What you claim is not what the text says for the simple reason that you insist on reading the text from a modern worldview. You insist that your reading is correct, but I can’t understand how anyone can think they have a clue about what the scriptures say when they ignore the fact that God chose writers who wrote in their own literary genres – that are alien to us – and under their own worldview. You can only get “what it so plainly says” when you know what it is.
So why do YECers ignore the fact that the ancient scriptures were not written from our modern worldview? The scriptures were written to ancient audiences, and if God is intelligent at all He would have His chosen writers use the literary genres and worldview they knew so they could express His message in ways their audiences would understand!
We have to remember that not a single word in the scriptures was written to us – we are reading other people’s mail. If we treat it as being written to us, we will get it wrong.
And from where I sit, he needs to provide evidence that the Bible anywhere at all claims to be 100% scientifically and historically accurate, as well as evidence that it should be read as though it’s modern English literature rather than the ancient literature it was penned as.
Well said. That’s a point my first New Testament professor made emphatically and regularly, in agreement with my first literature professor who reminded us that we can only understand a piece of literature if we know what the writer intended it to be.
And mine is the text, always the text!
With a side order of “get your science straight”.
I say the same about the text: not taking it for what it actually is, is not an option. It’s plain in church history that treating the scriptures as something you assume they are is a quick route to false teaching.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
The text does not say they were consecutive – they are labeled, “Day One”, “a second day”‡, “a third day”, etc. If they were meant to be consecutive there would be a definite article with the numbers, and those aren’t present.
‡ or “another day”
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
Not in the New Testament we aren’t.
The difficulty is because YECists pick and choose what to treat literally and what to ignore. In this instance, what’s being ignored is that the text as we have it assumes that it is day for the entire Earth and then night for the entire Earth – which is what we should expect given the worldview of the writer.
Another issue is that “evening . . . morning” is a phrase that outlines the night, not a whole day. But again that’s what we should expect since the ancient near east regarded night as a manifestation of darkness chaos that the gods had to defeat in order for the sun – on its chariot or barque, depending on the culture – to be able to pass untouched through the underworld and emerge to bring light again. The Genesis writer, however, is taking that repeated period of combat and declaring that the entire ancient near east was wrong: night is something YHWH-Elohim created for His purposes, not something to fear or stress over (“stress” being manifested by having temples where priests made offerings daily in support of the gods’ battle against darkness).
Of course for anyone who has bothered to find out what kind of literature the first Creation account is it would be obvious that it isn’t to be taken as a “literal 24hour-Day” because they days are not intended to be taken literally. Something that makes these literary types weird to us is that the days can be treated as literal for the purpose of understanding the point of the account even though they’re not meant literally in themselves – modern minds want it one way or the other.
That’s an assumption – the text doesn’t tell us how long, and the arithmetic that gets a hundred years is based on guesses that also aren’t found in the text. All we are told is that Noah was five hundred when he begat his named sons, and then that he was six hundred when they all went into the ark. A reasonable assumption would be that he didn’t start building until his sons were grown, which would limit it to eighty-five years at most; another reasonable assumption is that wood back then behaved like wood now and he would have had to deal with issues of insects and rot. It’s been shown that the ark as described could have been built in just five years assuming more than just his family for workers, and that twenty years would be the maximum before concerns about insects and rot would become critical, so the building time was probably between five and twenty years; I’d go with an average because it comes out to twelve, which is a very symbolic number in both the later writings of the Old Testament as well as in the ancient near eastern culture.
That’s not in the text, it’s a sheer rescuing device.
I second that motion!
Given all the YECers I knew in university that makes sense to me. They were very careful to work at not hearing, or letting anyone else hear, anything that might challenge the accepted positions.