People – this isn’t rocket science! Mike has told everyone here that he isn’t concerned about the science. He wants to know what lessons from the Bible are the guiding principles for folks here because the Bible (and not science) is where he is currently at! If somebody from Dayton Ohio wants to know directions to NYC, you don’t start by berating him for being in Dayton and then proceed to give him instructions on how to get from Hoboken, NJ to NYC! If you hope to be of any use to him, you’ll have to start where he is at. Yes, I know this web site includes science as one of its main agendas, but surely not the only agenda?! I think we can accommodate somebody who wants wisdom from Scripture. If or when they are ready to hear about science, I’m sure they will be glad to get into that too. It is true that knowing more about God’s creation [science] does help us avoid some error in how we understand some Scriptures. But meanwhile … He’s in Dayton, okay? Deal with it!
Hi Mike,
It is interesting to watch how you are being treated here after such reflexive and kind, open, sincere, searching posts; even a moderator tells you to “keep ignoring.” I don’t find it a welcome culture here the way “This thread is ridiculous” is allowed, while simply and patiently holding BioLogos columnists accountable carefully to the way they express themselves with controversial terms is astonishingly disallowed by that same moderator & deleted from public. & there is no Thread to discuss moderation at BioLogos.
That said in defense of your ill treatment, Mike, I don’t find your position consistent, even taking into account implicit/explicit readings of Scripture. Even your “what the Bible says” is unnecessarily “conceptualist”, rather than a living faith in Christian fellowship globally with people who can help you to see what an anomaly YECism actually is. But I don’t think you have as far to go towards Christian orthodoxy on this topic as you seem to think.
A few suggestions:
- Reject evolutionism, as distinct from evolutionary biology. This puts you right in the center of BioLogos position. [Yes, even though Swamidass in this thread mistakenly thinks “closer to Jesus” means “further away from anti-evolutionism.”] It would not surprise me at all if you & I at least, along with George & quite a few others here are ready to say publically, are all strongly anti-evolutionism. Not shrouded in double-talk & nuance, but straight-up anti-evolutionism.
- Embrace (or at least drop the hostility towards or rejection of) evolutionary biology that does not challenge or call into question any “non-negotiable” part of Scripture. It shouldn’t be hard to accept those features of biology non-controversial to your worldview, which everyone here wishes to respect. Lay them out for us so that we can see you are willing to put in some work learning the basics of biology that most schoolchildren are taught.
- If you really are “unaware of any biblical verse or book that directly addresses the age of the earth or the universe,” then why not leave the age open to scientific input, even from orthodox Christians who are scientists? It might be that a small group of Americans has decided, on their own, that the book of Genesis, is the beginning & end of wisdom about the age of the Earth. If that is the case, then keep open the option that they might be totally deceived by ideology, while not seeing how it impacts and distorts their religious faith in the fetish of YECism.
These moves alone will likely make your “journey” at BioLogos more palatable, should you choose to stay.
As a 4th point, I’d suggest taking a break from reading American evangelical Protestant writers on this topic. Sorry, but that is about as safe a sociological suggestion one could make on this topic given the current state of the world. The Ken Kemp monogenesis article is great. He’s a Catholic who accepts historical Adam and Eve, monogenesis, biblical authority within apostolic tradition, and of course, an Earth not trapped by YEC ideological distortion. He’s more “traditional” than BioLogos who come across sometimes as evangelical revolutionaries. He’s also more “orthodox” than many at BIoLogos who often seem to have no orthodoxy to turn to on this topic beyond “personal theological hermeneutics.”
Finally, if you think the YECists who you consider “scientists” & authorities are not likewise (just as BioLogos is) rhetorically & ideologically invested, then I’m sure there’s another bridge somewhere for someone ready to sell you. 
We are all sinners, after all. Right, Mike? Some sin ideologically & it’s probably, given the social environment they grew up in, largely “not their fault.”
