Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Rocks of ages

JD WALTERS SAID:

“Nothing in the Bible suggests that inspiration included that kind of knowledge. Did Paul say that every scripture is profitable for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, and knowledge of biology and geology?”

i) Inspiration covers whatever the Bible teaches. Genesis concerns itself with the origin of the world, including the origin of natural kinds–like birds, fish, and land animals.

You may say the Genesis account lacks technical specificity, but it’s true at the level of specificity it aims for. It’s speaking at the categorical level. Natural kinds by category.

ii) Perhaps you’re endorsing a more liberal theory of inspiration, like partial inspiration/limited inerrancy, where inspiration is confined certain types of subject-matter.

If so, that’s vulnerable to familiar objections.

“The only factual claims it makes that intersect with science are that God ordered and structured the Universe to make it a place fit to manifest his glory. Again, see Walton and Beale.”

i) I wouldn’t assume that Walton and Beale have identical views. Walton makes some useful points, but he overstates his case.

ii) There are also temple motifs in Gen 2-3, but this doesn’t mean Beale treats those chapters as nothing more a proleptic allegory for the tabernacle. It’s not as if he denies the historicity of Adam and Eve, or the Fall, &c.

“Even the number and sequence of the days and what was created on them is a stylized literary patterning, with two pairs of three days for God to create the structures and then the creatures to fill them. The number 7 is highly symbolic: It took seven years to build the Jerusalem temple, and the root of the word is 'savah' which means 'to be full or satisfied, to have enough of'. Therefore obviously (according to the Hebrew writers) God had to complete his work on the seventh day, the day of rest, the day of completion.”

That’s not all of a piece:

i) A basic problem with the framework hypothesis is the way it overrides the explicit septunarian sequential progression by subordinating that pattern of a nonlinear, hexadic pattern.

ii) Yes, the seven days may reflect a stylized numerological pattern. However, the fact that Scripture frequently uses round figures for numerological purposes doesn’t mean these figures don’t approximate real time (or space or units of something). It doesn’t obliterate a linear sequence. At most it rounds up or rounds down real time intervals for symbolic purposes. To take your own example, while the interval given for the construction of the temple may well be chosen for its numerological significance, this doesn’t mean it either took a nanosecond or a billion years to build the temple. Rather, it’s a round number.

You may say it does more than that, but if so, that requires more of an argument than numerology alone.

Of course, numerology sometimes occurs in literary genres (e.g. Revelation) where it does not approximate a real-world analogue, but that’s a side-effect of the genre, not the numerology, per se.

“I wasn't talking about ancient people, I was talking about modern YECers. My point is that, from their context of acquaintance with modern biology, they pose questions to the text that it never intended to address.”

Whether or not that’s the case, it’s hardly germane to my own responses to you.

“Not when you load it with speculation about what point in the cycle God started from. There is a difference between the biblical and philosophical concepts of ex nihilo.”

The Bible teaches creation ex nihilo, as well as the creation of periodic processes. So that leaves it an open question where in the cycle the cycle is instantiated. Exegesis may further pin that down.

“My objection is predicated on science, on philosophy and on exegesis. I've already argued repeatedly that there is no evidence in the Genesis text for God starting at any particular point in the development of vegetation and animals when he created.”

It doesn’t have an evolutionary narrative in which self-reproducing plants and animals are the end-product of an age-long process, beginning with the Big Bang, cosmic expansion, formation of galaxies, primordial soup, development of microbes, &c, until we finally reach the types of birds, plants, and animals familiar to the target-audience for Gen 1.

“Except with creation there's no reason, other than the Genesis 1 timeframe (which is a literary construct), to assume that God worked as fast as he did with the loaves and fishes.”

Well, I don’t view the timeframe as just a literary construct.

“Maybe not with respect to modern biology, but intertestamental exegesis was full of attempts to get information from the text that it never intended to give. The same goes for medieval and more recent Jewish and Christian exegesis.”

You’re shadowboxing with people other than me.

“It's not a non-sequitur. The Bible doesn't give that information, we get that from science. My point has been precisely that the biblical account is neutral about the issue.”

Which is duplicitous when you demand biblical warrant for all my counterarguments to your biblically unwarranted arguments.

“Again, you're getting too much information out of the text. It doesn't specify what form the emergence of those creatures took. Can we stick with what the Bible says please? The Earth 'put forth' vegetation, and the waters 'swarmed' with creatures. At some point in the process there weren't these things, and then there were. That's all the information we get.”

