A question for accommodationalists

Faith & Science Conversation
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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.

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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.

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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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46

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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So are you saying that Gen 1:24-25 comes from the understanding of the ancients or that God was limited to the understanding of the ancients? To be sure the human authors could not have intended such a thing, but I have always seen the reality of God most clearly when words carry a message which even the speaker/writer does not understand himself. I think good authors can often state things in a way that employs the understanding of the reader to fill in the blanks. I think the very fact that @gbob can see evolution in these words demonstrates such skill on the part of God.

Of course you are correct that the Bible doesn’t actually speak of evolution really and to do so would only have confused its first audience/readership. So the most we can say is that the words of the message suggest that it might have come from someone (God) who did understand evolution.

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Hi @gbob, I’m not making any scientific point so I don’t need evidence in this case. All I am trying to say is that the Genesis text does not teach science, but says that God created everything. I’m speaking purely from a textual point of view.

I’ll sign off here. Looks like the thread is taking a different course to the one I thought it would. As I said in my first reply, hope everything goes well with your friend. I prayed for her yesterday.

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49

Thank you for that book recommendation. It looks interesting.

I like this quote from the book jacket:
“ Proceeding from a belief that Scripture is inspired and without error and that God’s creation should inform how we interpret the Bible, Davidson shows that Scripture and science need not disagree”

The author is one of the BioLogos speakers, and wrote a response to a question that relates to topics discussed on this forum thread:

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As would I. Because for starters, they did understand what was being taught. Why? Because they weren’t being fed the nonsense that 21st century thought would have been to them. Of course we can find threads of ancient Greek thought that we admire. We admire it because we see in it the precursor to western thought as it developed to today. But to suggest that Anaximander is the proxy representative of now-apprehended truth that God should have privileged over all other times and cultures is breath-taking arrogance. Not just arrogance of our own contemporary culture over all prior cultures, but even over all future cultures as well. I.e. if centuries from now, scientific understandings significantly progress from where they are now, then why should your/our present, inferior understandings still be singled out as ‘God’s truth’ over those future ones that we now might not understand?

I trust that you and I agree that God is a God of actual, reality-matching truth. If God is only permitted to divulge that unvarnished truth straight-up (no translation, no interpretation, none of that dreaded accommodation that you so-despise - just literal truth straight up) then it will almost certainly look like gibberish that is beyond all of us from any age. What this leaves us with then (if God was the failed communicator you would have him be) is a God that is helpless to have any relationship with us at all, beyond just moving us around like so much brainless pottery.

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While it is possible for someone to symbolically see evolution within the text but the text in its plain and ancient context has zero to say about evolution. I don’t mind a person finding the idea of “evolution” within the text in a symbolic manner but we need to see that the original meaning of the text isn’t trying to communicate evolution, but the fact that God and this one God alone made humans for divine purpose.

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52

No.

On a controversial issue to reason like Paul is an option.

15 Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will.
16 The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.
17 The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.
18 What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. [Philippians 1]

53

Ha! :fireworks:

In theory God could have created the Universe aged, as Adam and Eve were created aged (as adults). Contrary to others I don’t see deception in that.

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So Adam and Eve were golems rather than human? Such toys could never have anything whatsoever to do with human life so the whole story there becomes a farcical puppet play to justify this dollmaker’s abuse of people. However, the Bible makes it pretty clear in Gen 4 that the rest of the earth was filled with real people so it is to these we can look to for our humanity rather than these marionette dolls you speak of.

There is however another explanation of the story which makes it much more meaningful to me. Where instead of being about necromancy, Genesis 2:4 is describing the making of our bodies from the stuff of the Earth by the processes of nature like evolution, and instead of voo doo, the divine breath refers to inspiration from God by which the mind of man came to life by direct inheritance from a divine parent. In that case, I can see our humanity in being the children of God through a memetic inheritance through Adam and Eve, and thus the story tells how their relationship with God was broken by poor choices of their own rather than from puppet strings. After all you have to ask, where did the characters of Adam and Eve come from? Did they come from their own choices growing up or from a doll maker?

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55

Well, I think everyone has missed the grammar in this sentence. When my wife tells me the lawn needs mowing and I tell her I’ll let Sam mow the lawn, who do you think is sweating out there in the Texas heat? It isn’t me. It isn’t my wife. It is Sam who is doing the work.

