God's relationship to early humans

Faith & Science Conversation
21

@gbrooks9

My comments were to show you how the truth content of any text may be understood once you had a sufficient grasp of the language and the people.

You seem obsessed with seeking flaws in a language and expression that you believe is derived in some way from another peoples - and yet you do not stop with this error, but add suppositions on how you think it should be written.

I am afraid this discussion gets us nowhere:

Just why are you looking for a plot and then imposing a structure - if you cannot see the truth that is conveyed (God dealing with humans, and how these humans increasingly choose to behave contrary to God’s will, and become increasingly sinful (evil) - and this continues (the fall) … and you add machine guns ?) … Adam and Eve were given a choice anyone would understand, with no compulsion - a 4 year old would simply live in joy in a paradise and wonder what the fuss is about - not contemplating a choice that contradicts his God.

I do not take liberties with poetry - again you miss the point entirely - I am conveying a truth in the most effective way the language permits. I think this discussion has gone as far as it can. All the best to you.

22

George

It’s nothing to do with “tolerating” - nor even about Greek, but genre. Apocalyptic imagery is found in Isaiah (24-27 are even called “The Isaiah apocalypse”), and reaches full flower in Daniel. There are many examples in the 2nd temple period and beyond. In Isaiah it’s about the coming judgement of Assyria and Babylon, in Daniel 8 it’s about Antiochus Epiphanes, in the synoptic gospels it’s about the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome, and in Revelation about the destruction of Rome’s tyranny (in the first instance) by the gospel.

The point is that the imagery is historically true, but in the sense in which apocalyptic uses it, which is never literal. N T Wright, for example, describes this very well wrt Jesus’s frequent use of apocalyptic.

Genesis 2-3 is, of course, from well before apocalyptic was developed, and the best clues to its genre come from ANE equivalents, as John Walton discusses in detail. But as in apocalyptic, both “myths” and “symbols” are representative of truths - though Walton prefers the word “archetype” for Adam…

To say, in whatever literary terms the Holy Spirit wraps it up, that sin and death came to mankind through being tempted to disobeying a command of God is flat contradictory to the story that mankind was created flawed and merely acts that out inevitably. You say that yourself by claiming the biblical account itself is flawed, rather than that it is true mythically or symbolically. The account does not say man was perfect (how would that be defined?) - but it says he was “good”, and also says that he fell into disobedience to God which marred the race and subjected it to death.

Now Jesus himself references the Eden story not infrequently, for it underpins the narrative of the kingdom of God he preached: “repentance” implies turning back from sin, which is only possible even conceptually if sin is not ontological. The cat cannot repent of being a cat.

For specific example, in John 8 the Lord’s naming of his opponents as “Satan’s children” makes sense only in terms of Genesis 3.15, and he goes on to call Satan a “murderer from the beginning”, because his malice brought death at the dawn of the biblical story, and “the father of lies” because he used deception to do it, thus implying that his opponents too are threatening the restoration of fellowship with God that Jesus brings.

That makes Jesus’s understanding and teaching about his mission “flawed” in exactly the same manner as the Hebrew Scriptures - he was trying to repair and/or judge what, according to your understanding, was created broken.

In short, he endorses the truth of the Eden myth, and I prefer his testimony to any un-evidenced assertion that Genesis is “flawed”.

23

@Jon_Garvey

You write: "Jesus himself references the Eden story not infrequently, for it underpins the narrative of the kingdom of God he preached: “repentance” implies turning back from sin, which is only possible even conceptually if sin is not ontological. The cat cannot repent of being a cat. " “…I prefer his testimony to any un-evidenced assertion that Genesis is “flawed”.”

My issues with these views:

  1. “Original Sin” is indigenous to being a human… how else would it transmit from generation to generation, forever?

Mortal humans certainly DO repent of being imperfect humans… because we attribute perfection ONLY to God.

  1. There is PLENTY of evidence regarding the flawed nature of Genesis, but most notably:
    a. there is no firmament in the sky;
    b. the fossil history of aquatic dinosaurs vs. large mammals (i.e., whales) is totally inconsistent with a Young Earth.

