You can sense some irritation in Augustine's response:
If the Manichees were willing to discuss the hidden meaning of these words in a spirit of reverent inquiry rather than of captious fault-finding, then they would of course not be Manichees, but as they asked it would be given them, as they sought they would find, as they knocked it would be opened up to them. The fact is, you see, people who have a genuine religious interest in learning put far more questions about this text than these irrelegious wretches; but the difference between them is that the former seek in order to find, while the latter are at no pains at all to do anything except not to find what they are seeking.- Augustine, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, Book II, Chapter 2, Section 3
The same applies to the irreligious wretches who today seek to find fault. The Manichaeans came and went, and Biologos will come and go as well. But there will always be those who will seek to find fault with the Word of God. We must always be ready to give an answer to them.
-TurretinFan
Thanks TFan for the quote by Augustine against the Manicheans.
ReplyDeleteIt gives good historical background.
Whew! I thought by the title you were saying that Al didn't believe in inerrancy.
ReplyDeleteGiven your anathemas against biologos, is it fair to assume you'll soon be issuing anathemas against Steve Hays and some triabloggers who agree with him on "idolatry'?
ReplyDeleteNo, Mr. Dean. I reserve anathema for the most serious errors. Brotherly exhortation is what I hope to give to the triabloggers.
ReplyDeleteGood quote Tfan.
ReplyDeleteI have fought the inerrancy battle myself on multiple fronts, and one of the most silly arguments is that it's only a 20th century doctrine that is foreign to the church.
*sigh*
Keep up the good fight brother.
And I was unaware of the triabloggers who were supporting Biologos. What in the world?
Wait, what? I didn't know that the triabloggers are supporting the biologos group. Where is this?
ReplyDeleteHow do we draw the line; and what is the line, between legitimate accommodation - Calvin - that God speaks "baby talk" to accommodate to our human weakness - metaphors, anthropomorphic language, symbols, etc.
ReplyDeleteand taking that and crossing the line over into What the Biologos folks are doing?
R. Scott Clark provides some good quotes from Calvin on this:
http://www.puritanboard.com/f17/calvins-doctrine-accommodation-10908/
But Kent Sparks and Peter Emms use Calvin's statements to promote their views on Scripture.
The armchair theologian - they did not mean Triablogue was agreeing with Biologos, rather they (some, all ?) have a different view of what constitutes a violation of the 2nd commandment and committing idolatry. Totally different issues.
ReplyDeleteTF - (and others) what do you think of Petter Enns response to Mohler's article?
ReplyDeletehttp://biologos.org/blog/how-should-biologos-respond-to-dr-albert-mohlers-critique-petes-response/
TF - (and others) what do you think of Petter Enns response to Mohler's article?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure yet. What do you think?
I was hoping others would respond first, to help me think though it; I admit I am asking questions because I want to learn how to answer these issues.
ReplyDeleteI should point out that the Peter Enns article that I asked about is a response to Al Mohler’s lecture at the Ligonier conference, “Why Does the Earth Look so Old?” and is not a response to the article that Turretinfan was talking about in his post here. But in looking at the links, it somehow led me to that article also.
I see 5 issues that stick out to me. (there may be more)
Enns raises 4 points from Genesis 1, and one about church’s response to Galileo:
1.watery chaos of Genesis 1:2
2.firmament of Genesis 1:8-9
3.evening and morning and issue of the sun being created on day four
4.the monsters of the deep
Peter Enns makes another point that would be number 5 for me, as far as off the top of my head issues:
TE = "Theistic Evolution"
OE = Old Earth Creationism
YE = Young Earth Creationism
ID = Intelligent Design
Galileo and the church’s response – this is the one that causes me to think the most – (not that YE is wrong (that is my position), but how to answer the set up question as a parallel to our day and issue of TE/OE vs. YE; and I don’t know how to answer the question that if the RC church was wrong to oppose Galileo and wrong on its thinking that Scripture said the earth was the center of the Solar System rather than the sun; the modern types who are TE and OE and ID and also unbelieving skeptics also pose the question to us YE'ers that we are acting like the authorities in Galileo’s day.
Does anyone know of a good answer for that?