Which doesn’t mean you can shoehorn the evolutionary narrative into Gen 1-2. You can write it off as a parable, but don’t act as if that’s consistent with your alternative.

“To accommodate the Genesis creation account as interpreted by YECers, all the evidence we have of those species is evidence of events which never took place.”

You’re conflating YEC with Omphalism. YEC doesn’t attribute the fossil record to creation a la prochronic time. It attributes the fossil record to a global flood. Since you know that’s the YEC position, I don’t know why you pretend otherwise.

Of course, you can take issue with flood geology, but that’s a different question.

Strictly speaking, the Bible is silent on the origin of fossils. Scripture doesn’t affirm or deny extinct species. Since I grant the existence of animal death before the Fall, that, per se, is not an issue for me.

“Simple. If you're going to make a radical disjunction between appearances and the external world, so that all we have access to are mental contents, then the Bible and its accounts are only part of those appearances, since we only have access to the Bible through appearances.”

That disjunction isn’t simply *my* disjunction. Rather, that follows from a *scientific* analysis of sensory perception, where the observer does not and cannot directly perceive the external world. All he perceives is coded information, viz. electromagnetic input translated into electrochemical information.

This is one of the dilemmas of scientific realism. If you accept the scientific analysis of sensory perception, then it undercuts the univocal correspondence between the distal stimulus and the proximal stimulus.

What we’re left with is a plaintext/ciphertext correlation, like the correlation between music and a music score, where the score represents the music even though the score doesn’t resemble the music.

“You can't arbitrary stipulate that one set of appearances (the ones we have when we hold and read a Bible) can provide our anchor to the external world. The kind of sensationism you're talking about is too strict for that.”

That simply commits a different level-confusion. Communication (apart from alleged instances of telepathy) involves symbolic discourse, where word and object don’t resemble each other. Yet that doesn’t prevent the successful transmission of ideas, since an idea of an object doesn’t have to physically resemble the object, and the medium of communication doesn’t have to physically resemble the object.

That’s quite different from the question of whether grass is really green, tables are really solid, &c.

“If you're going to espouse that kind of extreme Lockean sensationism, where all we have access to are our mental contents, you'll quickly be threatened by skepticism about the external world from which even appeal to the Bible or revelation won't help you. After all, you couldn't claim that you have access to revelation, you could only claim that you have access to a mental image of revelation.”

i) Revelation is the revelation of ideas. Propositional content. If that’s garbled in process of communication, then the result is gibberish. Since, however, the Bible is intelligible, we know that God successfully communicated his message to the percipient. The process of transmission is self-confirming.

ii) You also act as though you have some alternative which sidesteps the consequences of my position. But what alternative would that be?

You think human beings are embodied creatures. Whether you’re a dualist or physicalist, you’re committed to the proposition that our knowledge of the external world is mediated by the senses. The mind/brain lacks direct access to the external world. If you stick a needle in my arm, what I’m sensing is a nerve impulse.

“Unless the understanding that we have access to the external world through our mental images is primary, and that our connection to the external world is grounded in those experiences themselves, all we can be is Chesterton's madman, locked up in the endless circle of our own mental images, but which is a very small circle indeed.”

No, it would have to be grounded in a God who has designed the encryption/decryption process so that what we perceive is relevantly analogous to what there is.

“For the reasons I gave above, any YEC account is going to have to resort to Omphalism to explain away the fossil record, light we receive from stars that are billions of light years away, etc. To save the appearances, YECers have to postulate that many events from the distant past we have evidence for simply never took place.”

That’s not how YECers account for the fossil record. It’s true that they often say starlight was created in transit, but that’s a different principle. That involves the initial set-up conditions of a cyclical process.

Your strictures wouldn’t permit God to create a coastline without going through the whole process of stratification, coastal erosion, &c. That’s a ridiculous restriction on God’s freedom of action.

“It is if you believe in a God who would plant traces of a history that never happened.”

You mean, like God planting the garden of Eden? What do you make of landscape engineering? Is it deceptive when a landscape engineer creates artificial ponds and waterfalls, or transplants flora from a tree farm, &c? All those traces of a nonexistent history. How deceptive!

“So you wouldn't object to the idea that God started real history five minutes ago, or more generally that we have no way of knowing where real history leaves off and the apparent history begins?”

