> My problem with your concern is your implicit theology of prayer. You > say that Gulley's concern has substance because one would not want to > pray to a God who creates in evolutionary ways. Why not? I guess if > you are praying to an intervening God who could deliver all the good > things you need but for some reason, which escapes our thinking > processes, chooses not to do so, you could then dismiss God with > contempt. But if you are praying to an evolutionary God who works at > keeping creativity, love and freedom as a single reality, then prayer > is not about what God delivers and whether it is of benefit to the one > praying, it is about communing with that Spirit who sustains us in our > microcosm of the divine being. So Jesus prays as he journeys to the > cross, "Father, if it be thy will, take this cup away from me. Yet > not my will but thine be done." (luke 22:42)
OK, now that I've taught my morning SRE and the OC kids were kind to me this morning, I'll have a go at answering Jim's response: Let us suppose that prayer is all about us coming into line with God, not bending God's will to our own. What line are we called to adopt if we have a God who creates by evolutionary strategy? Let me suggest a few examples: Illness. Mr X has a hereditary disease that has made him gravely ill. Should we pray for Mr X or should we just accept that, following the "survival of the fittest", Mr X and his gene pool has to be eliminated? Bye, bye Mr X, your genes are a threat to humanity. May you and your children's children forever disappear from the face of the Earth. Commerce. I've got some bad news for all you Linux users. Mr Gates is a far better promoter of his products and a capitalist extraordinaire. His software is going to conquer you because his strategies are stronger than yours. In the world of commerce, it's the survival of the fittest, as well. I mean, hey, does the Uniting Church use Linux or Microsoft Windows? Homosexuality. Need we even say it? "Survival of the fittest" is in the first place sexual reproduction. If this evolutionary strategy is how God creates, homosexuality is doomed to either oblivion or an even smaller minority of the population. In fact, all those wretched fundamentalist Christians are working against God's evolutionary tactics by pressuring homosexual people to act like heterosexuals and reproduce, thereby passing on their genetic predisposition to homosexual orientation. Of course, the Dean Jensens of this world won't be too worried about this, even if it doesn't match their theology. Animals. Evolution has made some interesting changes to our world. Think about those super-sized cuddly marsupials - the so-called mega-fauna - that used to roam Australia, possibly even in the time of human habitation around 50,000 years ago. Poor little critters apparently died out because they had to gather around increasingly smaller puddles of water and couldn't roam far enough to find food. Sort of reminds you of people in Sydney. Talking about human critters, or at least humanoid ones, there are the Neanderthals. As I understand it, Joachim Neander (1650-1680) was a famous German hymn writer who gave us a well-known hymn about God's providence (TIS 111). So they named the valley (German "Tal") after him - Neander Tal. Then it all went wrong. In that valley, they first found the remains of an ancient humanoid which they named "Neanderthal Man". When I did physical anthropology at uni 28 years ago, Neanderthal Man was supposed to be one of our ancestors, but recent DNA work has suggested "no", a separate branch of humanoids. (Yeah, it's life Jim, but not as we know it!) They lived at the same time as our ancestors, communicated and traded with them, had flowery funeral rites. But they died out. Seems like God's providence didn't apply to them. Or was God just being kind because they'd never win a beauty contest? - Greg ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
