The Human Genome

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line. On a Tuesday morning, lots and lots and lots to cover today.

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I was listening to an article, for those of you who think that sounds strange, remember

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I do most of my studying on the back of a bike, and so thanks to TextSpeech Pro, for those who keep asking that,

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TextSpeech Pro for Mac, when I find especially a lengthy article that I definitely want to read,

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I throw it in TextSpeech Pro, have it converted to MP3 audio, throw it on the iPod

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Nano, and somewhere along the... So far, on average, this year, 169 miles per week of riding,

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I get it done. This morning I was listening to an article from TheNewAtlantis .com

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called Getting Over the Code Delusion. I'm not sure who linked to it, I think it was on Twitter, which means

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I'll never find it again, but thankfully I was able to find the article again. And like I said, it's

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TheNewAtlantis .com, Getting Over the Code Delusion. Let me just read the end of this article.

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The article is a little complex. If you don't have a science background, it might be a little bit difficult to follow.

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It deals a lot with genetics and ribosomes and DNA and RNA and nucleosomes and RNA polymerase and all the other neat stuff that if you study genetics, you're familiar with those things, though, you know,

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I studied genetics back in the 1980s, and boy, are things a -changin'. I need to try to keep up with some of this stuff, and that's why

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I was listening to this. But listen to the end of this particular article. It might take me a few moments here, but fascinating stuff.

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The topics covered in this essay represent just a small sample of findings of genetic and epigenetic research, and we can be sure that as the field develops, more discoveries will be made and will continue to undermine the doctrine that a genetic code defines the program of life.

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But this is enough, I hope, to suggest why researchers are so energized and excited today, a sense of profound change seems to be widespread.

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What he's talking about is everyone was expecting upon the mapping of the human genome that all the secrets of life would be unfolded to us.

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They were not unfolded to us. We have found significantly less complex forms of life that have more genes than we do.

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And the old, well, chimpanzees have 98 % of the same DNA that we do argument, that whole mindset has simply been trampled underfoot of the reality that we were completely wrong to think that this two -dimensional code in DNA was going to answer all of our questions.

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It's shed much light on many things, of course, but it has not explained the mystery of life.

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I continue on. Meanwhile, the epigenetic revolution is slowly but surely making its way into the popular media.

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Witness the recent Time Magazine cover story, Why DNA Isn't Your Destiny. The shame of it is that most of the significance of the current research is still being missed.

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Judging from much of what is being written, one might think the main thing is simply that we're gaining new, more complex insights into how to treat the living organism as a manipulable machine.

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The one decisive lesson I think we can draw from the work in molecular genetics over the past couple of decades is that life does not progressively contract into a code or any kind of reduced building block as we probe its more minute dimensions.

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Trying to define the chromatin complex, according to geneticists Shiv Gruwal and Sarah Elgin, is, quote, like trying to define life itself, end quote.

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Having plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, catch that?

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Catch that? In their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, biologists now find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, and every gene expression profile.

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Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate. The explanatory task at the bottom is essentially the same as the one higher up.

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It's rather our understanding that all too easily becomes constricted as we move downward because the contextual scope and qualitative richness of our survey is so extremely narrowed.

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The search for precise explanatory mechanisms and codes leads us along a path of least resistance toward the reduction of understanding.

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A capacity for imagination, not something many scientists are trained for today, that's interesting, is always required for grasping a context in meaningful terms because at the contextual level the basic data are not things but rather relations, movement, and transformation.

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To see the context is to see a dance, not merely the bodies of the individual dancers. Now I really recommend the reading of this entire article so you have the background to this because it's fascinating in its discussion of how they're discovering that how genes are activated or regulated may have much more to do with more of a dance, interrelation of factors.

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It's not the mechanical simplistic thing that we were expecting all along and no matter how hard they try, they cannot explain these things without talking about design.

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It is designed all the way down to the most basic level.

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They can't avoid using that terminology at all. I go back to the article.

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The hopeful thing is that molecular biologists today, slowly but surely, and perhaps despite themselves, are increasingly being driven to enlarge their understanding through a reckoning with genetic context.

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As a result, they are writing finis to the misbegotten hope for a non -lifelike foundation of life, even if the fact hasn't yet been widely announced.

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I know some atheists that need to hear this stuff, you know what I mean? It is time, I think, for the announcement.

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There is frequently told a story about a little old lady who claims after hearing a scientific lecture that the world is a flat plate resting on the back of a giant tortoise.

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When asked what the turtle is standing on, she invokes a second turtle, and when the inevitable follow -up question comes, she replies, you're very clever, young man, but you can't fool me.

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It's turtles all the way down. As a metaphor for the scientific understanding of biology, the story is marvelously truthful.

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In the study of organisms, quote, it's life all the way down, end quote.

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Excellent article, I would highly recommend it. Just trying to wrap your mind around what they're discovering about the nucleosomes.

