Leaving fundamentalist faith and the compatibility of Christianity and evolution (spin-off)

Faith & Science Conversation
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Further (to deal with the language as it appears clearly), the word “bring forth” (yatsa) does indeed come as the “response” to God’s command (or deliberation) in v12, providing (according to John Walton) a literary parallel to show the link of Day 3 with Day 6, where yatsa is used in the command/deliberation, and “made” in the fulfilment.

So to summarise the linguistic features of the three passages:

Vv11-12:
Command/deliberation: “Let the land grow green with grass” (or maybe, to show the Heb construction better, “Let the earth grass over with grass”).
Fulfilment: “And the earth brought forth grass.”

V20ff:
Command/deliberation: "Let the waters swarm with swarms… and flyers (uph) fly (oph).
Fulfilment: “And God created…”

V24ff:
Command/deliberation: "Let the earth bring forth living (beings)."
Fulfilment: “And God made…”

V26ff:
Incidentally, note how the words used for man relate to these:
Command/deliberation: "Let us make man…"
Fulfilment: “So God created…”

About that word yatsa, “bring forth”, used only in the fulfilment of v12 and the command of v24, then. Does it imply merely the “fertility” of the earth, as I suggest, or does it contain deep implications about creative secondary causes? Simply check the closest parallels.
Deut 14.22: "all the increase of your seed that the field brings forth year by year"
Ps. 104.14 (the creation psalm): "(Yaheweh) causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and vegetation for the service of man, that he may bring forth (yatsa) food out of the earth (and wine, and oil, and bread)"
Isa 61.11: “For as the earth brings forth (yatsa) the bud, and as the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, so the Lord will asue righteousness and praise…” (don’t forget here Paul’s metaphor in the NT about God giving the increase of the soil for both sower and reaper).

Clearly your garden brings forth its Dahlias in the same way that the earth brought form living creatures, as far as the Hebrew goes. As in Genesis 1 generally, the sense is phenomenological, not ontological.

Now to include providence in this in the general sense that “God providentially makes the land productive” is clearly implicit, though of secondary import, in all these texts, where God’s sole Creatorhood is assumed. To go beyond that to give an impression that the land was given a kind of “co-creator” role (perhaps determining what forms the various vegation or animals would take) goes far beyond the text, and miles away from Israel’s theology.

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@Jon_Garvey

All very nice narrative… but I don’t really see a definitive rebuke of the idea that God is creating by means of the intermediary of natural processes.

One recent posting from a Hebrew scholar suggests that the natural processes actually take precedent over God’s initiative … God lets nature accomplish these ends.

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Well, it would hardly be unusual for an author to fail specifically to rebuke a position he’s never even imagined. I saw that post you mention, but apart from rejecting the idea that one rabbinic interpretation settles the matter, the poster who cited it is simply reading far more into the text than is in there - that’s my opinion as a biblical interpreter for many decades.

Now in the end, there’s no reply to that except for me to point out the details (as I have - but however detailed I make it, it’s always possible to dismiss the cumulative argument as “very nice narrative”, or to use another poster’s favourite non-argument “handwaving”), to point out the anachronism of positing quasi-autonomous natural causes in a text that preceded the concept of nature by at least a few centuries, and to reiterate the inconsistency of a taking concordist approach that seeks to wed late-modern views of nature to ANE Scripture, whilst at the same time pointing fingers at YECs and other concordists for making theological mountains out of molehills of texts.

So I’ve done what I set out to do by treating the text as honestly as I can - others will bring to the text their own presuppositions and make their own judgments, theory-laden or not as the case may be.

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@Jon_Garvey,

Agreed. I think you and I are “more or less” in agreement that you’ve given the issue a treatment thorough enough that others can approach your views objectively, and decide for themselves whether your conclusion(s) is/are persuasive or not.

At the end of the day, there’s only so much satisfaction you can get from a Unitarian Universalist on some matters.

It’s the cross I must bear. (< Hey… see what I did there? Ironic to say the least! :slight_smile:

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Nothing personal to you Jon, just where I was when I hit the reply button.

The odd thing is that any information put out by a perfect source of information is limited by the capabilities of the receiver. This is why we require the holy spirit to understand the information reality throws at us. Some people think scientific methodology is enough and everything can be explained by the mathematical language of science. I have not yet seen any math that can transmit emotional information, that can quantify my love and put it into physical units.
The task of the bible was to describe reality in a way that allows it to describe the physical and the emotional reality that shaped the society of the time. To do so it is necessary to use a poetic language that allows people to understand a concept if they can not read or write and that contains a truth that goes beyond the material reality and allows the reader to perceive it where it matters, e.g. in themselves.

If your faith is fundamentalist because it is based on words on a piece of paper (or a screen) it has material foundations and will crumble like the house built on sand. The funny thing of the parable is that the rock upon which to built your house is anything but the stones that you find in the ground. Love provides us with the most gentle forms of touching another persons soul but at the same time is the hardest thing when it comes to comprehension. It contains more energy than the entire universe but can touch you like the stroke of a feather.

The bible was written by primitive goat herders for primitive men as the Hitch would say. Guess in their wisdom they did not consider how primitive men would become when their hearts turned to stone that they could not speak poetic language any more and their minds were blocked to associations that simple words try to convey because they could only see the letters of the words and not their meaning any more - or did they anticipate that even at the end of time there would be still some that read this book with the love of God in their heart so they could still see its eternal truth? Perhaps they were fundamentalists that were founding their faith not just in words written on a piece of paper.

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Marvin, even though not to me, good thoughts.

There’s a need to point out the difference between our concept of poetic, and the ancient world’s. To us “poetry” is something removed from reality, so that Wordsworth doesn’t really write about nature (which is what scientists do), but about his emotional reaction to “reality”. But in some way under the older understanding reality was poetic, and the material, the divine and the subjective belonged together, rather than being divided off into “science” “religion” and “arts”.

As you hint, we’ve lost as well as gained in the transition.

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I wonder if it is perhaps more what you would call figurative language as it goes further than the prosaic language. But then in the age of materialism the transcendence of language has become reduced to its prosaic use.

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