You mean, like when Adam opened his eyes for the first time, to find himself a full-grown man, with innate knowledge, in a preexisting Garden–none of which existed a few hours before?

There’s also a difference between antecedent objections and subsequent objections. Since the Bible demarcates real history from apparent history, I object to Last Thursdayism. But I’m not Adam. I have a different history than Adam. A different real history.

“But on your own account, your knowledge of what Genesis says is only an appearance, a mental image. You can't use that to ground knowledge that those events took place.”

You’re confusing a carrier wave with what it carries.

“So you take back what you said in your previous post about how accepting the full evolutionary history has no bearing on whether and how many supernatural influences there have been throughout history?”

That depends on how hostile or open to supernatural factors a particular version of evolution happens to be. That ranges along a continuum. Your own version is pretty hostile.

“So yes, in a sense we just 'posit' them, but we posit them to account for our existence in a life-supporting universe, and thousands of experiments confirm that they are indeed constant through time.”

So you admit that you don’t have a noncircular method of measuring time.

“So that makes it more reliable? Now you're sounding silly.”

What’s silly is the way you change the subject. The question at issue wasn’t what’s more reliable, but you’re anachronistic application of modern physics (i.e. physical constants) to Gen 1:14ff. It doesn't speak to that issue one way or the other.

“You're going to have to explain how you think armchair philosophical antirealism invalidates the evolutionary narrative.”

As far as that goes, there are many things which invalidate the evolutionary narrative.

“After my repeated statements of accepting the veracity of boatloads of miracles, you think I'm trying to convince people that they shouldn't believe in miracles. Your extremism is not only callous at times, but also downright dishonest.”

The question at issue, as you yourself framed it, is your standing presumption against miracles. So you’re dishonestly misrepresenting your own position.

“There's plenty of Christian silliness to go around. Think of televangelists who sell blessed 'healing handkerchiefs' or 'miracle wafers'. Think of Christian groups that refuse to use modern medicine and have their children die as a result. It's not as if there's a few Christians tainted by bad experience with supernatural claims and the rest are lily-white innocents who happen to have chanced on exactly the right combination of beliefs, so they don't have to worry about being critical of such claims. Every Christian should be equipped to critically test other people's claims. Even if Scripture is (rightly) part of that critical apparatus, the Christian must exercise reason to properly interpret Scripture and apply it to claims she encounters.”

That tirade is irrelevant to the issue I raised. As I’ve repeatedly explained, is not an immediate miracle, but the way in which past miracles impact the present. Past miracles, like answers to prayer or providential timing, affect the “course of nature” further down the line. Yet in many cases that would be indetectible further down the line. For the long-range effect of a supernatural cause is indistinguishable from the long-range effect of a natural cause. Yet we know, on theological grounds, that answered prayers (to take one example) are factors in historical causation. Therefore, you cannot stipulate a presumption against supernatural causation in world history.

“Ooh, perish the thought! You think holding those beliefs is incompatible with saving faith?”

It’s incompatible with revealed truth.

“You think Martin Luther was damned for entertaining the possibility of postmortem salvation? You think it put him on a slippery slope to apostasy?”

Are you equally nonchalant about his anti-Semitic diatribes?

Luther never meant to break with Rome. So he was having to make up his theology as he went along. He was right more often than wrong, but you can’t use him as the yardstick, for your situation is different from his. You have advantages he did not.

“Your problem is that you see a straight line leading from certain beliefs to apostasy. The Church has outlined clearly which beliefs put someone beyond the pale, and those aren't among them. Nor can you legitimately extrapolate from someone's entertaining them to the conclusion that they are in danger of apostasy.”

A straw man.

“By the way, I'm not saying that I do hold to those things. In proper critical mode, I won't assent or withhold my assent until I've examined all the Scriptural evidence. I certainly won't take your word for it that those beliefs are beyond the pale until I've researched the matter for myself.”

Another straw man. You have a habit of projecting “Father David” onto your opponents. (At least where I'm concerned.) You need to outgrow that father-complex. It clouds your judgment.

Unlike “Father David,” I never ask anyone to accept something I say on my personal authority. I argue for my positions. I’m not claiming the angel Gabriel whispered this in my ear. And that includes my extensive critique of universalism.

“Just because he personally became more skeptical doesn't mean his strategy was ill-fated. Many Christians throughout history who never apostasized held similar views to his theory of 'robust formational economy'. Again, that straight line idea.”

