worldview blinds you to certain simple basic realities and your religious indoctrination has made you dishonest in it’s defense.
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Thus, we keep going around and around in circles. Remember: you signed up for this. You’ll have to find another line of attack when you jump in on another post. You’ve tipped your hand here and shown yourself to be not a smidgeon above the things you accuse me of because, yes, your worldview won’t let you go any further. That’s all I’m going to give to this one.
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Tipped my hand?
Bollocks! I have openly acknowledged the multiverse is simply a theory, but there are physicists working on it and a number who consider it a real possibility. Furthermore if it pans out it will be naturalistic.
Do you understand this? Not divine. Not supernatural, but naturalistic.
Nothing, and I mean absolutely fark all has EVER been shown to have a supernatural origin.
Your worldview can’t go anywhere as it is all simply BS.
This is why you refuse to even attempt to offer any evidence for your god, the former Canaanite deity, Yahweh.
As I said, you haven’t the integrity to acknowledge the Noachian Global Flood tale is nothing but a work of plagiarized fiction, and you say I have tipped my hand.
You are simply an indoctrinated Christian fundamentalist whose pathetic worldview is dependant on you believing you are a sinner desperately seeking salvation via the blood of a barbaric 1st century human sacrifice.
And this is the individual you are convinced is the creator of the universe!
Good grief.
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Yes, I understand very well that you are deeply, religiously committed to naturalism. Because of those determinedly thick naturalistic set of lenses, you can’t imagine a world that has a supernatural element to it. You are so committed to this end, in fact, that you are willing to place your faith in a comic book theory in hopes of giving justification to your beliefs.
You can ignorantly criticize and caricaturize the Christian worldview all you want, but it just comes off now like you are trying to push attention away from the fact that you are a person of faith just like I am. You have faith that physicists will find this evidence one day that will totally justify your naturalism. This is different only in detail from the faith of many Christians that believing scientists and researchers will find evidence to justify beyond faith a belief in an ancient flood.
You too are an indoctrinated fundamentalist. Again, you have put your faith in a comic book theory. You just happen to be a naturalistic fundamentalist instead of a Christian one. You may prefer your religion over mine, but let’s finally dispense with the nonsense that you aren’t a religious person.
Good grief indeed.
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Amazing, here you are a devout fundamentalist Creationist who is not only dishonest but replies to comments with snide backhanded remarks and a smug, sanctimonious holier than thou attitude.
And now you accuse me of being religious
So we can add disingeious and liar to your list of attributes.
Finally you have shown your true colours.
Didn’t take too much of a push, now did it, Jonathan?
So much for thou shalt not bear false witness.
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You can deflect and bluster and insult all you need to. It’s not taking away from what is fundamentally true. You are a religious person with a deep faith in naturalism.
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I consider naturalism is the only thing there us evidence fir.
You, on the other hand, are a disingenius ignoramus with a massive chip on your shoulder. If this were not the case you would simply present the evidence for your religious beliefs and we would be done.
I am deadly serious, the sooner you recognise this fact, are prepared to look at yourself honestly, the sooner you will be able to face your congregation and finally admit you really do not believe all this nonsense and all you are doing is faking it.
I recommend you go visit the clergy project. Com and take some time over the testimonials.
Come now, Jonathan. Time to put on your big boy pants and be a man.
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Naturalism doesn’t have evidence for it the way you mean. It is a philosophical position that you use to interpret the various facts of creation and by that come to the conclusions you do. The same is true of theism.
That being said, no, I don’t suspect we would be done if I could somehow furnish the evidence you keep demanding. You know how every conversation we have is going to go because they’ve all gone the same way. And yet you keep coming back each time. The only difference this time is that you have pulled back the curtain on just how motivated by faith in all of this you really are. It makes my repeated observation that you are an evangelical atheist seem more and more correct.
I’m not exactly sure how reading the angry and hurt reports of a relative handful of people equates with being a man or wearing big boy pants. This is especially true when you consider that their admittedly bad experiences don’t have any bearing on the truthfulness or not of the Christian worldview. Truth isn’t determined by experience.
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“Facts of creation” ?
Bollocks!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Evolution is fact. There’s your answer right there. Period.
Provide evidence of creation.
“Motivated by faith..”
You really are naughty, Jonathan, continuously lying through your backside.
