Perspectives : Resolving Genesis - Partus Unus

I'm very excited to begin a series with the Faith Bible Institute on the creationism and evolution debate. I've actually put my thoughts on Eldwan's mythology on hold for awhile to see if the elective course will offer any fresh perspective to this over-analysed and irrationally charged ground. The first of eight classes is today, and I'll update this post once I've had the time to digest what they present there.

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Outline of Lesson 1

I. Why the Creationism and Evolution issue matters for the Church

II. Explaining Evolution

III. Explaining Creationism

I. Why the Creationism and Evolution issue matters for the Church

Content
The FBI preacher begins by raising awareness of why this issue is something that the Church needs to address head on. His primary thrust is that because what our culture accepts as truth contradicts what is in the bible, many Christians, particularly youth and young adults, come to view Christianity's position on Creation as an outdated fallacy. By extension, the rest of the doctrine becomes unreliable as the Church doesn't seem to address or have a solid position on how the world was created and how that meshes with empirical evidence.

He also points out that the Gospel requires the Genesis account to be true in several ways: There could have been no human death before the fall, or death would be part of the natural cycle and we are discrediting the apostle Paul, who teaches that death entered by Adam's sin. If there is no Creator God, there is also no standard for moral absolutes, no standard for sin and no standard for forgiveness.

A wishy-washy understanding of the Creation account has been a contributing factor for a diminishing view of who God is and what He intends for us.

Comments

I agreed with this section for the most part, and certainly with the idea that the Church has, for the most part, failed to address key issues with the current generation, which is why we are experiencing such a great time of apostasy. Where is God's voice in the debate? I was particularly struck by speaker's point that America is approaching a point where ten times more babies have been killed by abortion in the United States than Jews were killed by the Nazi regime. He was using it to illustrate the extent of moral degradation and how far the USA has left God's Law as a result of the lies that the Church's silence and failure to represent God has allowed to infiltrate popular culture.

II. Evolution

Content

Atheistic Evolution - Completely undirected evolution was sufficient to give rise to the complexity we see today.

Religious Evolution - Evolution incorporated into some larger superstructure of religious belief.

The speaker points out that the majority of religions have no particular objection to evolution. He then provides a list of religions that are compatible with evolution. He also takes the argument that evolution should not be taught in schools and pushes it further, suggesting that the facts of Creationism should be publicised just as much and that people should be allowed to evaluate the evidence personally, instead of being presented with only one perspective on the issue.

Comments

I didn't really know what to make of the claim that evolution is also religious because other religions incorporate evolutionary ideas. Personally I do know that Buddhism and Confucianism have no objection, because they don't claim to have any authority on where things come from. However, with other religions like Animism, Bahaism, Spiritualism and so on, which he lists as 'structured around evolutional theories', I don't know enough about those beliefs to be able to accept that statement at face value. Of course, the idea that people would see the truth and past the lie of evolution once they are presented with all the evidence, or that evolutionists are afraid to let creationists stand up for themselves, smacks of the initial assumption that creationists have the truth in the first place, which isn't a very good place to start when addressing a skeptic.

III. Explaining Creationism

Content

The Young Earth Perspective - The earth is but several thousand years old, literal 7 days of creation. Supported by creation science and flood geology. The speaker claims that the majority of evidence that we have empirically supports a young earth, but evolutionists choose to rely only on the ones that can be interpreted to imply an old earth. 

As part of a defence of creationism, he then goes on to attack what is traditionally used to support evolution, beginning with the sketchy nature of the fossil record and geological strata. He then moves on to untangle the observable examples and points that have been used to support evolution. Evolution is too slow to be observed - Seems more like a cover than anything else. Peppered moth - Doesn't demonstrate evolution, but only population dynamics. Mutations in subject animals like fruit flies - Doesn't demonstrate that evolution can drive increases in complexity, but rather overwhelmingly that mutation is negative and results in loss or corruption of information. Minor variation in a species does not imply evolution, just variety. 

