Who best reconciles the Bible and Evolution?

Mike, if there were two possible interpretations of a passage, and one agrees with science and one does not, then which one would you choose?

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That was indeed my understanding of your purpose, and I think you’ve done a great job of concisely summarizing your purpose in the above. I also think that you introduced and have helped sustain a very productive thread that may be quite helpful for a lot of people who share your questions and wrestle with these complex topics. So even though these can be very challenging concepts to articulate accurately and in an easily comprehensible prose—and it is difficult to reduce entire books and long technical articles in academic journals to a few paragraphs—I do hope that the casual and spontaneous attempts at achieving such goals have shed at least a little new light on the topic. Having gone through a long and tedious path myself—from a anti-evolution YEC “creation science” enthusiast in the 1960’s to what eventually would be called evolutionary creationism by the time I retired—I do hope I never give the thoughtless or discourteous impression that everybody should just “pay attention, hurry up, and get on board” the evolutionary creationism train. (If my posts give any impression of frustration with this topic, it is more about my frustration with myself in having difficulties effectively articulating a lot of complex ideas. In fact, one of the reasons I participate in discussion forums like this one is to learn better ways to explain these topics to inquirers.)

So I will say again that I appreciate everything you’ve shared and the fact that you’ve given us excellent and very meaty questions to tackle!

That said, I’ll add to the stew yet another reason why I consider Genesis 1 not just another of the Bible’s “historical narrative” pericopes. (Thankfully, this thread has not recycled any of the arguments of past forum debates on whether the Hebrew grammar of Genesis 1 demands that it be understood as a chronologically-ordered sequence of events.) I read Genesis 1 much like a poem or set of song lyrics appearing immediately after the title page of a book. Authors through the centuries have often used something well known to the audience to set the tone of a book and to provide a foundational framework for what follows.

So how does this help me to understand Genesis 1? In addition to the often emphasized 3+3 YOMs, A,B;B,A chiasm patterns, and parallelisms of the six-YOM creation account, the six-stanza hymnic structure seems inescapable. Each day’s verse/stanza is followed by a rigidly formulaic, repeating chorus: “And the evening and the morning was the Nth YOM.”

So whenever I read traditional Young Earth Creationist demands that Genesis 1 must be read according to the “plain and natural” meaning of “what is obviously a historical narrative of real events happening in the chronological order as they are presented in the text”, I’m prone to point out that most narrative accounts in the Old Testament aren’t written in a series of numbered stanzas followed by a simple repeating chorus.

I’ll also interject my observation that “And the evening and the morning” is probably idiomatic. After all, a YOM/day in Semitic culture is not confined to an evening through the next morning. Instead, it strikes me as an idiomatic way to refer to “from start to finish” (as in the duration of a single night), much as sunset through sunrise can describe a single night. Otherwise, “the evening and the morning was the Nth day” doesn’t really make sense in the context—because God didn’t restrict his creative commands to the hours of darkness, from evening until the next morning! Thus, to even allow for a traditional YEC “plain and natural reading” of the text, “And the evening and the morning…” surely must be understood idiomatically.

Literally speaking, a Jewish day began at sunset and ended with the following evening’s sunset. So even though I agree with traditional Young Earth Creationists that Genesis 1 is referring to YOM as a conventional 24 hour day, that doesn’t have to mean that Genesis 1 has to be read as “the story of what happened during the universe’s very first week as a summary of each day’s events.”

What if Genesis 1 was intended as a six-stanza HYMNIC TRIBUTE to the Creator. It would serve as a very appropriate introduction to the Genesis scroll, the first book of the Pentateuch which explains the beginnings of the Children of Israel. Instead of starting with the birth of Abraham or even the origins of the first Imago Dei creature(“the Reddish-Soil Man”, HAADAM), it goes back further. It tells us that God the Creator is so powerful that he could make the universe and everything in it in a single human workweek. (Does that sound like something a poet or song-writer might do?) So a hymn to that Creator which assigns separate “sovereignty domains” to each numbered day and its verse makes for a strong contrast with the pantheons of gods and goddesses of Israel’s neighbors, where each deity’s power is confined to a single domain. (In those nearby cultures, a particular god rules the fish of the sea, while another god governs the beasts of the fields. Some goddess may rule the moon or even be the moon.)

