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

Faith & Science Conversation
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You and others seem to view me as a monochromatic version of your former, and less mature, selves. Perhaps you are right. Time, not a debate about it, will tell. Therefore, I’ll leave it aside.

As for the OP, I think we could make more progress on it if we’d focus on the three key passages identified there as opposed to talking so much in generalities.

I detect two distinct criticisms of Mosaic Creationism in this thread:

  1. The three passages don’t say what I think they do.
  2. Even if the three passages say what I think they do, it’s moot because modern science speaks more reliably about the matter than does the Bible.

To which do you hold? And if you say “both,” then my question to you is (as it was to @Chris_Falter here), “If the second is true, why waste time discussing the first?”

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No, Chris has not done this. On the contrary, he is pointing out that since the Bible speaks within the phenomenalistic culture of its era, it makes statements about the physical universe which we know are in contradiction to science. He is not saying they are science. He is using “scientific content” to describe “content which can be tested by science”.

Ironically you are the one being anachronistic, because you are the one claiming that when the Bible speaks of a solid firmament it doesn’t really mean a solid firmament, and when the Bible speaks of the sun moving it doesn’t really mean the sun was moving. You think that the early Hebrews really did understand these statements with the correct scientific frame of reference, when very clearly they did not.

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[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:141, topic:36410”]
I detect two distinct criticisms of Mosaic Creationism in this thread:

The three passages don’t say what I think they do.[/quote]

Yes. This is where you need to focus.

[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:141, topic:36410”]
Even if the three passages say what I think they do, it’s moot because modern science speaks more reliably about the matter than does the Bible.[/quote]

I don’t see that anyone has said this.

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And that’s why I appreciate that Mike started these threads: he is expressing viewpoints which are shared by many millions of Christians. And so many Christians like me spent many years and a lot of effort finding our paths out of those deeply cherished positions. I truly don’t want to sound smug or condescending. (Indeed, over the course of my lifetime I would say that I was overly hesitant and far too slow-witted in letting the great masses of evidence change my mind on these topics.)

Mike, you’ve asked a lot of good questions and I could easily write three or four weighty tomes just answering the specific questions you’ve addressed to me. But you may see me pulling back a little from now on, not out of exasperation but because I feel like you need time to reread a lot of the answers that people have already posted, investigate various scholars including various Biologos articles, and letting all of it sink in. It’s hard stuff.

I’m feeling a bit like I did when I ignored the wise advise of my departmental colleagues at my first full-time academic appointment. I was determined to be the amiable professor who students could always count on. So I allowed a very enthusiastic and convivial undergrad to take a 400-level course even though he hadn’t completed one of the 300-level prerequisites. He managed to convince me that he would enroll in the prerequisite course concurrently and that he already knew most of the content from a similar course he took in the Eastern European country of his birth—even though the international service which evaluates academic course credit transfers for college transcript purposes rejected that Hungarian (?) course credit. I later regretted my “generosity” and really didn’t do the student any favor. The questions he posed during my lectures were a daily reminder that he was falling further and further behind. He was a hard-working, eager learner. But it was like expecting someone who has mastered algebra to take a differential equations course while still struggling through differentiation and integration calculus problems beyond a textbook’s illustrations. Familiarity is not enough. Sometimes one has to learn the prerequisite material to a level of very confident experience before taking on the next level. (I had physicist friends tell me that they had to pause and spend a lot of time reviewing some obscure areas of mathematics before they could tackle and truly understand how Einstein managed to draft his General Theory of Relativity. Sometimes there just aren’t any shortcuts.)

We live in a society where a lot of things are easy to do without our having to learn much about the processes which make them possible. People cook with microwaves without knowing about magnetrons. People use GPS devices without understanding how Einstein’s theory keeps them accurate. And how many people use computers without knowing NAND gates, VLSI design, and programming? Similarly, most people can easily read Genesis 1 with no idea of the struggles of many centuries of Bible translators who worked hard just to get the English words right. And those translators knew that even their word choice over the tiniest nuance of the text could potentially send the reader off-track into misunderstandings and grossly unwarranted tangents leading to centuries of error-prone traditions. (e.g., rendering Hebrew ERETZ as “earth” instead of the more typical “land”, “country”, or “region” in some of the Genesis 1 to 11 passages.) These issues are virtually impossible to summarize and explain in a footnote at the bottom of a page in a study Bible. And even then, most Christians won’t fully appreciate or even remember that study note. How could they? Millions of monolingual Bible readers have not had opportunity to learn that language from experience that translation is not a one-for-one word substitution process. That brings a story to mind:

Years ago I remember somebody at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association saying that they had been thrilled to hear from a women who was willing to translate all of Billy Graham’s books into Latvian, Lithuanian, and various Slavic languages. She lived close to the BGEA headquarters so one of the executives told her that he would deliver a copy of all of the books on his way home from work. He discovered that the reason she had lots of time to do the translation work for free was because she was on full disability. The executive asked her, “So, did you grow up in a multilingual home in the Baltic area?” She said, “Oh no. I don’t speak any of these languages. I just recently bought the various dictionaries, and looking up all of the words will help pass the time. I get very bored sitting on my couch.”

