Out of Egypt

Dagood has replied to my rebuttal. He buried his reply in the combox over at Debunking Christianity. Having read his reply, I can well understand why he consigned it to obscurity.

“Dating of Exodus Again, steve brings up Kitchen, and the complete lack of evidence of Exodus not necessarily meaning it never happened. I did not intend to go through all the problems with the Exodus itself in this blog, just the Plagues. (Too long!)”

i) The “complete lack of evidence” disregards my follow-up post on Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/04/israel-in-egypt.html

ii) Again, Kitchen’s immediate point is not about summarizing the state of the evidence, but about what evidence we can expect to survive given the conditions of the Delta.

Do we good reason to expect more evidence? Is that expectation unfounded? That’s the point.

iii) Let's be clear on one thing at the outset: intransigent unbelievers don’t care about archeological evidence. There’s a long history of unbelievers denying Biblical claims in the absence of corroborative evidence.

And every time an archaeologist makes a discovery which confirms a Biblical claim, the unbelievers go right on denying the historicity of Scripture.

All they do is to retreat to the ever-narrowing circle of the remaining uncorroborated claims.

iii) In addition, it isn’t necessary to have direct and independent corroboration for everything someone says to find him credible.

“However, as an example, I would encourage anyone to read the excerpt of Kitchen. It shows how forced the archeologist must go to attempt to maintain any viability to the Exodus. Kitchen notes that where the Hebrews allegedly lived was primarily mud, and therefore writing would not have existed.”

“Now I would hope that steve would be at least a little more skeptical. Why do the records have to ONLY be written where the slaves lived? There would be other records of slave trade, not necessarily JUST in the Delta.”

i) This is a very deceptive summary of what Kenneth Kitchen said, as if we do have extensive written records for everything else at that time and place—but not, suspiciously, for the slave-trade or Exodus.

This is what Kitchen said: “Scarce wonder that practically no written records of any extent have been retrieved from Delta sites…And in the mud, 99 percent of discarded papyri have perished forever; a tiny fraction (of late date) have been found carbonized (burned… Otherwise, the entirety of Egypt’s administrative records at all periods in the Delta is lost; and monumental texts are also nearly nil.”

ii) Kitchen does say “a tiny fraction (of late date) have been found carbonized (burned…A tiny fraction of reports from the East Delta occur in papyri recovered from the desert near Memphis.”

So not all our records were lost, but what survived is extremely fragmentary.

iii) Apropos Memphis, this was the chief administrative center of Egypt. But little has survived the ravages of time. Cf. “Memphis,” The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archeology (Zondervan 1983), 310.

If Dagood actually knew any Egyptian history or archeology, he’d know this, and not continue to raise such empty-headed objections.

iv) Kitchen also says that “pharaohs never monumentalize defeats on temple walls, no record of the successful exit of a large bunch of foreign slaves (with loss of a full chariot squadron) would ever have been memorialized by any king, in temples in the Delta or anywhere else.”

So there’s more than one factor to account for the state of the evidence.

My original quote from Kitchen already anticipates Dagood’s objections. He turns a blind eye to what was stated.

“Further, is Kitchen claiming that the Hebrews were ONLY used in the Delta?”

The Exodus narrative is centered in the Delta.

“Part of the reason for the dating of the Exodus in the 13th Century BCE is to place their existence in the reign of Rameses II, at the time of building the cities Pithom and Ramses. (Ex. 1:11) Is Kitchen stating that these cities were made of mud?”

Kitchen already addressed that objection as well: “Even great temples reduced to heaps of tumbled stones.”

“I apologize for not getting any deeper in terms of the Exodus, and again encourage anyone to go read some books (not websites) as to the problems involved.”

Yes, and Hoffmeier’s monograph would be a good place to start.

“And steve, the dates are NEVER irrespective of the evidence. Those that favor an earlier date do so because of the inability to coordinate the evidence with the later date. Those that favor a later date recognize the problems intrinsic with the earlier date. Those that favor an entirely different millennium (!) see the problems with both of these dates.”

“Never” is a fine example of Dagood’s hyperbole.

The evidence which I cited distinguishes between the first millennium BC and the second millennium BC, not between the 13C BC and the 15C BC. So the evidence I cited is irrespective of whether one favors the early or late date of the Exodus.

“Think of this—the single most important event in Hebrew history, and the archeologists/historians cannot even agree which Century it happened in, due to the problems with evidence!”

How is that surprising? We don’t have a continuous calendar extending from our own time back into the ANE. Reconstructing a relative or absolute chronology for ancient history is extremely complicated and inherently provisional, in attempting to piece together a timeline from fragmentary and diverse sources of information, such as regnal years, astronomical records, as well as lithic and ceramic typology. The ANE had more than one calendar at more than one time and place.

“But let’s move on to the Plagues:

“I see, you too, fall into the concept that ‘every’ does not mean ‘every’ and ‘all’ does not mean ‘all’ and the person writing this was using grandiose generalizations. Is God always this indistinct in his inspiration? When the Flood covered the whole earth, does this just mean ‘some’ of the earth? (Gen. 7:17) When the author states that every living thing perished, is this just more hyperbole? (Gen. 7:21-23).”

“While you claim the patter is from “general to specific” you give no examples in the Plagues. Where does God state, for example “All Egyptian livestock died” (Ex. 9:6) and then later specifically state it was only the livestock of a certain area, or personage? (Psuedo-Exodus 58:52??).”

i) No, nothing “grandiose.” Just an innocent, garden-variety generality.

ii) I said that quantifiers are context-sensitive, and I went on to specify in every case just what I meant. Pity Dagood can’t read the fine print. It’s all there.

iii) The point at issue is not the inspiration of the text, but the intelligence of the reader. Does the reader pay attention to quantitative caveats within the text, as well as the overall shape of the narrative? Or does he seize on a few isolated expressions, in defiance of the way in which their usage is implicitly and explicitly qualified in the course of the narrative.

God inspired the writer, not the reader. If a reader is dense or chooses to misread the text so that he can force it into self-contradiction by willfully disregarding internal clues and caveats, then he is welcome to his self-deception.

All Dagood does is to drop all of the qualifications given in the course of the narrative, then proclaim the narrative internally inconsistent.

“I certainly agree that there is a mean between a single cow and the every Egyptian cow killed. Does your Bible indicate where, on this mean, the Plague fell? Why, yes it does—it says ‘every.’ Can you give us a method by which we can even remotely determine where, on this mean, the author intended us to be persuaded that fewer than “every” cow died?”

I don’t need to lay down a general methodology. All that’s needed is a close reading of the text, where the text itself tells what did and did not survive each plague. That is something else I documented in detail.

“Water to Blood You did read Ex. 7:19, right? Every bit of water God stated he would strike—every pond, every stream, ever canal, every reservoir, every bit of water in a wooden bucket or stone jar.”

Yes, I read 7:19. I also read 7:22 and 7:24. Reread what I wrote.

This is how one reads a narrative. By reading the entire narrative, the way it was meant to be read; not by cherry-picking isolated verses out of context that were never meant to be read in isolation from their function in the narrative flow.

“It would not be just the Nile. All the fish in Egypt would die.”

The Egyptians would lack fresh fish for a week. Mass famine does not ensue.

“True, I am not a biologist, and would never claim to be. I am, though, at least familiar with environmental eco-systems, and have owned a fish tank or two. What happens when you drastically change the ph level in water? The fish and aquatic life either radically adapt, or die. According to your Book, it was the latter.”

A fish tank is a closed ecosystem; a river is an open eco-system. Dagood still doesn’t get it. The Nile is not an aquarium!

“No, the fish do NOT just start to wash down from the upper river, and replenish the lower river. They would have nothing to eat! The large fish need smaller fish, the smaller fish need insects and algae, and all of those items would be gone. There would be no eggs or young or tadpoles or anything left in the lower river to reproduce and repopulate. That, too, would have to come from the upper river.”

A river is a moving ecosystem. You have little fish as well as big fish upstream, and both are moving downstream. You have algae wherever you have algae. Insects are ubiquitous.

“I am not saying it could never happen, but it would take years on the river systems alone. The canals, ponds and streams would take decades.”

Yes, there might be some long-term damage. Just not on the scale you insist.

“And I did not take into account the blood washing into the headwaters, affecting that portion, NOR the problem of coagulation. I gave the Christian the benefit of the doubt that God kept the blood with some viscosity, and ended the Plague prior to it hitting the ocean. If the blood did thicken, and scab, all underwater plant life would die as well. The ecosystem, in that case, would be completely destroyed. It would take more than decades.”

If…if…if. This is the iffy objection to the Ten Plagues.

“The only reason I mentioned crocodiles was to actually get people to think about the full implications of the plague. Not just ‘all the fish were gone. Now all the fish are back.’”

The narrative never said “all the fish are back.” But fish would come from up river.

“I did like the response—'crocs don’t need to eat very often.' It reminded me of debating with inerrantists. Often, when pointing out contradictions between two verses, the inerrantist peels one verse down to just a phrase at a time, and shows how each individual phrase does not contradict the other verse. Yet when taken as a whole, it makes no sense.”

You suffer from a lack of reading comprehension. My point all along has been to read the text in context. It makes perfect sense when taken as a whole.

You are the one who tries to wedge it into a contradiction by acting as if one verse was written in ignorance of another verse, even within the confines of the very same narrative or pericope.

But one verse was not written independently of another verse. It was never meant to be understood in separation of the entire literary unit.

“Yes it is true that a crocodile can go a long time without food. Are you saying that every crocodile had just happened to eat prior to the plague? That there wasn’t a single crocodile that may have been hungry, and by being deprived of food, wouldn’t start to go out looking?”

i) The narrative doesn’t discuss crocodiles one way or the other. You’re the one who brought that up. So any discussion will be speculative.

ii) Crocodiles are cold-blooded creatures. Reptiles. They have a slow metabolism. A crocodile can survive without food for a week. A crocodile is not a Humming Bird or Least Weasel.

iii) You’re setting up a false dichotomy: either every crocodile had to survive or else every crocodile had to perish. Non sequitur.

iv) You are also dissembling. As I explained at the time, the crocodiles would have plenty to eat in the way of dead fish and carrion.

“Or perhaps it was another miracle in which God told all the crocodiles to fill up immediately before the plagues so as to survive. He wanted his people to leave Egypt with stylish belts, shoes and bags.”

