Examining the Assumptions of Mosaic Creationism vis-a-vis the Assumptions of Evolutionary Creationism

An interpretation of the relevant biblical data that does not conflict with SGH.

I have been told that it is my assumptions that prevent me from finding and accepting such an interpretation. However, the assumptions identified in the OP did not prevent me from accepting a biblical interpretation that claims everyone is going to heaven, or one that claims that the Second Coming of Christ has already occurred (late in the first century, just when Jesus and His disciples said it would). Even though accepting both these interpretations made me a heretic in the eyes of most of my friends and fellow ministers, all it took to convince my conscience of them was a clear understanding that the relevant biblical data pointed unambiguously to them.

Therefore, even though you may think that my conscience is a hard sell, God knows that it is a soft touch for a clear biblical teaching.

You mean, like this:

Yep, that is the recurring problem.

But remember, SGH is something you invented which does not reflect the way you treat other passages of Scripture. In fact it doesn’t even reflect the way you treat Genesis 1.

Do you believe it’s a clear biblical teaching that there were 24 hour days even before the sun was created? Because that’s clear biblical teaching. There’s more clear biblical teaching here.

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Indeed. I accept an old earth and evolution because the earth really is old and evolution definitely happened.

A clear biblical teaching is like a Lego - it fits snugly with other clear biblical teachings. It is not like a brick which needs mortar applied in order to secure it with other bricks.

One of the things that the varied interpretations of biblical creation - Gap, Day-Age, Revelation Day, Literary Framework, Walton, and so on - have in common is the labor that must be expended in explaining them and correlating them with other biblical teachings.

When God gives light on a matter, it is an “Aha!” moment - and you hear the sound of Lego pieces snapping together.

Jay, that reminds me of an essay I read on quantifying some of the carbon imprint and climate change impact of the American obesity epidemic. It calculated the extra body weight of today’s average American and the resulting additional jet fuel and CO2 exhaust. Moreover, Disneyland had to re-paint the bench space allotment for each passenger on the African boat ride because the vessel was scraping bottom and even getting stuck in the mud.

And all of this illustrates that a Biblical idiom like “the fat of the land” can have positive connotations in one era and negative ones in another, even if the new connotations are introduced by comedians.

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Ok how does that work with the clear teaching that there were 24 hour days before the sun was even created?

That’s actually the kind of work required for any good Bible study. It seems that what you’re really saying is that you don’t think understanding the Bible should require any significant amount of thought.

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This topic brings to mind the students who have told me, “Homer’s The Odyssey sure doesn’t sound like poetry to me!” Likewise, whenever I make reference to poetic elements in Genesis 1, some Young Earth Creationist will always reply, “Genesis 1 is nothing like the poetry we see in the Psalms.” Even if we leave that claim unchallenged, it is much like saying that Beowulf can’t be poetry because it doesn’t sound like “Mary had a little lamb. It’s fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

Of course, most of the people who reprimand me by saying that Genesis 1 isn’t poetry (1) can’t read Hebrew poetry, and (2) can’t define what constitutes poetry. Indeed, defining poetry is no easy task! I would encourage readers to Google the topic and try to draft a one sentence definition of poetry. Better yet, try to compose a single paragraph which provides exhaustive heuristic rules for determining what is and isn’t poetry for any given text from every culture, language, and era of human history.

With those complexities in mind, consider that Genesis 1–and/or the oral tradition on which it is based—may be the product of a language and culture which predates Moses by many centuries. It may be a relic of an ancient literary structure complete unknown to us—just as it may be impossible to determine if any given phrase from an ancient text had an idiomatic meaning lost long ago.

The ancient Hebrews were intelligent people. They realized that days with evenings and mornings made no sense if no sun yet existed—unless the recurrent evenings-and-mornings chorus had another kind of purpose. They would have noticed multiple poetic elements in the Genesis creation pericope that a lot of English Bible readers in our day entirely miss. Yet, even the chiasms are evident to modern day English readers, if they are first explained and circled. Those are patterns which are poetic elements.

As I’ve often noted, if Genesis 1 had always been part of the Psalms and Seventh Day Adventist prophetess Ellen White hadn’t suffered a brain injury as a child (which led to hallucinations which included visions of the ancient earth and her “flights” to other planets), I doubt that George McReady Price would have written a book which led John Whitcomb Jr. to interpret Genesis 1 far more literally and “scientifically” in ways which launched the Young Earth Creationist “creation science” set of hermeneutics we know today.

