Define “true”.
{Note: this will reveal your actual worldview!}
And biblical scholars concluded the reality of “deep time” long before we even had telescopes.
Not a thing. That biblical scholars back before the telescope was invented came up with numbers ranging from thousands to a trillion shows how thoroughly the Bible is interested in providing a timeline.
I believe you.
@Christy
My focus has been Roman Catholicism. I must be picking up other stations.
@Bill_II There’s been a lot of additions made to Christianity.
Can you explain this part, didn’t quite understand.
Not sure what you mean, but some of the sources that Bishop Ussher used were secular histories that have never been a part of Christianity.
That’s what I mean. They’ve looked outside the bible.
It would be more accurate to make this comparison:
“In the beginning” = 13 billion years.
In fact, personally I would try this…
“Once upon a time” = 13 billion years
…if I wasn’t worried about the potential “mythology backlash”. I think that version better reflects how little interest Genesis 1-2 has in when things happened.
Our understanding about the biblical scriptures is always based on interpretations of the text. The interpretations can be accurate or not. I assume that no human knows the perfect interpretation about all the parts of the biblical scriptures - our interpretations of some details can be more or less misleading because we are just humans.
If we believe that God created the universe and the biblical scriptures are messages inspired by the same God, there should not be fundamental conflicts between the two sources in matters that are important for our relationship with God. If we stumble to apparent conflicts between the sources, it is likely that there is a mistake in our interpretations about the biblical scriptures, the creation, or both.
It is a fact that all available scientific measurements and studies tell about a very old Earth and much older universe. If someone interprets the beginning of Genesis (chapters 1-11) so that the Earth is less than 10’000 years old, there is a conflict between that interpretation and facts. A simple conclusion is that the interpretation of a young Earth is very likely a mislead, false interpretation.
If we study the beginning of Genesis more deeply, we can learn that Genesis does not tell about a young Earth - that is a mislead interpretation, based on reading the ancient text through assumptions that are not true. The apparent conflict between the facts and Genesis 1-11 is something that only exist in the heads of some people who read Genesis 1-11 like a modern history book or newspaper article - these types of literature did not exist in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Bible is not just a collection of books written in the ANE, it is itself part of the ANE world and should be read and interpreted as such.
History has events not fully or correctly recorded in words or artistry, now even audio/pictures/videos can be Fake(Not True). It would be an accomplishment if We could download all memory of Our Brain, now we’re in Science Fiction(Not True). So what is the Truth of His(Story)Jesus
I don’t really think it’s right to infer that when the Bible says “in the beginning,” it was referring to 4.5 billion years ago. It wasn’t. The ancients didn’t have an exact concept of deep time like we do. Probably a better translation would be “At Creation God established Heaven and Earth.” The focus is on the event and its significance, not the timeline. And the event has to do with ordering the cosmos and establishing rule, not bringing matter into existence from nothing. Matter already exists in the narrative, it is just chaotic and ungoverned, and devoid of life and flourishing. Heaven and Earth out of the Watery Deep is a reference to the three-tiered universe of ancient cosmology, it’s not a reference to planet Earth and Outer Space like our modern conception of the cosmos. What was important to the ancients were the boundaries of realms. God was associated with the heavenly realm, humans were associated with the earthly realm, and the dead and departed and forces of chaos were associated with the Deep or the Underworld. They thought the earth sat on pillars or foundations over the Deep and that Heaven and Earth were spearated by a hard dome sky (translated “firmament” in older translations).
We can’t and shouldn’t try to make this narrative, (which is explaining who God is and who humanity is in relationship to God) about science or history. That’s not what the text is trying to do.
In ANE mythotheology, darkness was a manifestation of chaos that threatened to undo the world. Every night, then, the gods had to fight chaos to get the sun through the underworld so it could rise again, preserving the world.
The Genesis writer turns this battle into just something Elohim uses as part of His ordinary workings of Creation, making a statement thereby that He has no need to fight chaos – it is His servant, just an ordinary part of the cycle. It shows His absolute authority and indirectly indicates that the gods of the nations are – to go modern colloquial – a bunch of wusses.