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You believe in the multiverse as an explanation for the fine tuning of the universe. You said it. Not me. There is no evidence for the multiverse. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. (I feel like our roles have been reversed here.) But don’t worry…physicists are working on it. Call it whatever makes you feel better, but that’s faith.
And, yes, evolution is a fact. What’s your point? You’re still not seeming to understand the philosophical nature of this conversation which results in replies like this one. Our only difference is that our respective religions aren’t the same.
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Not faith. If anything I trust that scientists will eventually discover the answer.
In the meantime the multiverse se theory is a far more rationak answer than asserting the former Canaanite deity Yahwrh/Jesus of Nazareth is responsible, which is simply risible.
You are simply behaving like an obnoxious did ingenious prat simply because you know damn well you have not one piece of evidence for a single foundational tenet of your revolting religion.
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No on the second part, but I do confess that I am somewhat enjoying getting under your skin by pointing out and not letting you get away from the philosophical realities of the position you have adopted for yourself. That you believe the existence of a comic book reality is a more rational answer than the existence of supernatural God is nothing more than an effect of the worldview you hold…by faith. You said it yourself. You trust that scientists will eventually discover the answer that they do not yet have and don’t have any evidence for. That’s literally a biblical definition of faith. Hebrews 11:1. You are a person of religious faith whether you want to accept that or not. And that, after all the storm and fury you have drummed up about religion and faith over the months of our conversations, is hysterical to me. You are free to get as worked up as you need to about that.
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Not getting under my skin at all.
I am laughing my arse off at the fact you have finally exposed yourself for what you truly are.
I am not in the least bit surprised by the way.
At the core you are no different from the likes of Strobel, Turek, Craig and any number of hypocritical ignorant apologists who, in the absence of evidence or even basic integrity, are forced to try to drag every non-believer down to their level.
You should spend some time watching Christopher Hitchens videos
Found that evidence for the Noachian Global Flood, yet?
😂😂😂
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Your increasingly strident vitriol could have fooled me, but so be it. And, yes, I’m just like those guys. I’m a committed follower of Jesus who accepts the truthfulness and reasonableness of the Christian worldview. I thought I had long since made that clear.
And on your tag line…Found that evidence for the multiverse yet? We are both men of faith. Almost twins, but not quite.
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Well as a believer in Yahweh that really doesn’t say much for how easily you are fooled then does it?
Oh, here’s an interesting fact for you to contemplate with regards your continual stupidity about the Noachian Global Flood.
The top most part of Mount Everest is composed of marine limestone.
I will let you figure this one out for yourself.
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Another thing I find so funny here is that we’ve basically swapped roles as far as how these conversations usually go. Usually it’s the atheist trying to provoke the believer who keeps trying to change the subject and finally gets mad and starts name calling or issuing out condemnations. Here, we’ve arrived at just the opposite place. You keep trying to change the subject and are falling to insults and condemnations.
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In actual fact the question I asked is highly relevant.
Have you managed to work it out yet, or are you afraid to Google the reason ?
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I didn’t actually give it any thought because I honestly don’t care. That’s your theologically hobby horse, not mine.
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Well if you were vaguely interested in being honest instead of incessantly being disingenious you would give it some thought
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No, I’m just focused on the questions related to the Christian worldview that matter rather than being borderline obsessively focused on ones that don’t.
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In context, this has quite a profound impact on your continued irrational adherence to your Noachian Global Flood claim.
Do you need it spelled out for you or will you finally have the integrity to acknowledge the implications?
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No, see, the mistake you are making is in thinking that anything you have to say about the Flood matters or has any kind of an impact at all on whether or not I believe Jesus rose from the dead and is thus worth following, much less on the larger coherence of the Christian worldview. Even if for some reason the Flood didn’t happen at all or at least anything like what the text describes, Jesus still rose from the dead, so the geological composition of the top of Mount Everest isn’t something I care about. Nor do I have to.
And, all of that is beside the point that you are doing little more than criticizing one position of faith as a representative of a different faith. Given how profoundly little you really understand what you are criticizing, your criticism does little more than to fall flat. You may find it compelling, but as I have explained to you in one way or another many, many times, you don’t really have a sense of what would be compelling to someone on this side of the line of this particular faith, so you’re not accomplishing much more than to make digital noise.
And, lest we lose the point: you have faith in a comic book theory. You don’t get to legitimately criticize faith in a God anymore.
