I’ve been to fifty or more churches where YECism is held to, and I didn’t hear those things anywhere near as much as I heard YEC rhetoric, and I can’t think of any of them where it was pointed out that if YECism is wrong, Jesus is still Savior; what I did hear was that if there is even one scientific “error” in the Bible then the whole Bible is wrong.
I come to Genesis via the Hebrew first and foremost and it;s because of that original text that I see that YEcism is bad: it not only lies about science, it lies about the Bible!
It’s from the perspective of scripture that YECism is bad; science could care less. But YECism boils down to this: the Bible can only be true if it’s all scientifically true. So when students learn that Genesis 1 cannot be taken literally, they are doing exactly what YECism preaches when they walk away from the church and the faith.
I did a historical study and found where the ideas behind YECism come from, and they come out of the scientific ‘enlightenment’ where the idea that truth only comes from science. That idea was modified only slightly to the proposition that in order to be true a thing has to be 100% scientifically correct. Until that notion permeated the church, no one really worried about science and the Bible; most scientists were Christians and had no problem with an ancient universe or ancient Earth or the Bible being a bit off in scientific terms because they understood that the Bible is not to be measured by science.
But measuring it by science is exactly what YECism does – and that is destructive of faith because it has a wrong definition of truth and a wrong center.
I think we are discussing ideas from unrelated perspectives. Are you arguing for paganism or for the inerrancy of the Christian bible?
It appears to me that you do not accept the Christian theology of biblical inerrancy if indeed you make the claim biblical writers (very ancient writers btw) copied their ideas from paganism.
A couple of considerations that are very problematic in your theory…
The plan of salvation is depicted across the entire bible (both testaments)
The bible consists of books written by at least 35 different individuals who in many cases, had no contact with each other
The theology of the bible across its pages is very very consistent
External references support the biblical narrative timeline (ie its historical writings and figures are supported by outside sources)
give the above, how do you reconcile the idea that paganism was capable of being used to present such an accurate and consistent theology with writers who had no contact with each other? (remember most of the bible did not exist as a single book…it was a series of scrolls for the old testament and the new testament was brought together long after the death of Christ).
The above is gives the indication that the consistency of the Bible theology across its pages is irrelevant…it would be interesting to see some scholarly support for that view.
I know of one YEC that left the faith because of all the falsehoods from YECism about physical reality, but remarkably came back, understanding that evolution does not preclude God. He would be an exception to the usual. I also know of an angry YEC father and his apparently permanently estranged and angry atheist son, in a heartbreaker of a situation.
In my youth, I was a YEC too, but after enough education in the physical sciences I became an OEC about four decades ago when I heard Hugh Ross on the radio in an unusual and providential circumstance… this was before RTB was even founded. I then learned that ID was not scientific, but what probably was most significant was learning about neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution and that evolution does produce information and complexity.
Kidney cancer and the series of multiple remarkable providences surrounding that episode demonstrating that God is sovereign over the timing and placing of mutations in DNA was not a surprise, but it was another determinant in my acceptance of evolutionary science. So I am thankful that the journey had no trauma, and that the most important people in my life are accepting of it too, including and especially my wife.
and there is the problem right there…“four decades ago”.
I fully accept that if we go back even just 25 years ago, church folk were still running around more concerned with CBism and preaching gloom and doom than they were preaching genuine Grace. It wasn’t as bad as the reformation model, but it did gain a lot of traction just the same. Out of it came the likes of the Hillsong movement…which went the opposite direction and is equally as bad in my view. We went from legalism to liberalism in one foul swoop and lost sight of the goal.
Little of the current research in YEC that counters evolution existed 40 years ago. Yep you moved over to an alternative belief inclusive of evolutionary science, unfortunately one that seeks to follow secular scientific interpretation, and that was because at the time, you could not find evidence that supported your world view scientifically. I accept that, however times have changed and the evidence is now front and centre and it poses questions to the evolutionary model that are very significant (Carbon 14 in fossils/ coal and oil deposits, radio halos in Zircon crystals etc).
I am not aware that YEC scientists claim complete solutions, but like their counterparts, they are proposing promising areas of further research. However, unlike their counterparts, they are finding solutions that remain consistent with the bible in such as way as to not destroy its theology.