George Brooks

24

@GJDS

The fictional nature of the Genesis story of Creation is readily clear and apparent.
You are obviously a man of GREAT faith.

George Brooks

25

I will rely on Jesus Christ on determining the measure of my faith, and not you - it seems that you are greatly excited by your disbelief (a genuine mystery to me, how people spend so much time and energy declaring their lack of belief and similar nonsense).

I have spend my adult life gaining knowledge from science, history, philosophy, and studied the Bible (and theological works) within this context. I am saddened by the ignorant (and nonsensical) remarks I have seen from people on various parts of the Bible.

26

George

(1) Scripture says sin is ubiquitous - it does not state how it became so, just how it originated. The idea of “transmission” is Augustine’s theory about the latter, through corruption of the act of sexual intercourse. Often that’s wrongly translated into “genetic transmission” nowadays, but it’s far from the only possibility (and a poor one, too - sin is not genetic). Vrtually all cultures, for example, use metal tools now, not to mention wearing T-shirts with English logos, but that doesn’t mean either arose at the same time as the race.

Adam’s federal headship, most recent common ancestor (MRCA) studies, the social conditioning of human personality, etc - all these and more are fruitful ways of speculating on how Paul’s teaching, that through one man sin came into the world, might have become reality.

Likewise, repentance of sin is repentance for what we are now, not what we were created to be in the beginning. “I’m sorry you went and created such rubbish, God” isn’t what Jesus had in mind when he said “Repent”. “Perfection” here needs some context: God’s perfection is not the same as human perfection, but if by the latter you mean something we ought to possess, but never had access to, what is there to repent of?

(2) Once one escapes from the modern idea that Genesis 1 is teaching physical science, and understand it is all to do with sacred function within God’s cosmic temple (with imagery to match), you realise it’s saying nothing whatsoever about the physical state of the sky (they weren’t overly interested) and a lot about access to or separation from God (key to worship, especially in the temple).

(a) Did you know, for instance, that all 17 instances of raqia (firmament) in the Old Testament have to do with God’s glory, including the “mobile firmament” on which God sits above the cherubim in Ezekiel as he traverses the earth? A prosaic synonym for “sky” it is not. Likewise Israel’s elders ascended Sinai for a theophany in which God’s throne is paved with sapphire - ie the firmament represented by sky - yet they are not represented as having to break through something solid. In other words, the language, as in Genesis, is divine temple imagery, not a bad attempt at physics.
(b) Where did you get this hang-up over a young earth, since it’s not taught in Genesis 1 (Or Genesis 2-3, come to that)? Are you saying that YEC interpretations are flawed? If so, I agree, but don’t blame the writer of Genesis for aiming above the heads of both fundamentalist and scientistic moderns!

27

@GJDS

I am saddened by the fact that vast civilizations have warred and millions of humans have suffered because of
the insistence of very religious men that only they know God’s truth.

Comparatively few have died over different interpretations of the fossil record.

George Brooks

28

@Jon_Garvey

You write:

"(1) Scripture says sin is ubiquitous - it does not state how it became so, just how it originated. "

Absolutely. But your comment that a cat cannot repent being a cat is completely off-base in the biblical context. Humans can and SHOULD repent being flawed humans.

You write: "Likewise, repentance of sin is repentance for what we are now, not what we were created to be in the beginning."
And this is completely conjectural. Adam and Eve did not change. They were not immortal; they had to eat from the Tree of Life
to be immortal. So they did NOT become mortal in this so-called Fall. The Fall was, in fact, a purge. Adam and Eve were
flawed from the very beginning. The story makes it quite clear that there was no CHANGE after eating the fruit - - other
than that they actually knew MORE about morality than they did before!

You write:
"(2) Once one escapes from the modern idea that Genesis 1 is teaching physical science. . . you realise it’s saying nothing whatsoever about the physical state of the sky …"

And this same logic can and should be extended to all of Genesis’s discussion of creation. It’s not teaching us about nature. It is giving us a lyrical explanation for
how the earth and its inhabitants came to be. The Egyptians had stories like this. The Sumerians. The Greeks. Only Evangelicals seem to think these stories have
anything to do with historical fact.