Howard Van Till took his strategy to its logical conclusion. He kept pushing God to the margins until there was nothing left on this side of the margin–at which point God became an expendable postulate.

“We can stop talking about time and instead talk about placing events in sequence. Fine. Either way if you look at the evidence, you're going to find the event of the landing on the moon in between our 'event' and WW1, and the time when Genesis was supposed to happen according to Biblical chronology in between our 'event' and the event of the Cambrian explosion. And one interval is a whole lot bigger than the other.”

The sequence is objective. However, as Poincaré pointed out long ago, you can’t directly compare one interval with another:

“The second half of Poincaré’s essay ‘The measure of time’ is the more famous because of its connection with special relativity. But I will concentrate here on the first half, where Poincaré begins with the problem that we do not and cannot have a direct intuition of the equality of successive time intervals (equality of duration of successive processes). This is not a psychological point. Two successive periods of a clock cannot be compared by placing them temporally side by side, that is why direct perception can’t verify whether they lasted equally long,” Bas Van Fraassen, Scientific Representation (Oxford 2008), 130.

“In the case of two sticks we can check to see whether they are equally long (at a given time) by placing them side by side; that is we can check spatial congruence (at that time) by an operation that effects spatial coincidence (at that time). We can check whether two clocks run in synchrony during a certain interval if we place them in spatial coincidence. These procedures do not suffice for checking whether two sticks distant from each other in time or space are of equal length, nor whether distant clocks are running in tandem, nor whether a clock’s rate in one time interval is the same as some clock’s rate in a disjoint time interval. But in physics, criteria for spatial and temporal congruence are needed. Poincaré is concentrating on this need,” ibid. 130-31.

“What measures duration is a clock, and physics needs a type or class of processes that will play the role of standard clocks. What type or class to choose? One answer might be: the ones that really measure time, that is, mark out equal intervals for processes that really take equally long. While certain philosophers or scientists might count his demand as intelligible, it must be admitted that there could be no experimental test to check on it. We cannot compare two successive processes with respect to duration except with a clock; but clocks present successive processes that are meant to be equal in duration. This is similar to Mach’s point about thermometry: whether the melting of ice always happens at the same temperature, or the volume of a substance expands in proportion to temperature increase, can be checked only with something functioning as a thermometer–and thus cannot be ascertained in order to check whether thermometers are ‘mirroring’ temperature,” ibid. 131.

“Poincaré wishes to reveal by these examples two problems that arise in developing a measurement procedure for duration. The first is the initial one, illustrated with the pendulum: we cannot place successive processes side by side so as to check whether their endpoints coincide in time. So there is no independent means for checking whether successive stages of a single process are of equal duration: the question makes sense only after we have accepted one such process as ‘running evenly,’” ibid. 132.

Continuing with Walters:

“And our unit of time might be conventionally defined, but the size of the temporal intervals we are measuring does not change for all that.”

The size of the unit is invariant, but the size of the interval is a different question. That confuses the measuring stick with what it measures.

“Now some will argue that we are only justified in accepting that physical processes we see operating now are in fact operating now, and that we cannot legitimately extrapolate into the past.”

I don’t object to backward (or forward) extrapolation, per se. And I don’t object to using natural processes to date events.

But at the same time I make allowance for the limitations and circularities of those procedures. And if something which was never designed to yield a reliable result turns out to be unreliable when we overextend it, I wouldn’t impute deception to God.

“We should of course grant the inevitability that in some cases God will work in a different mode…”

Notice how he minimizes exceptions to the uniformity of nature. But that’s not quantifiable. How do I estimate the impact of angelic/demonic activity, or providential timing, or answers to prayer, or other miracles along the way? Once they occur, the effects are rapidly assimilated into the new status quo.

“That would be valid if there were any direct biblical evidence for that idea, so that God told us clearly that that's what happened during creation, and if all Christians knew that to be the case even before the rise of modern science. Instead, I see views like this become prominent only after new understandings emerged about the age and development of the Earth (and universe), and about the evolution and extinction of species.”

To take one example, pre-Darwinian paintings of Eden depict mature creation.

“This suggests to me that this is not just one legitimate understanding of creation among others, but that it was put forward specifically to counter the mounting evidence for an old Earth, a long history of life on Earth well before the current batch of species came on the stage, and a vast Universe.”

Even if that were true, so what? Both sides adapt to new intellectual challenges. Both sides coin new arguments which were not in circulation prior to some new development.

