Help: I’m on a slippery slope

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Ted, long time no see, since I was thrown off the ASA list. lol

Accommodation is logically unnecessary. First, neolithc farmers had the same IQ as we do. They were fully modern humans. Secondly, There are always ways to tell true but simplified scientifically accurate accounts. God could say, “Let the Earth bring forth living Creatures…” Which can be interpreted as the earth evolving life. When describing the solar system one doesn’t have to talk about geodesics of gravitation to simply say the earth goes around the sun.

One can claim that the Fall is not real because snakes don’t talk, but do we really believe that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.? If we don’t believe that, then certainly talking snakes are impossible. If we do believe that, then one must ask what powers do these spiritual forces have? Can they make a snake talk? Can God make Balaam’s donkey talk? If He can’t, then how can we believe that he can raise a man from the dead?

What I find lacking in accommodation is faith that God doesn’t tell falsehoods, and a wrong idea of the intelligence of humans in the Neolithic.or Iron age.

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Intelligence would have nothing to do with it. Culture and knowledge is what necessitates accommodation - to all of us. If a math teacher uses calculus concepts to attempt to teach a group that hadn’t yet even heard of algebra, the teaching will be useless. If the teacher is attentive they will work first on arithmetic and then algebra foundations before proceeding to more advanced things. It isn’t that the pupils were less intelligent. They just hadn’t yet had the opportunity to know the more advanced things yet. Just as the ancients did not yet know what we now know about astronomy.

Thank God for accommodation. Without it we would not have a bible and any revelations we did “get” would be indecipherable to us as it would probably involve concepts we would have no idea about yet now. Accommodation is absolutely necessary and unavoidable in any relationship that involves communication … i.e. all of them.

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See, that is the point of my critique of accommodation—God didn’t have to use highly technical language to say something true but simplified. We do that all the time when teaching young kids. What we don’t do is say something false in the effort to teach them truth. So telling me how those people couldn’t understand things doesn’t match the facts as I see it. One can describe an accident in terms of momentum, strength of material, energy dissipation etc, or one can simplify it all and say the blue car hit the red car. Both descriptions are totally accurate. Accommodationalism ignores that there are ways God could have told a totally evolutionary story in Genesis 1 in a simplified manner. In fact, I think he did do that but people have their own positions that they prefer, which is fine, but still accommodationalism ignores what God could have done to avoid mixing his message with the falsehoods of the culture.

Accommodation as I have understood it is that God accommodates his message to the culture of the day, and lets false things remain in the message so the culture can understand what he is saying. That is what gives me the heebie jeebies about accommodationalism. It is a license for God to fib about nature and history. And if God fibs about that, is He fibbing about the story of redemption? Once we allow God to ‘accommodate’ his message to the false things in a culture, I see no way to stop the cycle of doubt that comes to my mind.

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He could have, but that is not what he is trying to communicate. To put scientific meaning in the text is to add something that is not there, be it young or old earth ideas.

But here are many examples of incorrect scientific facts that are present, such as anatomical misconceptions, cosmological misconceptions, botanical misconceptions, etc which the Bible allows for the common beliefs of the day to stand uncorrected. The problem comes when we try to read the Bible as something it is not and read into it things that it is not saying.

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We do this all the time! I lie to beginning physics students by telling them that gravity is constant (be it 9.81 m/s^2 or just 9.8 or even just 10) depending on context. What they are not ready to hear yet is that actually gravity decreases according to the inverse square law of distance, but that fact makes little difference in the context of “local” gravity and so is neglected so that we aren’t suddenly turning their early physics problems into calculus problems. But then even when we do account for that, I am still lying to them as gravity is really a hopeless many-body mishmash of vectors adding together and not originating from one perfectly uniform sphere. But those new facts make problems hopelessly complicated and besides are unnecessary for their success in basic understandings. Good students come to understand that education is always an accommodating (and therefore technically false - but very useful) oversimplification so that they can actually learn good things and [presumably] come closer to truth.

I never tire of this Asimov quote:

When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Here is an earlier thread where I wrote more on this very topic.