To go back more specifically to the question here…I had a work colleague who is an atheist throw exactly this question’s claim at me as an illustration of why the bible is a myth…“the Jewish Bible creation account was copied from Sumerian culture”.
So here is the dilemma, if a Christian accepts that the Bible is not authoritative, is not 100% innerant inspired by an Almighty God, how then do you propose to convince my atheist work colleague that the Jewish plagiarism of Sumerian cultures creation story can be ignored and he can accept and follow the model of Christianity? (a rhetorical question because this is irreconcilable…it cant be done)
They only care about that because their actual foundation is the belief that to be true, the Bible has to be 100% scientifically accurate. I don’t know if it’s there on websites, but Morris, one of the fathers of YECism, flat out said that to people at a conference I attended: he said that if anything in Genesis isn’t 100% true, then the Bible is false. He refused to listen to actually geology or anything else; his whole program was to force the Bible to appear scientifically correct.
All the “evidence” supporting a global flood is just twisted justifications to try to prove that they Bible really is true. There are too many different, independent ways that tells us that the Earth is millions of years old at the very least, from rock and crystal deformation to magnetic fields to radioactivity to sedimentation to fossils to metamorphism to plate subduction to coal…The first of those tells us several millions, the next tens of millions, the next hundreds of millions, and the others just confirm those.
And when you get down to it, declaring that the Earth is young just denies the incredible glory of God the Creator!
None of which has ever happened, but if it did, you realize that would alter the energy barrier to decay, which would alter the energy of the emitted particle. That in turn would alter the radius of the halos. Given that even YEC articles report radio halo diameters as consistent with modern reference energies, there could not have been significant differences in the ability of the alpha particle to escape the nucleus, and therefore no significant difference in the decay rate.
…and the heat problem
…and Noah being irradiated from without by the earth and sea water, and from within by the potassium-40 and Carbon-14 in his own body, beyond the help of iodine pills and bone marrow transplants.
…and where in the Bible is there mention accelerated nuclear decay? Who ordered that? Not Moses or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther. Earth was judged by a flood, not by nukes. If radiometric dating was never invented and did not offer a challenge to YEC, would anyone ever say, hey look, here’s a verse that tells us we need to add accelerated nuclear decay to our doctrine? Accelerated nuclear decay is not found in the Bible and has no support in observational science.
Yes it jolly well is, Adam. In fact, it’s what your very next sentence says:
And please kindly stop using the passive-aggressive derisory insult “mainstream secular science.” The reasons why scientifically literate people, Christians as well as everyone else, reject young earthism have nothing whatsoever to do with secularism. It’s a matter of honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information. Nothing more, nothing less.
As one who really came to Genesis via the Hebrew what I see in YECism is a failure to understand either science or the scriptures. They take as history things that are not because they have failed to grasp that the Old Testament, especially Genesis, is written with worldviews and literary types and forms of thought that are alien to us today, and they read Genesis as though it was a friend’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he lived through and is describing, because that’s what it looks like in English. That those literary types are written to standards of truth that differ from ours does not make them erroneous, it makes them different – and that’s all. Our ways of thinking are dominated by science, but taking that worldview and imposing it on the scriptures is the same mistake the Roman Catholic church made when it adopted the Aristotelian worldview and imposed it on the scriptures, thus coming up with bizarre notions such as Mary being born sinless, a doctrine that is actually insulting to her Son, or that the pope is the fount of the church as though no other apostles mattered, and other oddities: imposing a human-invented worldview on all the scriptures is an error if only for no other reason than that it denies that the worldviews actually represented in scripture have any validity – but if they had no validity, God would not have used writers who worked within and from those worldviews.
Some of the church fathers noted that to deny the humanity of the authors God selected risks denying the Incarnation because it inherently rejects the idea that God can work through human flesh. But the inspiration of scripture can only be possible because of the Incarnation: Jesus becoming flesh is what opened the door to the Spirit working in human beings – however crazy that sounds to people bound to thinking of cause and effect occurring in linear fashion in time, though scientists are now understanding that in the quantum world, at the very base of being, cause and effect do not have to progress forward in time, so why should not spiritual matters? Yes, that’s an argument from the lesser to the greater, but Jesus used that very form of argument!
