How does an approach like that work when we get to Job 38–39? Here’s another take on creation, and once again the only person speaking is God. Unlike Genesis 1, the whole thing is presented as God’s speech, not just a few choice quotes in a third-person narrative.
Do you also have high expectations for transcendent scientific accuracy in Job?
I don’t, in either Job or Genesis. I’m not bothered that we now know a fair bit about births of mountain goats, or that many of the rhetorical questions have lost their punch in our own age. I’m okay with God not using this perfect opportunity to blurt out a bunch of scientific trivia that only God could know so that much-later readers could be impressed. When creation is depicted like constructing a building, complete with cornerstone, foundation, plumb lines and doors, I don’t think God is “spinning quite a tall tale that is utterly false.” I’m curious: do you?
Golems seems to be a polpular word of you, I looked up the definition - Golem, in Jewish folklore, an image endowed with life. The term is used in the Bible (Psalms 139:16) and in Talmudic literature to refer to an embryonic or incomplete substance.
I don’t see what A&E created as adults has anything to do with embryos, but perhaps you can explain the part I missing.
Puppet play, dollmaker? I don’t follow.
I am not YEC because the evidence points into a a different direction, it doesn’t mean it can be excluded. God is the author of living cells, DNA, He can read and judge the minds of 7½ billion people in a split of a second, He can do anything He wants, including the creation of a planet fit for life in seven days looking old.
Fascinating discussion, but I believe one thing about Genesis has been overlooked, as it often is for much of the Old Testament. It’s a Jewish book, written by Jews, inspired by God, for the Israelite nation. So perhaps we should ask what do Jews (for the past 2000 years at least) think about Genesis? Do they think it’s mythical, or factual? Do they think it contains real science or is an accommodation for the goat herders of the ancient times? The answer is interesting - neither. The Jewish religion holds (as do Christians) that the Bible is true, but they also believe that every word of Torah (and to some extent the rest of the OT) requires a very great deal of interpretation to find the truth of what was written. And when I say a great deal, I mean hundreds of volumes of commentary like the Talmud, a commentary on the Biblical text, and commentaries on the Talmud, and commentaries on the commentaries. A LOT of interpretation.
Should Christians adopt that strategy of understanding Genesis? Not in my view. But we should at least acknowledge that the people for whom the book was written (and who wrote it, and whom God inspired to write it) made it very clear that the truth contained in Genesis requires a great deal of interpretation.
My own view is similar to many of those expressed above. Genesis tells its first audience, and later audiences, including us, that God created the world and everything in it. That implies that the world had a beginning. Is that science? It is today, but it wasn’t 70 years ago. And if might not be tomorrow. Did God create every kind of animal the way He created Adam from clay? The text doesn’t even say that; it says He ordered the Earth to bring forth life, which is scientific (in our day) to be easily interpreted as being consistent with what we now know.
My point is that God was sending a message to all people at all times, not just to the ancient goat herders. And that included people living 5000 years in the future, who I expect will know a lot more scientific truths than we do. How do we know that we are not missing all kinds of messages in the Genesis text because they refer to a science that we cannot conceive of? Do we really think we have physics and cosmology and biology all figured out? I don’t.
Let’s accept Genesis for what it is (as I believe the woman who is the subject of this post did), a powerful testimony to the majesty of God the creator, and let’s accept that it is true, and acknowledge that we are unable (without a great deal of interpretation) to define exactly how and why it is the truth. I believe (as part of my faith) that God knows a lot more than we humans do, and that is a fact for all times and places.
Hi Marshall, always great questions. What I do when I face something like ‘doors’ in that context I don’t throw up my hands and say it is insolvable. I learned in 47 years of looking for oil that when we had a problem and an employee threw up his hands and said it was insolvable, the problem would never be solved because he wouldn’t even try! Can I say I can answer every question? No.