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When I see the genetic fallacy committed by someone who ought to know better, it disappoints and discourages me.

That is not the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy says “This is wrong because the source has some unrelated failing”. In this case Socrates is rightly pointing out that if Ellen White hadn’t popularized her particular brand of YEC, it wouldn’t have been picked up by Price and Whitcomb later. The fact is that by the end of the nineteenth century YEC was all but dead. White revived it.

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You are on fire! haha

Just a quick summary noting the differences in style and language: Gen. 1 is closer to poetry than history, Gen. 12-50 is a “typical” Hebrew historical narrative, and Gen. 2-11 fits somewhere in between – not really history, but not poetry.

Obviously, the way that an author structures his work should provide a clue how to read these passages. This is how all literature works. But when the literature in question happens to be in the Bible, for some reason the usual rules for understanding fly out the window. How anyone can read Genesis 2-3 and conclude that it is literal, I will never know …

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You say that as if interpreters of Gen 2-3 fall into one category or another, yet I do not know of anyone who interprets those chapters entirely literally or entirely figuratively.

Straw men arguments, genetic fallacies… How is the truth to be found?

The discovery of truth ought to be prized more than winning an argument or saving face.

If the BioLogos forum exists to promote its views about Christianity and evolution, no problem. If, however, it exists to stigmatize alternative views…

To me, these are just conversations. Individuals may promote or stigmatize other views, but this isn’t necessarily why BL hosts our discussions. I see it as nothing more than a service.

I wasn’t trying to stigmatize other views. Just saying that I cannot understand how others can read Gen. 2-3 and arrive at a literal interpretation. To me, everything about it screams “non-literal” in the strongest possible terms. Anyway, I apologize if I gave offense. It wasn’t my intent.

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Good to know.

I would have thought that all sides agreed that the devil’s in figuring out which parts are literal and which are figurative. Surely no one reading Gen 2-3 thinks a physical snake is the source of all our woes or that “God” is a figurative expression referring to some other being.

I don’t want you to apologize. I’m just glad to hear it wasn’t your intent.

In any case, this is my penultimate post at BioLogos. Next up: my sign-off post.

Sign-Off

As I wrote above yesterday, I am signing off from this discussion board today - this being my last post. In closing, I thought I should give a report on my activity here.

I have been on this BioLogos forum from June 22nd until today - a week shy of two months. During that time, I have launched 12 threads (which your discussion software calls “topics”) - 3 major and 9 minor. By “major,” I mean of major importance to me. By “minor,” I mean secondary to, and supportive of, my interest in the major threads.

All the threads I have started, major and minor, were worded in the form of a question - except for the last one (“Examining the Assumptions of Mosaic Creationism vis-a-vis the Assumptions of Evolutionary Creationism”).

Here then is a re-cap of all my threads so that you may remember my participation here at BioLogos in terms of the focus I brought, and have kept, throughout my stay: a commitment to biblical authority coupled with a search for biblical clarity.

Major Threads

These major threads are listed in chronological order. That is, I focused my primary attention here at BioLogos on the first major thread until I transitioned to the second, and then finally to the third.

  • Who best reconciles the Bible and Evolution? (This is the thread with which I began my participation at BioLogos. It most clearly reflects the curiosity that brought me here.)

  • What biblical reasons are there to accept the scientific view of the earth as billions of years old? (This is the major thread I started and transitioned my attention to after being advised by several parties here that the best way to come to a conclusion about the question of evolution is to focus first on the age of the earth. Even in retrospect, I still think this was a good suggestion.)

  • Examining the Assumptions of Mosaic Creationism vis-a-vis the Assumptions of Evolutionary Creationism (This is the thread which I began a little over a week ago, and to which I have given my exclusive attention since then. I started it because my queries here - major and minor - had reached an impasse, I was on the verge of simply giving up, and this thread seemed a way of focusing tightly on a final energetic attempt to achieve closure regarding the initial curiosity that had brought me to BioLogos. It represents a coda in my participation here and I am glad I was encouraged to give it this extra oomph. While it didn’t give me closure on the overarching issue, it did bring my search to an acceptable conclusion.)

Minor Threads

I have listed these minor threads not so much in a chronological order as in a simple logical flow - grouping like curiosities. This logical flow derives from the way I view the importance and flow of the three major threads. Therefore, there is some chronological flow to what follows, but it is not strictly chronological.

