My dear Jamie, I think you are making this up as you go along.
If readers struggle with REAL science… how are we going to get anyone to accept your suppositions and speculations?
Hi Jamie,
I’m glad you’ve found a way to read this that strengthens your faith. I don’t have any interest in trying to tear that down. But you’ve put this out there and it raises some interesting questions for me, so for discussion’s sake I thought I’d bat them around with you a bit.
What do you make of the fact that the original author had different biological categories than we do today? The original author seems to make links between a kind of life and the space it inhabits. Notice the structure…
Day 1: light.
Day 2: sky / water.
Day 3: land.
Day 4: sun / moon / stars.
Day 5: birds / fish.
Day 6: animals / humans.
[In my original version of this post, 1/2/3 were in the left column & 4/5/6 were in the right column, but the formatting didn’t work. You’ll have to imagine it.]
The idea is this: First three days, set up the space. Next three days, fill it with life, each in its respective order following the first three days.
As such, the Hebrew word for “birds,” in the right context, can just as well be used for insects, as in Leviticus 11:13-23.
Similarly, on the day when the earth is populated, we have not only livestock and mammals but also “creeping animals,” which seems like it could refer to, I dunno, your guess is as good as mine, but land insects? lizards? snails? Hard to imagine it means anything mammalian. Poke around in online Bible dictionaries like I just did and you’ll find lots of interesting guesses but, interestingly, they don’t all neatly fit into a single Linnean taxonomic group. Rather, they follow an ancient Hebrew ethnozoological category, which had more to do with the “creeping-ness” of the thing, whatever that meant to them, rather than some monophyletic cladogram from a high-school biology textbook.
My point being, if you look at Genesis, you see a neat progression: fill the seas and the skies with life (all kinds of life, including birds and flying insects!); then, after that, fill the land with life (all kinds of life, including mammals, reptiles and creepy-crawly insects!).
But if you look at evolution, you see multiple colonizations of aquatic animal life onto land (first various invertebrates, later vertebrates) and multiple colonizations of land animal life into the air (first invertebrates, later amphibians, later avian dinosaurs, later mammals). These colonizations are interleaved, so by the time amphibians came along, insects were already flying in the air, but bats weren’t flying around until long after other land vertebrates. You even see “backtracking” where land animals return to the sea (ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, cetaceans, pinnipeds, platypuses, penguins, etc., to varying degrees). Critically, what you don’t see is animal life going straight from sea to sky, bypassing the land. What you do see is a stunningly diverse tapestry of adaptations to different niches that doesn’t follow a neat linear narrative of sea > sky > land.
Don’t these seem like two completely different accounts of the development of life on earth to you? Don’t they seem to use completely different sets of categories for talking about the natural world? Why are we trying to force these to align? It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m trying to understand.
I think you are having trouble coming up with substantial criticism.
No they dont seem completely different. It seems like as correct an account as could be conveyed simply through ancient terms. We aren’t forcing them to align, they seem to align pretty easily.
I understand the evolutionary order you describe, in Point 2 I note that first origin of the most important “kinds” is the point.
By all means “tear it down”. I could be wrong. This is not what my faith is based on.
And aren’t mice creeping animals?
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Well, if I were to dumb down evolution for, say, a kids’ book, I would start with filling the seas, then filling the land, then filling the air. That’s the order evolution actually took. There’s no reason whatsoever that the author wouldn’t have gone that direction if he was trying merely to simplify an accurate description of the evolutionary development of life for an ancient audience.
That’s not what he was trying to do.
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How can you expect specific criticism when no specific evidence is offered?
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You are basing this on the filling the spaces idea. Thus you already have an interpretation, and your interpretation leads you to conclude Genesis does not reflect the scientific reality. It is your interpretation that does not reflect the scientific reality, and you are extending that to the text itself as if you have correct/complete interpretation. However that was not the purpose of this thread as I understood it. It is entirely possible that there were multiple purposes intended and explaining evoloution was not very high on the list. The ordering is correct nonetheless.
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I didn’t come up with the notion of filling; the text did, in verses 22 and 28. The text has a structure that is hard to miss, with obvious parallels between days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6. My goal is to understand what the text is actually intending to say. I have the gall to believe that when we figure out what it is actually intending to say to its original audience, and we look at evolutionary theory, the two will not conflict. That is entirely consonant with the purpose of this thread.
And now I’m going to hit “Reply” before you edit your post again. 
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Well I hope you succeed. Yeah I figure editing is better than adding extra posts.
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Yes there’s a lot of cruelty, love, stupidity, laughter, bad luck, beauty, etc in the world; it’s a complicated picture, but I still think the trajectory is generally favorable. But whatever, I don’t think there was ever anything resembling a Fall, and Christian theology was built upon the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the Fall.
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There certainly is a lot of subjectivity in our own appraisal (whatever that is worth) of how our contemporary moral fiber compares with that of our ancestors. But, mixed bag that it may be from person to person and culture to culture and over time, there still is and always has been plenty of sin to go round.
Regarding the foundations of Christianity, there is no shortage of contemporaries who agree with you. I would tweak your statement just slightly, though, to read that you are closer to the basis of Christianity if you speak of the reality of our fallen state rather than alleged historicities of how we got there and all the personages involved. And, of course, if you want the absolute foundation of Christianity, you won’t read of it [Him, rather] in Genesis at all - not explicitly anyway- the gospels are the place to go. Genesis and everything else is now read and understood in that greater light, at least for the Christian.
