Report to AGM, 3 March 2019

Report to AGM, 3 March 2019

following resolutions of 4th March 2018
re various understandings of Scripture and discoveries of science (see page 1) :Note: This is a majority report; Bro Colin Lean concurred with the report with reservations, submitted alternative recommendations below #clrec

Notwithstanding the second Resolution's provision for the Management Committee to "appoint a small group of suitable members willing and able to undertake this task . . . " the meeting proceeded to appoint volunteers. Members who volunteered themselves as meeting these requirements were sisters Daphne Lapham, Jacqui Gorman and Prue Creighton and brothers Colin Lean and Bruce Philp. Brother Paul Niven set up an email list for the group and joined it soon afterwards, as sisters Jacqui Gorman and Daphne Lapham wished to withdraw.

Bro Bruce Philp suggested that the group collaborate in a wiki to generate a self-documenting resource. This has gone ahead, mostly with his own work, and now has about 1000 interlinked pages, most of them short, many unfinished, and more than 300 relevant Bible passages.

Within a month, strong disagreement arose over whether the task was possible: if there was any prior reason why "our various understandings of Scripture" cannot be reconciled with "the discoveries of science", then the group would have volunteered for an impossible task. Bro Colin Lean continues to believe that reconciliation is impossible and that most Christadelphians share that belief.

The undersigned, who did not believe that the task is necessarily impossible, worked out a process for analysing and dealing with relevant topics, whether general problems (such as disagreements about the authority of scientists or authors), questions of fact (including questions of Biblical interpretation) or "reconciliation challenges" where relevant understanding(s) of Scripture and discoveries of Science are identified along with a summary of the "problem reconciling them" as per Resolution 1.

A process was negotiated by which each of these Problems/Questions/Reconciliation Challenges could be endorsed as being well-defined and worth addressing, following a critical assessment modelled on research methodology. An agreed summary of the topic would then be necessary before free discussion, leading to well-informed conclusions made by all contributors who wished to document them, automatically collated in a single wiki page. Very few topics have been brought to completion in this way.

Bro Colin Lean also contributed questions seeking personal answers, which have been incorporated in the wiki without going through the agreed process.

At many times during the process separate pages for Bible passages have been linked in the wiki, and there is opportunity for written discussion on all of them. By following simple conventions all references can be linked as hypertext. For example the page for the "Gap Theory" (here) has links to it from thirty other pages including Beliefs re The Flood, Beliefs re the Age of the Earth, Old Earth Creationism, Beliefs re the Witness of Scripture, Beliefs re the Witness of Creation, Beliefs re the Origin of Life, Beliefs about Dinosaurs, Beliefs about humans before Adam, etc; and the page for "Isaiah 27:1" (here) is linked from Psalm 104:26, Leviathan, Job 26:5-14, Genesis 1:21, Isaiah 51:9-10, Job 3:8, The Crooked Serpent, Isaiah 30:6-33, Genesis 3:2-7, 11-12, 22-23, Isaiah 17:12-14, Nahum 1:4, Nahash (נ ָחָש), and Tannin (תּנ ּין) among others.

The endeavour has been hindered by our inability to recruit anyone able and willing to participate in meaningful dialogue from a Young Earth Creationist, Old Earth Creationist or Flood Geology perspective, and we have been reduced to transcribing content from magazines, Youtube talks, etc. We hope that the recommendations below will help address this problem.

As discussed in the February Management Committee meeting we are inviting members to come to an introduction to the wiki – see page 7.

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