Genesis 1-11 - Why the TEs are wrong.

[mindlight]

From a Christian perspective it seems to me that the whole Creation - Evolution discussion revolves around the interpretation of the first 11 chapters of the bible from creation through flood to tower of Babel.

It does not really matter how convincing atheistic evolutionist scientists sound if these passages contradict them as the whole edifice of evolution and evolutionary history would be called into question by what God Himself has revealed and inspired. Increasingly the world is polarising between those who accept the gathering momentum of the evolutionary colossus , rewiring our brains and the very way we think about reality to accommodate its "truthes" and explain its discrepancies and those who start with a revelationary view which they believe contradicts this.

Now between us and this atheistic army dedicated to the "overthrow" of the Almighties hold on our minds stand the Theistic Evolutionists. It seems many are convinced by the scientific arguments, consider Creationists to be on the wrong side of history on this issue and are looking for an accommodation with their faith to allow that. Others have never thought the issues through and others are motivated by an evangelistic concern to win people for Gods Kingdom and see Creationism as a barrier to that.

I hear 5 main arguments from these people which I think are of relevance to a Christian which I would like to discuss but which in the end I think do not work:

1) A FRAMEWORK OF LITERARY DEVICES OR GODS METHOD AND INTELLIGENT PLANNING IN REAL HISTORY?
The TE view is that Genesis 1-11 can be interpreted in more poetic terms. A popular version of this view is that of Literary Framework theory.

Augustine (a famous and early Young Earth Creationist) is often cited as an example of this because he saw these chapters as allegorical as he could not see how it could take God as long as 6 days to do anything! But the allegorical method has a shameful history in the church and has facilitated all sorts of out landish interpretations and Augustine himself urged a degree of caution with it. Another argument used to question whether the text can be taken literarily is that of 2 Peter 3:8 (a day is like a thousand years) though the link with Genesis and especially the way the days are numbered and referred to in the text makes this linkage a rather remote possibility also it does not help TEs who want a licence to think in terms of billions not thousands of years. The talk is of literary devices like chiasm, inclusio - groups of 10s and 7s reoccurring. The days of forming and filling in Genesis 1 are cited as a example of these literary devices rather than as of the intelligence of Gods planning and method in real history.

Other TEs suggest that Genesis might be considered Poetical even though it does not correspond to the Hebrew style of doing poetry (parallelism).

Various apparent contradictions are pointed to in the text as a way of undermining literal interpretations. They point to issues like the plants being created before the sun BUT not before Light itself was created. They suggest that the concept of a day is meaningless without the sun although a rotating spherical earth and the undescribed Light source described in the first day would explain that. Because of the way TEs define species they suggest that Adam could not have named all the animals of the earth as there were too many but you do not have to consider 30 finches if you take a narrower definition - just one. The text itself does not describe itself as a song or a parable and was written in an historical format.

The Literary Framework theory has been decisively rejected by James Barr, Andrew Steinmann, Millard Erickson amongst other serious scholars.

2) SCRIPTURE v BOOK OF NATURE (Revelation or Observation based view of reality)

Psalm 19 and Rom 1 v 19-20 are cited as examples of Gods general revelation in nature. Given that they suggest that we can find God through the natural order and an understanding of attributes like power and wisdom for instance why not go further say the TEs and suggest that the use of our God given senses and intelligence can also be used to overthrow false interpretations and established misuses of his Revelation. But their own interpretations contradict the straight forward sense of the scriptures and introduce a reductive materialistic method to the reading of scriptures that in effect removes its supernatural elements and focus on the Divine. Miracles become allegories that never happened and at the end of the day God Himself may simply be the creation of evolved minds! Bultmanns debunking and Schleiermacher existentialism become the new way to approach scripture and materialistic relativism seems to be the fruit. It is interesting that various established scientific viewpoints that contradicted scripture were later proven wrong e.g. can snakes hear, the way lions kill their prey.