The Genesis 1 text may have existed in those exact words for many centuries before it was consolidated with other texts—and that separately written text or similar outline may have existed for many centuries and have gone through a number language versions before being written in Hebrew. Or perhaps the six-stanza creation hymn had existed as a well known oral tradition(s) for many centuries before being chosen by the Genesis author as a suitable introduction to the first book of the Pentateuch. Or perhaps it was heavily edited and reworked to where it was unrecognizable.

Yet, we don’t have to know those details before deciding how to interpret (and not interpret) the text. Because God is omniscient and not bound by time, it is not difficult to imagine that God decided
to describe himself as building a universe using concepts familiar to time-bound humans, both ancient and modern humans. So God placed his creative “acts” into the convenient outline of seven-day week. In actual fact, an omnipotent God didn’t need six days nor did he need evenings and mornings. But seeing how it is impossible to write a TRULY LITERAL description of a supernatural being doing such impossible-for-humans, supernatural things from the “first person perspective” of a deity who exists outside of the time dimension of the matter-energy universe which he himself created, Genesis 1 had to be one-big-accommodation to the limitations of the human mind and human languages. And it is! For that reason, I find it extremely difficult to read Genesis 1 “very literally”, just as I don’t read passages where Jesus is a shepherd “very literally”.

Mike, I would be curious to know if you find the Hymnic Tribute view of Genesis 1 to be at all helpful in considering why this text need not be viewed as conflicting with origins science. And suppose scholars made some amazing discovery which confirmed that Genesis 1 was based on an oral tradition that had been well known within the culture for many centuries—and perhaps was even sung as a worship hymn where the soloist chanted or sung the six “verses” and an entire choir sang the chorus: “And the evening and the morning was the Nth day.” Do you think that that would or should change “the plain and natural reading of the text” as understood by many fundamentalists and evangelicals? [Personally speaking, I don’t know if it would have much impact on the average American Bible Belt Christian. But the question fascinates me.]

Now, with all that said, I’ll reiterate for those who have just now joined this thread: I have no problems harmonizing Genesis 1 through 5 with what I know of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and geology. And I don’t have to discard or disrespect any scripture to say that. I find God’s revelations in his creation and in his scripture to fit together in ways that no longer frustrate me, though it took me a lot of study, especially in the original languages.




** A FOOTNOTE FOR THOSE WHO CARE **

This is another TANGENTIAL EXCURSUS due to heavy medication:

Just to make an important point again: English authors and readers tend to think that order-of-presentation in a text necessarily conveys order of chronology, especially when numbered. But not all languages and cultures assume that bias.

And cultural biases as to priorities and perspectives are also reflected in things like systems of inflection. I’ve already mentioned that Hebrew verb inflections in themselves don’t necessarily communicate past, present, and future, because they didn’t consider time relationships a high priority when communicating. And some languages with a different set of priorities use extremely complex inflection systems which constantly remind everyone the superior/equal/inferior social caste relationships of everyone involved in every sentence! English lost most of the last vestiges of that in the pronoun distinctions a few centuries ago–when the informal thou/thee/thy dropped out and the formal you/your got applied to everybody. (I can’t resist mentioning that the eldest of my Board of Elders at my first church used to exhort me to always address God in my public prayers with the pronouns thee/thou/thine “because it is more respectful than using ‘you’ when speaking to God.” I probably took a bit too much delight in explaining to him that he had the archaic formal/informal distinctions backwards! I don’t know if he felt frustrated or deflated when I told him that thee/thy/thou/thine were at one time restricted to very informal settings and addressing one’s children and closest friends of the same social class. YOU/YOUR were important in formal contexts, such as addressing the king and one’s social betters. The man never changed his “prayer pronouns”, but he did stop complaining about mine—at least in my presence!)

I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of differences in languages and cultures. I’ve found that even many of my non-academic audiences, such as Sunday School classes and home Bible study groups, have enjoyed learning about these linguistic topics—especially when I explain how it impacts the work of Bible translators on the mission field today and in the history of English Bible translations.