In other areas, there is no convincing theory for the origin of life. Darwin thought that the cell was a simple part of a complex organism when he proposed the leap from non-life to life, but we now know that cells and life, even the simplest prokaryotes, are already densely packed with complexity. If anything, the leap from non-life to life is larger than ever. Without God, we also have no convincing answer for the origin of the universe, as the Big Bang also doesn't return to T=0, and also offers no reason why it should have happened in the first place. The Big Bang is a theory of change, not of creation. He also suggests that the fossil record is not a result of evolution, but rather of the flood in Noah. The reason why the fossil record has been misinterpreted is that no one really took the time to consider what a catastrophic worldwide flood would produce. He argues that such a flood would indeed produce millions of dead creatures, all over the world, that are buried under layers and layers of silt compressed into rock, which is what we see with fossils.

The Old Earth Perspectives

The Gap Theory - Tries to stick with a literal interpretation of Genesis, but finds sections of the text that could allow for vast ages of prehistory. This gap is generally taken to be between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Dinosaurs and the fossil record fit into this extended period that was hastily glossed over. The speaker argues that the gap theory begins with the assumption that an old earth is correct. The age of the earth is only necessary to explain gradual geological and biological change. Since the gap theory rejects evolution, which requires millions of years, and still proposes a massive flood, which can explain the fossil record, there is no need for such a convoluted explanation. In addition, the idea of the gap theory was initially proposed as an explanation for when Lucifer's fall took place, and that the gap theory only works with science as it was understood 150 years ago, when gap theory was first proposed.

The content on the gap theory and old earth ideas continues into next week's lesson.

Comments

This section might be better titled: Arguments against evolution. I felt it was a little premature to bring some of what he did. It would make more sense to present the various creationist stands in an overview before going into arguments against evolution, or internal contradictions in the stands. Anyway, since this was what he did, I shall have to tag along in my reflections.

It was funny to see classic biological examples used to support evolution overturned. In truth, if one thinks critically, they often only demonstrate the premises of evolution, such as population drifts, genetic change, variation within a population and so on, but fail to demonstrate macro-evolution itself. It is of course compelling to claim that all these observations must add to up evolution on a long and large scale, as many people have done, but it does seem that we haven't observed it empirically. 

A long standing issue that I have with evolution, and this was addressed by the speaker, is that evolution demands that coherent, complex information is able to emerge from randomness. The evolutionist argues that out of the pool of mutations, one in some improbably high number is beneficial and proliferates within the breeding population. I accept that as true, and we have seen it with traits like lactose tolerance. However, I don't think we have examples of new information actually emerging, rather than just existing information being modified. In the case of lactose tolerance, it has to do with extending the time in which lactose is expressed, a far cry from something like the emergence of the lactose enzyme in the first place. It seems to me that in our daily experience, new information does not arise from an unintelligent source, but existing information can be modified or corrupted, and the result of that may even be beneficial, but the information itself is not genuinely new. 

If one takes a simple image, and photocopies it, and copies the copy, ad infinitum, we do not expect that a final product will somehow acquire the same complexity as Da Vinci's Last Supper or Van Gogh's Starry Night. Rather, errors that do creep in distort the image and one eventually ends up with a streaky, blurry mush. If one makes a copy of an audio track ad infinitum, we don't expect it turn into Debussy's Arabesque or Dvorak's New World. Even if there are some snatches of randomly generated good music from copying errors, and even if there was a 'natural selector' looking out for those good melodies, the sheer rate of bad mutation would overwhelm any snippets of sense. In our everyday experience, information as a net whole is lost in repeated replication. I never liked the idea that evolution wants to make an exception in this area.

Another major exception that the atheistic evolution worldview begs us to make is that of the transition between non-life and life. The speaker touched on the idea that when early evolutionists made their suggestion that a cell could have arisen from non-life, we knew much less about cells than we know now. Cells are not simple building blocks in a complex arrangement, they are complex building blocks in a doubly complex system of a whole organism. What we have learned about cells in recent decades should, if anything, convince people about how difficult it is to make that transition from the inorganic to the organic. All these recent studies that have had research teams making artificial genomes and advances in what we might call artificial life are subject to the same problem. They do not prove that life could have arisen by chance. If anything, they show how much thought, experimentation, planning, resources and calculation have to go into creating even a single cell. What they do prove is that human beings are acquiring the technical capacity to craft life. In my opinion, such advances do not do away with the need for a designer, any more than the experiment could have succeeded without a dedicated researcher.

