Creation

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

Lga-atlStrict creationism versus that which accommodates geological ages " these 2 systems are like oil and water; they will never mix because they are founded on two different premises. The one believes that Scripture should govern our interpretation of scientific data; the other believes that current scientific majority opinion should control our interpretation of Scripture. Neither evolution nor creation can be scientifically proved, since they are dealing with history instead of repeatable science. It is possible to build a case for either view, and the decision finally boils down to what one wants to believe. Furthermore, the case for believing in evolution is far from self-consistent...". Dr. Morris. Te revival of modern creationism. Book idea: the genesis flood. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris

If chance be the father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky and when you hear "state of emergency, sniper kills 10", "troops on rampage", "youths go looting", "bombs blast school", it is but the sound of man, worshipping his maker.

Nothing exists but natural phenomena...no supernaturals forces, no supernatural entities...nature simply exists.  Matter is.

It is significant that biblical Christianity is the only Trinitarian religion--and therefore the only true religion--in the world. Most religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc.) are pantheistic and humanistic, denying the existence of an omnipotent God who created the space/time cosmos. There are two other major religions, however, that are monotheistic, believing in the God of creation and in the creation record in Genesis--Judaism and Islam. However, these two fail to understand that the Creator must also be the Redeemer, and therefore they also become humanistic, believing that man must achieve salvation by his own efforts. Further, they also fail to acknowledge that God's objective work of redemption must be made subjective in each person by the indwelling personal presence of the omnipresent Creator/Redeemer.

I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.

What else can save us but your hand remaking what you have made.

Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If nature is all that exists--in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature--then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. Present Concerns: Essays by C.S.

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

From Cambridge to California, a growing number of scientists are becoming more open to theological considerations...a drift prompted, they say, by recent advances in biology, particle physics and especially cosmology.

Ever since Darwin, we have bought into the idea that humans evolved from ancient, chimp-like creatures. That’s because modern chimps seem to share a lot of anatomy and behavior with we humans. So the idea that we evolved from something like chimps seems to make sense. But now, the discovery of ardipithecus shows that this is totally and completely wrong.

When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. We are summoned to pass through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.

To image the being of God toward the world, to be the priest of creation, is to behave toward the world in all its aspects of work and of play, in such a way that it may come to be what it was created to be, that which praises its Maker by becoming perfect in its own way.

Whence comes this idea that if what we are doing is fun, it can't be God's will? The God who made giraffes, a baby's fingernails, a puppy's tail, a crooknecked squash, the bobwhite's call, and a young girl's giggle, has a sense of humor. Make no mistake about that.

Who has told every lightning bolt Where it should go; Or seen heavenly storehouses Laden with snow? Who imagined the sun And gives source to its light; Yet conceals it to bring us The coolness of night? None can fathom. Indescribable, uncontainable. You placed the stars in the sky And you know them by name. You are amazing, God!

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.

It is fashionable nowadays to regard the biblical story of Adam and Eve as 'myth' (whose truth is theological but not historical), rather than 'significant event' (whose truth is both). Many people assume that evolution has disproved and discarded the Genesis story as having no basis in history. Since 'Adam' is the Hebrew word for 'man', they consider that the author of Genesis was deliberately giving a mythical account of human origins, evil and death. We should certainly be open to the probability that there are symbolical elements in the Bible's first three chapters. The narrative itself warrants no dogmatism about the six days of creation, since its form and style suggest that it is meant as literary art, not scientific description. As for the identity of the snake and the trees in the garden, since 'that old serpent' and 'the tree of life' reappear in the book of Revelation, where they are evidently symbolic, it seems likely that they are meant to be understood symbolically in Genesis as well. But the case with Adam and Eve is different. Scripture clearly intends us to accept their historicity as the original human pair. For the biblical genealogies trace the human race back to Adam; Jesus himself taught that 'at the beginning the Creator "made them male and female"' and then instituted marriage (Mt. 19:4ff., quoting Gn. 1:27). Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God had made every nation 'from one man' (Acts 17:26); and in particular Paul's carefully constructed analogy between Adam and Christ depends for its validity on the equal historicity of both. He affirmed that Adam's disobedience led to condemnation for all, as Christ's obedience led to justification for all (Rom. 5:18). Moreover, nothing in modern science contradicts this. Rather the reverse. All human beings share the same anatomy, physiology and chemistry, and the same genes. Although we belong to different so-called 'races' (Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid), each of which has adjusted to its own physical environment, we nevertheless constitute a single species, and people of different races can intermarry and interbreed. This homogeneity of the human species is best explained by positing our descent from a common ancestor. 'Genetic evidence indicates', writes Dr Christopher Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, 'that all living people are closely related and share a recent common ancestor.' He goes on to express the view that this common ancestor 'probably lived in Africa' (though this is not proved) and that from this ancestral group 'all the living peoples of the world originated'.(1)

“Sure, I can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “‘But only God can make a tree.”