I try to make sure that all of my students, in both academic and non-academic settings, come away with at least a little understanding of why a dogmatic insistence on “the plain and natural reading” of a given Bible passage can be an almost humorously presumptuous folly—especially when reading an English translation of a Hebrew/Aramaic Old Testament text (or a Greek Testament text) without a realization that translator(s) have probably already resolved the most difficult ambiguities in the text and chose which “plain and natural reading” the English Bible reader will think is so obvious from the text. For example, every time the KJV translators used EARTH instead of LAND for the Hebrew word ERETZ in the early chapters of Genesis, they nearly-forever established a “natural bias” that would lead millions of English Bible readers to assume that EARTH referred to “planet earth” rather than “earth, the opposite of sky” or “the ground” and what a farmer tills. That bias is so strong that even modern day Bible translation committees tend to relegate “or LAND” to the translation footnotes at the bottom of the page. Otherwise the new translation would be DOA (dead on arrival) in the very competitive English Bible translation marketplace!

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It still makes me very uncomfortable, as well! My mother has been passing out tracts for about 40 years and I still vividly remember one in which a calm, dignified student systematically destroys all evolutionary arguments made by an irate professor as he “devolves” before our eyes. (I actually found the tract with the magic of the internet here!)

It took me quite a while to come to the point where I could actually consider something other than a Young Earth creation, let alone the possibility that evolution was real! I am still grappling with the theological implications. For me, the bottom line is this: God reveals Himself through both His Word and His Works, and it is a mistake to ignore either one.

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And now for something entirely different.

Rather than focus on evolution as it appears to have a lot of baggage just look at Genesis versus the real age of the earth. Which is 4.543 billion years. The geology is rock solid, if you pardon the pun. Once you can reconcile the history of the earth with the history in Genesis the rest will be a piece of cake.

I agree with you here.

This was not my personal story. You might benefit from reading part of my story.

http://peacefulscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/swamidass-confident-fatih.pdf

For me there were really several steps.

  1. I had to understand the science for myself, but this was the last step.
  2. I had to understand how could fit with the Bible, and this was among the most important questions for me. I need also to know that any adjustments I made were not just to accommodate evolution.
  3. I had to find a place to put confidence instead of anti-evolution arguments. And this was the most emotionally difficult step, because I was so attached to anti-evolutionism.

In the end, a key step for me was realizing how different YEC and ID arguments were from traditional interpretations of Scripture. Ultimately, it was a return to Jesus-centered orthodoxy that brought me to theistic evolution. For me, it was a process of taking down idols.[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:83, topic:36078”]
And while we’re at it, let’s be honest that the majority of people who believe in evolution don’t believe in it because of the evidence; rather they believe in it because the weight of the scientific community is behind it.
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Maybe that’s true, but not for me. I’ve witnessed the evidence myself.[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:83, topic:36078”]
Some participants in this forum might say, “Well, Mike, you ought to love Meredith Kline and John Walton because they demonstrate that the Bible is not actually claiming the things that you think it is.” I am willing to be convinced that the Bible is not making the claims that I think it is in this area but neither Kline nor Walton are convincing in their arguments.
[/quote]

Walton is not how I came to my position. There are reasons in the text itself, and also within the traditional interpretations themselves that demonstrate that there is much more ambiguity here, but also real messages that we are to receive. None of this is really a secret, and it just requires some attention to the actual traditional interpretations (rather than what people say is the traditional interpretation). I’m personally not writing off or explaining away Genesis, but evolution has allowed me to embrace it more coherently, more consistent with the early and historical Church.

This, I feel, is one of the great opportunities here. Our faith is not threatened by science. It is not contingent on the human study of nature. It does not need science. The fact we have lost site of this is a testament of the times, and our cultures theological innovation (in the worst sense of the word). For me, evolution was a call back to orthodoxy and Biblically-based faith, rooted in Jesus and God’s sign in history of raising from the dead.

