Your original question was about how far to take the literal view of Genesis. It rests on the false assumption that the literal view is the only valid way to see it. That is the viewpoint of both YEC and atheists. My response is that I do not take the literal view any further than as a template for an epistemic view of Genesis. Your opinion as to whether you agree or not is irrelevant. The epistemic view does nothing to destroy the meaning of the Hebrew words. Rather, it preserves and enhances their meaning in a way that gives them divine relevance and credibility.
We are living in God’s creation and we have the intelligence to understand it with knowledge that it provides from the empirical data that it gives us. A literal translation of the empirical data given to a person standing on the earth would tell them that it is stationary, flat, and the center of the universe. The epistemic translation that the empirical data gives us when we add more empirical data to our understanding tells us that the earth is a sphere that is spinning around its axis and rotating around the sun at the center of our solar system. The term, ‘epistemic translation’, is created by me to identify an understanding that is obtained with knowledge from a broader perspective than is used for a literal translation. As the creator of the term, I get to establish the rules with which it is applied. That is simply the answer to your question about the way I view Genesis. God’s creation and the knowledge it gives me takes precedence over ancient man-made words.
That does not work because then the waters would already be there with the spirit of God hovernig over them.
As it was me and not @St.Roymond who started this thread I will refute your statement. Id did not asume that the literal was the only view, in fact, I refute the literal view. I was just asking how literal people were prepared to takee early Genesis as much of the theology is based upon that sort of understanding. You cannot have Original Sin without an original sinner, for instance.
I am not a linguist so would not wish to comment upon the accuracy of specific translations. I bow to those who have that knowledge.
However, as I do not take early Genesis literally I have to be able to draw some relevance from it, but that is for elsewhere.
Richard
2 Likes
This is a modern phobia. It wasn’t that long ago in many places that at swimming holes everyone went in bare skin and if you swam with any clothes you were considered weird. Even closer to today, showers were wide open, the shower heads three feet apart along a wall; no one had any problems with that.
But that has nothing to do with the Garden stories.
I take it and try to see how the ancient author would have seen it, I hold that the narrative of Adam and eve is a real event with real people but that god used them for a theological purpose, and even before I was a true Christian whenever I read the bible I realized how highly theological and symbolic the narratives are in chapters 1-11. Particularly with the Adam and Eve narrative, I currently lean on my own Adam and eve interpretation since it makes since for me.
1 Like
Because “in the beginning” (or "When God began to create) is a heading or title.
Evening followed by morning is a description of night. In the polemical function of the first Creation story its inclusion is a direct attack on the Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythic/theological idea that night and darkness were the enemy of order, a foe that the gods had to do battle with every 24-hour day in order that the chariot of the sun could pass through the realm of darkness and emerge again to being morning.
True, it isn’t fatal. 1:1 is a heading/title, 1:2 sets the scene, and First Day begins in verse 3 with YHWH-Elohim speaking to light that didn’t yet exist, commanding it to come into existence (somewhere in the New Testament there’s a reference to that). That’s where the assault on the Egyptian-Mesopotamian pantheons begins: to them, light was just something that existed, but the Genesis writer essentially said, you guys are clueless; light is something that our Elohim made by command! I’ll note that commanding things into existence was something a number of deities were said to have done, but light was held to have its own existence apart from the gods and thus in a sense was greater than the gods; the writer here thus set YHWH-Elohim far above any other gods by announcing that light was just His first creature.
By setting forth that YHWH-Elohim is greater even than light – and, one by one, greater than all the gods of Egypt – that’s already been done. The story starts with YHWH-Elohim; if you translate the opening word with a different first vowel (remember vowels are a late addition), then it declares “In the beginning [was] God” – and given the flexibiity of the ancient mind, they would have read that set of consonants and thought of both “In the beginning [there was] God” right along with “When God began to create” (which is, BTW, really a clumsy way of putting it, but English doesn’t have any way to get closer to the Hebrew without a somewhat lengthy essay).
That we can look back and see that there is physics happening is not an issue; the issue is importing any science into literature that frankly couldn’t care less about such things! Thinking of science and Genesis my mind always leaps to those ancient scholars who concluded on the basis of the Hebrew that the universe started out smaller than a grain of mustard then expanded unimaginably rapidly until the fluid (waters) that filled this expanding universe thinned enough for light to be able to shine, at which point God commanded light into existence; that the universe is incomprehensibly ancient (one commentator insisted it must be “ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand” [though that can be read symbolically, it nevertheless also means “a really long time”] of years old; and that the Earth is also ancient beyond human counting.