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The fact that you dismiss this, is indicative of your dishonesty in this matter. And it obviously does, matter otherwise you would have acknowledged up front the Bible tale was a plagiarized work of fiction.
You only make matters worse by your adherence to other erroneous beliefs – your hilarious non answer about Pharoah’s army – and numerous other theological, nonsensical drivel, including the foundational tenets of your faith.
That you get shown up time and again for just how indoctrinated you are is further illustrated by your desperate need to try to drag me down to your level.
It really is quite pathetic that you have to resort to such childish antics rather than step up to the plate and display even a small degree of integrity.
As I wrote earlier, you really should spend some time over at theclergy project. com
At least you might come to understand what honesty and integrity are all about.
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Having given this a little more thought, and a little more reading, I see where you are coming from with regard the multiverse argument. Which has proponents for and against. There are some very interesting ideas/theories out there. Many of which are fat too mathematically complicated for me to grasp.
Be thatvas it may. Correct me if I am wrong.
Your argument is: In the absence of verifiable evidence acceptance of the possibility of a mulitiverse is based purely on faith, ergo your assertion that this aspect of my supposed naturalistic worldview is, in your mind, a religious perspective or even a form of actual religion.
Am I understanding you correctly?
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Well, I would quibble a bit with the language of “supposedly” and “in your mind,” but yes, that’s pretty much the argument I have been making.
But, as naturalism is a worldview position and not a scientific one that is rooted first in philosophy, not science (which is not the same thing as saying naturalists don’t make scientific arguments; they do because that’s about the only kind of arguments they can make) the entire worldview is different only in detail from any other worldview that is explicitly linked with a particular religion. (This is not to say that all of these different worldviews are equally valid, let alone equally correct. That’s a different question altogether.)
So, while that is indeed part of my argument, it is also bigger than just that. You are correct in part, though.
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Excellent!
While I will, of course flatly reject the notion of ‘my religion’ , which is just plain silly, I will accept there is currently no hard and fast evidence to support the multiverse theory.
Therefore, would it be fair to say that for my position to be justifiable/ valud5, verifiable evidence is key?
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I’m pretty sure I see where you are going here. You’re setting up another attack on/challenge to my own position on the basis of what you perceive as a lack of empirical evidence.
The trouble you keep running into in doing this, though, is that you keep constructing these challenges from within your naturalistic worldview framework which cannot properly make sense of what and why I believe what I do.
Perhaps most notably, mine is a supernatural worldview and yours is not. Yours only accepts empirical explanations for things (except the multiverse, of course, but we’re not talking about that presently). But, the existence of the supernatural is not something that is provable or disprovable on empirical (i.e., natural) grounds. It is SUPERnatural.
Because of this it will only ever seem illogical and silly to you unless and until you learn or at least become willing to see things through a different set of lenses.
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Oh, I firmly agree the supernatural is not provable or testable on any (known) grounds.
Thus, it is purely a position of faith determined by (in Christianity’s case) a theistic worldview. This l accept.
And you are absolutely correct, my naturalistic position, whether methological or philosophical does not
inlude the possibility of the divine.
While you, on the other hand, most certainly do accept the divine.
I presume you also accept that a great many things about our reality can and are determined by empirical means?
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Of course, although I would again quibble a bit with your description of Christian theism as being “purely a position of faith.” But, in the sense that any worldview frames out how we see and understand the facts of the world around us prior to our encountering these facts such that every worldview is a position of faith at its heart, I suppose I can accept that language in those terms.
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Nothwithstanding your theistic position, do you have an example of something you accept purely on empirical grounds?
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It would probably be a shorter list of things I don’t accept.
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Well, can you give me a few examples?
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How about gravity.
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There we go.
You acknowkedge we have evidence for it as well, I presume?
Any others?
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How about jump to where you’re trying to steer things?
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I am trying to establish to what degree you accept empirical evidence without the inclusion of Theism. It is an interesting exercise I have never discussed with Christian before
So, gravity is one.
Are there others?
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I’m always up for genuine interest conversations over mocking ones.
What I don’t think you are quite coming to appreciate in the way you need to in order to get your mind fully around this is that on the Christian worldview, empirical truths and spiritual truths are not two different things that are somehow totally independent or otherwise mutually exclusive of one another. Theism (and for me, specifically Christian theism) forms the frame of reference for understanding everything that is true. The same is true of naturalism, by the way, but in a different way because of the different philosophical commitments to which it holds.
