Hearing about men of God, reject Earth’s age, despite overwhelming corroboration from multiple bodies of evidence, is one of the reasons millenials are increasingly avoiding all the mainline churches.
You don’t seem at all alarmed that the very extreme position you take is contributing to the loss of a generation of Christians.
Just in case you are wondering, I define “extreme” to be a position or belief “which persists even when there is overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary.”
You must have missed this post in which I made clear that the concern you identify is the very reason I’m going through this exercise.
As I’ve said, unless such an exercise can bridge the gap between thousands of years and millions of years, I don’t have time for it. I’m focused on the question that began this thread.
(1) So, then, do you agree that when Genesis 1 uses descriptions like “God said”, it does not mean that God verbalized literal audible words which were heard by no one because nobody with ears were around to hear them?
(2) What is the purpose of Exodus 11?
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
The purpose is to associate the significance of the SEVENS in the Mosaic Law, beginning with the seventh day sabbatical, with the SEVEN of Genesis 1. We know that the SEVEN is the significant point and not the definition and exact duration of a YOM because the seven of Genesis 1 becomes the basis of not only the sabbatical days but also the sabbatical years and the sabbatical weeks of years.
It is the SEVENS which are the most important aspect of the association. The 6+1=7 pattern of Genesis 1 is the basis for Israel’s being expected to special observe the seventh of the sevens: the seventh day, the seventh year, and the year associated with the sevens of seven years: the Jubilee year. All of these sabbaticals were based on the seven YOM time periods of Genesis 1.
How did the seven-day week get started? There’s a lot that we don’t know about such origins but historians have long understood that many cultures, from the ancient Babylonians to the Japanese and the Chinese, based the seven days of the week on the seven planets which they had been watching for countless generations. (In fact, the ancient Hebrews were atypical in not naming the days of the week after the names of the planets.) The number seven had a special symbolic significance in many cultures. So it would not be the only instance in the scriptures when God took something already well understood and assigned it special significance that would serve as a continuous covenantal reminder to his people. Instead of linking the days of the week to the seven stars and the deities assigned to them, Israel would view days, weeks, years, and weeks-of-years as YHWH’s.
As I wrote previously, I certainly have no problem with those who interpret Genesis 1 as God exerting his creative will for the universe over a six-YOM/day period. Generally speaking, it seems to fit with what God has revealed in his scriptures and with what God has revealed in his created universe. The conflict arises when one tries to impose the entire development of the universe (the fulfillment of God’s creative commands) into a six day period. A popular tradition says that such a view can be harmonized with Genesis 1—but, unfortunately, it doesn’t harmonize with what we observe in creation itself. Why would God create a world filled with evidence contradicting a six-day developmental history? So if there are other interpretations of Genesis 1 which fit both the scriptural evidence and the scientific evidence, isn’t that a more likely reality?
I want to make clear that I’m not saying that the Days of Proclamation view is the only legitimate interpretation of Genesis 1. I like to use it when addressing this topic because (1) it is more easily summarized than some of the other interpretations, and (2) I believe it might be among the easiest to harmonize with the scriptural evidence and the scientific evidence for those who may share a Young Earth Creationist background similar to mine.
You are correct, I missed this post! I think you are quite the brave fellow.
You are willing to base your wager on the future of your credibility based on your ability to comprehend your God’s requirements based on a few English translations of a Hebrew document, to make a conclusion that virtually no Jewish thinker ever adopted… either before Jesus or after Jesus!
That is gutsy stuff!
Mike, I think you posed an excellent question in launching this thread. These are important topics and just about all of us have had to wrestle with them. I do wish more people were wiling to step outside of the echo chambers and engage these topics as Biologos has done.
And as I have pointed out repeatedly, there is no such gap. That gap only exists in your mind. It is the product of you reading the genealogies wrongly. Until you realise that you are reading the genealogies wrongly, you will not be able to understand how to read them correctly.
As I have pointed out several times, no one in the Bible reads the genealogies you do. As you have acknowledged, you are reading them the way James Ussher did, not the way the Bible does. Can you see why this is wrong, and why it has caused a problem which otherwise would not exist? Why are you reading the genealogies in a way that the Bible does not? I have asked you this several times and every time you avoid answering it.
I would like to tarry over one point of epistemology: how will your grandchildren know one way or another?
Since it is unlikely that Young Earth Creationists are going to discover their Faith has been confirmed until the End of Days, the only way your grandchildren will know whether you were right or wrong in this life is if you teach them the important of Corroborating Evidence!
