Generally, that he died for me and saved me from my sins. Specifically, that I thought I had felt him interacting in my life on certain occasions.
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Your point about how the YEC viewpoint makes the original creation seem like a “candyland” is interesting. I kind of agree with you that the EC viewpoint makes better sense of the harsh realities of life. Still, the YEC view has the advantage of saying that a perfect creation was the ideal that got corrupted later, while the EC view has creation corrupted from the beginning.
I’d like to get some more information on your view of the difference between Adam and the other early hominids (like his parents, or the Neanderthals). Like, do you think the only visible difference was a full grasp of Turing- complete language? (Or maybe you don’t believe in a historical Adam and Eve at all?)
I think they can, having had similar thoughts as you at a similar age. I did not have some of the resources like this website available, but still managed to hold it together into what I feel is a better founded faith that I can take comfort and confidence in, though the conflict with some of those outside my understanding still causes difficulty.
I think that reading more is a help, and something readily available to you. I would suggest staying with some of the books by John Walton, whose Lost World of Scripture goes a long way toward helping you understand how the Bible came to be, as well as his other Lost World books. Peter Enns has a nice little book on How the Scripture Really Works that gives insight as to the purpose behind the writings. N.T. Wright is always good, and I would recommend his Surprised by Hope, and his Surprised by Scripture regarding biblical interpretation. If you want a little more interaction with science and faith, I recently read The Bible & Ancient Science : Principles of Interpretation - by Lamoureux which gives a view by someone who is both a Ph.D. in science and theology.
If you like me were raised in a monolithic denomination, it may be a little surprising how faithful learned Christians dedicating their lives to God can have different takes than the party line you grew up with. Each little sub-culture in Christianity has its pet authors, and you have to look up and around to discover a fuller world of truth. There are bad ones out there also, but stick with those with a proven track record to get your bearings. If you are like me, there may be even some anger felt towards your prior limitations of experience in your church. I think some is perhaps a little healthy in motivation to seek truth, but ultimately we should give grace to those doing the best they could in their own cultural stream.
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I mean, it’s very different from those other mythologies in key respects, notably that it only involved one God and there was no war or sex involved in the creation. Just pure creative will.
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First of all, thanks for the article/video links earlier on, I appreciated the perspectives shown.
I don’t believe God inspired Scripture through direct dictation, since he obviously utilized the individual writing styles and vocabularies of the human authors he used. But I also believe that part of the inspiration process involved leading the human authors to “step outside of their worldview” in what they wrote. For example, the idea that Jesus Christ was the Son of God was completely foreign to the apostle Paul until God inspired him to write the truth. Similarly, there’s no in principle reason why God couldn’t have inspired whoever wrote Genesis 1 to describe the earth as a globe suspended in space with animals evolving over billions of years under His direction. Worldview shifting? Yes. Impossible? Obviously not.
That said, I recognize that God had no in principle reason why He would correct the ANE cosmology of the Biblical writers. I think it’s possible that God accommodated to them because He wanted the primary focus to be on them understanding their relationship to Him as creator, and not wanting them to be distracted by side scientific details that wouldn’t be fully understood for thousands of years.
The thing I’m still having trouble with is when the Bible seems to be clearly affirming something incorrect. Like when it affirms an ANE Flat-earth cosmology or a literal six-day timeline of creation. I can kind of understand the perspective that Genesis 1 is just supposed to be symbolic theological myth, but it’s still uncomfortable to call anything in the Bible “mythology.”
(P.S. Why is verbal, plenary inspiration incompatible with modern cognition understanding?)
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Hi @SeekerKid
What an astounding story you must have, from home schooled YEC to EC in a couple of years. I’m a fiercely rational man. Now. It’s taken over 50 years. And I’ve never had a higher view of scripture. Of its space needle claim towering over the landscape: incarnation. Without that it’s myth. Still the best myth by a country mile if there were no incarnation; it’s absolutely brilliant. The OT is full of brilliance, let alone the NT. If it’s a man made artefact, there is nothing to touch it.
And I want to believe, that at least in it’s claim above all others, it’s true.
But trying to make any of the infinitely lesser claims, claims that may not have been believed as such by their writers and by Jesus, fit with the untouchable magisterium of science is an insult to both. A&E literally never existed. Not in the 770–126 ka Chibanian. We have no idea if they existed before the 597 BCE Babylonian Exile as mythical archetypes. And when, later, much later, they began to exist as literal rather than archetypal figures in the minds of some.