What this means is that there aren’t things that are empirically true, but not spiritually true or vice versa. There is simply what is true. And while some truths can be verified primarily by empirical means (again, gravity since I’ve already identified that one), some can only be verified by spiritual means. Both are equally true. At the same time, when something is held to be spiritually true and seems to be contradicted by empirical evidence, the process of sorting out what is the real truth can be messy.
For Christian theists, God’s character and identity is the final arbiter of all truth, but the Scriptures, rightly understood, are the means by which we know it. That “rightly understood” caveat is superlatively important. If we don’t understand the Scriptures properly, we will run into all kinds of situations where we claim one thing or another to be true, but isn’t really because of our misunderstanding (cavemen riding on dinosaurs, for instance), that can needlessly put us at odds with what empirical methods have determined to be true about it.
At the same time, because of the inherent imperfection of empirical methods for determining truth (most notably that they are not able to be pursued entirely free from any kind of bias that could potentially either sway results in the wrong direction or else result in their being interpreted incorrectly), there will occasionally also be times when something that appears to be true empirically, but in a way that contradicts what the Scriptures proclaim to be true, turns out either not to be true at all or else is actually true in a way that is perfectly harmonized with what the Scriptures proclaim to be true.
Where this lands for your question is that it is an odd question. Putting together a list of truths that can be verified empirically doesn’t make sense to me because if something is true, whether that is empirically true or spiritually true, I’m not going to have any trouble accepting it. Where we are going to run into disagreements, though (and indeed, where we have run into many, many disagreements), is on whether or not some things you insist are empirically true and in ways that obviously (if they are indeed true) seem to contradict the Scriptures are really true or merely seem to be for now, but which further study and investigation may very well reveal to be either not true or else true in a way that harmonizes easily with what the Scriptures proclaim to be true. That brings us back to the “rightly understood” part of role of the Scriptures in helping us to determine truth.
One other thought here. We have to handle the Scriptures correctly more generally in this whole effort. Namely, because the Scriptures were not composed as a single unit (“the Bible”), a potential error in one part (I’m saying that for the sake of argument, not because I believe there to be errors in the Scriptures when rightly understood) doesn’t have any impact on the truthfulness of another. More specifically since you keep bringing things back to this, if there never was a global flood, the Genesis narrative’s getting that completely wrong doesn’t have any impact on the claim of the New Testament authors that Jesus rose from the dead.
What this means is that as a Christian theist, my faith in Jesus has remained secure in the face of pretty much every argument you have ever levied against it. In fact, you have yet to make an argument that has caused me to question my commitment to Christ. This because you are making arguments rooted in a naturalistic worldview and which make sense on that worldview, but which don’t gain any traction on a worldview of Christian theism. Maybe to put this in another way: while you think you are attacking the foundations of my position, you are really just trying to smash furniture in a skyscraper thinking that’s going to make the whole thing topple over. If it ever feels to you like none of your arguments are gaining any traction, that’s why.
I’m certain that’s a great deal more than you wanted, but you seemed to be in a learning posture, so I took the opportunity to do some teaching. Maybe that’ll all go into a blog one of these days.
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Do you believe in theistic Creationism?
Can you give me an example of something that can be only be verified by spiritual means?
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Clarify what you mean by “theistic Creationism.”
And the resurrection would be an example of something that fits in that category. While there are many arguments that bear out the reasonableness of accepting that as the historical truth that it is, it cannot be empirically proven and is ultimately a position of faith. It is still entirely true, but spiritual means will provide the confirmation of that truthfulness.
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Theistic evolution.
So accepting the Resurrection is a position of faith, but cannot actually be verified.
Can you offer something more up to date /modern?
And how old do you think the universe is?
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I don’t agree with the theistic evolution position. For starters, I don’t think the evidence supports the kind of speciation (one species becoming a different species over a sufficient amount of time, and, no, I don’t consider the Galapagos finches an example of the kind of speciation that I’m talking about here) required by Darwin’s theory. Simply saying, “Well, God did it that way,” falls flat both scientifically and theologically.
Theistic evolutionists try to have it both ways. They want to have Darwin’s theory be completely correct, but they also want to say God did it all. The trouble is that Darwin’s theory is definitionally undirected. How can you say something is undirected and God-directed at the same time? That’s a contradiction in terms.
