I would not like to summarize his arguments for you. It would be a huge undertaking. I am starting to think about the relationship between doctrine and tradition. I think that the desire to support YEC is partly rooted in nostalgia. There is an emotional investment in YEC, or any belief that has been held by a person for a long period of time. My self and a couple other old-earthers are meeting with the folks putting on this genesisacademy workshop. The meeting will be this coming Monday. The classes are on Thursdays. I have a feeling that we will go to this meeting on Monday and then be asked not to come back on Thursday. Yesterday was the second class. The (other) folks in class were visibly strengthened in their faith. I worry that the short term strengthing will be followed by long term disappointment.
For me it’s an established fact that there are all kinds of slippery slopes in life. Those guardrails you talk about obviously don’t do their job well in many cases. Every person has some vulnerability to go towards all kinds of extremes.
Simply labelling some phenomenon a fallacy does not make it non-existent (it reminds me of somebody who denied the reality of demonic possession in the same way here on the Forum). “It’s a fallacy so it doesn’t exist.” That is a circular reasoning (which is also a logical fallacy 
).
However, I do agree that “slippery slope” should not be abused as an argument, because it usually involves exaggeration of consequences. Still, people can often be observed to slide down slippery slopes and I consider it a noble cause to draw attention to such possibilities. The most powerful example of a slippery slope is that of sin. That’s why Jesus encouraged us even to stop sinning within our own minds and hearts (“If you hate your brother, you have committed a murder.”, “If you desire another man’s wife, you have committed adultery in your heart.”)
Anyway, even if your position on Genesis 1 would be the “final station” (i.e., no risk of more extreme outcomes), I still wouldn’t subscribe to it. Mainly because in my opinion you insert an intention into these writings that has never been present. Genesis 1 conveys very important truths such as that God made a good Creation according to His will, with human beings set apart. However, there is no indication that God injected any “divine knowledge” about the natural world into the biblical writer.
This is an interesting pair of talks with John Walton and a pastor named Joe Fleener. I have not read Prof. Walton’s books, but I am skeptical that Genesis 1, being a creation story, is not literally about the creation of the universe. While I certainly agree with his points about cultural context, it seems to me to make an unwarranted assumption about the intent of the creation account to say that the first creation account is ONLY about assigning functions and creating order and installing functionaries. The creation account appears to me to also be about describing the creation of places, things and people.
That’s all fine and good, but you aren’t an ancient near east original audience member, so whether or not it appears to be describing material creation to you really isn’t relevant to good exegesis.
I took another look at that Ken Ham book. I think that I can summarize the motivation for making his arguments as:
- Ken can’t see how old earth fits with scripture.
- Ken can’t see how evolution fits with the character of God.
On page 38 he states "The battle is not one of young earth vs. old earth, or billions of years vs. six days, or creation vs. evolution - the real battle is the authority of the Word of God vs. man’s fallible opinions."
I think that pretty much sums up the motivations behind the book. You can’t easily sum up the arguments of the book since the whole book is basically one argument after another.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t have any ancient near east original audience members on the forum. 
For cases like Genesis 1 it can be argued that the original audience did not receive those parts of the Scriptures as a chronological account of natural history. Especially because of all the stylistic features of how the days were organized and the special motives (i.e., darkness, watery abyss, formless earth).
However, we also have some people around here on the Forum who like to think they are reading the Bible infallibly like original audience members from the Ancient Near East. That’s also not a good practice.
I think you are being overly cautious about wooden literalism and inerrancy, because I think the Bible is inerrant. I think that if you deny the old earth concordance of the days of creation with natural history, and if you do that because you are thinking that it will somehow make it easier to present other biblical events as non-literal, then you lose far more than you gain.
I, too, hope that some people will BITE on Biblically Inerrant Theistic Evolution.
[rimshot]
I have been toying with the idea of starting a campus outreach called Biblically Inerrant Theistic Evolution Ministerial Evangelists, but I fear the acronym might turn people off.
@Nick_Allen Can you define your take on the term “inerrancy”? It can be defined in different ways. To what extent should we expect inerrancy from the Bible? For example, do you accept that the writer of Genesis presents the sky as a solid dome? (see e.g., http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/the-firmament-of-genesis-1-is-solid-but-that’s-not-the-point) If you do, wouldn’t that contradict your ideal of inerrancy?
I uphold the authority of the Bible on the intended teachings of the biblical writers. In that sense, I hold it to be “inerrant” in its teachings. But I don’t think the Bible makes any claims to presenting a chronological account of natural history as a teaching.
In my opinion, the Old Earth concordance reading seems to disregard important motives of Genesis 1. As I have pointed out, there is this motive of the watery abyss as a representation of chaos, in which God created order. I think that understanding helps to make sense of other parts of the Bible.
To demonstrate this, we start with:
Genesis 1:6 “And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.”