2 Likes
That idea can actually be found in some ancient near eastern writings, though as I recall that shout was said to have brought the (lesser) gods into existence, and it was they who actually made everything.
It can also be found in the church Fathers who regarded the opening Creation story as poetic prose written to enable the human mind to grasp it all – though I don’t recall any of them using the word “shout”; “in an instant” comes to mind and “in the flash of light”, the latter referring to God’s command to light to exist and everything else erupting into existence in that first moment of light.
[In something fascinating to me, some of what these Fathers wrote closely parallels Hindu and other far Eastern ideas, yet there is no evidence even suggesting that these Fathers had encountered any of that eastern teaching {there was likely some such contact in the churches now called “Oriental Orthodox”, though}].
1 Like
You confuse interpretive models with translation. So what you just said above is that you don’t consider the meaning of the actual words as important, you just use them to say something else.
But it does – your “epistemic” “translation” butchers the concepts in the text by replacing them with something that you think the text should have meant.
What you posted doesn’t enhance the meaning, it shreds it by throwing away the worldview of the original writer and the intent of the genre he chose. You don’t get credibility by forcing a modern worldview on ancient literature, you get credibility from analyzing that literature according to the worldview of the ancient writer and the literary genre he chose.
I’ll cite your original proposal:
That throws away much of the basic meaning as well as adding to the text things that aren’t there. “Heavens and Earth” isn’t at all equivalent to “space and matter”, and “fluid matter” is completely contrary to the concept the text was conveying.
And “vibrating” is ridiculously silly.
It seems that “epistemic translation” really means “rewriting the text to say what I think it should have said”. It’s an arrogant and lazy approach: arrogant because it assumes that grappling with the original text in its original concept isn’t necessary, and lazy because it doesn’t require any more work than stuffing modern words into the text.
1 Like
I disagree. Describing the ‘earth’ as ‘formless and void’ is contradictory. It means that it is not an earth. The only material that can be formless and void is a gas or plasma in a randomly fluid state.
What ancient near eastern writings make you think so? The writer certainly didn’t think it was contradictory, and since he was part of that culture he would certainly have known if there was anything at all wrong with the way he wrote the passage. So please, point us to the scholarly work which points to your claim.
Just a passing thought. Seeing as Judaism probably never knew of the far East, isn’t is probable that God established a relationship with these people also? The Universalism of Christ is very late in human existence. Perhaps God is bigger than Christianity thinks?
(I do not wish to pursue this here, but maybe there might be a discussion of inter-faith comparisons elsewhere.)
Richard
Bereshit is used elsewhere to indicate the beginning of a period (https://biblehub.com/interlinear/jeremiah/28-1.htm).
The text doesn’t say God created everything ex nihilo. The waters are the non-functional and chaotic precosmic condition.
The Hebrew word for create, bara, can also involve functional creation. Which can involve material creation of course.
If someone would create a food programme, several things need to happen. You need to hire a location and prepare meals. But you must also create a team and a schedule.
God creating the heavens and the earth means He creates a functional cosmos. And all that is de-created when the flood happens.
Welcome @poseunitedose !
Yes, yet there is still a difference between bathing with your peers or your own father. For Roman males it was normal to go to the bathhouse together. But for a(n adult) son to go there with his father was a taboo.
it was an ancient custom in Rome, and in many other states as well, that grown-up sons should not bathe with their parents, or sons-in-law with their fathers-in-law, in order that the great duty of reverence for parents should not be weakened.
Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy, 1.18.79.
Although I don’t know about other periods in history.
1 Like
I would say that was what was intended from the first line. If not then God is not the full creator. Did the waters create themselves? I am sorry but that does not make sense. God, being eternal Alpha and Omega has no beginning or end but, in theory, the Universe has a beginning.by God.
Richard
What ancient writings from anywhere can have an epistemic translation applied to a scholarly literal translation and even approach an accurate description of how the universe and earth formed based on what the creation itself has revealed to us? I realize that epistemic translation is a new concept and will meet the typical criticism for its adjustment to established literary dogma. That has always been the initial response to a new ‘philosophical’ view. It really doesn’t matter if it seeps into the academic consciousness. It makes sense to me.
