See my answer to Mervin
Ok, thanks for clarifying my mind. This is a science place lets look for evidence.
Was it Jehovah or Ahura Mazda who created the world? You clearly say it was the Jewish god. What evidence do you have to back up such an audacious claim that the Jewish God is the creator of everything and not some other God? Please explain why you trust that evidence.
If you have no evidence, then the above claim is mere assertion, nothing more
How else was God to explain rocket science to a bunch a goat herders who though the land they were on was the “world”? You cannot ignore the ANE symbols in the creation stories of Gen. 1-2, did God also give that information as well or was it added? Also a lot of the moral rules are not meant for all time. God was working with a people within their time and native location. God worked differently for the people of NT then the OT, both pre and post exile. And God woks with us in the way that we can understand Him. Again, though the Bible is for us, not everything in the Bible is for us.
Marshall, I use reduction ad absurdam a lot. It is one of the most powerful logical tools we have. When I am saying God can’t do this, I am trying to show that accommodationalism leads to that view. I think you and I agree that God CAN do a whole lot. Accommodationalism puts a fence-wall around God’s ability and makes him in some sense a god of our own making, in that we get to control what he can and can’t do. As Scripture says, it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God. We can’t control him, we can’t decide his actions. We can only try to deduce his actions.
Take my views. one reason I haven’t really pushed them much over the years (admittedly I am doing a bit of pushing before my exit stage right), is that while I know they match reality, I can’t prove they ARE reality. Accommodation on the other hand won’t acknowledge that it might be possible for God to do precisely what he said AS HE SAID IT–meaning YEC. Here is how YEC could literally be true.
We know little about the ultimate structure of the universe, we don’t know why energy congeals itself into matter–we know it does and can predict how much energy is in a unit of matter. We don’t know how our minds interact with the material world really. We can claim that it is an epiphenomenon of the brain but some evidence suggests that consciousness is not subject to natural law (Mitch you don’t need a knee jerk response here). go look up Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment:
Wheeler noted that it is possible to devise a double slit experiment at the cosmic level using light coming from quasars and a galaxy which operates as a gravitational lens on the way to Earth, bending the light inwardly as it passes by massive objects (as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity). This light would generate an interference pattern showing that light has travelled as waves. But if a measurement would be performed before the screen on which the interference pattern takes form, the pattern would dissolve and the photons would change from waves into particles. In other words, our choice on how to measure the light coming from a quasar influences the nature of the light emitted 10 billion years ago. According to Wheeler, this experiment would show that ‘retrocausal effects operate at the quantum level. " 13
Wheeler changed his mind and said eventually that we create the past with our observations. That is a profound concept. There are delayed choice experiments in quantum (and I will refer people again to the site no one goes to. my blog) which indicates that humans when making quantum observations actually create the past. What if what we see is not reality but what was altered by sinful human observation? It is a stretch, I don’t believe it, but one can’t rule it out. It is a way to make YEC literally true and what we see a matter of consensus observation by humanity.
One: we are not talking about ‘rocket science’ and two: God could have said, “out of the slime I brought forth life” Even a goat herder could understand that. It ain’t hard to say something true in a simple manner. Sheesh, everyone seems to think God had to give them a college education about nature when simple things like that would suffice.
Are you going to tell me that a goat herder couldn’t understand that?
Edited to add: maybe God added the rest of the stuff to communicate with us.
Since Genesis 1 is by all accounts a unique piece of literature, I would add a factor in that uniqueness, that there can be two true and noncontradictory narratives at the same time, not unlike the classic optical illusion drawing that contains the image of an old woman and a young woman. A sequential reading and an ANE/literary framework reading can be simultaneously true. (It is developed somewhat here and here – short reads. 
)
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These were your words, not mine. I took you at your word, gbob, but I see now that the OP about your friend wasn’t really about your friend. I guess it was just a rhetorical device so you could talk about your beliefs about Genesis 1. More fool me.
Please don’t assume you know anything about me and my understanding of God or Creation or the science that’s found in the Bible. Thank you.
I gotta go do other things for a while. bbl
Yes, thank you for pointing out that they are my words. I already knew that. But my words do not convey in any sense guilt. The argument I was using is called reduction ad absurdam. it basically means show that the debate opponents position leads to an absurdity. I think it worked. You may disagree.
