| Greene's Creationism Truth Filter |
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BereanSpirit/message/29280
From: Steve Heiden Dear BereanSpirit forum participants, As Christians, we should be sensitive to truth. We declare our allegiance to truth, in putting our faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We accept that God created our world (our entire universe, and not just our planet), and we accept that this world outside of ourselves is real — just as real as our God who created it. As part of our declaration of truth, we accept the idea that the Bible, inspired by God, is true, not that it merely contains truth, but that it is true. We also know from experience that we human beings are fallible. We are fallible both because our knowledge is incomplete, the knowledge that we possess is flawed, and the ways in which we gather additional knowledge is also flawed. This fallibility of our nature holds in all cases, regardless of whether we are talking about our ideas about the Bible or our ideas about the world. Many critics of the idea that the world has existed for billions of years attempt to divert attention from the objectively determinable factual information about the world by pointing out this philosophical aspect of human knowledge being fallibile. They apply the concept to 'science,' but rarely in the same context do they acknowledge the fact that this aspect of fallibility applies equally to our human interpretation of scripture. One very important reason why the Bible cannot teach that the physical world is only 6,000 years old is because we know for a fact that the physical world has existed for billions of years. We know this fact about the world by examining the world itself. Whenever it is that God created our world, we know that He created it a very long time ago, because we have observed the results of ancient events (such as trilobites living in ancient oceans, comet and asteroid craters, and wolly mammoths) on the earth, and we now observe ancient events in the universe that took place millions and billions of years ago but which we are just now seeing due to their immense distance from the earth. If we happen to learn by independent investigation that a particular interpretation of the Bible is wrong, and if that independent conclusion can withstand scrutiny, we must accept the conclusion since that conclusion represents an aspect of truth, and then we must change our biblical interpretation accordingly. How can it be right and proper to refuse to change our fallible human interpration even though it has been shown to be false? When critics of the idea of an ancient world claim that the idea is not sound doctrine while refusing to examine the issue in an open and fair manner, they are making the fundamental mistake of assuming that their fallible human belief is the sound doctrine and failing to consider the possibility that their human belief about what the Bible teaches is itself flawed and thus not sound doctrine. In refusing to engage the controversy, or in attempting to stave the matter off with methods of antagonism and intimidation ('If you don't accept young earth creationism, you are rejecting scripture and thus aren't pleasing to God'), it becomes impossible to determine whether or not a doctrine is sound since in that case 'sound doctrine' is determined not by what is true but by what is considered (by some fallible human beings) to be traditional or orthodox. The soundness of a doctrine is not necessarily determined solely by biblical interpretation, since it is a practical fact of the matter that biblical interpretation alone can be and has been flawed and that depending solely on the biblical text in all cases, no matter what, is not a legitimate form of biblical hermeneutics. External information can be and has been relevant for helping to determine the proper interpretation of parts of scripture. It is also true that there are parts of scripture which we do not clearly understand today, and there are parts of scripture which were understood incorrectly in the past but which we understand (interpret) differently today based not solely on textual considerations but also on considerations of relevant external information. Is it true? Whatever aspects of an issue are connected to determining the truth of the matter are then elements that must be considered in trying to arrive at a correct conclusion. Sometimes the only way to determine sound doctrine is to examine areas we may not be accustomed to examining — even areas outside of the biblical text itself, and sometimes it means we have to overturn some 'tables in the temple' even though we will upset some table owners in the process.
Sincerely, "People who cannot abide sound doctrine simply cannot
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