Probably much more enlightening to you, though, if you take the time to read through all of it is this Ted Davis essay on Galileo, history, and accommodation.

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JPM wrote:

He could have, but that is not what he is trying to communicate. To put scientific meaning in the text is to add something that is not there, be it young or old earth ideas…
…
But here are many examples of incorrect scientific facts that are present, such as anatomical misconceptions, cosmological misconceptions, botanical misconceptions, etc which the Bible allows for the common beliefs of the day to stand uncorrected. The problem comes when we try to read the Bible as something it is not and read into it things that it is not saying

Well, I would suggest there is a big difference between what is purported to be a statement by God, in Genesis and a statement by Elihu in Job or similar situations. What Elihu and people say can be perfectly in error, and is merely recorded as a fact that they said what they did. If we take, say Genesis 1 as representing the order of created things, we have great problems because it would imply God didn’t have a clue about what happened at creation and God is the one making all the statements in Genesis 1. Can’t blame error on others unless you say God didn’t really speak in Genesis, effectively saying Genesis 1 is the product of a human mind not representing God at all. In which case bad conclusions can be drawn about the nature of this religion. And IF one says that the statements of God in Genesis 1 are not from God, of course, this immediately would raise the question of whether the statements of God in Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Pentateuch etc are really statements by God or are figments of human ingenuity.

We can also differentiate what God said vs how the humans might have understood what he said. But to say that statements of God show no knowledge of the creation event in my mind makes it unlikely that this God is really the creator. After all, He is the only one who witnessed the event.

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Hi Mervin, I read your old post on the Cheyenne and I know Ted, although he probably wouldn’t recognize me under the gbob moniker. Again, I would bring up the argument in my last post on this thread. If things in the Bible which start with “And God said…” are not true, and God claims elsewhere that He is truth, and we are told he doesn’t lie.

Hebrews 6:18 God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie

or
Titus 1:2 which God, who does not lie

And if God lies, i.e. doesn’t tell the truth, then God owes Annanias an apology.

I simply think that theology should fit logically together. Making God say false things means God can’t be trusted to tell us the path to salvation. Period. In human societies, once a court witness is found out to be a purjuror, his entire testimony is thrown out as a lie. Why would we treat God differently when it is HE who tells us don’t bear false witness?

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Amen to that! And of course God is a God of truth as well - I should think all who are believers would agree. What I wrote in the post above of teaching my students a “lie”, I don’t really mean that in any malicious sense. I’m not trying to deceive them but to use the necessary means to bring them closer to truth. I use words like “lie” or “falsehood” for provocative effect (or to respond in kind to words already chosen by you or others), but I should probably refrain from doing so.

So why then do you persist in making God say false things by twisting scriptures into teaching something scriptures simply don’t teach? It is precisely because we believe that God is a God of truth - all truth that we don’t accept understandings of scriptures that plainly are not true. God is teaching them (and still us today) the things we need and can handle as any perfect teacher would.

Have you thought about the arrogance inherent to the view that would deny accommodation today? Think about this: To insist that the only truly spoken word would have to be scientifically convincing to us specifically today is to say that we, and we alone in all of history have finally arrived. Our understanding is now so complete that we alone are ready to hear the unvarnished, (no details neglected, no complexities left unaccounted - “unaccommodated” to put this in your terms) that we are the only generation that would truly understand God’s activity fully in every mechanical detail. You cannot allow that our present understandings still leave room for significant growth, but then simultaneously think that God should have accommodated to 2019 understandings. Because if we still don’t know everything, then the truly straight-talking God would have to accommodate to the better future understandings (lest he fall afoul your charge of lying to us); but then what we would hear would be confusion since we wouldn’t yet understand what is being taught (we being stuck for the moment in 2019 and all.) So on your scheme of things, you have ruled out any possibility of God’s word being effective: Either God must be - on your terms - totally truthful (in which case he is a horrible teacher that cannot connect with any audience but a practically omniscient one), or else God must be a liar because, as a good teacher he went to the effort of connecting with his actual audience [accommodation].