So there is nothing to be sceptical of scripture about, apart from its interpretation and its great claim. The greatest of all human history to come.
The short version is that it sees words as “containing” meaning. Modern communication theory has moved away from that model to one in which meaning-making is a cooperative enterprise that involves words and linguistic structures triggering context-based inferences.
Also when we translate from the original language, we aren’t trying to find “equivalent” words. We are trying to trigger the same inferences about meaning that would have been triggered by the text in the context shared by the author and the original audience. That’s never going to be an exact match because of the nature of language and the fact that we rely on tons of implicit knowledge (our worldview) to process meaning.
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Sure. It’s a monotheistic mythology of a god of love. It’s still not written like the stories of Moses, Jesus or Saul. You can fight it. But it’s not written like any of the other historical or biographical accounts in the Bible. That’s why you can only find it similar to highly symbolic places like revelation or psalms.
But you can’t argue that it’s written in a way to heaven interpreted literally and just because Jesus or Paul references it does not mean they read it as a literal story or indicated that it should be understood as such. There is no way, except being badly taught, that it’s written as a actual recording of history.
The reason the Bible is saying something incorrect is because it is, if we are talking about the creation account. However, the Bible doesn’t have to contain no error for it to be truthful. The Bible is authoritative in the way it is intended to be. For example, there are no literal “pillars of the earth”, but that was used to make a point. Using culturally relevant concepts is not being dishonest, but is instead a vehicle for the message. You have to “accommodate” certain things to match your audience’s background and understanding.
We still use the Bohr model of the atom, even though it is a flawed model compared to the quantum-mechanical explanation. We use it to reveal concepts about the basic nature of atoms, not as a definite truth explaining every aspect of the atom perfectly. As long as the Bible uses potentially flawed ideas in that manner, I see no issue with using them.
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I think a lot of people are too quick to impose a history/myth or fact/fiction binary on Genesis when those are probably not appropriate categories. Genesis contains theological narratives. Some are probably more grounded in factual history than others. The creation account in Genesis 1 uses very poetic language and notable careful literary structure. There are good arguments that it isn’t intending to tell how the world was created, but to assert who created it and refute specific pagan beliefs from other culture’s origin myths. The Garden of Eden account uses symbolism and imagery that is echoed elsewhere, in the design of the ark of the covenant and the layout of the temple as well as in the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. The account of the Flood ties in to the creation account (it is a recreation event and there are obvious parallels) and the analogical means of salvation in the face of coming judgment preached by John the Baptist. The tower of Babel provides a literary foil for the Abrahamic covenant in the next chapter. Pointing out these literary features of the narratives is not equivalent to saying “it’s just myth” or “it’s fiction.” It’s pointing out that the stories were communicating on a literary level in literary ways (through theological types, figurative language, symbols, sacred numerology, repeated motifs, etc.) and that the authors were probably more concerned with communicating what they saw as the most essential truths about God and humanity and Israel’s covenant with God then they were interested in communicating objective historical data. That doesn’t mean “it’s all just made up.” It means the telling of the history has been shaped by forms, conventions, religious commitments, and cultural norms that are different from our own modern history writing conventions.
I think this is a legit struggle. I personally don’t mind the idea that God would humor ancient ideas about biology or cosmology. The fact that he accommodated women as chattel, a pretty disturbing rape culture, polygamy, slavery, justice via death penalty, and genocidal war and conquest is far more troubling. It’s okay to wrestle with these things, they’re hard. I don’t think God is sitting back disappointed in us because we are trying our best to understand him and his ways, and some things don’t make sense to us from our current perspective.
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Or… the simple words of perfection and corruption are an overly simplistic understanding of what happened. You see I think the mind creating ideals from God also enabled us to indulge in self-destructive habits, like blaming others for our own failings so we don’t learn from our mistakes. This carried to absurd extremes where murderers and rapist blame their victims for their crime. So in the story this went from Adam blaming God and Eve, to Eve blaming the angel (snake), to Cain blaming his brother Abel – three quick steps to fratricide and only a few more until the entire human world was filled with so much murder, abuse, and torment that God was sorry He made us at all.
There are a lot of difficulties with the question… Nature and reality doesn’t give a great deal of support to the overly black and white distinctions of human languages. In nature we see mostly continuous spectrums.
Looks like the Neanderthals had the same Foxp2 adaptation to language use, so there wasn’t much difference physically as far as language capability from ourselves.