You write:
"(a) Did you know, for instance, that all 17 instances of raqia (firmament) in the Old Testament have to do with God’s glory, including the "mobile firmament"
on which God sits above the cherubim in Ezekiel as he traverses the earth? A prosaic synonym for “sky” it is not. "

So you must be talking about Exodus 24:10:
"And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. "

You attempt to use this reference to DISPROVE the idea that the ancients viewed the firmament as made of beautiful blue crystal-like rock. When in fact,
it CONFIRMS that this is how the Hebrew viewed the nature of the firmament (raqia). If this was a unique interpretation of the sky, I would be tempted to
accept your interpretation. But this was a COMMON and ESTABLISHED view of the cosmos to the Ancient Near East.

Thanks for giving me another good test text on the concept of the Firmament. Though we should agree that the term ‘raqia’ isn’t even used in this text;
the phrase for “paved work” is “libnah ma’aseh” [literally pavement/brick work]. However, the term “shamayim” is used (in comparing the Lord’s
"mobile firmament" to the sky in general.

As Gesenius explains:
"… from the root [for] firmament … which seems to be spread out like a vault [ceiling] over the globe, as supported on foundations and columns (2 Samuel 22:8; Job 26:11), whence the rain is let down as through doors or flood-gates (Psa. 78:23; compare Gen. 28:17 … above which the abode of God and the angels was supposed to be, Ps. 2:4; Gen. 28:17; Deut. 33:26."

Sincerely,

George Brooks

29

Briefly - “lyrical explanation”: I don’t argue with that at blog comment level! But I would want to qualify it by distancing ANE “theological” mythic language from western Romanticism. The latter is all to do with expressing ones emotional impression of something as, say, sublime (as most of the definitions of “lyricism” seem to suggest), limiting its truth to emotional truth - all else, like accurate history or material precision, is subordinate.

Genesis, however, like Babylonian myth only with radically different theology, is expressing truth at the theological, not the emotional level, but still subordinating material matters, in particular, to the periphery. If they had views on, say, literal waters kept out by a hard dome, these did not form any significant element of the message, which was about the heavens as the glorious holy of holies, the air as the holy place separated by the inevitable curtain or door, and the earth as the court of the temple where men worship.

In that light Gesenius, in my view, saw through Enlightenment eyes an older scientific description in the Bible, and wasn’t even looking for a predominantly ritual description. If the cosmos is like the temple, but also its patterm (“as shown you in the high mountain”), in a kind of mutual exchange of symbols, then it will need foundations and columns (like Boaz and Jachin), it will need water vessels like Solomon’s bronze Sea, it will need a menorah (sun, moon, five planets), it will need a curtain separating the Holy Place. Whether those correspond to particular mountains, atmospheric structures etc is entirely secondary.

As for heaven being God’s dwelling place, that is certainly the idea - but Solomon recognises that God’s presence both in the temple and the cosmos are “virtual”, for even the highest heavens cannot contain him. It was no threat to Jewish theology that Pompey found the Holy Place physically empty. That wasn’t the way they thought about the temple, and I doubt it’s how they felt about the heavens either.

In retrospect, even their “waters” is no less inaccurate an image than our colloquial references to “outer space” or “vacuum”: why don’t we habitually think of space as chock full of energy, particles, fields and space-time? Just a different set of ideas, only ours reflect Newtonian, pre-relativity, science instead of Hebrew theology. “Right” or “wrong” are just the “wrong” categories to work with if we want to hear what God is saying from Genesis. That’s my point.

30

Just one more thing - remember that all those diagrams of “the ancient cosmos” one sees are the kind of interpretation scientific Western Europeans make. The Egyptian tomb drawings, for example, consist of gods, which in our wisdom we interpret to show what they thought the world was “really” like. But they REALLY thought it was gods and goddesses, and that rocks, water and air were ephemeral appearances of less importance

AFAIK we have no equivalent Mesopotamian diagrams - and descriptions, as I have suggested, have an associated mindset, that’s vastly different from ours. Cosmic temples, as Walton shows, were not restricted to Israel.

31

@Jon_Garvey

I think you are being a little overly whimsical about how many ways there are theoretically available for interpreting the
ancient world view of the earth and heaven.

If you skim through this book: Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography By Wayne Horowitz . . .