“Paul is clearly talking about spiritual death in Romans.”

Really? That’s not even clear to liberal commentators like Fitzmyer and Jewett. While Paul’s concept of death in Rom 5 includes spiritual death, that hardly excludes spiritual death. And your reductionistic interpretation is scarcely compatible with 1 Cor 15.

13 comments:

  1. "Rocks of ages"

    This post kicks J.D. Walters in the "rocks."

    (C'mon J.D., let's hear loud guffaws from you on that one.)

    ;-)

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  2. "i) Inspiration covers whatever the Bible teaches. Genesis concerns itself with the origin of the world, including the origin of natural kinds–like birds, fish, and land animals."

    Not according to Beale:

    "I concluded that these cosmic portrayals that some believe to represent ancient mythology and ancient naive scientific views are, in reality, better understood as symbolic depictions of the cosmos as a massive temple where God dwells. Such a depiction does not intend to convey ancient or modern scientific views or mythological views of the world but rather a theological conception about the heavens and earth as God's dwelling place...since such descriptions were not attempts to give scientific descriptions, they do not contradict the inerrancy of the Bible."
    (Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy, pp.219-220)

    Notice that he does not say the Genesis account is scientific but merely lacks 'technical specificity', but that it doesn't contain scientific information at all, in the sense of a true account of origins. Notice also that implicit in that last statement is the acknowledgment that if Genesis 1 were scientific, it would be in contradiction to modern science and would falsify inerrancy.

    I guess Beale doesn't have the advantage of being able to explain away modern science using instrumentalism and Poincare's (and Van Fraasen's) highly contested conventionalism about time.

    "ii) Perhaps you’re endorsing a more liberal theory of inspiration, like partial inspiration/limited inerrancy, where inspiration is confined certain types of subject-matter. If so, that’s vulnerable to familiar objections."

    I haven't done enough research on the subject. But wherever I come down, it will take the actual phenomena of the text with full seriousness, and won't be based on an a priori conception of what a Scripture must be in order to be authoritative.

    Would those 'familiar objections' happen to boil down to, "But if it wasn't inerrant, things would be so...well...uncertain, wouldn't they?"

    "i) I wouldn’t assume that Walton and Beale have identical views. Walton makes some useful points, but he overstates his case."

    Beale bases his argument in chs. 6 and 7 of the previous book almost entirely on Walton's research. He comes to almost the same exact conclusion.

    Beale might still hold to the historicity of Adam and Eve. But we were discussing Genesis 1 and whether it gives us scientific information about the origin of things. Beale clearly believes it doesn't.

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  3. "i) A basic problem with the framework hypothesis is the way it overrides the explicit septunarian sequential progression by subordinating that pattern of a nonlinear, hexadic pattern."

    But on the seventh day God doesn't actually create anything, so it's not part of any sequential progression. It stands apart from the previous six days.

    "ii) Yes, the seven days may reflect a stylized numerological pattern. However, the fact that Scripture frequently uses round figures for numerological purposes doesn’t mean these figures don’t approximate real time (or space or units of something). It doesn’t obliterate a linear sequence. At most it rounds up or rounds down real time intervals for symbolic purposes. To take your own example, while the interval given for the construction of the temple may well be chosen for its numerological significance, this doesn’t mean it either took a nanosecond or a billion years to build the temple. Rather, it’s a round number."

    Whoa, wait a minute. Are you now saying that we can talk meaningfully about the difference in size between different time intervals? So that it makes sense to say that a nanosecond is a shorter interval than a billion years? And how would you independently measure that? From your quoting of Van Fraasen below: "So there is no independent means for checking whether successive stages of a single process are of equal duration: the question makes sense only after we have accepted one such process as ‘running evenly."

    Actually by this argument we couldn't say whether all the days of Genesis 1 were of equal length, because the Israelites derived the length of their day from the sun (there was evening and there was morning) but the rotation of the Earth is only yet another temporal process, to be compared with other temporal processes.

    What's your independent process that runs evenly, Steve, so that you can assure us that the days of Genesis were of equal length with our days (or the Israelites' days), and all equal with each other?

    Not to mention that if the Bible does often round up or down numbers for symbolic value, then we can't even be sure of the exact time interval those numbers are referring to, in which case we can't use any of those intervals as our standard interval.

