Dear Ron,
I am sorry you feel that way, there is a considerable body of rigorously sound evidence that squarely supports the Genesis historical accounts of creation and global flood.
I honestly don’t know why you appear to exhibit so much disdain to fellow Christians such as myself simply because we disagree with your beliefs.
Ultimately, when all the petty squabbling about this or that is done away with, this debate is about the Truth that Jesus is Lord of all and that He died on the cross for each one of us.
I know of some highly capable eminent scientists who hold many world patents, have each published hundreds of papers in prestigious scientific journals, who work in military, government and private research facilities that disagree with the disingenuous accusations you make here against other Christians who see things differently to you.
It is telling you didn’t attempt to answer the questions any of the questions A, B, C. or D. so I’ll ask just the last two again:
Why would they need to have an ark to save their lives and save the lives of the animals God brought to the ark, if all Noah had to do was travel for a week or two to higher ground and all God had to do was move the animals to higher ground in another area?
The purpose of the flood was to obliterate all life from Earth, or LAND if you wish, it makes no difference. If all the life on land is to be drowned, WHY would God just use a ‘local flood’?”
With regard to these two straightforward questions, who said anything about science?
The clear and obvious implication here to me at least is that God had Noah build such a massive ocean going vessel, the ark to accommodate his family and all the representatives of the 'Biblical Kinds", that is a much broader classification than the present day taxonomy level of specie, BECAUSE the flood was a catastrophic Global event of unimaginable scale.
THEREFORE THE FLOOD COULD NOT HAVE BEEN A LOCAL EVENT, IT WAS TRULY GLOBAL IN EXTENT, JUST AS THE BIBLE CLEARLY TELLS US IN GENESIS
That is the only explanation that makes any sense. I had hoped you would understand that.
You have channeling YEC scientific claims throughout this thread.
I have not been arguing for a local flood interpretation.
I understand your argument. I am saying that it is not scientifically relevant whether you take it as local or global. Others on both sides of the question may seek a more concordist approach.
If you don’t want to be accused of misinformation, selective fudging, fabrication and misrepresentation of evidence, then make sure the arguments that you are making stick to the rules.
And if you’re told that your arguments don’t stick to the rules, then the correct response is to either fix them so that they do stick to the rules, or retract them.
And there’s a big difference between being persecuted for being a Christian and being told that you aren’t getting your facts straight. Claiming that you’re being subjected to “venomous” “false accusations” that are only “because you believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word” when in actual fact you are simply being told you aren’t getting your facts straight is just being petulant.
The rules apply to every area of science, and dividing it up into “operational science” and “historical science” does not change that. In any case, “historical science” is every bit as repeatable and testable in the present as “operational science.” The claim that it isn’t is a falsehood told by people who don’t understand what being testable and repeatable actually means.
The recent tragic flooding from the aftermath of the hurricane bring to mind the futility of going to higher ground. In this localized storm, even with lots of forewarning, lives were lost and whole towns destroyed with “only” 12-20 inches of rain in 24 hours. There was no going uphill for man or beast once the water started flowing, only going downstream. In our local area, I had an acquaintance who lived near a local river that normally in only 1-3 feet deep and popular with tubers and rafters. He got the call of flood warning, and before he could get out of the house, the water was waist deep. He barely escaped with his life. Several were not so lucky, and their bodies never found. And that from 10 inches or so of rainfall in 24 hours Multiply the rate of rainfall by 100, and you would see the problem of animals traveling to higher ground to die in place and form discrete layers of fossils as some propose, or of people being able to escape a local flood of much lesser magnitude easily.
It then leaves us with the question of reconciling the flood story with physical observation. And I think however you do it is fine, so long as the truth of the message is recognized. We can even argue about that, but to me the primary truths are God’s displeasure with sin, and his provision for salvation and new life through grace.