To most of the world, YECists are simply fanatics, so far outside of 21st century reality. But it’s a collectivist mentality to YECism that makes it a most peculiar; it is a martyr mindset as if they know something the “zombie Christians who accept biological evolution while rejecting evolutionism” don’t know. This “dark knowledge” aspect of YECism is something that most in the mainstream are not aware impinges on their every last and first argument.
The system that promotes YECism among Protestant evangelicals in USA, to outsiders, appears to be quite badly, tragically, excruciatingly broken. What are you doing to help fix it, Mike? Good wishes in whatever calling you receive from the Creator in this difficult position.
- Al-Khalil
I’m right here reading the thread @Al-Khalil. Why don’t you direct your complaints to me personally instead of constantly throwing in your little jibes? It’s easy, just type @Christy. Start your own thread to discuss moderation at BioLogos if you want to. I look forward to it.
Your post was deleted because you insist in multiple places on making huge mental leaps from what someone said and then attributing something ridiculous to them as their belief and then contending the whole BioLogos organization is hypocritical and suspect. That kind of behavior violates our gracious dialogue policy.
Violates BioLogos’ gracious dialogue policy. Will you take responsibility for that @Christy or will anyone else, moderator or not, at BioLogos?
[content removed by moderator because it referred to a private conversation and previously deleted topics].
How does expressing the opinion that a thread is ridiculous violate the guidelines? Which one? Who was personally insulted or misrepresented by that statement. You can feel free to flag the post if you want the other moderators to look at it. I think it’s fine.
Okay, let me try this again. The Bible is not precise with numbers all the time, the simplest being the imprecise value given for ‘pi’ as in 1 Kings 7:23-26 or 2 Chronicles 4:2-5. So many thing arbitrarily took 40 days or have 12 people (amongst other numbers) involved it either shows that God miraculously kept intervening or the Biblical writers felt liberty to round their numbers to make a point. It is most likely that the Biblical writer(s) were also rounding in Genesis (or they were choosing a happy medium between reality and the mythical ages of Babylonian Kings) as the numbers follow certain mathematical patterns. How about that the names of the genealogies make up a story that matches that of the coming Messiah fairly well? Real names or good storytelling to make a point? I imagine it was the latter. Just imagine a story in English that you are being told for the first time:
The first person, his name is ‘man.’ He gives birth to a son named ‘appointed,’ who gives birth to ‘mortal’ who gives birth to ‘sorrow’ who gives birth to ‘the blessed God’ who gives birth to ‘shall come down’ who gives birth to ‘teaching’ who gives birth to ‘his death shall bring’ who gives birth to ‘the despairing’ who gives birth to ‘rest.’ In other words, one such version of this clever bit of storytelling can say ‘Man appointed mortal sorrow, the blessed God shall come down teaching - His death shall bring the despairing rest.’
And if you heard a story like that, would you even imagine those were really their names, especially when their ages follow certain patterns of choosing numbers in Babylonian numerology?
I’ve hinted at this before, but nobody today affirms (not even likely @Mike_Gantt) that Ecclesiastes 1:5 for example teaches the sun revolves around the Earth. Yet, that’s a pretty plain teaching for me and easy to understand. The Bible contains ancient science as I gave a few examples from above…
Some more could be that:
- There are four corners of the Earth (Isa 11:12, Ezek 7:2, Rev 7:1)
- The ends of the Earth are mentioned over 50 times (i.e. Isa 41:9, Jer 16:19, Ps 65:5, Job 28:24, 37:3, 38:13; Dan 4:11, Acts 13:47, Matt 12:42, etc.)