While I am perfectly happy to accept small evolution within a larger species (including finches of one beak size to another, which, as I’m sure you know, have a tendency to go back to the first break size over time depending on climate and food source variations in a cyclical pattern) because the evidence clearly supports that. The fossil evidence does not support the larger kind of speciation necessary to explain the full variety of flora and fauna on earth on Darwin’s theory. God created according to each creature’s kind and those kinds have developed from there.
Accepting the resurrection is a position of faith, yes, but one made imminently reasonable by examining the known evidence of history. Another example of a truth that cannot be verified empirically would be the love we believe someone has for us. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you love your wife and kids, and what’s more, they love you. You can’t prove it, though. Not scientifically. You can point to a number of points of evidence in favor of that conclusion, but there’s no amount of testing that will absolutely confirm what is in their hearts for you. At the end of the day, you have faith that they love you. You know it is true, but you cannot actually verify that as you can the strength of earth’s gravitational pull. You know that truth spiritually, not empirically.
As for the age of the universe, if I”m not mistaken, the currently dominant view among the relevant scientists is that it is about 15 billion years old and that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. I’m good with those numbers.
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So you are an Old Earth Creationist, yes?
The fossil evidence does support evolution, in actual fact.
Common descent is well documented.
Embryology and DNA form part of this evidence.
The HGP is another example.
There is no evidence of the resurrection.
Faith is all there is, I’m afraid.
There us no known history of the resurrection only the stories in anonymous gospels.
gMatt and gLuke used gMark as a template for their own versions copying large swathes.
Furthermore the long ending of gMark is a known forgery.
Would it be fair to say then, that you are happy accepting scientific evidence up to the point it clashes with the word (creation) of your god, Yahweh?
I
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I suppose I’m a creationist in the sense that I do in fact believe that God is primarily responsible for creation. I definitely accept an old age of the earth.
The fossil evidence does not support the kind of speciation that is fundamental to Darwin’s theory. Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt covers this in explicitly scientific terms at length. Common descent in academic literature is not well documented. There have been many hoaxes and things that looked like examples but which turned out not to be after more examination over the years, but the evidence just isn’t there.
I said there’s not empirical evidence for the resurrection. I don’t dispute that. But the secondary evidence of things we know from history make the conclusion reasonable. You’ve made those same arguments against it before and they fell flat then too.
And, the way you frame that question at the end, no, I don’t think that’s fair because of what you are implying by it. That’s a framing from out of a naturalistic worldview. I reject that worldview and so I reject the framing. I don’t think there’s any scientific evidence, properly understood, that needs to be rejected because none of it will ultimately clash with reality as God created it. Rather, I think there are things we either don’t understand like we think we do, understand improperly, or understand incompletely.
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Meyer is a proponent of ID
I might just as well listen to Ken Ham.
What secondary evidence for the resurrection claims are you referring to?
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We’ve been over all those before and you didn’t like them then. Your unwillingness to accept the historical claims of pretty much any of the New Testament moves many of those secondary evidences out of reach. Habermas makes the case here, but you’ve long since rejected that.
And, having a reasonable conversation here is difficult when you keep defaulting back to bad internet caricaturizations of ID rather than taking them at their word. That effectively lets you avoid having to actually deal with its arguments, but it’s not a terribly honest approach to take on the matter.
Meyer and Ham are nearly as different in their approaches as are Meyer and Carroll. To conflate the letter with the former in order to conveniently dismiss his arguments suggests to me that you don’t really understand either of their positions very well; at least, not beyond bad internet caricatures of them.
But, if you are going to stick with that position, it’s really not a subject that’s going to be worth our time going back to. We’ve already covered that ground more than once.
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The gospels are anonymous and the long ending of gMark is forged. This is simply old news.
So, I ask again, what other evidence are you referring to?
ID is Creationism in a party dress. We both know this and Meyer is promoting your god, Yahweh as the designer and has admitted this.
Of course there are transitional fossils. Where do you imagine birds came from?
As I wrote before you accept science until it comes into direct conflict with your religious beliefs – insert Yahweh here.
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Old news. Yes, that argument was bad when you made it, and it still is. Yes, the Gospels are officially anonymous, but reports of the church fathers dating back to an individual who likely knew John personally have always ascribed to them the traditional authorship. I would trust their take on the matter far more than a modern skeptical scholar who literally has a vested interest in their continuing anonymity. You’re making more of the point than can really be made about it as something that supports your case. Paul’s writings also offer secondary evidence. But, as we have already talked about, you’ve rejected those already and on similarly weak grounds.