. . . you will see that the Biblical view of a crystal/stone firmament was not an unusual view. It was pretty
much “state of the art” cosmology!

And thinking that those “tiny stars” could fall to earth (without destroying the entire solar system) was not
an unfathomable conclusion.

George Brooks

32

I think you are being a little overly whimsical

Not at all - when you shake off the Enlightenment and try to think more like a Mesopotamian (or Egyptian) you begin to see that a less material view is the obvious way to think - that’s even so, in a different way, if you look at a much closer time and place like mediaeval Europe and its mappae mundi, which are not “inaccurate”, but “non-cartographic”.

If you believe the god Tiamat’s (salt water’s) body was used to form the dome of the sky, you’re already well outside the box that says “the sky is made of solid stone”. At the very least it’s divine stone. Come to that, if you believe your elders can gather to eat before Yahweh’s throne above the firmament, you’ve got more in your heaven than primaeval waters.

Firmaments, I agree, were common currency. But as Walton and Beale show, so were cosmic temples. Their construction isn’t as clearcut as all that, either, as some scholars have pointed out - Gen 1.20 has birds flying in the midst of the firmament, apparently without hitting their heads or getting fossilized. How does that work?

In any case, the only falling stars, unless you know of others, are apocalyptic stars, which are no more to be taken astronomically than beasts with 7 heads and 10 horns… unless you think that 2nd temple Jews took monster movies too seriously. If so, you’ll have scholars of apocalyptic like Richard Bauckham putting you right.

33

@Jon_Garvey

I think you missed my point.

The idea that the sky was constructed of brilliant blue crystal was common AND unchallenged
in the Ancient Near East.

The idea that the Hebrew scribes somehow wrote Genesis, using the same vocabulary and world
view as the rest of their neighbors - - BUT CERTAINLY DIDN"T BELIEVE THAT THE SKY WAS
A CRYSTAL DOME - - is not only without foundation . . . it is virtually impossible.

All the literary and linguistic evidence points to the Hebrews SHARING this world view - -
that the firmament separated and divided the waters of the earth from the waters of the sky.

George Brooks

34

George,

It’s clear you’re unshakable in your certainty about the consistent errors of ANE “science”, but for anyone interested there are other considerations. Younker and Davidson in THE MYTH OF THE SOLID HEAVENLY DOME: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HEBREW [:yqir); (RĀQÎA‘) (2011) not only deny that the Hebrew word raqia denotes a solid dome, but unpack how the idea became established in current scholarship from 19th century (they cover the myth of the mediaeval “flat earth” too, though that’s a separate issue).They cite Horowitz’s recent PhD work on Mesopotamian cosmology to show that it wasn’t even consistent with itself, let alone the rest of the ANE:

Wayne Horowitz… actually found that the Mesopotamians believed the heavens consisted of a series of flat planes that were suspended above each other by a number of strong cables (Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography [Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1998]). Yet this cosmology is not systematically set out and had to be pieced together from various sources. In reality, the various descriptions of the cosmos were created in isolation from each other, with no thought of how they might fit together.
Indeed the cosmological description merely provided the stage upon which the gods conducted their activities. The physical setting provided a conceptual vehicle to explain or accommodate certain theological understandings about how the gods related to each other and to humanity. That some of the religious concepts might appear contradictory or mutually exclusive was not of any serious concern to the ancient priests who created them since they were never intended to be integrated into a single whole. No ancient Mesopotamian ever set out to tie all of the fragments together into a single cohesive cosmology—it was not necessary and would have made no sense.

Horowitz’s work is here, and in the introduction he states the same caution about taking a literal, modern view of the ancient texts that I have raised:

This investigation attempts to glean evidence from the widest possible variety of surviving sources in order to present as clear a picture as possible of Mesopotamian views of the universe. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that this approach poses certain dangers, not the least of which are our distance in time and space from the ancient writers… The current evidence simply does not allow us to know, for instance, if ancient readers of Gilgamesh really believed that they too could have visited Utnapistim by sailing across the cosmic sea and “the waters of death” or if a few, many, most, or all ancient readers understood the topographical material in Gilg. IX-X in metaphysical or mystical terms.