Again, it isn’t about turning anything into “allegory” (a form of reasoning that is actually very rare in the Bible), it’s about recognizing what types of literature the writer’s God chose used. Trying to make their worldviews fit ours strips away meaning from the scriptures; ignoring their worldviews and using only ours denies them the dignity of having had God speak to them in their terms – which is what the Incarnation is all about: bringing the divine to the human in order to bring the human back to the divine.
Genesis is the primary issue – and early Genesis at that – because by the time we get to the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his family the literary types are already converging towards ours. Even so, there are differences in how they wrote and how we would – though those ways aren’t as far apart as they were a millennium ago because our culture has adopted more than a few ways of thinking that are found in the scriptures.
Since the literary types before Abraham are not intended to be history in the way we think of it, there’s no “stripping away history” involved when reading them for what they are. Taking an event and doing what we would call mythologizing it was a perfectly acceptable and valid way of conveying truth back then – not that it is foreign to us; Shakespeare mythologizes in order to make points, and he’s following in the footsteps of the Greek playwrights – and we do not lessen the meaning of the scriptures by reading them for what they are, we uphold them and in so doing we stand with the saints of old and say, “God has spoken to us all!” in words we can understand. Don’t forget that the inspired writer tells us directly that God has spoken in diverse ways; that’s something Paul illustrates when he tells us that a certain story from the Old Testament is an allegory (and we say, "What? because we never saw it that way). Even God does it; He got the point across to Peter that the Gentiles were included and not rejected by an allegory using a sheet full of animals!
To digress a tiny bit, ponder the odd form of literature of the first Genesis Creation account, what I learned to call a “royal chronicle”. One of its odd features to us is that none of the details are meant to be taken literally in themselves, but they are fully intended to be treated literally within the account in terms of setting forth the point of the account – which for a royal chronicle is to proclaim a mighty accomplishment of a great king. So the writer structured it poetically with days,balancing three upon/against (not in the sense of contrary but in the sense of leaning and supporting one another) three, and those days aren’t meant as literal days – except that in understanding what this great king Elohim has done they can be taken literally, and the literal sense and the non-literal poetic reinforce and strengthen the declaration that our great King accomplished the mighty work of creating all things. And at the same time it is a second form of literature because the way the writer built the structure it turns out as an ANE account of establishing and sanctifying and dedicating a temple – which is totally missed in the YEC approach (and in fact has been denounced by a number of YEC advocates) because it is treated as mere history (in one example of idiocy a YEC preacher told me that it can’t be a temple establishment/filling/dedication because it’s history!).
What was new to the people of Israel was the meaning of sacrifice, as that had been mangled beyond hep by the intervening pagan millennia: the pagan concept boils down to “buying off God”, as Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde put it, but the true meaning doesn’t involve buying off God, it involves God offering to be gracious if we offer to Him what He has specified, not because He by nature needs to be satisfied but because by nature He seeks to be a loving Father. The pagan version of sacrifice is akin to groveling and begging, but the YHWH-Elohim version of sacrifice invites us to lift up our eyes to Him and rejoice! It’s really how most of the pagan creation stories differ as well; they maintain that the gods fashioned mankind as slaves or servants and a few of the gods had to save mankind from the rest, while the Genesis accounts declare that God formed us to be His friends.
What was also new was that people couldn’t just pick a place and decide that’s where they are going to make sacrifices (though it kind of looks that way in Genesis) and so draw the gods’ attention to them at that place (which is what the Tower of Babel was really about, forcing the heavens to pay attention of their terms and not those of the gods), but that we meet God at the place and time of His choosing, that He condescends to live among His people in a house in one place (though He originally didn’t choose either the place or even to have a Temple, He in effect humbled Himself and accepted what His chosen king offered). That aimed them toward the ultimate lesson that just as it was just one place and just at appointed times that sacrifices were welcome, it was also in the end and at root one Sacrifice as well!
Of course the entire sanctuary service is an allegory; it’s also much more than that. Paul would say that the lesson of the Temple as allegory is that it isn’t the sacrifices that made the people holy, it was the faith that by bringing those sacrifices to that Temple God would keep a promise a make them holy. Also, the entire sanctuary service is symbol, but it’s more than just symbol (though in the ancient sense the difference is vanishingly minute because the ancient sense of a symbol was something that conveyed
what it portrayed).