If you decide in favor of the Scientific Evidence, then you and your grandchildren will all have the confidence of adhereing to an Old Earth because there is no countervailing scientific evidence.
But if you decide in favor of the “Gantt Interpretation of Genesis”, and they do too, they will never know for sure until the Resurrection.
But here’s the sad news:
Let’s suppose you continue to adhere to the “Gantt Interpretation of Genesis” … confident in your faith in the text.
And your grandchildren decide that overwhelming scientific corroboration is more convincing than the “Gantt Interpretation”, they will believe you were wrong until their final days.
Conversely, if you adopt Science and they don’t, they will know you took the path of Science as a reasonable response to evidence, even though they think Faith is more important.
They still won’t know that you are right (or wrong) until the final days.
It seems like you may be conflating the idea that you (and others) find the presentation of the history of creation in a week misleading with the idea that the history is unreliable. Is that really fair?
I could write a poem about my grandfather’s life, and use a calendar year to structure it. I could talk about his spring on the farm, and his summer fighting poverty and the Nazis, his peaceful autumn as a sign-maker, and his long, lonely winter as a widower. The words ‘spring,’ ‘summer,’ ‘autumn,’ and ‘winter’ wouldn’t be used in some secondary sense. No definition of winter will tell you a secondary meaning is “old age.” But this “seasons of life” idea is a common and accessible literary trope in English, so it is easily calculated by most native speakers.
No one is going to argue that because the meaning of the word for each season clearly denotes one quarter of a calendar year, therefore, I must be claiming my grandfather lived out his whole life in 365 days. I could tell a true history about my grandfather in a poem structured around a calendar year, and if you were to tell me my poem was “unreliable” or “untrue” because my grandfather lived 83 years not 1 year, I would think you were being ridiculous.
So, personally, I don’t have a problem allowing for the possibility that a calendar week could have been a familiar literary trope to the original audience. Perhaps it was one they associated with completion or perfection or memorializing something important. I don’t have a problem allowing that even though the word “day” there clearly refers to the normal kind of day and not some secondary sense of “eon” or “age,” that doesn’t necessarily imply the “history” of creation fit into 168 hours any more than the “history” of my grandfather’s life fit into 365 days.
Nice, @Christy !
And this, @Mike_Gantt , is the kind of cognitive adjustment millions of Christians have already made (some more, some less) in order to pray to their Savior with conviction, despite being convinced long ago that the Earth is billions of years old!
There you go again, portraying science as mere hearsay.
Moreover, Jonathan doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you are accusing him of seeming to be. He’s very big on evidence.
I am a bit confused about this focus on genealogies, as if this tells us anything about the age of the earth. Let us say we grant that the genealogies allow at most 7K years between us and Adam. What does this tell us about the age of the earth? Nothing really.
There could still be a gap between vs. 1 and 2. Yes @Mike_Gantt I read your interpretation, but the passage is ambiguous. How do you know for sure you are right?
There could still be a substantial gap between the ch. 1 and 2 accounts. The first account talks about Elohim’s creation of mankind with words, but then the second account talks about Jehovah’s creation of a single man by molding him from dust. Maybe your interpretation is right, but the account is ambiguous. How do you know for sure that there was not a gap in time between 1 and 2?
Given Adam was not born in the story, we do not know from when to count his age. Perhaps it was from when he was kicked out of the garden. Passage is ambiguous. How do you know for sure it was from his birth and that they were in the garden for a short time?
Of course we have not even touched on how long the days are. Yes @Mike_Gantt I read your interpretation, but the passage is ambiguous. Morning and night exist before the sun and moon, which should be a clue. How do you know for sure you are right?
There is just so much ambiguity about the time between when the earth is created and when the genealogies start, it really makes no difference how long the genealogies are.
You asked for a Biblical reason to accept the scientific view that the earth is a billion years, but we have gotten side tracked into a separate question. It seems like we are arguing if the bible teaches the earth is a billion years. Let’s be clear that I do not think this is the case. Rather, I think the Bible is ambiguous about the age of the earth.
Still, there is Biblical reason to accept it.
I think we both agree that the age of the earth is not consequential to our faith, and that it could be consistent with Scripture.
We also agree that it is consequential to those in our scientific world.
That guides us to the best reason to accept the earth as a billion years old. 1 Corinthians 9:20-22. Rather than focusing on adjudicating an inconsequential fact that is extraneous to our faith, why not turn our eyes to more important components of the faith-science conversation?
Hello Mike,
Thanks for the compliment!
I’m going to have to flat out disagree with you on this. There is a big difference in saying someone, “ceased” working on a project and someone rested the day after they finsihed it.
