Maybe this will help. Here is one of Aesop’s Fables:
An Ox, drinking at a pool, trod on a brood of young frogs, and crushed one of them to death.
The mother, coming up and missing one of her sons, inquired of his brothers what had become of him.
“He is dead, dear mother; for just now a very huge beast with four great feet came to the pool, and crushed him to death with his cloven heel.”
The Frog, puffing herself out, inquired, “If the beast was as big as that in size.”
“Cease, mother, to puff yourself out,” said her son, “and do not be angry; for you would, I assure you, sooner burst than successfully imitate the hugeness of that monster.”
Can you find an interpretation of this fable that says animals don’t talk?
But you do. You only have to stop interpreting the Bible as a history book that is completely accurate. That is your choice of initial assumptions and until you can change that you will never find, sorry to say, what you are looking for.
If it will help you come to the conclusion that you can not trust all of the history in the Bible look for the problems with the history in Joshua. An example being walled cities that are listed as destroyed that didn’t exist at the time given.
@Jonathan_Burke makes good points… but more importantly, the Bible does not give false testimony about solid looking atoms… and the other ridiculous examples you propose.
The fundamental flaw in your argument is that the wine Jesus produced at Cana was not accompanied by any evidence of having been produced through a very long process. On the contrary, it was seen to be water one second, and it was wine the next second. It did not leave behind vineyards stripped of grapes, a winepress covered in grape juice, or empty fermentation jars still smelling of fermented grape juice. It did not leave any misleading evidence whatsoever.
So when we examine your analogy, we find it does not fit.
The earth: evidence of very long process of development, evidence of thousands of years of change, evidence of billions of life forms having lived and died over millions of years; massive evidence indicating the earth is very old and life has been on it for millions of years
The wine at Cana: no evidence of grape picking, no evidence of grape juice production, no evidence of fermentation; no evidence indicating the wine had been produced over time
Can you see why your analogy is flawed?
You’ve been shown several, you just didn’t acknowledge them.
I feel exactly the same way, Mike. That’s one of the reasons why I apply the Framework hermeneutic to Genesis 1 - 3, and find myself agreeing with John Walton’s exposition of the Hebrew text. But it’s not the only reason, by far.
So…I’m not the first person on this forum to recommend John Walton’s books to you. Since you have apparently read them already (based on the above statement), would you mind sharing where you think Walton is fundamentally wrong? Or am I misreading your statement–and you have not yet read Walton?
I think you would find Asimov’s essay on the science of the earth’s geometry to be very enlightening, Mike:
Asimov addresses exactly the question you raise. Moreover, the example he offers in his essay is the geometry of the earth–one of the issues you have mentioned in this thread. Asimov’s essay is a quick read, it’s free, and as always, Asimov writes very clearly.
It’s been several years since I’ve given attention to Walton. I remember being uncomfortable at several points but the overriding one was that I didn’t find his fundamental thesis plausible - that thesis being that the Bible’s creation account referred only to functional origins, not material origins. The reason I say this is because there are too many other places in the Scriptures that refer back to that creation account as if it were describing material origins (e.g. Ps 33:6-9; Jer 32:17; Matt 19:3-9; 2 Pet 3:3-7 to mention a few). I was edified by Walton’s exposition of the temple motif, but I did not find him convincing when he suggested that apprehending functional origins disallowed apprehending material origins.
You are right about Asimov’s clarity. If science textbooks had been written as lucidly when I was going to school, my knowledge of science might not be as impoverished as it is. That said, as the English Lit major had wrapped up things a little too neatly on one end of the argument, Asimov did so on the other. Alas, I don’t know enough English Lit or science to fully critique either one of them. I can say, however, that while Asimov made the English Lit major look foolish, his progressive arc of “we’re getting righter all the time” in geometry is an insufficient argument for me to accept that only smaller, not larger, surprises await us in our ongoing quest to discover the mysteries of the material universe - especially when you consider that in the light of even only a couple more millennia or so, we’re still very, very close to the dawn of modern science.
I have explained to you why it seems absurd to me to expect veracity from the prophets when it comes to prophecy but not when it comes to history. If you don’t think it’s absurd, that’s up to you, but in no case is what you’re proposing an interpretation of the Bible. Rather, it is a non-interpretation of the Bible - that is, you are, in effect, choosing to ignore the Bible when it comes to matters of ancient history. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’ve misunderstood some of the prophets’ statements about ancient history, but I’m completely unwilling to ignore them whenever modern historians make conflicting claims.
The matter is not as simple as “Either Earth is 4BYO or God is deceitful.” For one thing, the very concept of “the appearance of age” can be tricky to employ. Presuming God created Adam and Eve as adults and not infants, is it fair to say “God created them with the appearance of age”? I don’t think so. God created them; it’s would-be observers who think in terms of “an appearance of age.” Is God obliged to imprint a time stamp on the foreheads of the inaugural couple to keep His reputation for truthfulness?
Consider this fictional conversation post-Adamic nap:
God: Well, Adam, here’s woman! What do you think?
Adam: She looks as old as me. Where’s she been?
God: She’s not been anywhere; I just made her.