Cute, but it misses the point that Genesis is asserting that there was a beginning, and that Elohim started it.
Bravo! 
Their concept is nigh unto impossible for a modern to wrap his/her head around because it didn’t involve counting. We want everything measurable to have numbers that can be assigned, but to the ancients deep time wasn’t countable not because a person couldn’t possibly count that far but because counting wasn’t something that could even be done with/for/to it.
And if that doesn’t make sense it’s likely because I’m trying to describe something I at best only vaguely grasp.
I have not yet read about this in the other ANE cultures but in the ancient Egypt, the initial chaos sea was followed by a period when the gods and their realm existed but humans did not yet exist or at least did not yet live on earth. This was called the First time. The length of the First time was not specified - apparently the length was irrelevant, at least for humans.
Before the First time, there was the chaos sea. The length of this period was practically eternal or irrelevant, at least in the most ancient beliefs. Creation or more accurately the coming to being happened from the chaos, so the chaos sea was the starting point, what was before anything. There was no creation from nothing, although the chaos might sometimes be treated as ‘there was nothing’.
Egyptians started counting the day from the point when the sun ‘died’ and entered the invisible Duat (‘underworld’). So, the start of darkness in the evening was the beginning of a new ‘day cycle’. The ‘day cycle’ was divided into the dark period when the sun was in Duat (from the ‘death’ of the sun to the ‘rebirth’ of the sun in the morning) and the period of light when the sun developed from the newly born sun in the East to the dying sun that descended to death in the West.
Wow never thought of it like that, thanks for the insight.
This is a great explanation, thank you.
There is no way for the Genesis account of creation to describe the development of the earth and the universe in the detail that God’s creation reveals with scientific study. Any correlation between the literal interpretation of Genesis and the epistemic interpretation of the creation that is provided by scientific study requires complex reasoning and analysis. The Hebrew Bible represents an early rendition of literate language. Literate language (written words with complex meaning) is a human creation that is about 6000 years old in a reasonably functional form. The essential message of Genesis is that human language is powerful and God’s words have authority. To focus on the implied age of the earth from a literal reading of the story is a distraction from the important information. The genealogy that is described in Genesis provides a useful identity for the Hebrew people. The importance of identity in the human mind, real or imagined, is obvious throughout human civilization. God’s creation tells us that time is a variable depending on the observer. God is the only observer of the creation described in Genesis. Jewish rabbis refer to the time frame in Genesis as ‘divine days’. From a human perspective, the earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
Ivano dal Prete, On the Edge of Eternity, documents in detail the early and medieval church ideas about the age of the earth. Four main interpretations existed:
These views coexisted as rival interpretations until the 1200’s, when the Roman Catholic authorities decided against an eternal creation.
Ussher, like many other scholars in the 1500’s and 1600’s (including Isaac Newton) sought to compile all available data into an overall history of the world. The resulting dates of creation ranged from 3000’s to 5000’s BC, depending on various assumptions. Note that 4004 BC is exactly 4000 years before 4 BC, the generally accepted date for Jesus’ birth. This reflects a chiliastic idea, popular starting in the 2nd century AD, that Ps. 90:4 (quoted in II Peter) “a thousand years is like a day” means that the total history of the earth would be six periods of one thousand years to match the Genesis 1 days. Of course, that means that we’ve all been left behind since 1997. But the Ussher-style effort to compile all available data got major data supplements in the later 1600’s, first from archaeology and then (as Platonic and Aristotelian ideas were rejected in favor of what we would now think of as “natural” explanations for how stuff gets in rocks) from geology. Ussher’s approach led into the modern understanding of the earth as being quite old; uncritical copying his date after his scholarship was superseded contributed to the young-earth misunderstanding.
Yes.Read Reflections on Genesis.
I looked at the Table of Contents. You appear to cover an extremely broad range of topics with surprising few pages. Was your intent to just highlight the high points?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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