Why didn't God just destroy Adam and Eve, and start again.

This was a question posed to Greg Koukl on his "STRask" podcast, and the 'start again' was posed on the basis of God knowing that he'd be wiping out all except Noah in a few centuries.

His answer was a little like the curate's egg: good in parts. The not good parts arose from his Calvinism and his view as to 'long ages' defining the history of revelation and thus the cosmos.

As a result he missed the obvious point, which I discuss.

Initially, the question seems to presume a couple of things that, to my mind, run against the Bible's data on creation (with respect to mankind's place and role, and God's action in creation) and on biblical anthropology.

Firstly, it seems to consider a cosmos that is disconnected from the creatures in God's image and that their fall affected only themselves. Subsidiary to this, it seems to presuppose that there was death before the fall, contrary to the God who found everything very good in a world not yet marked by corruption. Even animal death would be very much a mark of corruption. Upsetting, as it often is even today, rather than a matter of joy!

Secondly, it seems to trivialize the scope of sin and God's true relation to his creation and its creatures in his image: that we are made for fellowship and the first couple are the only ones by whom that unique status is unveiled. It would hardly be significant if there was a 'start again' option! God made them for fellowship, and now he goes about restoring the breach.

The notion that God could 'start again' with a new couple fails to recognize the effect of the fall on the cosmos. Paul tells us that the entire creation is groaning (Romans 8:19-23). So post fall, any new couple would no longer be in the pristine creation, but in the marred creation, subjected to futility and corruption: death now the unwelcome feature.

There would be other depredations of sin affecting the entire cosmos by virtue of Adam and Eve being God's image bearers and vicegerents. A new couple would be aliens at best, in a world not fitted for them and be either immediately frustrated, not knowing the world for which they were made as it has been damaged, or quickly become part of it. At worst they would conceivably be completely incompatible with it!

The original couple who fell being God's image-bearers are not just disposable and replaceable. Because sin has entered there could be no starting again. Yet they are rescuable, and God shows both his love and his power in that he is not outdone by sin, but rather overcomes it, as he promises them. A benefit of this is our further encouragement that God is truly the King of Creation and not a Zoroastrian bit player. God is not equally opposed by the 'not-God' of sin, but overcomes it. He does not tolerate death, but in Christ defeats it.

Following on, then, the gross condition of Noah's time was cleared for the line of the Messiah to be established in the. God let conditions play out until they needed to be wiped away for his plan to unfold.

Your Muslim friend

 Two questions for your Muslim friend (and I mean friend: this is to be a fruitful and friendly conversation):

1. How do you know who is a prophet?

2. How can you tell if a document is from God?

The discussion:

1. Mohammad is claimed to be a prophet, because he said so. The biblical prophets claim to speak for God in the public sphere, not hidden in a cave; they make predictions; the predictions come about.

Mohammad was an acquitistive war lord; the prophets of God in the Bible were far from the 'great', but humble and despised; yet they spoke against the powers of the day to their own detriment and had a massive effect in history.

2. The document records the events of people, words of God, and unfolding of history in public. For all to see, for others to debate and comment on. The Q by contrast was compiled from 'narrators' 200 years after it was claimed to be dictated (no one else was there), and Uthman destroyed the written parts he didn't like.

I'm not really religious, but I'm spiritual!

How many times have you heard this on a news clip or 'vox-pop' video?

What does it mean?

How do you deal with it?

Mostly, I'd say, it is an evasion to avoid you talking to me about your religion.

But, it might be right.

However, if you are 'spiritual', then you are 'religious'. All religions represent an approach to the spiritual in terms of seeking a resolution to life's contradictions.

The base contradiction is this: how can there be discontents when this is the world we are in; perhaps evolved within: so where does the transcendent notion of a 'discontent' of experience come in. Surely what is, simply is?

But it is not; and no one has ever been satisfied with this. Even materialist atheists would rely on the dead hand of evolution to make things better (but again, whence such transcendence as a view of the future, and a comparison against what actually is?); but we are all worm dung in the end; so it doesn't matter...but no one lives this way! 

According to Westphal (God, Guilt and Death: An existential phenomenology of religion) there are three types of 'religion'. That is, three types of quest for a resolution of existential contradictions in the quest for a satisfying life.

1. Exilic - religions that conceive resolution as absorption into a great anonymity, monism. Often 'the universe' impersonalized. Salvation by absorption into the 'all'.

2. Mimetic - semi-worldly religions that merge the 'creation' and 'salvation' in perhaps time-independent manner. Paganism both ancient and modern (environmentalism, veganism, atheistic materialism, scientism, evolutionism).

3. Covenental - form a type of relationship with the creator/God that is both worldly (takes the real world as real and valid) but needing resolution in relation with the creator in some way. Salvation by external action.

In a way all religions seek the same thing: resolution of the human existential dilemma. The route is: ignore, own effort, external savior.

The first two fail on the face of it: ignore solves nothing, own effort seeks the solution in the very problem (while perhaps pretending to deny the problem).