Phill Sacre

Tag: genesis

  • Genesis vs Science – Talk recording

    Genesis vs Science – Talk recording

    About 18 months ago, I ran a session at our church called “Genesis vs Science”. A few people had been asking questions about Genesis and the Bible and how it squared up with questions of science e.g. the Big Bang and evolution. The whole thing was recorded and for a while was available on our church website, unfortunately for various reasons it’s not there at the moment.

    So, I’ve decided to upload the sessions here so that there’s a permanent archive of them in case they’re useful.

    The morning was split into two halves – the first session was on the foundations of science, and the second was specifically about Genesis.

    The first session started out with this video, which you may wish to watch first:

    Downloads

    This is the handout, which you can download to refer to during the sessions:

    Genesis vs Science HandoutDownload
    Session 1 – Foundations of Science
    Session 2 – What Genesis does and does not say

  • Sermon: Abraham and the Promise – Genesis 12:1-9

    This is the text of a sermon I preached this morning at church. It’s part of a series on Genesis (looking at Creation – Fall – Noah – Abraham – Joseph, following our Holiday Club themes).

    I think at some point I will need to reconsider posting up sermons as I’m not sure that the blog is the best format for this kind of thing. In the meantime, they will be here. Without further ado, here’s the link to the PDF:

    Abraham and the Promise – Genesis 12v1-9

  • Sermon: Genesis 42-45, Joseph and his Brothers Reconciled

    On Sunday night I preached at the evening service of Christ Church Cockfosters. I haven’t got the audio available just yet, but if you’d like to read the approximate text of what I preached, I’ve attached the script. If I get the audio too I will update this post.

    You might want to have the passage open while you read. (Note that the sermon was part of a series on Joseph, from chapters 37 to 50, so it might help if you don’t know the story to read from there, or even before in Genesis, just to get some of the context!)

    Sermon: Genesis 42-45

  • Creation / Evolution 5 – Ground Rules for interpretation

    This is part five in my (not-so-mini) series on “Creation, Evolution and Evangelicalism”. I’ve talked in previous posts (see that post for all the links) about why I think that so-called “Creationism”, more properly known as Young Earth Creationism or YEC for short, is not a sufficient explanation to account for both the Biblical and scientific data. Well, I’ve now done my assignment and the relevant reading for it and I think I’m in a position to at least move on slightly!

    In my previous post I looked at Genesis 1 and how we might understand that from an old-earth and, I believe, a Biblical perspective. We now come to looking at the rest of the Bible, specifically, what do we do with the question of Adam and Eve? What do we do with the fall? Now I should say at the outset that anything I say here is not going to be anything other than tentative. The long and the short of it is, at the end of the day we just don’t know exactly what happened.

    That said, I think there are a few points which we need to agree on before moving towards any kind of resolution.

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  • Creation / Evolution 4 – Genesis 1

    This is the fourth instalment of my mini-series “Creation, Evolution, and Evangelicalism”. Note that the series is still technically on hold, I just wanted to expand on a couple of things I mentioned in previous posts, namely to do with Genesis chapter 1. All clear? Good! 😉

    But first, a clarification: I mentioned in a previous post that I had problems with ‘creationism’. I probably should have been clearer in this post but the particular version of creationism which I have a problem with is ‘young earth creationism’ (which for brevity I shall refer to as YEC from now on): obviously, all Christians are “Creationists” in the sense that we believe God created the world and “the fulness thereof” (a phrase which Mike Ovey is particularly fond of, from the King James version of Psalm 24:1). However, what I am arguing for is that being a ‘creationist’ does not conflict with being an ‘evolutionist’, in the sense that one can believe both in the creative acts of God and the biological process of evolution.

    The second thing I’d like to clarify is that I’m not necessarily arguing for evolution in the sense that “I’m a scientist and I believe this to be true”. I think my point is more general, that I believe science and Christianity should never be in conflict: that we can accept what science to be saying, provided that it doesn’t come loaded with any metaphysical connotations (i.e. I don’t believe evolutionism is required by science, despite what people like Dawkins would have you believe. Evolution is a scientific model / biological process, it has no concerns with God.) In other words, if scientists come up with a better theory than evolution (or a more refined version) in the future, I’d be happy to go with that.

    That turned out to be a slightly longer clarification than I intended, sorry! – but anyway, what I’d like to talk about in this post is something which is contested by the aforementioned Creationists. I touched on this in my previous post on creationism but I’d like to expand on it now: how are Christians to read Genesis 1?

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  • Creation / Evolution 2: The problems with Creationism

    This is the second part of my series “Creation, Evolution, and Evangelicalism“. To be honest, it’s not the most snappy title I’ve ever come up with, but it will do for now.

    In this post I will be exploring the reasons I believe that Creationism is wrong. Creationism is the belief that Genesis 1-2 describe literal events, i.e. that the world was created in six literal 24-hour periods. You can find out more information about it than you’d probably ever want to know on the Answers in Genesis website. Now, I should point out before we start that the Answers in Genesis beliefs were my own up until relatively recently (well, 2003, which I will admit is not all that recent.) In my teenage years I used to get magazines which set out the standard Creationist arguments about flood geology and the like. I probably still have some of the magazines at my parents’ house, I should look them out at Christmas!

    Anyway, my contention is that there are problems with Creationism which aren’t just to do with believing in evolution per se. Let me try and explain a few objections which I have. Note that I’m not arguing here for evolution, I’m just arguing against a literal 6-day Creationism.

    What is a ‘Plain Understanding’ of the text?

    If you read through the Answers in Genesis section on the Bible, you will often find that they appeal to a straight or plain reading of the text. In general, if you believe that the ‘day’ of Genesis 1 is not a 24-hour, literal day then you are being influenced by external factors and not accepting the text as it is speaking to you.

    Now I think this is a wrong way of looking at it for several reasons:

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