While that could be true, but Gen. 1:27 and Gen. 2:7 don’t state that though, In Gen.1 humans just appear out of no where and in Gen.2 Adam is made from the dust.
I think you are nearer the truth here than you probably intended this parody to be.
It’s been said that God meets us where we are, but never leaves us there.
Those were times when idols, sacrifices, and conquests (my god is bigger/badder than your god, etc.) - that was the common currency of tribal turf wars. God most certainly did enter into just those sorts of things with them and allowed those contests to play out with Himself as one of the players. True - they were to be different in many respects than their neighbors. They were not to make idols or graven images, etc. But God certainly did enter into that world with them and tolerated quite a bit of it too, before some of those prohibitions (think of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their household idols/gods). We don’t think in those terms any more, so for us having depictions of deity in art or in the art encyclopedia on your coffee table are no big deal for us because we don’t worship those images or confuse them for actual deity. God meets us today in a different place than he met them then. We are in need of different sorts of prohibitions than statues or images.
It isn’t about God getting their attention - it’s about giving them a word that actually means something once their attention is so-fixed. Telling ancients about 21st century sciencey stuff would have had exactly zero value (or truth - because it would mean nothing to those hearers). It would only have served to be embarassingly anachronistic on God’s part - almost as if he can’t remember which epoch he’s talking to.
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For me, it’s more that the way certain accounts are written give clear signs of a different style of literature. Imagine the following story came from anywhere but the Bible: A character named Humanity is split in half, one side becoming a woman and the other a man. The two sides reunite as one flesh in marriage. Our protagonist, Humanity, is prohibited from eating fruit that gives knowledge, but once split in two his other half is tempted by a talking beast into disobeying, prompting God to bar Humanity from eating fruit that gives eternal life.
As a parent of two young boys to whom I’ve read many stories, I know that nobody’s natural inclination is to treat a story like this as revealing scientific facts, or even as being mistaken about scientific facts. It’s not that I’m dedicated to the story being false. I’m dedicated to reading it on its own terms.
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And you did. Sorry for not reading enough to realize that!
However, I take even bigger issue with talking like God’s omnipotence means we should accept that God can do whatever someone says in whatever way they care to dictate.
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I believe the events are real, but figurative language is being used. Much like Revelation talks about the destruction of Jerusalem using figurative language.
Did God create the heavens and the earth in the beginning? Yep. Did he tell the earth to bring forth plants and animals? Absolutely. Evolution doesn’t contradict that.
What was the point of Genesis 1? To tell the order that God did things? No. To tell the method used to create things? No. The point is to tell who and why. Those two things matter a whole lot in understanding who God is and what His relationship is with us and why He has authority. There’s no reason to explain how tiny lifeforms started billions of years ago. Would that knowledge help your understanding of God in any way? So maybe God didn’t mention that, because it isn’t important.
I like your interpretation of Genesis 1, with the days of proclamation. I don’t hold that view, but I can see it as a legitimate possibility. Your view on Adam gets a little too out there for me, and he’s not really created from dust, if I recall correctly (it’s been months since I read it). You have him being born with one less chromosome and dead, right? I just don’t think Moses was talking about that when he wrote Genesis 2. I’m sorry. I just don’t see it. I do wonder if the creation of Eve story is possibly a vision, since the same language for putting Adam to sleep is used for visions elsewhere in the Bible. I haven’t fully fleshed that out though.
I do understand your issue with accommodationalism. I’ve talked to a YEC at church who had the same issue. He thought that if the order of creation in Genesis 1 wasn’t how it historically happened, then the Bible is false. I don’t think the order is intended to be the actual order of creation (and you get around that by making it days of proclamation). I think it’s likely a literary device. But I do think God created all of those things, and I don’t think old earth or evolution go against that.
Have you read Gregg Davidson’s recent book, Friend of Science, Friend of Faith? He goes through each of the main stories Genesis 1-11 is concerned with and looks at how the science and the Biblical text interact. I thought it was pretty well done.
I don’t completely understand what exactly happened in reality in those stories, but I do think they are real history. The language is just more difficult for us to understand. I find the OT in general to be more difficult than the NT. The style of writing is so different. That doesn’t make it untrue though. The message God is trying to convey is clear and easily accessible, no matter how you think it all happened.