    "It doesn’t have an evolutionary narrative in which self-reproducing plants and animals are the end-product of an age-long process, beginning with the Big Bang, cosmic expansion, formation of galaxies, primordial soup, development of microbes, &c, until we finally reach the types of birds, plants, and animals familiar to the target-audience for Gen 1."

    But according to Beale there's absolutely no scientific information in Genesis 1 anyway, so I wouldn't turn to the Bible to confirm or disconfirm the evolutionary narrative.

    You're probably going to dismiss Beale now too, along with Longman and Waltke as reliable exegetes of Genesis 1.

    (More comments to come, but I'll be gone for a few hours)

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  4. If you're going to make a big deal about what you think Beale thinks, I can just email him. That's more efficient than parsing brief statements.

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  5. JD WALTERS SAID:

    “Notice that he does not say the Genesis account is scientific but merely lacks 'technical specificity', but that it doesn't contain scientific information at all, in the sense of a true account of origins. Notice also that implicit in that last statement is the acknowledgment that if Genesis 1 were scientific, it would be in contradiction to modern science and would falsify inerrancy.”

    From what I can tell, he simply denies that Gen 1 teaches modern science. Which doesn’t mean he denies that Gen 1 makes factual claims about the world.

    “I haven't done enough research on the subject. But wherever I come down, it will take the actual phenomena of the text with full seriousness, and won't be based on an a priori conception of what a Scripture must be in order to be authoritative.”

    That’s another old canard: the inductive/phenomena of Scripture v. the deductive/self-witness of Scripture.

    “But on the seventh day God doesn't actually create anything, so it's not part of any sequential progression. It stands apart from the previous six days.”

    Of course it’s part of the sequential progression. That’s why it’s enumerated as the 7th day. It completes the progression.

    “Whoa, wait a minute. Are you now saying that we can talk meaningfully about the difference in size between different time intervals? So that it makes sense to say that a nanosecond is a shorter interval than a billion years?”

    i) The Bible is written to and for timebound creatures. It uses tensed language which tracks the phenomenology (rather than ontology) of time. How human observers experience time. How they mentally process time.

    ii) Likewise, Bible writers use the available calendars of the day.

    So we distinguish Biblical intervals in Biblical terms.

    “And how would you independently measure that?”

    It’s not incumbent on me to independently measure that. I interpret the Bible on its own level, according to its own conventions.

    “What's your independent process that runs evenly, Steve, so that you can assure us that the days of Genesis were of equal length with our days (or the Israelites' days), and all equal with each other? Not to mention that if the Bible does often round up or down numbers for symbolic value, then we can't even be sure of the exact time interval those numbers are referring to, in which case we can't use any of those intervals as our standard interval.”

    That’s all irrelevant to exegesis. If you raise exegetical objections, then I’ll answer you on exegetical grounds–but if you raise nonexegetical objections, then I’ll answer you on nonexegetical grounds. I go wherever you go.

    “You're probably going to dismiss Beale now too, along with Longman and Waltke as reliable exegetes of Genesis 1.”

    You’re letting polemical momentum overtake honesty. Needless to say, I don’t have to give a scholar carte blanche to find him useful some of the time.

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  6. "You’re shadowboxing with people other than me."

    I can't help but do that, because you never make your own positions on these issues plain. I never know whether you're making a point on behalf of someone else's position, which you are noncommittal on, or whether you do hold that position and are actually defending your own views.

    "Which is duplicitous when you demand biblical warrant for all my counterarguments to your biblically unwarranted arguments."

    No more duplicitous than it is for you to give biblical evidence in response to those biblically unwarranted arguments. If you think the Bible trumps certain (non-biblical) philosophical arguments, and then I argue that the Bible in fact doesn't provide such a trump card, you can't then complain that the original objection wasn't biblical. I'm simply going where you go, as you claim to be doing with me in another comment. If you offer biblical responses to my philosophical/scientific arguments, I have the right to engage those responses on biblical grounds.

    "Which doesn’t mean you can shoehorn the evolutionary narrative into Gen 1-2. You can write it off as a parable, but don’t act as if that’s consistent with your alternative."

    For the umpteenth time, I'm not trying to. You're the one that insists on taking a factual view of Genesis, and then I engage with you on that level. I don't think there's any factual information to be gleaned from Genesis apart from the overall 'moral of the story', which is that God created the universe as a Temple for him to show forth his glory.