But it doesn’t matter whether the Genesis Creation accounts are literal; the Temple and the sacrifices and the meaning God assigned them were very real, and it has to be remembered that while they may on one level be allegory, they were always more than allegory – that allegorizing of Old Testament events was a failure of imagination by the German theologians who set it off, and adopting their views robbed a couple of generations of believers of something basic.
I will say this: the Incarnation cannot be allegory, nor can any part of it, because it is the end of allegory: allegory requires something to point to that is beyond itself, and there is not anything, could not be anything, beyond the intersection of True God and True Man; that Event is what all allegories ultimately point to!
I heard the start of a sermon once that tried allegorizing the Resurrection; I don’t know how it turned out because I walked out and led a friend with me. How a preacher with fourteen years of education, ten of it in seminary and graduate seminary and doctoral seminary, in theology could manage to arrive at the notion that the Resurrection could be anything but real… well, it doesn’t actually baffle me because I’ve read enough of the liberal German theologians to follow the train of (what passes for) thought, but the idiocy of it appalls me.
“Inerrancy”. I hold to that in the way the early church meant it: that the Word of the Lord, in the fashion of an arrow fired by a champion archer, strikes the targets where God aims it. I reject it in the sense that YECism means it because that is a failure to understand what scripture is and an insult against the generations to whom God spoke in ways strange to us – indeed an insult to the Holy Spirit Who chose to speak in divers ways.
I am arguing for Jesus as the firstborn, a term that when used amidst the bits of Greek philosophy Paul was engaging and using means “opener of the way”, where the opener of a way imposes his/its “shape”, “form”, “character”, and “likeness” on that opening so that everything that comes through it takes on the “Shape” etc. of the opening and thus of the Opener. Since Jesus was the Opener of the Way of all Creation, it is not possible for all pagan or polytheists of whatever form concepts to be devoid of truth. And I’m thus arguing the fact that parts of Genesis lift material straight from pagan sources should not be surprising because pagans, even as Lucifer, cannot help but serve God even in their opposition to the True God.
You mean the minority and indeed novel view that the Bible has to fit the standard of scientific materialism, which is where the YEC definition of inerrancy arose. I oppose that because it belittles the revelation of God, arrogantly demanding that He could only have spoken in terms that make us happy. It is a “Christian theology” only in the sense that some Christians hold it; it has never been a Christian theology in being universal or necessary. And as Augustine noted quite correctly, such parading of ignorance drives people from the faith.
None of those are contrary at all to “my theory”. But there is a problem in the last one because it relies on a fallacy, namely that given a collection of writings the fact that a subset of that collection is upheld historically then all the writings in the collection must be historical. Trying to make writings that had nothing historical (as we understand it) in mind ruins the message of those writings.
Because Christ is the Opener of the Way: paganism has no choice but to here and there speak some truth, even if it is distorted as is the case of the Egyptian creation story which the Genesis writer copied and edited.
Indeed if the fact that the inspired writer lifted the details of the Egyptian story and tweaked them is ignored much of the purpose – indeed most of the immediate purpose – is lost! To grasp what that writer was doing we have to see that he very skillfully used the Egyptians’ own account to utterly deny that their gods were of any account at all; they weren’t even gods, they were just made things formed for YHWH-Elohim’s own purposes and as such were His tools and property! Read in the Hebrew and with the Egyptian version in mind, the first Creation story in Genesis is a brilliant piece of polemic writing, with (as I like to summarize it colloquially) its message of “All your gods are blong to YHWH!” For a people coming out of a place where they could not have helped but hear the Egyptian version that story struck a mortal blow to everything the people might have wondered about, and turning it into two other kinds of literature at once was utter genius. As a polemic it essentially tells the Israelites, “Don’t sweat it; the gods of the people you are leaving behind are NOTHING! YHWH has got this!”
Truth has to pop up in paganism; they can’t escape it because they are also shaped by Jesus the Opener of the Way. That the inspired writers could pick up pieces of partial truth and tweak them to show fuller truth should be expected. In fact if it hadn’t been so, I would not have believed Christianity because its claims about Christ are such that bits of truth have to pop up because every little bit, from quarks to quasars, from seas to seasons, from refuse to Resurrection, have been formed by the character of Christ and inevitably serve Him and declare Him.
