- From AiG’s The Battle for Biblical Authority** [“Our Conversation with Avery Foley” February 9, 2020]
- “If we can say, “Well, that’s not really what God meant there,” when it comes to origins, how can we say that God means what he says about sin and the only way to salvation, Jesus Christ?”
- The real question isn’t whether God means what He says, but what God meant by what He said. Take Jesus’ words: ‘I am the door’. Do you believe Jesus is made of wood and hinges? Of course not. You don’t think He was misleading either—you recognize the metaphor.
The same principle applies to Genesis. God’s Word always tells the truth, but it doesn’t always tell the truth in scientific categories. When Genesis says God created, that’s a true statement. When it describes creation in six days, that may be theological or liturgical language, not a laboratory report.
So the consistency isn’t lost. I take the Bible seriously in both Genesis and in the Gospels, but I respect the different kinds of truth God is teaching. In Genesis, it’s theological truth about God as Creator and humanity as His image-bearers. In the Gospels, it’s historical truth about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Both are reliable, IMO, when read as God intended."
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This is nonsense. This is a parallel phrase to those found in most ANE creation-of-people stories, and it doesn’t refer to tiny individual particles, it refers to dry dirt capable of being blown in the wind. “Formed” depicts God as scooping up a bunch of this stuff and shaping it.
That’s contrary to the image-of-God theme from Genesis on. In Genesis 1 humans are made as God’s image – in the Genesis 9:6 justification for the death penalty the verb is in the perfect: each human is fully the image of God, not “becoming”. The seventy acknowledged this when in the LXX in Genesis 2 the Hebrew יִּיצֶר֩ (yi-tzer) is rendered as ἐποίησεν (eh-POI-ay-sen), an aorist – and the aorist does not indicate a continuing process. So scholars who lived with Hebrew recognized that there is no process going in; God made humans as His image. (One could argue that this was provisional since the perfect was not used, but that does not make it less than whole. Indeed it cannot be less than whole, because “image of God” is a status/vocation, not an attribute: it cannot be marred, or broken, or diluted. The only difference is that in Christ that image is no longer provisional.)
That’s certainly what the seventy elders who translated the Septuagint understood.
In one sense Adam is correct, but he is implying that Jesus’ and Peter’s words indicate that the Flood was a global event and Genesis 6ff was written as history. But the grammar of neither Genesis nor Jesus nor Peter indicates such a thing, nor does the vocabulary, nor does the literary type.
So yes, the statements of Jesus and Peter fit with the Genesis narrative, but they do not align with the implication behind Adam’s words.
So you defend lies and poor theology by calling it “misinformation”.
This is one of the reasons that YEC drives so many people from the Gospel: it uses lies and misrepresentation and thus makes God look like a liar.
The deception is on the part of YEC: the text does not say what YEC claims it does. YEC turns the Creation accounts into newspaper reports, but that is not what they were written as. It reduces the first of those accounts to a recitation of MSWV facts and thereby throws Moses’ messages into the trash.
How can you not see that YEC operates on the basis of a modern scientific worldview? That is its foundation, both philosophically and historically.
This is false. To reach this view requires cherry-picking quotes and misrepresenting what dozens of theologians have said. For example, I encounter people quoting Augustine to support YEC, them not realizing that Augustine’s view was that Genesis 1 was not literal, that there were no individual days, that all of that happened in an instant.
That is not a view that comes from the Bible, in fact it arises from imposing a modern worldview on the scriptures. What can be affirmed from the Bible is that the Messiah was foretold, that Jesus was that Messiah, that He lived and taught, that He was put to death, that He rose again on the third day, that He ascended to the throne of power, and that all this was done for us. The scripture does not claim inerrancy in all things, but it does claim infallibility concerning the message of the Messiah.
For that matter, we are nowhere called to preach the merits of the Bible – we are rather called to proclaim the Gospel as outlined above. YECists spend 99% of their effort in matters we are not called to do!
YEC does – it’s their whole point. The moment someone says “The Bible contradicts evolution”, they have claimed that the Bible teaches science.
The Bible doesn’t even care about science! Science is like the dust from a set of sandals; it seems to come along everywhere, but it is not relevant to the journey. YEC is like a pair of disciples who spent their time trying to determine which was good dust and which was bad dust . . . instead of proclaiming what Jesus sent them to do!