What difference do ideas make? The difference can be enormous and rather small and subtle at the same time – the difference between human and monster, but also one which we also see bridged by redemption. Consider what Jesus said in Luke 9:60, “let the dead bury their own dead.” Sometimes it can seem like people locked into the habits of their lives are like the living dead with rather limited awareness. And yet when ideas are the only difference, doesn’t it mean the potential is all there? Do we measure our humanity by our social and mental realities or by our potential for greater things? A quick consideration of infants and children puts the emphasis on potential, doesn’t it?
So once God had spoken to Adam and the ideas were out there to be shared with the rest, then all that potential in other homo sapiens was also waiting to be unlocked in them as well. And ideas can spread rather quickly, for one thing that primates have always excelled at is imitation.
And yet I think the human mind, which is life in the medium of human language, is an enormous difference. We can measure the difference in the rates of change and development, where we see changes happening in thousands of years (or less) as compared to the millions years it takes for evolution. That is a factor of a thousand at least.
But if the difference between man and animals is smaller than we thought, then it wouldn’t mean much more to me than we should value animals more than we do. But perhaps I don’t really understand all the theological struggle over this issue. More than one person has said that the existence of alien civilizations would be a problem for Christianity and I really couldn’t understand why.
My views on the subject:
(background notes: I have been EC since I could understand what that meant, and I am an invertebrate paleontologist)
I believe that God guided evolution and other natural processes to create members of the genus Homo about 2.6 MYA (along with all the other diversity we see in the world today), and anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago, then, around 70-100,000 years ago (this is speculative), in what is now the Persian Gulf, he directly created (or selected) two humans, with the added characteristics of a soul, complex language, and other traits that are uniquely human.
These two humans then rebelled against God, and were driven out of the perfect garden, into the surrounding world. They then had children who intermarried with the surrounding populations, spreading their new characteristics throughout the entire human population by c. 40,000 BC.
Sometime between then and 10,000 years ago, Noah lived in that same area, and was told to build a boat to ensure his family, livestock, and some of the local fauna’s survival when the gulf reflooded with ocean water.
I am also of the “inerrant but figurative, and meant to convey the theological concept, without needing to explain the scientific side in detail, as that would just confuse the original audience” view.
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When I asked for his help, I didn’t believe for a split second that He was real. I desperately needed help. It wasn’t the first time. It was the first time I prayed to him and I begged him for help, over and over again. As I’ve shared, I sought his help as I prayed from the bottom of my heart. There was no bargaining–“if you help me, I promise to stop being an idiot.” Nothing like that. I really needed and wanted his help although again, I had no faith at all that He was able to help me because He didn’t exist and no matter how much I needed and wanted him to be real, I could not fool myself into believing what wasn’t true. But, I was sincere, totally.
A few weeks from that night I moved and someone knocked on my door and asked me if I had ever heard of the 4 spiritual laws? What timing. I was opening the door as he knocked, to go out looking for trouble and to get drunk. I had hundreds of questions for him.
Jesus became real to me that night and continued to manifest his presence over the next few weeks as he and I talked and I bought a bible and talked to God–and He spoke to me through that bible, through nature, through my completely changing attitude around the people I met in my new neighborhood. An invisible wind gently blew through my soul and cleansed me of heaps of hatred, lust, jealousy, bitterness, the desire too drink, smoke, curse and to use women.
What happened to me can not happen to people like me. I am a skeptic’s skeptic. I was street smart enough to know the differences between bull and reality. Yet, this love in my heart poured out of me for everyone, everyone, I met.
He will reveal himself to anyone who wants to know him, if your desire consumes you and you call on the name of Jesus Christ. I have seen what He does over and over.
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The first human records are from 5000 years ago. Human agriculture began 12,000 years ago. Before that, for 2.6 million years our ancestors were hunters and we adapted to this role as the best long distant runners on the planet.
So what you are saying is that after humans had already evolved for millions of years, God ignored all of them to magically create special humans. So why did God create the other humans by evolution? Was this to supply the magical humans with slaves, or to train the magical humans in absolute obedience to God, so they would slaughter men women and children when their god says they are really only animals?
And what about these souls you say God created the magical humans with? Why did these souls make absolutely no difference in how they lived for more than 55,000 years – eleven times as long as human history? Does this “soul” you believe in actually do anything? Or is the point of these invisible “souls,” to give you the right to enslave and slaughter the non-magical humans?