On ID, no, we don’t both know that at all, and your willingness to literally do the thing I just said you are doing and which reflects a lack of understanding of the matter doesn’t really help your case. The “creationism in a party dress” trope is a bad internet atheism attack that never had any really grounding in reality, and certainly doesn’t reflect any honest engagement.
Read Darwin’s Doubt and the technical literature he cites there, then we can talk about the actual existence (or lack thereof) of transitional fossils.
And, you are referring to the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. Number one, using that here reflects that ongoing lack of understanding of ID. Rather than scoping out what you can find on the Internet (much less the truly terrible Wikipedia page about it), try actually reading the major books on the matter for yourself. Number two, if you don’t like the ______-of-the-gaps arguments, what do you think something the multiverse hypothesis is except for a naturalism-of-the-gaps argument?
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And this is why you are dishonest, and I am sorry to say wilfully ignorant.
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Oh, and where do you imagine birds came from? Did you miss this?
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As you regularly assert I do not fully address your comments, here is an expansion on my brief reply.
Biologos rejected Meyer’s work and although they are a little more polite and thorough in their rebuttal of his book than I am, they also consider ID is Creationism in a Party Dress.
So did the US Supreme Court if memory serves?
We all remember the Wedge Document, I hope?
I have not read Meyer’s book(s) and do not need to as I prefer not to be bamboozled by bullshit and thus it is far more informative to read what scientists conclude.
It is enlightening that of those I have read a number mention what Meyer does NOT discuss, especially his omissions when it comes to the Cambrian explosion (a misnomer if ever there was one)
This on its own is enough to show Meyer has an agenda, a point made by by the reviewers at Biologos ( again, who do it in a polite manner).
Of course I am not in a position to write an exhaustive critique, and neither am I qualified to do so.
So there we have it. Meyer was trying to smuggle Creationism into the classroom via ID and was caught red handed.
His book is still out there but it’s only appeal is for those who are already on board with ID and are blinded by the bullshit. Or at least bamboozled enough not to bother to critically examine the other side.
So we are back to the G OT G.
Now, the truly wonderful thing about this is, like evolution, step by step, bit by bit, scientific discovery is pushing the bible character Yahweh/ Jesus of Nazareth further and further out of the picture, and this includes the likes of Stephen Meyer and the Discovery Institute et al.
Isn’t it ironic how certain prominant Christians are inadvertently aiding in this cause? Francis Collins is one and Meyer and his ilk are helping on the other side of the spectrum.
And to date there is not a single aspect of science that points to a deity/ creator and certainly not a shred that suggests your god, Yahweh/Jesus of Nazareth is behind it all.
Furthermore, this is not due to viewing life through some sort of biased lens but merely accepting reality for what it is without the need to build a religious/supernatural crutch (and all the disgusting dogma/criteria this involves) for certain insecurities.
Nothing wrong with ignorance, mind you. It provides a jump off point to seek, to discover to learn.
I have said before, there is no evidence to support the foundational tenets of your religious beliefs and faith is all that upholds you.
This view is held by countless highly qualified people and not run of the mill come as you are skeptics like me.
So unless indoctrination plays a part you should at least have the integrity to acknowkedge this.
Oh, and if you are interested, I came across a fascinating, and thorough scientific/ geological explanation why the Noachian Global flood as told in the bible never happened and could not possibly have happened. It sticks to the science with no need to go into logistics of Noah as a ship building maritime zoo keeper and all that nonsense.
All factual and commonsense with loads of straightforward evidence.
I can provide a link if you would like to read it?
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I’m well aware of Biologos’ rejection of ID and their take on Meyer’s work. I simply think they’re wrong, and betray the same ignorance (which on their part is hard to see as other than totally willful) of what ID is all about as I pointed out that you are doing as well.
It wasn’t the Supreme Court that rejected ID’s being taught in classrooms, but a federal appellate court in the Dover Case. The judge in that case was clueless about the issues at hand and basically let the Biologos side write his opinion for him. It was an embarrassingly bad opinion in the sense that it reflected his total ignorance of the issues and his heavy reliance on one side of the matter because of his political leanings rather than approaching the matter in a fair and balanced way. Plus, the Dover case did not have the support of the Discovery Institute. The school district that was sued was taking an approach they did not support in the matter.