    And I take issue with your suggestion that I "write off" Genesis 1 as parabolic, as if reading it that way in any way diminished its theological value. The prodigal son story is no less true, and no less valuable, for not being historical.

    "You’re conflating YEC with Omphalism. YEC doesn’t attribute the fossil record to creation a la prochronic time. It attributes the fossil record to a global flood. Since you know that’s the YEC position, I don’t know why you pretend otherwise."

    I know they make that distinction, but 10,000 years simply isn't long enough to accommodate the full trajectories of all extinct species, even if there was a worldwide flood. So even with a flood some of the fossil evidence would simply have to be construed as fake.

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  7. "That disjunction isn’t simply *my* disjunction. Rather, that follows from a *scientific* analysis of sensory perception, where the observer does not and cannot directly perceive the external world. All he perceives is coded information, viz. electromagnetic input translated into electrochemical information."

    You're confusing codification of information with its preservation. When a message is translated from English into Morse code, for example, everything in the original message is preserved, even though the carrier is different. When a ray of light bounces off an object at a particular angle and it reaches our eye, it gives us real information about the object's location, and that information is preserved through all the different stages of sensory processing. Now it would be true to say that we don't receive ALL true information about objects, but we are certainly in contact with the objects themselves, not just our impressions of them. What we know is to a significant extent determined by the thing known.

    "What we’re left with is a plaintext/ciphertext correlation, like the correlation between music and a music score, where the score represents the music even though the score doesn’t resemble the music."

    That is true of some representationist accounts of perception, but there are many other options. Thomas Reid's 'common sense realism' is one. James J. Gibson's ecological theory of direct perception is another.

    "That simply commits a different level-confusion. Communication (apart from alleged instances of telepathy) involves symbolic discourse, where word and object don’t resemble each other. Yet that doesn’t prevent the successful transmission of ideas, since an idea of an object doesn’t have to physically resemble the object, and the medium of communication doesn’t have to physically resemble the object."

    If that's true, then your objection to scientific realism on the grounds of undercutting univocal correspondence is also defeated. Proximal stimuli don't have to resemble the distal stimulus in order to convey true information about it.

    But that's not the problem I was alluding to. The problem is whether all we have access to are our representations of the world, or whether we can claim that through those representations we have access to the external world.

    "Revelation is the revelation of ideas. Propositional content. If that’s garbled in process of communication, then the result is gibberish. Since, however, the Bible is intelligible, we know that God successfully communicated his message to the percipient. The process of transmission is self-confirming."

    That doesn't refute strict sensationism, since our perception of the intelligibility of the Bible is itself mediated through the senses which, as you claim for scientific realism, don't have direct access to what it is they are sensing.

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  8. "The mind/brain lacks direct access to the external world. If you stick a needle in my arm, what I’m sensing is a nerve impulse."

    Which nerve impulse is produced by the needle stuck in your arm. Admittedly that impulse can be induced by other things, but that's why we rely on the integration of inputs from all our senses. If I feel a nerve impulse which normally corresponds to a needle prick, but I know there's an EMG inducer attached to my head stimulating the right area of the brain, then in my overall perception I will know there is no needle pricking my arm.

    "No, it would have to be grounded in a God who has designed the encryption/decryption process so that what we perceive is relevantly analogous to what there is."

    So this is really a version of Plantinga's 'proper function' argument for warrant. How do you reconcile that belief with scientific anti-realism?

    "Are you equally nonchalant about his anti-Semitic diatribes?"

    I don't think he was damned for them, which is the point I was making. You're worried about my salvation because you're afraid I might be toying with certain views which you think are beyond the pale of orthodoxy. My point in bringing up Martin Luther was to force the question of whether adhering to those beliefs means a person isn't saved.

    "Another straw man. You have a habit of projecting “Father David” onto your opponents. (At least where I'm concerned.) You need to outgrow that father-complex. It clouds your judgment."

    I'm not projecting Father David onto you. And I don't think you're my opponent. I do think that your defense of the authority of Scripture by undermining all sorts of other human knowledge is unworkable, which is why I'm having this discussion.

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  9. "The size of the unit is invariant, but the size of the interval is a different question. That confuses the measuring stick with what it measures."

    No, that begs the question in favor of conventionalism. You believe that there is no way in principle two temporal intervals can objectively be of equal size, whether we can know it or not. I don't.

    "So you admit that you don’t have a noncircular method of measuring time."

