In general terms, insofar as I can tell, (a) yes, you now understand how I currently view Scripture on the subject of the age of the earth. My purpose here at BioLogos is to find out if there is an understanding of Scripture on this subject that is superior to this one.
(To be slightly more precise about it, I came to BioLogos focused on the subject of evoution, but have been counseled that focusing first on the age of the earth is a more efficient way of ultimately answering the evolution question.)
None of these three case types fall within my focus, which is, generally speaking, around putative biblical obstacles to geocentricity and interplanetary motion of the earth.
If I have failed to acknowledge anyoneâs submission, I apologize and ask that you please post again if you feel your list contains verses that wouldnât be covered in the lists I have acknowledged.
I donât know how to estimate how long it will take me to track down all these lists and explanations, and go through them, but I will do so and report back here with my reaction.
The point of any valid âlistâ is the potential such a list woulld have to create trend points regarding methods for how Bible readers cope with texts that have the appearance of one or more erroneous understandings of natural science - - natural science in general ⌠not just limited to eccentricity!
Your criterion that you only want to review Bible references that relate to ââŚthe interplanetary motion of the EarthâŚâ - - is a rather Large & Vigorous Red Herring!
On the list I was putting together for you i didnt even include references for that topic because they are not nearly as clear and compelling as other problem verses from the Bible.
I fear you are wasting everyoneâs time⌠including your own.
Considering your follow-up post that you are only interested in verses that touch on ââŚinterplanetary motion of the EarthâŚâ, I canât imagine your reaction having any dramatic conclusions.
To paraphrase your prior discussions, you have already established that you are a Young Earth Creationist - and that you feel honor-bound to disregard Actual Evidence from the science of Geology regarding the age of the Earth.
So there doesnât seem to be any realistic possibility that you will not be equally zealous about how to interpret the purported figurative nature of some of the Bibleâs most notoriously vague verses.
Sorry for missing your question. Thanks for raising it again.
I agree with you that v. 2 describes a state before vv. 3ff (the Six Days). I also believe, though I cannot tell if you would agree, that v. 1 is a prefatory summary of vv. 3ff (the Six Days). Therefore, the question to me would be âHow long did the state of v. 2 take?â and the answer is that I do not know. I do not say that this question is unimportant, but I do say that I do not understand how it bears on the OP because I see âIn the beginningâ as commencing with the end of the state described in v. 2.
In other words, the phrase âIn the beginningâ describes the beginning of creation. What is before the beginning is therefore before creation and therefore outside the scope of inquiry about the age of the earth. At least, this is my view.
Thanks for that. While I take a different view of v. 1 (I see it as a dependent clause to v. 3, which I take as the first main-line clause), itâs irrelevant to this discussion. Like you, I take v. 2 as prior state to the âcreationâ of the 6 Days. However, I think this is relevant b/c it describes the existence of âearthâ before the âcreation.â If one is trying to find some concordance (which you seem to presume), then one canât discount an earth that exists outside even the most literalistic timeframe, and this is relevant to any discussion about the age of the earth.
Fair point, given your interpretation of v. 2. However, I do not take âThe earth wasâ in v. 2 as if it were an independent statement meaning that the earth existed during the v.2 state; nor do I take âThe earth was formless and voidâ as if this was a description of the earth as it existed in the v. 2 state. Rather, I take the âThe earth was formless and voidâ to mean that the earth was not - evoking for us, if not for the apostle Paul himself, the words of Rom 4:17 (âcalleth those things which be not as though they wereâ in the KJV, âcalls into being that which does not existâ in the NASB, âcalls into existence the things that do not existâ in the ESV). In other words, v. 2 seems to be making emphatic that the earth did not exist prior to creation week, and this seems all the more clear to me when read immediately after v. 1, which gives the dividing line âIn the beginning.â
I take the witness of Heb 11:3 to be that âthe watersâ referred to in v. 2 are waters which do not appear to us - as distinguished from the waters (oceans, rivers, etc.) that would be created. I take 2 Pet 3:5 to be making a word play on this distinction.
All that said, I recall your reference to âdifficult syntax,â and would only add that for that reason and others, it seems to me that reasonable people can disagree on some of these particulars.
Therefore, to summarize, I can see why v. 2 would be relevant to your view of a biblical age for the earth, and I hope you can now see why for my view it is not.