I reject that as a false dichotomy, of course, because it has neither truth nor scriptures to support it. God must be the best teacher and as such would show and teach us what it is we need for where we are to help draw us closer to him. And that teaching for us comes in the form of a person: Christ, who is the master accommodation of it all, who …“being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death …”

And as such, it behooves us to attend to his teaching and not try to make it into things that he would not affirm. He did make creative use of scriptures to be sure, and so there is some precedent for us to follow as we may and even do the same, but always guided by his Spirit. Which means we are not allowed to make just any use of scriptures we may please, such as insisting that early Genesis must teach accurate science before we can take it seriously. We would never do such a thing to Christ’s teachings (like thinking the prodigal parable an untrustworthy teaching unless it actually historically happened). So we must emphatically reject any attempts to force the rest of scriptures through that same modernist agenda that contends to be the philosophical gatekeeper of your mind. I reject that gatekeeper. And you should fire him too as he continues to do you a great disservice.

[edited]

[continued thoughts…] If I may presume to renovate my parting “gatekeeper” metaphor above, milking it for even further use if indeed it’s of any use at all - Let me retract my advice that he be dismissed. Scientific skepticism is a great gatekeeper to keep around so long as he doesn’t aspire to more domains than that for which he’s fitted. So the one who would presumptuously begin to annex other domains where the questions become harder, higher, more interesting, and indeed more important - that gatekeeper needs to be demoted and put back in his proper place where he does good service. He need not fear that he must take over other realms of love or meaning, philosophy or religion in order to be seen as important - certainly not in the Christian mind. The material world is God’s creation and thus should enjoy promotion rather than demotion on the strength of its creaturely status. But I see now that you have another response posted, so having repented (partly) of my suggested abuse of your ‘gatekeeper’, I’ll stop here to read on.

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It is hard to respond to a post that asserts I twist the scripture which doesn’t give precise details where you think I am twisting things. I suspect I know but to save us all times, tell me specifically to what you refer.

LOL, my view of the accommodationalist position is that it effectively gives up on the Bible before doing thorough thinking through the issues. You didn’t respond, I noticed to the problem I see in making what God said in Genesis 1 not true (that is no concordance with science or history). That problem is that how would we know if other places where it says: The Lord said… are actually true or not, leading to a collapse in our ability to believe God said anything at all.

So, I would appreciate it if you would tell me what you think I am twisting and I will respond to that, but also would appreciate it if you would engage with my argument about the veracity or lack there of in Biblical statements that start with “The Lord said…”

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I do not think God was trying to communicate science in Genesis or elsewhere in the Bible. Apparently you do. Is that correct? If so, I can understand your point that it places you in danger of…

And that, is why such an interpretation is potentially disastrous to faith.

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God doesn’t teach us untrue things in Genesis 1 or 2 or anywhere else. You draw untrue things out of it when you try to make it teach things it doesn’t. Our [My] quibble here isn’t with scriptures. It’s with what you put forward as the way they must be understood.

Why would you give special privilege to statements that began that way? Isn’t that to already admit the germ of what you are trying to reject? That all of scriptures are true (and true on your terms and understandings, no less)?

In any case, though, my objections written of so far here is on the general level of you not accepting that God accommodates to humanity in scriptures, which if consistently applied would reduce to absurdity countless passages. What I really suspect, though, is that you don’t consistently apply any thorough-going “non-accommodationism” but have probably already smuggled a good bit of accommodation even while you may deny it. E.g. I’m sure you don’t believe in a geocentric universe or an unmoving earth, etc. To do so (as well as to interpret Genesis 1 and 2 as mechanical cosmological commentary) are all what I would put forward as examples of twisting scriptures to a modernist agenda.

