The Best Attempt I've Seen to Reconcile Science and Scripture

I got a book recommended on this site called A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture by Carol Hill and even if this woman is not correct on everything, I think that she is on to something. The Thesis of this book is that Genesis 1-11 is not a history of the entire world from our perspective, but the entire world from the perspective of the Israelites who saw the entire world at the time of writing as being the Near East or at most the Mediterranean.

Thus under this view, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Genealogies, the Flood, The Tower of Babel, the Table of Nations, and all of these things happened in the Middle East. Yes, there is symbolism involved as is well known by Biblical scholars (the long ages corresponding to Israelite Numerology in the genealogies, the archetypical depictions of Adam and Eve, and the first creation account) as the Genre of Genesis would be a type of mytho-history writing about ancient events mixed with mythic elements.

Adam and Eve are listed as the first people because they are the first ancestors that lead to the line that became the Israelites and the first people put under a covenant with God. They in this view were not the first humans but were people elected by God in a covenant in the Garden of Eden, a covenant that they broke bringing spiritual death to all other humans. The people that Cain was worried would kill him if they found him as a wanderer in Nod, that his wife came from, and that he built the city of Enoch with were a pre adamite race of humans that were created in the first creation account. Adam and Eve were created in the second one.

The thing is that there is actually a lot of evidence that Genesis 1-11 records the prehistory of the Middle East. Watch Inpiringphilosophies videos on the reliability of Genesis and the one titled Proof that Genesis is History and not Myth (he did this on Capturing Christianity) or read this book which provides many compelling proofs in its own right.

What I like about this theory is that it reconciles almost all of the problems that I have been voicing on this forum and actually makes sense (as Genesis 1-11 is thoroughly Mesopotamian in setting). It explains exactly why New Testament authors referred to these events as literally happening (because they did), and explains away why they would refer to these events in a global fashion (from their perspective it was global or “worldwide” would be a better term). It explains also why the stories of Genesis 1-11 are so similar to the other Near Eastern stories that surround them (they are all recording the same history; the Israelites are just telling it correctly). The fact that it has actual evidence that we can measure in its favor also leads me to believe that there is something to this.

However, this view does not explain everything. Jesus when speaking of the marriage covenant said that God created humans male and female from the beginning of creation. Paul likewise calls Adam the first man and Adams genealogy calls him the son of God. I’m also unsure of the particulars of how original sin caused the rest of mankind to spiritually die. If anyone here has plausible answers to these questions do tell me in the comments but I think that this Worldview approach to Scripture is, if not all encompassingly explanatory, nevertheless very much on the right track.

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This is pretty close to the way I view the text of the Bible as well.

Yes. What can bring it the rest of the way is an understanding that human beings are more than a biological species and DNA, but also another form of life with different inheritance from God. This is the life of the human mind – a form of life which is memetic rather than genetic. In this way, Adam and Eve can actually be the first human beings even if they are not the first homo sapiens. It gives new meaning to Genesis 2:7 which instead of being some kind of necromancy animating a golem of dust, this is saying that we have the life of our bodies from the Earth according to the laws of nature (i.e. evolution) and we have the life of our minds from the inspiration (divine breath) of God who spoke to Adam and Eve. And humanity spread over the earth by the means of ideas rather than a genetic descent from just two people which the evidence of science cannot agree with.

In this way, even though the story is about the Middle East it is also still the history of human beings, including the destruction by a flood of the first human civilization and the subsequent spread into many different cultures after that.

It doesn’t work for me. It would have done once upon a time.

Yes I agree–“very much on the right track.” See my “Local Creationism and the Statement of Fact View” here in Open Forum.

Can you link it so I can find it easier? Thank you in advance.

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