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all....It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming.

Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters. - Aslan the King at the creation of Narnia, C.S. Lewis' Narnia Tales

All the other myths of the world are a mixture of truth and error - truth because they are written by those made by and for God - error because written by those alienated by God. But the Bible is the one true myth. It is a true accounting of truth, while everything else we do is mimicking.

Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.

for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.

But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.

What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint. Introduction Page 1 · Location 168 In pondering the twenty-third psalm, Joseph Sittler once observed that though we walk through the valley of death just once, we spend our whole lives in the valley of the shadow of death. Middle-aged people notice that shadow more often than they used to. Page 2 · Location 178 The whole range of human miseries, from restlessness and estrangement through shame and guilt to the agonies of daytime television —all of them tell us that things in human life are not as they ought to be. Page 2 · Location 184 The reason is that sin distorts our character, a central feature of our very humanity. Sin corrupts powerful human capacities —thought, emotion, speech, and act —so that they become centers of attack on others or of defection or neglect.

For central in the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be. They ought to be as designed and intended by God,

both in creation and in graceful restoration of creation.

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom.

In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight —a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. 7 Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

This is where the definition comes in. “Culpable disturbance of shalom” suggests that sin is unoriginal, that it disrupts something good and harmonious, that (like a housebreaker) it is an intruder, and that those who sin deserve reproach.

To get our bearings, we need to see first that sin is one form of evil (an agential and culpable form) and that evil, in turn, is the disruption or disturbance of what God has designed.

Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made. Sexism and racism, for example, show contempt both for various human persons and also for the mind of God.

In sum, shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.

None of this would have surprised the church father Athanasius. According to him, human beings east of Eden corrupt everything they touch, competing with each other in lawlessness and in “devising all manner of new evils.” 37 In the works of Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and in classic Protestant confessional literature, corruption —an unhappy cluster of spiritual perversion, pollution, and disintegration —represents one of the two components of original sin (the other being guilt). In these sources, corruption and guilt present the problems that the gifts of sanctification and justification graciously address. According to Scripture, God’s original design included patterns of distinction and union and distinction-within-union that would give creation strength and beauty. In Genesis 1 and 2, God —who sometimes speaks there in tantalizing first-person plurals that helped kindle early Christian interest in the distinction-within-unity of the Holy Trinity —sets about to dig out oceans, build hills, plant forests, and stock lakes and streams. But the setting for these endeavors is a “formless void.” 38 Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements —a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God. (Older translations of Gen. 2: 24 present the man as “cleaving” to the woman, a word that nicely suggests both distinction and union.)

According to Scripture, God’s original design included patterns of distinction and union and distinction-within-union that would give creation strength and beauty.

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements —a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God. (Older

Against this background of original separating and binding, we must see the fall as anti-creation, the blurring of distinctions and the rupturing of bonds, and the one as a result of the other. Thus, human beings who want to be “like God, knowing good and evil,” succeed only in alienating themselves from God and from each other. Even the good and fruitful earth becomes their foe (Gen. 3: 17-18; cf. 4: 12-14).

The flood is thus uncreation, “only the final stage in a process of cosmic disintegration which began in Eden.” 39

The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the “formless void” from which it came.

Along the generations, human nature itself, with its vast and mysterious amalgam of capacities to think, feel, supervise, love, create, respond, and act virtuously —that is, with its vast capacities for imaging God —has become the main carrier and exhibit of corruption. Human nature, says the Formula of Concord, has been despoiled of its powers by original sin. The image suggested by this language is that of stripping —stripping a tree of its bark, an animal of its hide, or an enemy army of its arms and provisions. To do these things is to remove the skin that protects against outside invaders and keeps one’s innards from spilling out. In other words, to despoil is to remove that which preserves integrity. 40

Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defenses against invaders. Corruption is spiritual AIDS —the mysterious, systemic, infectious, and progressive attack on our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks it down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins. These make life progressively more miserable: conceit, for instance, typically generates envy of rivals, a nasty form of resentment that eats away at the envier. “Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.” 42

We are persons of seemingly endless possibilities and of immense power, but we are also creatures utterly dependent on the good offices of our Creator. So we live on the edge of our finitude and freedom, anxious lest we miss opportunities and anxious anew when we have exploited them.

Evil wants good; in fact, evil needs good to be evil. Satan himself, as C. S. Lewis explains, is God’s Satan —a creature of God who can be really wicked only because he comes from the shop of a master and is made from his best stuff.

The better stuff a creature is made of —the cleverer and stronger and freer it is —then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: you're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

When you focus on what is taken (dust), what is the human being? When you understand the One doing the molding, the human is great; indeed he is nothing because of the material and great through the honor.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

BEHOLD, I AM MAKING ALL THINGS NEW!

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

In him we live and move and have our being.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful….

I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.

All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

God thunders wondrously with his voice… he says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth…

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command.