The problem is that YEC tramples what the Bible intends to teach! It utterly throws away almost all the theology of Genesis 1! And in the case of Noah and the Flood, it pulls people’s eyes from the theology by focusing on details!
Here’s a fact: “deep time” was found in Genesis long before the first trace of modern science can be found – it shows up before, as rabbis studying the Tanakh concluded that the Creation was a million (a thousand times a thousand), a billion (a thousand times a thousand times a thousand), or even a trillion (!) years old (I forget the reasoning for a trillion, only that it seemed silly when I read it). I think the clearest statements come from eighth-twelfth century scholars who, studying Genesis 1, concluded that the universe started out as the smallest thing possible, expanded rapidly beyond comprehension, and the Earth was ancient beyond counting with the universe being far more ancient still.
BTW, not a one of those who studied under the Apostles or under their students considered the age of the earth to be important; the important point was that God created it all. Not a one thought that a young age was important – as reflected in the fact that there were a number of different figures mentioned and no one had a problem with that! Some considered Genesis 1 to be pure allegory, some fewer extended that to Genesis 2 – and that continued for centuries, with no one complaining about differing views.
As for evolution, the vast majority of biologists don’t care what Genesis says – they are setting up anything in opposition to anything, they’re studying the evidence God has allowed us to find and learn from (not that most of them would include God in that).
The Bible doesn’t teach a “Recent Creation” nor a “Global Flood”. Even taking Genesis literally, there’s no way to put a date to the creation of the universe or the Earth; and the text itself does not indicate that the Flood was global – in context it says that it wiped out the known world (which is what Peter says as well).
I don’t care about that – I care that YEC butchers the text of the scriptures by forcing a modern scientific worldview onto that text.
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All this does not cover up the issue that there are Christians and Christian denominations that believe theistic evolution and old Earth views are heresy.
William Dembski got into serious hot water during his stint at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for old Earth views and an earlier proposal that there was no Noah’s Flood. As he described later:
At the meeting with president, provost, dean, and senior professor, the president made it clear to me from the start that my job was on the line. “Job on the line” in this context does not mean finishing out the academic year and giving me a chance to find another academic job. My questioning the universality of Noah’s flood meant I was a heretic, or at least not suitable for teaching at Southern Baptist seminaries, and thus I’d need to be clearing my desk immediately—unless my theological soundness could be quickly reestablished.
With a severely autistic son, debts, and a family still upset about my experience at Baylor, I wasn’t about to bare my soul and tell this second star chamber (my first being Baylor’s External Review Committee) what I really thought. I therefore finessed it. You can read the statement I wrote for yourself, especially paragraph three, where I said just enough to keep my job, and just enough to give me room to recant, as I’m doing here.
If I had been feeling less vulnerable, if I had independent financial means, I would have said goodbye to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary right then and there. This is one of the things I find most destructive about fundamentalism, the constant threat that at any moment one can run afoul of the orthodoxy du jour, and be thrown under the bus because that’s the proper place for heretics.
This is a deeply unhealthy situation for theological education, leading to a slavish mentality among faculty, who must constantly monitor and censor themselves if they are to stay in the good graces of the fundamentalist power structures.
Now that’s not in keeping with the Southern Baptists of recent past, but I suspect the shift is more a reactionary & political story rather than a doctrinal one.
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The reason people don’t admit it is that it simply isn’t true, and demonstrates an ignorance of what science actually is, how it works, and what scientists actually do. Yes, science has limitations, but “were you there?” is not one of them. Sorry, but claiming that science has limitations that it does not is lying.
Or physical evidence. Take a look at this.
I think you’ll agree that this is a fossil of a fish, and that at some point in the past, it was, in fact, a fish. You don’t need to have a time machine or a TARDIS or an eyewitness, and you don’t need to have been there to see it happen. You just need the physical evidence that was left behind. To claim that that could have been anything other than a fish just because you weren’t there is simply ridiculous.
How do we know this? Because interpretation of physical evidence has rules. The rules set strict constraints on what you can and cannot claim about evidence, and it is these rules that allow you to make inferences about what happened in the past without having been there, and without needing a time machine or a TARDIS or an eyewitness.