Authoritive, yes, but that doesn’t mean real history. The few times Jesus referred to the first human family in Genesis, he saw the stories as prophetic more than historical. The creation of humanity on day six speaks of how God creates every person, male and female. The story of God making the lonely first human into man and woman speaks of how God joins every couple together so that “what God has joined” in marriage “let no man separate” by divorce. Jesus read Adam and Eve (if translated, more like Human and Liv) as prophetically revealing who humans are, not who they came from.
Then there’s Abel (if translated, something like Dewey, since his name is the word for vapour or meaninglessness). Jesus took the details of his story so seriously that he calls him a prophet – the first prophet (Luke 11:49–51). Where did Jesus get that idea, since Abel never speaks? It appears Jesus took the story more seriously than most literalists, so he recognized that Abel did speak prophetically to God. God told Cain (if translated, Lance) that “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10).
Further, Jesus claimed that Abel and Zechariah’s blood are the extremities of “the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world.” This may seem to be a historical claim that Abel is the first prophet killed and Zechariah was, at that time, the last. But that’s obviously not the case, since John the Baptist had already died. Jesus is throwing the book at the religious experts, from the prophet killed in the first pages of Genesis to the one killed in the last pages of 2 Chronicles (which ends the last portion of the Jewish Scriptures, the Writings). What’s important to Jesus is that these people are first and last in the Scriptures; their historical placement didn’t matter.
All this suggests that Jesus took Genesis as authoritative, even the details that seem to be plainly figurative. Unlike today’s literalists, he could find authoritative truth even in details that were not historical.
“Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem … I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off the blood from you and anointed you with oil. I clothed you with embroidered cloth and with sandals of fine leather; I bound you in fine linen and covered you with rich fabric” (Ezekiel 16:3, 8–10).
Why do you think God made garments for his wife Jerusalem if she was not a real person? Is it possible that a biblical story could use a fictional character to personify a real group of people? And if so, what group might characters named Human and Liv personify?
A lot of sites do that; they either don’t expect anyone to cut and paste Hebrew (in many cases I suspect they don’t actually read the language) or lack the expertise to put it in a universally useful code. Just for future reference, Bible Hub’s interlinear (though its translation is heavily biased) has Hebrew font that can be cut and paste if you’re after single words, and www.chabad.org is good for longer bits of text (though admittedly only useful if you actually read Hebrew).
I remember the moment when the implications hit me; I almost dropped my Nestle Greek NT in the floor. I’d read the passage in Greek at least a half dozen times before, but I was taking a discussion course where we pondered every word and for the first time my brain made the connection. We’d already examined a number of other words in their Greek philosophical context but I’d never considered such a context for this particular one before.
What fascinated me once I got a grip on my Greek NT again was that almost that entire “Hymn to the Firstborn” is just an explication of what “firstborn” means philosophically and application of that to Christ.
This is a theme that in its ANE setting was radical; the claim that the pronoun “your” referring to a deity could be applied to the chaos-realm would have been jaw-dropping. We see the whole swallowed-by-a-fish thing as the amazing part, but to an ANE person unfamiliar with the God of Israel that would have been no big deal; they would have been jolted/shocked at the idea that the watery chaos was not the enemy that the gods protected humans from but was rather just one more instrument in the hands of a single Creator.
That is, to the borders of the underworld!
Thus YHWH is lord also of Sheol; even that is part of His greater realm.
As noted above, much of the Hymn to the Firstborn is explication of the term “firstborn” and application to Christ, so the intent is definitely metaphysical: all that is holds, in some fashion, His “shape” – it isn’t metaphor. So as struck me one day while reading Stott’s The Cross of Christ at a swimming hole even an autumn leaf falling into a swirl of water along a stream cutting through bedrock declares His name and tells us something about Him if we only had the eyes to see, and for that matter my own hand (which I held up to the sun and saw the light shining through the thin tissues) shows something about Him. Indeed just last night as I watched Jupiter rise above the early night fog I recognized that somehow it held a message about our Lord (it, and the fog, too!).
When you resort to AiG and Creation. com, the difference lies in lies – they do not “have a different interpretation of the evidence”, they lie about the evidence.