Conclusion

Thanks to all who helped me in these threads. Alas, I am not able to report to you at this time a definitive conclusion to my work - that is, a clear and complete satisfaction of the curiosity that brought me here. However, I remain hopeful that Christ will yet bring me to that - in the form of an unswerving conviction. I will continue to seek Him until He does. (If He doesn’t, I’ll still serve Him gladly; if He does, I’ll write a book about that conclusion which you would be able to eventually find at www.mikegantt.com.) In any case, the portion of my seeking work that has taken place here at BioLogos hereby concludes…and that is why I am signing off. May God bless you all.

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When I see someone presume to correct others while flagrantly misusing a term which they don’t understand, that disappoints and discourages me. Please look up the meaning of the Genetic Fallacy in any compilation of logical fallacies.

In anti-evolution literature, especially among many of the Young Earth Creationist ministry websites, the misapplication of the Genetic Fallacy is almost as common as misbegotten complaints about the Ad Hominem Fallacy. Both misindentifications are also all too common in exchanges between anti-theists and some of their Christian opponents.

There’s a great video on Youtube where an audience members confidently and defiantly accuses William Lane Craig of the Ad Hominem Fallacy after Dr. Craig explains in a very entertaining way the glaring folly of some famous anti-theist’s argument. Craig got big laughs and a round of applause as he step-by-step explained to the young man the fact that even a very insulting criticism of an opponent in the midst of a factual explanation of a conclusion is not an Ad Hominem Fallacy simply by virtue of being abrasive or even downright discourteous. (The video has a title something like “Dr. William Lane Craig puts a cocky young man in his place to the audience’s delight.”

(Thank you to those who brought the aforementioned erroneous statement to my attention. I’m not always able to keep up with these threads in a timely manner.)

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@Socratic.Fanatic

I think you have flown off in another direction. You have spent a bit of time trying to explain how it could have been practiced and interpreted. But the point I was making was that pilng [heaping, stacking, balancing] rope on one’s head was not a known practice of submission.

But putting a coil of rope (a noose or a halter) around one’s neck was. And the same term “kabeltou” was used in the Bible in conjunction with this practice as the Freemasons would eventually use the term (though spelled cable-tow). The Freemasons inherited the term, not from the Templars (who called it merely a cord or rope), but from the Kabbalists who taught the Freemasons other Jewish idiom and number concepts connected with the Bible.

This practice was frequently encountered in the Medieval monastic period … sometimes monks would have themselves buried with the rope around their neck … to help prevent the Evil One from possessing their soul.

Prisoners who were under investigation for heresy would also have a rope placed around their neck to create the appropriate context and atmosphere as they were marched to an ecclesiastical judge, or to their execution.

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The irony is that your commitment to biblical authority may actually erode that very authority. When you insist on an interpretation of the Bible that can so easily shown to be wrong by the very Universe it is supposed to describe, then the Bible loses authority. If one has to ignore the Universe around us in order to find clarity in your interpretation of the Bible, then it reduces clarity.

When a position requires one to ignore observable reality, that position loses both clarity and authority.

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I have to agree with you completely, @T_aquaticus. It is this obvious clash

    • between what we can actually see in the world around us and what @Mike_Gantt would have us defend in the Bible because of a grammatical maneuver - -

that will further drive a wedge between the upcoming generations and the seminar schools that so carefuly work to maintain the status quo.

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Part of my purpose in the post is that practices change and knowledge of customs can even be lost entirely. Thus, we don’t necessarily know what was NOT a practice. You are correct in what you posted about the custom. But we don’t know if there were prior rope-on-the-head customs which might have related to those later customs.

I gave the military salute example to illustrate that point as well. When I was young, even a lot of historians would simply say that the modern salute began with knights of the Middle Ages raising their helmet visor. The explanation made a lot of sense, but now that explanation is held with strong reservations and many historians deny it outright as just pop-mythology. The custom may actually be rooted many thousands of years prior—along with a series of real and imagined explanations for it. (You’ve probably seen the Internet spam email that has gone around for years claiming the origin of all sorts of imagined practices of the MIddle Ages, including the stories being “thresholds” and “raining cats and dogs.” All of the entries on many such lists are wrong.)

I’m saying customs as well as the origins stories and the labels which are associated with them are like living entities—and centuries later it can be extremely difficult to sort out the “real” and the unreal.