On reflection of most of my exchanges here tonight, I seem to be putting a quite confrontational foot forward - which is perhaps questionable behavior (at best) for a moderator. I quite often set my ‘moderator’ hat aside here to function as just another participant. You seem to be taking it pretty well and are showing exemplary patience with me in that regard, and for that I thank you. Not that I’m trying to end this discussion - I’ll gladly further respond as your interest may continue. You obviously have struck a chord with me here that winds up my clock! :mantelpiece_clock: So if you had a specific “The Lord said …” statement in mind that you want more commentary on, just let me know. I looked back and couldn’t find where you mentioned anything specifically in that regard. So my objections were just over your apparent rejection of all accommodation.

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No, God’s purpose wasn’t to write a science book, but where he touches on topics that involve science, like the creation, what he says should be true.

As to the interpretation being disastrous, you seem to have missed the point that it comes from what I see as the logical outcome of making the statements of God about creation untrue. It comes as a logical outcome of accommodationalism as far as I am concerned.

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I think we can agree on that, so I take it Im not twisting scripture so much as having an uncouth interpretational method. lol

As I said above, if god says something about nature, it must be true, or he is a God who doesn’t know anything about nature. Genesis 1 is all about Nature. I see no way to avoid that.

Mervin wrote:

In any case, though, my objections written of so far here is on the general level of you not accepting that God accommodates to humanity in scriptures, which if consistently applied would reduce to absurdity countless passages. What I really suspect, though, is that you don’t consistently apply any thorough-going “non-accommodationism”

I have already said that when Elihu and his friends say things to Job, or the Witch of Endor says Samuel’s spirit is an Elohim, those are not in anyway to be taken as a statement of God or even inspired by God. I hope you don’t disagree with that.

But statements where God is quoted, are certainly problematical. In Genesis 1 you say God didn’t say anything false. Let’s look at 1:6. does God say there was a vaulted heaven? If so, He said something false. I don’t know how to avoid that conclusion. Now, one can take the view that he meant ‘spreading’, which raqia is sometimes translated as, and avoid the problem. Why? Well, loads of you accommodationalists will roll their eyes at this, but empty space expands because of quantum effects. It is interesting to me that the word with a root of expansion is used to describe that space. But, if you, like most accommodationalists I have discussed these things with, say it means a vaulted domed solid sky, well, Jehovah, doesn’t know cosmology, which would be a bad thing for the Creator. Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.

Mervin wrote:

On reflection of most of my exchanges here tonight, I seem to be putting a quite confrontational foot forward - which is perhaps questionable behavior (at best) for a moderator. I quite often set my ‘moderator’ hat aside here to function as just another participant. You seem to be taking it pretty well and are showing exemplary patience with me in that regard, and for that I thank you.

Over the years I have been called about every name in the book, so I have a thick skin. I do walk to a different drum and am not conventional by anyone’s definition. And I am used to standing up against the crowd, both in business and in theology debates. so, don’t worry about it.

I gave the The Lord said statement that I think you will have the most problem getting over the hump–the much cherished idea of the vaulted domed cosmology. lol but I have already given you an eisegetical escape path.

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I guess we will just have to disagree, as I see truth in the text regardless of factual discrepancies in the details, and find no problem with that, because Genesis 1 is not about nature, but rather is about God, who he is and what our relationship is to him and to his creation.

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Only if God is talking about nature and history. The argument most people make when they appeal to accommodation is that he wasn’t trying to communicate historical facts or facts about the natural world, he was trying to communicate theological truths, and correcting the worldview or cosmic geography of the people would have been orthogonal to his communicative intent.

If the entire culture believes that men plant their “seeds” in the “soil” of a woman’s womb, which is either fertile or infertile, and God communicates messages about reproduction to people in those terms, is he lying because he doesn’t speak of the meeting of gametes or let them know that men can be “infertile” too?

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Yep, we will certainly have to agree to disagree here. God is talking about creating plants, animals, The stars, the sun the moon, and man, all of these items are natural objects in nature. Claims that it is about who God is, seems to me to have a hidden assumption that somewhere in Scripture or elsewhere, God communicated his private thoughts, or private intent about the nature of that chapter, and I can’t find that communication. I have been left out of the loop. Lacking that communication, it seems to me that the chapter should be about whatever nouns are contained in the chapter. That is how we read most books. If a book talks about plants and how to grow them, we generally don’t try to say it isn’t a gardening book but about theology of God. The nouns in Chapter 1 are biological and cosmological entities. God no more says who he is in Chapter 1 than he did with Moses. so, yeah, we have to disagree unfortunately.