I used to think OE could be ok and falls within orthodoxy, but always thought Theistic Evolution (TE) was wrong. I agree that YE Creationism has the best exegetical support, with the repetition of “evening and morning, one day”, etc. ; and most especially because of Exodus 20:11, where the command to keep the Sabbath Day rest is built upon a YE understanding of the days of creation. (But, I also like the ID and OE folks (like Phil Johnson (Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds) and Stephen Meyers and William Debenski (Intelligent Design)and Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box, “irreducible complexity”, etc.) who write against Evolution and Darwinism – they do a good job of critiquing Evolution/Darwinism/Naturalism/Materialism.
The problem I started having with Old Earth Creationism is that those writers, when critiquing Evolution/Darwinism/Naturalistic Materialism, usually do not talk about the details that come out later, that if it is true that the “days” mean long periods of time, then the fact that they are open to animal death over millions of years, and hominid creatures (human like soul-less creatures before Adam and Eve) and some of them ascribe to a local flood of Genesis 6-9 – then these 3 things raise lots of problems for me with the Old Earth Creationism.
Continued
The four points that Enns asks Mohler about from Genesis 1:
ReplyDelete1. –“watery chaos” - never thought about that one too much – seems like Peter Enns is saying the Genesis account is pre-supposing it existed before creation. (is he saying the text seems to say it existed before God started creating? - I cannot tell if that is what Enns means or not. If that is what he means, then I think he is wrong. It is describing the earth after God created it (matter of the earth and water) in verse 1 and that it was covered with water and did not have land yet, and did not have atmosphere yet. Just seems to be saying that the Spirit of God was there at creation; and that when God created the heavens and the earth – the earth was covered with water, and land appeared later, without form at first and later God separated the clouds from water by air(atmosphere).
2. Genesis 1:8-9 and “firmament” or “expanse” – see above – the “expanse” is not a “solid dome”, but just a way of speaking to the audience at that time of the separation between water in the clouds /atmosphere and the liquid water on the earth. That one does not seem to be a big deal to me; that is, I don't think it is hard to just see it as a language issue of finding a Hebrew word to describe the separation of water from clouds in the atmosphere before the development of more sophisticated language about science that comes much later.
3. God created light first, before the sun, so, “evening and morning” of course can be measured by God, even before He created the sun for our solar system. The substance of light was created before the specific star of the sun of our little solar system. Light is much more that the one sun of our solar system.
4. “Rahab” seems to be a poetic language for Egypt and God’s defeat of Egypt in Exodus and the warning not to trust in Egypt in Isaiah 30 and other parts of Isaiah. But I need to study that issue more; I admit I have not looked at that one deeply before.
The point I think Peter Enns is trying to make is that if we agree that these 4 points, God is accommodating to us and our weakness and lack of scientific knowledge of those days, (when Bible was first written, for the original audience to understand) as Calvin says, “taking baby talk” (see the link to references at the Puritan board and R. Scott Clark’s post) to us; then they (Enns, Sparks, and others) are asking us, “why can’t the age of the earth and the days be taken figuratively also, that they could be “long periods of time”?
Does anyone/everyone agree that that is what he is trying to say?
That is why I am still asking, how to discern between legitimate anthropomorphic language and accommodation, (we all agree that God makes some accommodation in language to our weak and human minds) and going over the line and applying it to the wrong passages where God means literally 24 hour days.
Just to be clear on the links to what I am referring to:
ReplyDelete“Why Does the Universe Look So Old?”
By Al Mohler
http://www.ligonier.org/learn/conferences/tough-questions-christians-face-2010-national/why-does-the-universe-look-so-old/
Enns response to Mohler's message:
http://biologos.org/blog/how-should-biologos-respond-to-dr-albert-mohlers-critique-petes-response/
No comments or interaction with what I wrote?
ReplyDeleteBummer!
I was hoping for some more interaction on this issue.
TF - thank you. As a person who's just barely starting to suspect that evolution might be correct after 30-some years of YEC, I find the most frightening prospect to be the heretics who believe that evolution is correct and therefore the Bible is false.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't able to start admitting that I thought evolution might be correct until I was able to find someone who believed that AND accepted the historical validity of the Bible. (I did, by the way.) I'm still a little bit worried, but in theory evolution is less of a danger than Old Earth or non-geocentricity; both are mentioned FAR more in the Bible than species fixity.