Unable to address the merits of the argument, you resort to rhetorical bubble-wrap.

“Unfortunately, God was not so kind with the fish, giving them a pre-warning. They all died. Just like all the fish in the Flood. To all you people out there with an emblem on the back of your car, here is news- God Hates Fish! (Strangely, Jesus used them to pay taxes and sustain a post-mortem body. Perhaps my next blog will by “Jesus couldn’t be God, because he likes fish!”)”

More rhetorical bubble-wrap. It didn’t take long for you to lose the argument. On the very first round.

“Frogs Not destroyed? Are you serious?”

I’m a serious reader, unlike you.

The plague of frogs assumes the existence of frogs. There were frogs around to plague the Egyptians.

“ I thought the idea of an enormous bunch of frogs was supposed to be some kind of miracle. Whether we started with 1 or 100, the idea was that God created a bunch more frogs out of nothing. Are you saying that of all the plagues, the frogs were natural?”

i) I neither affirm nor deny a miraculous multiplication of frogs. The text is silent on the source of the frogs, so I’m not going to be more specific than the text. That’s part of being a responsible interpreter. That’s the difference between exegesis and eisegesis.

Whether their origin is natural or supernatural is speculative in any case. One can toy with the implications of either conjecture.

ii) The timing is miraculous.

iii) Oh, and frogs are not fish. Frogs are amphibious. They breathe air. Some lay their eggs on damp ground. Some are desert dwellers.

“At least I have the courtesy of reading the plagues as being miracles before showing the results would have destroyed the country.”

I don’t prejudge the question. That’s a matter of exegesis. And Scripture is often indifferent to the mechanism, if any.

“Livestock Ah. Now you are saying that all the livestock were not killed. So what do we do with 9:6 where it says….uh….”all the livestock of the Egyptians died.” Sure I know there are livestock in the next plagues. Where do they come from? I guess you are saying we should not trust the narrator of the story when he says “all died.” What else can’t we trust them on?”

More of your transparent sophistry. The way I exercise trust in the narrator is to interpret individual verses in the narrative context.

That’s what a narrator does: he writes a narrative. It’s a literary unit. It has an overall shape. A natural progression. Earlier stages may foreshadow later stages.

“Oh, and if the Tanakh went from general to specific, how come vs. 3 says “livestock in the field” and vs. 6 says “all.” Now you are saying that the narrator went from specific to general? Which is it?”

Both. There’s no uniform principle of composition. But one needs to be aware of various narrative techniques which a given narrator will deploy.

“It is not that hard to keep up with the apologetic. If you want general to specific (like Gen. 1 to Gen. 2) you say (without a lick of proof) that narrators went from general to specific. If you need it to be an alternative, you say it is an exception.”

No, you simply interpret the text before you. You judge every pericope on a case-by-case basis.

I didn’t give examples because it’s a common place of OT scholarship. As Oswald Allis put it, "We often find in describing an event, the Biblical writer first makes a brief and comprehensive statement and then follows it with more or less elaborate details," The Old Testament (P&R 1972), 82.

Here are a couple of examples: the relation between Gen 6:19 and 7:2 is an instance of going from general to specific.

Likewise, the relationship between Gen 1 & 2, where Gen 1presents a general account of creation, while Gen 1 fills in the details regarding the making of man.

There are many examples in the Exodus account because it has a broadly concentric structure of escalating damage, where the some of the same targets take more than one hit, resulting in a steady diminution of the original stock.

This is the overarching structure of the narrative.

Within that framework there are many individual specifications. You need to read a historical narrative with a view to both the macrostructure and the microstructure, especially in the case of the Plagues, which are cyclical as they circle back to build on what went before.

“Trading with Hebrews I purposely left this out. The relationship between the Hebrews and the Egyptians is so muddled throughout these events, any position one holds, makes no sense.”

“Pharaoh (if you go with the later dating of Exodus) has enough power to kill all the Hebrew baby boys (1:15) as well as ordering them to work without materials. (5:7).”

Every pharaoh was an absolute monarch. This doesn’t depend on the early or late date of the Exodus.

“Why trade with the Hebrews, if he could just take their cattle?”

All other things being equal, he could.

“But in 10:24, Pharaoh is asking Moses to leave their livestock behind. Asking? Why not swoop in and take them?”

Because, by that point in the narrative, he’s taken a beating. He’s gone up against Moses and repeatedly lost.

This is why you need to read a narrative…as a narrative.

“As of 12:36 the Egyptians were favorable to the Hebrews to the point of simply giving them Gold and silver.”

i)Yes, and once again, where does this occur in the course of the narrative? At the tail-end they’ve been bested and defeated. Demoralized. Their resistance is worn down to nothing. That’s the cumulative effect of the plagues. That was the intention all along.

ii)Moreover, their favorable disposition is attributed to divine agency, just as the ill-will of Pharaoh is attributed to divine agency.

“If the Hebrews had cattle, and the Egyptians did not, there would be cattle riots. And sheep and donkey riots. The story acts as if these two nations were peaceably living side by side, with bad things happening to the Egyptians and good things happening to the Hebrews.”

Even if there were riots, so what? The fact that good things happen to the Hebrews and bad things to the Egyptians is irrelevant to the possibility of a riot.

“Even if they DID trade cattle, there would still be the issue of how to negotiate with the Hebrews.”

At the outset, there’d be no need for negotiations. Slave-masters don’t dicker with slaves. Slave-masters have the upper hand.

But as the narrative unfolds, there is a shift in the balance of power. The Egyptians are on the losing end of the plagues. They are beleaguered and disempowered.

“And the influx of Egyptian items (all sadly lost in the wilderness. Whoops, not there, either, since archaeology can’t find them in Canaan, and can’t find them in the desert. Must have dropped them in the Reed Sea.).”

i) Once again, you disregard Kitchen’s observation that this is typical of ancient military campaigns. It is not a suspicious exception in the case of the Exodus.

ii) You also disregard the evidence which he and Hess do adduce.

So you have failed to engage their arguments.

iii) Oh, and while your at it you might also wish to brush up on Hoffmeier’s sequel volume, Ancient Israel in Sinai.

“And the loss of livestock being replenished and lost again.”

That’s your tendentious spin.

“I stayed away from any interaction between Egyptians and Hebrews, since the book is so contradictory as to the events, and any scenario proposed by me would be (rightly) pointed out as contradictory by some verse. I can’t help it that your book contradicts itself.”

i) No, what I did was to introduce the Jewish stock to debate you on your own turf. My position doesn’t depend on this. Indeed, I reject your underlying misinterpretation. But, for the sake of argument, I pointed out that you chose to ignore a resource readily at hand.

ii) I can’t help it that your argument is vitiated by selective quotation.

“The Egyptian granaries. Enough to sustain a nation? And not a single record kept of their depletion? Not a note made of the loss of grain? And even with stores, they would STILL require outside assistance.”

Egypt was the breadbasket of the ANE. As John Currid notes,

***QUOTE***

Egypt has always been the land of grain for Palestine during rough times (cf. 12:10-20; cf. 26:1-2). A good example comes from the time of Pharaoh Heremhab of the 19th Dynasty in Egypt. It tells of Asiatics being allowed to come to Egypt to pasture herds and to obtain food because of times of distress in the rest of the Near East.

Genesis (Evangelical Press 2003), 2:280.

***END-QUOTE***

Dagood can also read about ANE granaries in The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archeology, 219-20.

As well as consulting the periodical literature on ANE storage facilities, cf. J. Currid, “The Beehive Buildings of Ancient Palestine,” BA 49:1 (1986): 20-25; J. Currid & A. Navon, “Iron Age Pits & the Lahav (Tell Halif) Grain Storage Project,” BASOR 273 (1989): 67-78.

“Royal Stables. Where were those stables, again? Oh, that’s right. That takes archeology. And the absence of evidence of royal stables doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”

Not only is Dagood ignorant of ANE agrarian economics, he is equally ignorant of ANE husbandry and horsemanship. Where you had horses and livestock, you had stables. Where you had cavalry and charioteers, you had stables.

Of course the king of Egypt had stables, just like other ANE rulers.

Chariotry was a fixture of ANE warfare since the Middle Bronze Age. Cf. ISBE 4:1015.

While you’re at it, try reading the entries on “Horse” (242-43) and “Stables” (423) in The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archeology.

Oh, that’s right. Dagood doesn’t study archeology. He just talks through his hat.

“And are you saying the person that ran the Royal Stables was one that feared YHWH? 9:20. I could point out that technically Pharaoh would have “owned” the horses, and HE did not follow YHWH, so his would have been killed.”

i) I never said that Pharaoh was the only one with stables. Other important landowners would also stable their horses and livestock.

In context, we were discussing the cavalry and the charioteers. Remember?

ii) At this point in the cycle (the seventh plague), the account doesn’t say whether or not Pharaoh left his horses or livestock in the open field.

iii) The fact, though, that Pharaoh still had a squadron of horsemen and charioteers to pursue the Israelites makes it obvious, from the viewpoint of the narrator, that his warhorses were not all exposed to the hail. An intelligent reader will interpret what went before in light of what happened afterwards.

All of the information isn’t given all at once. Much of the narrative suspense lies in leaving some details unstated, to be explicated at a later phase in the dramatic arc.

“Only the cavalry? (14:23) O.K., so God was lying in 14:17 and 14:4 when he claimed he would ‘gain glory’ through all of Pharaoh’s army. (See also 14:9 and 28) Ya sure this is the apologetic you want? Not all the army died, so God was lying? Or incompetent? Note also Moses’ song in 15:4 indicates it was the entire army. I’ll grant you that it is song, not history, so was Moses exaggerating, too? Seems to be a common problem in these parts.”

As I’ve said more than once now, specific usage qualifies generic usage.

But, hey, you’re welcome to be obtuse.

“Natural possibilities? O.K. So you are saying God didn’t have any part of this at all? That his part was ‘written in’ at a later time? And this is all an exaggeration.

Hmmmm…I thought that was my line!!”

Dagood is dissembling as usual. Or is he just a little slow on the uptake? I explained exactly what I meant.

But, since he chooses to make an issue of this, let’s connect all the dots:

i) The Bible doesn’t offer any systematic definition or classification of the miraculous. But a miracle can take different forms:

a) A miracle can run contrary to the ordinary course of nature.

b) A miracle can represent an extraordinary conjunction of ordinary natural forces.

c) A miracle can either operate through second causes (e.g. Exod 14:21) or else it can bypass mundane media.