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Just a quick reply for now … especially since others are beginning to answer as well … I would say that if one took that passage at face-value (as you seem to suggest), then yes, you have a falsehood. Since I see that passage (and those surrounding it) as affirming other more general things (that God has brought specific order or ‘cosmos’ to chaos) I see it all as affirming truth, even while particular words in such discourse taken in a literal sense would indeed be inaccurate and untrue. But for me then, the charge of falsehood belongs to those who try to extract such things from scripture, rather than to the scriptural affirmations themselves.

I think for all of us it’s a matter of faith principle (to the outsider a mere tautology) that what scriptures affirm must be true.

[And while your point is well-taken that where words are attributed to, say, Job’s friends or such, that of course the words become suspect. But those words were still included, and thus their discourse must be important and have something to teach us. Satan himself is given quotes in the Bible - one may fairly ask why if it is given that all his words must be false. But I think the answer is that there must be something for us to learn by hearing from all different characters in the scriptural narratives, so we neglect anything at our own peril. I.e. – I would argue that there is truth to be learned and discerned even from the villains of the Bible. Otherwise their stories and thoughts would not also be included. What you can’t do is just take everything said at face-value (and I would include in that warning even those parts that begin with “The Lord says…” - after all why should it be only God’s direct communiques that have all depth or effort of understanding disallowed? If anything those should be worthy of the deepest reflections and studies). But that is the peculiar baggage and burden for you ‘non-accommodationists’ to have to try to answer!] Okay - so much for my brief reply.

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Hi Christy, I think you have missed a very important point that I have stated several times. The bible records what people said, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was inspired or believed by God. But the “God said” statements which are quotes of God in the Bible are either quotes from God or they are fictional things written by man. If one of those statements says something wrong, well, we can know it isn’t from God–after all, God said to kill prophets that predicted false things.

I find your example above quite interesting because, I know of no statement in the bible that God gave lessons on the birds and bees. Please show me what I have failed to notice in Scripture here. I would be interested to see God’s statement about seeds in the soil of a woman’s womb.

You also said: "Only if God is talking about nature and history. " As I pointed out to JPM, I simply find it impossible to see how Chapter 1 is not talking about the creation of objects in the universe–something that science knows a wee bit about. But, alas, I have been told it isn’t about nature but about God. To the extent that it tells me he can create life, yeah, it is about God in that respect, but it is also about the things he created–which is ALL of nature.

I see Mervin has replied but I gotta get up early tomorrow so I gotta go to bed. continued tomorrow

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Well, I can’t help myself, gotta reply tonight. I did grad work in philosophy of science and one of the guys I studied, was Wittgenstein. He was a philosopher of language and one of the things he said was a word’s meaning is how it is used. It seems to me that trying to understand some ‘deeper’ message to statements like Gen 1:6 is doing exactly what Wittgenstein wouldn’t like–i.e. making the words mean something other than how they are used. If we did this to communications from our spouses, I would predict a divorce in the short term. Words mean what they mean and are chosen by the writer to communicate what he meant.

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Well more than one Bible scholar has invested a lot of time and thought in the whole “functional vs. material creation” or “temple inauguration” idea, so obviously there are ways to view the account in context as being about something other than material creation.

In the OT, reproduction was understood in agricultural terms. Descendants were seeds, Jesus was the shoot from the root of Jesse, infertile women were barren; that was just the pre-scientific conceptualization of reproduction. God accommodated this conceptualization every time he used “seed” or “barren” other plant language to talk about descendants, which was frequently. I don’t have time at the moment to look up a bunch of chapters and verses. Gen 3:15 is one. Gal. 3:16-19 is another. When God decided to use a specific human language to communicate, he limited himself to the conceptual categories encoded by the language. Those conceptual categories were not always scientifically accurate.

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