It’s exactly the same with figuring out how old things are. Take zircon crystals for starters. I keep bringing these up because they alone are sufficient evidence that the Earth is billions of years old and not six thousand. Zircon crystals exist that contain approximately as much lead as uranium. The only way you can get that is by waiting more than four billion years for the uranium impurities in the zircons to decay into lead. Contamination won’t help you here because it is physically, chemically and crystallographically impossible to contaminate a zircon crystal with lead. Nor will leakage, because it will be lead that leaks out, leading to the U-Pb age being a lower limit. Nor will accelerated nuclear decay because accelerated nuclear decay is not a thing. Sure, you could propose a miracle, but any such miracle would have been deceptive in nature as it would serve no purpose whatsoever other than misleading us into believing that the Earth is older than it really is.
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Sadly this is true of many denominations, even among more mainline types, e.g. the LCMS. It led not just to destroying careers, but at least one entire educational institution (that had been praised worldwide for its innovation and excellence).
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Just as I keep bringing up upthrust mountain ranges. They all have rocks and crystals that have been deformed without breaking, and such deformation can only happen so fast – and we know the rates thanks to work and measurements in the laboratory. Using those rates we can look at such rocks and say, “This rock is at least x years old”. In one geology course we were given rock samples and asked to determine their age, and we arrived at a minimum of hundreds of thousands of years, i.e. the materials in those rocks could not have bent as much as they had in less time than that. So just from rocks from upthrust mountain ranges we know that the planet is at least hundreds of thousands of years old.
I like that example because most people understand that there are materials you can bend if you do it slowly but try to do it fast and they’ll snap.
= = = = =
BTW, I like the zircon thing because a university roommate who did his master’s in geology collected them from everywhere his research took him, noting the exact locations. Another friend was doing work involving the ages of various formations, and the added data was welcomed. That former roommate now has at least one sample from each location, now mounted in a display case his wife had made for him.
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Hi Terry,
yes, I would most definitely agree with Martin Luther.
And of course I wholeheartedly agree here too.
The Holy Bible was never intended to be a science textbook, that should be abundantly clear to all.
That said, it must be clarified here that God is not limited in His communication with us through the Holy Bible and the reality that the Bible is not intended to be a ‘scientific textbook’ does not preclude God informing us about events that He wishes us to know.
The language in Genesis about the Creation Event and Global Flood is so painstakingly written so that we will know the history of what occurred so very long ago, that I cannot ignore what the text ever so transparently tells us, just to accommodate 'deep time; and ‘evolution’. I don’t think it could be written any clearer than it is, to mean exactly what it Truthfully states that the days of creation were days as we know them, by writing ever so clearly:
5 … And the evening and the morning were the first day…
8 … And the evening and the morning were the second day.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
God knows the end before the beginning, He knew that people would come and teach ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ and would deceive many who are in the ‘world’.
Thus He ensured that there would be NO MISUNDERSTANDING by any people of any time throughout the age. He wrote the timing of the creation event in terms that everyone would understand, And the evening and the morning were the [number] day.
And as God well knew beforehand that false teaching would arise and mislead many, the TRUTH of the Holy Bible has remained immutable for ALL to see.
False teachings of ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ are now accepted in mainstream academia as established fact, and hence the issues aired here, now.
That is what is occurring here, and well meaning people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the ‘deep time’, ‘evolution’ soaked worldview appear unwilling or unable to hear the clear and honest truth of the Creation and Global Flood events that honestly DO NOT conflict with science whatsoever, despite the cries and accusations to the contrary that appear here on this website.
Please know that I understand where those views are coming from, as for many years I myself believed that the world was unimaginably old and that evolution was the mechanism that God used. And I used to cringe when I saw honest Christians saying the world was only six thousand years old. I thought to myself, they should not be saying that as it might lead people away from knowing Jesus.
How wrong I was, I can now see that I was deeply under the ‘deep time’, ‘evolution’ soaked worldview and was unable to see the wood for the trees. Even the ever so clear words in Genesis about the creation and flood, did not register with me, before my heart and eyes were opened to the Truth.
There never was any deep time!