When God proclaimed his plan for the structure of the universe, prior to the universe existing, He proclaimed Let the EARTH bring forth living creatures. God put the power of evolution into the earth to bring forth life. This is not a new view, indeed, if anyone would actually read my days of proclamation post here or on my blog they would know how old this view is. This view is consistent with the understanding of the Church fathers, from Augustine, to St. Basil, to Chrysostom. From my blog post:

The idea of mediated creation was held by many of the church fathers. St. Augustine believed that God put potentialities into creation which developed later in other days:

" For Augustine the seminal reasons have a real physical existence, but in the creation act recorded in Genesis 1 they were not produced with definite bodily form. They did not exist actually but only potentially, and contain as potential all possible species of particular things."20 " Augustine stresses that everything was created before it appears on the earth, so that things are not created at the time when they appear. "21

St. Basil wrote that it was the earth that travailed to obey God:

" Let the earth bring forth. See how, at this short word, at this brief command, the cold and sterile earth travailed and hastened to bring forth its fruit ".22

He further writes that God gifted the earth with grace and power to bring forth life!:

" At these words Let the earth bring forth, it did not produce a germ contained in it, but He who gave the order at the same time gifted it with the grace and power to bring forth. " 23

John Chrysostom agrees that the earth was awakened to bring forth life:

" What is really remarkable and surprising is that the one who now by his own word awakens the earth to germination of so many plants and demonstrates his own power surpassing human reasoning, " 24

Chrysostom says it was the waters which were activated by God’s spirit, so that the waters brought forth life.

" but what does this word mean, the Spirit of God was carried on the waters? It seems to me that it reveals to us that the waters possessed an effective and vital virtue . They were therefore not stagnant and motionless, but they moved with a certain activity. For every body that rests in total immobility is completely useless, while the movement makes it fit for a thousand uses. " 25

Chrysostom says this about the ability of the waters to produce life:

" Therefore the Holy Prophet said that the Spirit of God was carried on the waters, to show us that they possessed an energetic and secret force, and it is not for no reason that Scripture expresses thus; for it wants to dispose us to believe what it will tell us later that animals were produced from these waters by the command of God, creator of the universe. "26

Yes, by the command of God, but the water did the work.

So, now we see that God didn’t directly create the plants but indirectly created them by empowering the created earth and waters to bring forth life, we can see here, that this is consistent with evolution. If only Christians had paid attention to grammar, we might not have the problem with accepting evolution that we have today in the church.

Thus I say that modern understanding of that verse is totally screwed up.

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I know that C would love to know you are praying for her. She is in no danger of losing her faith–if anything I think her faith is stronger than mine. As I said, this post was made to point out a big flaw in the accommodationalist view and in the approach we take to our brothers and sister who believe YEC. Do we want to turn them into atheists? The reality is they hold to the need for historicity in scripture like I do. And they are correct in the need for historicity and accommodationalism is wrong on that point.

57

Thank you for the link to his answer. It was as I feared, an apology for the Bible being wrong when Davidson writes:

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Note the claim is in its usefulness and authority in correcting and training in spiritual matters. Correcting misunderstandings about nature is never claimed.

Davidson seems incapable of drawing the proper conclusion here. Especially in light of these verses, which are good for correcting spiritual misunderstanding as he says:

Numbers 23:19

"God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

1 Samuel 15:29

“Also the Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.”

Hebrews 6:18

so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.

This gets right to the heart of why YECs and I an non-yec, won’t accept accommodationalism. It makes God a liar about nature. No, the verse Davidson quotes doesn’t claim correction in natural phenomenon, I can agree with that, but when God says anything it better be true—and like it or not, the only person speaking in Genesis 1 is GOD!!!

Under normal interpretations of Genesis 1, God is spinning quite a tall tale that is utterly false. So do people on Biologos believe God lies or not?

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Mervin, you took me to say precisely the opposite of what I actually said.

I trust that you and I agree that God is a God of actual, reality-matching truth. If God is only permitted to divulge that unvarnished truth straight-up (no translation, no interpretation, none of that dreaded accommodation that you so-despise - just literal truth straight up) then it will almost certainly look like gibberish that is beyond all of us from any age.