This is a helpful demonstration of how reasonable minds can land at different places. Your View of v. 2 seems to me novel and creativeâwhich is fineâbut itâs not very literal/straightforward, which makes me wonder why you press the language in a more literalistic way elsewhere. But, thatâs another conversation for another day perhaps. Thanks again for the interchange.
The thrust of your argument in this section seems to be that it would be anachronistic to expect Genesis to speak in the sort of numbers to which modern science has conditioned us - e.g. âbillions of yearsâ (re: age of the universe), â93 billion light yearsâ (re: vastness of the heavens).
Agreed.
However, it is not what Genesis does not say that sets up an obstacle to believing in an earth progressively-created over 4.543 billion years. Rather, it is in what it does say.
In fact, if all we had read of the Bible was Genesis 1, we could narrow the problem down to six sentences found in that chapter. They are:
And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
There was evening and there was morning, a third day.
There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
I re-read Genesis 1 ignoring these six sentences. Do you know what information weâd lose from Genesis 1 if these six sentence were absent? Nothing - except that creation was accomplished in six days along with an accounting of what each dayâs creation brought forth. Thatâs it! Thatâs all weâd lose! The sublime prose that has enchanted human imagination for millennia would largely remain intact. Hardly anything meaningful or edifying would have been lost.
Think of it! Without these six sentences in Gen 1, a major casus belli for the culture wars would not exist! An old earth would pass Gen 1 with flying colors. Evolution would face not a single Gen 1 obstacle. People could even claim Gen 1 support for various views on the historicity of Adam and Eve. There would be no need for a BL, an AiG, an RTB, a CMI - at least as theyâre currently constituted and focused.
Without these six sentences, an exegete could even claim that the text doesnât specify a defined sequence in Godâs creative activity. Since it would just be a series of narrative statements strung together with conjunctions, a reader could reasonably interpret everything happening at once, or being strung out over vast amounts of time, and occurring in no particular order. The thumpingest Bible thumper in the world would be able to accept every scientific claim that Ken Ham hates and Ken would just have to live with it because he wouldnât be able to find any basis for protesting it in Gen 1.
Therefore, we can be sure that it is not something Gen 1 failed to say that got us into this dilemma of âIs it 4.543B years or something much shorter?â Rather, it is what Gen 1 does say - specifically, what it says in those six sentences.
Now come all the arguments about what Genesis means by those six days - whether theyâre of 24 hours, or of eons, or whether, as John Walton would have it, theyâre mere literary latticework. It would even be reasonable to ask why God, knowing it would only be a few thousand years before anyone who took those six sentences in their traditional sense would look like a fool to most of the world, would have included these six sentences in the first chapter of the first book of the collection He would ask His servants to lay down their lives to write and preserve in the first place. What was the point of complicating the matter, Lord? Those six sentences and our inability to interpret them consistently have divided those who love You. Do You have so many people loving You that You can afford to have them divided?
But I donât want to deal with all of that now. I only said what Iâve said to this point in order to make a more limited point, which is to affirm what you said about the old-young earth controversy in your closing:
Times Four. We are certainly starting from the same place.
This last post of yours was elucidating. Let me summarize your point, and explain how I moved forward from it. This is very close to my starting position.
You do not just hold that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. You also hold that all Scripture is useful. You are very concerned about dismissing any part of Scripture as unuseful, and this is part of how you are assessing interpretations. This why you want to find a âuseful interpretationâ of the 7 days in Genesis 1. This is just as important for you as delimiting what it does not say. You want to know what you are moving to in the teaching of this feature of the narrative, before you leave the day interpretation.
Am I right on that? If so I can affirm that approach. It is similar to mine.
The good news is that there are important teaching entirely different than the age of the earth embedded in that feature of the narrative. This is, I think what you are asking for.
There are some factual errors in your post too that are material to the conversation.
This was one of the dominant tradition interpretations (see Augustine). They saw the days as (1) playing a pedagogic role regarding Sabbath and (2) teaching that God did it all at once, but He had an orderly plan too.
Do answer that question in my other thread.
Though you misread the traditional account. Instant creation of all 6 days is one of the dominant views in traditional interpretation.