What I do next is go see what the word ‘door’ means to see how the translator chose that particular English word. Clearly this passage is challenging Job’s arrogance and his knowledge. It is also using figurative language, but I still think this figurative language has truth to it,
The words ‘door’ and ‘bar’ are used of the sea, not the earth. I think the passage is asking Job if he knows why the sea water is trapped where it is. The word delet, is translated once as ‘lid’ and ‘bars’ has one definition; a fortress, of the earth as a prison And the word ‘shut up’ means 'hedged in" so the passage could be translated as
Or who **hedged in** the sea with **a lid**,
When it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?
9 When I made the cloud the garment thereof,
And thick darkness a swaddling band for it,
10 And brake up for it my decreed place,
And set **a prison** and **lids**,
11 And said, **Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further:**
** And here shall thy proud waves be stayed?**
Verse 11 really shows the context here. He is asking job what keeps the waters where they are, so the translation should match the context. What is above, is actually true.
Of the foundation of the earth, have you never heard of the earth’s core? As to measuring it, if the earth were bigger, we would have a different atmosphere, and life would not be like it is. Iff the earth were smaller, we would have much less atmosphere and life would be non-existant. Our earth, whenyou look at it from a physics perspective is pretty well suited to mobile life forms. ON a bigger earth the bones must increase by the square of the radius to support gravitational weight. etc. Loads of issues if the earth were not measured properly when God caused it to be formed.
Edited much later to add: 2 of my scientific papers were on the Earth’s gravitational field. The water is capped by the equipotential surface of the gravitational potential. That is why it can’t rise up out of the sea to flood the continents. So, the water is in a prison with gravity holding it from going up too far above the mean sea level. and it is held in prison laterally by the continents. Thus I don’t see anything unscientific about this verse. Here is my paper. I think I have the full pdf on Researchgate
As I pointed out earlier, I think in the miracles thread, what you say is true of modern Judaism. It wasn’t true of ancient Jews, who were over and over told to believe the miracles and what God said.
I’m sure YEC would see you as wrong and just another compromiser of the “Word of God” by stating that the 7 day creation wasn’t literal 24 hour days. Again, what makes PoD different from all other accommodationalist ideas? Your idea is as compromising as other EC point of view. We need to understand that God was communicating truth to an ancient people in an ancient way that they could have understood it. i.e a Yahweh-centered creation story with ANE themes but with YWHW at the center of it and humans being made in His Image.
They didn’t? Did some believe in an after life and some not? Did they all miss the interpretation that signaled the coming of Jesus? I don’t know a lot about ancient Jews but I’m thinking they had some differences in interpretation between the sects?
If Adam and Eve were clay or bone images endowed with life, then that would make them golems.
The key questions were… Where did the characters of Adam and Eve come from? Did they come from their own choices growing up or from a doll/golem maker?
God is all powerful. But no this doesn’t mean God can do anything you say by whatever means you care to dictate.
People keep confusing omnipotence with magic, which is frankly a notion that comes from the experience of infancy where you cry and parents do things you don’t understand to make you feel better. Omnipotence is something like having unlimited amount of energy you can give any form you choose, while magic is having a genie in bottle to make your wishes come true. The former means you have to know how to make things work while the latter means having someone more powerful and knowledgeable do things for you. Big difference and it should be obvious which of these applies to God.
This presumes that results are independent of the means, and I think this presumption is false. To be sure , whatever time God experiences is of His own making, and so He can pass whatever amount of time He chooses while billions of years pass on the Earth. But while you may believe that God made billions of living organisms suffer pain and death for no reason but mere whim, I do not. He did it because it was necessary – it is the only reason which makes sense for a God I will ever have any respect for. So… I say your Walt Disney version of seven days can only make a Walt Disney movie and not result in anything real or alive.
What is the raqia? That is a huge question that has caused great confusion.
Forewarning: this is coming from a creationist perspective.
The raqia had waters above it, as well as below it. The raqia is hard, a spread out solid. Raqia is the earth’s crust. It separated the earth’s surface water from the earth’s subsurface water on the preflood earth. When raqia is used by itself, earth’s surface is what it means. When raqia is followed by “of the heavens” it refers to the sky.
This idea of raqia is discussed here, plus the following 2-3 pages.
They had (and continue to have) differences in interpretation between every individual. The old Jewish joke - take 10 Jews, find 12 opinions. As for the coming of Jesus, who do you think the earliest Christians were? And for the afterlife, yes.