Sigh, what a straw man I meet over and over throughout the years. I have repeatedly said, that God can simplify but what he says must be true. He could have said “out of the slime came life.” He did say Earth bring forth living creatures, which I believe is mediate creation and a simple statement of truth–I have repeatedly said and said in this threat that yall act as if the goat herders had to have a college education or they couldn’t understand evolution. and you are acting like we have to have God who is incapable of simplifying TRUTH, and thus must engage in propagating falsehoods. I guess all I can say is get real. You can explain to a 5 year old the basics of evolution and earth history. Surely a Neolithic adult goat herder could understand what a 5 year old today can understand. Shoot, when I was six years old I was reading adult astronomy books (no I didn’t understand everything and dad had to help simplify it but my own father, was able to communicate some of those truths to me without telling me that each star is actually a candle hanging in mid air. sheesh This straw man is very very tiresome.

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Prodeo, I like that, and it has applications to how we treat YECs and other people some often look down on as intellectually challenged or just plain tree stump dumb. Admit it, we have all thought that of YECs at one time or another, I know I have, and looking back it was a sin to do so.

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60

Absolutely. While I do have problems with deception in such a creation, there is nothing even non-physical about it.

“Shortly after this triumph, a huge hole was knocked in Boltzmann’s argument by the French mathematical physicist Henri Poincare, who rigorously proved that a finite collection of particles confined to a box and subject to Newton’s laws of motion must always return to its initial state (or at least very close thereto) after a sufficiently long period of time. The state of the gas therefore undergoes “recurrences.” Poincare’s theorem carries the obvious implication that if the entropy of the gas goes up at some stage then it eventually has to come down again so the gas can return to its initial state. Whatever set of molecular motions may increase the entropy, or chaos, of the gas, there must be another set that decreases it. In other words, the behavior of the gas over a long time scale is cyclic. This cyclicity in the state of the gas can be traced to the underlying time symmetry’ in Newton’s laws, which do not distinguish past from future.”
“The length of Poincare’s cycles are truly enormous-roughly 10^N seconds, where N is the number of molecules (about a trillion trillion in 40 liters of air). The age of the universe is a mere 10^17 seconds, so the duration of the cycles is huge, even for a handful of molecules. In the case of a macroscopic system, the length of the Poincare cycles dwarfs all other known time scales. Nevertheless, the cycles are finite in duration so the possibility of an entropy decrease at some stage in the very far future cannot be denied. Boltzmann’s conclusion that entropy can rise only as a result of molecular collisions was therefore shown to be wrong. It was soon to be replaced by a less clear-cut, statistical claim: that the entropy of the gas will very probably rise. Decreases in entropy are possible, as a result of statistical fluctuations. However, the chances of an entropy-decreasing fluctuation fall off very sharply with the size of the fluctuation, implying that large decreases in entropy are exceedingly improbable-but still technically possible. Boltzmann himself went on to suggest that maybe the universe as a whole undergoes Poincare cycles of immense duration, and that the present relatively ordered state of the universe came 'about as a result of a fantastically rare decrease in entropy. For almost all the time, the state of the universe would be very close to equilibrium-Le., the heat-death state. What these ideas suggested is that cosmic heat death was not forever, and resurrection was possible, given long enough.”
“With the discovery of Poincare’s recurrences, the concept of the eternal return became part of scientific discourse, but in a rather different guise from the folklore version. First, the world takes unimaginably long to return to its present state. Second, the cyclicity involved is not an exact periodicity but merely a statistical recurrence. The situation can be envisaged in terms of card shuffling. If a pack of cards arranged in suit and numerical order is shuffled, then it will almost certainly be in a less ordered state after the shuffling process. However, because the pack has only a finite number of states, continued random shuffling must cause any given state to appear and reappear, infinitely often. Simply by chance, the original suit and numerical order will eventually be restored. The state of the cards can be regarded as analogous to the states of the gas, and the shuffling process plays the role of chaotic molecular collisions.”
"The foregoing argument was seized upon by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who concluded that cosmic recurrences robbed human life of any ultimate purpose. The senselessness of endless cycles rendered the universe absurd, he opined. His despairing philosophy of “nihilism” rubbished the concept of progress, whether human or cosmic. Clearly, if the universe is one day to return to its initial state, all progress must eventually be reversed. This conclusion provoked Nietzsche’s most famous aphorism: “God is dead!” " Paul Davies, About Time, (New York: A Touchstone Book, 1996), p. 37-38

The problem with this view is that it means our world could have been created 6 min ago with us having all our memories of a childhood that didn’t happen, a world history that didn’t happen, and a world in which the historical memory of Jesus is lacking an actual Jesus. Such a world has no purpose as Nietzsche pointed out, so if that is the kind of world one wants, have at it. If our world is really this world of Poincare, non of this thread or the issues we debate here are of any value at all.