No – the scriptures do not talk science because that’s not their purpose and they’re generally the wrong type of literature. To try to get science from them is disrespectful to the writer, to the Holy Spirit Who chose that writer, and the the audience to whom it was written. YECists claim to honor the scriptures, but they do not even have the common decency to acknowledge that they’re reading someone else’s mail and so go to the effort of working tom understand those whose mail they are privileged to read.
In a piece of literature not meant to be taken literally in either of its genres.
The fascinating thing here is that to maintain that it must be read literally is to assert that the Egyptians and most of Mesopotamia got a large amount of their theology right – and they didn’t have Yahweh’s help!
Only if you think you can understand the inspired scriptures without bothering to actually do the required homework.
If you got a letter from someone who had been in WWII in Burma, and it had to be translated, would you assume that because you could read the translation that you understood clearly what the letter was talking about? No – you’d need to investigate cultural references and other background material or you’d zoom right over much of the meaning. It’s no different reading the scriptures, except they’re from much farther back than merely WWII, from a far more different culture, and for the most part they aren’t letters and so it is necessary to understand what kind of literature they are.
No, it isn’t – that’s just intellectual laziness and arrogance. It comes from a desire to know things without having to do the necessary homework.
That cannot be supported from the text – it’s a statement from the “Well it looks like this to me, and of course I must be right” school of thought . . . or rather lack of bothering with school or engging in actual thought.
Of course he was – in their language, using their types of literature, within their worldview.
The amazing thing is that it is just common sense when you’re making a message for someone that you use means of communication that they will understand – but when it comes to YEC and the scriptures they refuse to admit that God was speaking to people millennia ago; they want to believe that the Holy Spirit had no respect for those people and instead coerced Moss into writing in a literary type that would have been totally alien to both him and his audience and thus useless in that time and place.
Instead Moses chose to take the Egyptian creation story and modify it to send a message the way people did back then – taking someone else’s theology and making it talk about your own God. He did this brilliantly, turning it from an Egyptian cosmological myth into two types of literature at the same time, one that portrayed YHWH-Elohim as a mighty king conquering a realm, the other showing how He built His own temple – the world – and decorated it, finally adding in the most important item in a temple back then, the image of the god, which in this case was a set of living images.
The first choice of literature was simple: people back then and there expected there to be a battle in a creation story because creation was a matter of the gods defeating the forces of chaos and darkness, generally after some serious combat – but Moses essentially says, "Nope – YHWH-Elohim doesn’t need combat, He just commands and the forces of darkness and chaos retreat. The second genre, though, really trumps the first one: YHWH-Elohim building His own temple and putting His own image into it wasn’t the way gods were supposed to do things, they were supposed to make slaves and have them do the work, but YHWH-Elohim does His own, and tops it off not by putting in a statue to represent Him but living images with minds of their own! It drops the final trump because up to the sixth day it was only clear that this was ‘royal chronicle’, so when Moses declared “as the image of God He mad them” those listening would have been baffled – what did that have to do with His victory? The the second shoe dropped: when it came to the phrase “God rested” the audience would have had to pick their jaws off the ground because he just switched from conquest talk to temple talk, because the last thing to happen when a temple was built and dedicated back then was that the god showed up and rested in it – after the god’s slaves had strained themselves to get everything just right! So when Moses says that God “rested from His work that He had done” he was turning things all upside down again because gods weren’t supposed to work, and a god resting in his temple was to enjoy what his slaves had made. Then perhaps the implications of earlier details sank in: YHWH-Elohim doesn’t make slaves, He makes living images, and He sits down in His temple with them.
That carried a potent message to the Egyptians who got hold of the story because it told them they were nothing but their gods’ slaves, but Yahweh’s people were essentially family! And in Egypt who was family to the gods? One, and one only – the Pharaoh. Moses had just written an account that set all of the Israelites on the same level as the Pharaoh.
We miss all this when we pretend we don’t need to do the homework, when we demand that the Holy Spirit instead had Moses write a dry, almost boring cataloguing of events little different from putting up a barn.
No, there’s always the option of throwing out pride and arrogance and admitting that the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire a work that would have been meaningless to people back then, instead He inspired one that communicated in terms they understood (and may have even gotten a laugh or three from).
But YEC doesn’t do that – what Answers in Genesis and their ilk do is choose to lie, misrepresent, lie, ignore the scientific method, lie, and use every slick and devious trick Madison Avenue ever thought up in a despicable fashion that makes Christians and GOd look just plain stupid.
Which some may look askance at, but is definitely not stupid.
It’s so easy to think that Easter was the victory, though it wasn’t at all, it was the beginning of the victory parade, the Triumph that Rome’s successful generals got. Paul doesn’t say, “We preach Christ, resurrected”, he said, “We preach Christ crucified”. The early church understood this and called the Crucifixion Christ’s coronation.
