Serious question from me. Why not?
Have you explore all posibilities that you can come with the conclusion the concordism is not possible or perhaps you heard from others? Now, I am not saying that you certainly can. All I am saying that it is possible. If it is possible that perhaps we can find new ways of looking. if you are starting with “not possible”, there will be no point for us to discuss.
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Not sure where you got this idea Kendel. I thought that every word in the scripture is important. In word study of the bible, we do spend time to find why the author use this word and not that and what is the significance of using that word. That is basic hermeneutics.
I am sorry Kendel, but I don’t know any theological statements in Gen 1 or any theological understanding that arises out of Gen 1. The language is not poetic, but documentary in nature. (my take in which you might disagree, but one view is as valid as others)
While my view differ from Marg, I don’t see the language of Gen 1 as allegorical or poetic, but as a documentary of history of how God had formed and filled the earth.
No that was my conclusion not where I started.
When investigating my first problem was which version of concordism is correct. For me personally this is the biggest issue. There are many different ways to align Genesis and science and I couldn’t come up with a way to determine which was correct. Which if God really was putting science in the Bible I would certainly expect it to be correct.
Second, why would God place (and other than direct inspiration how could He) information in Genesis that was meaningless for 4,000 years until the science came along.
Third, what would be the purpose of adding science. We are told " All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" and I don’t see how finding science would apply.
Fourth, John Walton says
Fifth, it is easy to pick out some detail and say “it fits the science” when you have a totally free choice in what bit of science you want to match. For instance the earth covered with water. And since the earth started out a rocky ball, heated to the point liquid water would not exist, cooled, accumulated water, then became covered with water it is easy to pick out the covered with water phase and say “it matches” while ignoring the millions of years when it didn’t.
These are the major reasons why I came to the conclusion that attempts at concordism will always fail.
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There is no scientific, i.e. real event described in Genesis. Faith can’t make it so. And intelligence can’t make faith make it so. Science and faith have nothing to converse about. Faith needs to ask. And science needs to tell.
exactly. if you start with conclusion already, then it is not possible to have intelligent discussion since whatever I say about concordism will not matter to you.
However since you point out your views already, this is my take.
- Gen 1 is not a science treatise, nor is the bible as a whole. I do treat Gen 1 as documentary history. It was what was observed by Moses in his vision given by God of what was happening on early earth. Now, the vision did start from the beginning of creation (Gen 1:1). from Gen 1:2 onward, the vision was on earth and it did not cover from the formation of the very early earth. The vision in Gen 1:2 started with the earth was covered with water (formless) and it was empty and it was dark. it was not scientific, but what was observed by the naked eyes of the observer.
I don’t try to add science to Gen 1, but by understanding Gen 1:2 onward, it allow spaces to have our modern science of evolution within it. It harmonise the two books of God. It had nothing to do with instruction in righteousness. It is history after all.
I think Gen 1 should be understood in reference to all time scientific consensus. When people understood earth was the centre of the universe, Gen 1 should still make the same sense whether you hold flat earth or round earth.
That is where Gen 1:2 started from. We don’t choose our vision. It is given by God. We are just trying to understand what our vision meant. if it is documentary in nature (things of the past event), then we try to find whether there were similarity of that vision with planet earth of the past. There is water in the vision, the earth was formless and empty and it was dark. That is where we started to look. We might find a similarity or we might not, but at least we should try to do this first if possible. If it is not, then we have to look elsewhere for the answer to our vision.
And you are basing your statement on … what?
How reality works.
Does it?
Plants appear on day 3
Sea creatures and birds appear on day 5
Wrong order to support evolution.
And how do you understand the different creation story in Genesis 2?
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It seems that we had the same conversation on the other thread when I mentioned the work of Dr. Michael G. Strauss. If you understand his approach, then you know where I am coming from.
I tend to agree with you on that Miekhie.
To me the vision theory does solve the issues of the meaning of the word “bara”. What would the ancient consider to be creation out of nothing? If you showed them a room with nothing in it, they would probably say that’s nothing. Now compare it with the modern “nothing brigade”. They want no space, no time, no matter, no energy, no light…so creation ex nihilo would mean something completely different to people thousands of years ago.
The best way of making the Bible understandable to all people, regardless of their scientific knowledge/views would be for God to ensure there’s no science in it…
Completely agree with this. There’s just too much stuff that I can’t see can be known and too many different theories flying around, often in complete opposition to one another, so I simply stopped dwelling on this. Sure, discussion is always interesting, I just don’t see it as important (in context of faith), especially as consensus is prone to change, therefore it’s best not to get too attached to various theories.
@Terry_Sampson this conversation seems relevant to our discussions
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Tell me if I am wrong, but his approach is
And the order of creation he presents doesn’t agree with what is observed today. Biggest problem being having plants, in particular the angiosperms which include fruit trees, appear before any other life. There are vast stretches of the fossil record which do not include pollen, hence no angiosperms.
Now you could say the order is what Moses saw in his vision, which would have covered millions of years, but then you are back to the problem of picking out scientific facts to match Genesis which removes the “quite remarkable” aspect of the story.