That story sounds extreme but the vast majority of Christians have a grasp of language translation and cross-culture communication dynamics that are not greatly more sophisticated that that of the well-meaning lady. If I had difficulty explaining to Dr. X [I wish I could freely mention the theologian’s name which you would almost all recognize] why the “rules for gender rendering in Bible translation” which he tried to write in an all-night typing marathon in his motel room were laughably naive, how can we expect the average Christian to quickly grasp the shocking realities of Biblical hermeneutics—and the differences between the literal and the truthful in Genesis?

Therefore, I have a lot of compassion for the Christ-follower who throws up his or her hands and says, “So, if what you are saying is true, we can’t really know anything about anything for certain! Then everything in the Bible can always be explained away!” Of course, that is the wrong conclusion, but the emotional reaction can be respected.

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Kind of. But not exactly.

I am NOT saying that the Bible makes valid scientific claims about planet earth being flat and not moving. I would just remind some participants that when one sees the word earth in an Old Testament passage, it is usually a translation of the Hebrew word ERETZ, which is usually translated as “land”, “nation”, “country”, “region”, or even “wilderness”, such in various as with various place names in the KJV. ERETZ in Hebrew is actually much comparable to the word earth in 1611 English: most speakers at the time of the King James Bible tended to associate earth with the ground they tilled and walked upon, NOT planet earth.

It is not surprising that since 1611 the predominant association with the word earth is planet earth----but we shouldn’t presume that association in older English texts and certainly not in most translations of ancient and even modern Hebrew. Indeed, even today, the nation of Israel calls itself ERETZ YISRAEL (“Land of Israel” or “Nation of Israel”) and nobody would ever translate the phrase as “Planet Israel”!

With that in mind, when the Bible describes the ERETZ as flat, is there anything “wrong” about saying that “the land is flat”? Moreover, the ancients were obviously familiar with lands which were NOT flat and hills/mountains [a single Hebrew word tends to apply to both English concepts]. Likewise, Iowans live in a place derided by travelers as boringly flat, yet nobody doubts that anthills rise up despite the flatness.

Besides, in daily life we are quite correct to think of our experience of planet earth as quite flat. After all, as we Iook towards the horizon, we see a flat earth that deviates from a “perfect flatness” by only about six or seven inches per mile. As a ratio of 1/2 of a foot per 5,280 feet, that is a deviation from absolute flatness of only about 1 in 10,560 feet, about 0.005 %. In that perspective, the working assumption of even a relatively flat planet earth works quite well—just as saying that the sun rises every morning is not really a false statement.

No doubt about it: ancient Hebrew cosmology is not up to modern day standards. Yet on the way to making that point a lot of today’s writers make a lot of casual statements which are nearly as flawed as the ancient Hebrew’s views.

Similarly, does the Bible say that planet earth is immobile? Again, most of the time the text is talking about the ERETZ, the land, and is there any doubt that even in our day we use the land beneath our feet as something we rely upon to be stable and immobile—despite our knowledge of the earth’s rotation and the frequency of earthquakes and micro-earthquakes? The ancient also dealt with earthquakes, so were even they making false claims when describing the ERETZ (land) as “can’t be moved”? No, many of the references to such were making observations similar to our own. Architects and engineers routinely refer (and depend upon) the earth beneath our feet as a reliably immobile foundation on which to build. That makes complete sense, today and in ancient times.

All of this serves to remind us of the dangers of literal assumptions and overwrought inerrancy doctrinal statements. It also makes things difficult for any writer who cares about veracity, precision, and potentially confusing the reader! Meanwhile, we need to always give ancient writers the benefit of the doubt and reasonable leeway of expression which we would wish for ourselves.

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I think it’s implicit in Assumption #2. Nonetheless, I just added a sentence there for your sake.

As for most everything else you’ve said in this post, it appears the river is widening. (However, I wonder if it is actually widening or only appearing to widen.)