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When I was in, for something you don't know, I was a science major in college, I finished a major in biology, department fellow in anatomy and physiology under Dr.

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James Witherspoon at Grand Canyon University, blah, blah, blah, blah, studied a tremendous amount of genetics my senior year in college, as well as majoring in Bible, and back then, nucleosomes and things like that, we just, we had no idea how incredibly complex they are and how they may be extremely involved in regulation of gene activity and all this stuff.

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The thing to remember, though, is that so many people in our society think that if you understand the mechanism by which something is done away with the creator, the vast majority of your radical atheists today, your

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Dan Barkers and your, obviously, the big names like Dawkins, the whole idea is that if you understand how something works, then there's no longer any need for a creator.

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They like to use the argument of the God of the gaps. You make reference to God simply because you don't know how something works, but once you find out how it works, you don't need

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God anymore. So, ancient men had gods who threw lightning and made thunder and things like that.

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Well, now we know how lightning and thunder work. We don't really fully understand it, but we've got a pretty good idea of the mechanics, and so, therefore, you don't need

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God anymore. That's the mindset. You know, I was thinking this morning, Rich and I were talking about some of our old computers around here, and I was talking about, we have this one computer that runs in my office under my desk, and it keeps track of our chat channel, and we call it the

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NA -27 machine. It's all it does. Well, actually, it also runs the video cameras that I can see in my office.

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But it runs 24 -7, and it has been running 24 -7 for over seven years. I think, we're thinking that one was made in 2003.

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I think that's when it was made. It may actually be older than that, but let's say it's been running for that long.

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Now, when I first got a computer, the compact, portable computer, I didn't know how this thing worked.

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I mean, it took a few weeks to figure out how WordStar worked and dot commands and sticking a five -and -a -quarter -inch floppy into a drive.

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It didn't even have a hard drive on it. 640K of RAM. I hadn't seen the inside of it, and then we decided to upgrade to a hard drive.

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Benny Diaz came over, and we opened that thing up, and I started seeing what the inside of a computer looked like. I'd been able to use the computer, but I didn't really know why it was doing what it was doing.

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But you start seeing that things are connected to other things, and you have to have these cables. These cables connect hard drives and back then floppy drives to the motherboard.

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They also have to have power, so there's certain power cables. Sometimes we'd have to go to a store. We'd have to have a cable made to connect one thing to another, because back then everything wasn't quite as standardized as it's become now.

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If I had tried to put a hard drive in and just took a piece of masking tape or a better duct tape, which is what's used for everything.

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Duct tape can fix anything. If I took a piece of duct tape and connected the hard drive to my motherboard, guess what?

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It would not have worked. It would have looked somewhat similar to that cabling, but it would not have worked. Why? Because there's design.

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You have to have certain cables that have certain connectors to make things work.

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Over time, we built a lot of the computers that we're now replacing, and Rich is building two more in the other room as we speak.

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The systems are installing, and the motherboards, one on the old ones finally, and they were running.

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Those are still on Windows 95, and we finally, or are they at 98, Win 98? They're running

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Win 98. Okay. So, they're old machines, but we're putting new ones together out there, and those are the ones we burn

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DVDs with and CDs and stuff like that. Is there something you wish to say? A point along the lines of what you're saying here, and that is, just because I can assemble components and make them work with one another, doesn't mean that I can build a computer.

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No, you're using pre -existing blocks. Someone else has designed this. I'm simply taking their design, as best as I can tell, and assembling it together.

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Make it functional. If you had gotten a Mac motherboard and tried to stick

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PC stuff on top of it, and was mixing and matching stuff that was never designed to go together, it wouldn't work.

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You've got to make sure that the memory that you've got in there is designed for that particular system. I believe you would call that a freak.

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I think you would. It wouldn't survive half a second. That's right. You turn the power to it, and it would just sit there and stare at you.

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That's right. End of that. The point is, over time, I learned how to switch out memory modules, and upgrades, and put drives in, floppy drives, hard drives,

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CD -ROMs, and I learned to do all that stuff. But none of that took away, as my knowledge of the computer grew, none of that changed the fact that the computer was clearly designed, that it showed evidence of intelligent thought.

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Back then, we weren't so certain about how intelligent some of that thought was. It's gotten a little better, a little more consistent, but the point was there was design, even though my knowledge of the how was increasing.

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So many of the people that you talk to today are convinced that because we've learned more and more of the how, we've somehow gotten rid of the creator.

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The amazing thing is, the more and more we learn, not only do we realize less we know, but we cannot describe the processes of life without using terms of design.

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We can't do it. It's not just a, well, it's just the way our language is. No, we can't do it.

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Things function in such a way that they have teleology, they have a goal, they have an end, they have a purpose, they have a reason, and that's the one thing the naturalistic materialist cannot grant.

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There cannot be a goal, there cannot be a purpose, there cannot be a reason. It's just not possible.