Hardly. תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ can be translated as desolate and empty - the opposite of the ordered creation and bountiful garden of Eden
Concordant interpretations of Genesis have been around forever.
1 Like
That is just philosophical bias. You are letting your modern conception of God as a maximal being and your modern understanding of space-time dictate what the text meant 2600 years ago. That is hardly a valid translational practice.
The opening of Genesis can be interpreted in several different ways and we are talking about people that believed in a three-tiered cosmos with a solid metal firmament in the sky.
From the very first lines, the Bible shows us it is not a book of answers for us, but one of questions.
Vinnie
1 Like
Where does my bias come from if it isn’t Scripture? It is not a scientific model.
Richard
At birth an infant is incapable off perceiving the expressed will (significant presence) of any other being. This changes at around 18 months, lasts quite a while, and is called “the Terrible Twos.”
Stipulating that sin can only occur in the presence of some other entity to sin against, the Terrible Twos implicates each of us as “born in sin.” We are born with an ultimately sinful response, hampered at first by the simple inability to conceptualize the idea of a competing active will.
There is no scientific proof either way what causes our basic morality… Certainly Scripture cannot impose such a condemnation.
Reality trumps scripture every time.
[/quote]
Reality trumps doctrine, not Scripture. Scripture defines morality; science has nothing to say in that regard. The Terrible Twos (above) show us that a well functioning adult can be moral, yet never perfect. That doggone id never surrenders.
-
Example: the doctrine that Earth is young.
Facts on hand demonstrate that Earth took shape as a ball about 4.54 billion years ago, and that human-like fossils date back nearly half a million years. -
Example: the doctrine that evolution is a misunderstanding of Creation.
Facts on hand demonstrate that speciation has been prolific since at least ~800,000 years; the oldest-found-to-date fossil is a sea sponge. Stromatolites demonstrate that a species existed more that 3 billion years ago. -
Example: God personally designs each attribute of each person.
No coherent explanation for that, other than God personally directing both mitosis DNA copy errors which wind up affecting the gonads, plus the meiosis DNA copy errors when one cell becomes four haploid germ cells, then which female germ cell (egg) is released, and finally which male germ cell (sperm) gets there first.
Of course an infinite God is capable of such. But evolution has both those forms of copy error (and there are others, critical to forming novel genes.) They enable evolution to produce the inconsistent elegance the real world exhibits. -
Evolution has produced seeming marvels of sophisticated design of systems requiring many specific genes to produce an eye or (name another part).
-
Evolution has also produced a nerve that runs between the jaw and the brain which loops around a specific aorta on its way. Fancy the presence of such a gene in a giraffe.
In theory evolution’s “design palette” has a color scheme dictated by unpredictable mutations, nearly all of which go nowhere. Evolution is slow that way.
But in any decent sized breeding pool, [[ and clearly in a few tiny ones planted on an island and watched for a third of a century ]] there is a huge likelihood at any point in time that many “un bad” mutations are slowly spreading throughout the total breeding pool.
When two mutations serendipitously enhance each other’s ability to do that, we have a visible forward step in producing something called Irreducibly Complex.
The reasonableness of, say, the vision of an eagle arising merely by a series of serendipities, is evident from the demonstrable pathways that created the eye from a nerve to a nerve that responded to light to - - - you see where that is going.
- (Forgive the verbosity - details count.)
If God wanted to do it all in person, fine. But there is the messy problem that at every point in the chain of mutations, the only factor was whether or not the change enhanced production of viable progeny. It dovetails with evolution’s great sloth, and the flaws show that Natural Selection is only elegant by accident, by long series of slight improvements. The best image would be a bulky old factory foreman with these words on the front of his overalls: “IF IT WORKS, SHIP IT!”
Consider the hubris of mankind imagining that God diddles our DNA, when the reality is that God knows what is coming next, species by species - with regard to us, word by word.
1 Like
From science and philosphy we can infer that God created our universe ex nihilo. I am saying that this particular text, Genesis 1, is not telling us that God created the waters.
This chapter also doesn’t say anything about the creation of the angels. The heavenly council just appears in verse 26. Yet that doesn’t mean the angels always existed. Psalm 148 tells us the angels are also part of God’s creation (148:2, 5).
Maybe some will argue that the stars of day four are angels. But I think many will find that to be a far-stretched reading.
I hope my reading makes a bit more sense now. 
3 Likes