Ecclesiastical Order

It would be useful for me to codify the positions that exist within the organisations of the Temples in Eleris, both for my own reference and for any of you who have hopped on over to my wordpress blog to read the first few chapters of my draft.

Service in the Temples was equivalent to service in the public sector in Radiant society. The Temples were responsible for social policy, taxation, safety regulations, formal education, the military et cetera, distributed between the five temples. Emerging from the compulsory education track, graduates so inclined could submit their applications to the Temples for whatever field caught their interest. In exchange for access to what was, often verifiably, the best equipment and resources for research, the Temples required additional duties of their staff.

A breakdown of the ranks within the religious hierarchy is given below, along with their canonical average duration and age, although it is worth noting that the Radiant education system was primarily concerned about mental development than physical development; it was not unusual to find exceptional sparks ascending through the progression far faster than the norm.

Initiate (36 - 37): Fresh out of school, they spend a year learning about the organisation of the temple they are posted to, various responsibilities of prayer and basic exercises of the mind and body, as well as appropriate manners and mores for their temples. They are also introduced to the temple's infrastructure in preparation for their next phase.

Servant (37 - 42): In these five years, a Servant is tasked with the maintenance of temple grounds, from the landscaping, to the architecture, research equipment, dormitories, cleanliness and so on.

Disciple (42 - 114): Shifting away from a rank of responsibility, the Disciples begin a lengthy phase of study. At this stage, they learn about the many years of history and developments of the cultural traditions of the Temples. Religious and philosophical texts and ideas are studied, compared and debated to ensure a complete understanding of each Temple's ethos and how they integrate to form the supporting pillars of Radiant Society. In this phase, mental training is accompanied by physical and magical training, and greater Aleric powers are unlocked for Disciples than for the average populace.

Devotee (114 - 180): Devotees begin to specialise in a certain department of the Temple they are with. They study it in more detail, with more rigour and are subjected to the scrutiny of superiors that comes with perceived ownership. They are often given the menial ends of research work for their departments, and greater magical abilities are unlocked for them.

At this point, the career progression bifurcates. In the story, Lelia is a Senior Devotee, which is one of the two options available to those in Temple service.

Senior Devotee (180+): Those who are content at this level of power and responsibility will choose to remain as quieter, dutiful servants in their respective departments. They may be permanently attached to one Priest as a full time assistant, but they are also granted the freedom to pursue small independent projects. They may stay with the Temple indefinitely and are held to have completed their obligations at the age of 216. Some oversee the younger servants, or serve as substitute teachers for Disciples.

On the other path, there are the ordained ranks, which will progress on to higher positions of management. The first of these are the Acolytes.

Acolyte (180 - 240): An ambitious Devotee must catch the attention of a fully ordained Priest and bid to be chosen as their Acolyte. At this point, the Acolyte receives personal attention and guardianship from the Priest, and is trained in that specific realm of responsibility or interest. Acolytes are also burdened with the responsibility of planning and coordinating for ceremonial events and routine Temple duties. The three most promising Acolytes, in line to replace the High Priest, are specially designated as the First, Second and Third Acolytes.

High Priest (240 - 252): The High Priest is responsible for the overall management and policy decisions of Radiant Society. The five High Priests from the five Temples form the High Council and are at the top of the hierarchy for the active public service. This is a phase of intense societal responsibility and the High Priest often has to put aside any personal pursuits, right from when he was in training as First Acolyte. The term in this office lasts for a duodecade, or twelve years. Once the High Priest steps down, he is accorded priority in the temple above the other priests as recognition of the work he has done. This position is increasingly occupied by younger Priests, as it allows one to bypass the age threshold of 240 that is canonically required for a full Priesthood.