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So again, excellent article that I would recommend to your reading if you really want to catch up on some of the developments in epigenetics and things like that right now.

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The New Atlantis, a Journal of Technology and Society, Steve Talbot, T -A -L -B -O -T -T's article,

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Getting Over the Code Delusion. I think you might find that to be useful.

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I don't remember who tweeted it, but I did look, but I could not find it. Moving on, like I said, we've got a wide variety of stuff to talk about today.

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We'll probably start taking callers maybe, I don't know, a half an hour afterwards, but I've got a number of things to get to yet here.

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You probably heard on the collapsing culture front what happened to Carl Palladino, New York GOP gubernatorial candidate, criticizes gay lifestyle during speech.

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This is from foxnews .com, the conservative Republican candidate to be governor of New York told

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Orthodox Jewish leaders on Sunday he doesn't want children, quote, brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality, end quote, is acceptable.

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Carl Palladino, who has received strong support from conservative libertarian Tea Party activists, made the comments at a synagogue in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section while trying to strike a contrast between himself and his

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Democratic rival, State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Palladino said he chose not to march in this summer's gay pride parade, but his opponent did.

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That's not how God created us, Palladino said of being gay, and that's not the example that we should be showing our children.

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He added that children who later in life choose to marry people of the opposite sex and raise families would be, quote, much better off and much, marry people of opposite sex,

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I had to re -read that, would be much better off and much more successful, quote,

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I don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option, he said.

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He skipped one line from his prepared text in his speech at the synagogue, quote, there is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.

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In a statement issued after midnight, Palladino said he did not agree with the passage, he said the remarks were suggested by his hosts at the synagogue.

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His campaign manager, Michael Caputo, told the New York Post that the congregation distributed the draft in Palladino's name without clearing it with the campaign.

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A message was left at the synagogue early Monday. Now, what absolutely strikes me is that statements of simple moral belief that were the vast majority of our culture 40 years ago are now reason for absolutely attacking anyone today.

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Here you have a situation, now some people might argue, well, you know, oh gosh, sure, the liberal media is going after him, but you know, the people sitting at home that go out and vote, they're all going, oh, you know what,

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I actually agree with that. But let's say you do. I certainly do. I would use significantly stronger language than that, but I certainly agree.

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But every single one of us knows that if we make those statements in the public sphere today, there will be consequences.

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And certainly for people seeking public office, a group that comprises less than 3 % of the population has a massively out -of -balance authority and power in our society.

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And they always seek that, and I've said for years and years and years, the reason they seek that is because they have to silence criticism of their lifestyle because they live every day trying to suppress the knowledge of God and the conviction of sin that is a part of that kind of perversion.

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And they will always be that way, that's just the very essence of that life -destroying,

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God -denying lifestyle. And it is sinful, and they don't want to hear people saying that, and if you dare say something morally true in many places in this nation today, you will be attacked.

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That is calling black white and white black. That is a perversion that is exactly what the minor prophets, all the prophets,

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God said to the nation of Israel, because Israel had perverted the right ways of God, God's wrath would fall upon them.

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And we must be straightforward and open with our message to the nation today, and that is if you continue to spit in God's face, which is what this whole thing is, if you continue to spit in God's face, you cannot expect

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God's blessing, you must expect only God's wrath. Don't march in a gay pride parade and then say,

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God bless America. That's blasphemy. It is absolute blasphemy.

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God will not be mocked in that way. It will bring

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God's judgment, and we see it all around us.

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Well, two more, continuing to shift gears, 877 -753 -3341. Two more, we have covered a fairly wide range, it's going to get wider.

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This is from JordanNews .net from past Sunday, October 10th.

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A statement released by the Kingdom's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, said respecting the

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Prophet's family and companions is part of Islam, and those who do not abide by this are not

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Muslims. The statement cited verses from the Quran to indicate the need to respect the Prophet Muhammad's wives.

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Regarding the Prophet's wife, Aisha, the statement said, anyone who does otherwise than show respect will be violating the orders of the

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Quran and will thus be a non -believer. The statement cited an incident when the Prophet was asked about the closest of women to his heart and he replied,

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Aisha. Aisha was the youngest wife of the Prophet. He married her following the death of his first wife of 25 years, Khadijah bint

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Khawilad. Aisha was around six years old at the time of her marriage and nine when the marriage was consummated.

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The edict from the council has come in the wake of several incidents in Shiite scholars in which

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Shiite scholars showed disrespect for Aisha. Kuwaiti cleric Yasser Habib had to flee to the

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UK after he was arrested in November 2003 on charges of cursing the wives. He was later sentenced in absentia to 25 years imprisonment for calling

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Aisha the enemy of God. Now, here's what happens.

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I've been listening to a lot of lectures recently on Tawhid and the focus in Islam upon the oneness of God.

