Hello, I am new here

Faith & Science Conversation
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In case you ask, the first half of my username is derived from the Russian phrase S nami bog, which means “God With Us”.

I am a former YEC, having slowly moved away from it after college and am new to Evolutionary Creationism. When I was in high school, a quasi-fundamentalist private Christian school, YEC was the main creed in terms of protology and Dispensationalism its eschatological partner. Of course, I wasn’t as mature in my faith as I am now, so as you can imagine, I pretty much lapped up Ken Ham’s material when I could.

I’m not quite sure how I broke away from YEC. It may have had something to do with being able to see Scripture beyond the plain-text reading employed by the New Atheists and fundamentalists. Stuff like linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and even geography at some points painted a more vivid picture of what made the authors of the Old and New Testaments write what they did.

Perhaps that stuff, particularly the language factor, led to me questioning stuff in the YEC narrative like Flood Geology (The Hebrew word eretz, used in the Noah story, refers to a finite area of land, not the entire planet).

But that aside, I’m hoping to be a writer and I hope I can get a hand with a project I’m currently working on.

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Welcome to the forum! Thanks for sharing your story. I love that it was your understanding of Scripture itself first, and not any particular scientific evidence, that led you away from YEC and toward EC.

What kind of hand were you looking for?

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I’m working on a “Biblical fiction” novel which focuses on the writing of Genesis. It’s set right after the division of the Reed-sea: God, through Moses, brought the Jews out of Egypt. What follows is Moses being instructed to write what becomes first book of the Torah, despite already working on a first-hand account of what happened in Egypt (a book which will later become known as Exodus). He is shown sporadic visions, not only of extended visits to Earth’s distant past, but also brief glimpses into the future on occasion. Meanwhile, as one can predict, he has to deal with the now-free Israelites’ consistent complaining and rebellion.

The premise of the story is that Moses was indeed shown the Big Bang, the dinosaurs, and human evolution but had to “dumb down” the visions he was shown for the sake of coherency for the Israelites, which is how Genesis as we know it came to be.

It’s pretty much my theory on the subject.

Currently, I am only at the Forward section discussing the story and the logic used to create it. Right now, I am looking for two quotes arguing the incompatibility of Christianity and evolution. It’s easy to find one from the first citation I plan to use, Ken Ham, but I also recall Richard Dawkins or somebody supposedly saying that the process is cannot be married. Of course, people like Collins, Craig, Plantinga, and others would call the stance of both men quite silly.

Even the ancient Church Fathers, if I remember correctly, were skeptical of a universe that was less than 10,000 years old.

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Well, you can find plenty such quotes on the AIG website. As to the premise of your book, I would also be interested in what you could do to incorporate campfire stories and the like to get oral tradition in the mix, and the contrast between the oral traditions of different cultures.

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Yes, oral tradition: because not everyone was literate and paper and ink were hard to come by.

Contrary to the jingoes of the New Atheists, it operated much differently than the Telephone game.

A friend of mine revealed that to me a while ago.

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For years I resisted the “day-vision” interpretation, and dismissed it out of hand. But last year I looked into it in detail, led not by my studies in Genesis but actually by my studies in Daniel. I ended up reluctantly giving it credit, and then when I examined it further I found it had a lot more evidence supporting it than I had realized. I had previously only seen two or three arguments, which were pretty weak. I ended up making a case for it myself. I also found it had historical precedent in early Jewish and Christian writings.

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The kinds of posts which Snamibog1987 and Jonathan_Burke have given us here in this thread are brands of casual sharing of perspectives which I much appreciate on Biologos. Whether or not I happen to 100% agree with them or not, applaud them or not, or even are confused by them or not is irrelevant. They aren’t obsessing on advocacy or declaring everyone who may disagree with them to “atheistic” or “evil” or “compromising” or anything else. Their posts are simply INTERESTING and prod me to think. I appreciate their participation.

Welcome, Snamibog1987. What fascinating topics and scenarios to explore!

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Long story short: my stance is that with the first eleven chapters of Genesis (especially the first three or four), Moses was writing Apocalyptically rather than literally, as Ham and his ilk propose.

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I agree he was writing apocalyptically; he was reporting what he saw. And what he saw was what God showed him, which makes the whole “is it literal or not?” question pretty moot. God showed him visions representative of literal creative acts in the past.

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during the many translations of the bible mistakes were made

Just try changing one word in Genesis 1:26 & 27
And God said, Let us make man IN our image

So God created man IN his own image, IN the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them. try using the word FOR …IN PLACE OF IN
who was he talking to ?

also there is no way the word , REPLENISH means fill…

there is a completely different OPTION / explanation for the evolution of human … BEING … my understanding is, God has always been in charge

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@Snamibog1987,

I think I have just the THING to give your Fictional-but-True version of the times of Moses some Reality!

Check out this post:

I have tracked down the most detailed discussion I could find regarding Napoleon and his personal horsed body guard crossing a section of the Red Sea (though not ALL of the Red Sea as in the usual imagining of the phrase) . . . knowing exactly when it would be possible … but then almost drowning on the way back!

If you absorb the historical detail, and infuse your version with some of the detail… nobody could challenge the historical plausibility of your version!

George Brooks