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@Socratic.Fanatic

I was pondering that question as well. In the end, either the scribes had no interest in any kind of ultimate statement of fact (since, most everyone knew there were sometimes Earthquakes), it seems verifiable that the Yahwists believed that only Yahweh himself could move the Earth.

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@Bill_II, I wanted to be sure you saw this post so I’m posting it a second time.

P.S. The formatting is off in this version so please revert back to the original if you choose to respond.

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I think the Bible makes general mundane statements just as we do, not focusing on the exceptions but summarizing reality as it is usually observed. Thus, even the ERETZ (land,nation,region) did now and then experience an earthquake or even an occasional mudslide or sinkhole collapse, most of the time one could count on the land beneath one’s feet being reliably stable (i.e., unmoved.) We tend to speak and write in the very same terms. We say things like “The farmer plants seeds in the spring and harvest many more seeds in the fall.” even though farmers also plant winter wheat in the fall and harvest it then next summer. And sometimes a farmer plants a field and then drought, hard rains, insects, or disease result in no harvest at all. Yet, nobody would complain that the original statement about the general cycle of springtime and harvest was a false or misleading statement. Nevertheless, a lot of people—both Christians and anti-Bible people—try to read the Bible in hyper-literal ways which ignore what we consider common sense in our own language and culture.

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Needless to say, @Socratic.Fanatic, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

But in this “Mosaic” thread, I do not think we could get “fair & equal air time” for this general principle of verbal casualness. While @Mike_Gantt is perfectly comfortable offering apologia for texts that give him some trouble, when the table is pivoted, all of a sudden we are parsing sentences down to the conjugating bone!

It is the general truth of your statement that allows me to tolerate the oddities in Genesis.

So while you have the soul of a diplomat when it comes to offering placid acceptance of oddities here and there … it serves you poorly if you don’t have a plan B for when someone rejects the idea that Yahweh would let his scribes write in a casual way!

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Here you go @Mike_Gantt

Since pre-history is concerned with history before the invention of writing I am sure they are different. Wikipedia says a trope is a figure of speech.

To me unknown, but the collected writings were referred to as if written by Moses. This would have been acceptable to a person in the ANE. It is the difference between being written with the authority of Moses and written by Moses. To me they are the inspired Words of God so the author really doesn’t matter. You are aware that most of the books in our Bible don’t contain anything that identifies the author, most certainly including “The Books of Moses.” The source of the authority is actually God. But I hasten to add that this does not automatically make them “true” for us in the sense you employ.

You might be surprised by my answer but the author, whoever he was, used the words that the Holy Spirit wanted him to use. Trying to work out why God would do this is pointless as we will never know. In my view, the author had heard the creation story and probably accepted it as true so he was not deceiving himself.

I believe I know you well enough by now to anticipate the question that is even now forming on your lips, “If this was written under the authority of God how could it be a lie?”

A few examples.

If God had said “Write that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.” That would be a lie.

If God had said “Write that the earth does not move.” That would be true to the author but with a future revelation provided by science we would know that it is not true literally.

For homework, provide my answer to a 6,000 year age of the earth.

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I’m drawing a line.

Mike, considering how many of my questions and posts you ignore, I don’t think you are in any position to chide me that I’m not working full-time here and being as detailed as you demand. (I’m fine with some good-natured snarkiness on your part—but it gets old after a while when you make demands of others as if they work for you.)

I’m happy to be as helpful as I can. But considering how you regularly dodge the issues I raise, cherry-pick without explaining why, and use what appear to be arbitrary double-standards, I just don’t feel like making the time investment anymore. (I don’t care whether you agree with my answers. But I do get frustrated when you simply ignore them or casually dismiss in the most unsubstantial ways what is explained to you by so many people in careful detail.)

I have this nagging feeling that you are going to eventually tell people elsewhere that “I took my questions to the people on the Biologos forum and they just weren’t very helpful. I got very few answers and even the theologians and Bible translators there had little of substance to say. Not much came of my attempts to get answers.”

Sorry. Until it appears that you are seriously reflecting on what people are explaining to you here and starting to apply that information to thinking through your positions, I’ve lost interest. I admit it: I don’t always respond well to demands when I don’t get the impression that the other person is really trying to grasp the important points presented.

Perhaps others will have more patience than this crusty old man who is a little weary of an exchange that involves very interesting topics but which is not likely to be as fruitful as I had previously hoped.

Mike, I will be happy to reconsider if I see a change in your approach. (Seriously, I’ve tried the best that I can but I’m giving up. I don’t think you are truly listening. This just isn’t worth my effort.)

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Hi Mike,

When I speak of statements with scientific content, I mean statements that reveal an understanding of how the stuff around us is structured and how it operates in a proximate manner. For example, if I release a pencil from my hand, it falls to the ground due to gravity.