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But the fact that Allah is so separate from his creation and so transcendent leads inevitably to the need for some kind of mediator and no matter how hard they try and no matter how many rules they set up,

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Muhammad ends up taking that position. Look what happens in the world today when someone, look what's happened to the woman who started the draw a

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Muhammad cartoon day. She's having to live in, just like so many other people, having to live in anonymity, hiding out, changing name, changing jobs, changing location, just as Salman Rushdie has had to do for years and years and years for writing a fictional book mentioning something that's found in Islamic sources.

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Why? Because of the exalted status of Muhammad in Islamic theology and practice.

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And if you dare insult my prophet, then you must die. I saw a tweet,

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I didn't keep it, but it was actually a good one. Someone had made the comment, the reason Christians don't kill people for insulting

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Jesus is because we realize they're already dead. The reason

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Christians don't kill people for insulting Jesus is because we realize they're already dead.

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Think about that. And of course, our desire then is that they experience life because we likewise were all once dead and have received

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God's life in Christ Jesus. That's why we desire that for them. But when you do not have a true mediator, well, that's what happens.

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All right, last one here, 877 -753 -3341. We have Skype up today.

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Dividing .line is the address for Skype as well.

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I read a fascinating blog article, and I think the best way to respond to it, to be perfectly honest with you, is to spend a little time with our old friend,

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Jonathan Edwards. Yes, Jonathan Edwards, probably one of the most brilliant minds that has ever been produced by American Christianity, at least.

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Every time I have the opportunity of reading Edwards, not only do I recognize how much

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English has changed, but also recognize that the level of writing in our day is significantly lower and more simplistic and not nearly as rich as it was in the olden days, shall we say.

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And I'm sitting here with my reading glasses around my neck. Now I'm putting them on.

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These are the CSI New York reading glasses. Reason being, I have my

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Banner of Truth edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1 here. And if you know, if you have that volume, you realize that the font is approximately 4 or 5 point,

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I believe. It is ridiculously small. And so I, these days, have to put on the reading glasses.

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I just want to read a number of sections from an extremely important work that I would highly recommend to you.

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This is available online. In fact, I pulled it up online, but since I had marked things in the print edition,

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I pulled it up at edwards .yale .edu. If you wish to track down the writings of Edwards, and this particular one is found there.

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If you want to search for a dissertation called A Dissertation Concerning the

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End for Which God Created the World. And I read this many, many moons ago, back when

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I didn't need reading glasses to mark it. But I did mark it up. And so let me share a few things with you here, and then we will look at this blog article by an

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Arminian, who says that there are no Calvinists who will take up his challenge on a particular issue.

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And I think we'll go ahead and take that up on the program today. In Chapter 1, we read,

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Indeed, this affair seems properly to be an affair of divine revelation. In order to be determined what was designed in the creating of the astonishing fabric of the universe we behold, remember, he was astonished by the fabric of the universe then.

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What should we be, knowing how much more we know about the very fabric of the universe today?

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It becomes us to attend to and rely on what he has told us, who was the architect.

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He best knows his own heart, and what his own ends and designs were in the wonderful works which he has wrought.

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Nor is it to be supposed that mankind, who, while destitute of revelation by the utmost improvements of their own reason and advances in science and philosophy, could come to no clear and established determination who the author of the world was, would ever have obtained any tolerable, subtle judgment of the end which the author of it proposed to himself in so vast, complicated, and wonderful a work of his hands.

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Edwards is saying we are dependent upon revelation for a knowledge of what God's purposes were.

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I skip down. As to the first of these, I think the following things appear to be the dictates of reason.

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Number one, that no notion of God's last end in the creation of the world is agreeable to reason which would truly imply any indigence, insufficiency, and mutability in God, or any dependence of the

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Creator on the creature, or any part of his perfection for any part of his perfection or happiness, because it is evident by both

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Scripture and reason that God is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy, that he cannot be profited by or receive anything from the creature, or be the subject of any sufferings or diminution of his glory and felicity from any other being.

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Right there you have so much of modern evangelicalism that would not hold a doctrine of God that high.

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Anybody who talks about what God needed from us, and God was lonely, and all the rest of that stuff, he and Edwards have gone far apart from one another.

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I continue on, skipping down. And if it was God's intention, as there is great reason to think that it was, that his works should exhibit an image of himself, their author, that it might brightly appear by his works what manner of being he is, and afford a proper representation of his divine excellencies, and especially his moral excellence, consisting in the disposition of his heart, then it is reasonable to suppose that his works are so wrought as to show this supreme respect to himself wherein his moral excellence primarily consists.

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Then continuing on in the second section at the very end. Therefore, to speak strictly according to truth, we may suppose that a disposition in God as an original property of his nature to an emanation of his own infinite fullness was what excited him to create the world, and so that the emanation itself was aimed at by him as a last end of the creation.

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His point being that there was a purpose of which God chose to create.

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There was a reason, and that is his own glory. Then in section three, one part of that divine fullness which is communicated is the divine knowledge.

