And thus the creation/evolution debate ends with one obscure blog posting

Somewhere in he Everlasting Man, g.k. chesterton makes the point that most of the classic creation myths weren't made by the thinkers of the time but by the poets. They usually involve various gods competing against one another, some wild entity doing combat with some other thing. None of these are really a logical processing of the world, I suppose if someone went about thinking of it logically we would have our cold scientific viewpoint from the beginning of the century, that everything has basically always been around and colliding in a random and chaotic fashion. What the ancients were trying to get at with these creation stories was not just a description of the world around them, but a description of how they fit into that world. We all experience this wide range of emotions, emotions that cause us to act in crazy and unpredictable ways. What these old stories get at, is that our emotional existence is just an extension of what came before us. These stories try to see the world and ourselves as more than just a thing that needed to be created, but as some step in a larger story. That's what these myths do, tie the human experience into some larger epic, and have our individual lives weave in and out of these events like the actors in a play. So, from this framework, I don't really see the need to back out a scientific explanation from the Genesis creation account. It doesn't seem that the flow and prose was to set up some description of the world, as if all creation, nature, and humanity was like so many planks of particle board, assembled in mechanical fashion with a cosmic alan wrench, and that our bible is just the leftover instruction manual. But it seeks to drive home the point that this was a creation of poetry, and song, and speech, and creativity. I appreciate the mystery of it all. There's a whole history of existence that stretches before the bible, and whole portion that most likely stretches beyond. We begin with the human account in Genesis, and even that is mysterious. I mean, sometimes we get a little vain that seeing as we started when God created us, that God started when we were created. There's a mystery beyond and between the verses.

Now's the time when I might get a little blasphemous. Our whole life is speeding along at a constant rate along the uni-directional stream of time. This God we are interacting with is beyond all that, having created it in the first place. Once more, we ourselves are beyond it all, having been created as eternal beings and one day leaving this whole spiral. Then, if this is true, why should our actions only have repercussions in the future? Can the decisions we make today, have affected events in the past, can our decision to not travel to Oregon for the weekend, set in motion a series of events in our life that will affect us in our current state, a series of events that would only mean something if we stayed here? Then comes the greatest decision man made, the fall. Can our rebellion of God set us apart to live in a cold and impersonal universe, one that is only now being resurrected into the glorious future by the appearance of the firstborn? What stems from this line of thinking is not that only the future is being made perfect, but the complete range of human existence.