3) CREATIONISM IS A RELATIVELY NEW INTERPRETATION v IT IS THE ORIGINAL INTERPRETATION
The fundamentalist strain of the Protestant Reformation is often blamed and especially its most recent American forms. The reductive Biblicism of the Reformers which stripped away the fanciful and allegorical interpretations of scripture are blamed for an impoverished understanding of the Creation account. However since the view is shared by many Orthodox faiths and was clearly the interpretation of those who created the Jewish and Orthodox calendars and early church fathers like Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian this view is clearly false.

4) CREATIONISTS HAVE MISSED THE PURPOSE OF THE ACCOUNT versus THE TES have FAILED TO UNDERSTAND THE CONTRIBUTION OF ITS HISTORICITY TO ITS AUTHORITY
Citing a alternate view of the genre of the text and reinterpretations of the authors intent and the cultural context expounded on by comparative religious studies they suggest that this is a Hebrew clean up of a Babylonian view of creation that points us back to the one true God. It is not a scientific text book - true. But the TEs miss the significance of historical details and the necessity of Adam as a special creation especially. Why should we accept any historical claims in the bible if we fail to understand historical claims made at its very beginning?

5) DO CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN CREATIONIST DATING SCHEMES UNDERMINE THEIR AUTHORITY VERSUS THESE DIFFERENCES ARE ONLY 1500 years not billions!

If you base your dating on the Hebrew Masoretic texts as did the Protestant Ussher then you get an Anno Mundi date around 4004BC or 3760BC as did the Jews. If you base your date on the Greek Septuagint then you will get an older date of around 5500BC as accepted by the Orthodox church. But these differences are miniscule compared to the kinds of timespans proposed by TEs so it is a rather mute point.

 

[gluadys]

From a Christian perspective it seems to me that the whole Creation - Evolution discussion revolves around the interpretation of the first 11 chapters of the bible from creation through flood to tower of Babel.

It does not really matter how convincing atheistic evolutionist scientists sound if these passages contradict them as the whole edifice of evolution and evolutionary history would be called into question by what God Himself has revealed and inspired. Increasingly the world is polarising between those who accept the gathering momentum of the evolutionary colossus , rewiring our brains and the very way we think about reality to accommodate its "truthes" and explain its discrepancies and those who start with a revelationary view which they believe contradicts this.

Now between us and this atheistic army dedicated to the "overthrow" of the Almighties hold on our minds stand the Theistic Evolutionists. It seems many are convinced by the scientific arguments, consider Creationists to be on the wrong side of history on this issue and are looking for an accommodation with their faith to allow that. Others have never thought the issues through and others are motivated by an evangelistic concern to win people for Gods Kingdom and see Creationism as a barrier to that.

I hear 5 main arguments from these people which I think are of relevance to a Christian which I would like to discuss but which in the end I think do not work:

Interesting phrase. Toward what goal do you think they are intended to work? Have you asked TEs if that is their intention in proposing these ideas?

1) A FRAMEWORK OF LITERARY DEVICES OR GODS METHOD AND INTELLIGENT PLANNING IN REAL HISTORY?
The TE view is that Genesis 1-11 can be interpreted in more poetic terms. A popular version of this view is that of Literary Framework theory.

Augustine (a famous and early Young Earth Creationist) is often cited as an example of this because he saw these chapters as allegorical as he could not see how it could take God as long as 6 days to do anything! But the allegorical method has a shameful history in the church and has facilitated all sorts of out landish interpretations and Augustine himself urged a degree of caution with it. Another argument used to question whether the text can be taken literarily is that of 2 Peter 3:8 (a day is like a thousand years) though the link with Genesis and especially the way the days are numbered and referred to in the text makes this linkage a rather remote possibility also it does not help TEs who want a licence to think in terms of billions not thousands of years. The talk is of literary devices like chiasm, inclusio - groups of 10s and 7s reoccurring. The days of forming and filling in Genesis 1 are cited as a example of these literary devices rather than as of the intelligence of Gods planning and method in real history.