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That communicated knowledge which must be supposed to pertain to God's last end in creating the world is the creature's knowledge of him.

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For this is the end of all other knowledge, and even the faculty of understanding would be vain without it.

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That is very, very interesting, and a very high epistemology.

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We continue on with section four. He again asserts, nor do these things argue any dependence in God on the creature for happiness.

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Then he says, for though these communications of God, these exercises, operations, and expressions of his glorious perfections which

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God rejoices in are in time, yet his joy in them is without beginning or change.

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They were always equally present in the divine mind. He beheld them with equal clearness, certainty, and fullness in every respect as he doth now.

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They were always equally present as with him there is no variableness or succession. He ever beheld and enjoyed them perfectly in his own independent and immutable power and will.

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He then goes on, and I'm skipping through many pages here. He says at the end of the section where he has been demonstrating the reasonableness of his position,

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I confess there is a degree of indistinctness and obscurity in the close consideration of such subjects, and a great imperfection in the expressions we use concerning them, arising unavoidably from the infinite sublimity of the subject and the incomprehensibleness of those things that are divine.

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Hence revelation is the surest guide in these matters, and what that teaches shall in the next place be considered.

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So he moves here to his biblical argumentation, and again, I won't go through all of this.

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There's so many things, but in these places we see that the glory of God is spoken of as the end of God's saints, the end for which he makes them, i .e.

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either gives them being or gives them a being as saints or both. The end in which

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God's design in this work is obtained and summed up is his glory. This proves by the seventh position that God's glory is the end of the creation.

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The scripture speaks of God's glory as the ultimate end of the goodness of the moral part of creation, the end in relation to which chiefly the value of their virtue consists.

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When the church says, Not unto us, not unto us, O Jehovah, but to thy name give glory, it would be absurd to say that she only desires that God may have glory as a necessary or convenient means of their own advancement and felicity.

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From these things it appears by the 11th position that God's glory is the end of creation, over and over and over again demonstrating that God's glory is the end of creation.

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This isn't an overly long dissertation, I would highly recommend it to you.

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Just skipping a number of pages, here it is evident, the last verse comes in, in connection with the foregoing, as giving another reason of the destruction of the wicked, that is, showing the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, higher degrees of their glory and happiness in a relish of their own enjoyments and a greater sense of their value and of God's free grace in bestowing them.

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An excellent, excellent section that I would highly recommend to you.

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Thus we see that the end of God's works, which is so variously expressed in Scripture, is indeed but one, and this one end is the most properly and comprehensively called the glory of God, by which name it is most commonly called in Scripture, and it is fitly compared to an effulgence or emanation of light from a luminary.

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So I recommend to you the reading of the entirety of Edward's section. Now, having gone through all of that very, very briefly, of course,

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I turn to the reason for looking at this, and that is

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Roger Olson's blog. Now, Roger Olson is an Arminian, and he is open about being an

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Arminian, and we've looked at some of Roger Olson's materials, we've looked at some of his arguments of the past, we've found his exegesis to frequently be wanting.

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And so I see stuff from Olson fairly regularly, but this one I found to be quite interesting, where he presents what he considers to be the fatal flaw of some

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Calvinist systems of belief. So let me read you his argument, and as I'm reading it, think about how you would respond.

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Most of our listeners are Reformed, not all, but most of our listeners are Reformed, and so I would be interested in how you would respond to this.

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Reading Roger Olson, this is from September 29th. I have identified here and elsewhere what

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I believe to be a fatal flaw in some Calvinist systems of belief. That is, insofar as a person believes that God foreordains and renders certain everything, without exception, for His glory, for His glory in all caps, and also believes that heresy, for example, diminishes or reduces

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God's glory, by robbing God of some of His glory, he falls into contradiction.

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Both beliefs cannot be held at the same time. It is not a case of ordinary paradox apparent contradiction.

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It is a case of sheer unresolved and probably unresolvable logical contradiction. That is why

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I believe no Calvinist has ever risen to my challenge to explain it. Every Calvinist that I know, and I don't know them all, says that some beliefs, that is, panentheism, detract from God's glory, and that is why we must oppose them with all our persuasive might.

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They diminish and detract from God's glory. They dishonor God. They rob Him of glory. Every Calvinist I know also says, usually elsewhere, in his or her book or article or sermon or whatever, that God foreordains everything without exception for His glory.

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Now, some Calvinists might take the approach that panentheism, for example, does not really, ontically, rob

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God of glory, as that is impossible for any creature to do. But it diminishes recognition and acknowledgement of God's glory in the minds of its believers.

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But so what? God foreordained that also for His glory. That a panentheist is a panentheist was foreordained and rendered certain by God for His glory, according to Calvinists I know.