And here’s one of those lies:
This ignores the fact that new information in bacterial genomes has been observed in nature – and not just in bacterial genomes, either.
And there’s another item: you’re attacking a straw man, misrepresenting what the ToE says either from deliberate choice or from ignorance.
And another example of a lie:
You know why that’s a lie? Because misrepresents what the ToE says; in fact it states part of the ToE and pretends ToE says something different.
Given the source, it isn’t surprising that this is another lie, this time by pretending that one possibility is the only one, and then with the switch from “any genetic information they carry is eliminated” to “The survivors carry less information”, which are not the same thing at all – and in fact that conclusion contradicts the model being used!
False. Any reputable biologist knows better than this, so if your source is even a biologist then he or she knows they’re lying.
And now the falsehoods about the text: you are inserting a modern scientific definition into an ancient language that had no such definition. That results in falsehood because it gives the text a new meaning while destroying the original one.
Yes – the flat earth-disk surrounded by a portion of the “great deep”.
Exactly! Which is why I don’t really care about ToE – what I care about is people employing lies about it in order to try to discredit it. A critique founded on lies is not a critique at all, it is just intellectual hooliganism.
The tragedy is that you fail to recognize that YEC does the exact same thing you accuse honest scientists of, making up stories about the text rather than reading the text. Calling the opening of Genesis “historical narrative” is not examining the text, it is inventing a story about the text to try to make it fit an existing belief.
What about trees that used to be ground ferns? Some can’t be visually distinguished from those ground ferns if you were to cut off the top and sit it on the ground; they’re so similar that without radar if you flew slowly over a forest consisting of such trees you wouldn’t know if you were one meter above the ground or ten.
Not just a made-up story, but a science fiction story at that!
Why do you insist on forcing the text to talk about modern science???
Death is a vital part of living. For you to eat something must die, be animal or vegetable. That has nothing to do with sin!
You have some sort of idealistic view of death and suffering that has nothing to do with Scripture.
Job is there to overthrow your ridiculous assertion. Sin and suffering are not partners. Job suffered despite being a righteous man before God.
Death is a vital part of the circle of life, without it the world would either over fill or starve.
You cannot impose Scripture onto reality and force it to submit. Sin does not have any power let alone the sort you are claiming. Sin has nor shape, or form, or any substance whatsoever. It cannot be transmitted, or inherited or corrupt. You clearly do not understand sin, despite Scripture, or rather because you have misinterpreted or corrupted Scripture.
All species in the genera Bos and Bison can be considered part of the cattle monobaramin.
Why don’t we extend this logic a bit. There was a eukaryote kind at the flood bottleneck. They diversified into particular eukaryotes from 4400 years ago, but a eukaryote is still a eukaryote.
It’s the standard these days, implemented natively in both the web browser and the operating system, so in theory copying and pasting between two modern programs shouldn’t be a problem.
Of course, in practice things are a bit more messy. Programs and sites that have been around a long time often use older encodings or even older fonts that use their own proprietary encodings altogether. Migrating from these older legacy technologies can be a painful and difficult task. For example it’s one of the main reasons why it took the Python community more than twelve years to kill off Python 2 in 2020 after Python 3 was released in 2008.
The math showing how that is true has been done here, even (I think) in this thread. That being the case, you just provided an example of the dishonesty required of YECers: ignore all inconvenient information.
I must say at this point, if I thought that yours was the only way to read the Bible, you would have by now convinced me to have nothing to do with Christianity because by your example it requires lies about both science and about the text. That is exactly why YEC was the biggest turn-off for evangelism when I was at university: people recognized that believing it required believing lies. I’d thought that the legalism that thrives in evangelical churches would have been the big turn-off, but YEC took the lead almost as though there was no competition.
YEC drives people from Christ. Measured by its fruit, that makes it the work of antichrist.
Right there you are forcing a modern scientific worldview onto the scriptures! “Authoritative and true” in the first century, or in fact at any time before then, mean “real events that occurred precisely as written”. “Authoritative” referred to whether the author was authorized to speak/write, and “true” meant that the material conveyed a correct message.