1 Like
35

@Jon_Garvey

Horowitz is just one historian. I look forward to reading these criticisms of his work.

But the ancient world view of the firmament as a solid layer does not rise and fall on Horowitz.

Your broader discussions about the cosmos seen as a “temple” and so forth … that’s all fine.
I see no reason why they can’t be quite valid.

But the “temple” characterization is not mutually exclusive - - it doesn’t change centuries of
historical material about the ancients’ belief that waters ALSO existed ABOVE the firmament
… and that the firmament had to be very firm in order to restrain them.

Sincerely,

George Brooks

1 Like
36

OK - I return to base at this point.

You started by saying that because Genesis was plain flawed in asserting a glass raqia and (in other parts of the Bible) falling stars, ergo its teaching on the origin of sin is at least probably flawed too (though you put it more strongly than that).

I showed you that no falling stars are mentioned outside a very specific figurative milieu of apocalyptic (and one can scarcely talk of “flawed” symbolism).

And you concede that Genesis 1 may very well be teaching cosmic temple theology and that it might be quite valid. One would hope so as it forms the basis for the whole theology of sacred space through the Bible up to and including the new heavens and new earth of Isaiah, Peter and Revelation. That too would seem to exonerate the acount from the charge of being “flawed” in its teaching.

…Unless, that is, one says that whatever Genesis 1 is actually teaching in the form of such sacred space theology and the functions of creation, its writers must have shared the ancient world’s conceptions of the physical structure of the cosmos (with or without a solid raqia) rather than knowing about modern popular science with its folklore of “vacuums” in “space”, “survival of the fittest”, “selfish genes” and so on. Because of this, they are undoubtedly flawed in their understanding of the theology of the origin of sin.

I have to conclude simply “That does not follow at all.”

37

@Jon_Garvey

I’m not really following your logic here. You write:

“. . . you concede that Genesis 1 may very well be teaching cosmic temple theology and that it might be quite valid. One would hope so as it forms the basis for the whole theology of sacred space through the Bible up to and including the new heavens and new earth of Isaiah, Peter and Revelation. That too would seem to exonerate the acount from the charge of being “flawed” in its teaching.”

What? My intent was to show that the SCIENCE or NATURAL PHILOSOPHY of Genesis is flawed … not that it was flawed in EVERY way.

In fact, isn’t the whole point of BioLogos to show that SPIRITUAL truths can still be validly extracted from books like Genesis…
without having to accept the literal history of it?

Let’s square this issue away before we move any further …

Sincerely,

George Brooks

38

You wrote:

In the same way, we need comprehend that the Hebrew depiction of creation in Genesis was flawed. There was no special fall; humanity was created in a flawed state.

Creation is a spiritual truth, not a scientific one.
The Fall is a spiritual truth, not a scientific one.
Man being created in a flawed state is a spiritual assertion about ?moral theology, not a scientific claim.

That’s where my objection started. It ended with my contention that Genesis isn’t even trying to teach scientific truth, making criticism of its science immaterial.

But in reply to your last, maybe one difference between orthodox Christianity and Unitarianism in its original Deist form, at least, is that history (not necessarily “literal”, whatever that means) is the foundation of theology. Spiritual truths are revealed by God’s acts in history, not as atemporal principles.

I’m not always sure what the point of BioLogos is with respect to the use of Scripture - to someone like John Walton, though, and to me, it’s certainly partly to show that the spiritually significant episodes of Genesis are founded on real events, and that these in no way conflict with a scientific approach to nature.

39

@Jon_Garvey

So … the Parables of Jesus are worthless unless they describe events that REALLY happened?

Sincerely,

George Brooks

40

Dear me - let’s not discuss this at kindergarten level.

The parables, unlike the first chapters of Genesis, don’t set up God’s diagnosis of the nature of the world we live in, and the threat to its purpose, on the basis of which God initiated a salvation plan which spoke to that specific need, culminating in the death and resurrection of his Son.

That is the difference. If Robin Hood never existed, you could still rob the rich to feed the poor because the tale’s moral message is timelessly true. If the RAF hadn’t won a real Battle of Britain, the world would (arguably) have been under Fascism now because the paradigmatic message of heroism was grounded in essential history.