I don’t believe in the rational soul of the Greeks, nor the bouncing soul of transmigration or reincarnation, nor the divine fragment soul of the Gnostics, nor this do-nothing soul of yours either. I believe in the spiritual body talked about by Paul in 1 Cor 15 which grows from the natural body like a plant from a seed. And I certainly don’t believe in any magical creation. God’s omnipotence doesn’t mean He can do whatever you say by whatever means you care to dictate, and there is certainly no higher power He can command to do things. Everything He creates and accomplishes has to be done by His own knowledge and ability about how things can be accomplished. God’s creation is not just a dream or a story where He just imagines stuff, but has all the rational coherence of reality where things do what they do because of how they are made.
So… anyway… I would tell a different story…
The adaptation to the use of language was at least from 500,000 years ago when Neanderthals split from other humans. Modern homo sapiens evolved in one of the remnants of the human species fleeing global glaciation to the south of Africa. Around 100,000 years ago the climate changed these homo sapiens spread northward absorbing at least two other surviving remnants, Neanderthal and Denisovans to cover the globe by about 15,000 years ago (crossing the Bering straight).
Between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago God adopted two homo sapiens Adam and Eve, speaking to them and raising them up as his own children. Thus he gave them another inheritance, one of ideas which gave life to the human mind. He gave them a parental warning much like “don’t play in the street or you will die,” only this was about the life of their spiritual body rather than their physical life. Challenged by the angel Lucifer, Adam and Eve failed to follow God’s guidance and the dire consequence God warned came to pass. They misused the mind God gave them to reject responsibility by blaming others and refusing to learn from their mistake, this rapidly led the human civilization created and led by their descendants to become a thing of absolute horror. So God destroyed this civilization with a local flood and He pushed Noah’s descendants to spread throughout the world among all the homo sapiens out there to create many different nations and cultures rather than just one dominated by evil as they had before.
At least that is where I see the Biblical Genesis history fitting in between the evolutionary history and the written history. I see no reason to take it less seriously than this: historical but not literal or magical using symbolic elements to convey invisible spiritual realities (as so many other parts of the Bible has done).
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Trying to make science fit faith is at least just as confusing now. More so.
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It would seem from the text, to me, that he directly created Adam and Eve, but that may be inaccurate, we do not have sufficient information to tell.
Their soul would have made an enormous difference in how they lived, in terms of their ability to have a close relationship with God, but in their overall lifestyle, it need not have made a difference, the same way that being a Christian doesn’t determine your profession.
To all of the others in these three paragraphs, I can merely quote Paul “by no means!” (I would be surprised if someone hasn’t tried this sort of justification for their actions).
Defining “language” is problematic, to say the least, if by it one means “able to communicate information”, then that has existed for about 3.5 billion years. If, on the other hand, one means “able to formulate complex sentences”, then it developed sometime between 500,000 and 70,000 years ago, and we have no way, at present, of telling any more precisely than that.
Homo sapiens appeared in east Africa, probably from Homo that had stayed there, rather than returning (but again, impossible to tell).
Covering the whole globe is more like 1000 AD, for Pacific islands.
Other that the exact timing, and some of the exact phrasing, I would agree with the last two paragraphs.
Here are some other BioLogos resources on the topic. 
I work by a rule of thumb that when something is particularly convenient for evil behavior then that is the most likely motivation and origin for that thing. I would see Christianity sanitized of these things which are so convenient for an evil use. So to take another example, I oppose the definition of sin as disobedience. That is so very convenient for using Christianity as a tool of power over others even to make good people do evil things as Weinberg suggests. In a Christianity which actually makes the world a better place, sin would be defined differently such as self-destructive habits which destroy our potential for good and our freedom of will.
This brings up a host of questions for me and I always enjoy your perspective as its usually informed and reasonable so I am going to let it all fly out here. In the end I think the Bible stops being “the Bible” as most people understand it today and throughout history if we follow accommodation through to its logical conclusion. The author of the article seems to warn against or suggest as much when stating at the end: “It can be pressed to account for any and every difficulty in the Bible without merit.”
The author also writes: “From God’s perspective, would it not make more sense for him to communicate with the conventions, customs, and cultural trappings of his intended audience rather than those of its readers several millennia later?”
So we got all the bad cosmology and incorrect prescientific views out of the way. Genesis 1-3 and even the flood account can be dismissed (or explained) under this rubric of accommodation as it looks like a reworking of older flood narratives.
