IF the meaning of Genesis 1 is clear, the how come there is one say “it’s clear that means… ” —VS-- the other one say “it’s NOT clear that means… ”, Jon ?
WHY before Evolution theory exist there are:
Bible believing Christians who see Genesis as historical narrative
and also there are:
Bible believing Christians who see Genesis NOT as historical narrative
???
Reading some links from YEC, (at least to me) those links show a condition something like this:
A. Before Evolution theory exist… ALL Bible believing Christians see Genesis 1 as historical narrative.
B. After Evolution theory exist …there is a division within that ALL, where:
some of them still view that Genesis 1 as historical narrative
the rest change their view from “Genesis 1 as historical narrative” into “Genesis 1 as NOT historical narrative”
My A and B conclusion is because the argument which YEC use in the links I read, ALWAYS use words something like this: “Evolutionists claim that …”
But after I dig the internet, it turns out A is not correct. Consequently, B also not correct.
So, I’d like to know the YEC’s arguments which occur before 500 AD, not current time.
How at that time, where it started from ALL say : "Genesis is a historical narrative" … then it divided into two : some (from that ALL) say “Genesis is a historical narrative” and the rest (from that ALL) say “Genesis is NOT a historical narrative”
To be honest, all YEC’s link I read in the internet, it’s pointless to me. As I say in my OP, I put myself as if I don’t have knowledge about evolution. So, “pointless” because the links I read always involve about evolution.
Well, of course God can do whatever God pleases so far as we could ever know. Taken to an extreme, this is known as “last Thursdayism”. God could have created the universe and all of us in it last Thursday and just planted in us false memories of lifetimes that never happened (except in the last few days.) Of course that’s silly, because there’s no reason to think that has happened - but it’s also non-falsifiable. And that is the main response that thinkers here give to YECs who want to push for appearances of age. It also makes God out to be a deceitful God who goes to a lot of trouble to makes sure a multitude of radioactive markers and other geological and biological and genetic markers are all aligned and calibrated just for the purpose of fooling anybody who went to the trouble of observing them! Most thinkers here believe instead that God is a God of truth and that God wouldn’t turn creation into some false witness about itself or about God.
I think the “main” problem is :
YEC “groundwork” already view that Genesis 1 as historical narative. So they say “Adam+Eve physical body certainly not appear as a baby’s body. God doesn’t lie and make a false witness here”.
So from there, it can be “received” among YEC’s member if one of the YEC say “probably Adam+Eve appearance is something like teenagers although their age is just a second yo”
Hence, if in the YEC pov that God doesn’t lie or make a false witness in the case of Adam+Eve appearance, then if they say “the universe (including earth) appear to be old although its age is just a second yo”, this won’t make YEC to conclude that God is a liar or God make a false witness.
For what its worth, my understanding on this is the following.
I do think that your overall assessment of A and B as quoted above from your post is correct.
From what I know of the Early Church and since most people if not practically all people believed Genesis 1 to be real history, it is clear to me that when Charles Darwin in the 1850’s introduced his dangerous new idea, he was quite aware of the anti Biblical nature of what he proposed that went against what most people believed. Upon publication of his theory and moving forward from that point in time, belief in evolution increased and provided people with what they perceived as an excuse for an alternative to recognising God as their Creator.
Science was hijacked along the way also to exclude the supernatural, and adopted a materialist philosophy which narrowed the possible solutions of problems to be only those that have a natural cause.
Thus God was rejected from science, even though it is His creation that is being studied, and the theory commenced being taught to an increasingly atheist population where evolution is believed to be true.
Move forward in time to more recently and we have a situation where some people who identify as Christians, believe that evolution is real, and have interpreted what they believe is needed in the Biblical texts to make belief in evolution and ‘deep time of billions of years’ a coherent whole.
Some churches also compromise with evolution and deep time, which I personally have seen does enormous damage and results in people leaving the church in droves.
When I was a child here in Australia, almost everyone went to Church on Sunday. fast forward to the present and most churches in Australia have a tiny fraction of the packed congregations they once had in the 1950’s.
Hi Reko, just a thought, but it is likely that both Adam and Eve are the only two people who would not have had any need to have a belly button as they were not born as every one else was with an umbilical cord.
I too, definitely don’t think that god did anything that could be interpreted as deception. Everything that God does is honest and devoid of anything that is dishonest. Adam and Eve obviously were the two exceptions to all other people who were born as babies and needed intensive care from their mother to survive, not a possibility for Adam as there were no other people in existence in the beginning creation week.