No it doesn’t – it merely declares that even God’s enemies are nevertheless His servants. It’s all part of “all things work together for good to those who love Him”; they have to work together for good because of Who our Jesus is!
This is something that bugs me about Christians who shy from celebrating the great holidays of Christ’s life due to the fact that they were once associated with some pagan god or goddess: the concepts of those pagan deities don’t belong to them, they belong to Jesus! Everything about Astarte that was celebrated in the past is stolen property – new life, the light of the world, love and fertility; none of those belong to anyone but Christ, so it is not just fitting but imperative that every celebration of those things be taken captive and brought back to Christ from whom they came.
The same thing applies to pagan writings: whatever is true (whatever is honorable!) in them should be taken from them, indeed stripped from them such that they are left with nothing and are remembered no more, cast into a sea of forgetfulness so deep that no one will even remember their names (which the Genesis writer does a nice bit of by not even naming two of the greatest Egyptian gods; he just names them as ‘appliances’ that serve a function).
“Secular scientific interpretation” is mostly a fantasy in the minds of fearful Christians. Just about every science professor I had in college was a Christian, and they would all have laughed at that phrase because science doesn’t care about being secular or religious, it cares about finding truth. I’ve been privileged to hear two Nobel laureates who were Christian scientists and both insisted that the Old Testament is right, that there is no “secular” realm, there is only God’s realm, and that science is as Einstein (and others – they all stole it from Johannes Kepler) put it, “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him”:. Yes, there are atheists who try to bend things to exclude God, but even my atheist physics professor back in 1990 pitied them because scientists should never try to speak on things science cannot address.
I have no clue what “CBism” is, but I do know that in the late 1980s YECism was alive and well on campuses; they just hadn’t hijacked the term “intelligent design” yet. Morris was already active working to warp Christians’ views of science and of scripture, and going tom Christian conferences of whatever kind it was hard to avoid having YECers pushing their agenda.
As for Grace, that’s something I’ve always found lacking in YEC-specific conferences; they reek more of hate than of mercy.
You’re talking about a time when in our informal intelligent design club – formed almost exclusively of former agnostics and atheists – a fair number had come to believe there must be a Designer from their study of evolution. Since that time the strength of the argument for a Designer from evolution has only strengthened as the evidence continues to show just how elegant a Design evolution is.
And also since then the evidence for YECism has only gotten worse; the only change has been that the charlatans pushing it have gotten slicker and more polished. (For the record, I started calling them charlatans after I met Henry Morris.)
Another false – well, the opposite of a dichotomy, I suppose; a false joining: “authoritative” and “inerrant” are not actually linked, In fact I would say that the modern view of inerrancy as held by YECism is contrary to the authority of the scriptures because it attempts to make them something they do not claim at all.
By pointing out that if there really is a Creator-God then by necessity His truth will pop up all over the place – and then going straight to Paul’s description of Jesus as Opener of the Way (i.e. the Alpha as in Alpha and Omega) and explaining that since everything in some way proclaims the character of Christ then of course there will be truth found here and there in pagan teaching.
But the point then is that what was taken from pagan teachings – something you regularly have avoided noticing here – is always “tweaked” because it isn’t quite right. Even when Paul on Mars Hill used Greek poetry and noted that “in Him we live and move and have our being” is a true statement about God, he moved on to show that it wasn’t sufficient.
Sorry, but it can be – I just showed it.
I kept this bit apart from the above because it struck me that thinking those are irreconcilable falls under the category noted by J. B. Phillips when he titled a book Your_God_Is_Too_Small [observation: we really ought to be able to do underlining!]. The notion that paganism can’t have any truth makes paganism awfully powerful! and thus says God is not παντοκράτωρ (pan-toh-KRA-tore), “All-ruler”.
I would argue that “secular science” and similar terms are actually tautologies, because secular (in this sort of context) means “not specifically religious”, and given that science is not religion, all science is secular by definition.
There he is with his personal opinion, and its theology, truly a self-contradiction. There is nothing ‘truly’ about illogical thinking. All the while neglecting the otherness of his ‘theology’, to which he has never responded.
George Washington admitting he cut down the cherry tree is a myth. Nonetheless, I’d think it fair to say that it has stopped many a young person from telling a lie. Mission accomplished!