There you go again: the only way to get the text, even in English, to mean what YEC claims is to force a modern scientific worldview onto it. If you know what kinds of literature the various parts were written as, even if the English the meaning comes through.
Translation cannot tell you the context of the writer and original audience – not the culture, nor the worldview, nor the literary type, nor even the idioms. Mistaking translation for theology is a superb way of making bad translations.
Besides which, translators bow to culture and tradition, which is why translations today still say “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” even though scholars have known for over a century that such a rendition does not accurately represent the Hebrew.
The only way to get your understanding of that is to re-define “relevant” as “scientifically correct according to modern standards”. Whether an account that was re-written from an Egyptian original was/is relevant has nothing to do with it even being non-fiction, it has to do with whether it gives an authentic portrayal of God’s character.
What is scientific about it is that you are pretending that God spoke in scientifically accurate terms. What in the text suggests we should do that? For that matter, what anywhere in the entire Tanakh suggests we do that?
Where do you get the idea that I think anything else? Of course He had all of humanity in mind, but that doesn’t mean He spoke in terms that would have been meaningless to the original audience just to make people with a modern scientific worldview happy! To think that the Holy Spirit would not use the most effective means available to an audience to speak to that audience is both intellectual laziness and arrogance.
By ignoring the original context – the culture, worldview, literary forms, methods of theological argument, etc. – you throw out nearly all the actual message. In fact, for the original audience, you throw out all the message because a recitation of observations of events would have meant nothing to them; it would have constituted no more than standing on a big rock and shouting, “I’m right! I’m right!” – what Paul refers to as “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”.
Good for him, because if read from a YEC viewpoint the scriptures are full of contradictions – he’s just an example of why YEC drives people away from Christ.
And why shouldn’t the flood account be “along the lines of a local myths in the middle East in those times”? That’s how people communicated theological truth back then, so why would the Holy Spirit use something that would have made no sense to His audience?
There is no such thing: everyone reads literature from the perspective of their own worldview. What you call “straightforward” is actually a MSWV perspective, which you can’t help because that’[s what you were raised in. Every time you say that Genesis related “what actually happened” you are speaking from a MSWV, especially when you insist that it is scientifically accurate.
And I will continue to ignore it because it is not the text’s question, it is only yours. Especially since you insist that the Genesis writer had to conform to a MSWV, I have nor reason to take your question seriously. You can repeat your questions all you want; I have answered most of what you continue to ask and have no interest in the rest.
There goes your modern scientific worldview again. If you take the Bible as what it is, instead of reading it as something else, at the very most the text is saying that the Flood wiped out the known world. You automatically seize on parts of the text that can be read as having scientific content, which rejects the real question: What did the text mean to the original audience?
Of course it does – that’s what the words meant back then!
You want to read it according to your MSWV; I want to read it according to its actual context – that’s my worldview: the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text.
“Odd”? Funny since it’s nearly impossible to find a scholar who won’t admit that the YEC reading does not fit the actual ancient Hebrew meaning in its context.
Your trouble here is also that you confuse translation with theology and stand on tradition rather than the text. I’ve previously explained how the modern English understanding of “earth” came about, but I’ll try again: when the Hebrew was translated into Greek, the only word available had a much different meaning than the Hebrew, one which didn’t just mean “the land”, i.e. the known world, but “the whole world”, and thus new, erroneous meaning got included. That Greek translation is what the church used for centuries, so when a Latin translation was made it, too, used a word that meant “the whole world”. The first English translations were guided by the Latin, so while the English word they chose could mean “the known world” it also could mean “the whole world”. The final piece of the puzzle is that since the scientific revolution the English-speaking world has read almost every noun possible with a scientific meaning – which is what you’re doing.
Translators today aren’t going to buck that tradition; if they did their translations wouldn’t sell well among those who buy the most Bibles – evangelicals. Changing traditional wording tends to happen about a century after the discovery that leads to it, first appearing as a footnote these days.