On Meyer’s book (trio of books, really) until you’ve read them, I’ll take your opinions on them as uninformed. The very idea that you wouldn’t engage thoroughly and honestly with views you reject so that you can reject intelligently and properly rather than relying on caricatures seems rather disingenuous to me. I mean, come on: You don’t want to read them so you don’t get bamboozled? Are you that insecure in your position that you have to rely on someone else to tell you what to think rather than doing the work yourself? I had thought not, but this makes you come across rather…I don’t know…indoctrinated?
On the pushing out that science is supposedly doing of faith, I won’t hold my breath while I wait for the fruits of their successful attempt to come to bear. I wouldn’t hold my breath I were you either. Unless you’re a pearl diver. Those guys and gals can hold their breath for a really long time. I’m not that good.
On your third big paragraph there, that’s all just worldview speaking. It’s you speaking about the Christian worldview from out of a naturalism. As we have talked about time and again, trying to make sense out of the Christian worldview from the standpoint of naturalism will always fail and leave you looking like you don’t know what you’re talking about. It has before and it still does. If you really want to reject the Christian worldview, stop relying on bad internet atheism tropes, read the best books we have to offer so that you can understand it for yourself and on its own terms, then you can offer meaningful critiques. Until then, you’re just taking pot shots from the outside in, criticizing matters you don’t really understand well enough to score any points.
And for the umpteenth time, I’m just not interested in talking about the Flood.
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I explained why I will not bother to read Meyer, I am not qualified to offer a genuine critique, which is why I turn to those scientists who ARE qualified, and this included those from Biologos.
They critiqued not only what he said but what he did NOT say. And I highlighted that Meyer omitted certain facts about the Cambrian explosion.
That you believe they are wrong is meaningless until you can explain why and also explain Meyer’s omissions.
And if you are not at least as qualified as those from Biologos, let alone the secular scientists I read then you would be wise to curb your criticism, especially of me.
No need to hold my breath. Science is doing all the pushing aside and when you consider how far it has come already it won’t be that long.
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If you say so on that last part.
As for the rest, unless and until you have read him yourself to form your own opinion (which you are perfectly qualified to do; his writing is very clear and readable, and he is very well sourced), all you have done is let someone else tell you what to think. To put it in terms you like using, you have allowed yourself to be indoctrinated into a certain perspective. Until that point, your criticisms don’t hold any water. And I’ve both read and listened to Meyer offer responses to his critics from Biologos and other places on each of the various points they have raised. Their criticisms don’t carry nearly the weight you give them when properly addressed by the guy who wrote the book himself. This point isn’t worth further discussion as you haven’t read the relevant material. Let’s not waste our time.
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Again,
1. He has a presuppositional agenda.
2. He omits and smudges critical data which I would not be aware of or likely understand.
3.That this is pointed out by highly qualified scientists is telling in itself.
That they are also Christian is the icing in the cake. And in his initial response Meyer failed to address the omissions.
The fact you simply dismiss these Christians and ( and let’s bring in the Catholic Church as well at this point) decree them to be wrong without even attempting to offer any sort of qualified critique is the height of arrogance and, to be frank, blatent pig ignorance. So much so it is contemptable.
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It really galls you that I won’t just agree with you, doesn’t it? And, honestly, I would go with something more like sheep ignorance instead of pig ignorance. Pigs are pretty intelligent creatures.
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Not at all.
I find it highly amusing the fact you Christians simply cannot agree.
All the ridiculous nonsense you put forth merely reinforces the assertion you are all indoctrinated to be degree or another
This adds more credence to the fact that what all of you believe is, ostensibly, a load of old cobblers.
Yes, thank you for the animal correction. It isn’t fair to malign pigs.
Mindless sheep would be a closer and more apt analogy.
Would the Pope be the Judas goat or would this role be played be the character Jesus of Nazareth?
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You are not consolidating to one thread. I’ll laugh along with you here, but I’ll do it over there later.
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I meant to write evolutionary Creationism. Sorry.
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Not a worry, and that makes more sense. I’m about to head home from the office and wrangle children while trying to work for the afternoon. I’ll be back with more later.
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Sorry. Have to curtail this for a while. Work calls.
And the multiverse theory is still a naturalistic approach.
Bear in mind you still consider the Noachian global flood to likely be fact and also the disappearence of Pharoah’s army via Yahweh’s intervention a valid explanation.
Are you going to go on record with those?
🤦
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