Which interpretation is correct can only be judged on a case-by-case basis. Also, because the account may be indifferent to the “mechanism,” if any, the account may furnish insufficient data to determine the mechanism, if any.

ii) One reason the Bible doesn’t define or classify or catalogue its own miracles is that, in the nature of the case, miracles are generally reported in historical narratives, and the genre of narrative theology does not regularly halt the action for editorial asides.

iii) Another reason is that, from a Biblical viewpoint, every event, whether miraculous or providential, is an act of God. It may or may not make use of secondary agents and agencies, but God is a primary, if not necessary the only, cause of every event.

iv) The distinction between what’s natural and supernatural is a secular distinction. For the run-of-the-mill secularist, nature is all there is, and nature is physical.

Hence, anything immaterial, like God, angels, demons, and discarnate souls, as well as the effects attributed to these incorporeal agents, are automatically relegated to the supernatural category.

But that represents an outsider’s perspective. In Scripture, the dividing line lies between creature and Creator, not nature and supernature.

Theory & reality

Brother Danny said:

"Steve,

I have decided not to address most of the points in your post due to time constraints.

Back to the object at hand -- I'll write on cosmology soon, and materialism, if time allows.”

On the basis of this statement, as well as his previous statement about Gen 1, (see below) it looks like Danny is going to contend that Gen 1 has been falsified by modern cosmology, which is sufficient reason for rejecting the Christian faith in toto.

If so, he faces the following challenges:

I. Exegesis

i) Many conservative Christians don’t interpret Gen 1 chronologically.

That is not my own position, but if Danny has bet the house on Gen 1 in relation to the chronology of modern cosmology, his argument, even if otherwise valid, would leave the position of many Christians untouched.

ii) An ancient Israelite was perfectly aware of the fact that the sun was source of the diurnal cycle.

They rose with the sun, and retired at sunset.

So one didn’t have to await the invention of the electric light bulb or modern cosmology to make this stunning observation.

However we interpret Gen 1:14-19, this does not represent a prescientific perspective which is been falsified by modern science, for one doesn’t need to be a child of the scientific age to raise the objection which Danny has leveled against this particular feature of the text.

iii) John Sailhamer, in Genesis Unbound, as well as his commentary on Genesis, has argued that 1:14 should not be rendered, “Let there be lights in the expanse to separate the day and night,” but rather, “Let the lights in the expanse be for separating day and night.”

Sailhamer is a Hebraist. Out of curiosity, I ran his interpretation by three other Hebraists: Bruce Waltke, John Currid, and David Clines.

Clines thought that this rendering was grammatically acceptable. Waltke thought it was unacceptable, while Currid also thought it was unacceptable, but for a different reason than Waltke.

So you had four eminent Hebraists evenly divided over the syntax of v14.

Then there was the view of Donald Wiseman, the late great Assyriologist, who felt that the traditional rendering of the verb (“to make”) was mistaken.

This illustrates the dangers of resting so much weight on one verse.

Many commentators have also noted parallels between the creation account and the flood account:

In the flood account we have a triple-decker ark with a window and a roof (6:16; 8:6,13). The animals occupy different decks. During the deluge the ark has water above (rain) and below (floodwaters).

Now, let's compare this to the world. In the creation account, the world has windows (7:11) and a roof (1:6-8; 14-16). It has water above and below (1:2,7). The world has three decks: sky, earth, water (cf. Exod 20:4). Animals occupy different "decks."

In that event it may also be that what we have in v14ff. is an architectural metaphor in which God is depicted as a cosmic carpenter.

So why there was light on day one—why, indeed, was there a day one with a diurnal cycle before the sunlight on day four?

The literary answer would be because a carpenter cannot install skylights until he has put a roof on the house. But there was sunlight before there were skylights.

1:14 was not the whole of Danny’s objection. But it’s part of it.

II. Botany

Perhaps Danny’s implicit objection is that you cannot have plants without sunshine.

But if the world was made within the span of six consecutive calendar days, then the flora could certainly survive for a day (day 3) without sunshine (day 4), even if you accept the traditional reading of v14.

Remember, too, that even on the traditional reading, there is a light source already in place.

III. Creation ex nihilo

i) Gen 1 doesn’t explicitly teach creation ex nihilo, although that is a natural enough way of reading the text.

Be that as it may, creation ex nihilo is clearly implied in Col 1:16-17.

So what, exactly, is the thesis which Danny is opposing?

This is what the traditional reading of Gen 1 amounts to:

God made the world in the span of six consecutive calendar days. He made no use of any preexistent “stuff” (matter, energy). And everything was made in the way it’s described in Gen 1, which is to say, fully formed. There is no transition from simple to complex, or embryonic to mature. Rather, the final product is given by God’s immediate creative fiat.

The end-product is a fully furnished and finished world, with no intermediate stages of development.

ii) Now, the question this poses for Danny is what evidence would count against that claim?

How would the world look if it were, indeed, made that way? How would it differ from the world we see? What, if any, would be the detectable difference between the world of Gen 1 and the world we see today?

Incidentally, I’m not appealing to the theory of “apparent age,” which is a misnomer, for objects have no inherent appearance of any particular age.

We date an object on the basis on experience. If we had no prior experience, we could not date an object.

In addition, this is not an apologetic ploy, drummed up on the spot to do an end-run around modern science.

The interpretation I’m presenting here represents the traditional, prescientific reading of the text.

If you’re going to say that Gen 1 has been disproven by modern cosmology, then you need to consider the implications of Gen 1. What would such a world look like?

Of course, Danny doesn’t believe Gen 1. But that’s irrelevant.

For purposes of argument he must assume the viewpoint of Gen 1 if he’s going to claim that Gen 1 runs contrary to modern cosmology or the natural evidence.

So, assuming, for the sake of argument, that the earth world was created ex nihilo in the span of six days, would science be able to detect its true age? Would there be a discrepancy between such a world and the world we see around us?

What kind of evidence would count for or against creation ex nihilo? Creation ex nihilo is sui generis. It leaves no trace evidence, for the effect involves no intervening process, be it fast or slow.

iii) I’d add that the world in Gen 1 is not necessarily identical with the world we see today, for the prediluvian world was subject to a global flood. So there’s also the question of what impact that would have on the empirical record.

IV. Process & Product

“Which also record lots of other goodies, like that the earth was created before the stars, that the plants were created before the sun, that the "days" were present before the sun” (Brother Danny”).

i) Danny tosses this off as if it the order of events in Gen 1 is obviously wrong.

At the risk of stating the obvious, none of us was around to see the origin of the world we inhabit.

What is more, none of us has ever seen the origin of any other world.

So the original and originating order of events is not an observational datum.

Cosmology attempts to reconstruct the distant past through trace evidence, mathematical modeling, and uniformitarian assumptions to justify the extrapolation of the past from the present.

ii) Consider, for a moment, some of the fudge factors that go into physics and cosmology these days:

***QUOTE***

UNTESTABILITY OF THE FIRST KIND

We are now in a position to discuss the testability of the new physics, which is broadly defined here as the standard paradigm of particle physics,3 the standard paradigm of cosmology and recent variations on these themes: A comprehensive analysis of the testability of these paradigms could fill several books and so only a representative sampling of major testing problems associated with the new physics will be presented here. Proponents of the new physics will no doubt feel that the present discussion does not include positive support for these theories and therefore leaves the reader with too negative an impression. However, countless technical, general, and popular discussions of the new physics have tended to be so dogmatic and optimistic that a small dose of antidote could not hurt and may be very helpful. If the "believers" repeatedly claim the right to present very idealized overviews of the new physics, then they are obligated to grant "skeptics" the chance to present reasoned alternative viewpoints.
(1) Mentioned earlier was the remarkable example of superstring theory, a variation on the standard paradigm of particle physics in which fundamental particles are treated as one-dimensional strings rather than mathematical points. The community of theoretical physicists is very excited about this theory and some regard it as the ultimate unified paradigm of physics: "It is a miracle; it is the theory of the world." 4 However, as attested to by one of the primary spokesmen for the new physics (Steven Weinberg), "there seem to be no decisive tests in sight"1 by which the superstring theory could demonstrate its scientific validity.
(2) The standard paradigm of particle physics has been unable to retrodict successfully the masses of quarks and leptons or the organization of fundamental particles into regular families. The values of more than 20 parameters that are crucial to the paradigm, such as particle masses, the coupling strengths of the forces, and the magnitudes of CP violations, cannot be uniquely derived and therefore are freely adjustable.4-6
(3) The standard model is completely dependent upon the existence of the hypothetical, "Higgs boson," yet none of the variants on the grand unification theme, a cornerstone of the new physics, can predict the mass of this crucial particle or how it interacts with other particles.7 One worries that the next new particle to be found with a mass between a few giga-electron-volts and a tera-electron-volt will be christened the Higgs boson by fiat.
(4) Many theories of the new physics require extra dimensions beyond the four dimensions of space-time with which we are familiar, 5 to 26 dimensions is typical and about 950 dimensions is the latest record. Yet there is no known way to test empirically for the existence of these extra dimensions.8
(5) The hypothesized unification of the four forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong) is predicted to occur at energies that are now and probably forever inaccessible to empirical testing.3
(6) The standard cosmological paradigm asserts that the key events in the evolution of the universe took place within 10-25 s after the Big Bang. However, even in principle, we cannot obtain direct information on the state of the universe prior to decoupling at about 1013 s after the Big Bang.9
(7) The validity of the most widely accepted cosmological model (Big Bang plus inflation) is completely dependent upon the validity of the standard paradigm of particle physics, but the latter, as we have seen, suffers in many ways from untestability of the first kind.9
(8) Standard cosmological models have never been able to retrodict satisfactorily the existence of galaxies, neither did they predict the recently discovered bulk streaming of large numbers of galaxies, nor did they predict the existence of the enigmatic dark matter that constitutes more than 90% of the mass of the universe.10
It is sometimes stated11 and more often implied that "physics is nearly finished," that we have just about figured everything out. The above examples of inherent untestability, which concern fundamental aspects of the "nearly finished physics,'' tell a different story.
Moreover, examples of effective untestability are more numerous and even more worrisome.