Anyhow, thank you for defending the fundamental truth of the Bible.
Ken -- nice, big post.
ReplyDelete1.watery chaos of Genesis 1:2: I think Gen 1 doesn't teach creation ex nihilo; it merely implies it. Other passages teach it explicitly. A person presuming a chaos-to-order creation would find little in Gen 1:1 to contradict their belief, but much elsewhere.
2.firmament of Genesis 1:8-9: The problem with your reading here is that it doesn't really work. If God was trying to teach a different truth than an actual dome over the Earth, He would have used a word which did not mean an actual rock-hard dome over the Earth to all of the people who were hearing it at the time. God could have guided Moses to write down words which didn't have such a misleading meaning to all those around him at the time; yet He didn't.
I have to agree partially with Enns: the Bible actually says that the Earth sits still; it actually says that there's a firmament between the waters above the Earth and the waters of the seas; and any number of other concepts that any ancient reader would immediately believe were literal, not figurative. In other words, even if the original author was divinely led to believe that he was writing about our concepts discovered after his time, none of the author's contemporaries would understand the writing that way without extrascriptural (gnostic) insight, because the author was inspired to use the ancient terms.
Some have said that all these passages are pheonomenological, and some of them may possibly be; but all of them unarguably coincide exactly with ancient cosmology/worldview, such that the average ancient reader would not even question whether they were literal and perhaps wouldn't even notice that anything was being said.
Let me draw an analogy. Some people believe that God preserved scripture _exactly_ from the original monographs (usually they point to the KJV, but some more educated ones point to the Majority Text); but the solid evidence of textual variants leads scholars to conclude that the preservation of Scripture simply does not work in that manner. (I believe that God does preserve the Scriptures, by the way.)
In much the same way, this evidence undermines one view of inerrancy, but this does NOT mean that the Bible is errant (this is a problem I have with most of the Biologos writers); it means that our ideas of inerrancy are too simplistic.
I don't have a solution; but I read a good summary of a possible direction of research (warning: link goes to a PDF/Adobe Acrobat document).
Ken -- nice, big post.
ReplyDelete1.watery chaos of Genesis 1:2: I think Gen 1 doesn't teach creation ex nihilo; it merely implies it. Other passages teach it explicitly. A person presuming a chaos-to-order creation would find little in Gen 1:1 to contradict their belief, but much elsewhere.
2.firmament of Genesis 1:8-9: The problem with your reading here is that it doesn't really work. If God was trying to teach a different truth than an actual dome over the Earth, He would have used a word which did not mean an actual rock-hard dome over the Earth to all of the people who were hearing it at the time. God could have guided Moses to write down words which didn't have such a misleading meaning to all those around him at the time; yet He didn't.
I have to agree partially with Enns: the Bible actually says that the Earth sits still; it actually says that there's a firmament between the waters above the Earth and the waters of the seas; and any number of other concepts that any ancient reader would immediately believe were literal, not figurative. In other words, even if the original author was divinely led to believe that he was writing about our concepts discovered after his time, none of the author's contemporaries would understand the writing that way without extrascriptural (gnostic) insight, because the author was inspired to use the ancient terms.
Some have said that all these passages are pheonomenological, and some of them may possibly be; but all of them unarguably coincide exactly with ancient cosmology/worldview, such that the average ancient reader would not even question whether they were literal and perhaps wouldn't even notice that anything was being said.
Let me draw an analogy. Some people believe that God preserved scripture _exactly_ from the original monographs (usually they point to the KJV, but some more educated ones point to the Majority Text); but the solid evidence of textual variants leads scholars to conclude that the preservation of Scripture simply does not work in that manner. (I believe that God does preserve the Scriptures, by the way.)
In much the same way, this evidence undermines one view of inerrancy, but this does NOT mean that the Bible is errant (this is a problem I have with most of the Biologos writers); it means that our ideas of inerrancy are too simplistic.
I don't have a solution; but I read a good summary of a possible direction of research (warning: link goes to a PDF/Adobe Acrobat document).
Ken -- nice, big post.