Trying to catch us on this, it appears you have gotten some very good input, but thought I would through my two cents in.
It seems to me that the main question is how you read scripture. If you read it as pure historical narrative, you have loads of problems making it work, not only from a scientific standpoint, but also as historical narrative and as instuctions for life, as there are many conflicting and contradictory statements made that leave literalists in contortions.
Even those who deny they do, read scripture in the light of what they have learned outside of scripture. Even AIG does not hold to a flat earth and three tiered universe cosmology. And I presume does not hold to the kidneys being the seat of emotions and reason. And the church once accepting a global earth but biblically putting it at the solar system, did not implode when the sun was definitively proven to be at the center, though it had a bit of a rough patch when it was still a little in doubt. So, we read scripture in light of what we know and see. Thank God, as I do not know Greek and Hebrew, so would be out of luck if we could not.
The question then becomes how will we read scripture in light of what we have now learned about the age and nature of the earth. Will we throwit out if it does not conform to our preconceived ideas, or will we adapt our reading in humility to conform to its revealed message in order to be transformed by Christ? Dawkins would say, throw it out. Hamm would say you have to throw it out.
If you have not read some of Walton’s work on reading scripture, I would invite you to do so. I enjoyed his Lost World of Scripture a lot. Also good is Wright’s Surprised by Scripture. And just to broaden your view, look at Enn’s, maybe his Bible for Normal People.
(/Written without coffee or editingthis morning, so ignore the typos please.)
No… it’s not correct, Jon.
A is not correct, hence B can’t be correct.
Why A is not correct, because I’ve just found in the internet some names (live before 500 AD) who see Genesis 1 as allegorical. Since it was before 500 AD, so…
So I’m sorry that the kind of words in the quote above can’t be involved, because they don’t exist yet. Hence, the explanation which I’m expecting is about “one see Genesis 1 as historical” —versus— “the other one see Genesis 1 as allegorical”. These two different views already exist before evolution theory exist.
Add in the fact that Christian geologists were finding evidence the earth was more than 6,000 years old well before Darwin published his theory. It isn’t evolution that drives finding the age of the earth.
You’ve already received many answers that I largely agree with, but I want to add another angle. If God created the universe to be old, no human could see through that to discover the actual age. The age it was created to be is the age scientists would see.
Suppose God created Adam and Eve as adults and a month later Eve goes to the dentist with a toothache. The dentist would do better to treat her as an adult than a month-old infant. It doesn’t matter if she tells the dentist she is just one month old, for the dentist’s purposes she is an adult. Similarly, if Jesus turns water into well-aged wine, then no wine expert is going to see past that reality to know that it is actually brand new wine.
Because of this, if God created the universe old, we should not dispute how the experts who study the universe see its great age. They are seeing the truth. In this case, there’s no reason to invent alternate science where mosts scientists are completely wrong and the universe is actually a few thousand years old. We aren’t going to be able to see through what God created as though the universe is a cheap forgery. And this is why those who are committed to that alternate science reject the idea that God created the universe old just as strongly as anyone else.
Right. And this is why thinking the universe is created old is different than thinking Jesus created old wine. The wine was made during the course of a wedding, so we know it didn’t actually exist for a long time. But the creation accounts don’t clearly say how old everything is. Even before anyone saw evidence that the earth was very old, many read the Genesis creation accounts in different ways that allowed for different ages and different lengths of creation.
Without a clear statement from Scripture that the universe is 6000 years old, or a clear statement that it was made already old, one can simply accept that it is just as old as it reveals.
The very fact that God enjoys the “complete knowledge of past, present, and future” is quite enough to perfectly explain the alleged contradiction between evolution and Romans 5:12.
Yes, the apostle is quite right: God has agreed to temporarily (till the eschatological accomplishment anticipated at 1 Corinthians 15:22-28) tolerate creatures’ mortality because of human sinfulness that started with the very first human beings.
But the omniscient Creator had no need to wait for the first humans’ arrival to know that they would become sinners.
A lot has been said about whether or not Genesis is “historical narrative.” But there’s one point worth making here, and that is that historical narrative itself encompasses a wide variety of sub-genres.
These can include, for example:
Court records
History textbooks
Documentaries
Newspaper reports
Newspaper editorials
Genealogies
Biographies
Personal diaries and letters
Family records
Archaeological reconstructions
Eyewitness testimony in a court of law
Some forms of songs and poetry
Hagiographies
Historical fiction
The History Channel (need I say more?)