UNTESTABILITY OF THE SECOND KIND

Below is a sampling of some of the more clearcut examples of the effective untestability of the new physics, beginning with particle physics. For an excellent and readable historical review of the development of the new physics, which is quite unique in that it avoids the seamless idealization that typifies recapitulations by the particle physicists themselves, the book Constructing Quarks by Pickering3 is highly recommended.
(1) When fractionally charged quarks were initially proposed as the fundamental constituents of hadrons, a truly definitive prediction--the existence of particles with unusual charges such as + 2/3 or - 1/3--appeared to be inevitable. After many fruitless searches, theoreticians hit upon a unique way out of the failed prediction: It was proposed that quarks were dynamically confined inside hadrons and so free quarks should not be observed. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. If negative results can be circumvented by strategies of this sort, can the theory in question be regarded as testable?
(2) The predicted existence of magnetic monopoles is another example of a definitive prediction by Grand Unified Theories (GUTs), a very important prediction for the whole standard paradigm of particle physics. In spite of many heroic and imaginative attempts over a period of at least 40 years to detect these mythological particles, results have been consistently negative.12 Most distressing is the fact that negative results are often followed by changes in the predicted properties of the magnetic monopoles (e.g., masses or hypothetical spatial distribution) such that the new magnetic monopole predictions are not in conflict with existing observations. If physicists are unwilling to take "no" for an answer to the question of the existence of magnetic monopoles, what does this say about the testability of the standard paradigm?
(3) For some time, the gauge theories that provide the mathematical foundations of the new physics had the serious problem of predicting infinite values for some physical quantities. This was regarded as physically unacceptable and a technique, called renormalization, was developed to remove the unwanted infinities. The technique worked quite nicely but some physicists, for example, Dirac,13 were deeply concerned about the ad hoc nature of this resolution and regarded renormalization as an arbitrary device whose necessity indicated that something was fundamentally wrong with the theories.
(4) In the 1970s, measurements of the proton structure function were at variance with initial predictions of the quark model. This problem was "solved" by introducing and manipulating two theoretical devices: a quark-antiquark "sea" inside the proton (in addition to the regular quark constituents) and a new set of adjustable particles (gluons) to mediate the interquark forces.3 Is this acceptable model building or the addition of epicycles?
(5) Even the strongest supporters of the new physics admit that the introduction of the "Higgs mechanism" was a totally ad hoc solution to major problems of GUTs: Without it, the gauge theory of the electroweak force was nonrenormalizable and disagreed with observations.3 In general, a renormalizable gauge theory with spontaneous symmetry breaking is highly dependent upon such a mechanism.4 According to an eminent theorist who has played a major role in the development of the new physics, "...the only legitimate reason for introducing the Higgs boson is to make the standard model mathematically consistent,.. . The biggest drawback of the Higgs boson is that so far no evidence of its existence has been found. Instead, a fair amount of indirect evidence already suggests that the elusive particle does not exist. Indeed, modern theoretical physics is constantly filling the vacuum with so many contraptions such as the Higgs boson that it is amazing a person can even see the stars on a clear night!"7 Indeed, and it is this tendency that severely reduces the effective testability of the new physics.
(6) To prevent inconsistencies between the electroweak and QCD theories, theorists invented a new set of quantum numbers for quarks called "color"; each "flavor" of quark could exhibit one of three colors.5 Like renormalization, this device worked quite well but, again, should we regard it as an ingenious and proper product of model building or as another epicycle?
(7) The same question applies to the introduction of yet another new quantum number, "charm," and the charmed quark (the GIM mechanism), which were initially introduced on an ad hoc basis to solve the kaon-decay anomaly and to provide symmetry with the four leptons known at that time (later more were found), and for which the supporting data are ambivalent at best.3
(8) Recently, the standard GUT model yielded the bold prediction that protons were unstable and had a lifetime on the order of 1032 years. This prediction is currently regarded as having been falsified, but what is more worrisome is that there is a seemingly limitless supply of alternative GUTs to take the place of the apparently falsified version. Since GUTs are so adjustable, how can one test a "one model fits all data" paradigm?
(9) A general prediction of the standard paradigm of particle physics has been that spin should be largely irrelevant in high-energy, large-angle, elastic scattering of hadrons. This prediction has been repeatedly falsified over the last 10 years in a series of proton-proton scattering experiments by Kirsch and his collaborators.14 Reaction of the theorists has been predictable: initial disbelief in the data and, when the unhappy results would not quietly disappear, subsequent attempts to "save the phenomenon" by introducing new theoretical considerations.
(10) A recent addition to the new physics repertoire is "technicolor": a hypothetical new strong interaction for hypothetical subcomponents of the hypothetical Higgs boson (see No. 5 above). How many levels of untestable abstraction are we to allow?
(11) There are at least six versions of superstring theories and currently no way to decide their relative merits.1 Even if the superstring paradigm could overcome its previously mentioned untestability of the first kind, it would still be plagued by untestability of the second kind.
(12) Coupling of the graviton (hypothetical particle mediating gravitational interactions) to the hypothetical Higgs field would result in an enormous value for the cosmological constant. This clearly violates the observation that the cosmological constant is zero (or exceedingly small). So theorists have proposed that without the Higgs field the cosmological constant would have had a huge negative value, but that with Higgs field coupling this is neatly canceled by the huge positive value to give a net value of about zero, as observed.7 Is this not the sledgehammer approach to physics problems?
These are just a few examples of the remarkable resiliency of the new physics, a resiliency that leaves it on the verge of untestability. It is amazing how predictive failures (e.g., nondetection of fractionally charged quarks) are cleverly circumvented and then gradually the failure/solution comes to be regarded as an argument in support of the paradigm! The fundamental question is where should one draw the line between acceptable modification of a theory according to traditional model building and artificial modifications that spoil the conceptual elegance of the theory and have no physical justification other than the fact that they circumvent inconsistency between theory and observation? Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut dividing line by which one could make an objective decision.

In the case of a theory in the latter stages of ad hoc development (e.g., the Ptolemaic universe), the shear ungainliness of the theoretical contraption begins to raise doubts in the minds of those who are not positively biased by participation in its construction, and gradually those doubts begin to spread throughout the scientific community. Could the new physics represent model building gone awry? Yes, that could be the case; so many new "fundamental" particles, force-carrying particles, and theoretical devices have been tacked on to the original quark model that the new physics is beginning to make the Ptolemaic universe look rather svelte. On the other hand, one must emphasize that the new physics has much more data to explain and therefore this heroic theoretical effort might not represent model building gone awry. Happily, there is an excellent prospect for deciding between these two possibilities and this will be the subject of Sec. V of this article. Briefly, the ability or inability of existing paradigms to predict correctly the form of the enigmatic dark matter that constitutes at least 90% of all matter in the cosmos will be a powerful tool for objectively and scientifically determining: (1) whether the new physics represents a natural or an artificial unification of our knowledge, and (2) if the latter is the case, then whether there are other "dark horse" paradigms that hold more promise.
Before this crucial test is discussed, however, let us take a brief look at the standard cosmological paradigm in terms of effective testability. The Big Bang theory has been the basic paradigm of cosmology for decades. The combination of the observed redshift-distance relation for galaxies and the isotropic microwave background radiation is strong evidence in support of the idea that 10-20 billion years ago the observed portion of the cosmos was in a much more compact state and that it has been expanding ever since then. According to the Big Bang model, the initial state was a singularity: All of the atoms, stars, and galaxies we now observe were compressed into an entity with infinite density, temperature, and pressure, and with a diameter equal to zero (in fact, space and time did not yet exist). For unknowable reasons (perhaps boredom), the singularity began to expand. Einstein, who developed the theory upon which the Big Bang model was based, general relativity, was very critical of the idea of an initial universal singularity because he felt that general relativity was being pushed beyond the limits of its applicability.2 He felt that one could turn the mathematical crank until values like zeros and infinities resulted but that this was not realistic. Aside from the problem of an initial singularity,9 the original Big Bang model had other major technical problems 9,15 such as the flatness problem, the horizon problem, and the smoothness problem. It also could not explain the existence of galaxies. It predicted a homogeneous distribution of matter on large scales whereas inhomogeneity in the distribution of matter has always been observed on the largest scales that could be adequately tested.16,17 It did not predict that the universe would be largely composed of an unknown form of matter referred to as the dark matter. It predicted uniform expansion of the galactic environment whereas observations reveal large deviations from a uniform Hubble flow.18 And there are many less dramatic predictive problems that have beset the original Big Bang theory, such as those associated with predicted elemental abundances19 and the predicted age of the universe.20
In order to rescue the Big Bang theory, particle physicists began to suggest ways in which the new physics might be brought to bear on cosmological problems. Although astrophysicists were initially somewhat demure about this new relationship, before long the majority of the physics community was proclaiming that the "marriage" of cosmology and particle physics heralded the birth of a complete understanding of nature. A much smaller group of scientists worried that it looked more like an incestuous affair with a high probability for yielding unsound progeny. Recently, a noted astrophysicist candidly characterized the interactions of astrophysics and particle physics as follows:
"[T]he big news so far is that particle physicists seem to be able to provide initial conditions for cosmology that meet what astronomers generally think they want without undue forcing of the particle physicist's theory. Indeed I sometimes have the feeling of taking part in a vaudeville skit: "You want a tuck in the waist? We'll take a tuck. You want massive weakly interacting particles? We have a full rack. You want an effective potential for inflation with a shallow slope? We have several possibilities." This is a lot of activity to be fed by the thin gruel of theory and negative observational results, with no prediction and experimental verification of the sort that, according to the usual rules of evidence in physics, would lead us to think we are on the right track..."21
Let us consider several examples of applications of the new physics to the realm of astrophysics and evaluate the testability of the results. Using GUTs as a theoretical toolbox, physicists fixed up the old Big Bang theory by the addition of a period of rapid expansion (inflation), which simultaneously removed the flatness, horizon, and smoothness problems.9 But, of course, the testability of the inflationary hypothesis is entirely dependent upon the testability of GUTs and we have already seen that there are major problems with the latter. Moreover, the inflated Big Bang model may have a serious problem with the age it predicts for the universe,20 and the one rigorous prediction that it does make: that W = 1 (which means that the density of the universe is equal to the "critical" value) has been repeatedly contradicted.9 A second example concerns the fact that the old Big Bang theory, when analyzed in terms of the new physics, appeared to generate too many magnetic monopoles; remember that no magnetic monopoles have ever been observed. Inflation deftly "solves" this problem by inflating space to such an extent that the resulting magnetic monopole density can be made arbitrarily low,15 in fact, low enough so that we could not have expected to detect a magnetic monopole even after 40 years of trying. Obviously, if the density of magnetic monopoles is now to be a freely adjustable parameter, via the inflation scenario, then the effective testability of theoretical constructs predicting the existence of magnetic monopoles is significantly reduced. One is reminded of that vaudeville act: "You got negative results? Not to worry. We just pump up the old cosmos a little. Oops, not too much! And, presto, your negative result is a vindicated expectation." A third example concerns the recent discovery that the large-scale structure of the cosmos is organized like "soap suds," with galaxies residing primarily in the interstices of huge bubblelike voids. The new physics has offered at least three different interpretations for this phenomenon, all post facto, of course. The cosmic suds are attributed to (1) superconducting and furiously vibrating cosmic strings,22 or (2) biased galaxy formation in a WIMP-dominated universe10 (WIMP stands for a hypothetical class of weakly interacting massive particles), or (3) hard as it may be to believe, double inflation23 (if one inflation doesn't solve all the problems, how about two inflationary episodes?). All of these theoretical interpretations are so unconstrained that they are effectively untestable and their ad hoc status is embarrassingly obvious. Many other examples of new physics applications in the astrophysical realm just leave one's mouth hanging open: Quasars are cosmic strings,22 quasars are axion lumps,24 the solar neutrino problem is due to axions or other WIMPs in the Sun,25 neutron stars are really big quark nuggets,26 the difference between spiral and elliptical galaxies is whether they were "seeded" with self-intersecting or nonself-intersecting "loops of string," 27 the dark matter is WIMPs or "shadow matter"16 (the latter idea may have been cribbed from Lewis Carroll),... .
In general, when the proponents of the new physics apply their art to cosmological problems they usually invoke essentially untestable physics that is supposed to have taken place in the unobservable past in order to explain current observations. Are they solving the problems or hiding them behind a curtain of sophistry? Without adequate testability, how are we to decide this question?