ReplyDelete1.watery chaos of Genesis 1:2: I think Gen 1 doesn't teach creation ex nihilo; it merely implies it. Other passages teach it explicitly. A person presuming a chaos-to-order creation would find little in Gen 1:1 to contradict their belief, but much elsewhere.
2.firmament of Genesis 1:8-9: The problem with your reading here is that it doesn't really work. If God was trying to teach a different truth than an actual dome over the Earth, He would have used a word which did not mean an actual rock-hard dome over the Earth to all of the people who were hearing it at the time. God could have guided Moses to write down words which didn't have such a misleading meaning to all those around him at the time; yet He didn't.
(More...)
I have to agree partially with Enns: the Bible actually says that the Earth sits still; it actually says that there's a firmament between the waters above the Earth and the waters of the seas; and any number of other concepts that any ancient reader would immediately believe were literal, not figurative. In other words, even if the original author was divinely led to believe that he was writing about our concepts discovered after his time, none of the author's contemporaries would understand the writing that way without extrascriptural (gnostic) insight, because the author was inspired to use the ancient terms.
ReplyDeleteSome have said that all these passages are pheonomenological, and some of them may possibly be; but all of them unarguably coincide exactly with ancient cosmology/worldview, such that the average ancient reader would not even question whether they were literal and perhaps wouldn't even notice that anything was being said.
Let me draw an analogy. Some people believe that God preserved scripture _exactly_ from the original monographs (usually they point to the KJV, but some more educated ones point to the Majority Text); but the solid evidence of textual variants leads scholars to conclude that the preservation of Scripture simply does not work in that manner. (I believe that God does preserve the Scriptures, by the way.)
In much the same way, this evidence undermines one view of inerrancy, but this does NOT mean that the Bible is errant (this is a problem I have with most of the Biologos writers); it means that our ideas of inerrancy are too simplistic.
I don't have a solution; but I read a good summary of a possible direction of research (warning: link goes to a PDF/Adobe Acrobat document).
I'm sorry for the dupes -- Google Blogger gave an error when I posted, and it looked like they didn't go through.
ReplyDeletewtanksley-
ReplyDeleteThanks for some interaction!
Genesis 1:20 - same Hebrew word for the old KJV "firmament" (which is a transliteration from the Latin) is clearly the same thing as the sky that birds fly in; so it seems to me that it just means "expanse"/air/atmosphere/sky.
So, I respectfully disagree with your take on Genesis 1:8-9; but I want to study the Hebrew word further.
Anyway, I think the phenomenological language use that you mention is probably right. (That God describes things the way that they appear to man; and man records them that way, ie, "the sun rises", "the earth is not moved", etc. But the earth rotates on its axis so that it "appears" to us that the sun rises and sets; and the earth feels and appears to not move, although it does; it just means it is stable and unshakable and firm; not necessarily addressing the issue of the earth rotating on its axis or around the sun.
Thanks again for now.
wtanksley:
ReplyDeleteInteresting that your experience is the opposite of mine - in seminary in 1983-1988, I became open to the Old earth view - that days are long periods of time; but then when I read that most proponents of that view also tended to believe in a local flood, and hominids of human-like structure without souls, then I began to question that. Then I began to read more defenses of the YE view; that were passionate for that position. Most evangelicals that I knew before this time said it did not matter. It doesn't until one gets into the details of exegesis. What convinced me to settle on Young Earth Creationism was exegesis of Exodus 20:11 and how it bases resting of humans and the Sabbath day on what God did. And also the repeated phrase for emphasis in Genesis chapter 1, "there was evening and there was morning, the ---- day" [God needs no rest; it is just a way of describing that God stopped created new things on the seventh day.] Also, the fact that we cannot go back and test and see and observe these things, we don't know how God did it, but He is powerful and can create by a thought and a word; so it seems logical and reasonable that God did it as the plain and simple reading of the text says; with the appearance of age.
Also, the understanding of so much death over millions of years before sin seemed to fly in the face of Romans 5:12 big time, as Dr. Mohler points out; and others also as the main defense for a young earth creationism.
Do you think there are real, genuine transitional forms in the fossil record from one "kind" of life to another "kind" (Genesis 1 - "according to their kinds" - similar phrase used 8-9 times?