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And to me that is the point. why didn’t God, or at least this god, say something simple? I think most people who hold YEC and accommodationalism are only thinking within Christian theology.They are not thinking in terms of comparative religion, and that changes the game.
Further, as I pointed out to you, few people think about what is called counterfactuals. What COULD have been communicated. It isn’t as if someone has to know what we know to understand evolution. I get that kind of comment a lot. Consider Anaximander, b. 611 BC, back in that goat-herder era.
"Out of the Infinite, which he called “the Divine” and conceived as an eternal and living, though not immaterial, being, he supposed actual existences to have sprung by the generation, first, of the “contraries,” “the warm” and “the cold,” “the moist” and “the dry,” then, by an eternal motion, of the universe of worlds, in the centre of which is the earth, fixed in position and cylindrical in form. From the original moisture all things were generated by heat. Animals and men were evolved from fishes. The soul he declared to be aëriform. Anaximander may be called the earliest “evolutionist”. https://www.e-torredebabel.com/greekphilosophy/ionicnaturalphilosophers.htm
So here we have an example of a guy in a goat-herder society understanding what we understand, Men were evolved from fish. That leaves out a lot of detail about evolution but it is a scientifically true sentence.
Thus, I find the claim that goat-herders couldn’t understand what we understand to be utterly without merit.
So, given that the premise of accommodationalism is false (the idea that God had to accommodate scientific knowledge to the stupidities of that era), and given that we can see an example of an evolutionist in that era, why didn’t God inspire something simple like Anaximander said, that is true but not complete in detail? That is where my reading of Genesis 1 comes in. I think there is a case to be made for a fully scientific reading of Genesis 1, but people prefer to take the easy road–just give up on it having historical/scientific value.
Well accommodation says God left them with scientific untruth. If God has even the foresight of a first level manager, he should have foreseen that leaving it as he did would cause problems some day.
It isn’t about God getting their attention - it’s about giving them a word that actually means something once their attention is so-fixed. Telling ancients about 21st century sciencey stuff would have had exactly zero value (or truth - because it would mean nothing to those hearers). It would only have served to be embarassingly anachronistic on God’s part - almost as if he can’t remember which epoch he’s talking to.
Well, as I pointed out in my note above, Anaximander b. 611 bc seems to have understood evolution better than the average YEC today. Thus,I find the idea that they couldn’t understand what God was talking about to be extremely misguided. These guys knew nature better than the average 21st century person.
While it is true for Anaximander, the Bible doesn’t give a single detail of science of evolution and is silent on it. It only tells about creation from the lens of the Ancient Near East audience. They were foreign to both modern concepts of evolution and ancient Greek science. It makes more sense for God to communicate to the Jews within their local environment as in the same way God would communicate to us in our local environment. The Bible is an ancient document that talks about people encountering God and their relations/reactions to Him, its not a science or history text book. Again, the Bible is an ancient book written thousands of years ago written by an ancient people to an ancient people talking about local ancient issues and topics and taboos. We need to understand the Bibles ancient context in the light of the 21st century. I have said it many times and I’ll say it again, though the Bible is for us, not everything in the Bible is for us.
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Well, in some sense that is one criticism of my views, that they don’t have 24-hour days but treat them as pre-temporal ‘days’, a word that doesn’t apply to an era lacking time.
Did God create the heavens and the earth in the beginning? Yep. Did he tell the earth to bring forth plants and animals? Absolutely. Evolution doesn’t contradict that
.Taken on its own, evolution doesn’t say anything about God being the cause of evolution, which places God in the position of an epistemologically useless add-on to evolution. God is a useless appendage to that theory. That is why I tried to find something else that put God back in the center of the game, which I believe he was.
What was the point of Genesis 1? To tell the order that God did things? No. To tell the method used to create things? No. The point is to tell who and why.
This activity of being certain about God’s motives always gets me. Where in the world does this information about what God was thinking come from? It certainly isn’t in the Bible. I always joke that God is not telling me what His purpose was. You must be a better, closer to God Christian than I
Those two things matter a whole lot in understanding who God is and what His relationship is with us and why
I agree that those two things matter, but they matter only if they are true. What is the source of this information. Friends tell me this all the time and I think it comes out of where the sun don’t shine.