    If you'll admit you don't have a noncircular method of validating Scriptural authority. To say that it's self-authenticating is deeply problematic at best. Even Paul didn't think it was. He appealed to the witnesses to the resurrection, to his own signs and wonders as an apostle, etc.

    "I don’t object to backward (or forward) extrapolation, per se. And I don’t object to using natural processes to date events. But at the same time I make allowance for the limitations and circularities of those procedures. And if something which was never designed to yield a reliable result turns out to be unreliable when we overextend it, I wouldn’t impute deception to God."

    So what do you think is the range of dating methods' reliability? How far forward and how far back in time can they extend? And how do you infer that those are the limitations of those methods?

    "Even if that were true, so what? Both sides adapt to new intellectual challenges. Both sides coin new arguments which were not in circulation prior to some new development."

    The difference is whether the new sub-hypothesis to save the appearances is fruitful and advances the particular research program. The mature creation hypothesis certainly does not. Its only value is to save the appearances. It does not advance our understanding of anything one bit.

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  10. "From what I can tell, he simply denies that Gen 1 teaches modern science. Which doesn’t mean he denies that Gen 1 makes factual claims about the world."

    I thought it was less efficient to parse brief statements.

    Your slipperiness can be incredibly frustrating at times. The aim of science is to discover true facts about the world. If Genesis 1 claims that the world was literally created in 7 calendar days, that is a putative fact about the world, and would fall under the category of attempting to teach 'ancient' science. But Beale explicitly denies that the narrative attempts to convey ancient science.

    "That’s another old canard: the inductive/phenomena of Scripture v. the deductive/self-witness of Scripture."

    Just because it's an 'old canard' doesn't mean the solutions that have been offered are any good, anymore than free will being an old canard means that we've already solved that problem. That's sheer rhetoric.

    "i) The Bible is written to and for timebound creatures. It uses tensed language which tracks the phenomenology (rather than ontology) of time. How human observers experience time. How they mentally process time."

    So the Genesis 1 days are just as phenomenological as another biblical author saying, for example, that the sun rises and sets? There is no sense in which those days were real time intervals?

    "It’s not incumbent on me to independently measure that. I interpret the Bible on its own level, according to its own conventions."

    In other words, you interpret it so that it cannot even in principle be wrong. You can evade any factual challenge, for example that an ark of the size depicted in Genesis 7 would not have had room for all the species we know existed at the time, by appealing to the limits of the mental horizon of the author. But in so doing you also make it completely incommensurable with any other view of the world. There is no way for one view of the world to be less accurate than another. That's a dangerous strategy.

    "That’s all irrelevant to exegesis. If you raise exegetical objections, then I’ll answer you on exegetical grounds–but if you raise nonexegetical objections, then I’ll answer you on nonexegetical grounds. I go wherever you go."

    Oh, no, you're not going to weasel out of that one. If you claim that Genesis 1 gives us a fact about the world, that it was created in six calendar days, you have to give content to that statement, which means specifying exactly how long those days were, and how you came up with that length. Otherwise there's no traction with the real world, and no way to either confirm or disconfirm that statement.

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  11. By the way, I hope you know that Bas Van Fraasen considers as a logical corollary of his empiricist non-realism about science the empiricist non-realism of religion. If everyday perception and scientific observation don't put us in touch with things as they are in themselves, neither do religious experiences, including the so-called 'self-authenticating' ones or some appeal to revelation.

    That's the problem with you and other Reformed apologists' general strategy of endorsing the most extreme philosophical skepticism about human knowledge and the reach of reason in order to make space for the authority of Scripture. What you don't seem to realize is that all human knowledge is of a piece. As Jonathan Edwards said, human beings cannot receive spiritual truth which does not first pass through the door of the understanding. The Bible is an object in our environment, just like any other object. It is printed with letters that have to perceived just like any other letters. The only difference is that the ideas the Bible conveys are supposed to have their source ultimately in God Himself. But we still have access to those ideas only through the same perceptual processes which we use to access any other ideas about and from our environment. Induce radical skepticism about those, and our access to the ideas and revelation in the Bible is also imperiled. Become instrumentalist about science, and instrumentalism about religion is sure to follow.

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  12. Hays' argument:

    Science is fallible, the Bible is infallible, and my interpretations of the Bible as I see them, are less fallible than yours.

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  13. Edward T. Babinski said...

    "Denis O. Lamoureux's review of Beale's book is now online."

    I already interacted with his review in TID. Try something new for a change.

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