This is not what refreshed is. We already know that God received pleasure in what accomplished from Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
Because it’s obvious, at least to me, that the creation narratives are not to be taken literally or historically. One, the ANE people weren’t looking for modern historicity and accuracy in their creation traditions. The ancient Israelites knew that Yahweh didn’t rest and refresh Himself. The whole point of the story is to show that God formed the world as a temple and he would reside in it on the 7th Day. Just like in Genesis 1 where God created light on the 4th day, the fact that it doesn’t make scientific sense is irrelevant, to us and the ancient Hebrews, to the point of the narrative. Similarly, the fact that God stated that He rested and was refreshed on the 7th day was understood that God would reside in His work - again, that fact that it didn’t make literal sense is irrelevant. This is all in addition to the fact that there simply no way for the 6-day narrative to be historical. [quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:111, topic:36256”]
Rather, I think He’s telling us about as much as we were told when it was written that Jesus “rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Hush, be still.’ And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm”
[/quote]
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Jesus performed a miracle, of course it’s beyond us as to how that worked. The creation narratives relate a 6-day creation where the creator rests after He’s done and is refreshed. Either those things are literally true or it’s a tradition, like other peoples of the time had.
I never stated that I thought that, “refreshed” can only be understood in a spiritual sense.
A huge issue for us (and probably with others here also, judging by the posts) is that you and I see the bible much differently. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you to hold to a Chicago Statement-type biblical inerrancy, that Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch, that there can be no real contradictions in scripture or its unreliable, etc. I don’t hold to any of those things. I hold to biblical authority and infallibility, but not to a strong inerrancy (my view of scripture could be a sort of inerrancy - there are many definitions as to what inerrancy is). I see the bible as a collection of books, consisting of poems, wise sayings, prayers, songs, genealogies and doxologies, historical narratives, letters, traditions, etc., written over 1,500 years in 3 continents in (at least) 3 languages that God is some way inspired and uses to, ultimately, save us. To expect all the incidentals to line up is modernistic and unreasonable, IMO. But I can guarantee you that I take the teachings of the bible quite seriously and continue to make major life decisions based on them.
To answer what you said to another poster, I can see that you are sincere in your efforts to make sense of all of this, and you’re not an acolyte of AIG or the DI. In a way my heart goes out to you, since it would be hard to suddenly accept that scripture uses traditions and legend-building, like the contemporary cultures did, to promote, in the case of the bible, true theology. [quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:111, topic:36256”]
I hope you will continue to labor with me.
[/quote]
I’m here as long as you need me. 
Actually, I take “God said” to be a central point of Gen 1. When people say that their only important takeaway from Gen 1 is “God did it,” I scratch my head. I wonder how they divorce the saying from the doing, given how the text repeatedly emphasizes this connection - and all the more so when you consider everything else the Bible says about God speaking. I would expect the minimum meaning any reader would glean from Gen 1 - if he were looking for a minimum - would be “God did it by speaking.”
As to your point about “nobody with ears were around to hear,” I don’t consider human beings to be the only beings. Therefore, just because there were no human beings around to hear God’s words does not mean that no beings heard them. What the equivalent of “verbalized literal audible words” is in the spiritual realm, I do not know; but it’s clear from the Scriptures that angels hear God speak.
I don’t see how the application of the original pattern of seven to longer periods of time disallows the possibility that the original pattern was in days. Does the application to weeks of years disallow the application to years?
For readers who take Gen 1 as a seven-day week, the answer is obvious.
See here.
I am in search of just such an interpretation which I can in good conscience accept. Hence I wrote the OP that launched this thread.
If I could become convinced that the Scriptures were ambiguous on the creation having taken a week, I, too, could be comfortable with multiple acceptable interpretations. However, as I state in the OP and this subsequent related post, I currently see no ambiguity.
By the way, I keep stressing that my conviction about a young earth turns on the combined witness of Gen 1:1-2:3; Ex 20:8-11; and Ex 31:12-17 - not on a traditional YEC reading of Gen 1. I have never heard AiG, CMI, or anyone else articulate this position the way I am doing. I do not say my position is unique; I’m just saying I didn’t get it from anyone else. If you truly understand what I am saying, I think it puts you in a better position to find my error, if indeed I am making one.
@Richard_Wright1, perhaps the best quote in the whole thread! Nice!!!
You simultaneously pull together distinctly different themes:
A. The Temple Theme
B. The 7th Day Theme
C. The Rest vs. Refresh Theme
D. The Science vs Lyric Narrative Theme
(which is a redux of Literal Sense vs Poetic Sense )
@Mike_Gantt, ignoring the unified sense of Richard’s synthesis will get you nowhere.