There is a significant difference between those who accepted a fairly literal understanding of the cosmology of the bible in a pre-scientific era and those who do so today. Augustine and others of his time had basically only one alternative to a cosmos created relatively recently and that was a cosmos that was eternal. Many pagan cosmologies attribute eternal existence to the material world, but only immortal existence to their gods. The universe in these cosmologies has always existed, but the gods, for the most part, were born out of the primordial movement of the universe itself. And older gods begat younger gods. So although they were not subject to death, they did not exist from eternity.

Jewish & Christian theology rejected this view and held that God and only God is eternal and it was God who created all else: even spiritual beings like angels. Beyond that, nothing in what Augustine or others observed at the time brought the apparent timetable of scripture into question. Indeed, Augustine's personal reason for considering the Genesis account an allegorical accommodation to human understanding was philosophical, not scientific: he believed creation actually occurred instantaneously.

IOW, pre-scientific readers of scripture generally experienced no cognitive dissonance between the world as it was known and the world as it is described in scripture. However, even in those days, there were what we might term generally accepted academic ideas that did not fit completely with scripture, and in regard to these, Augustine counselled against disputing these by an appeal to scripture, lest the holy writings of the church be brought into disrepute.

Modern young-earth creationists are in a very different situation, for we now live in a scientific age where knowledge is tested as to its reliability and claims that cannot be substantiated by evidence, or possibly not even tested at all, are given short shrift. We all know the discrepancies between a strictly literal reading of scripture and the cosmology now considered most accurate by every field of science. Cognitive dissonance is inevitable if one attempts to hold both as factual.

So it is rather disingenuous for modern YECs to try to conscript Augustine or any of the biblical writers or Church fathers or scholars of the pre-scientific era to their standard. We really do not know what they would have made of later discoveries; we certainly cannot assume they would have held to the easy acceptance of a literal reading which their own age made possible.

Other TEs suggest that Genesis might be considered Poetical even though it does not correspond to the Hebrew style of doing poetry (parallelism).

One thing that should be stressed for YECs and TEs alike is that "poetry" and "history" are not natural opposites. A poetic form is not a signal that the content is unhistorical. Nor is a prose form a guarantee that it is. One can certainly hold that Genesis 1:1-2:4a is both poetic and historical. In any case, one cannot use its poetic form to argue that it is not historical. Nor is there any validity to asserting that is cannot be poetic because it is historical.

The actual form of Genesis 1:1-2:4a remains the subject of much discussion. It is a unique form among biblical writings, found only here. It is not classical Hebrew poetry, but it is not simply mundane prose either. It does seem to have rhythmic and repeating elements that suggest it was written to be sung in worship.

Various apparent contradictions are pointed to in the text as a way of undermining literal interpretations. They point to issues like the plants being created before the sun BUT not before Light itself was created. They suggest that the concept of a day is meaningless without the sun although a rotating spherical earth and the undescribed Light source described in the first day would explain that. Because of the way TEs define species they suggest that Adam could not have named all the animals of the earth as there were too many but you do not have to consider 30 finches if you take a narrower definition - just one. The text itself does not describe itself as a song or a parable and was written in an historical format.

As long as one sticks to a literal interpretation (by which I understand using the basic common meaning of a word or phrase, without regard as to whether the text is prose or poetry, history or fiction) the contradictions are contradictions. The only way to eliminate them as contradictions is to interpret at least one text non-literally. I know a lot of work has been done by a lot of people to resolve contradictions, but remember, no resolution would be necessary if the contradictions did not exist in the first place.