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I don't know why he doesn't just quote the Westminster Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession, or whatever else. It's not just a matter of, well, the

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Calvinists I know. It also won't work to say that God foreordained panentheism, so that He could overcome it by revealing it as false, glorify

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Himself. Okay, there's a typo there. Even then, the existence of panentheism, if determined by God to rebound to His glory, when

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He overcomes it, in the meantime glorifies God, insofar as it is decided by God as the means to that end.

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For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Calvinists of my acquaintance do not see this as a sheer logical contradiction and move to resolve it.

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I have asked many about this issue, and they have always just looked at me as if they never thought of it, or they rely on some version of an answer

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I just mentioned above, which are no answers at all. All that is to say, one reason

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I am not a Calvinist is that to be one, I would have to sacrifice my intellect in the strongest sense of embrace sheer logical incoherence and unintelligibility, not in the sense of embrace mystery, with which

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I have no absolute problem. I believe that it is a fatal flaw in so -called consistent Calvinism, which, in light of this flaw, is really inconsistent consistent

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Calvinism. Many contemporary Reformed theologians have moved away from decretal theology, divine determinism, and I think that has something to do with this issue.

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Certainly, it has also to do with another possibly fatal flaw in traditional Calvinism, about which I'll write more later.

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So there's the argument. The argument, in essence, is that if God foreordains and renders certain everything without exception for His glory, and also believes that heresy diminishes or reduces

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God's glory by robbing Him of some of His glory, He falls into contradiction, since God foreordained the heresy as well. So, there's the argument.

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Now, I think a number of the things that Edwards said just in a few segments that I read directly address this, because he specifically makes reference in that particular essay to the demonstration of the entirety of God's nature as being part and parcel of the demonstration of His glory.

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And it surprises me that Roger Olson hasn't found

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Calvinists who can answer this, or at least to his satisfaction.

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And I've had a lot of people, you know, they'll come up and they'll ask me a question. I give them the best biblical answer is, and well, that's not to my satisfaction, therefore you can't answer it.

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Well, that's why I liked also what Edwards said. This is a matter of revelation. It is only by revelation we can know

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God's purposes in His creation. If you don't like what God reveals about His purposes, well, then you can't blame

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God for not giving an answer that you like. Whether you like an answer or not is irrelevant to whether the answer is a full, complete, and appropriate answer.

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But I think you might see where the problem in Olson's argument lies by reading his expansion of his assertion.

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He says, Now, if all he's talking about here is that, well,

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God would be the most greatly glorified if every single creature in the universe were to be continually in obedience to Him and glorifying

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Him, if that's all he's saying, well, I think he's missed the point of why

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God created. The very fact that God created in such a way that evil exists demonstrates that there is an aspect of God's revelation that goes beyond just simply creating a bunch of people to stand around worshiping

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Him all day. And so the idea of robbing Him of glory, well, I suppose if you execute a mass murderer that you are robbing

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God of glory because it might be that if you hadn't executed the mass murderer, then he might have glorified

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God, so there might be a little bit more glory of God. I mean, that kind of argumentation seems awfully silly to me.

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But the idea is not that God's glory is an additive sum. It's not a, well, it's not the same thing as the gas in your gas tank.

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And you have to balance the output of gas that is the cost of running your engine and the input that keeps you going.

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That's not what we're talking about. It's a very surface -level view of God's glory that sees it as merely some substance that at the end is going to be counted up and say, see, the way

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I created it, I get the most of it at the end. It is the revelation of God's being and the means by which

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He chooses to reveal Himself that is the issue. And God has chosen to glorify

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Himself in the way that is the wisest. And when we say the most glorious, we're not talking about numbers.

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We're not talking about amounts. We're talking about kind. That is why

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I've so often said that when people massacre Romans 9 and they miss its essence and its fundamental statement, they sacrifice something that would help them greatly in understanding the whole issue of suffering in this world.

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What do I mean? Well, you remember the argument that the writer raises, that Paul raises, but you will say to me then, why does he still find fault for who can resist his will?

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But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, why have you made me like this?

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Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?

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What if God, and here verse 22, what if God, desiring to show

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His wrath and to make His power known, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which

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He prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called, not from Jews only, but also from the

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Gentiles? And I have challenged people over and over again, if you're going to enter into Romans 9,

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I've just simply got to ask you a question. What if God, desiring to show

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His wrath and to make known His power, now let's just be really, really honest with ourselves.

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How many people, including all you good, complacent

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Calvinists, how many people are really comfortable, really believe that it's a good thing that God has a desire to show

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His wrath? I mean, it's really easy for us to sit here and go, well, yeah,

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I want God to show His wrath on those homosexuals over in San Francisco marching down the street.

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I want God to show wrath on those sinners over there. But why?

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What is the purpose of God showing His wrath? What is the purpose of God making known

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His power? I mean, the atheist looks at that and goes, big deal, who cares?

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What kind of a God wants to show wrath? What kind of a

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God wants to make known His power? Well, the text would say the very same

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God who also wants to make known the riches of His glory on vessels of mercy. And what you need to see in Romans 9, 22 -23 is that the two are connected.