Priest (240/252 - 864): A Priesthood is granted upon an Acolyte reaching the age of 240, or upon the completion of a High Priest's term of twelve years. At this point, Priests are able to lead full research projects, are required to perform or participate in many ceremonial duties for the temple, and full magical autonomy is granted. Of course, they also have the responsibility of teaching the younger generation and possibly having to adopt a personal Acolyte.

Bishop (864 - 1296): A Bishop is exempt from any teaching duties, unless they wish to do so. They are granted the right to pursue what they will, directing Temple departments and research projects, reserving veto power for the Priests under their charge. At this point, most Temple servants will spend their days in poetry, philosophy, theatre, sculpture, worship or language construction, although some choose pursuits considerably more esoteric. They are no longer required or expected to have concerns for the basic functions of the world.

Elder (1296+): Elders are granted no longer required to participate in any duties both temporal or spiritual, absolved from any ceremony or responsibility to the Temple. They, while free to use any of the Temple facilities, are typically more engaged in virtual realities and abstract projects. A sizeable number choose to adopt the post-corporist stance and discard their physical bodies entirely. An Elder may also express interest in joining the Elder Council, though they are largely a dormant political body with most of the work left to the discretion of the High Council.

At any point along this progression, a servant of the Temple may decide to leave to join the private sector, though there will be penalties for those who either do not complete their time as Senior Devotees or as Priests. Furthermore, the ordained ranks will have their magical abilities restricted to those of a Senior Devotee, which may seem quite debilitating to them after centuries of growing accustomed to a high degree of magical sensitivity.

Vignette: Urbs Musicae

Tangled streets gird ornate palaces and pale townhouses, plastered over with classical divinities and emblems of victory. Each one plays a variation of the imperial theme in its symbolically infused facade. Wings and robes, kotinoi and trumpets resound in an enduring efflorescence. Every anthropomorphic pilaster and corinthian capital romantically suggesting far more than any current amalgamation of ferrous alloy and brittle silicon. When Nox arrives, the organic generation of multifarious melodies by composers long inhumed put the artificial perfection of present popularity to sonorous shame.

Yet, globalised modernity rises like a tide to drown bastions of antiquated practice. The majestic mirage is disillusioned by the commercial proliferation of 'Kassa'; reinventing itself as a curiousity to maintain a voided existence.

Perspectives : Ostensible Counterproductivity

It's always struck me as rather odd that the demons in the gospels declare that Jesus is the Son of God. Just some references for you - Mark 1: 23-24 / Mark 5: 6-7. Isn't it somewhat against the grain to lend credence to someone you logically should be discrediting? Surely, if even the demons are declaring Him to be the Son of the Most High God, this man is worth paying attention to.

It has been conventionally proposed that the demons are helpless when they encounter Jesus. As they are beings who can see through this fuzzy physical shell that we call reality, they recognise Jesus immediately for who He is and they respond by declaring His Sonship in fear and compulsion. Jesus, wanting nothing to do with unclean spirits, drives them away, that His ministry would not be tainted by their demonic testimony. 

What follows may be but idle speculation, but perhaps someone could advise me of its veracity and plausibility. I suppose that when the rebellious forces of Satan noticed that the Son had descended to earth in the form of a man, they would have been highly suspicious and perplexed by the unexpected play from heaven. This is evident from the questions that they confront Jesus with:

And they cried out, saying, 'What business do we have with each other, Son of God? 

Have You come to torment us before the time?'

- Matthew 8: 29

They don't really know why He has come, the divine salvation plan was hidden from them. They know their time of judgement will eventually fall, but they also seem to know that this was not yet the right time for that final judgement. I gather that there must have been an attitude of puzzlement and curiousity. There was an increase in demonic activity around the time of Jesus; perhaps all these spirits were all watching anxiously, wondering why the Creator of the universe was in a fragile human body and sanding away at wood in Nazareth.

Now, they would certainly have noticed Jesus' baptism, and perhaps after this, they took extra note of Jesus' activity, with Him having emerged from a hiding of sorts. It certainly seems the case as the father of lies himself came to tempt Jesus after that incident. I'm sure the darkened light-bringer must have been wringing his wits to figure out what the Light of the World was up to. This time of temptation must have been an opportunity for the enemy to probe and figure out how he could derail the divine directive.