No problem. One of the big turning points of me was reading Augustine’s literal interpretation of Genesis, where he concludes only on an “idiot” (his words) would think that those days are defined as 24hr days because the sun did not exist till the 3rd days. He also makes a brilliant theological point that spiritual death is more literal to God than physical death, and the death it refers to in Genesis caused by the fall, therefore, in his literal interpretation, is spiritual death.

Of course Augustine writes in the pre-science era, based almost entirely on textual analysis. He is not influenced by evolution. This is what tipped me over the edge. The “Traditional interpretations” i was supposedly to affirm without questioning, were not even the traditional interpretations (!!!).[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:59, topic:36078”]
My question for you on this point is this: If Genesis 2:1-3 does not mean that the original creation was completed, what does it mean?
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I think we look to the text to understand it. You emphasize stopping creating = rest, but this is not the whole story. We see in the story that the narrative of rest also includes God taking up residence on our world, in the Garden alongside Adam and Eve. Rest is closely connected to home, relationships and family. I think a better understanding of the rest of the 7th day, is that God had a purpose in creation that centered on creating us, beings that he could build a relationship with. Having created us, He takes up residence with us as the primary work of creation is over.

This is not an absolute statement about never anything new ever being created. This is not, for example, a statement that no new stars will form or species will arise (as we observe in telescopes and in a nature). Rather it is a statement about God’s attention and primary purpose, not a prohibition on new things arise in this world. It is a claim that we are the pinnacle of creation because we are the first thing that God makes that He can bring into his family, and bear His Image.

Now the people who most strongly dispute this are YECs, that will want to take the 6 days as 24 hour periods, and then inexplicably take day 7 as an age with no end. I find rigid inconsistency here really surprising. If this is really a literal week, we should wonder what happens on the 8th day, but they don’t.

Yes I know, but why exactly? Is that really what the passage teaches? How do they reconcile that there belief in the creation of a new heaven and a new earth? Or how God makes a new creation in our souls when we come to Jesus? We all believe these things, even those that take this view. We can all agree that God no longer creates in the same way in the past (even theistic evolutionists like me think this), but this passage isn’t articulating an absolute prohibition on new creations.

In the Church, I would say that this is what evolution is:

Evolution is scientific theory that most living things, including humans, share ancestors in the distant past. Historically, there have been several mechanisms proposed to explain how life changes over time, including natural selection. These mechanisms are the subject of intense and sustained inquiry and debate, and we currently understand evolution to progress by a wide range of genetic, ecological, selective, neutral, development, social, cultural, and contingent processes. No one in biology thinks that natural selection and random mutation is the sum totality of the mechanism, it is much more complex than this, and it is an active area of intense research.

It is important to understand that science never explicitly refers to God’s action or looks for it. From our Christian and non-scientific point of view, we do not believe science can tell us where or how or if God intervened in evolution. So it is reasonable to wonder if God intervened in evolution to inspire mutations or more intently direct our path at times. However, science is blind to God and silent about Him. As Christians, we also believe it is impossible to discern the exact nature of God’s action independent of Him revealing it to us. God does not reveal the exact mechanisms and mutations of creation to us in Scripture, so will never have clarity in on this.

None of this should surprise us, because the way God reveals Himself to all people is by raising this man Jesus from the dead. It is through this act in history that we find the identity of the Creator of all things. It is through the Empty Tomb that we see that God exists, is good, and wants to be known. We are people rooted in this revelation, this revealing, this act of God in history.

Personally, I often say this briefly by saying:

I believe that God created us, He designed us, by a process of evolution. I know this because the Creator of Everything reveals Himself through Jesus, by raising Him from the dead.

Even if I am wrong, this directs people rightly to Jesus. Even if we are wrong about evolution, we can still follow Him. Even if we are right about evolution, nothing compares with the message God has for all of us in Jesus. God’s act to reveal Himself will always be greater than our effort to study nature. Jesus is the Lord of All things, including science.

Honestly curious your thoughts about my journey.

http://peacefulscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/swamidass-confident-fatih.pdf

Peace.