http://home.pacbell.net/skeptica/thenewphysics.html

***END-QUOTE***

iii) One might object that Oldershaw’s article is almost 20 years old, and therefore badly out of date.

And that may well be true. But if physical and cosmological theories suffer from such an ephemeral shelf-life, then that hardly inspires our confidence.

iv) It is not enough to say that Gen 1 is contrary to modern cosmology or historical geology.

To generate a conflict, you must say that, given the same process, Gen 1 yields a result contrary to modern cosmology, &c.

But does it follow that Gen 1 is at odds with the natural record given an alternative process, or even the absence of any process whatsoever?

A dating scheme assumes a certain process. Remove the process, or substitute a different process, and what becomes of the dating scheme?

Given a certain sequence, a certain order of events, a certain rate of change, you will have a predictable result.

But to say that this is inconsistent with Gen 1 is, at best, a tautology, and, at worst, a petitio principii.

If you assume a series of events different from Gen 1, then, by definition, that will generate a conflict. But all you’ve done is to beg the question in your own favor.

What would result from Gen 1 on the basis of its own internal, narrative assumptions?

V. Mathematical Physics

Theoretical physics and mathematical physics are not interchangeable, but they do overlap, for mathematical modeling is, to my knowledge, the chief tool used by the theoretical physicist to extend the experiment data beyond the range of the extant evidence.

And it’s striking to consider the level of mathematical incompetence among theoretical physicists. In the course of reviewing a book, Steven Weinberg made this admission:

***QUOTE***

For me, the modern computer is only a faster, cheaper, and more reliable version of the teams of clerical workers (then called "computers") that were programmed at Los Alamos during World War II to do numerical calculations. But neither I nor most of the other theoretical physicists of my generation learned as students to use electronic computers. That skill was mostly needed for number crunching by experimentalists who had to process huge quantities of numerical data, and by theorists who worked on problems like stellar structure or bomb design. Computers generally weren't needed by theorists like me, whose work aimed at inventing theories and calculating what these theories predict only in the easiest cases.

Still, from time to time I have needed to find the numerical solution of a differential equation,[1] and with some embarrassment I would have to recruit a colleague or a graduate student to do the job for me.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15762

***END-QUOTE***

Here’s a Nobel laureate in physics who can’t do his own number-crunching!

Or consider an anecdote of Freeman Dyson’s:

***QUOTE***

In the spring of 1985 Ed Witten, one of the most brilliant of the young physicists at Princeton University, announced that he would give a talk. Rumors were buzzing…Witten spoke very fast for an hour and a half without stopping. It was a dazzling display of mathematical virtuosity…when Ed Witten came to the end of his hour and a half, there was no Oppenheimer in the audience to make a sharp-tongued comment. The listeners sat silent. After a while the chairman of the session called for questions. The listeners still sat silent. There were no questions. Not one of us was brave enough to stand up and reveal the depths of our ignorance. As we trooped glumly out of the room, I could hear voices asking quietly the questions nobody asked out loud.

I describe this scene because it gives a picture of what it means to explore the universe at the highest level of abstraction. Ed Witten…has moved so far into abstraction that few even of his friends know what he is talking about….[His] role is to build superstrings into a mathematical structure which reflects to an impressive extent the observed structure of particles and fields in the universe. After they had head him speak, many members of his audience went back to their desks and did the homework they should have done before, reading his papers and learning his language.

Infinite in All Directions (Harper & Row 1989), 15-16

***END-QUOTE***

It makes you wonder how many practioners have mastered the basic tools of the trade.

Witten can do his own computations, and I dare-say Roger Penrose can as well, but how many others are up to the task?

VI. Theory & Reality

Stephen Hawking is undoubtedly the world’s most famous cosmologist. But what epistemic status does he assign to his own theorizing?

“He's [Roger Penrose] a Platonist and I am a positivist. He's worried that Schrödinger's cat is in a quantum state, where it is half dead and half alive. He feels that can't correspond to reality. But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I do not know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I am concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.”

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

“Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make.”

http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553802023&view=excerpt

“If the universe was essentially unchanging in time, as was generally assumed before the 1920s, there would be no reason that time should not be defined arbitrarily far back. Any so-called beginning of the universe, would be artificial, in the sense that one could extend the history back to earlier times. Thus it might be that the universe was created last year, but with all the memories and physical evidence, to look like it was much older. This raises deep philosophical questions about the meaning of existence. I shall deal with these by adopting what is called the positivist approach. In this, the idea is that we interpret the input from our senses in terms of a model we make of the world. One cannot ask whether the model represents reality, only whether it works. A model is a good model if it first, interprets a wide range of observations, in terms of a simple and elegant model. And second, if the model makes definite predictions that can be tested, and possibly falsified by observation.”

http://www.fu-berlin.de/info/einstein_lectures/2005/vortrag.html

Now, one may or may not agree with Hawking’s philosophy of science. But the immediate point is that you cannot simply appeal to a scientific theory or scientific evidence without addressing the metascientific question of what you think a theory is good for. Your science is only as good as your philosophy of science.

Here’s another quote from Dyson:

***QUOTE***

The main thing which I am trying to suggest by this discussion is the extreme remoteness of the superstring from any objects which we can see and touch. Even for experts in theoretical physics, superstrings were hard to grasp. Theoretical physics are accustomed to living in a world which is removed from tangible objects by two levels of abstraction. From tangible atoms we move by one level of abstraction to invisible fields and particles. A second level of abstraction takes us from fields and particles to the symmetry-groups by which fields and particles are related. The superstring theory takes us beyond symmetry-groups to two further levels of abstraction. The third level of abstraction is the interpretation of symmetry-groups in terms of states in ten-dimensional space-time. The fourth level is the world of the superstrings by whose dynamical behavior the states are defined. It is no wonder that most of us had a hard time trying to follow Ed Witten all the way to the fourth level.

Ibid. 18.

***END-QUOTE***

Now, I ask you, what’s the chance of a fourth-level abstraction, a mathematical construct four steps removed from the observational data, being even approximately descriptive of the actual world we live in?

True, string theory is not the only game in town, and Dyson’s summary is rather dated.

But could any rival theory operate at a lower level of abstraction?

Again, string theory is not the same thing as cosmology. But the methodology is similar, is it not?

VIII. The Veil of Perception

Not only are our mathematical models far removed from the observational data, but the observational data is several steps removed from our mental representation thereof. As one philosopher expresses the relationship:

“The direct realist view (Gibson 1972) is incredible because it suggests that we can have experience of objects out in the world directly, beyond the sensory surface, as if bypassing the chain of sensory processing. For example if light from this paper is transduced by your retina into a neural signal which is transmitted from your eye to your brain, then the very first aspect of the paper that you can possibly experience is the information at the retinal surface, or the perceptual representation that it stimulates in your brain. The physical paper itself lies beyond the sensory surface and therefore must be beyond your direct experience. But the perceptual experience of the page stubbornly appears out in the world itself instead of in your brain, in apparent violation of everything we know about the causal chain of vision.”

http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/consc1/consc1a.html

Before we can even theorize about observables, the “observable” already lies at the end of black box in which the sensible is encoded in the form of electromagnet information, and then reencoded in the form of electrochemical information, in order to reach the mind of the observer.

IX. Whither Cosmology?

What’s the current state of modern cosmology and physics, anyway?

Cosmology is not the same thing as physics, but their fate is intertwined.

Here are a few recent comments from leaders in the field:

***QUOTE***

M theory is not a theory in the usual sense. Rather it is a collection of theories, that look very different, but which describe the same physical situation. These theories are related by mappings, or correspondences, called dualities, which imply that they are all reflections of the same underlying theory. Each theory in the collection, works well in the limit, like low energy, or low dilation, in which its effective coupling is small, but breaks down when the coupling is large. This means that none of the theories can predict the future of the universe, to arbitrary accuracy. For that, one would need a single formulation of M-theory that would work in all situations.

Up to now, most people have implicitly assumed that there is an ultimate theory that we will eventually discover. Indeed, I myself have suggested we might find it quite soon. However, M-theory has made me wonder if this is true. Maybe it is not possible to formulate the theory of the universe in a finite number of statements.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/

***END-QUOTE***

***QUOTE***

“WE DON’T know what we are talking about.” That was Nobel laureate David Gross at the 23rd Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels, Belgium, during his concluding remarks on Saturday. He was referring to string theory - the attempt to unify the otherwise incompatible theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to provide a theory of everything.

