Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom . . We certainly live in a culture in which relativism is accepted and absolutes are being seriously questioned, but just because we are living a more modernist than literally post-modernist culture does not mean the post-modernism is not present in our culture as it is defined today. But what about his point that we do live in a world that is marked by a tendency to see no big story line in history (a meta-narrative) in which there is logical and realistic cohesion from beginning to end? In his book and his First Things article10 summarizing his book, he has failed to deal with critically important verses such as Genesis 2:7 and 2:22, Mark 10:6, and Romans 1:20, and he attempts to neutralize other important verses (e.g., 1 Corinthians 11:89) by his fallacious distinction between a literary Adam and a historical Adam. A short summary is below, with a longer one impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. You describe Genesis 111 as mytho-history, arguing that an ancient-Near-Eastern audience would not have understood this text as a literal historical narrative. Meanwhile, elsewhere, on a planet that has drunk too much trappist beir, Re: Meanwhile, elsewhere, on a planet that has drunk too much trappist beir, Law's posted his own transcript of his opening speech, This Christian apologist thought Craig lost, it was me saying "don't go in unprepared", http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/10/craig-on-infinite-old-universe.html. The doctrine of inerrancy states that Scripture is truthful in all that it teaches, and that teaching can be expressed via literary forms poetic, apocalyptic, mythological, and so on. Get Dr. Craig's newsletter and keep up with RF news and events. Details. And a single book of the Bible can contain two or more genres, such as the two examples of poetry in the historical narrative of Genesis that Craig cites (as well as Jacobs prophecies about his sons, in Genesis 49:227) or the examples of the parables that Jesus spoke as recorded in the historical narrative of the gospels (e.g., Matthew 13:153). For the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation. Jesus envisions that all people will be raised from the dead. As for the founding pair, you propose that God might have lifted them to the human level through a radical transition that plausibly involved both biological and spiritual renovation. Why is this scenario a better explanation than a de novo (from scratch) creation of Adam? Genesis 2:2122 says, So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. But, if so, he has no logically or biblically consistent basis to doubt the statements about the supernatural events, unusual trees, or ages of the patriarchs as described in Genesis. A vision is a sort of mental projection of something that the mind puts out there. Ultimately, Craig's position on theism will always lose against rationality. My colleague J. P. Moreland has warned of the danger that lies before us: [Such] a church . In fact, Genesis 111 contains poetry as well as mytho-historythink of Lamechs boasting (4:2324) or Adams response to meeting Eve (2:23). Matt Tully How so? What hes saying here is that if he had his preference, he would rather live until the second coming of Christ, so that he wouldnt have to go through that intermediate state of nakedness of being disembodied. We dont need to be afraid. The souls of unbelievers, by contrast, enter into a state of conscious torment and separation from God which is called Hades. They have wings like angels in his experience. However all this may be, some might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost. On this perspective statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. Instead we just share our narrative and invite people to join in it. Many Christians fear that a nonliteral understanding of the early chapters of Genesis is incompatible with the doctrine of inerrancy. ), we do live in a world that is marked by a tendency to see no big story line in history (a meta-narrative) in which there is logical and realistic cohesion from beginning to end. They choose to walk in the darkness because of their sin (John 3:1920). What are these, and how do they differ from supernatural elements? I did go in the end. This brainwashing is coupled with the fact that in most churches that do believe Genesis 111 is literal history (a minority of churches today in America and in the rest of the world), children and their parents are not taught any biblical and scientific apologetics to defend that belief. This calls for a mind that has wisdom (Rev. Look at this saying by Jesus: Do not marvel at this. So if we received our resurrection body immediately upon death, the graves of all the Christians would be empty! Plus someone from the Faraday Institute. Theyre in the intermediate state. But placing Adam and Eve anywhere in that time range makes the genealogies of Genesis 511 ludicrous and total mythology. See Are Mustard Seeds the Smallest or Was Jesus Wrong?. In his book (p. 363), Craig says Adam lived at least 500,000 years ago. Im not using the word myth in the popular sense of a falsehood, but rather in the folklorists sense of a traditional, sacred narrative explaining how the world and humanity came to be in their present form. Finally, third, the resurrection will bring complete physical and emotional healing. Did Elisha not make an ax head float (2 Kings 6:17)? . . It is equally impossible to harmonize the Bibles account of the origin of the first female human with the myth of evolution. Undermining Scripture Regarding Adam: An Initial Response to William Lane Craig, Are Mustard Seeds the Smallest or Was Jesus Wrong, according to evolutionists at the Smithsonian, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/the-historical-adam, https://answersingenesis.org/genesis/did-bible-authors-believe-in-a-literal-genesis/, Jesus, Evangelical Scholars, and the Age of the Earth. Likewise, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Jesus and the New Testament writers took Genesis 111 as anything other than straightforward, literal, and completely accurate history, just as the rest of Genesis is.2 This is clearly shown in my chapter on Jesus3 in Coming to Grips with Genesis and in Ron Mintons chapter on the teaching of the rest of the New Testament regarding Genesis 111 in the same volume. Now, you might ask, What about unbelievers, people who dont know Christ? Well, obviously, books of this nature have aroused a great deal of interest in the Christian church. Oh my God, transfinite numbers are a bit different from natural numbers, let's all run around with our hair on fire! This conflict is apparently not even on Craigs radar. Scientifically, that would be false, but nobody thinks Jesus is teaching botany. Dr. Craig's