Engaging the Evolutionists

Concerning: St John of the Cross, ‘the 16th-century mystic’.

If he was a true mystic, then he must have realized that in nature he saw as in a mirror, however dimly, the reflections of spiritual things otherwise invisible. – Tertius

Concerning:  “…the whole point of creation…” – that there should be people “capable of intimacy with God, not so that God can gain something, but so that these created beings may live in joy.”

But no one unregenerate and therefore still integral with ‘creation’ has any such intimacy with God available to him or to her. Natural intimacy with other ‘created beings’ is available to the natural, but intimacy with God is unavailable to anyone who has not been born from above nature. All born-from-below human pretensions to intimacy with God are disqualified by the preclusion expressed in Him Who was singularly born from above, and Who alone exemplified intimacy with God. – Tertius

What if the apparently contradictory accounts are of different, coexistent ‘creations’? – Tertius

Tertius, you are exactly right. They are two different accounts and were most likely from different sources. It proves that the bible was written by man, not god, and that what is written in the bible are redactions of ancestor’s tales. – Aequusvox

What do your ‘most likeli-hoods’ ‘prove’ about the ultimate origin of the Bible? The God Who purports to speak within it, not to the estranged but to His own, and to them only, about their peculiar state of being, and not about a ‘world’ discoverable to scientists, has been ‘co-writing’ in partnership with men since Adam. An amanuensis ‘writes’, but at the dictation of another. One ‘taking notes’ ‘writes’, but he is inspired to reflect upon the spoken words of another. The God Who makes Himself known in secret to Christians commends to them the assembling and the collating that He has done from ‘different sources’, all of which are at His disposal. There is no ‘proving’ of anything about this one way or another to ’scientists’. – Tertius

I guess that it is my exact point that they [the two accounts of 'creation'] are two independent stories. They also have contradictions. Creationists deny that there are contradictions, but their denials are empty. – Dol

Indeed, but as images of nascent spirituality these differing accounts emanate from a realm free from the strictures by which ‘contradiction’ is definable in the lower realm in which parts of them appear. It is rather like the visitation of three-dimensionality by a creature that belongs to four-dimensionality, only parts of whom ever intrude upon three-dimensional sensibility. The three-dimensional cannot apprehend the whole visitor.

It is useful, in considering how space can be ’squared’, and new space opened ‘perpendicularly’ to space already in place, to conceive of a transparent cube, whose edges alternately assume the aspect of either the back and the insides, or the front and the outsides, of a box, as the eye naturally searches the figure for every possible interpretation of it. The box dwells contentedly in perpendicular, ‘crossed’ dimensions without either altering or relinquishing a linear inch of its ‘form’, yet in such a way as to escape instantaneous apprehension of its duality, but only of one aspect, and then of the other. Just so is the ’spiritual literature’ that is ‘holy scripture’. It is all figurative – images of things which cannot be immediately apprehended – things which ‘it is not lawful for a man to utter’.   – Tertius

So does Tertius accept the absolute necessity of a Supernatural Creator? – Optimus

He does. But he acknowledges that it cannot be held to be obvious to intellects over-invested in the obvious. – Tertius

Does Tertius fully accept that all life is the result of Intelligent Design? – Optimus

- Fully – but that by Intelligent Design it is disguised as ‘accidental’. – Tertius

Anyone who accepts those things is only an “outrage” to evolutionists and atheists! – Optimus

Perhaps evolutionists and atheists might consider the possibility that they have missed something, and that there is a reasonable explanation as to how they could have missed it. – Tertius