So, then, in the story of Noach, we see that God decides to stop upholding this order, and the watery abyss returns:
Genesis 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
In the Gospel accounts, we see Jesus commanding the waters, showing the same power in creating order from the watery abyss (also see this great article by Pete Enns Jesus and the Sea - BioLogos):
Mark 4:37 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
39 He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.
Then, in the Book of Revelation, the motive is completed:
Revelation 21:1 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
This verse from the Book of Revelation never made any sense to me before I understood this motive of the sea in the Bible. In a completely “literal” reading, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to make the new creation without any sea. But understanding the connection between water and chaos makes it a beautiful reference.
@Casper_Hesp… this might be a wild guess… but I think @Nick_Allen was going for ‘the laugh’ with his
collegiate B.I.T.E. M.E. movement !
As for the question of inerrancy … have you ever delved into New Testament scholarship on the earliest texts we have for the Gospels? There is literally mistakes, additions and omissions in virtually ALL these texts …
How can anyone think something written up by humans can be inerrant? INTERPRETATION is everything when it comes to reading even older texts of the Old Testament…
Compare the LXX with the Hebrew version … it’s easy to say the Greek LXX gets things wrong . . . but what do we do when we discover that SOME of the passages in LXX are actually CORRECTIONS to flawed Hebrew versions?
I’m aware of the types of mistakes that you’re referring to, though I won’t pretend that I have “delved into the New Testament scholarship”. Despite all such mistakes, I think that the intentions of the texts have been transmitted sufficiently accurate for representing the teachings of the Gospel.
One funny example is when Jesus said:
“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
There is a variety of explanations for this reference to a camel. Quote from Wikipedia:
Cyril of Alexandria claimed that “camel” is a Greek misprint; that kamêlos (camel) was a misprint of kamilos, meaning “rope” or “cable”.
However, whether it’s a rope or a camel going through a needle, it’s still pretty difficult .
If Jesus was aligned with the Ebionites (“the poor”), the point Jesus may have been making is that the kingdom of heaven is most easily accessed by those in communitarian societies like the early Church, or branches of the Essenes… where members literally “owned very little” but lived a prosperous life (often repeated every generation in various monastic communities).
But for some reason … only the smallest percentage of Christians take the words of Jesus seriously!
‘The inerrancy of the Bible means simply that the Bible tells the truth. Truth can and does include approximations, free quotations, language of appearances, and different accounts of the same event as long as those do not contradict.’ Charles C. Ryrie, What You Should Know About Inerrancy, p. 16
Irony is a Wikipedia entry on inerrancy.
I believe that Genesis is accurate to within one degree of shepherd. Specifically, I think that Genesis is accurate enough that a shepherd living 5000 years ago could acquire from the Genesis account sufficient knowledge about astrophysics and paleoatmospheric chemistry that he would be able to effectively perform his day to day tasks in animal husbandry. Needless to say, one does not require a great deal of knowledge of astrophysics to prevent sheep from getting tangled in a thicket. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find that the picture painted in Genesis 1 uses a very broad brush. On the other hand, since God created the earth, and God also inspired Genesis 1, we should not be surprised that day 4 of the Genesis account is roughly accurate to natural history. see here A Hazy Atmosphere on Early Earth - Reasons to Believe and then here History of Earth's Atmosphere II | Earth Science | Visionlearning Anyways, there’s your firmament.
Here is a good commentary on the camel and the eye of the needle. Blog Post - What Is the Eye of a Needle?
I’ve decided that “Biblically Concordant Theistic Evolution” more accurately describes what I am suggesting. But the acronym is not as good, and probably all theistic evolutionists think that their viewpoint is biblically concordant. So, bummer.
As far as I know, the hazy-atmosphere theory is much further from the text than the solid firmament interpretation. It’s also shown in other parts of the Bible how the biblical writers thought about the sky. Consider, for example, when Elihu spoke to Job in the Book of Job 37:18:
“Can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?”
How can a hazy atmosphere be hard as a mirror of cast bronze?
I think this could be a good article to read if you’re interested: The Waters Above The Firmament (By Ben Vandergugten) | PDF | Genesis Creation Narrative | Religion And Belief.
The author treats a variety of topics, how the Hebrews and early Christians thought about the sky. One quote from this article is:
If God wanted to wrest the ancient physical cosmology from the minds of the Israelites, he of course could do that. If he desired to “correct them” and replace their ancient notions with something more akin to our modern cosmological understanding, there is no stopping him. But if God did overhaul their understanding of the physical cosmos, it would be clearly apparent in Scripture. In my view, it is not. Every book and letter of the Bible has far more pressing concerns to communicate to the people of God.
Why is it hard to except that the author of Genesis 1 chose for a phenomenological description of the cosmos as he understood it? In my expertise, astronomy, we still often talk about pointing our telescopes at “objects on the sky”. This implies that the sky where some kind of billboard on which the objects were pinned. However, none of us has any problems with this description because it is perfectly clear. From a phenomenological point of view, this is an appropriate description.