I like your interpretation of Genesis 1, with the days of proclamation. I don’t hold that view, but I can see it as a legitimate possibility. Your view on Adam gets a little too out there for me, and he’s not really created from dust, if I recall correctly (it’s been months since I read it). You have him being born with one less chromosome and dead, right? I just don’t think Moses was talking about that when he wrote Genesis 2. I’m sorry. I just don’t see it. I do wonder if the creation of Eve story is possibly a vision, since the same language for putting Adam to sleep is used for visions elsewhere in the Bible. I haven’t fully fleshed that out though.
I really do appreciate you giving my views a hearing. The reason I do what I do with Adam’s creation (and you are not alone in not liking it) is that we have broken genes that connect us to the Apes. Mankind evolved and was NOT created ex nihilo. Those broken, non-working genes should not be there if there is no evolutionary connection between us and the apes. All I am doing is what every scientist who theorizes does, explain the facts before him.
I do understand your issue with accommodationalism. I’ve talked to a YEC at church who had the same issue. He thought that if the order of creation in Genesis 1 wasn’t how it historically happened, then the Bible is false. I don’t think the order is intended to be the actual order of creation (and you get around that by making it days of proclamation).
On this we agree. But see, he thinks God’s purpose was to explain the order, you think God’s purpose was merely to say he created it all. I don’t claim to know God’s mind that closely, as you and your YEC friend do. The fact that you both hold opposing views, both of which are claimed to be what God intended, illustrates why I doubt we can ever know what God intended. All we can do is make a suggestion, which is what my views do.
Have you read Gregg Davidson’s recent book, Friend of Science, Friend of Faith ? He goes through each of the main stories Genesis 1-11 is concerned with and looks at how the science and the Biblical text interact. I thought it was pretty well done.
I have not read that book, maybe I should but frankly I have given up on Christians to ever think creatively, out of the box, and actually deal with the facts of this universe, and the logic which constrains all of us. I am tired of reading the same-ol-same-ol stuff on each side, with no creativity. I made Ray Bohlin really mad at me when I reviewed a book of his and complained that there was really nothing new in the book or its thesis. It was just another Probe Ministry book and I could have predicted what he said prior to reading it. God is creative; why are Christians so hide-bound to two views, YEC and some form of accommodation?
I don’t completely understand what exactly happened in reality in those stories, but I do think they are real history.
This is an honest statement of Faith and humility. I like it and prefer it to us claiming that goat herders couldn’t understand what Anaximander understood or claiming we know what God’s intent was for inspiring Gen. 1. Such claims are hubris and egotistical, making us out to be smarter, more intelligent than the goat-herders. But we aren’t smarter, we just have more knowledge, that knowledge does not constitute intelligence.
Agreed, and again, I ask, If God has any capability at all to communicate with us He could have said something like that. And I think he actually did. when God said, “Let the Earth bring forth living creatures,” I view this as a simple statement of evolution. God didn’t create the living creatures, the earth did the work at God’s command. Thus, I do see Genesis 1 as indicating at least a 2nd scientific fact–that of the earth bringing forth life leading to all the animals.
It makes more sense for God to communicate to the Jews within their local environment as in the same way God would communicate to us in our local environment.
I would argue if the two main views of Genesis 1 are the way to go, then God isn’t communicating with us in our local environment–at least not in the modern environment. Consider how many people left the faith because of the perceived lack of evolution in scripture. I think they are wrong–Let the EARTH bring forth life, is an evolutionary statement or at least compatible with evolution
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this is for Marshall, One thing I need to correct in your first reply is that Days of proclamation position is not days of having a vision. That view held that Moses had 7 days of visions. That was proposed by Kurtz in 1857 and I reject that view. I believe the days are pretemporal proclamations by God of what WOULD be in the world. the days are the planning for the universe, not the actualization of the universe. I saw this tonight and though I would clarify it for you.
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How? The ancient understanding for Gen. 1:24-25 has nothing to do with evolution and the ancient audience would have just assumed the animals were made ex nihilo as with the other creatures of the air and sea. The ancients again, had no concept of evolution and saw creation as happening spontaneously over a period of time (i.e. 7 days for the Jews).
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