Quotes from Harrison, R.K. (1982), “Firmament,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia , ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
ReplyDeleteR. K. Harrison noted in regard to the “firmament”:
“Although in classical Greek the latter denoted something solid, or a firm structure such as a foundation, its LXX [Septuagint—BT] usage was of the open sky, or the expanse stretching above the earth. This curious divergence of meaning is matched by the difficulty in translating the original Hebrew term raqia. It is a cognate of the verb rq, to “spread out” (Ps. 136:6; Isa. 42:5; 44:24), or “beat out” (Ex. 39:3; Nu. 17:4), the former usage referring to the expanse of the heavens at creation, and the latter to the beating out of metal into thin plates or sheets (1982, 2:306).”
When a word has more than one meaning (as firmament obviously does), the context in which the word is used in the passage under consideration is critical to a proper understanding of the meaning of the word.
Harrison went on to point out:
“In Genesis 1:6 the firmament comprised an expanse that penetrated the mass of water vapor covering the earth and divided it into lower (or terrestrial) and upper (or atmospheric) levels. The expanse that was formed by the lifting of the water vapor constituted the atmosphere, which stretched around the earth and made possible the existence of subsequent plant and animal life. In Genesis 1:8, the expanse was given the name “heaven” (samayim), a better translation of which would be “sky” (cf. Ps. 85:11; Prov. 30:19) [1982, 2:307].”
I should have added:
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't (matter which view, OE or YE) until one gets into the details of exegesis; and the details of the implications of millions of years of death, before sin; and then finding out other things that OE advocates believe - local flood, soul-less hominids, etc.
Sorry! Sorry!
ReplyDeleteI totally misread something. The sky is not falling. Triabloggue doesn't support Biologos.
My bad!
Thanks Ken.
ReplyDeleteI got it now.
Being literate doesn't mean I understand what I read...
...doh!
Thanks for some interaction!
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure! Thank you for literately defending the integrity of the Scriptures. I hope I'm doing the same, even though I disagree with some of your points. I'm not completely confident.
Genesis 1:20 - same Hebrew word for the old KJV "firmament" (which is a transliteration from the Latin) is clearly the same thing as the sky that birds fly in; so it seems to me that it just means "expanse"/air/atmosphere/sky.
I looked at the NET translation's word search, and I don't see that it's clear that the birds are flying IN the raquiya. They're actually flying "al" (Earth) "al" (face of) "raqiya". The preposition "al" has a huge semantic range, but since birds do not fly in the Earth, it seems symmetric to guess that they also do not fly in the "face of the raqiya". And the rest of the verses leave absolutely no room for saying that raqiya means "air" except in the loosest translation. In particular, in Ezekiel a throne is sitting on something like a raqiya.
After looking at these, I have to admit some ignorance; but I have heard that the concept of "raqiya" is not unique to Hebrew, and in neighboring cultures it's used as a central concept of cosmology, and the uses we see in the Bible are entirely compatible with their cosmologies. In particular, they have the idea of the heavens being a solid vault restraining the waters (or chaos) above from crashing down and obliterating the Earth. We see an apparent echo of that in how the raqiya is made to be "between water and water". By the way, it should be clear that "between water and water" is a poor description of "sky", even phenomenologically.
Anyway, I think the phenomenological language use that you mention is probably right.
Many times it clearly is -- but there are two problems in using this as a hermeneutical principle. First, it can tell us only about things we already believe, and it tempts us to assume that the Holy Spirit was using "phenomenological language" anytime His description doesn't match what we believe. Second, the culture the original authors of other ancient works wrote for not only used those terms as figures of speech, but entirely believed that this is how things _were_.
(more...)
If we don't accept the same about the Bible, the Bible tells us less about the people who wrote it than other ancient literature does: essentially, we start assuming that Moses believed the same as we do about the sky, no matter what he writes. That's not blasphemous or anything like that, but is IS rather a peculiar result.
ReplyDeleteA better idea (it seems to me) would be to set specific marks for how one can tell whether a description is phenomenological, rather than simply saying "anything that's different from what I believe right now".
I read an article to which I linked
above (the "good summary") which attempts to do that. The summary is that the author attempts to make the case that the difference between phenomenological and direct description is the worldview of the author's culture.
