Even if one were to grant the literary structure for Genesis that you outline, and the biblical precedent of a non-chronological sequence of events, I don’t see what it gains you with respect to the problem at hand. If, for example, we posit that, analogous to saying that Jesus may have healed the ten lepers after His encounter with Zaccheus instead of before, God may have created fish and birds after He created animals and humans instead of before, where has that gotten us?
Maybe you are suggesting that “increasing ‘realism’” actually means “from fanciful to factual”? If that’s the case, I’m not sure you’re even safe coming away from Genesis 1 with “God did it.”
I’m actually open-minded about your Gen 1, 2-11, and 12-50 breakdown proposal, and I probably wouldn’t contend hard that Luke’s overriding purpose was chronological purity even though the NASB has him promising “consecutive order” in his prologue, but, given my exposure to all the Hebrew poetry extant in the rest of the Bible, I have a hard time imagining the God of Isaiah 55 inspiring a creation account as fanciful and divorced from reality as your thesis demands.
Morever, I thought one of the few points where EC’s (or TE’s) and YEC’s agreed was on the general order of God’s creative activity - that is, plants then animals then humans. And here you are giving that away at the git-go!
P.S. All that said, if you could show me how this interpretive scheme better explains, or better fits, the way Jesus interpreted the book of Genesis, I could find a way to work past its difficulties.
As I said yesterday, I have to sign off now. Though I will stop posting now, I will eventually read and reflect on anything you continue to post to this topic.
I told my wife the other day, “This BioLogos community is not as hostile as many others with whom I have interacted; as a group they’ve been very gracious.” I have interacted with many discussion forums and blogs over the last ten years, always on Christian topics, but usually on topics other than the one that has engaged us here. It’s been rewarding. Thanks for that.
I do not know at this point where I will end up on this issue, but I pray to God that I don’t end up where I am now: the valley of decision, the haunt of the double-minded. Harry Truman longed for a one-handed economist (if the reference is unfamiliar, you can easily google it); may I once again find myself a one-handed servant of Christ, and - if at all possible, Lord - may the hand I choose be the one of Your choice.
You really should read @Reggie_O_Donoghue’s fine posting (link at the bottom) about what can be found “between the lines” of the Genesis creation account!
It’s quite good! He shows how readers can make conclusions about what was motivating some of the scribe’s writings that go a long way to explain why the text is written the way it is written.
To be concise, it wasn’t written because they thought this is how the Earth and life was created … it was written to demolish the pagan ideas - - which we know existed prior to the Biblical literature - - could only be expressed as a contest between multiple gods doing ridiculous things !
So, aside from needing an etymological explanation for why Hebrews should rest on the Sabbath, Genesis uses a pagan skeleton where the only actor is God and humanity … no other gods!
Here is a sample:
“On day four, he are told that God created the great sea beasts. The great sea beasts are the only creatures in 1:21 which are explicitly named, which assigns special significance to them. The Hebrew word used, ‘Tannin’, literally refers to a sea serpent, and is the name of a sea serpent in Canaanite mythology. All mythologies have what is known as the ‘Chaoskampf’, where the chief God battles a serpent or dragon who is associated with chaos; Baal and Lotan, Ra and Apep, Zeus and Typhon, Teshub and Iluyanka, just to name a few examples.”
“By addressing special significance to the Tannin, the author is directly rebuking these pagan beliefs, and stressing the goodness of God by saying that the sea beasts are not adversaries of God, but his own creation. Again, this is not ‘refuting these ideas because of real events’ . . . there would be no reason for this to be in the narrative unless these beliefs already existed”
[ ^^^ And thus in need of contradiction! Note from @gbrooks9 ]
Genesis says there were birds before there land animals!
Genesis 1:19-21
And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth,
which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Compare:
Genesis 1:23-24
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,
cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
.
.
Mike, are you really going back to your Creationist blog to reaffirm to the world
that they must understand that birds flew in the sky, produced from the
oceans … before there were beasts and creeping things of the land ???
Which is why the very question at the beginning of this thread now seems like such a non-starter to me. For something to be reconciled, it must first have been at odds. And to be at odds it would have to have some relationship with the thing in the first place. Evolution has nothing to do with the Bible. It does however have much overlap and conflict in historical understandings with recent YEC understandings of creation accounts in Genesis. That is what seems to me to be irreconcilable.
Yes, you have summarised the matter well. It is a good idea to remind ourselves that a great deal of orthodoxy deals with how we may discuss the attributes of God, and high on that list is God the Creator. These discussions have taken place over thousands of years, and we as Christians are much the poorer if we neglect reasoning that provides the Church with a sublime intellectual and spiritual feast that has taken great effort from some of the greatest intellects in and out of Christendom, and instead opt for a diet that has less spiritual nourishment than a mac burger.
Isn’t it, though?! Like a great weight lifted. On the other hand I might start to go through Biologos Forum Participation Withdrawal (BFPW). I think I can already feel my hands starting to shake.
You do have a point. Were it not for concern over the dichotomy presented by some which tends to force a break from Christianity, we could. My politics has sort of a libertarian bent, and I think that Jesus’ teaching also tended that way, where the individual is responsible for their heart, so I am happy to let folks go where they want on such matters as evolution, so long as they don’t drag others away from the faith.
Thank you for defending Sunday School, the teachers and children. They are right, God did make us. It is not their fault that some people do not grow up enough to understand that there are often more than one right explanation for an event. Life has more than one dimension.
Look at Psalm 139. David wrote: Psalm 139:14-15 (NIV2011)
14 I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
David says that God formed him in his mother’s womb without denying the physical reality of procreation. He was not stupid or ignorant. He did not know about DNA, but he knew the facts of sex and reproduction.
