Undeception

I have been musing lately about how my stance on the creation/evolution controversy would impact other areas of theology if applied consistently. The stance I’m referring to is my conviction that viewing the history of the natural universe as a string of miraculous interventions into nature is hopelessly misguided. I have argued that the atheistic science apologists and the fiat creationists find themselves in agreement on a falsehood, namely that there’s either a natural or a supernatural explanation for the physical phenomena of the cosmos. While agreeing in principle with those two groups, the God-of-the-gaps philosophy known as Intelligent Design tries to bridge the gap a bit and posits an admixture of natural and supernatural explanations that end up sounding arbitrarily inconsistent: the leading ID advocates accept common descent as predicted and confirmed by the scientific method but paradoxically insist that the theory of evolution is insufficient to explain natural phenomena without the aid of Someone/something (nah, just Someone) else whose interventions must remain unrecoverable by the scientific method. One is left wondering where the natural explanations stop and the supernatural ones begin, or even why one must stop for the other to begin.

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Summary of Part One

• God the Gardener created a son (Lk 3.38) to tend the garden.
• God, as a father, was training up his children Adam and Eve in the garden.
• Adam was put in a garden for instruction because gardening requires faith: both faithfulness in tending day by day and faith that what is planted and cultivated will one day grow. Planting and tending a garden is an exercise of faith.
• The prohibition against the Tree of Knowledge, like the dietary laws of the Mosaic Covenant abolished in the New, was intended to be a temporary restriction.
• The Tree of Knowledge was made for Adam and Eve when they matured.

Support for the last two points is found in Hebrews 5:13-14 (all quotations hereafter are from the NRSV): “. . .for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.”

• Adam did not have to earn his place in God’s Garden: rather, God gave good gifts to His children.
• Adam was gifted with gold, precious stones, rivers teeming with life, and authority over all living creatures; no dowry was demanded for him to take Eve as his wife.
• God created the world so that faith was necessary from the beginning. Adam lacked faith in what God told him, and impatiently asked for his inheritance before time (cf. the Prodigal Son).
• The temptation was a shortcut to glory (Genesis 3:5).
• Satan tempted them with something they already had (Genesis 1:27).
• God didn’t just throw His son out of the garden for the first mistake he made. God warned Adam of only one sin.
• Adam was being taught to trust His Father and His goodness. Adam’s sin was his rebellion against his own experience of what God was doing in his life, impatience with God.

The Garden in the New Covenant

Is this motif shown elsewhere in Scripture? Martin gives examples of the gardening metaphor in the NT, specifically as regards life under the New Covenant:

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When I was at Truthvoice 2008 a month ago, the co-author of Beyond Creation Science, Tim Martin, gave two talks that I thought were worthy of discussion on my blog. Here are my thoughts on the first talk.

[Note: I am summarizing based on the notes I took, and I honestly hope I misrepresent nothing he said. I'm going to let him know about this to give him a chance for correction/clarification.]

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