“The state of physics today is like it was when we were mystified by radioactivity”
Gross - who received a Nobel for his work on the strong nuclear force, bringing physics closer to a theory of everything - has been a strong advocate of string theory, which also aims to explain dark energy. “Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory,” he said. “But now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break.”

He compared the state of physics today to that during the first Solvay conference in 1911. Then, physicists were mystified by the discovery of radioactivity. The puzzling phenomenon threatened even the laws of conservation of mass and energy, and physicists had to wait for the theory of quantum mechanics to explain it. “They were missing something absolutely fundamental,” he said. “We are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then.”

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825293.700.html

***END-QUOTE***

***QUOTE***

Steven Weinberg recently said that this is one of the great sea changes in fundamental science since Einstein, that it changes the nature of science itself. Is it such a radical change?

In a way it is very radical but in another way it isn't. The great ambition of physicists like myself was to explain why the laws of nature are just what they are. Why is the proton just about 1800 times heavier than the electron? Why do neutrinos exist? The great hope was that some deep mathematical principle would determine all the constants of nature, like Newton's constant. But it seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature are more like the temperature of the Earth - properties of our local environment that vary from place to place. Like the temperature, many of the constants have to be just so if intelligent life is to exist. So we live where life is possible.

For some physicists this idea is an incredible disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. I find it exciting to think that the universe may be much bigger, richer and full of variety than we ever expected. And it doesn't seem so incredibly philosophically radical to think that some things may be environmental.

Could there be some kind of selection principle that will emerge and pick out one unique string theory and one unique universe?

Anything is possible. My friend David Gross hopes that no selection principle will be necessary because only one universe will prove to make sense mathematically, or something like that. But so far there is no evidence for this view. Even most of the hard-core adherents to the uniqueness view admit that it looks bad.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825305.800.html

***END-QUOTE***

***QUOTE***

The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening which is far more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. This is one of those rare moments when our entire outlook, our framework for thinking, and the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology are suddenly undergoing real upheaval. The narrow 20th-century view of a unique universe, about ten billion years old and ten billion light years across with a unique set of physical laws, is giving way to something far bigger and pregnant with new possibilities.

I don’t know what strange and unimaginable twists our view of the universe will undergo while exploring the vastness of the landscape. But I would bet that at the turn of the 22nd century, philosophers and physicists will look back nostalgically at the present and recall a golden age in which the narrow provincial 20th century concept of the universe gave way to a bigger better megaverse, populating a landscape of mind-boggling proportions.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/susskind03/susskind_index.html

***END-QUOTE***

***QUOTE***

As Lenny says, this means that the old dream of a unified theory that makes unique and falsifiable predictions appears no longer possible. Much that physicists hoped to explain, as necessary features of any possible universe, are just contingent, or environmental features of one universe out of many possible ones.

http://www.edge.org/discourse/landscape.html

***END-QUOTE***

X. The Road to Nowhere

Of course, not everyone agrees with string theory, but the very degree of disagreement illustrates the underlying point just as well.

All these guys are groping in the dark with a book of wet matches to light their way.

Conceptualism

Brother Danny said:

“To answer your question about numbers:
Do ‘numbers exist other than as a concept? Do concepts exist other than inside minds?”

So Danny resorts to conceptualism. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed, I agree with him that numbers are mental entities.

i) The question, though, is the kind of mind in which they inhere.

How can a human mental act—the act of a finite, mutable mind—constitute an actual infinite object like the Mandelbrot set?

To be an actual infinite, it must be a given totality. Unless all it’s members are given, it cannot be a set.

ii) What is more, if numbers inhere in human minds, then there were no numbers before there were human minds.

Hence, there was no third planet from the sun before hominids evolved to the point where they could conceive of the number “3”—assuming evolutionary epistemology, which is a version of naturalized epistemology.

At that point the earth suddenly became the third planet from the sun.

If everyone were comatose, would the earth suddenly cease to be the third planet from the sun?

iii) Furthermore, conceptualism is only as good as your philosophy of mind. If you’re a physicalist, then in what sense is an actual infinite object like the Mandelbrot set exemplified in time and space? Finitely or infinitely?

“Do minds exist which do not supervene on the physical brain?”

Yes. God. Angels. Discarnate souls.

“What is your explanation for numbers? God poofed them, and there they were?”

This is a good example of a man who dismisses Christian theology without ever knowing what he’s even dismissing.

The answer is found in the exemplarist tradition, which goes back to Philonic Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Augustinian Platonism, according to which it is the infinite and timeless mind of God that constitutes abstract universals.

They didn’t come into existence. Rather, they are consubstantial with God, as mental attributes.

Robotics & design

Brother Danny said:

“Re your analogy with robotics and "design":
Let's compare, shall we?”

“Scientific laws state that matter and energy are conserved, not created or destroyed.”

Yes, Danny, we’ve all heard of the law of conservation. We’re children of the scientific age too, you know.

But are you using “law” descriptively—or proscriptively in terms of what is possible?

God is not bound by natural law. God owns the whole house; he’s not a house-burglar who must “break” into his own home. He has the key.

“The Big Bang is a singularity out of which space-time was created, but not energy. The idea is that matter, in the form we all know and love -- atoms, did not exist until after the BB cooled. That doesn't mean that matter/energy were "created" by the BB, and in fact, we would be declaring "something from nothing". First, the singularity is an artefact of inadequate mathematics to deal with quantum gravity, and it will "disappear" after we have the models necessary. Second, the singularity is a uniquely "unphysical" event, in which infinite density is posited, and infinite mass, without volume.”

i) I never appealed to the Big Bang.

For the record, I’m an indirect realist. As such, I don’t have much use for scientific theorizing about the origins of the world, whether in the form of conventional cosmology or creation science.

ii) Are you or are you not a materialist? If so, what are mathematical entities?

iii) I think you’re getting carried away with hyperbolic language about “infinite” mass and “infinite” density.

“Back to your [godawful] analogy:
we know human beings
we know the sorts of activities they employ, and the objects they use
we know the materials that they use, and how they manipulate them

thus, in archeology, "finding a designer" is trivial”

i) Yes, that’s warmed over Hume. Been there, done that.

It assumes that the design inference is an argument from experience. Wrong.

How do I know that a watchmaker is trying to make a watch? I don’t have direct access to his intentions.

Yes, I can observe him making a watch, but I cannot observe his intention to make a watch.

So I can only judge by the effect. If it’s a timepiece, then I assume he intended to make a watch, and not a flowerpot.

Thus, I infer design on the basis of the watch rather than my experience of the watchmaker.

ii) You’re criterion would also render it impossible to judge whether an alien spacecraft was a product of intelligent design.

After all, we don’t know aliens. We don’t know what sorts of activities they employ, or the objects they use, or the materials they use, or how they manipulate them.

iii) Indeed, by your yardstick we could never learn anything at all. For if we can only learn from experience, then we can never learn anything for the first time.

“We do not know the universe's proposed "D"esigner.”

Actually, we do. It’s called revelation.

And aside from Scripture, we can infer the unknown from the known.

“We do not know the sorts of activities/mechanisms/objects that "D"esigners use [to make universes, or anything else]”

Our ignorance of the process is irrelevant to our knowing that an effect must have had a cause.

“We do not know how matter can be created ex nihilo, and scientific laws contradict this.”

Two basic blunders:

i) Creation ex nihilo doesn’t “violate” any laws of nature, for creation is what instantiates the forces of nature in the first place. No creation, no natural laws. The laws of nature are a consequence of creation, not a barrier to creation.

ii) Even if it were a violation of natural law, so what? From a Christian standpoint, natural law is merely a synonym for providence. God is not bound by the ordinary course of nature.

“Can we say non sequitur, from the flaws pointed out above?”

I agree. Your flawed rebuttal is a non sequitur. Happy now?

“Every unfalsified prediction of science is evidence that supports the uniformity of natural law.”

In that event, it only takes a single false prediction to falsify the uniformity of nature.

Since there are plenty of these to choose from, you’ve disproven your own thesis. Thanks a bunch.

“What "substantiates" the view of nature as "interruptible" rather than your faith and dogmatic attachment to dusty scrolls of uncertain origins by unknown authors?”

i) You seem to suffer from short-term memory loss. As I already explained, any observational testimony for the regularity of nature must share equal time with observational testimony for the miraculous.

Predictions are only as good as observers to confirm them.

ii) Not all predictions are scientific predictions. There are also prophetic predictions. The argument from prophecy is a stock argument in apologetics.

iii) Belief in the miraculous isn’t limited to past events, as I also said before.

iv) Belief in the uniformity of nature, which is, in the nature of the case, radically undetermined by any available or attainable evidence, is a textbook specimen of dogmatic faith.

v) To say the Bible was written by unknown authors is a naked assertion bereft of any supporting argument.

By contrast, there is an extensive body of scholarly literature defending the traditional authorship of Scripture.

“What axiomatic stance do you have? Nature is uniform...except when God intervenes...which I know by...the Bible?”

i) You have skewed the alternatives by treating uniformity as the standard of reference, against which any “interruption” would be an inexplicable anomaly. Once again you resort to a rhetorical gimmick in lieu of a real argument.

ii) Science is supposed to be based on observation and discovery, not stipulative definitions of what can happen in advance of the fact.

iii) The Bible is one of my sources of information.

iv) But I also don’t come to the table with your preconceived notion of what is possible. All you’ve done is to cloak your prejudice in the name of science.

“As I said in the beginning, much of this post seems to revolve around Hume vs. religious believers. Those who agree with Hume are going to stack up on one side, and side with science and UN and naturalism, etc., and those who disagree are going to stack up on the other side.”

The uniformity of nature is not a scientific deliverance. And it’s not a precondition for doing science.

Likewise, naturalism is not a scientific deliverance. And it’s not a precondition of doing science.

“I am not a philosopher”

Yes, and it shows.

“But I've done enough science to know ‘superstition’ and ‘miracles’ are non-answers to the reality of our cosmos. They are faith objects. They connote no more secure knowledge than leaving a blank or gap and admitting, ‘I don't know, but I believe...’"

How would doing science yield your conclusion?

Miracles were never intended to be the answer to every phenomenon. If a “natural” explanation will suffice, fine.