Nope – you only have to look at it from a laboratory measurement and statistical worldview.
Wasn’t that mutation actually found to occur in a modern population that hadn’t had it before?
Well put. Indeed if the opening Creation account is read as the temple inauguration literature it is, Jesus jumps right out as the center of Creation because “He is the image of the invisible God” and humans are the images in YHWH-Elohim’s temple. We remain God’s images, though we do a bad job of imaging Him, but until Jesus we were disconnected from YHWH-Elohim’s temple. And that makes sense of temple theology as well, the Jerusalem temple being a stand-in for the Messiah who had not yet come – Himself the Priest, the Sacrifice, and the Holy Place!
There’s the Passover: Jesus is the lamb we eat, and instead of putting the blood of the lamb on doorposts outside of us we put it inside; the Lamb is our food, and where the blood of lambs protected against physical death the blood of this Lamb protects against true death.
Rather it is a set of texts that include theological narrative/history, mythologized history, ‘royal chronicle’, poetry, polemic, temple inauguration, genealogy, poetic prose, apocalyptic, allegory, parable . . . (and probably some I missed).
By that measure you would have to accept the books by John Grisham and Tom Clancy as “eyewitness historical claims” because they read the same way. You don’t seem to realize that your set of criteria make a lot of books into history that actually aren’t; I’ll add Michener and Steinbeck to that list. To be consistent, you have to include those in your list of history.
You really don’t understand literature – there’s this thing called “universalization” where what happened to some is applied to all.
It wasn’t – it was due to the Nephilim teaching mankind so much wickedness that the thoughts of their hearts were only evil continually. This was the second time heavenly beings had meddled and God had to put things right – except that it wasn’t a complete fix, obviously, any more than kicking the first two out of Eden had been. Also it isn’t a lesson about the Second Coming except by extension, it is foremost a lesson about the Messiah: He would get chased “out of the garden” and die, but this fix would be full and final.
A local flood has nothing to do with evolution, theistic or otherwise. You have this immense fixation on the idea that the Bible has something to do with science.
If you don’t read it as the kinds of literature it was written as you aren’t getting a straightforward, or logical, reading. Common sense says to read ancient literature from the viewpoint of the original audience, which I have yet to see any YECer attempt to do. YEC rests on a MSWV, which is totally alien to the entire set of Old Testament writings.
They are straightforward and clear only if read from the original context, which you refuse to do. YEC cannot bear the truth about scripture.
Sometimes even without environmental change. In botany (204, IIRC) we looked at a plant that today has a roughly square stem (the faces are slightly concave) that descends from a forebear which had a flat stem (with slightly convex faces). In addition, the leaves went from simple units to multiply bifurcated, so that the plants today look nothing like their ancestors. As I recall there were just two mutations that accomplished this by changing how two proteins got folded, one in the stem that turned two faces into four and flipped the cross section of the faces, and another that caused the leaves to have multiple divisions instead of being unified.
Yet underlying this was another change: the ancestral plants had had fewer chromosomes than their eventual offspring; somewhere along the line a division had resulted in a large number of the chromosomes ending up with two copies in a seed rather than just one – and the mutations that changed the shape occurred on duplicated chromosomes.
The fascinating thing is that this change occurred during the last two centuries, and the original version is still around, which means that (a) this is an observation of an increase in information and that (b) offspring in just a few generations (no way to know how many, but not many) can appear completely different than their parents. The two are known by field observation, laboratory examination, and genetic analysis to be something like 99.9% genetically identical, yet they cannot interbreed – and thus we have the emergence of a new species in historical times.
I just wish I could remember the species involved! Yet it’s no more surprising than the fact that new species of plants were found around bomb craters in England after WWII, really.
Dear Ron,
I am very glad to hear that, as the whole concept of a localised flood makes no sense whatsoever, is entirely contrary to the clear text from every translation of the Bible that I have examined.
The localised flood belief is one of the major differences between Theistic Evolutionists and mainstream Christians.
John 6: 53 says “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”.
