The Age Of Adam!

This is what the Lord showed me is conclusive proof as to whether the days in genesis are literal 24 hr periods, or thousand year periods, or 'ages'.



Phil

I dont normally watch videos like this, but I liked ya flag.

Good point, I have never thought about it that way.

I still think that the writing style clearly conveys 24 hour days though, and there should really be no debate on what the author intended the audience to understand.

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loud graphical signatures are against my religion.

I completely 100% agree that the days in Genesis are meant to be 6, literal days, within the story.

But its the entire story that is meant to be allegorical.

This interpretation is not new as a reaction to evolution and modern science, but can be clearly shown as far back as Augustine in his commentary on Genesis 1-3 where he states this story can clearly not be historical.

There are also hints of this interpretation being the norm before augustine, but people didn't debate or care about it so we don't have explicit statements either way.

Well, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die". Since Adam lived for nearly 1000 years afterwards, we CAN assume that "a day is a thousand years".

YEah.. is the story told from God's perspective or the earth time frame is the big question? Like someone posted.. the death decree upon Adam was given in God's time frame.

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Since the Torah is a finite book expressing the will of an infinite God, many lessons must be derivable from each passage from all the infinite angles.

Originally Posted by valuecard

This is what the Lord showed me is conclusive proof as to whether the days in genesis are literal 24 hr periods, or thousand year periods, or 'ages'.

YouTube - THE AGE OF ADAM

Phil

Hey.. long time no hear from..
Is that you in the video?

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Since the Torah is a finite book expressing the will of an infinite God, many lessons must be derivable from each passage from all the infinite angles.

Great video, but it's probably worth noting that most evolutionary creationists don't, in fact, read vast periods of time into the days of Genesis 1. That's more of an OEC thing to do.
I'm an evolutionary creationist and I interpret the days of Genesis 1 as literal 24-hour periods of time. As Siyha notes, though, that does not mean that the entirety of the story itself is meant as a literal or historical narrative. I think the significance of Genesis 1 is much better understood through the framework interpretation.

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"There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well." -- creation scientist Dr. Todd Wood

Hi Visionary! Yep, thats me

you forgot one group of Christians. Those who accept the fact that the book of Genesis is just ancient Hebrew mythology. Useful only for story telling and completely unimportant to Jesus' message.

Hi valuecard. That's very interesting. But I'm not sure that you've adequately addressed other common interpretations. A few possibilities I've seen:

1. Not all interpretations of Genesis involve a one-to-one correspondence of events. By that I mean many figurative interpretations treat the account of an allegorization and not as a plain sequence of rote historical facts. Siyha has advocated this view. The days are 24-hour periods but there is no way to reconcile them with historical 24-hour periods because the thought of scrutinizing history in our modern critical way was as far from the author's mind as computers.

2. Within the set of interpretations that _do_ treat the story as something one-to-one, there are variables that make it less clear than what you may be used to hearing. For example, one interpretation is that we are right now in the seventh day. The seventh day is God's rest and it continues until today. Alternatively, one ancient interpretation holds that all the days were one day and that each is a retelling that emphasizes a different part of creation (if I'm not mistaken, St. Augustine held this view -- at any rate, it's ancient).

3. With respect to the account of creation (not necessarily extending into the temptation and the fall, etc.) there is a popular interpretation that the days mentioned are days of revelation. The author received revelation for a week and each day a part of creation was brought to the mind of the author who proceeded to write about the revelation in a literal way. Thus, the explanation for things relating to creation were actually related to the revelation he had received (e.g., the Sabbath).

For myself, I think Siyha hit it on the head. The natural way for one of us to read the text is quite different from the way an ancient Hebrew would have heard it. Unfortunately, their society did not have certain forms of literature that ours does, and ours lacks certain forms theirs had. This is not an insurmountable problem, of course. It also does not mean that the meaning of God's revelation in the Bible is not for everybody in all ages. But it does add a layer of complexity and it means that we will have faulty intuitions about what we read; this above and beyond language barriers.

And the last couple of centuries are not the first generations to have these disputes. We're in good company. The interpretation of Genesis (especially the first few chapters) has been hashed over by various saints holding various interpretations for the length of extant Christian history.

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