Sigh, if the Bible is so false, why should one believe anything it says about unverifiable topics?
this is the fundamental question I spent years thinking about. It was why I almost became an atheist, because unlike you, apparently, I think if something is false on the verifiable portions, it is likely to be false on the unverifiable portions. That is the problem accommodationalism presents me.
Why would you believe what it says about the unverifiable plan of salvation if it is false in all other areas of science? To me, that is just utterly bizzare.
they did. The sadducees were the ‘liberals’ of Christs time and the Pharisees were the ‘YECS’ of that time. Yes the issue of creation wasn’t a big deal but thee are lots of similarities between the two.
I know of that AiG promulgated idea that there were waters below. The problem is that they know nothing of the physics of structural engineering. Nor do they know of the brittleness of granite rocks or the time it takes to chemically weather granite into quartz sand and shale.
Here is what is proposed by the waters below. the high density crust (2.8 g/cc) is ‘floating’ on low density water. (1 gm /cc) and the water sits on an inner central core not equivalent to our modern core but it is solid all the way down below the water.
Such a situation has to be exactly gravitationally balanced or the thing collapses within days. It wouldn’t last 1636 years or what ever it is from the creation to the flood. The water can flow say at 10 mph and that could empty one side or the other due to gravitational instability causing the core to meet the crust as below.
Now you are going to try to say that this is what caused the collapse and the flood. I would say no it isn’t. Assuming we had a moon as the Bible says, and assuming we had a sun, then the tidal bulge as the earth rotate would crack the brittle floating granite and cause leaks on the first day. and these cracks would break up and cause the flood in a week, so you can’t claim that these are the mists in Eden. see below
Frankly, this is a worse idea than the old vapor canopy idea that my first CRSQ paper proved couldn’t exist. It took 10 years before other youngearther’s agreed, but they did eventually agree. You can find my first article at thislink. Go to page 164.
Edited to add: You are free to believe what you want, to teach what you want and to exercise your religion as you want. Freedom means the freedom to be wrong. If we can’t differ from some supercillioous arrogant people who think they know better than you, then we don’t actually have freedom. So enjoy your freedom even though I think your idea is nuts.
If you look at the Genesis text there are a number of things:
The earth is without shape and empty and darkness is over the deep
God says let there be light and there’s light
God makes the expanse/firmament thing and separates water from water
The water under the firmament is gathered to one place and dry land appears
God commands the land to produce vegetation - plants with seeds and trees bearing fruit
The sun and the moon and stars created
The waters are to swarm with things and the same with the expanse. It also says God made the creatures and he blessed them.
And so on.
The order is terribly wrong at face value. Taking a look at your post on the historical proclamations it seems that you’ve generally gone through various events and found them to be obviously consistent between how you’re interpreting the text and Genesis. Except that they’re not. You can’t have the ‘let there be light clause’ refer to anything even remotely close to the Big Bang because the earth already exists before God says ‘let there be light!’ The spirit is hovering over the waters but the earth doesn’t exist until 8 billion years after the universe began. The sun also wasn’t created after the earth and there were stars long before the sun, earth and even our galaxy. When did fruits come about? Definitely much later than the events I’ve mentioned so far.
At this point we can do a number of things. One thing is that you can aim to try to find ways to re-read the text such that it is consistent with modern science. I think that’s one of the approaches that you personally take and others do similar things like Hugh Ross/Reasons to Believe. But of course, when the Bible says that the Earth brought forth seed-bearing plants before God makes the sun and the moon and the stars, it appears as if you don’t actually think this happened. Now it did eventually happen at some point, so maybe you are aiming to argue that the order of Genesis 1 isn’t scientifically accurate, but the things that it talks about God making are real? Clarity would be helpful for me here if you have time.
However, there is another approach that many take, some in this thread that you find unacceptable.
Well, the Disney / Golem version (as you call it) has been the dominant understanding for thousands of years. Then the Darwin guy comes along and everything changes, believers are forced to reinterprete Genesis, Fact: nobody was not around when God created, nobody can’t be 100% sure.