You could even possibly include myth (in the academic sense of the word as opposed to the colloquial sense of meaning “something that someone just made up one day”) at one end of the spectrum, and CCTV footage, lab notes and scientific papers at the other end.
Different genres of “historical narrative” will have different audiences, different requirements, different emphases, different priorities, and different approaches. Some of them will prioritise factual accuracy and attention to detail. Some of them will prioritise being easily readable and easily understandable. Some of them will prioritise making a specific point or promoting a specific agenda. Often, these different priorities are mutually exclusive, and may end up working against each other, even if they are totally honest and legitimate.
To give one example, I used to work for the UK Parliament. One of the projects that I worked on was the software used by Hansard, the Official Report of the debates. This is a form of historical narrative where accuracy, precision and attention to detail is paramount. This is a hard problem: it requires whole teams of people working from audio and possibly even video recordings, and the end result is something so long winded and verbose that it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. It requires gigabytes of storage, and a search box to make it usable. Clearly, whatever form of historical narrative Genesis 1-11 is, it is not Hansard.
On the other hand, there are forms of historical narrative which merely aim to provide a summary of what happened. In such cases, you need to be selective with the details, and possibly even rearrange things to present a coherent account. In such cases, you may even end up throwing a whole lot of interpretation and opinion into the mix and possibly even figures of speech or fictional elements for illustrative purposes. Which details you include or exclude, which order you present them in, and what you introduce in terms of opinion, interpretation, figures of speech, and so on will depend on what point you are trying to make.
All of this can be perfectly legitimate. Even fictional elements can be perfectly legitimate. We even see this in technical documentation. There is a tradition in IT security tutorials to refer to characters called “Alice” and “Bob” in the (fictitious) example scenarios that they present. No security researcher believes that Alice and Bob are real, historical people, nor that the scenarios in the tutorials actually happened as described. But at the same time, no security researcher would consider those tutorials to be any less authoritative just because those particular elements are fictional.
So yes, Genesis 1-11 could well fit into the broad super-genre of “historical narrative.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s telling us that the days of Genesis 1 were 24 hours long or that Noah had sauropod dinosaurs on board the Ark.
To me, that is a good analogy. If I may add, perhaps even the dentist becomes confused: should he prescribe medication in the dosage intended for teenagers or for toddlers?
But I think in the pov of YEC, they will be unable to grasp your analogy, because they will apply your saying as historical narrative, not as the analogy. Hence they will say “Nope, there is no sickness before the fall, letalone a dentist”.
That’s what I mean on my chat with Jon about “it’s clear” --vs-- “it’s not clear”.
In the pov of YEC, the creation accounts clearly say that Gen 1:1 means “the universe is one second years old”.
The YEC continue: since Gen 1:1 clearly say that “Earth is one second yo” … then from the calculation on the years of genealogy, the Bible clearly say that “the age of the universe is 6000 yo”
Using the YEC historical narrative we’ve seen in this thread, a month after creation would be post-fall. And, because the first humans were given super intelligence and knowledge, Eve’s dentist would be Adam.
Hi Nicholas,
yes, and a lot of the rest of Paul’s words in Romans 5 reinforce the fact and make it abundantly clear, to make certain there can be no misunderstanding that sin and its consequence death entered the world with Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden.
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
This passage of scripture unequivocally shows to all that belief in Theistic evolution is misguided.
This fact is very significant and needs to be grasped by those that believe evolution is real.
It is for no other reason whatsoever than the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden that we all need the atoning salvation of our Creator Jesus,who died on the cross in substitutionary place for our sins.
God’s omniscience means that He knew full well in eternity what would transpire in the garden of Eden, He was not surprised in any way, and made provision through His great Love for us all to save us from the result of sin that is death that left unchecked would ultimately result in eternal separation from Him.
.
For any who doubt this, and who would protest at this scriptural truth, God’s omniscience is made unequivocally clear that He knew the choices individual people will make right from the foundation of the world:
7 It was also given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority was given to him over every tribe, people, language, and nation. 8 All who live on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written since the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slaughtered. 9 If anyone has an ear, let him hear. Revelation 13:7-9
Hi Ron,
well yes, the basic premises of ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ are both clearly false, thus any historical science that presupposes those two assumptions are correct are in error.
There are a lot of PhD scientists who do real empirical science daily would categorically disagree with your summation that, “You have to choose between the orderly world of science and YEC”!
See for yourself at: Creation scientists
And there many, many, many more that would disagree also who are not on the list and wish to remain anonymous for a number of reasons.