One thing that would have been very apparent would be Jesus' reluctance to declare Himself publicly. In the temptation on the temple, Jesus resisted what would effectively have won the allegiance of the people by claiming the promises of God. He didn't want to demonstrate Himself as the Son of God openly, but countered Satan's challenges to 'prove' Himself with reservation and steadfast resolution to obey God. Thus it could have been revealed to Satan that Jesus was resisting a glorious unveiling that would overwhelm the people into rapturous submission.

If my train of thought was accurate, Satan could have communicated this information to the rest of his unholy hierarchy and instructed them to toy with it a little more. In this fashion, the demons' declarations would be a rather more sophisticated attempt to undermine the success of Jesus' first coming. I think we get traces of this when Jesus is more well known as a miracle worker than as the Messiah. The crowds have their own expectations of Jesus that are not in line with God's purposes. 

Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, 

withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

- John 6: 15

The exhortations from the demons would have added to that detrimental revolutionary impulse. They might not have known the whole plan, but they knew enough of it to latch on to whatever they did suspect and aim for those characteristics. Of course, at the end, the Lord prevailed with the amazing resurrection of Christ.

Then again, perhaps, as my father remarked, that coordinated attack in this mode might be giving the enemy forces too much credit. I don't really know, part of me is wary of underestimating the fallen morning star. If you've got any ideas, let me know what you think.

Abandoned Adjectives

Adjectives have been entirely eliminated, or rather, their function has been subsumed under verbs and participles. I haven't detailed the participle system before, but suffice to say that my imagination has birthed a system with more inflections than Latin. Partially because I'm avoiding fusional endings and because my verbs have five aspects instead of Latin's two aspects.

In Tas Eldwaraj, there are three verb conjugations, the concrete verb - first conjugation, the stative verb - second conjugation, and the abstract verb - third conjugation. Stative verbs serve the descriptive function in the language. 

The example verb 'barze' is strong, will be used to demonstrate.

os barze - he is strong

A quick thing to notice is that the copula in English, which serves to indicate the time when the adjective applies to the noun, is not a separate word. It's function is incorporated into the stative verb of Tas Eldwaraj. So it would be more accurate to think of the stative verb infinitive, if I come up with one, as 'to be in the condition of strength'.

os barge - he was strong

os barfe - he will be strong

Similarly, all the other verbal tenses and aspects applied, and can be translated by altering the form of the ever-versatile English 'to be'.

os bargivie - he had been strong

os barzevem - he is not (being) strong

et cetera

When it comes to the other voices for stative verbs, they take on the meanings to make ____ and to be made ____, for the active and passive voices respectively. As you might deduce, the reciprocative voice will be where both the subject and object make each other ____.

os barzo isü - he makes you strong/he strengthens you

os barfavo isü - he will be making you strong/he will be strengthening you

os barfu isü - he will be made strong by you/he will be strengthened by you

os bargivaotu isü - he and you began to make each other strong/he and you began to strengthen each other

et cetera

Participles are used in a fashion more recognisably adjectival. The participles are formed by taking the positive conjugation of the verb and adding on the appropriate declensional noun ending. Participles have to match the declension and case of their linked noun, but not necessarily their polarity. To illustrate :

os barzes - he, being strong

osem barzes - not he, being strong

os barzesem - he, not being strong

osem barzesem - not he, not being strong

In all four examples, the noun and participle are in the anthropic nominative case, but each of the combinations of positive or negative noun or participle are valid, and have specific meanings.

When used to describe a natural noun, the participle takes on the declensions of natural nouns. With some tenses, a relative pronoun might yield a more idiomatic translation.

selen bargen - the animal, which was strong

seledi barfaviedi - with the animal, which will cease to be strong

And of course, with an abstract noun, the participle uses abstract declensions.

yel barfelem - the spirit, which will not be strong

yelam barzevulaj - of the spirit, which is being made strong

As a result of this system, there are a total of 2160 participles per verb. Sixty positive verb conjugations by twelve noun cases by three noun declension systems. All of them are regular though, and their formation follows simple agglutinative rules.