The fact that a “natural” explanation may be sufficient under ordinary circumstances is irrelevant to those cases wherein it cannot account for the phenomenon.

“We *know* that every human being in recorded history has died a physical death,”

This is not inconsistent with Scripture, for Scripture has a doctrine of mortality.

“Excepting those recorded in "Scriptures"”

And Scripture gives a reason for the exceptions.

“Which also record lots of other goodies, like that the earth was created before the stars, that the plants were created before the sun, that the "days" were present before the sun,”

And the problem with all this is what, exactly?

“That 10 plagues were poured out on Egypt (though there is no evidence for it, and evidence to the contrary), that a Exodus occurred where 600,000 men (not counting women and children) left Egypt and wandered for 40 years...(ditto on the evidence)...”

I already responded to Dagood’s post. Try again.

“SOOO...you guys stick with your religious faith, I'll call it superstition, and I'll stick with a universe in which flippant magical Beings don't do miracles every couple of thousand years and let the "well-oiled machine" run the rest of the time. I'll stick with naturalism, because it works, and I have evidence, and not faith, that it does.”

i) This is an ignorant caricature of the opposing position.

You impute a deistic framework to Scripture, in relation to which any miracle would be a deus ex machina.

Since that is not an accurate characterization of the Christian worldview, you are burning a strawman.

ii) In what sense does naturalism “work”? Can naturalism explain abstract objects like numbers? Can naturalism explain consciousness?

iv) To say that you have evidence instead of faith conveniently ignores, without so much as an argument, an extensive body of apologetic literature in which various lines of evidence are brought to bear in defense of the faith.

All you’ve done is to lock yourself into a windowless room and unscrew the light bulb, then pat yourself on the back because you don’t see any evidence to the contrary.

SOOO…you guys stick with your irreligious faith. I’ll call it superstition and prejudice, and I’ll stick with observation, testimony, and discovery instead of dictating to the universe what it’s allowed to do.

Bible Criticism: Online Resources

A Summary Critique: Who Wrote the Bible?

The Old Testament in Light of the Archaeological Evidence: A New Assessment for the Twenty-First Century

Approaching the Old Testament

Methods of Studying the Patriarchal Narratives as Ancient Texts

Pentateuchal Studies Today

The Date of Deuteronomy: Linch-pin of Old Testament Criticism. Part One

The Date of Deuteronomy: Linch-pin of Old Testament Criticism. Part Two

Archaeological Data and the Dating of the Patriarchs

The Origins of Israel in Canaan: An Examination of Recent Theories

Studies in the Book of Joshua

Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel

Superstition

Brother Danny said:

“Isn't this really about Hume's PoI, which clearly divides believers, of all stripes, in a supernatural ontology from materialists/naturalists? The uniformity of nature (UN) and the openness to scientific examination of alleged violations is the crux of my position, but I can't speak for John.”

“I haven't read the other posts by fellow triabloguers, but let me systematically categorize "ancient superstitions" versus "modern superstitions". Do we agree that scientific knowledge usurps superstition?”

No, we don’t agree to that.

i) Not all scientific theorizing counts as scientific knowledge.

ii) It’s true that science can undermine superstition, and that’s a good thing.

iii) The uniformity of nature is a metaphysical axiom, not a scientific discovery.

iv) There is, in Danny’s discussion, a systematic equivocation over the definition of “superstition.”

Does “superstition” mean (a) irrational belief, or (b) religious belief?

v) Science is not opposed to religious belief, per se.

vi) Science can also swap out an ancient superstition with a modern superstition, viz. ufology.

vii) To take another example, it’s obvious that Darwinism is far more than a scientific theory for many unbelievers. They have a deep emotional investment in evolution. It has become their alternative to a Christian worldview. That’s why they brook no dissent. That’s why they blacklist anyone within the scientific community who expresses doubt over evolution.

It has become a modern superstition.

“Do we agree that someone who subscribes to the UN and does not believe any event cannot be explained via naturalism is antithetical to superstition?”

This is antithetical to “superstition” as religious belief (a tendentious definition), but it is not antithetical to “superstition” as irrational belief.

“Good. Now, I would simply argue that proposed ‘holes’ in the UN can either be patched via the natural worldview or via any of the various supernatural ontologies.”

If Danny is admitting that there are gaps in the uniformity of nature, then the dogma of UN is underdetermined by the evidence.

“We should make a line of demarcation there. If you agree, then we must agree that categorically speaking, the number of ancient peoples with a strictly natural worldview, who subscribed to the UN, was incomparably small relative to today. Therefore, the number of peoples across the line, who subscribed to one of the many pseudo-explanations of myth, lore, and miracles to plug in the holes of their knowledge, [qualified that we're talking about myth and lore that incorporate gods, supernatural entities and events, etc.] were hugely disproportionate to today. Simply put, then number of materialists/skeptics then, compared to now, is pitifully insignificant.”

“The schools of the Cynics and Skeptics made up what fraction of the world at the time? The disproportionate writings we have from them are representative not of their size, but of their historical place within the "ancient enlightenment" of Greece, and the abundant literature poured out at the time (relatively speaking) from all schools of thought there. As a proportion of the worlds' population, these schools were insignificant.”

“ Therefore, probabilistically speaking, John is justified in saying that the category of "ancient peoples" is not fallaciously equated with "superstitious" peoples.”

i) Danny is equating superstition with religiosity or belief in the supernatural.

That definition is invidious and prejudicial. All he’s done is to beg the question in his favor through the semantic ploy of truth by definition.

ii) We also need to distinguish between general belief in the supernatural, and the specific identification of the supernatural.

The specific identification of what constitutes the supernatural is often culture-bound. Cultural tradition supplies the interpretive categories.

But it doesn’t follow from this that belief in the supernatural is culture-bound. Historically, belief in the supernatural is a cultural universal.

iii) Secularism is also a consequence of social conditioning.

iv) At the same time, all that modernity is done is to replace one form of superstition or religiosity with another.

A postchristian culture isn’t any less religious or superstitious than a prechristian culture.

Rather, a postchristian culture will either substitute a secular superstition like ufology and metaphysical naturalism or else revert to an ancient superstition like the occult.

Belief in the supernatural either remains intact, but is merely relocated, or else it’s transvaluated into a secular surrogate.

“You proceed to examine ancient beliefs and disregard them on the basis that they are ancient. John disregards superstition, characterized by a supernatural ontology and disbelief in the UN. Obviously, the bedrock of the UN is the foundation for materialism, so I don't see how you can justify calling people who subscribe to it ‘superstitious’. By default, it would seem, people who disregard miracles and agree to the UN are non-superstitious.”

Because this trades on the equivocal usage of “superstition.”

“The same goes with skeptics. If they require evidence to believe that the UN is violated, doesn't that make them the opposite of gullible, naive, or superstitious? Isn't that where the term "enlightenment" and the phrase "the age of reason" come in: where superstition is abandoned?”

This is a classic example of a blinkered outlook. Notice where he places the burden of proof.

He takes the uniformity of nature as a given, so that the onus is on the Christian to proven an exception or “violation.”

But there is no evidence for the uniformity of nature. There is only evidence for the regularity of nature.

There could never be evidence for the uniformity of nature since that is a universal claim which is vastly underdetermined by our sampling base. Induction alone cannot possibly justify the uniformity of nature.

At most, there would only be evidence that things have always happened the same way as long as earthlings have been observers.

Unfortunately for Hume and his epigones, the same historical testimony to the ordinary course of nature also includes testimony to the miraculous.

Indeed, this is so pervasive that unbelievers must summarily dismiss their testimony by branding it as “superstition.”

But if those who lived before the glorious age of reason are unreliable witnesses to the miraculous, then pre-enlightenment observers are also unreliable witnesses to the “uniformity” of nature throughout the preceding millennia.

“And the average American scientific illiterate today, compared to 2000 years ago, is still extremely less superstitious, in that they at least almost universally acknowledge the UN, excepting only miracles done by their preferred god.”

Aside from Danny’s ubiquitous equivocation, why does he assert that we limit miracles to our own religion?

i) To begin with, Christians believe in the dark side. In the reality of witchcraft.

ii) Most religions never lay claim to miraculous attestation in the first place.

“The good news is that the number of gods has shrunk, leaving less "alternative explanations" for our gaps in knowledge and proposed violations of the UN. As silly as people are today, with 60% believing in ESP and 32% in lucky numbers, compare that to the ancient world's various superstitions, or even our modern-day third-world countries, and what would we see, percentage-wise?”

This assumes, without benefit of argument, that belief in the paranormal is inherently superstitious.

But the parapsychological literature cannot be disqualified with a wave of the hand. Not everyone involved in this line of research is a quack or dupe. And some case-studies are more impressive than others. Just consult some of the standard literature on the topic, viz.

Bartholomew, D. Uncertain Belief (Clarendon 1996)

Braude, S. Immortal Remains (Rowman & Littlefield 2003)

Montefiore, H. The Paranormal: A Bishop Investigates (Upfront Publishing 2002).

John W. Loftus said:

“No, No, No. One main point from what I wrote is that since these Ephesians were totally convinced in Artemis WITHOUT evidence, then whether they believed Paul or not would not depend on evidence either. “

i) A nonsequitur. Given the force of social conditioning and the fear of being ostracized, they would need a reason to convert.

ii) And the fact that they had no evidence for their hereditary pagan faith does not imply that they were also given no reason to believe the Gospel.

“So the fact that the gospel spread in the Roman world among THE MASSES (or specifically the Ephesian area) doesn't show anything about the evidence there might have been for the gospel. Miller does not/cannot refute this point since I quote from the Bible itself. (Look also at Acts 17:22-23 where the KJV uses the word ‘superstitious’).”

i) The Christian faith has always been an apologetic faith. Just read F.F. Bruce, The Defense of the Gospel in the New Testament (Eerdmans 1984).

ii) By “superstitious,” Luke means idolatrous.

“On the contrary, since we are all children of our times, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Paul himself was a child of his times and believed a wonderful story based upon a vision he saw.”

i) Yes, the Bible writers were children of their times. They were products of their social conditioning.

But God is responsible for their social conditioning. That is why the Jews were called upon to separate themselves from the idolatries and immoralities of their pagan neighbors.

ii) Loftus begs the question by assuming that there’s no such thing as revelation or providence.

iii) Paul revised his views on the basis of new information. That’s rational, not irrational. And besides the vision, he appeals to other supporting evidence, viz. prophetic fulfillment, eyewitnesses.