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Part of what gives me pause here is the use of the word ‘good’ in Genesis 1, particularly in Genesis 1:31 where ‘God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.’ This is understood to be perfect and without any defect in any way. This would of necessity require a Fall to mar that goodness and to create the need for redemption through the Gospel and eventually a new heavens and a new earth. Romans 8:18-21 and context speak specifically of this, namely, that the creation was subjected to futility due to Adam’s sin, yet this was part of God’s original plan to bring about redemption and restoration and to show the majesty of His character in a way that no other plan could (see Ephesians 2).
The plain meaning of the redemptive flow of history seems impossible to reconcile with the theistic evolution view. Under that view, at what point would one say that the creation was good, and at what point would one say that it fell? Beyond that, how would one be able to define that restoration to that original goodness?
“Let all the earth fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” (Psalms 33:8-9, NASB)
I still feel like you’re saying that the Fall and original sin is a new position. This is orthodoxy through the centuries.
I’m not sure how you can talk about the “reality” of our fallen state while dismissing its historicity. If it didn’t happen, I don’t think it is reality.
Actually, fwiw original sin was not well established pre-Augustine, and is still not well-established in the Orthodox (capital-O) churches today.
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That we are fallen is nothing new. How (and how fast, and how important the historicities of these details are) is necessarily a new thing because it is a reactionary position to something that didn’t exist until recent centuries: the notion that the earth and life in it is ancient far beyond previous assumptions. There had never been a reason to suspect this, and thus it wasn’t even on their radar.
Regarding the reality of our fallen state; so are you implying that before something can be a reality, its historicity must be completely and correctly apprehended according to modern historical-analysis standards? On that logic, if, say, the American civil war and the reasons for it had gotten a bit murky … maybe historians are even just wrong about some things, would the discovery of that error force us to conclude that the civil war never happened? Or perhaps a better example, your and my ability to read this English prose is obviously beyond dispute. But I seriously doubt anybody will ever be able to point to the single day in their history before which they could not read, and after which they could. So if somebody had a narrative about how they became a reader, but then we came to doubt their narrative (or our understandings of their narrative, rather) … would our skepticism about the details of how they learned to read call into question their present ability to read? Not at all! So too, the reality of our sinful state does not rise or fall on this issue.
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There are ways of ways that evolutionary creationism/theistic evolution that can include a Fall. Check out this table link and go to Sin/Sinning and Compatibility with Paul’s statements on Adam.
@Noza I suspect you may be somewhat overwhelmed by this discussion. Two suggestions: 1. Check on the link above and the website it is part of, and 2. Try using Evolutionary Creationism (vs Theistic Evolution) Interpretation of Genesis instead. Evolutionary Creationism is the term that is more widely used these days. Biologos is the leading site for that and has an overwhelming amount of material on Genesis. Neither it or my linked site above has one single view of what went on, because that is never detailed out in scripture, but there are 4 or 5 major ‘plausible scenarios.’ It shouldn’t surprise us that from a God who is so far above us. There could not be any explanation that would be understandable from ancient times through modern times. He never gave us natural world/scientific explanations throughout scripture. I think that he designed discoverable natural laws that can be more thoroughly revealed as time goes by.
The Fall was an image crafted by a Greek theologian! In my profile, I have this exact quote:
“The phrase “The Fall” was coined by a Greek church father named Methodius of Olympus - - sometime in the 300’s CE.”
In the book “The Story of Original Sin” by John Toews (2013), we read:
“. . . the term “the fall” was first used with certainty . . . by the Greek church father Methodius of Olympus, late third or early fourth century (d. 311), as a reaction to Origen’s [typo corrected!] teaching of a pre-natal fall in the transcendent world. . . . . Why is it profoundly significant that this much later Christian and Greek “fall” construal is not stated or even suggested in the [Hebrew] text? Because that means the story of salvation history, which is a fairly normative interpretive framework for a Christian reading the whole Bible does not begin with “the fall.” Rather, it begins with broken relationships and exile, which is a very Jewish way of reading the text. And lest we forget, it was Jewish people who wrote this text originally for Jewish people, probably for Jewish people living in exile trying to understand the profound tragedy of the destruction . . . “ of their paradise on earth.
Footnote 29 “. . . the word used by Methodius and the later Latin Fathers was ‘Lapsus’ not the ‘Casus’ of IV Ezra. The Latin translation of the 9th century would appear to reflect the dominant understanding which ‘fall’ language achieved in the Western Church. . . .”
[END OF CLIPS]
The Fall is hardly the concept that the Hebrew intentionally transmitted; for the Hebrew it was an EXILE . . . not a Fall. Women do not have birth pains because her physiology responded to her moral violation; women suffer this because God chose this punishment. Men do not become farmers because their brains instantly became agricultural at the moral violation; men are decreed to work by the sweat of their brow as a PUNISHMENT… not because of their FALLEN nature.
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Yeah, my understanding is that the orthodox view of the Orthodox is that we inherited the propensity to sin, but not Adam’s guilt. I could be wrong though.
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We might be talking past each other a bit. So, I guess you’re not dismissing the historicity of the Fall. You’d say it happened; we just don’t know when or how it happened.
Yes, we know the Civil War happened. We know that we learned how to read and write sometime in the past. But it’s not at all clear that we have fallen. The fact that humanity does bad things is not the same as being in a fallen state.
Thank you! This chart is great. I’m currently reading Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose, which seems to layout similar scenarios.Are you, or anybody else, familiar with the ““Progressive” responsibility, just as children progress as they grow up” model from this chart? Christianity doesn’t seem to leave much room for gradualism. You either have the image of God or not. You’re either going to heaven or hell. I’m not sure how progressively gaining a spiritual soul/deserving damnation plays with this paradigm.