This means that before I can believe that God declared the raqiya, I must believe first in the raqiya. If my worldview/cosmology doesn't include a raqiya, it's not sufficient to simply pretend that "raqiya" means the same as "sky", because it didn't when it was written. Rather, we have to look at the worldview which included the raqiya, and see how the concept of the creation of the raqiya for the separation of water from water translates into our worldview.
How it translates will depend on context. I don't think the point here is simply that "raqiya means sky"; I think it's something more along the lines of "God decreed institutions to hold back the crushingly devastating forces from the Earth; and they were there." I'm not offering that as a translation of Gen 1:6, by the way; it's merely an uneducated guy's guess at what a commentary might include.
A modern author might write something like, "And on the second day, God set the cosmological constants to values compatible with the existence of life, and decreed the narrow bounds on the distance of the sun from the Earth, and placed an atmosphere around the Earth such that a water cycle could be sustained." (Except for the vital fact the the Holy Spirit inspired ancient writers, not modern ones.) This wouldn't be taken to mean that God fiddled with dials on a decree panel to set the cosmological constants; rather, (I think) it should be taken to mean the same thing Moses meant when he taught about the Second Day, except cast into a modern worldview.
I disagree with any approach that pretends that the Bible is untruthful in describing people or events; however, I believe that the Bible is written by humans inspired by the Holy Spirit to accurately record events, but they will accurately record what they see through their culturally trained eyes.
This isn't perfectly satisfactory to me, I admit. But it does leave the essential truth of the Scriptures intact (as does the idea of "phenomenological language"), and it gives us a clear hermeneutic (unlike the idea of phenomenological language).
-Wm
Good questions for Theistic Evolutionists (and Old Earth Creationists)
ReplyDeletehttp://creation.com/some-questions-for-theistic-evolutionists
Ken:
ReplyDeleteConcept violated: the goodness of God
This is both arbitrary and unfair. It's arbitrary because you might as well claim the Incarnation or the sacrificial system or parasites or hell or natural disasters or just about anything else "violates" the "goodness of God".
It's unfair because you use a description of evolution which is preposterously slanted -- it begs the question.
Concept violated: Adam’s sin brought death and decay, the basis of the Gospel
Adam's sin brought death "into the world" and "upon all men" -- but it's immediately clear that it did NOT bring immediate physical death. I understand that you'd want to assume that means eventual physical death, but the entire burden of the rest of the Bible is that we are freed not from eventual physical death (although its sting is gone), but from our spiritual death. THIS is the foundation of the Gospel.
Decay, though? That's not from the Bible. Creation groans, subject to futility -- but "him who subjected it" didn't do it in sin, but "in order that it may be set free." In other words, God subjected creation to futility; not Adam.
Concept violated: the divine inspiration of the whole Bible
Here I agree -- any explanation that rejects the authority and reliability of the Bible is false.
Concept violated: the straightforward understanding of the Word of God
Utterly false, ridiculous, and contemptible argument.
If the Genesis account does not mean what it plainly says, but must be “interpreted” to fit an evolutionary world, how are we to understand the rest of the Bible?
By interpreting it. The same thing we have to do anyway. The hard work of exegesis. We all know that we have to do this! In some passages it's explicitly obvious (Ezekiel's dry bones); in others it's clear enough (Revelations' dragon and woman); in others it's become obvious over time (the very many passages that mention the sun moving or that claim the earth is still).
How are we to know that the historical accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection should not also be “reinterpreted”? Indeed, can we know anything for sure if the Bible can be so flexible?
This question seems to simple to answer that there must be something hidden.
Concept violated: the creation is supposed to clearly show the hand of God
This might be a little different from the first question, but it shares many of the same problems.
Is it not philosophically inconsistent to marry God (theism) with evolution (naturalism)?
And yet God created the laws of the universe and holds them constant, and by covenant declared that He would continue to uphold them. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.
If God “created” using evolution which makes Him unnecessary, how can God’s “eternal power and divine nature” be “clearly seen” in creation, as Romans 1:20 says?
People made the same arguments about Newton's laws. They were wrong then too.