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@Mike_Gantt you might also find some value in this concurrent thread on the Fall in an evolutionary context:

I try to push that truth as often as I can. God reveals his answers to our questions through multiple means of revelation. We err when we ignore God’s Bible or God’s creation. We err when we pretend that “fallible man” perfectly interpret God’s scriptures while equally fallible humans are presumed to misinterpret God’s creation. (That is my frustration whenever I hear Ken Ham pushing that false dichotomy: “We can trust God’s Word but not fallible man’s science!” It drives me nuts.)

But isn’t that a very good reason to affirm the Theory of Evolution? (I’ve avoided the phrase “believe in evolution” because people argue about the meaning.)

The fact that the scientific community is so strongly behind the Theory of Evolution is because the quantity and quality of evidence is absolutely overwhelming. Indeed, I actually wish the general public was far more inclined to affirm what appears in science textbooks. Scientific theories and scientific laws appear in the textbooks because the scientific method has been carefully applied and the ideas have survived peer-review and massive falsification testing.

So I’m very concerned when people do NOT find the weight of the scientific community convincing. Far too many people are jeopardizing public health by rejecting what scientists know about the importance of vaccinations. And far too many people are risking the lives and health of populations all over the world by denying what scientists have learned about human role in climate change.

I don’t expect everyone to have the time and energy to personally review the important evidence, especially when most people lack the knowledge, training, and requisite skills for even evaluating that evidence. I wish more people had a basic understand of what it takes to earn a PhD and why the opinions of competent PhDs in a relevant field are far more important than what some politician, talk radio host, or my own “gut feeling” tells me.

Even when I was a young Assistant Professor who should have known better, I naively thought that I could put more trust in the scholarship of my much older, senior “creation science” colleagues because they were born-again Christians who held to Biblical doctrines very similar to mine. After all, I reasoned, Dr. X and Dr. Y were godly men who prayed and preached and constantly praised God—so I assumed that (1) they would never dishonestly quote-mine, publish bogus citations, misrepresent scientific principles and terminology, and (2) because they regularly prayed for God’s leading, God would not allow them to fall into error or mislead the flock of trusting believers who would automatically believe anything these men taught. Yes, I was very gullible—because shouldn’t I trust the opinion of Spirit-filled men of God rather than those godless and worldly evolutionary biologists? Why wouldn’t I trust those who shared my faith in God and had repented of sin in order to follow Jesus Christ as Lord?

I think my viewpoint was and is very common with the Church.

I wish that the American public could be sufficiently educated in their public school science courses to:

(1) have a better understanding of why they should have more respect for what the scientific community has determined and published in textbooks. (The science in K through 12 science textbooks tends to be the more crucial concepts and those reflecting enormous consensus of the science community.)

(2) to understand what the scientific method can determine while also understanding its limits. Hopefully, this could help the average person to separate, for example, Richard Dawkins’ science from Dawkins’ personal opinions on philosophy, theology, politics, history, and other non-scientific pontificates. (Obviously, just because a scientist happens to claim that evolution renders God unnecessary, that doesn’t mean that the scientific method demands that conclusion. Science is limited to natural processes, so it cannot determine the existence or non-existence of God.

Far too many Christians think that just because the media gives a few atheist scientists a lot of attention, that means that modern science is “atheistic”. Far too many actually believe that the Theory of Evolution denies the existence of God. That in itself does not reflect well on our public schools and how we teach science.

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I heartily agree! If you’ll recall my confessions of science ignorance, you’ll realize even more keenly that it is the testimony of the majority of the scientific community that makes my struggle with this issue so intense. If I didn’t respect what they thought, or if I thought I knew their field as well as or better than they did, I could more easily dismiss their claims.

I take your point. You’ve made me see that my statement implied that people generally start with a conviction about evolution and then go to the Bible; this was a clumsy of me because I wasn’t really trying to say that most people study the science before they study the Bible. I was only trying to say that conclusions about science seem to get prioritized in discussions about how to reconcile the Bible and evolution. Therefore, let me try to state my point a different way.