The Bible is more than Gen 1. The Bible is also John 1 and Psalm 139, which everyone ignores in talking about evolution.
Reconciliation means bringing ideas together, contrasting and comparing so we can see how they fit together. This is what I have done in my book, Darwin’s Myth: Ecology, Malthus, and the Meaning of Life. This is the best way to understand the full meaning of science, philosophy, and Christianity.
I react to anyone who uses the polemic term “evolutionist” in the same way. You’re taking people who accept a scientific theory supported by mountains of evidence and misrepresenting them as followers of a political or philosophical movement. It’s not a sign of an open mind; it’s a clear sign that I’m dealing with a culture warrior.
Would you use the term “heliocentrist” to describe me? Or you?
I’ve been trying to make my way through this entire thread so I’m all caught up and can respond to you, but with a hundred posts still to go, I’m going to daringly start replying without a full understanding of the current state of the debate.
Your question seems clear and reasonable, and I have a few thoughts which may be of use to you although I present them as options for thought rather than items of personal faith to me (I’m not Christian, just trying to gain a deeper understanding of those who are).
First, it is not the case that the traditional interpretation of what the Bible says is unchanging. In the Middle Ages it was assumed that Genesis’s “Let the earth/waters bring forth” allowed for spontaneous generation of all sorts of life: maggots from meat, mice from the mud of the Nile, etc. Biblical interpretation allowed for this as it was the common scientific belief of the day, and it was only relatively recently that it was disproved conclusively by Pasteur and others. Theologians barely had time to adjust to this shake-up before Darwin was shaking it all up again. I think a lot of feeling on the issue comes from the history of how scientists and theologians had just about concluded that animals did not spontaneously arise (the creatio continua argument was likely referenced here) or form from other animals (tapeworms forming from intestines) when Darwin said, well, actually…
Which brings us to the question, what exactly does the Bible mean by ‘kind?’ Does it imply ‘fixity of species?’ Why or why not? Does it loosely translate to species or genus, or is that too specific an interpretation and really it just means God created all sorts of plants and animals? (I can cite at least one article on this if you are interested.) What do we make of His repeated instructions to let the land or waters bring forth life? Genesis definitely sees no conflict between these instructions and a description of God creating.
Did God create Adam from nothing, or form him from pre-existing material? It says Adam was formed from the earth, or soil, or clay. Does that mean God literally molded him with literal fingers? Does God have literal fingers? What else could it mean?
It’s very interesting to me that Genesis 2 is set very distinctly in an agricultural setting. This places it, to me, significantly after the beginning of the human race (Gen 1:26) but in a time of great significance and change in our condition. Was there a right way and a wrong way to adopt agriculture, begin to live in cities, and begin our religious understanding and interrelationships? When we started talking about and passing along opinions on capital letters Good and Evil?
These are the thoughts which have occurred to me so far, reading this thread: I’m sure I will think of others as I continue!
If the Book of Job has Yahweh telling you (and Job) that he has warehouses in Heaven full of snow and hail for when the time and need is right, don’t you accept this as a limitation of the scribe’s understanding of how snow and hail are actually made?
Do you really think God has such difficulty in making all the snow and hail he needs that he has to have a miraculous supply of “extra snow and hail” - - rather than simply “miraculously making more” in the same way we see snow and hail made every winter?
How do you explain your unwillingness to offer the same allowances to the rather non-scientific approach to Creation in Genesis 1 that you offer to texts like those in Job?
Alright, finished the thread and I see that Mike Gantt is elsewhere for now and may or may not resume participation, though I’m glad for the cordial note he left on! One more point I thought could bear closer examination was on what it means to refer to natural history.
I have seen this distinction before, but I believe it is generally considered too narrow, assuming you mean written down in human language. I would rather say that history is that which is recorded.
How is this different? There are many kinds of records. Oral history is one, written history another. Cave paintings record that people were there and painted things—animals they had hunted, perhaps. And some records have meanings which are mysterious to us: proto-writing or tally markings recorded without the context of any language we currently speak, for example.
And yet records of past events are not confined to things humans have recorded. One obvious example is that of a tree whose rings we examine: we can see which years the tree grew more and which it barely grew in, and perhaps find a charred ring which indicates that the tree survived a forest fire.
This seems to me an excellent example of ‘natural history.’ The charred ring in a tree also seems to me a more clear and reliable record of a historical event than many human records I could think of.
The term natural history was used more a few centuries ago than it is now; it was a specific subset of ‘science.’ The Wikipedia article on Natural History has a lot of interesting context to the term and the ways it’s been used over the centuries.
One addendum with regard to the thread in general: I very much hope @Socratic.Fanatic is doing better, I’ve always enjoyed his contributions and perspective and my thoughts are with his struggle!
I have presented a biblical argument for evolution and Genesis being compatible (Genesis and Evolution (Larkin)) as I believe the accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are sequential. Throughout the book of Genesis, the “generations” of the line not leading to Jesus are always given first (Cain before Seth, the generations of Japheth and of Ham are given before the generations of Shem, and so on.
I believe that the creation described in Chapter 1 is consistent with this approach, describes the line not leading to Jesus (and the “daughters of men” in Chapter 6), and the creation describe from Chapter 2 on describes the generations leading to Christ (the “sons of God” in Chapter 6, consistent with the rest of Genesis (more detail in the book).
I can send folks a manuscript (again it is short) if they don’t want to buy the book - I just want to get this information out and get constructive feedback as well.