John Walton thinks these six days are 6 24-hour periods. In this limited sense, he is a six-day creationist. He does not see them as mere literary latticework. He does not see them as ages of time. He sees them as six of our literal and earthly days.
Why is it that you think it is imperative to evaluate scripture on the question of geo-centricity, but of no value to examine the âappearanceâ of much more definitive errors in understanding the Natural Universe?
As for the project you propose I take on, I see no value in the expenditure of energy in that direction as it would be tangentially, if at all, related. I think what I committed to was substantial enough. I still have not sized all Iâve got to work through.
I donât take Jesus in John 5:17 to be contradicting or superseding Gen 2:1-3. Rather, I think the rest of Gen 2:1-3, as stipulated, was regarding the activites of creation. Certainly, the Father continued working from that point because the universe would fail without His sustaining power. Moreover, Godâs redemptive work was initiated in the very next chapter with the fall of Adam and EveâŚand would continue, of course, through the mission of Messiah. I donât conflate Godâs creative activity as delineated in Gen 2:1-3 with all His other activities.
Then you want a useful reason for why Genesis 1 uses daysâŚ
One important way to interpret Scripture is to use Scripture to interpret Scripture. So, it is worth asking of the day-like structure and language of Genesis 1 is ever used as the basis for theological reasoning elsewhere. If we can find examples of this, we know that your objection is not grounded. There are things weâd lose by removing the day-like language from the Genesis account other than the age of the earth.
We find that the six days does hold a function in later theological reasoningâŚ
It establishes the week as a God-ordained cycle, in which to situate the Sabbath. Without this day-like structure, this message would be lost, and so would the Hebrew notion of Sabbath.
To put a fine point on it, unlike years, months, seasons, days, there is no astronomical reason for choosing 7 day weeks. It is just an out of place number that does not evenly divide the other cycles. Removing the day-like structure of Genesis removes the fundamental theological claim (in the ten commandments) that God created a specific day (the 7th day) for rest.
The days of creation are given as some of the explanation of Sabbath.
This connection between the week and Genesis 1 functions among Hebrews as liturgy. It brings us into a weekly object lesson where we work for 6 days to create the conditions and space and preparation for a place of worship and family. This liturgy is lost without Sabbath, which is rooted in Genesis 1 day-like language.
So this is all to say that losing the day-like language in Genesis 1 actually does lose something more than the age of the earth.
Moreover, even if we take them to refer to literal 24-hour periods, it does not logically follow that the earth is young. For a long time many people have posited a gap between Gen 1:1 and 1:2. Waltonâs book takes this, but there is also a long history of positing a cosmic fall during this time (during which the angels are created and fall, so we have a way to understand the Serpent).
So I do also dispute the notion that interpreting these days as 24 hour days even tells us the earth is young. That does not follow.
It sounds from this as if you are forgetting the OP. There I explain that it is precisely because of the way that âthe six daysâ are mentioned elsewhere in Scripture - specifically, in Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 - that I interpret them in Gen 1 as I do.
As Iâve said to others, if the only scriptural reference to âsix daysâ was in Gen 1, I could more easily see them as referring to âeonsâ and thus accept an old earth. The problem is that explicit references as well as many allusions to the Gen 1 cycle are littered throughout the biblical text - as you well know.
My point wasnât that weâd lose little if we removed the day-like language from the entirety of Scripture. Weâd lose a great deal. On this point, you and I agree. My point was, however, that weâd lose little in Gen 1 by removing those sentences from Gen 1.
Generally speaking, I agree with all you say here. But again, I was only saying that removing the six sentences from Gen 1 would remove little from Gen 1 - not that removing the six-day structure from Scripture would remove little from Scripture.
You seem to assume that because the six-day structure we see so often referenced in Scripture is rooted in Gen 1 that it could have been rooted nowhere else and thus if the six days were not part of Gen 1 we would have to give up everything else that the Scripture says about the weekly cycle, the Sabbath and so on. Such an assumption seems to me unwarranted. For one thing, God could have given His Exodus 20:8-10 commandment to keep the Sabbath holy sans the explanation of Ex 20:11. After all, this commandment is the only one of the Ten Commandments that includes the justification of a precedent. Removing the justification for the commandment wouldnât diminish Godâs authority to command it. All subsequent references to the weekly cycle and Sabbath could then have been rooted in that commandment just as easily as in Gen 1.