Imagine a judge trying an automobile accident case. It’s a simple matter of deciding which driver was at fault. There are only two witnesses: Sam and Bob. The problem is that their testimonies contradict at certain key points. In scenario 1, the judge listens to Sam and Bob (the order doesn’t matter), he compares their respective testimonies and tries to determine the truth of what happened. In scenario 2, the judge listens to Sam and Bob (again, the order doesn’t matter), but can’t help noticing that Sam is educated, articulate, clear and confident in his assertions while Bob is slower to speak and harder to understand, almost mumbling at times…at least on the issues at stake in the case. The judge finds Sam so easy to understand and so compelling, at least on the crucial issues, that he comes to regard Sam’s testimony as fully credible, and therefore keeps going over and over the transcript of Bob’s testimony to see if it might actually be more in line with Sam’s than he originally thought.

This is what I mean by prioritizing a testimony. It’s a natural reaction for the judge, but I prefer scenario 1 as a means of arriving at the truth. Nevertheless, even I myself am acting according to scenario 2; I’d be a fool to deny it because all my activity in this forum proves it. And the proliferation of Genesis interpretations over the years indicates that believers in general do not cavalierly disregard the majority of scientists on the subject of evolution. However, I keep trying to pull myself back toward scenario 1 because my conscience won’t let me be fully satisfied with a verdict that flows from scenario 2.

P.S. Having re-read this, I realize I need to make a finer point about scenario 2 If in the course of reviewing Bob’s testimony the judge has an “aha” moment where he genuinely arrives at a better understanding of what Bob said and which removes the conflict with Sam’s testimony, then I would not - in that case - consider it a flawed verdict, even though the methodology was not preferred.

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I could not choose an interpretation based on that criterion alone. However, if one interpretation agrees with science and better resonates with my understanding of the rest of Scripture, I would choose it in a heartbeat.

For discussion’s sake, let’s assume that your view on Genesis 1 is correct. Where then do you land (no pun intended) on the other major controversial issues (i.e. contested historical claims between science and the Bible) of Genesis 2-50 (e.g. the Flood and Babel) not to mention the rest of Scripture?

Wow, that question covers a huge amount of ground. I’m sure that the moderators would expect those to be divided into multiple threads.

Moreover, I’m not sure how I should leap from Genesis 1 into all 49 other chapters of Genesis.

I’m must retire for the evening and sleep, but as to the flood, I’ll simply mention that my Hebrew study brought me to the realization that Noah’s Flood describes a deluge of Noah’s ERETZ, not the entire planet. And due to a grammatical issue in a key sentence of the text, I believe the depth of the flood was described as about 22 feet. (The claim that the flood was over five miles deep so that it could surpass Mt. Everest is bogus on so many levels.)

I also cite 2Peter’s comparison of the future judgment by fire with the past judgment by water doubles down on a planet-wide fire versus regional-flood because of the careful distinctions between GE versus KOSMOS.

I tend to think in terms of a real flood that wiped out that ERETZ but as the culture and the genre in Genesis was prone to do, the real events were woven in traditional ways which produced a masterful “teaching story” with theological purposes over and above a focus on a scientific or strict historical description of events.

Perhaps that will help address what you were getting at in asking about my views? (By the way, I am not necessarily dogmatic about everything I just now quickly summarized. I certainly do try to shake off the tradition-based confinements of my YEC background that used to inform how I interpreted the Noah pericopes.

Good night.

P.S. A question for you that I want to repeat: Do you find the HYMNIC TRIBUTE to the Creator a somewhat obvious characteristic of Genesis 1? Do you agree that there are many poetic structures in the chapter? Do you agree that it is not just a straightforward “historical narrative” as many traditionalists insist? Does it seem to you that six-stanzas and a repeating chorus jump out at you? Does that help explain why there are so many internal contradictions within the text was treated as if a straightforward description of a sequence of events? (For examples, poets don’t have to be consistent about chronologies and “picky details” that don’t fit well.)

By the way, I tend to get annoyed by traditions that have no scriptural basis nor substantive historical support, such as the association with what the Genesis text calls “the hill country of Ararat” to a mountain in Turkey which many many centuries later would be called “Mt. Ararat.” I recall something like at least a half dozen “traditional sites” for the ark’s final resting place according to ancient traditions. I know of now good reason to demand a Turkey site.