What about all the instances of blatant immorality in the Old Testament? All the genocide and a very angry, jealous and murderous deity who looks just as primitive as the cosmology he is embedded within? What about the treatment of women? Slaves? God commanding the death of a man for picking up sticks on the sabbath, murdering (probably) millions of children and so on?
I can see God not caring about teaching cosmology, but turning a blind eye to immorality, injustice and suffering of his children rather than just correcting it? Rather than just banning frivolous divorce, God has Moses lists how it is to be done with a certificate? Jesus has to correct it much later. Did God just feel it was prudent to wait for some Hellenization to occur? Rather than outlawing slavery God just makes sure you don’t beat the slaves to death? Was it the divine right of kings to have hundreds of concubines? Did God just goes with the flow of women as the property of men, listed alongside livestock? Are we accommodating morality? Because the Old Testament is in dire need of this accommodation.
I hate to play the village-atheist card but we have primitive cosmology, a primitive war-mongering nationalistic deity, primitive morality, a primitive worldview about bad things happening due to sin, a primitive view of God controlling all aspects of nature, and many stories which certainly seem unhistorical based on all available evidence. Distinguishing between what the Bible assumes, affirms or merely narrates is a challenging thing and it is not how most people read the Bible.
And if we accommodate morality, which I very much think we should since I find things like rape wrong, why not move on to the allegedly historical stories in the Bible. The Exodus narrative was a foundational story to Jewish people but as its told it is filled with very difficult logistic problems and I think Archaeological evidence and extra-Biblical evidence is strongly lacking here. Are we calling this just a story, maybe with some small core of truth? Is the truth really theological like early Genesis? Is it just a story meant to inspire? Why is it in the Bible? What should it mean to us today since it really didn’t happen like the account narrates?
Historians also tell us the gospel authors were not eyewitnesses but creatively shaped traditions they inherited in Greek which were already developed. For example, Mark has a number of literary features in his gospel. The sandwich technique is one. Mark loves to sandwich material together (Jairus and the Bleeding woman, the Fig tree and temple cleansing, Peter’s denial with Jesus’ trial) and so on. In addition, many have found where Jesus hided his identity in Mark (these called “messianic secret”) and his over-the-top portrayal of the stupidity of disciples as literary or narrative devices. The disciples in many cases may simply be Mark’s own community. Not to mention self-enclosed units such as the chiastic structure of Mark 2:1-3:6 which interrupt the narrative of 1:45 and 3:7 show high levels of sophisticated literary ability. Sequences like that do not turn up by chance and are certainly not historical as they stand. Details would be embellished to make them fit. Many of these an other controversy stories are troubling and look like Jesus defending the later church, not Jesus ca. 30 AD. If we just admit what they and the Gospel of Mark is, these “errors” disappear.
The Chicago statement “accommodates” imprecise citation, inexact numbers, non-chronological narration and so on. Should they also accommodate historical errors, contradictions between accounts and the creative activity of the evangelists themselves? Should we view Paul’s mistaken urgent eschatology as the basis for his pro-asceticism and statements whereas we should generally just stay in the position we are in when saved? Is that why like Jesus its suggested its good not to marry? Maybe later on in the Pastorals, after it was realized Jesus was not coming back right away, someone writing in Paul’s name (we can accommodate the practice of pseudonymous writings as accepted convention can’t we?) can temper this and reflect a much more pro-marraige attitude.
At some point he goal posts are being moved so much by accommodators the doctrine of inerrancy is actually quite meaningless and I am not even sure what “accommodation” is supposed to mean. I think even a lot of evangelicals are starting to drop the term inerrancy as its just no longer applicable and leads to more misunderstandings than anything else. But I find it odd that so many people are willing to “accommodate” Biblical cosmology but not all the rest that so desperately needs it. We can regard Genesis as non-historical but why not the Matthean infancy narrative? This sounds a lot like trying to hold on to a model of inspiration that just needs to be let go of it.
Personally, I have settled on the Bible is inspired insofar as it serves the Salvific purposes for which God intended it. When a person reads it with an open heart or through the spirit God will move and instruct them according to his will. Other than that, it has the same resemblance of any other human work, filled with errors and opinions.But if we define inspiration along those lines then the Bible is extremely good at doing its job. The salvific record the Gospel it relays speaks for itself. Sometimes the sinfulness of man and overall picture of Jesus is the only thing I think the Bible can ultimately be trusted on. This is not to say that most of it is problematic. But issues run all throughout the Bible from cover to cover that need “accommodating.” It is certainly not just Adam and Eve.
Vinnie
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