Aw shucks!
Richard
It shows up in Romans, Colossians, and Hebrews (probably elsewhere, but those are what I can think of).
1 Like
Jesus saved you on the Cross outside Jerusalem. Nothing in the scriptures says you can’t decide to throw that away.
3 Likes
Very good. You don’t believe in once saved, always saved. The “St.” at the beginning of your moniker kind of suggests that. 
AI: The original Hebrew of Genesis 1 does not explicitly suggest creation ex nihilo
(“out of nothing”). Instead, the text describes God bringing order to a pre-existing state of “formless and void” chaos, known as tohu wa-bohu.
-
Pre-existing chaos: Genesis 1:2 describes the earth as being “formless and void” and covered in darkness and a watery abyss (the tehom) before creation begins in earnest.
-
Ordering, not creating from nothing: The narrative portrays God as a cosmic organizer, imposing order and structure on the existing chaotic matter rather than creating the material itself from absolute nothingness.
-
Comparison to other ancient Near Eastern myths: This view of a creator ordering chaos is common in other ancient Near Eastern creation stories and does not align with a strict ex nihilo interpretation.
-
Later development of the doctrine: The doctrine of creation ex nihilo developed later in Jewish and Christian thought, becoming a more prominent theological concept in the centuries following Genesis.
Jesus concurs (John 5:17)!
People disagree on all sorts of things. It doesn’t mean we can’t have a discussion, or that some of us are not right and and some of us are not wrong. I don’t believe in giving up because there is diversity of opinion or it’s difficult to wade through a mess sometimes. I don’t argue from consensus or appeal to popularity. Consensus is simply a good place to start in a discussion. So since the majority of philosophers of religion believe in God, maybe starting with their arguments is a good idea rather than dumping all of philosophy out.
Vinnie
AI: Whether we should automatically accept the opinion of the majority of philosophers of religion as fact is a complex question with no simple answer. The short answer is no, their opinions should not be automatically accepted as fact, but they should be given significant weight and consideration for several reasons [1].
-
Philosophy Deals with Non-Empirical Questions: Unlike empirical sciences where consensus often points to a verifiable reality, philosophy of religion largely deals with questions of value, meaning, morality, and ultimate reality. These are not matters that can be definitively proven or disproven through objective, scientific methods. Philosophical truths, if they exist, are arrived at through argumentation and reasoning, not empirical evidence [1].
-
Lack of Consensus on “Facts”: The history of philosophy is a history of disagreement. Even among experts in a specialized field like philosophy of religion, there is often no universal consensus on many core issues (e.g., the existence of God, the nature of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness) [1]. What is considered the “majority” opinion can shift over time and is often contested.
Gary: I have no problem listening to the opinions of philosophers of religion just as I have no problem listening to the opinions of philosophers in general. The problem is that there is no means to determine which philosopher is correct! Where you find ten philosophers you will find eleven different opinions. Nothing is ever resolved because there is no correct answer in philosophy. Everything in philosophy is a matter of opinion and perspective.
So there has to be a better method of truth discovery for such issues as the origin of our universe.
Derek Kinder: mTyndale Old Testament Commentary: Genesis
Wenham’s Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis says this of the traditional ex nihilo interpretation after discussing three others:
Also, in the New Cambridge Commentary Bill Arnold says:
To the question whether God used preexistent material to create the universe or rather he created it “out of nothing” (the early Jewish–Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, first explicitly occurring in 2 Macc 7:28; and see Rom 4:17; Heb 11:3), it must be admitted that Gen 1 neither precludes nor defends the possibility, and we must look elsewhere for data to decide the issue.24 However, such a concept is not false to the intent of Gen 1. Indeed, had we an opportunity to pose the question to the author of this text, we may assume with Westermann and others that he would “certainly have decided in favor of creatio ex nihilo.”25
Even if Genesis 1 did not support a strict creation ex nihilo it is pretty darn close. As Arnold writes:
We fail to appreciate the profundity of vv. 1–3 for two primary reasons, among several others. First, it is exceedingly familiar to those of us in the West, who still benefit from the long years of Judeo–Christian education and influence. Second, we have overemphasized the similarities between Gen 1 and the other ancient cosmogonies without fully appreciating the differences. This text soars above them in such a way as to deny implicitly any possibility of the theologies expressed in the Egyptian or Mesopotamian accounts. If we consider it an ideological polemic, we must admit it is not specifically so and only indirectly. It contains no theomachy, or cosmic conflict among the gods, or victory enthronement motif. Both are excluded by “in the beginning when God created . . . ”! Israel’s God has no rivals. There can be no struggle with forces opposed to his actions or corresponding to his power. There can be no victory enthronement motif because God’s victory was never in doubt; rather, God has never not been enthroned. There can be no enthronement portrait here because God has not become sovereign; he has simply never been less than sovereign.