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Notice it says, in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy.

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You see, God is not glorified in a partial demonstration of His being.

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God is glorified in the revelation of the totality of His attributes.

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And just as you're only seeing a part of the cross when all you see is the love of God and you don't see the wrath of God against sin, you don't see

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His holiness. In the same way, you are getting significantly less than the real

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God when you present God as one who has no wrath, has no purpose, has no decree, and is not seeking

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His own glory in the creation in toto, the entirety of the universe, all of mankind, the universe as a whole.

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God desires to show His wrath. God desires to make known

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His power. God desires to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy. He is revealing all of His attributes,

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His holiness, His power, His justice. That becomes a very background, the matrix, the essence upon which we are then to see the riches of His grace upon vessels of mercy.

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His grace, His love, His mercy. It is one revelation, not two.

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It's all part and parcel of the same thing. And so this shows where Olson has completely missed it.

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Is that when a person embraces heresy, they are expressing their rebellion against God.

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They are using the gifts that He has given him to find a way to suppress the knowledge of God.

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They are finding a way of actually holding down the knowledge of God by a perverted expression of worship, whether it be the false religion of atheism.

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And atheism is as much of a religion as anything else. I think the current Messiah is living on earth for the atheists. His name is

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Richard Dawkins. Say anything about Richard Dawkins and your email box will be filled with vile emails so fast you won't even know what happened.

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There are people far more in love with Richard Dawkins as their Messiah than some people who call themselves Christians are with Jesus.

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Or whether it be false religion, whether it be heresy. These are expressions of rebellion against God and God's justice and God's holiness and God's power is demonstrated in the punishment of these individuals and in the demonstration that even though they have so much light,

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Think of the person who carries the Bible around in their hands and yet refuses to bow to its message.

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Does that not tell you something about the depth of man's rebellion and hence the rightness of God's judgment and God's holiness?

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And if that is a part of the demonstration of God's glory, then the obvious error in Olson's argument, which makes it a non -argument and a non -starter, is his whole idea of what the glory of God is in the first place.

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He's misunderstood the very essence of the glory of God in the demonstration of his whole being.

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I'm not going to accuse the man of lying. I don't know how many Calvinists he knows and I don't know how many conversations he has, but shouldn't there have been some answers given,

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I would imagine? Now, maybe that was buried in some of the examples that he gave there, especially in the one, if determined by God to redound to his glory when he overcomes it, in the meantime glorifies

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God insofar as it is decided by God as a means to that end. So maybe that's reflecting that someone tried to explain this to him and since he's an

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Arminian he decided not to listen to the explanation. I don't know. But the objection sort of encapsulates what a lot of people struggle with when it comes to the absolute sovereignty of God and the existence of evil.

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And we do need to take time to think through these things. And I just absolutely insist on the fact that the ultimate answers are going to be found not in looking to the creature or even to the creation, but in looking to the creator, his self -revealed purposes, and his actions in time.

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That's the only place you can go. Edwards was right. This is a matter of revelation. And yet so often, even

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Reformed people, try to defend this not on the basis of revelation, but on the basis of philosophy first and foremost.

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No, revelation has to come first. Revelation has to be the foundation from which we draw our epistemology and therefore all of our philosophical conclusions.

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And if a person is not willing to embrace those, well, there you go. That's a problem. 877, this is weird.

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Last dividing line, call after call after call after call. And this dividing line, since I have addressed how many different topics now?

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I'm not surprised one bit. Why? Because people in our audience tell us that you get in this frame of mind, you get on a roll, and all they want to do is sit back and listen.

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And nobody loves me anymore. They just want to take it in. They don't want to talk to me. You know what?

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It's a good thing when people don't need to talk, they want to listen. They've got two of these and one of these.

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But what happens when you've still got eight minutes to the program left and you're done? I was rushing through reading all that Edwards stuff because I didn't want to bore people, but at the same time

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I wanted to lay the foundation. It's good stuff. Well, yeah, it's important stuff. And it's a whole lot faster to deal with it on the dividing line than to try to write it all out, that's for sure.

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But these are the types of things that I'm thinking of. I've often said, if I ever get hit by a truck out there on the road, and that's not how

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I want to go, but there's worse ways of going, I can assure you, they're going to pick up my iPod and start listening to what

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I was listening to. And it's going to have, like on my daily ride, when I go between this article and then a discussion of Tawhid of Rubabiya, Tawhid of Rubabiya, the

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Tawhid of Allah in lordship, Rubabiya. In between the two,

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I have sections from the Quran in Arabic that I'm working on memorizing. And so it will go from some discussion of genetics through a couple quotes of the

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Quran to something from that and then over to what's the other thing that I just threw on there.

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Anyway, it's weird stuff. There's no two ways about it. I recognize that I'm a little bit on the odd side, but that's okay.

