I have talked about God online a lot. What I have most found is people projecting Utilitarian Secular Humanism on the Bible.
Utilitarianism came from Jeremy Benthem and John Stewart Mills. They were not Christians.
Modern Liberalism - Everyone is born good.
Christianity - Original Sin.
There was a Counter Culture in the 1960’s. It looked to push all taboos and traditions. Which taboos and traditions? Christians taboos and traditions.
If are looking for what is wrong with a “Modern” World View, these are some of the culprits leading to roots of problems. Certain philosophers, like John Rawls, worked to create Philosophy that was set against Christians and Christianity. It was a rejection of. In their rejection, they may have stolen some concept they liked, and twisted them, and presented them back to people in a corrupt way.
I agree that the essence of truth comes from God. Genesis starts by saying that the universe, as understood literally by the ANE culture, comes from God. Therefore, the physical universe is truth. There can be no dispute that humans had nothing to do with the creation of the universe. There is also no dispute that words and their meaning are entirely a human creation. The literal translation of Genesis is well established and must include the ANE perspective and limitations of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary. A change to the literal translation based on modern knowledge from God’s creation would necessarily require a new identity with rules that could be applied to the translation of any ancient creation myth. It would look exclusively at the original man-made words without regard to ancient cultural bias and limitations. This is what an epistemic translation of Genesis does. It is an alternative to the literal translation, not a replacement. It would validate and give credibility to the Genesis creation myth using the truth of God’s creation. It would also give credibility to the Tanakh as truth from God that no other ancient scripture could claim. Otherwise, any ancient literature could make equal claim as truth.
That would not be a translation, it would be mangling the text.
By changing the meaning you just trash the text.
By forcing the scriptures to speak in a different worldview from what they were written in you don’t give credibility, you just make an idol of the different worldview.
And doing so also goes against the ancient concept of truth because it sets up a new standard and changes the meaning of the text.
I agree that the epistemic translation may be thought to mangle the literal translation, but it remains a translation of the words. I consider it a fulfillment of the text rather than a trashing of the text. While the meaning of the text may be enhanced by an epistemic translation, the appearance of the original written words doesn’t change. There were no better written words available than those used in the ancient Hebrew text.
It brings in meaning that God’s creation provides without changing any jot or tittle of the original written Hebrew words. The text is about God’s creation that He gave us to study as revelation exclusively from God, without any human intervention.
That might be difficult. God did not even write the Ten Commandments with His own hand let alone all of Scripture. Humans are God’s hands and feet on this earth, to exclude them would be meaningless. And to assume that humans have no part in the process would be foolish.
Bringing in meaning to Genesis from God’s creation should not be thought of as an invalid exterior meaning. While an epistemic rendition is exterior to a literal translation that is academically restricted, it is not exterior to the topic or the alleged source of inspiration for the information. Many words have several different meanings, especially in translation, even in modern vocabularies. If you are bothered by the use of the word ‘translation’, the epistemic understanding of Genesis may be called a ‘rendition’ or ‘interpretation’ if you prefer.