Inconstant Conjugations

I've decided that with the old verb conjugations, not that they're that old, the post was only a few weeks back, but upon a little further thought, the plosives render pronunciation clunky. So it's been reworked.

The tense infixes have been changed from [-pi-], [-te-] and [-ca-] to [-ze-], [-gi-] and [-fa-], the differing types of sounds serving to differentiate the tenses more markedly. Instead of three voices, there are now four, distinguishing the reflexive from the reciprocative. There can be multiple meaning for each stem, as some meaning are clearly intransitive and can be complemented by related transitive concepts. I'm not sure if I still need an infinitive either, so for now I'll just give the finite forms.

Using the verb 'leze', live, as an example, the simple, intransitive/reflexive [-e], simple system is :

leze, lezem - live, do not live

lege, legem - lived, did not live

lefe, lefem - will live, will not live

For the continuous aspect, the infix [-v-] is added, and the tense infixes are no longer reduced by the voice suffix.

lezeve, lezevem - is living, is not living

legive, legivem - was living, was not living

lefave, lefavem - will be living, will not be living

The incipient aspect uses the infix [-va-]. Note that there are currently no standard diphthongs for Tas Eldwaraj, though it would be pretty easy for speakers to slip into it with the compounds that emerge in this system, so that may be added in eventually.

lezevae, lezevaem - is beginning to live, is not beginning to live

legivae, legivaem - has begun to live, has not begun to live

lefavae, lefavaem - will begin to live, will not begin to live

Conversely, the perfect aspect substitutes the [-va-] for [-vi-].

lezevie, lezevaim - is ceasing to live, is not ceasing to live

legivie, legivaim - had lived, had not lived

lefavie, lefavaim - will cease to live, will not cease to live

The habitual aspect, the last aspect, retains the use of the consonant [-r-]

lezere, lezerem - lives regularly/daily, does not live regularly/daily

legire, legirem - lived regularly/daily, did not live regularly/daily

lefare, lefarem - will live regularly/daily, will not live regularly/daily

For the other voices, the active and passive have the same suffixes, yielding :

Active Voice

lezo, lezom, lego, legom, lefo, lefom

lezevo, lezevom, legivo, legivom, lefavo, lefavom

lezevao, lezevaom, legivao, legivaom, lefavao, lefavaom

lezevio, lezeviom, legivio, legiviom, lefavio, lefaviom

lezero, lezerom, legiro, legirom, lefaro, lefarom

Passive Voice

lezu, lezum, legu, legum, lefu, lefum

lezeru, lezevum, legivu, legivum, lefavu, lefavum

lezevau, lezevaum, legivau, legivaum, lefavau, lefavaum

lezeviu, lezevium, legiviu, legivium, lefaviu, lefavium

lezeru, lezerum, legiru, legirum, lefaru, lefarum

Of course, there is no active or passive equivalent of 'to live', so a related meaning would be associated with the active and passive voices for verbs of this stem. A possible verb would be 'to nourish/give life'

The reciprocative voice suffix is no longer [-odu], to avoid fusional endings with the natural dative noun case. Instead it will be [-otu]

Reciprocative Voice

lezotu, lezotum, legotu, legotum, lefotu, lefotum

lezerotu, lezevotum, legivotu, legivotum, lefavotu, lefavotum

lezevaotu, lezevaotum, legivaotu, legivaotum, lefavaotu, lefavaotum

lezeviotu, lezeviotum, legiviotu, legiviotum, lefaviotu, lefaviotum

lezerotu, lezerotum, legirotu, legirotum, lefarotu, lefarotum

Thus, there are a total of 120 conjugations now, excluding any forms for an infinitive or imperative. Which I don't really think the language needs at the moment. The participle system will now have 2160 forms in total, based on 60 positive verbal endings multiplied by 36 case endings of nouns. The features of the Tas Eldwaraj participle system will be explained in future post. Too tired to think at the moment.