Cain, Abel, Seth and the Meaning of Human Life as Portrayed in Genesis and Ecclesiastes
The meaninglessness brought into the world through Cain's murder of his brother is forever revoked by the death of Jesus, the second Adam.
The meaninglessness brought into the world through Cain's murder of his brother is forever revoked by the death of Jesus, the second Adam.
Spiritually, in the end time, we sorely need to know the truth about the two key earth history issues discussed above— Creation and the Flood—because the way in which these questions are answered can either establish or undermine living faith in God.
Any reading of Ellen White quickly confirms the fact that she affirms the biblical teaching of creation as it is established in the Old and New Testament on a literal, historical reading of the text.
The words kind and kinds that are mentioned in the Creation narrative of Genesis 1:21, 24, and 25. How are we to understand these terms in a modern context? How do they relate to current terms and classifications in biology?
This paper describes three models of the relationship between religion and science, which differ in their view of the nature of theology and how it should or should not interact with science. Published in Origins n. 59.
Is God real? Is the Bible true? What about all those amazing stories in the Bible? Specifically, what about the Genesis stories? Did God really create the world and all that is in it in a literal week? Did that Creation occur only some 10,000 years ago? How could all these biblical accounts be true when so many brilliant scientists advocate otherwise?
The present dissertation seeks to develop a theology of judgment in Gen 6-9. Following an introductory chapter, the second chapter is devoted to analyzing the three main extrabiblical ANE flood stories (the Eridu Genesis, the Atra-Hasis Epic, and the Gilgamesh Epic) from the four aspects of judgment: date, cause and purpose, extent, and procedure.
A lot of evidence indicates that the universe had to be exactly the way it is, or its existence, and especially the existence of the life we find in it, would not be possible.
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was inspired not primarily by his observations of the natural world, but by Thomas Malthus's theory of scarcity.
The last few years have shown that there are a number of views on creation within the Adventist Church. Not all of them can be right. Should theistic evolution become more and more accept ed, we will be in danger of losing the biblical foundation for the Sabbath and our understanding of salvation.
How should the Bible and natural science be related, explained, or studied? At least two positions seem possible. On the one hand, there are those who hold that a conservative understanding of the Bible and the findings of science cannot be harmonized. On the other, there are those who believe that conclusions drawn from the two disciplines can be harmonized to fit into one overall view of the world.
Ever since it was discovered in 1861, Archaeopteryx lithographica has been a controversial fossil. Its remarkable finding has provided certain credibility to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Archaeopteryx has a mixture of characteristics found in birds, reptiles, and theropod dinosaurs, and for that reason, scientists are divided regarding its origin, flight capacity, and position in the alleged evolutionary sequence from reptiles to birds.
The world is not divided into the good creationists and the bad evolutionists. Many scientists have never had opportunity to see reasonable alternatives to a materialistic evolutionary process. Many scientists, though convinced by the evidence for evolution, are unwilling to give up on God and/or are searching for some meaning in life. Do we want to draw these people to us or drive them away?
Whenever religion and science have a dispute about some question of fact, religion always loses. So goes a common belief. The implication is that religion should never make any factual claims, as it has no contact with reality. For some religions, such an assertion is irrelevant, as these religions do not make any claims about the physical universe. But for biblical Christianity, such an assertion would be fatal.
Many models have been proposed that tend to blur some of the contrasts between the biblical and naturalistic theories. A number of attempts have been made to develop intermediate models in which elements of the biblical story of creation are mixed with elements of the scientific story of origins. All of these models share the biblical idea that nature is the result of divine purpose and the “scientific” idea of long ages of time, but all suffer from serious scientific problems or are entirely ad hoc and conjectural.
Darwin’s view of God is contrary to the biblical view of God and should give Christians pause before buying into Darwin’s naturalism and attempting to wed it to the supernatural in a theistic evolutionary synthesis.
Creation is crucial for our theology because, I am deeply convinced, all our essential doctrinal points can be directly or indirectly traced to the Creation roots. Each of our 27 fundamental beliefs is somehow tied to Creation.
During the last two years we have heard many papers that challenge the traditional Adventist, biblically-founded position of a recent six-day creation. I believe there are many problems with the “objections” and the alternatives they offer.
Currently evolutionary geology explains the fossil record as the result of slow processes and change occurring over long periods of time. However, an increasing number of rock formations and fossil occurrences previously interpreted within such an evolutionary framework must be reinterpreted as the result of rapid, or even catastrophic, processes operating on a different time scale.
The goal of this essay is to assess the compatibility of Adventist theology with deep time and the evolutionary reconstruction of the origins of earth history.