Richard you are correct, there is a category error being made. Moral sin and ontological sin (not being of God’s essence) are two different categories.
The “right change” could be a mutation that happened 100,000 years ago and just hung around because it wasn’t detrimental, then an environmental change happened and that mutation became important.
An example is that there are organisms that had a sort of “antifreeze” in their genetic makeup long before any of their descendants ever spread to places where there is snow.
Nope – in plants there are different stages of development in evidence with respect to photosynthesis. That tells us that “ALL the information for photosynthesis” most certainly does not have to “be there immediately”.
Add to that the fact that there are a number of photoactive chemicals whereby photosynthesis takes place.
To rely on one of my favorite analogies, this is equivalent to arguing that the existence of a complete mansion built of LEGO bricks is a separate thing from building it brick by brick – or that if you have two separate LEGO mansions they couldn’t have occurred from a single earlier form through accumulating brick by brick.
It’s really saying that accumulated steps cannot lead to large change, which is ridiculous from the viewpoint of one of my conservation projects; it started with a couple of railroad ties that served the function of steering rain runoff from a parking area and part of the adjacent road away so it didn’t run down the path to the beach. Step by step, not always in direct proximity, that path grew in its number of steps that had distinct functions when installed – such as keeping a section of path from collapsing and eroding the hillside – but as the sections merged the sets of steps came to serve a different function: making the route to the beach (much) safer.
In fact when I started I didn’t have that as an end goal; I was just addressing a need for the path, then another, then another, until it became clear that I might as well just make a complete stairway.
note: legally speaking those aren’t steps because it would be unlawful to install steps on that coastal slope; they are officially “human erosion mitigation devices” because mitigating all forms of erosion is encouraged under the law.
So basically you’re saying that what certainly appears from the evidence to have happened didn’t but what you think happened did even with no evidence at all.
This is why so many STEM students at university rejected Christ: YECers made believing in scripture look purposely ignorant.
Only if you insist on forcing a MSWV onto the text.
Tell me, how is it that the Egyptians (and many Mesopotamians) well so close to having Creation right that Moses just adapted the Egyptian version for his purposes?
You really need to get over your idea that reading the Bible with a modern scientific worldview forced on it is the right way and anyone else is engaged in “false teaching”.
Measured by its fruits, YEC is the false teaching.
I would add provided that they let the Bible be what it is and read it the way the original audience would have understood it. In terms of science, I only want people to be honest and accurate; in terms of the text I want the same thing.
Dear Richard,
absolutely not, no I am not kidding. This is very serious and has eternal ramifications.
Death may be a vital part of living to you, but I accept God’s Word that it is not the way it was in the beginning before Adam sinned.
The Holy Scriptures clearly tell us that every green Plant is for food, i.e., all life was originally vegetarian, the concept of death does not apply to plants.
Yes plants die, that is a given, but it is not the type of death that applies to animals including humans in whose nostrils is the breath of life.
If what you say is true, then how do you account for what Paul’s tells us about sin and death?
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—
13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.
14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.
19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Romans 5:12-21
My understanding is based upon the straightforward text in both Testaments, nothing more and nothing less, there is nothing idealistic in that, the Bible is ever so clear about why there is death of ‘nephesh chayyah’ life.
Yes Job was and is a righteous man before God, however Job lived in a fallen cursed world where sin and death are present, just as we are also.
But what in the world are you talking about? This is a very strange assertion that you make against me here. Where have I ever stated that “sin has shape or form or any substance whatsoever”?
Don’t you understand, that we are living right now in a fallen world that has been cursed by God and subjected to futility?
We are ALL sinners, we ALL need forgiveness for our sins from our Loving Lord Who is the Only Living God, there is no other.
Have you not read and understood: 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.? John 3:16
Everlasting life has no Death, everlasting life is eternity alive, death is no more.
Despite your contrary belief, I assure you that Death is NOT NORMAL!
55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
I certainly have many faults, my Lord knows them all.
I have prayed since I was young to my Gracious Lord that I might have wisdom in these matters and know the Truth.