Concept violated: the need of restoration for the creation
See above; Romans 8 does not at all say what you claim it does.
-Wm
Interesting that your experience is the opposite of mine
ReplyDeleteI think both of our paths are not completely unusual. I would like it if yours was more common, which would mean that more YEC people knew Old Earth well.
but then when I read that most proponents of that view also tended to believe in a local flood
Indeed this is a common tendency -- although I've heard one host explain that he didn't accept that, so it's not universal. I think the one thing you HAVE to reject is "flood geology", i.e. the catastrophic extreme changes that the YEC theory requires.
I'm not sure if it's actually consistent to accept an old earth with a global flood, though. It seems to me that a global flood would leave more evidence in a narrow layer of the old earth than we actually see. (This problem only affect OEC, not YEC.)
and hominids of human-like structure without souls, then I began to question that.
I'm not sure why you'd object to that -- many YECs also believe that some human-like anthropoids were mere animals, while some rare OECs believe they bore the image of God. Interestingly, I think this is starting to change, since the evidence is strong that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.
Then I began to read more defenses of the YE view; that were passionate for that position.
I grew up with this.
It doesn't [matter] until one gets into the details of exegesis. What convinced me to settle on Young Earth Creationism was exegesis of Exodus 20:11 and how it bases resting of humans and the Sabbath day on what God did.
I do think that's a strong argument; but it's also very indirect evidence, and weakened slightly by the many repeated sabbath periods used elsewhere in the law (capped off with the Jubilee). That's not a complete weakening, of course, since those other periods of time are not justified in the same manner, so one cannot simply claim that the length of the period doesn't matter.
And also the repeated phrase for emphasis in Genesis chapter 1, "there was evening and there was morning, the ---- day"
I find that less convincing, honestly. Repeated formulas are much more likely to have a literary explanation than less formulaic expressions. ("After their kind" also seems formulaic, by the way.) And the asymmetry in the formula for the seventh day seems to hint at some kind of significance; one common interpretation is that the seventh day is still ongoing, but God knows when it will end and He will cease resting from creation, and begin to create again. (This interpretation depends on the less common meaning of the Hebrew "yom" as "a fixed length of time"; there's another word that means "an indefinite amount of time" which if used would have implied that God would never again create, or had no plans to.)
(more...)
[...]so it seems logical and reasonable that God did it as the plain and simple reading of the text says; with the appearance of age.
ReplyDeleteGranted, but this "simple" reading also has some direct textual difficulties (quite aside from the philosophical and evidentiary problems). The biggest one is probably the length of the sixth day from Adam's point of view; much of Genesis 2 has to fit into that day.
Also, the understanding of so much death over millions of years before sin seemed to fly in the face of Romans 5:12 big time,
I don't see this as a strong argument; in fact, it contradicts the Genesis text. The death that came through sin was simply not possibly physical death, because the covenental curse for eating from the Tree was that death would apply "on the day you eat".
And the Rom 8 argument (which you didn't mention) is even weaker; the fact the creation groans doesn't mean that it started groaning when Adam sinned. On the contrary, it was subjected to groaning not due to the curse of sin; but rather in hope of the glory to come. Further, the credit for the subjection to groaning is given not to Adam, but to God.
Do you think there are real, genuine transitional forms in the fossil record from one "kind" of life to another "kind" (Genesis 1 - "according to their kinds" - similar phrase used 8-9 times?
I suspect that the phrase means not that there are specific kinds whose borders cannot be broken; but rather that the children of a parent will be the same kind as the parent. To put this negatively (and to highlight our difference), I do NOT believe that this passage says that the descendants of an ancestral creature will be the same kind as the ancestor. Parents, yes; remote ancestors, no.
Now, I'm not sure what predictive value my reading has; I'm not sure it has much. But then, so far no predictive value has been found for baraminology, either. If God created specific baramins (as opposed to creating creatures which occupy baramins), it seems that this phrase doesn't mean that the baramins cannot change over time, since they manifestly DO.
I think -- but I'm not certain -- that all the baraminologists now studying currently set baramin boundaries much larger than species, right? The ones I read in the AIG magazine have a best guess at somewhere above the Family level, possibly higher (and no way to set an upper bound).
-Wm