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My wife still loves me, and that's all that really matters. And I was joking with the folks at the dentist's office yesterday.

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We've got a Skype call. I was joking with the folks at the dentist's office yesterday. I have a tooth problem.

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I'm going to need to have one of those implant things. And I went to the same dentist that my wife went to about three, four years ago for the exact same thing.

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And guess what? We've been married 28 years, and I'm having the exact same tooth replaced that she had.

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Now that's togetherness. I mean, when you lose the exact same teeth, I think that's just special.

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What, are we wearing the same clothes now? No, not going there. She likes pink.

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I'm really not into that. Oh, that was an odd -looking thing that just happened on my screen. All right.

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Oh, goodness, really? In six minutes, that subject, huh?

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Okay, well, let's go ahead and take a shot. We might as well make it a very interesting and eclectic dividing line today.

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Let's go all the way to Athens, Greece, and talk with Nicholas. Hi, Nicholas. Hello, Nicholas.

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Yes. Yes, sir. What can we do for you? Yes. Hello, Nicholas.

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Go ahead. Okay. Hello? Yes, sir. How are you? How are you doing?

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I basically needed to ask a question concerning the Septuagint. Okay. Well, you're in a good place to ask that question.

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You're in Greece. Yep. No, my concern is that the

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Greek Orthodox Church teaches that the text of the

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Septuagint is the text of the Old Testament, and they say that the

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Hebrew text has been, what's the word?

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Corrupted? Yes, corrupted by the Jewish people. Oh. How would you respond to that?

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Well, it certainly reflects a common early Christian belief in the first few centuries where the

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Septuagint became the standard for the Church, and in light of the fact that the translation of the

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Old Testament that is most often cited by the New Testament writers is the Greek Septuagint, it became quite common, especially given the fact that the early

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Church had a very strong split between the Jewish element, shall we say, and the

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Christians, and there was persecution involved both directions and so on and so forth. So a lot of it goes back into history, but the reality is that anyone who looks at the

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Greek Septuagint realizes that it is a translation. Not only do you have different versions of it, and you can identify different strains of transmission in the

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Greek Septuagint, but it is very clearly a translation from another language, and it's from a

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Semitic language, and the only Semitic language it could have been translated from was, of course, the

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Hebrew, and with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we leap that textual history back a thousand years to a contemporary period of that of the

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Greek Septuagint. Now, while there are still some differences, for example, whatever was used as the foundation for the

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Septuagint rendering of Jeremiah was quite different than what we have in the first century before Christ in the

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Hebrew, in the vast majority of places, especially in the Pentateuch, Isaiah, and places like that, it's very, very clear that the

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Septuagint is a very good translation, but it's a translation of the

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Hebrew original. So to imbue the translation with an authority above the original, now, there might be some places where the

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Hebrew is difficult to discern or we're not certain of a particular reading where the

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Greek Septuagint can help us immensely, but to do what you're suggesting the

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Greek Orthodox are asserting is that the Septuagint needs to take preeminence over the

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Hebrew text for the rendering of the Old Testament would be to basically fly in the face of the history that we know would have been the situation at the time of Jesus and what he would have been reading from, what he would have been handling, the scroll that he read in the synagogue, etc.

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was not the Greek Septuagint, even though the New Testament writers use that.

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The reason the New Testament writers use that is because they are proclaiming the gospel to all the world and going beyond just the

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Jewish context. I see. I understand. It's just, it's hard to try and,

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I don't know where they get their information from, and I'm just trying to figure out how they would…

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Well, Orthodoxy gets its information from its own traditions. Right.

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I know. I know. When you dare question those traditions, you're looked at as just being inferior or lacking something along those lines, but it is difficult because it's very deeply entrenched and it's not necessarily critically examined.

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Would they, do you know, what proof would they bring to make such an assertion to say that, well, that the

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Hebrew has been corrupted so we can't trust it? Yeah, well, very, very quickly, because we're just about out of time, Nicholas. Yeah, I'm sorry.

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It basically would be what I indicated before. The only arguments that I could see that they would use would be,

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A, the fact that the New Testament writers use the Greek Septuagint, and B, they might be able to point to certain elements of Septuagint renderings that they feel are more friendly to Christian positions than what's found in the

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Hebrew or something like that. Maybe something, for example, in regards to like, well, Psalm 110 .1

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and the Hebrew vowel pointing very clearly does show a Jewish prejudice against Christian fulfillment, but that's the vowel pointing, that's not the original

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Hebrew text itself. So that's about all I could think of that they would come up with. But hey,

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Nicholas, the music's coming up behind me. Thanks for calling in all the way from Athens, Greece today. Chris, sorry we didn't get to you.

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James, too, is a great question. Maybe we can get to that one on the next issue of The Dividing Line, which will be this Thursday.

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We will be here because I don't fly out until Friday. Looking forward to seeing you in Minneapolis this weekend as well.

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We'll continue on Thursday. See you then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

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World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.