Yet, as you rightly suggest, the reality is that God chose to root all Sabbath references not in Exodus, but in Genesis. Let us focus on that.
I have to ask myself, âWhy did God root the Sabbath commandment in His behavior?â As I suggested above, He didnât have to root it in anything. And if He wanted to root it in behavior, why didnât He rooted in it manâs behavior instead of His own? For example, God could have expanded the Gen 2:18-25 account of Adam naming the animals such that he spent six days doing the work of naming all the animals and seeking among them a suitable helper, only to have the week concluded by his resting from those efforts as God produced the woman who was âexceeding abundantly above all that Adam had asked or thought.â It would have been a reasonable and poignant precedent. Nor is this the only way God could have established a precedent for the weekly cycle based on behavior other than His own.
The undeniable fact is that God chose to root all this âsix days - Sabbathâ talk in His own behavior. I am not here going to disgress into speculations about why He did this. The point is that He did, and the question pressing us is what He meant by the words He chose.
If you say to me, âMike, you have insufficient grounds to insist that the six days mentioned in Gen 1 cannot mean eons,â I could agree with you. The problem for me is that I have to view Gen 1 in light of Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 which are quite obviously referring to it. I am, as you rightly encourage me to do, using Scripture to interpret Scripture.
The only way I could agree with this statement would be to ignore the Bibleâs genealogies. I have explained elsewhere in this thread, or one of the others I started, how Gen 1:1 - 2: 3 and the genealogies are inextricably linked such that they together disallow a dating of the earth in the millions, much less billions, of years - even allowing for some gaps in the genealogies. I am willing to re-state that logic here, but am reluctant to say much more on this until I find out just how far apart we are after you read this post.
I assume you are here speaking of âthe gap theory.â I have previously worked through it and found it to create more problems than it solves.
You mention Walton. Do you embrace his interpretation of Gen 1? I think it is effectively summarized in this excerpt from an article of his on the BioLogos website:
If we are correct in identifying Genesis 1 as a creation account that intends to inaugurate the functioning cosmic templeâŚwe would therefore no longer have to try to defend the âbiblicalâ view of the age of the earth. The age of the earth is a material issue not addressed in a functional account. Likewise, if Genesis 1 is not an account of material origins, the Bible offers no account of material origins. If that is the case, then empirical science could not possibly offer a view of material origins that we would have to reject in defense of the Bible.
While I enjoy and am edified by Waltonâs presentation of the functional view - especially the conception of creation as the Creatorâs temple - I do not find him persuasive when he asserts âthe Bible offers no account of material origins.â In other words, I donât find them mutually exclusive. I ask where you stand with respect to Walton because the answer would help me understand better how you actually interpret the Scriptures yourself on the matter at hand.
Before saying more, Iâd like to hear your response to everything else Iâve said here. You can only help me overcome the obstacles I face if I have given a clear description of them.
The argument for a six day working week and the 7th day as the Sabbath is Biblically based, so Christianity has accepted it, and the entire habit in the world is based on this structure (although few observe the Sabbath, and the say of rest is Saturday for the Jewish faith, and Sunday for traditional Christianity).
I think we can see why there are arguments, when a beginning of creation is equated with six days of activity by God, a rest on the seventh, and time is then counted from Adam, via the genealogies from Adam onward. However, I emphasise my point - the Ten Commandments (including the Sabbath) are stated as explicit and beyond argument, The Bible doe not give such a statement regarding the age of the earth or the universe, nor are the genealogies used in the Bible as a measure of time in an explicit manner.
As I now see this discussion, it hinges on a number of matters, particularly (1) are the days of creation, days as we understand now? (2) If the creation was made in the six day preceding Adam, why would God create a separate garden and place Adam and Eve there (since the entire creation would have been completed in the preceding days, and would be equivalent to the garden)?
Other arguments could be made, but they are peripheral, such as the inference of other human beings during Adamâs life.
I admire a conviction that seeks to practice the Ten Commandments, as I believe every Christian must obey the Law, and yet I am inclined to see these as essential to teaching us the Gospel, especially the intent of the Law as exemplified, for example, by the Sermon on the Mount.
In the final analysis, the personal conviction of any Christian far out ways any discussions on material origins, and definitely cannot be swayed by scientific arguments regarding the material world.