Opening Arguments . The article is blockquoted (indented) here in full, with the introduction in italics, the interviewers comments in bold, and Dr. Craigs replies in regular text. He recognizes that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Premier Christian Radio seems to be organising the tour, and they've posted the audio of the debate. It hasnt happened yet! Owen Strachan. The first half of the twentieth century was dominated by a philosophy of meaning called Verificationism. Similarly, the primordial history of Genesis 111 includes elements which, if taken literally, would be so extraordinary as to be clearly false. For example, in the Mesopotamian myth The Epic of Gilgamesh, theres a story of how the bull of heaventhat is, the constellation Tauruscomes down to Earth and rampages through the town of Uruk until Gilgamesh and his cohort grab the bull by its tail, slay it, and distribute its meat to the towns citizens. As I said in the article, a post-modern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. What a hope and a prospect! The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). But from the Beginning of . For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if, indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. We do not receive our resurrection bodies until the second coming of Christ. What I suggest is that God may have brought about both a biological and spiritual renovation of a hominin form that would make it truly human, biologically capable of sustaining a rational soul. But I decided I had better things to do. William Lane Craig is Visiting Scholar of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Christian University. And finally the resurrection is our hope for complete physical and emotional healing. It was scientific naturalism that destroyed modern mans hope of meaning and significance. But as we have seen, he has already said that several statements in Genesis are palpably false. Jesus did not speak error in Matthew 13:32Craigs explanation is false. Myths are typically characterized by these sorts of fantastic elements. Paul says that at the second coming of Christ the dead in Christ will be raised first, then those who are still alive at that time will be transformed into their resurrection bodies, and we shall go to be always with the Lord. For dont we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Well, let me summarize what weve seen before drawing some applications. If I am right, however, this is a suicidal course of action. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruinsall these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Since the Bible clearly teaches (and orthodox Christians and Jews have always believed) that Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago, even putting Adam at 200,000 years ago would require inserting nearly 10,000 years, on average, between each patriarch in those two Genesis genealogies! It could be that what these experiences are is visions of their departed loved ones and of Jesus. We dont need to fear it. . He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology . The rich man also died and was buried, and being in torment in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. What is the point of such a mythological genealogy? Our lives are tremendously and eternally significant. Now can you appreciate the impact such a philosophy would have upon religion, art, and ethics? If Adam lived 700,000 years ago, you must insert approximately 35,000 years between each of them. Does Craig think that description of divine action is palpably false, too? Again, Craig is not reading Genesis carefully. We really dont know what this disembodied existence is like. Theyre in the state of disembodied existence. In the resurrection we will be freed from every disability, every infirmity, every disease, from your bad back to paraplegia or multiple sclerosis. Well, the answer to that is, no. Look at Luke 16:19-26. Only then are people ushered in to their final state, which is heaven or hell. William Lane Craig is Visiting Scholar of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University. Most people dont for a minute think that there are no objective standards of truth, rationality, and logic. Given that religious statements are not statements of fact, its perfectly appropriate for the unbeliever to respond to the Gospel by saying, That may be true for you, but its not true for me. Such a response would be crazy with regard to the engineering technology that goes into building a bridge or even a hairdryer, but it makes perfect sense with respect to expressions of personal taste. In this case what these people are experiencing is visions, as it were, of persons who are really disembodied. The primary motive of this conclusion is the idea that, without God, there is no immortality. Im convinced that Western culture, as the stepchild of the Enlightenment, remains at heart deeply modernist and so must be addressed as such. I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. Therefore, it is false in some details. Chapter 10 of Searching for Adam, written by two genetics experts, shows that the genetic evidence (specifically the mutation rate in the human genome) confirms the biblical chronology (as determined by taking Genesis 5 and 11 and other chronological information in the Bible literally) and refutes the evolutionary timescale for the origin of man. 06.19.2018. A public debate between James Crossley & William Lane Craig. Theyre not literally seeing these people. Science and religion scholar Melissa Cain Travis spoke with Craig about his views on Genesis, human origins, and the historical Adam. It is not young-earth creationism that turns people away from Christianity. Even though God has no body--God is a spirit--sometimes in the Old Testament people have visions of God in a sort of bodily form. That he fed 5,000 with two loaves and five fishes (Mark 6:3044)? But theyre projecting bodily images of themselves and others, so that they can recognize one another and have interaction with one another. Also, the 23-page bibliography in his book contains plenty of books and articles by theological liberals, secular scientists, and theistic evolutionists but cites only two book chapters by two leading young-earth Old Testament scholars11 and two books by two leading young-earth scientists.12 But as noted above, the 14-scholar, in-depth biblical and historical defense of young-earth creation, Coming to Grips with Genesis (2008), and the scholarly 16-author, biblical, historical, and scientific defense of the literal truth about Adam, Searching for Adam (2016), are not cited or discussed. Kristof : Merry Christmas, Dr. Craig! He says to stay in the flesh, in the body, is more needful for the Philippians.
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