So when we read a Bible passage that says that God sends the rain, I would agree that it is devoid of scientific content. It manifests no “model” of how clouds and rain operate. Such a statement can peacefully coexist with a statement about the water cycle.

When a statement asserts that God stores up the waters above the raqi’a in great jars, however, that contains an understanding of structures and proximate causality in the physical universe. It is a statement with scientific content.

Do you believe that the ancient Hebrews had no conception of how the stuff around them was structured? Anthropologists have surveyed many hundreds of cultures, and every single one without exception has had an understanding of how the world works, how animals reproduce, where diseases come from, etc.

It would be a most astonishing thing for a sacred text with the size and scope of the Bible to manifest no understanding of how the world above and below operates. To suggest that I am importing a Western view into the Scriptures is basically an assertion that Israel, unlike any culture known in the history of the world, had no view of how the world around them worked.

Now if I were to condemn them on the basis of their imperfect knowledge of the world, you could well accuse me of cultural hegemony. But if I read God’s revelation to them with sensitivity to the fact that their culture is different than mine, how am I importing my worldview into their text?

I’m not saying that I can see with 100% clarity. However, claiming there is no cultural difference to focus on does not seem helpful. We need scholars of the ancient Near East to help us understand their culture, including their science, so we can understand what God spoke to them millenia ago.

Also, your phrasing of “Sola Scriptura” seems like it will lead nowhere in a discussion like this. If I am reading you correctly, once someone arrives at a conclusion, there is no deviation from it. So how would you apply assumption 2a to Marcion, Arius, Mary Baker Eddy, or Joseph Smith?

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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@Mike_Gantt -

You articulation of “Sola Scriptura” does not recognize that Augustine, Origen, and other theologians who disagree with MC did so (or, if still alive, do so) on the basis of the Scriptures.

Have you read Augustine’s Literal Interpretation of Genesis? He examines the Genesis text with extreme care, and he rejects MC specifically due to its lack of consistency with the first chapters.

You seem to be claiming that you are proceeding on the basis of Sola Scriptura, whereas Augustine and Origen are introducing non-Scriptural authorities–therefore you can ignore them. But I don’t want to leap to conclusions. So I ask:

Is that what you are claiming? If not, then how does your articulation of 2a help anyone decide between Mike’s Mosaic Creationism on the one hand and Augustine’s rejection of 6 24-hour days on the other?

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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HI Chris,

Another way to put what you are saying (I think) is that scientific hypotheses must be mechanistic.

That’s why the ID hypothesis (there was an intelligent designer) fails to be scientific in both the mechanistic way and in the testable way.

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Hi Ben,

I appreciate any and all attempts to clarify our ideas, so thanks for chipping in. I would prefer to say that the structures within the universe exist, and the interactions occur, according to an order that can be discerned through scientific investigation. And the order, once discerned, can be used to predict future observations.

“Mechanistic” seems a bit ambiguous to me; my concern is that some readers might think it implies adherence to metaphysical materialism, which is not where I stand. I do not think that you necessarily use the word that way, though.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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The worldview of biblical writers was that creation exists in essentially two dimensions: visible (physical) and invisible (spiritual). The scientific view is that there are multiple physical dimensions. For example, I am seated at my desk. Science tells me I am moving through space at a high rate of speed, but that is not something my five senses are telling me. Science also tells me that that my desk is made up of atoms and that there is more empty space in this “hard” surface than actual matter, but I know my hand will still smart if I slap it on the table. Science has therefore brought me awareness of two additional physical dimensions - but that awareness does not change the primary physical dimension that I still operate within and that the ancients operated within as well. Nor does science change, or render unimportant, the spiritual dimension which lies behind the physical dimension(s).

Modern thinkers impose their worldview on ancient thinkers when they assume that the ancients thought of activities in the spiritual realm the same way we think of activities in the “behind the scenes” physical dimension(s).

Similarly, consider that science gives us germ theory such that we know unseen physical germs lie behind diseases. The ancients thought that God or evil spirits lie behind diseases. Cultural insensitivity is at work if moderns assume that ancients erroneously thought of evil spirits as causes when, had they known better, they would have thought of germs as causes. It would be more “culturally sensitive” to recognize that the awareness of germs is awareness of an additional physical dimension - not of a replacement for the spiritual dimension.

