An opinion - Genesis directly clashes with Creation.
Genesis 1:1-3 says in effect “I AM created time, space, matter, and energy (light); the age of science will name this the big bang. I AM the uncaused first cause. I caused it.”
Verse 2, on the other hand, nestling between those strong arms, anchors Genesis to the time and place where the Spirit passed it to the early Hebrews. Consider: should the actual business of the big bang, 13.78 billion years of an unfolding cosmos, star formation, planets, First Life, evolution - - REALLY? The importance of those mere details was nil. The point of Genesis is to declare the Glory of GOD – all creating, purposeful, holy, and desiring Children. Planet Earth serves that purpose. GOD wants us to understand that GOD created everything.
The opening verses of David’s Psalm (19) look like a direct prophecy of the age of science, where astronomy will succeed in hearing and understanding the nightly wisdom spoken (but not in human language) by the stars in the sky.
Day Four makes it very clear that the rest of the visible universe crosses the vault of the sky beneath the Waters put above the vault of the sky on Day Two. Creation on the other hand includes Planet Earth orbiting the nearest star at a distance of about 93 million miles.
It is thus clear that to deny Creation for the sole purpose of dignifying Genesis with our human choice to read it as fact leaves YEC and SDA people as infants drinking milk. On the other hand even children of three have teeth and can chew meat. We come too Christ as children able to chew meat - to discern that Genesis is theology. And it is divine.
Sunday School uses Bible Stories; toddlers - children! - absorb theology. Story presents profound theology to be readily absorbed by ordinary minds.
Genesis is story. this is plain from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 11:10 (Tower of BabEl) -from there, we read it as a communication from God.
bearing in mind that God’s ways are not ours, and not every communication from God is necessarily fact, data, or science. God’s Spirit speaks to us in many ways.
I acknowledge Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour irrespective of how old the earth is, or who did or didn’t evolve from what.
If you think I’m being inconsistent here in this while also acknowledging the reality of an ancient Earth and biological evolution, then that’s your problem, not mine. I don’t see any conflict between the two and I’m not going to let anyone condemn me for it.
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow. – Colossians 2:16-19
I want to piggyback off of this with a recent article I saw exploring the appeal of biblical inerrancy as I see many people adopt YEC dogmatically for some of these reasons as well:
In the article he notes a few reasons for this:
Ontological reasons - “Christians begin with the existence of a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and supremely loving… The fact that the vast majority of scientists conceive the universe in essential agnostic terms is deeply troubling to people of faith. The doctrine of biblical inerrancy (especially when linked to YEC) is salve to the wounds of evangelical anxiety.”
Logical reasons - “If the biblical God is ‘pwerfect in power, in love and purity,’ the self-revelation of God should reflect this perfection. A perfect God cannot be revealed by a book marred by misinformation.”
Doxological reasons - “Chapions of blibcal inerrancy portray a cage match between their vision of a glorious God and a godless scientism. If the scientists are right about the big bang and biological evolution, they argue, the biblical vision of God is reduced to ashes.”
Etiological reasons - “How do we know about God, creation and the fall and salvation of our race? On what authority do we speak of the fires of hell or the glories of heaven? Either God has revealed these things in the Bible, or we are utterly in the dark.”
Pedagogical reasons - Bill Graham told Charles Templeton “when I take the Bible literally, when I proclaim it as the word of God, my preaching has power. When I stand on the platform and say, ‘God says,’ or ‘the Bible says,’ the Holy Spirit uses me… I’ve decided once for all to stop questioning and accept the Bible as God’s word.”
Sociological reasons - “But those who question inerrancy are severely dealt with, often in traumatizing and career-ending fashion.”
Mythological and demagogical reasons - these are more political and not exactly related to the YEC question, but I do think the super charged political landscape helps solidify some people in the YEC camp as it is linked to so many other politicized topics - to stop being YEC is akin to leaving some of those other things behind too.
What do you think? I’ve personally seen some of these at play with myself and students I’ve taught over the years.
Whoa – that’s certainly not in the text! I see how it can be read in, but Genesis gives no hints what happens during the night, nor does it care because that’s not what it’s about.
That is a very difficult claim to support. Id suggest plenty of relevant biblical references are needed because as i see it, an evolutionist cannot find direct biblical support because its a view that simply isnt biblical…its a fools errand but you may try.
For starters, the claim that one must compromise self evident biblical theolgy for sinful/coruuptible mens interpretations of the world around us is ridiculous…and yet you claim doing that is respectful? The prophet Samuel said to king Saul, to obey is better than to sacrifice!
IMO, all of the points are relevant, but these points, in particular, ought not be underestimated:
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy (especially when linked to YEC) is salve to the wounds of evangelical anxiety.”
A perfect God cannot be revealed by a book marred by misinformation.
I’ve seen both features in “dogmatic Islam”, too.
The following rewrite just occurred to me:
“1 A mighty fortress is the Word of God,
a bulwark never failing;
our helper it, amid the flood
of mortal ills prevailing.”
And there it is, isn’t? … "The power of conviction that the Bible is “the Word of God”.
I was not at Sinai.
I was not at the cross;
I was not at the empty tomb;
I was not on the road to Emmaus;
I didn’t see the ascension;
I wasn’t n Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks.
I wasn’t on a horse riding to Damascus.
But I own a copy of “the Word of God”.
That is a very difficult claim to support, in fact silly, because the evolution and antiquity of the cosmos denialist thinks (badly) that the Bible has to teach correct science.
The text is simple thus hard to mistake. The rest of the visible universe goes into the vault of the sky. Day Two is also hard to mistake: God places the vault of the sky in the midst of the waters; below the vault are the seas and above the vault are the rest of the waters.
