Most of the time the discussion between creationists and everyone else centers on science. Creationists feel they can discredit the science and weaken acceptance of evo, we knock down the zombie lies hoping they will come to their sense. But theologically, they can’t do that, ever, and still be consistent:
Myrtle Beach — Ross said the issue of an historical, flesh-and-blood Adam and Eve is important in the ARP denomination because of two key passages in the Bible, Romans 5:12 and I Corinthians 15:20, which brings together Adam, who ushers sin and death into the world, and Christ, who offers life and salvation.
If Adam is a symbolic figure meant, as many evolution adherrents believe, to represent God’s creation over millions of years, it “turns this part of the Bible into a myth, and the ARP Church is committed to the Bible as the Word of God.”
Bingo. No Adam and Eve, as the first and only couple in the Garden of Eden with the Serpent, means no original disobedience. Which means no excuse for an all loving, all powerful Creator to throw them and their descendents out into a cruel world of decay, disease, and death. It also means there could be no reason to provide special salvation to escape death through Jesus Christ.
Creationists are right in one sense, evolution is an enemy of most any classic or new age creation story. But the enemy isn’t just evolution, it’s virtually every field of natural history that exposes Genesis for the Ancient Near East fable it is. I’ve argued and written that the only way to keep creationists in check is to win over believers. This is a proven stratgey. But how those theistic allies juggle physics, geology, biology, and astronomy, all of which independently confirm an ancient universe and some of which thoroughly debunk a literal Adam and Eve, is up to them. I can offer no real help there.
Holy shit! I never thought of that. If you understand that Adam and Eve never existed, that the whole of Genesis is a metaphor, that whole business about sin and redemption falls apart.
No wonder they hate the idea of evolution so much!
Yeap. On that part of it. Ken Ham is right <==added to list of things I never thought I'd type.
Creationisyts key in on evo, but it’s not just that, far from it. If Adam and Eve are not the first couple in a literal Garden of Eden and disobey God, the rationalization, weak as it is, for why pain, suffering, evil and death is our fault — despite what a loving God originally wanted — blows away like dead leaves.
Yeah, I still don’t get how the Catholic Church can paper over the fact that the whole edifice of their doctrine rests on the Eden story being factual. They have their cake (Original Sin) and eat it too (accept evolution, an old universe, etc. as scientific fact). None of the theology and cosmology developed by the Fathers of the Church (for example, notably Augustine in The City of God) makes any sense with a solely metaphorical interpretation of Genesis. And yet they go on, pretending as though nothing has changed. It’s extremely bizarre when you actually look at it.
I think the whole original sin thing is only needed for the church, not for the core faith. To a large part I think that the fight against science we see from some corners is mostly about the faith portions of their belief system. Few of them really want to attempt to justify the church itself, which frankly is a very clever move on their part. “Jesus died for your sins” is much more compelling than “Jesus died for our offering bowl: give as much as you can.”
On a side note, it really puzzles me why anyone would focus on Romans and Corinthians for proof. Most of those books at the end of the bible are more like ancient self-help books or theology tutoring than an attempt at history, even bad history.
If we evolved from a common ancestor with modern apes, we’re not unworthy slime that needs to beg forgiveness from a fickle Creator!
Yup, the whole premise of Christianity is based on the necessary reality of demonstrably false bronze-age myths.
My weekend highlight was pointing out the story of Balam’s talking ass to my ex. Even devote believers have trouble believing a lot of this bs.
Ibis3, the RCC is a soupy miasma of various understandings – whatever works for a believer, expedient means. If you have certain levels of theological understanding (or at least follow a philosophy based off someone who does/did), you can take craptons of the Bible as metaphor, but to the same effect as if it were literal. What you could do that with publicly depends a lot on the times if the Church didn’t already include it in their official positions.
And in some ways, this is somewhat institutionalized, like Mormonism or Scientology or Freemasonry, where higher-level members are brought into the higher-level mysteries. Then there’s the factor that the Church was run a lot like a political institution, royal court, empire, and merchant’s guild, with a lot of not-particularly-religious Machiavellian cynical ladder-climbers in power.
Lot’s of room for various interpretations and sloppy, inconsistent mixing of these interpretations, as long as they don’t particularly threaten the structure. The Cathars, or Galileo, were just too different in the wrong way at the wrong time. But you can have wild differences, such as those between Bill Donohue and my super-liberal folks and some of the priests I’ve known. (I just wish a lot of these sorts of Catholics, who only support parishes and societies of their choosing, ignore the Pope, and refuse to support the central church or the diocese would take two seconds occasionally to fucking speak up against the shit they don’t support so that situations like the one where Obama was listening to crap from some bishops wouldn’t happen. They don’t seem to get that these “leaders” get to claim that they represent all Catholics.)
A classic argument from consequences. “Accepting that Genesis is a myth would destroy our theology; so evidence be damned, we can’t accept it.”
To put it simply, they just relocated the point at which cognitive dissonance kicks in to one that the average person would reach less often. :)
The Adam-and-Eve part is metaphorical and eating the apple that makes people tell “good” from “bad” can be seen as the last step in becoming a conscious human being capable of ethical considerations, and also of recognising conflicts of interest that can’t be solved to make everybody happy (see lions and lambs).
Jesus dying for our sins and all that stuff *somehow* saves believers from this horrible contradictory world and gives them a nice and straightforward one for when they’re dead.
This *somehow* now can get twisted and turned in whatever manner is needed to give a seemingly sensible answer to a specific question of “how?” and “why not just make this world nice”, and by weaving how the non-nice parts of the world are supposed to be necessary for “free will” to exist, they even manage to make the point that it’s all our own fault.
And of course just where a story sits on the “metaphorical vs literal” spectrum is never exactly determined (typically one would claim lots of spots at the same time), so that in the end everything can be derived just the way it’s needed for the conclusion one wishes to end up with.