The culturally insensitive modern imposes his worldview on the ancients when he assumes that an ancient thought of the behind-the-scenes production of rain in the mechanical way that we do. A proper way to compare our view with theirs is that we have more awareness of what is going on physically than they did, but this has nothing to say about what was going on behind-the-scenes spiritually. Viewing things in this proper way helps us to see that it’s not that the ancients were wrong about science, it’s that they weren’t thinking about things in scientific terms. That is, they weren’t thinking about the physical dimension existing in multiple forms. To say it another way, they were thinking about things in terms of a single physical dimension and a spiritual dimension whereas we think about things in multiple physical dimensions - and, to our detriment, often forget about the spiritual dimension.

To come full circle, I am sitting at my desk and I want to be aware of the spiritual dimension all around me. Most of all, I want to be aware of the Lord - much as Brother Lawrence described in The Practice of the Presence of God. The speed of the earth’s movements, or the action of the desk’s atoms in motion has its purposes, but the prophets and apostles had it right that ignoring the spiritual dimension is never a good idea. We should walk by faith, not by sight. That we today can see multiple physical dimensions is helpful in many ways, but it can be a distraction from the ever-important spiritual realm - and all the more so if we assume that the ancients thought ignorantly about “how the stuff around us is structured and how it operates.”

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You would apply it to them the same way you would apply it to John Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin. You make your choice about who is being more faithful to the Scripture and who is not. One man’s heretic is another man’s hero.

Not at all. Of course, they take their position based on Scripture; so do I. That’s the not the difference between us. The difference is in what we see the Scripture saying.

No, I’m saying I can’t accept their interpretation of the Scriptures if I believe in good conscience that it conflicts with Moses’ view.

Sola Scriptura says that a person has to decide which interpretation is more faithful to Scripture regardless of the position or reputation of the person promoting the position.

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What does this actually mean? Modern thinkers who are thinking correctly, do not think that the ancients think the way we do.

This does not make sense theologically or biologically. We know for a fact that many of the ancients (though not Israel), believed that evil spirits caused disease. We know that if they had known of germ theory, they would have understood that disease actually are caused by germs. We know that diseases are not caused by evil spirits; not as a proximate cause, or an ultimate cause. Where is the actual evidence for “cultural insensitivity” here?

We don’t impose our worldview when we read what they say about how they thought rain was produced, and understand this is what they actually believed. If you want to claim that they wrote X but actually believed something different, you need to demonstrate that this is actually true. Where is the evidence for example that they wrote that the firmament was solid, but actually believed it was not solid?

How is it to our detriment if we believe that rain is the product of the evaporation/condensation/precipitation cycle? What is the “spiritual dimension” which we’re missing, which prevents us from understanding properly how rain is formed?

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We know that the Lord lets go of some things - and wants us to let go of them - when they become obsolete, when they are replaced by something greater.

For example, when the temple was built, the tabernacle was no longer important. And when Messiah came, the temple was no longer important - nor were its furnishings, nor was animal sacrifice, nor was the Levitical or Aaronic priesthoods, nor were dietary restrictions, nor was Jewish bloodline, and so on.

We also have this Scripture:

1 Cor 13:10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.

Thus we have the clear principle from Scripture that while some things stand forever, others rightly pass away.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to ask: With the coming of Messiah (and His glorious resurrection from the dead) and particularly with the advent of modern science, is Old Testament history thereby rendered obsolete? That is, should we regard it as no longer important to uphold or defend?

We can ask and answer this question about OT history at several levels:

  • The entirety of OT history
  • The history recorded in the Torah
  • The history recorded in Genesis
  • The history recorded in Genesis 1-11

In other words, the answer to the question might differ based on which portion of OT history we are considering.

Although I have not previously asked the question, at least not in this formal way, it seems clear to me that many of you would answer “yes” to the question, at least in one of these forms - most saying that the history recorded in Gen 1-11 may be discarded in favor of SGH with no loss to our faith.

I give you the opportunity now to answer this question explicitly at whatever level you wish. (I am adding to the OP by making this issue a fifth “Stipulation” by which MC would fail.) If any of you do answer, please describe at what level you are answering it and what guided you as to where to draw the line. That is, if you think it’s only history in the Torah that’s obsolete, how did you decide that as opposed to all the history in the OT on the one hand and only the history in Genesis or in Genesis 1-11 on the other?

P.S. The relevant fundamental difference between MC history (see “Defining Mosaic Creation” in the OP) and SGH is that the former dates the universe in thousands of years and the latter dates it in the billions. Other important differences include:

  • The extent of Noah’s Flood
  • The historicity of Adam as progenitor of the human race
  • The historicity of Eve as an individual formed by God through Adam
  • The historicity of the Fall as the actions of these two individuals
  • The historicity of the Tower of Babel including the multiplication of languages