“Now I know that I can prove none of this”

Agreed!

“Just like you cannot prove the opposite.”

A tendentious claim.

“But it leaves room for doubt, such that if you were a juror judging the case it would be enough to cause "reasonable doubt" like it does with me.”

Whether the Christian faith is doubtful or not depends on one’s theology and epistemology.

For my part I regard saving faith as a mode of knowledge, not defeasible belief.

They’re Creeping In! Pt. 2

(from my post from Strange BaptistFire).

We are continuing our series of responses to this article from BaptistFire. The first post can be read here. You might be wondering why I am spending so much time and space on what might seem to you as little details. The reason is three-fold:

1. Often, the BaptistFire articles are permeated with out-of-context Scripture citations used to support an assumed point. The misuse of God’s Word is no light matter, and therefore I seek to address extensively the Scripture citations utilized by these anonymous contributors. Obviously, not everything needs a long answer. But some things do.

2. The main purpose of this blog (Strange BaptistFire) is to serve those who might be “fence-sitters” when it comes to these issues. We do not want them to be deceived by the works put out on BaptistFire. We want them to be convinced of the truth of, among other things, the Doctrines of Grace. But we don’t want them to accept it blindly. We want them to be convinced on the basis of Biblical convictions.

3. I don’t want any of the unfortunately-anonymous-authors of BaptistFire to make the accusation that I have not handled their works with care. We at Strange BaptistFire do not view highly the material that is produced at the BaptistFire website. We believe it to be sub-scholarship. It is also divisive, accusatory, and unfair (if you do not think this is already evident, just continue to “stay tuned”). But we as Christians want to handle things honestly and fairly. We wish to treat them how they have not treated us.

Anyway, getting back to this article… I’ll recite the context for our next point:

“Crept in Unawares …”
Calvinists want to take over your Southern Baptist church
a BaptistFire special report
(Updated: Sept. 26, 2005)

What Calvinists Believe

Calvinists do not believe that God loves everyone (contrary to John 3:16). They do not believe that God wants to save everyone (contrary to 1 Tim. 2:4). Most do not believe that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. (contrary to 1 John 2:2). Not only are these doctrines contrary to the Bible they are contrary to what the vast majority of Southern Baptists believe.

Here’s today’s point:

They do not believe that God wants to save everyone (contrary to 1 Tim. 2:4).

1. The question at first isn’t so much whether or not God wants to save everyone, but if God wants to save anyone. In synergism, we have a God that states that he wants to save everyone but makes no efficacious effort to save anyone. Synergism allows for the possibility of no one being saved. We begin to wonder if God truly wants to save every individual.

But Scripture does not pose such a scenario. Rather, we have a God who is concerned about his people, interacting with them redemptively, choosing to love them out of his own good pleasure alone, effectually accomplishing their salvation. We see Christ who loves his bride the church to the extent that he redeems her (Eph 5:25, John 17). We see the Father choosing a people for himself that will proclaim his excellencies (1 Peter 2:9, Eph 1:3). And we see the Spirit monergistically regenerating God’s elect and enabling them to believe (John 3, Eph 2:4-5). In the Bible, we see a monergistic salvation, and this is a monergistic salvation that is accomplished in a specific group. God mercies whom he wills and he hardens whom he wills.

2. My readers have seen me address 1 Tim 2:4 numerous times, and are probably tired of hearing (or… reading) me on the subject. But for those who are new readers, let’s take a look at this text. What is the context?

1 Timothy 2:1-7 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

Let’s forget about verse 4 for a moment and pretend that we are reading this from the beginning for the first time. Paul urges us to pray for “all people.” What do you think he means by this? Paul, are you asking us to get out the New Testament phone book and pray for every single person in the world who has ever existed or will ever exist? Is that what Paul means? Well, we don’t have to guess for ourselves because Paul clarifies this for us: “for kings and all who are in high positions”. You see, the word “all” is a universal quantifier. We must not confuse extension (referent) with intension (sense). A universal quantifier has a standard intension but a variable extension. The word “all” by itself makes no sense, that is, unless the referent is assumed on the basis of context. I could ask my co-workers, “How many of you guys want to go out to eat?” They might answer, “all.” Does that then mean that every single person in the world who ever existed or whoever will exist wants to go out to eat with me? No, I’m not free to make the referent anything I want. Context determines referent. Here, the extension (referent) was “my co-workers” or “of you guys.” All of my co-workers wanted to go eat. All of you guys wanted to go eat.

Thus, Paul qualifies his statement with the phrase “for kings and those in authority.” In other words, we are to pray for all kinds of people. Remember, we haven’t gotten to verse 4 yet. To us, it doesn’t exist. So far, honest Biblical exegesis has caused us to conclude that Paul is telling us to not limit our prayers to any one kind of person, but to pray for all kinds of people. Pray for kings, too. Don’t just pray for your best friend. Pray for your king. This makes sense, because kings, in a great way, can control whether or not we live peacefully (v. 2).

But what is a bigger reason? Even more so than our own peace, why should we pray for all kinds of people? Why should we pray for kings? Well, “this is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior” (v. 3). Why? Because he “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (v. 4). There we have it. We shouldn’t limit our prayers to any one kind of person because God wants all kinds of people to be saved. He wants to save kings, too. He wants to save your best friend.

So, as far as I can see, we have two choices with this text: either dogmatically assume that the extension of the word “all” is “every single person who ever existed or who ever will exist,” or we can read this verse in light of its context and determine that God wishes to save all kinds of people. The first option poses some difficulties. First, it puts us in quite a predicament, for, being consistent, we are all disobeying the command to pray for every single person in the world. Synergists can’t have their cake and eat it two; they can’t argue that the extension for “all” in v. 1 is “all kinds of people” but then argue that the assumed extension for v. 4 is “every single person without differentiation.” Either verse 4 promotes synergism and we are all disobeying the command in verse 1, or the text is a consistent piece that tells us that God wants to save all kinds of people and that we should therefore pray for all kinds of people. Second, the synergist reading poses the problem mentioned earlier concerning the will of God. Does God really desire to save every single person? Why, then, is not every single person saved? Ultimately, we have a God that doesn’t will to save anyone to the extent that he’ll wholly and efficaciously accomplish it. If from their autonomy they generate faith, God is pleased. But otherwise he can’t really do anything about it. God’s will, therefore, becomes a matter of mere opinion, not something that has reality to its accomplishment.

But we shouldn’t stop here in the text. We can bring Paul’s line of thought all the way through:

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

We have another universal quantifier in v. 6, with no stated extension. It is incorrect for us to assume that the extension is “every single person.” My example earlier with the co-workers shows this. If we don’t make such absurd assumptions when it comes to our every-day speech, why do we do it with the Word of God? Anyway, the point is that the extension (referent) must be determined by the context. We already have the context of v. 1-3, establishing the extension of all kinds of people. Does Paul abandon this extension? He certainly does not. Ponder v. 7: “for this reason I was appointed a preacher… of the Gentiles…” For this reason? For what reason? Well, Paul is obviously alluding to the information beforehand concerning God’s will and whom he desires to be saved. And the fact is connected with Paul’s Gentile ministry. God doesn’t just want to save Jews. He wants to save kings and Gentiles too! This is radical news to the first century mind. Paul was appointed to minister to the Gentiles because God wills that all kinds of people be saved.

Furthermore, consider some key terms of this text: mediator and ransom. Now, is Christ really the mediator between God and every single person (the supposed meaning of “all”)? Is he really their ransom? Or is he only a potential ransom or a potential mediator? You see, universalism is unavoidable apart from unadulterated eisegesis. It is only after eisegeting the word potential into this text that the synergist reading becomes comfortable. Therefore, the choice is between a non-contextual, eisegetical reading, and the Reformed contextual, exegetical reading.

We’ll move on to the third point in the next post!

Evan May.

Acts 19 And Differing Types And Degrees Of Gullibility

I think that what we're seeing with John Loftus is what we often see with skeptics who use the argument that ancient people were gullible. As the discussion progresses, they come to more and more of a realization of how flawed their original argument was. They modify the argument along the way, but act as if they've been saying the same thing all along. The more qualifiers they add to their argument, the more reasonable it becomes, the closer they get to agreeing with what the Christians here have been saying all along.

Yes, modern people have some advantages over ancient people. Similarly, people of the forty-first century surely will have some advantages over people of the twenty-first century. Just as forty-first century people can't therefore dismiss the testimony of twenty-first century people based on vague references to gullibility, so twenty-first century people can't dismiss the testimony of first-century people based on vague references to gullibility. Just as the unreasonable behavior of the Ephesians in Acts 19 doesn't prove that the apostle Paul can't be trusted, so the unreasonable behavior of twenty-first century militant Muslims doesn't prove that John Loftus can't be trusted.

Again, John Loftus and the other skeptics posting here ought to either read Glenn Miller's article on this subject or read the summary conclusions at the end of the article. As Miller explains, we have to distinguish between different types of gullibility and differing degrees of gullibility. No reasonable jury would dismiss the testimony of a witness to a murder just because that witness carries a good luck charm with him wherever he goes. People can be unreasonable in one area of their life without their credibility in every area of their life being thereby eliminated. Even if a person is considered highly gullible in general, his testimony can be credible in some circumstances. A child can be a reliable witness in a court of law under some circumstances, even if that child believes in many unreasonable things, is highly ignorant in many areas of life, etc. The fact that some ancient Ephesians behaved irrationally in Acts 19 doesn't lead us to the conclusion that the apostle Paul isn't credible.

A person who accepts a religious belief that's popular in his culture, without making much effort to examine that belief, isn't in the same category as a person who was an enemy of a religion, then converted to it after eyewitnessing a supernatural event that he testified to at the risk of his life. When we compare the behavior of the Ephesians in Acts 19 to the behavior of the apostle Paul, we notice many differences, including some that are of a highly significant nature. Rather than making John Loftus' case, his citation of Acts 19 undermines his case. Acts 19 gives us another illustration of how there was a wide diversity of people in the ancient world, as there is in the world today, and we can see how reasonable somebody like the apostle Paul was by comparing him to truly unreasonable people like those in Ephesus in Acts 19. Vague references to ancient gullibility don't overturn the specific evidence we have for the credibility of a Paul, a James, a Luke, or a Polycarp.