Adam: But she has the appearance of age!
God: Okay, but I’m telling you that I just made her.
Adam: You expect me to believe that?
God: Would it help if I put it in writing?
When scientists tell me in their books that even though it seems to me that I’m sitting still I am actually spinning around at speeds approaching 1,000 mph, revolving around the sun at roughly 66,000 mph, together flying through the Milky Way at some 432,000 mph, I believe them. Why then, if it were so, could a scientist not be expected to believe that even though it appears to him that the earth is billions of years old it is actually only thousands of years old if God told him so in His book? Is faith to only go one direction? If laymen can trust scientists, can scientists not trust God?
It’s not as if God is asking us to ignore appearances. We are flesh, and have to live within them. He’s just asking us to trust that there are greater prevailing realities of which we should also be aware.
(I am not here making the argument that YEC is right and OEC is wrong. Rather, I am explaining how “Either Earth is 4BYO or God is deceitful” obscures important nuances and is thus too simplistic a formulation. This is why I say it feels like a false dilemma to me. Therefore, if OEC is right, it is right for reasons other than this argument.)
What appearance of age would she have? Age, not maturity. Parents? Photos from childhood? Memories of teen years? High school exam results? Where would Adam get the idea that she had been around for years and suddenly just wandered into the garden?
Again this is not analogous, this is God clearly and explicitly arranging a situation in which there is no false appearance of age.
Where are we told that the taste gave the false impression that the wine had been produced over years of vine growing, harvesting, fermentation, and bottling? You’ve ignored all the reasons why your analogy was false. There’s no indication that Jesus deliberately created the wine with a false appearance of a fictional past.
But this doesn’t address my point; Jesus did not create any evidence which gave a false appearance of age. There’s no actual chain of evidence indicating age. Once again this is a false analogy. It’s not like the huge chain of evidence from multiple perspectives, which shows the earth and universe are very old.
But no actual chain of evidence indicating age. God didn’t create any such evidence. Eve had no memories of childhood, no evidence of birth, no wearing on her teeth, no scars or scabs from falls and scrapes in youth, no evidence of a past.
Once again this is a false analogy. It’s not like the huge chain of evidence from multiple perspectives, which shows the earth and universe are very old.
You write: “I’m completely unwilling to ignore them whenever modern historians make conflicting claims…”
So let’s examine an example: the Classic case is the New Testament claim that the O.T. contains the prophecy of a messiah born to a “virgin” (or young woman, or whatever).
Virtually any Hebrew scholar can confirm that the O.T. text in question was a prophecy about a child born centuries before Jesus was born.
In my view, the historicity of Jesus (The Divine, The Messiah, The Christ, The Man, The Son of Man) is not affected a bit by interpretation that the OT prophecy is not actually about Jesus.
But on the other side of the coin, how can we give Biblical Prophecy a higher reliability of face value truth than our own eye-witness testimony provided to us by evidences from Geology, Physics and all the other converging corroborations regarding the age of the Earth?
This is literally the test case for comparing the inevitable conflict between what is real vs. what is imagined by the writers of various Biblical Narratives!
On one hand we have a cosmic truth about the age of the Earth… and in the other hand we have a supposed proof text (which even when wrong doesn’t change the reality of Jesus) which is a proof text for someone else entirely.
How can you rank an illusion to be of higher value than reality?
You are right, but my Adam and Eve example was not intended to address the quantity of evidence. It was intended to address the separate but equally important point that “the appearance of age” is something found in the perception of the observer, not in the design of that which is observed. Therefore, it’s inappropriate, and even unfair, to impute deceit to the designer when the age we infer turns out to be inaccurate - and all the more so if He tells us, in writing no less, the facts that transcend appearances.
Now, lest I be miusunderstood on this point I am making here, let me repeat the coda I gave above:
@Mike_Gantt, you are attempting to use one category of events as proof for all categories of events. How do I mean this?
You present us with cases where God could have reasonably employed his mastery over nature…
And expect us to consider All of God’s mysteries to be equally explained.
While @Jonathan_Burke 's points regard such things as fossilized creatures that apparently lived long before large mammals came to exist! Your template of interpretation cannot apply to such cases … because there is no reasonable explanation for why such fossils should exist … other than as part of an Old Earth scenario.
You speak as if the two are mutually exclusive - as if the fulfillment of first precludes the fulfillment of the second. Yet the Old Testament is full of historical events - some prophesied, others not - that foreshadowed what would be fulfilled in the life of Jesus our Lord.[quote=“gbrooks9, post:78, topic:36232”]
But on the other side of the coin, how can we give Biblical Prophecy a higher reliability of face value truth than our own eye-witness testimony provided to us by evidences from Geology, Physics and all the other converging corroborations regarding the age of the Earth?
[/quote]
You have no such eye-witness testimony. What you have is inference from observations. I do not say inference from observations is invalid, but I do say that it is not eye-witness testimony. You are stacking the deck against the biblical testimony, and it leads you to conclude with a leading question which implies that the prophets deal in illusion while scientists deal in reality. Such reasoning is unworthy of a fair-minded person.