Question - In my view Gen 1 is written in a Jewish framework (work 6 days, rest on the 7th). Gen 4 hints (no proof, there are othher explanations) humans already existed. Suppose from the humans available at that time A&E were the 2 people chosen by God (as He choose Israel, again following the Jewish framework) and put them in the Garden to be tested. A&E represent pre-Israel soto say. It’s something that makes sense to me, only problem is Gen 3:20 Eve being the mother of all living.
Just because the Bible is an ancient document doesn’t mean we throw the baby out with the bath water. What we Christians should do is follow the love and spiritual teachings of Jesus i.e. follow the law of love, the first true commandment. Just because the First couple of chapters of Genesis are in a sense “fictitious” in a nature doesn’t mean we throw the rest of the Bible out. And the same can be said for the Gospel, they aren’t history or biography’s, they are four different ways people have told/understood of the Jesus story, but that doesn’t throw me into a crisis of faith. My question is, is God bigger then a series of stories in Gen. 1-11 or even the Bible it self or have we constrained Him in our little box of theology and religion?
I view Genesis 1:1 as a summary of what follows, an introductory sentence, so no, I don’t think that rules out my Days of proclamation view.
But of course, when the Bible says that the Earth brought forth seed-bearing plants before God makes the sun and the moon and the stars, it appears as if you don’t actually think this happened. Now it did eventually happen at some point, so maybe you are aiming to argue that the order of Genesis 1 isn’t scientifically accurate, but the things that it talks about God making are real? Clarity would be helpful for me here if you have time.
Clearly you have not understood that the proclamations are PRETEMPORAL, they are the PLANNING of the universe and as such the order something is planned in does not have to be the order it is built in. Indeed architect often draw the exterior first, but of course can’t build that first. To help you understand, Yes, God proclaimed the existence of plants before the sun but didn’t MAKE the plants before the sun. Genesis 1 is billions of years prior to and also before time away from Genesis 1. The statement that God saw everything was good is a statement of God liking his plans. In between Gen 1 and 2 is when all the creativity happened.
Look, during my years of doubt I asked one question over and over. It is a question based upon the reality that we depend on the observations and experiences of the disciples for our belief in the resurrection. Like it or not, that is reality. Without their reports we have no reason to believe anyone rose from the dead.
So the question is “If the first Christians were as bad at logic and observational data as are the modern Christians, how on earth can I believe the reports by the disciples?”
I find YEC "science’ abysmal, but I find accommodationalism’s logic to be, well, totally lacking in logic. We don’t believe in cold fusion because it teaches us wonderful moral lessons(Cold Fusion is simply false), but we are willing to believe that a document which is objectively false, has the real path to salvation? Really? How silly!
I don’t believe the Book of Mormon teaches the way to salvation because there is not one shred of archaeological, genetic or historical piece of data supporting the occurrence of the events described therein. That book is fiction. Why would I not reject what it says about unverifiable metaphysical things?
You say we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, if we can’t trust the disciple’s account, then there is no baby in that water! Without anything verifiable the Bible is just another Book of Mormon, only better written and lacking in the plagiarism of the King James Bible found in the B o M…
Now, I resolved those doubts by the way the 12 lived and died for their faith. I couldn’t get around the apparent fact that they believed what they said. Indeed, one of my favorite stories is of John in his last years, chasing a guy he had converted but who had become the leader of a murderous band of thieves. Why would an 80+ year old man do that if he didn’t believe that kid’s soul was worth it? And the only reason he could be that sure it was, was if he believed that there was an afterlife by having seen the risen Christ.
Secondly conspiracies don’t hang together. At least 2 of the 3 witnesses to the Mormon plates recanted. I know of none of the disciples who recanted, even while being crucified and otherwise tormented.
Just nearly caught up but had to skim some to get here. The question in my mind now is why should we assume that anything in the Bible is about science in the modern sense? Even if one believes the Bible is divinely inspired, is there any reason to think pre-figuring modern science would have been the divine intent? That doesn’t make any sense to me. If the actual intent of the writing was not to address modern science then we can assume that sometimes what is written will accord with science and sometimes it does not. Isn’t that what we find?