- The Pillars of the Earth (Ps 75:3, 104:5, Job 9:6, 1 Sam 2:8)
- The Foundation of the Earth which ensures its stability (1 Sam 2:8, 2 Sam 22:16, Ps 75:3, Zech 12:1)
- The Biblical Earth was fixed and immovable (Ps 93:1, Ps 96:10, Isa 45:18, 1 Chr 16:30)
- The Earth was flat (Dan 4:10-11, Matt 4:8, Rev 1:7)
- The epic battles over creation where Jehovah prevails over other gods (Job 26:11-12, Ps 89:9-10, Ps 18:10-16, Ps 74:12-15)
- That God opened up the sky-dome (a literal belief above the clouds) to begin Noah’s flood (Gen 7:11)
Instead of apologizing for the texts as I used to in the past, even pretending that they predicted amazing science like a spherical Earth (Prov 8:27-28, Job 26:10, Isa 40:21-22) or that the Earth is a globe located in space (Job 26:5-7) but the actual move away from the flat Earth wasn’t due to a few obscure verses like this that ultimately fall flat in light of the 3 tiered cosmos idea, but the work of ancient Greek philosophers and ultimately 3rd century BC astronomy. But that is too much science for this thread so I digress.
I suppose I’ll add this quote to finish:
The creation of the sun, moon, and stars on day four is meant to be a theological point, rather than a scientific one. As other cultures worshiped the sun and moon and divined by the stars (astrology), the Hebrew authors are making the point that none of them is the source of the light, but rather merely reflectors of the light (as lamps) whose ultimate origin is in their God. The creation myth also uses poetic parallelism to narrate the story: Day 1 and Day 4 are paired (light; sun, moon, stars), Day 2 and Day 5 (seas and dry land; fish and fowl), Day 3 and Day 6 (plants of the earth; beasts of the earth and humanity). Furthermore, given the similarity of this narrative to the creation myth of the Babylonians, whose god Marduk creates the cosmos by slaying his sea-serpent mother Tiamat, the Hebrew presentation of God creating over the deep (Hebrew: “tehom”) by means other than violence and declaring the creation to be “good” is a rebuke to the Babylonian myth. The abundance of literary and theological devices in the narrative make it clear that the text is not attempting to be a scientific account of the origin of the world, but a theological declaration of the goodness of the creation as against competing religious systems (Canaanite, Babylonian, etc.).
Not that I can see.[quote=“jpm, post:197, topic:36078”]
If science is a way of looking at evidence and telling us how we got to here, and how to make sense of what we observe, you may call it history, but if you cannot trust what is observed, how can you trust your senses and make sense of anything you see and hear, including the Bible?
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To my way of thinking, you’re bundling an awful lot together here - so much so that I actually can’t figure out how to unravel it. Because I see conflicts between the Bible’ account of how we got here and evolution’s account of how we got here that means I have no basis for trusting what I observe or what my senses tell me, and can no longer make sense of anything I see and hear, including the Bible?
I don’t follow. Could you paraphrase what you’re asking me or the point you’re trying to make?
I didn’t take you to be wanting a response from me; I took you to be dismissing me. If you do have specific questions you want me to answer, I’ll be glad to. I see that you’ve since posted again so I’ll address whatever you’ve ask me in it when I get to it.
If you cannot trust what you see and observe in nature, how can you trust your eyes, ears, and mind in anything?
My point being, you can trust what you read in the Bible, dependent as that is on linguists and translators, so why can you not trust what in seen in nature?
Sorry, I wasn’t thinking things through. I thought OEC’s were more fraternal but I should have realized OEC’s who don’t believe in evolution would not be a fit at BioLogos. I concede that your criticism of me doesn’t put me in good company after all.
I am surprised that you would say this. Even if you think the “days” in Genesis 1 are ages, or even if you think they’re mere literary constructs with no point of correspondence in reality at all, don’t you still think Genesis 1 is God is telling us about “the historical realities of the beginnings of the universe and the development of life on earth”? Why would you say “There is no other access…except through science”? Why do you say it’s “a mistake” to “count the Bible as such a source”?
It’s sounds as if you’re saying that any person who makes this distinction can have no principled reason for doing so. Is that really what you believe?