Yes this provides a conundrum regarding how all that east to west vault-traversing done by sun moon and stars allows them to return to the eastern horizon.
David’s Psalm 19 begins by declaring that the sky proclaims God’s glory in ways incomprehensible to humankind*; the following verses mention a tabernacle for the sun for its repose during the night, to repeat its passage across the sky each morning.
Genesis manages to support these things orbiting earth (or earth rotating) by declining to choose either one, also declining to provide any instruction at all regarding how they transit from west back to east.
The clearest implication is that passage across the vault of the sky is beneath things set above that vault.
And the clearest implication of that is that Earth cannot orbit the nearest star without placing the waters closer to Earth than the star.
Hence Genesis is story not science.
This sounds a lot like a prediction of astronomy finally reading those paeans to God’s glory.
and yet the dilemma you face is you are attempting to do the exact same thing…you claim that science explains biblical theology…you do this because you demand that the bible is not authoritative…indeed TEism even claims that any bible writers who support creation are wrong!
So much the the divine inspiration idea, TEists do not believe that. Two of the bibles greatest writers, Moses, and the apostle paul, are discredited at every turn because they clearly align with the literal reading of creation!
The really unfortunate thing about discrediting Paul is that it is through His writings that we better understand the sanctuary which is directly tied to the writings of Moses. And since this is also an historical relationship, its a stretch to make the claim Moses either didnt really exist or, its just fairytales!
Psalm 19 starts with the following… The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
the work of someones hands i think is rather specific in that it means God physically came down and moulded it. That supports the literal reading of Genesis 2 not what you are attempting to claim there. Then we go back to Genesis chapter 2 and read stuff like the following…
7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east,
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
They do. And to get the theological truths jammed into your YEC science, you have to cram the antiquity of magnificent cosmos into some kind of 6 ka make-believe story exactly analogous to this:
I’m genuinely puzzled how you make these leaps of thinking to repeatedly accuse people falsely!
Just how did you get from “aim to see the text of the scriptures treated with respect” to “compromise self evident biblical theolgy for sinful/coruuptible mens interpretations of the world around us”? That’s one heck of a leap!
Other ancient near eastern mythologies/theologies had mechanisms to explain this; the Genesis writer doesn’t bother; as you say:
Genesis has no knowledge of the Earth as a globe – it wasn’t in their cosmology and if we could go back and show them a picture of the Earth from space they wouldn’t connect it with the Earth even of we told them what it was (they might even execute us for claiming to be gods – who else would be able to see the Earth from above the sky?).
Well, it isn’t our science, but it counts as their cosmology.
Would you PLEASE stop lying about others here??? You’ve read Dale’s views often enough to know that the above assertion is just plain false! I know that doing theology-from-below, which is what YEC is, inevitably leads to lying about others, but could you suspend that here at least?
You also keep talking about things that only you are talking about. Please, just who here has “made the claim Moses either didnt (sic) really exist or, its (sic) just fairytales!”?
Are you suggesting that the pre-incarnate Christ actually shaped the stars with His hands??!?
…also occurs through telescopes and microscopes and other equipment as well. Your ‘consultant’s’ lame attempt at explaining girdled rocks wasn’t even funny – weird maybe, but wrongheaded definitely.
Other attempts to explain around the elapsed time indicators that God providentially engineered into creation are equally lame, especially when they certify each other:
Boy, that brought back memories! In one botany course we were given several dozen tree-ring core photographs and tasked with matching them up. For some these were photomicrographs, and the scaling differed between samples since some were taken closer up. This meant that our first task was to get all the core photos turned into the same scale, which before the various image-handling software available today was tedious.
Once we had them all to the same scale we then had to align them. The result was a set of tree ring data going back to about the collapse of the western portion of the Roman Empire – and interestingly which came from all over that region. So we thought we were done…
But at the same time a geography class had been doing the very same thing with lake deposits from all over the same region, so we got a copy of their results (and the raw data) while they got a copy of the same from us, and both classes went to work matching the two sets of results, including checking the result against raw data any time something looked odd. So eventually we had the two data sets aligned and thus had a very nice data sequence covering a millennium and a half.
This all went into a paper by the two professors, though I don’t know if it was ever published. But besides learning how this was done by researchers (okay, we were in effect research assistants) we also learned that such data can be trusted.
One interesting item: we could track the development of the Age of Exploration by the age of tree samples from various places. Also, our data went to some other folks who analyzed the tree rings and lake varves independently for chemical make-up, and that showed an increase in atmospheric CO₂ beginning with the Age of Exploration. Both of these showed the deforestation of over half the continent.
I hate to be seen to back up a YEC but there does strike me one element of Gensis 1 that evolutionists seem to overlook. Whether it was 7 days, 700 days or 7,000,000,000,000 days God created!. Genesis 1 goes out of its way to specify what was created by God as opposed to the other versions of the story whereby the sun and the moon create themselves and are therefore deified.
In Evolution God does not do any creating at all. It is all done by due process. Nature creates, not God. It doesn’t matter whether you think that God started evolution off, He has absolutely no control over what happens next. He does not create a fish Evolution (Nature) does. He does not create an amphibian evolution (Nature) does. He does not shape anything Evolution (nature) does. He does not create man in His own image, He has no control at all over what shape or form man is Evolution (Nature) does.
Therefore scientific Evolution still contradicts Genesis, even if you remove the methodology of the 6 (7) day creation.
(Unfortunately this is philosophy not science so some will deem it invalid!)
The evolution of the universe: nature creates, not God?
The evolution of the weatherstorms: nature creates, not God? God is not sovereign over the weather storms? I think Jesus would disagree. And his sovereignty was demonstrated without needing to break any natural laws. If you had been observing from the shore of the Sea of Galilee and could just barely see a distant boat through the storm, what would you know?