Deep time is the cornerstone that’s continually reinforced in our culture everywhere, that keeps people from turning to God. In our schools and universities, in our museums, on our televisions and radios, on signage at national parks, on websites like this one, etc…
If people truly understood that the whole creation is only about six thousand years old, as measured here on Earth, then it becomes ever so abundantly clear that everything was created; but the firmly entrenched ‘deep time mythology’ provides some plausibility to the evolution mythology for those that don’t fully comprehend how inane the whole evolution myth actually is.
That’s how I see it.
God Bless,
jon
I disagree, the text is as clear as crystal about the creation week events and the Global Flood.
No extraneous interpretation is needed to be forced onto what is ever so clearly written.
God ensured that ALL people across history within this present age would understand it exactly the same.
A day is a day, and a Global Flood is total covering ALL the land everywhere under Heaven.
There really is no room whatsoever to misinterpret what God has ensured is so CLEARLY WRITTEN.
Where?
That is your interpretation. The Holy Bible speaks for itself, God made it that way.
How the creation week events can be interpreted as occurring over millions of years requires a lot of excessive dogma and deception.
How the Global Flood that covered ALL the land under Heaven, so that the High mountains were 15 cubits underwater, can be interpreted as a ‘local flood’ requires a lot of excessive dogma and deception.
In both cases above there does not appear to be any respect for the clearly written Truth being revealed in Genesis.
At last we can agree on something! Hallelujah!
There is a massive difference between field evidence and intel collected from a recent murder scene AND what actually occurred many thousands of years ago. If you can’t see that, there is little point in continuing this discussion.
God Bless,
jon
Sure it can. No problem. For one, carbon dating is soundly conceived, is rigorous, is operational science, and can determine the time of events that happened thousands of years ago.
In common with forensic science, geochronology reveals history without you having been there, as James points out, as sure as a fossil fish was a fish.
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Of course you will disagree, but that doesn’t change reality. Saying the Bible is “not a science textbook”, then insisting Genesis must be read as literal science-history is a contradiction—one that the early church and Reformers themselves warned us against.
- If Genesis were meant to be a scientific timetable, why did Augustine in the 4th century and Calvin in the 16th century both warn Christians not to read it that way? Debate isn’t a new thing—it shows the Spirit never intended Genesis to serve as a lab report.
- I was struck by your honesty in saying you once worried that YEC claims could turn people away from Christ. That makes me wonder—might it be that the heart of the gospel is best served when we keep Jesus at the center, even if faithful Christians differ on how to read Genesis?
Here
It is not an interpretation, it is an observation. Otherwise how do you explain the more than 45,000 Christian denominations in the world. Examining just a few will show great differences in their interpretation of Scripture.
Except when He doesn’t.
You are adding to the text. The flood covered the known world, AKA the Near East.
No difference. They both are based on EVIDENCE. You don’t like the evidence for the age of the earth but it is there none the less. The Ken Ham “were you there?” argument just doesn’t hold up.
Hi Terry,
absolutely yes, as long as the belief doesn’t lead people away from knowing Jesus and His merciful offer of salvation.
God Bless,
jon
It strikes me that online debates can feel like the “front lines” of evangelism, but sometimes they end up reinforcing identity more than persuading outsiders. Do you find these conversations change minds, or do they mainly strengthen your own convictions?
The existence of atheists who have read the bible renders your belief false.
It’s not complicated. It’s not hard to understand. It’s not real history.
Hi Terry,
I don’t really know, this is the only online website that I’ve had time to contribute to. But I do think it’s important that there is a balance of views. It does feel to me to be very one sided here, when I enter the fray.
Contrary to what it appears some may believe here, I don’t know a great deal about Ken Ham or AiG at all.
I did read some of their articles several decades ago,and found them to be fine, but recently I have not. I actually came across the video at the top of this post on YouTube whilst searching for something else, I watched it once, and was compelled to post it on this website.
Whether the content will change anyone’s beliefs about creation and the Global Flood of Noah’s day, I do not know. But I guess it has at least allowed people to air their respective views and write what they believe to be true.
I agree though that always the focus should be on our Lord and Saviour Jesus.
Ultimately, He is what the Holy Bible is all about.
As a Bible believing Christian, I know I am unworthy of the great Love that the Lord Jesus has for me, but I am grateful for His great Love and care for us all.
God Bless,
jon