Darn I really have been duped @gbrooks9 . Behold, the blog of Mike Gantt (your mind 100% made up before ever posting here):
http://www.blogforthelordjesus.com/2016/11/26/the-foolishness-of-evolutionism/
http://www.blogforthelordjesus.com/2016/11/27/is-the-earth-old-or-young/
Some nice quotes:
We know that evolution cannot explain the origin of the universe because the concept of evolution contradicts the Bible at many important points
You mean the Big Bang Theory cannot explain the origin of the universe? The two are completely unrelated topics. The theory of evolution only applies after the first life comes into being and it has nothing to do with either the origins of life or the origins of the cosmos.
And this one is one of my favorites (emphasis mine):
Furthermore, it is impossible for any old-earth chronology to be reconciled with the Bible anyway… the issue is doubly settled.
You trickster 
. Reminds me of my accusation of YEC science a few posts ago where God needs to be a trickster making the Earth and Cosmos with apparent age. Anyways, I think I’ve made a good enough case for the ancient science of the Scriptures, ignore at your own risk.
Generally speaking, agreed.
As for the assumptions you listed, I was right with you on the first two. I fell off the sled after that, not so much because I disagree with you, but because I don’t think about those things in the way you do. So as to reciprocate your open kimono, let me spell out my assumptions (which generally track your 3-6) in the following way:
The Bible is concerned with history, not science - specifically, history as it bears on the messianic promise which forms the basis for our salvation. This includes creation and the fall because the need for our salvation is rooted in them. Thus the Bible is filled with both history and prophecy as well as, of course, moral and related instruction.
I have no problem at all with science telling me we are living on a sphere spinning 1,000 mph, revolving around a larger sphere at 66,000 mph, and together they are moving at 432,000 mph…without the Bible ever giving me a hint of any of this. This is because I do not deem these scientific facts to be in conflict with anything I read in the Bible, which is written according to the way things appear to the naked human eye, not the way they appear through microscopes and telescopes.
Evolution and a billion-year-old earth, however, cause me a problem primarily because they do call into question the history that the Bible has given us. I don’t have to take all this biblical history literally but neither does saying “It can be interpreted figuratively” in and of itself eliminate all conflict. I have to know the figurative interpretations and see if reason and conscience will support them.
Hope that helps. If not, give me another shot.
Shot #2.
There is literal history and there is history.
Literal history would be the earth was created 6,000 years ago by God.
History would be the earth was created by God.
The Bible is written as if it is recording literal history, hence your confusion. I believe it actually only records history. Confused yet? I don’t consider this interpreting figuratively since what matters is the sequence not the exact dates. I retain the literal sequence.
For example, you can put together a bunch of scripture and work out the exact date, more or less, of the Exodus. The problem being that that date doesn’t line up with any of the history of the people outside the Bible, the Egyptians for example. The solution is simple, you treat the Bible as history and place the Exodus where it fits. Does this mean the Bible is lying to us? I don’t think so.
As far as salvation goes the only history that matters is we were created in the image of God, we sinned and needed a redeemer, a redeemer was promised, and a redeemer was given. Do we need to know the exact dates when any of this happened? No. Do we need to know it did happen? Yes.
Further example, do we know the exact date of Christ’s birth and death? Does it matter?
I would certainly agree that @pevaquark’s criticism applies especially well to OEC’s who reject evolution.
Being a YEC and rejecting Old Earth Geology (along with Evolution) is just “same ol’ same old”.
Al-Khalil,
Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions.
I don’t know what @Christy is going to say, but it’s certainly the position that I hold.
“Old Earthers” who reject Evolution are the most inscrutable of people. The same suite of natural laws (physics, chemistry, stratigraphy) embrace Geology as they do Evolution. There is virtually no way to un-tangle one from the other.
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If you’re just wanting to know the truth, why use the framing of “evolutionists” on your blog, Mike?
Even if I were to concede all the points you are making here, without making any comments on their relative merits, it would not account for the vast discrepancies we see between the history of creation in the Bible and that which science is currently implying.
I do trust what I see in nature, as well as what scientists see of nature through microscopes and telescopes and tell me. Where I go wobbly is when these scientists tell me that what they’re seeing now means that something God told me about the past cannot be true.