And as to your very broad followup question for me about my views on other Genesis issues, why did you ask? Are you wondering if the Genesis text is important to me? Or are you trying to get a general idea of what “category” I fall into?

I’m just curious.

I did a lot of Bible translation consulting work and on a lot of Bible reference works.

Whoa. I’m not asking you to account for all Bible-science controversies; that would be unfair of me. What I am seeking to understand, however, is if you think your Genesis 1 hermeneutic has utility beyond Genesis 1 controversies or if it solves Genesis 1 problems only.

I agree that Genesis 1 is very lyrical prose, that its thoughts are presented in a structure not normally found in historical narrative, and that this structure is quite pronounced - for the most part recognizable by any reader in any language. Where I cannot keep step with you - at least not yet - is when you seem to suggest that this literary structure means that some unknown (known perhaps to you at this point, but not to me) amount of information in the account (“chronologies and pesky details”) is not to be taken as historical. I’d need to know more about what falls into your category of “details” that can be ignored.

By analogy, I don’t expect a poet to give me the factual precision that a historian can, but neither do I assume that a poem is ipso facto devoid of any historical facts. The devil (sometimes literally) is in the details.

Good morning, Mike. Let me take your traffic court just a bit further. What if Bob is completely silent about a major issue in the accident, but Sam can recall quite a few details about that particular issue? Maybe Sam can’t explain every single detail about the accident – he can’t recall if one driver or both had their turn signals on, for instance. I think it would still be reasonable to go with Sam’s account instead of insisting that it is completely invalid because a detail is missing. I’m probably going overboard, but I feel that many YEC and ID advocates do the same thing.

In these types of discussions, I often hear people talk about two books from God: the Bible and the book of nature. Or someone might say “His Word and His Works.” And I know it’s shown up in this very topic - more than once, I think. Herb Ross is the face I almost always see when this concept is invoked for he has made it a point of emphasis in his ministry.

I have no objection to this framing, and can appreciate the sentiments of those who invoke it (including Hugh Ross). However, most of us are aware that, as Paul said of his unbelieving fellow Jews in 2 Corinthians 3:15, it is possible to read the Bible and not “get it” - to misunderstand what’s read. Therefore, I am surprised that the reference to the “two books framework” is rarely, if ever, accompanied by the warning that it’s possible to misinterpret either one, or both, of them.

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See my note above. I was not trying to “slot” you.

I’ll go you one better. We can further assume that Sam is alive and well, that he is willing to come in a testify any time, and as many times, as we want…whereas no one’s sure of Bob’s whereabouts and all we have is the transcript of his original testimony. So it’s Sam’s ongoing testimony versus Bob’s written record. Oh, and I forgot to mention that while Sam has a good reputation for honesty, Bob has a superior and, in fact, unparalleled reputation for honesty - to be specific, that he’s known for never telling a lie and never himself being deceived.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each witness.

Oh absolutely, and I completely love both witnesses, for obviously very different reasons! :slight_smile: But again, if Bob’s testimony is silent on things that Sam’s testimony speaks volumes about, then we have to work on meshing the two accounts together better.

Joshua (if I may call you that),

Thank you very much for your extensive and thoughtful reply. It will take some time for me to work through it as well as the other replies I’ve gotten. (I’m trying to work on a first-in, first-out basis, but sometimes when I think a short reply will do I move it up in the queue.) Rest assured that I will read thoughtfully all you have written including your personal testimony, and respond thoughtfully as soon as practical for me.

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I think there is a great deal of merit to what you say. Ken Ham says, in part, something very similar when he says “Evolution is the symptom; millions of years is the disease.” I know you and he are opposed on the age of the earth, and perhaps on many other things as well. However, you are both putting your finger on a very important relationship between the two ideas (evolution and the age of the universe).

Alas, for various reasons too detailed to mention here, I am currently focused on reconciling evolution with the Bible. I keep my eyes open for opportunities to shift focus to the age of the earth when I think it might get me to a strategic conclusion sooner. However, I haven’t yet found a biblical opening to do so; and, as you may have discerned, it’s biblical openings that matter most to me.