If I have misinterpreted Scripture the Lord my God will correct me, but if what I say is true, then it is not I that is, as you say, misinterpreting or corrupting Scripture.
Death is an enemy, it will be destroyed forever and ever!
26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. 1 Corinthians 15:26
I was reading about cyclonic storms a while back and was awed by how much better we understand those now than when I took meteorology.
I must have missed that earlier. Neither science nor the scriptures indicate such a thing.
And some are both. Take a plant type that I’ve written about: the parent population had flat stems, some descendants – a totally new species – about a century later had square stems. Flat stems aren’t as resistant to breaking, so the square stem would seem to be an improvement. But when one of the square stems does break, it is far more likely to result in the death of the plant above the break.
I am baffled at how unaware of actual science YECers regularly appear. Every single one of my biology professors, Christian or not, would have loved to make a discovery that overturned some major aspect of theory; if Burrawang’s claim was true, researchers would be swarming to pursue it.
It’s the difference between taking the historical-grammatical method seriously and employing an “I’m right because it looks that way to me” approach (or what I saw called “I say it, the Bible agrees with me, that settles it” attitude). The first requirement of the historical aspect is to identify one’s own worldview and its elements and then choose to set those aside; the second is to absorb as fully as possible the ANE worldview and use that instead when reading the scriptures.
Most people never even do the first; they are generally less aware that they even have a worldview than fish are of the water they swim in. The first question to ask in figuring out one’s own worldview is to ask, “How do I define truth?” That is where YEC fails from the beginning: they fail to ask the question and thus fail to recognize that they have absorbed the culture’s worldview of scientific materialism and use its definition of truth. They thus cannot even see that the writers of scripture had an entirely different definition of truth.
Or at the very least it has to be considered that any story Moses wrote – and the Creation accounts are unarguably story – is highly likely to be a parable.
I suppose in a way the temple inauguration literary form could qualify as parable, and if I really push the envelope I can make ‘royal chronicle’ work as parable as well.
Oh, how I wish I’d had that thought to drop into discussion for the honors seminar at the Christian study center I haunted/frequented!
But that’s not true – your claim in bold does not arise from the text, it arises from you and is imposed on the text. That approach never stops to ask what kind of literature the text might be, it assumes that what it appears to be to a modern uninformed mind is what it must be.
But that’s imagined, and it’s the result of imposing a MSWV on the text. When Genesis was written, historical narrative didn’t even exist as a type of literature, so unless God dumped a whole different way of thinking into Moses’ head nothing Moses wrote can qualify. In fact theological narrative wasn’t yet a thing; the closest was mythologized history where events could be rearranged into whatever order was seen as useful to make a theological point using mythological forms.
You have to throw out your MSWV and ask what an ancient Israelite had for a worldview instead – anything else is unfaithful to the Holy Spirit Who chose that man in that culture to write to others in that time and culture.
None of them are YEC, or they would never call Genesis “historical narrative”. Genesis 1 - 11 hold several different genres, and I’ve only ever heard a YECist even mention one of those and that only to say that his MSWV was superior.
You haven’t even mentioned the most important literary genres in the opening of Genesis. I’ll give you a hint: none of them exist today.
Whom as I observed on university campuses primarily succeeded in driving people away from Christ. Of the people I know who have abandoned their faith, YEC is still the greatest cause.
That’s because you don’t even realize that you hold a MSWV – it’s so ingrained that you don’t recognize you have it. YEC rests on a foundation of insisting that the words in Genesis as rendered in English have to be interpreted according to a modern, uninformed worldview where the proper definition is always a scientific one.
And various ancient scholars who found uncountable ages in the text of Genesis 1.
I don’t particularly care how old the Earth is, I care about the text, and it does not, indeed cannot, say what YEC claims.
In truth, YECers say that of themselves yet meanwhile are actually driving people away from Christ – by the hundreds, where I attended university, and by the dozens where I live now.
That includes every Christian here. That you do not see it is a measure of the YEC-imposed blindness.