@BradKramer, another great posting!
For goodness sake…
Is it speaking if you don’t have a mouth?
If my mouth is closed and I make a loud noise in my throat, am I speaking?
If I don’t have a throat is it speaking?
If I speak in outerspace, do I make a sound?
If I don’t make sound in a vacuum, is it speaking?
If I think loudly in my head is it speaking?
Why would you conclude that one of the take aways is that God literally spoke… in the vacuum of space… without a mouth… and without sound?
With each new posting, Mike, you push the eccentricities of your interpretation to newer extremes.
I take Genesis 1 as a seven day week. However, I know that this doesn’t necessarily result in a young universe or a universe which is only a few thousand years old. I also know that there’s no evidence that anyone from Genesis 12 to the end of 2 Kings knew anything about the sabbath being a memorial of creation; instead they know it as a memorial of the Exodus.
I’m one of a few people who has pointed out that the days in Genesis 1 can be read as literal days without requiring the entire universe to have been created in seven days, or without requiring the universe to be only a few thousand years old.
Well actually you’ve made the point that the only passage on which you rely for dating the earth is the genealogies of Genesis 4-5, because they’re the only passages in which you can find anything like date information. And as I’ve demonstrated, the way you are reading those genealogies is not the way the Bible reads them.
You have the interpretive tools to do this. I understand that your concern is that if the Bible isn’t speaking literally or honestly in the way you require it to, then it can’t be said to be speaking literally or honestly. But your fear is unfounded for these reasons.
You read the Bible as saying that the heart is the seat of thought and the liver is the organ of emotion, but you don’t actually believe this is so. You read those passages figuratively and you have no problem with this.
You read the Bible as saying that the earth has pillars, but you don’t actually believe this is so. You read those passages figuratively and you have no problem with this.
You read the Bible as saying that the earth doesn’t move, but you don’t actually believe this is so. You read those passages figuratively and you have no problem with this.
You read the Bible as saying that the sun moves around the earth, but you don’t actually believe this is so. You read those passages figuratively and you have no problem with this.
Examples could be multiplied. So you have no problem reading these passages as non-literal despite the fact that there’s no indication to do so. In the case of Genesis 1 and the genealogies, there are good reasons inside the Bible itself for not reading them the way you do. So let’s start there.
George, I want to elaborate on the importance of your point about the millennials.
Let me re-post here from its original thread the essence of the post to which you are referring.
I am 65. I can probably live the rest of my life in peace without resolving this issue. Same for my children, who have all been grown for many years and have made their own decisions about these things. It is my grandchildren who are my primary focus when I think about this issue. There are two things I don’t want for them:
- I don’t want them thinking Grandpa believes in a young earth if God made an old one.
- I don’t want them thinking Grandpa believes in an old earth if God made a young one.
Yes, my conscience is driving my participation here - but not for my own sake. Rather, it’s for their sake. If they believe in a young earth when God made an old one, they will struggle and be persecuted for no good reason. I would be pained but honored if my grandchildren suffered for the truth, but I would be pained without the comfort of honor if they suffered for a falsehood.
So, yes, I have deep emotion about the matter. And I am mindful of 2 Samuel 23:13-17. I asked you if the YEC’s gave any of you any pause. They do give me pause, and I cannot dismiss them as categorically as you do. Here’s why: If the YEC’s are wrong, I believe God will regard them as David regarded the three mighty men in this episode. I also believe if the OEC’s are wrong, that the same sentiment will apply. But in both cases, God’s sentiment will be to the degree that the position taken by an individual was taken truly in the fear of God and not the fear of man.
Let me now add to these comments for clarity and emphasis.
My motive is not to try to get my grandchildren to think well of their grandfather. Rather, I know that what I think has some influence on them. How much or how little really doesn’t matter. What matters is that whatever influence I have on them, I want to be for their good and the Lord’s glory. On this issue, they will either think Grandpa stood up for the truth, that he stood up for an error, or that he didn’t stand up for anything. As much as I am able, I want to influence them the right way on this issue. I’ve tried to be relatively silent about it for a long time, but I no longer feel comfortable with that. Therefore, I want to reach a conclusion and conviction…for their sake, not for my own.
All of us on this board - whether we are OEC, YEC, or just confused - need to be engaging on the basis of seeking each other’s good, and the good of the rising generation: the millennials…and their children. I agreed with you 100% when you challenged me to think of the younger generation. On this subject, I seldom think of anyone else.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.