You indicated you wanted to “make room” in the Genesis story for evolution, but once you drop a literal interpretation of the days in Genesis there is nothing left that would say evolution is wrong.
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A snippet from Bill Arnold’s commentary on Genesis (Baker Exegetical Commentary series) that may be helpful:
“The creative action that God takes in v. 1 is the verb ba ̄ra ̄ ì, which is regularly over- loaded with theological content by commentators of this text. Routinely, exegetes aver that Israel’s God is the only subject of this verb in the Hebrew Bible and that its accusative is always of product and never of material.27 Various theological con- clusions are often drawn from these observations, including creatio ex nihilo, and God’s sovereignty and power in creating effortlessly.28 These concepts are present in Gen 1, or in the case of creation without the use of preexistent matter, are at least compatible with the passage and asserted elsewhere in Scripture (Pss 33:6, 9; 148:5). However, this is entirely too much for our little verb to bear. The assertion that Israel’s God is always and only the subject of this verb is slightly misleading, since an identical root (ba ̄ra ̄ ì III) means to “separate (as by cutting),” and is perhaps not a separate root at all, but only a distinct use for another derived stem.29 Furthermore, although it is true that creating (ba ̄ra ̄ ì) never mentions the material out of which something is created, it is frequently used together with other verbs that do, such as “do, make” (ëa ̄ ́saˆ, vv. 26–27). Thus it seems likely that the verb ba ̄ra ̄ ì has devel- oped from “separate by cutting” (the supposed ba ̄ra ̄ ì III),30 and that it has here an intentional, and no less theologically significant connotation of creating by cutting, shaping, or fashioning (not unlike the use of ya ̄.sar in 2:7, see below). Indeed, it seems likely our author has intentionally begun the story with a theologically loaded word play in the first two words of the Bible, using the consonants br ì in an alliterative sequence: bˇer ̄e ìˇsˆıt bˇero ̄ ì, “In the beginning when [God] created . . . ”31 The word play anticipates the specific manner in which God brings order and shape to his creation, by dividing and separating, as in light from darkness and waters from waters (Hiphil of bdl, vv. 4, 7, 14, and 18 below). God masterfully divides the cosmos by a series of “cuts” and differentiates its components into “kinds.”32 Without reading too much into this particular verb, it is no doubt still true that this creative activity in 1:1–2:3 is clearly reserved for the domain of the sovereign God of Israel. Creating in this way is something only God can do.”
Vinnie
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If God gave Moses a vision of creation, why do the two accounts of creation disagree? Which came first, man or animals? I guess we could take Gen 1 literally on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and Gen 2 the rest of the week. Concordism can work if you get creative!
Because people get things wrong?
The vision in Gen 1 never mentioned that plant life came first. it was what Moses saw with his naked eyes. If you look at the fossil today, we might say that microscopic life form might have existed long before the plant life. We understand that today. But the author of the Gen 1 did not and only wrote what he observed.
Gen 1:11-23, And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
As you can see, the third day allow space for the evolution of plants to happen. with them perhaps the great oxidation event that follow. Once the oxygen level arose, the atmosphere became transparent, the observer now could see the sun and the moon and the stars at night… the fourth day. This allowed room for bigger animals to evolve … the fifth day.
I never said that evolution was wrong. We are in this forum to see how faith and science can work together. That is the intention, correct?
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I do want to take this word play seriously. While ‘bara’ is more of the work of God creating ex nihilo, ‘asah’ is more about God forming, separating, and making something from something else. This word ‘asah’ is important because it allow space where our understanding of evolution of million and billion of years happened. While ‘bara’ might be an instantaneous act of God, ‘asah’ is the work of God that allow natural law to work.
You are basically saying that the references to days doesn’t imply the sequence. At the time of the great oxidation event there was already life in the ocean, “fish” if you will. So the fish mentioned in Day 5 were already present on Day 3. Kind of strange for a story that is supposed to be about the order of creation. Or are you saying that the Days in Genesis were just the Days in the author’s vision? He had a 6 day long vision and this is what he saw on each day?
Color me confused. You don’t take Genesis literally and you accept evolution so what exactly are you looking for? Support for evolution in Genesis?
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that is correct.
Gen 1 is not a science treatise, so it is not a sequence as our modern understanding of what comes before or after in evolution. Just the vision that is shown to Moses.
Where did you ever get a notion from my post that I was against evolution?
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we do know that “fish” at its present form appeared long after the great oxidation event. But yes, life already existed (according to modern science) in microscopic form in the ocean before any plants appeared on earth. It was however unobservable to the vision of the author.
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I agree. I have seen this argument used to support the idea that Genesis does not say that the sun and moon were created on the 4th day but rather their purpose was given on that day, and from the pov of the earth this was when the clouds enveloping the earth started to dissipate and thus the sun and the moon could be seen. This gets around the problem of the sun and moon apparently being created after the earth. But I find it a rather bogus argument, trying to fit modern understanding into an ancient text. I find it rather odd that suddenly on the 4th day the focus shifts from God creating to looking up from the earth to the sky.