Over-simplification of complicated issues is not a noble trait.
Vinnie
1 Like
If I cared about AI’s “opinion,” I would be on chatgpt and not here.
Vinnie
AI is cold. It panders to the scientific approach where by emotion and feelings ae ignored. it thinks in terms of data or quotes without any experiences of its own. It is second hand knowledge at best.
Richard
1 Like
I find it useful if I say “write me a rap song about why we have seasons” or some other science topic that I can make students laugh at. I also enjoy having it write me a Christian songs titled “bourbon on the rocks.” But yeah, it’s a programmatic algorithm. Cold equations. I’m glad I will be dead by the time it fully rules the world or just really old and on the way out. I want to be gone before arguments of whether it’s immoral or not to marry your ai-sex bots reach the limelight. I’m actually quite happy I was able to get to my very late teens before cell phones were a big thing. I feel a great deal of pity for kids growing up on iPads/iPhones their whole life.
Vinnie
2 Likes
Having been one, I know don’t I? And? Nice rhetoric about subjective, interior, lived experience, i.e. feelings, is not reality beyond the phenomenological.
If there’s one, there’s infinite.
And as we abandoned the OP long ago, on what day of the week were the angels created?
Which assumes that the angels were created on what planet?
Ooooh! So they’re chthonic?! Of the ageless tohu bohu fallen?! Cyclical?! Earth. Nohhhh! They’re spirits.
The previous universe had collapsed! Back to the centre!! Earth!!! As it always does!!!
It can be read that way, yes, but the grammar is two-edged; “created” comes before “heavens and earth” and if the “declarative” ‘edge’ is considered, that means all the stuff that follows was made by Elohim. Take the other ‘edge’, the adverbial ‘when’, and the idea is that Elohim started out by making what the rest of the ANE took as pre-existing. Sure, that makes for a messy start, but this isn’t science or history anyway, it’s theology, which means concepts.
So the sense I’m seeing in the Hebrew is “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, He began by making the Great Deep and some land” – thus attributing to Elohim two things the typical ANAE story had no explanation for.
And that fits with the rest of the chapter which is a polemic that can be summed up as saying that all things, including gods, are creations of Yahweh-Elohim, with the implication that they are supposed to do His will. That polemic tells us that the entire thing should be read contrary to the rest of the ANE, not with it.
1 Like
A great number of commentaries on Genesis argue precisely this. I quoted three above. Gary spends too much time reading Bart Ehrman who presents too many controversial ideas as “consensus” or “historical fact.” If that is the literature you are exposed to and places like r/academicbiblical or Dan McClellan, you will be misled in such ways. And I actually think Bart is a pretty solid scholar as far as NT researchers go. I have 6-13 of his books and his NT intro is very sober if you want a survey of critical scholarship.
1 Like
You are welcome to your personal opinion. That fact is that most experts believe that the Hebrew Creation Story was very similar to other creation stories in the ANE: the creator god formed the earth from existing material, not ex-nihilo.
John 5:17 can be read that way, but it could also indicate that Creation is happily running along but God is busy in it, too. You have to go to Romans and Hebrews to really get “Creation is present tense”.
Yep – right there are the two “edges” of the grammar, and (given that the vowel pointings are not inspired) both have to be taken into account.
You haven’t used ChatGPT much, obviously; it is darned chatty, encouraging, friendly! When I use it for studying statistics (it’s great at whipping up realistic problems) I have to tell it to be more like an old-day British professor, stiff upper lip and right to the point and stop acting like my friend. It doesn’t work completely, but it cuts through its tendency to try to be your pal.
2 Likes