Further, the biblical writers knew nothing of a rotating spherical earth. Even the Greek philosophers knew nothing of a rotating earth. They believed day and night occurred because the sun moved around the spherical earth, not because the earth rotated in the light of the sun. Biblical writers had not even got as far as thinking of the earth as spherical yet. The biblical description of the earth is of a body of land set on foundations above the great deep. Biblical writers usually describe the cosmos simply as heaven above and earth below, and when they want to be more complete they add the waters below the earth. Reading the bible and seeing in it a rotating spherical earth is reading it with modern eyes, not the eyes of the writers. So even a "straightforward" reading gets complicated: whose straightforward reading? How much does the literal meaning of the text get distorted when read by moderns who automatically view the created world very differently from Jewish and Christian writers of an earlier age?

The Literary Framework theory has been decisively rejected by James Barr, Andrew Steinmann, Millard Erickson amongst other serious scholars.

And it has been accepted and promoted by Meredith Kline, John Walton, Peter Enns amongst other serious scholars.

2) SCRIPTURE v BOOK OF NATURE (Revelation or Observation based view of reality)

Psalm 19 and Rom 1 v 19-20 are cited as examples of Gods general revelation in nature. Given that they suggest that we can find God through the natural order and an understanding of attributes like power and wisdom for instance why not go further say the TEs and suggest that the use of our God given senses and intelligence can also be used to overthrow false interpretations and established misuses of his Revelation.

And do you have a problem with that as a general rule? You have already indicated that you accept a modern concept found no where at all in scripture: that the earth is a rotating sphere moving through space in orbit around the sun. Do you not therefore defend a re-interpretation of all the so-called "geocentric" passages of scripture away from their literal meaning to some other status?

But their own interpretations contradict the straight forward sense of the scriptures and introduce a reductive materialistic method to the reading of scriptures that in effect removes its supernatural elements and focus on the Divine. Miracles become allegories that never happened and at the end of the day God Himself may simply be the creation of evolved minds! Bultmanns debunking and Schleiermacher existentialism become the new way to approach scripture and materialistic relativism seems to be the fruit.

I think you are overstating your case here. I am not aware of any generally accepted position among TEs that denies the miracles in scripture---in particular the incarnation and the resurrection. These are fundamental to Christian faith. And personally, I don't have a problem with Elijah calling down fire from heaven to burn his drenched sacrifice or Daniel exiting alive from a lion's den, or Jesus healing a man blind from birth and so on.

What I find offensive is the apparent need of YECs to multiply miracles which scripture does not record for the sole purpose of trying to defend their interpretation of scripture. Everytime there is no possible alternative to a scientific conclusion, the YEC answer is to reach for a miracle. That is simply bad theology.

It is interesting that various established scientific viewpoints that contradicted scripture were later proven wrong e.g. can snakes hear, the way lions kill their prey.

It may well be that various such viewpoints were established, but they were seldom scientific. In pre-scientific times, such ideas were often established by the reputation and authority of a person who wrote of it, not by actual observation, and not by testing to see if it were true. In most such cases it was the introduction of science that showed the established view was untrue and not supported by actual evidence.

So be careful about saying science has been wrong (though sometimes it is) if the idea is quite old. An idea that predates the intentional practice of scientific method is not an established scientific viewpoint. It is the untested folk wisdom of a pre-scientific era.

For me, this is a very important issue. I do think it is essential that we accept the best scientific understanding of the nature and history of the physical universe--not as dogma, for science is anti-dogmatic by nature, but always with the proviso that even the best science may be altered by evidence we do not currently have at hand, or by a paradigmatic shift in theory that lets us see the world in a new way.

Why?

One of the fundamentals of Christian belief is that God is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible. Nothing exists which was not made originally by God. And by "God" here, we understand the full participation of all persons of the Trinity. It is not the Father alone who is Creator, though all begins with His will. But Word and Spirit are equally co-creator with the Father (Gen. 1:1, John 1:1-3)

Connected with this is the understanding that the created world is, in and of itself revelation, a revelation independent prophetic revelation and scripture. And this is testified to in scripture. It is the one revelation available to all. Special revelation, by contrast, comes to individual persons and to a chosen people and must be carried from the original recipients to others.

It is fairly clear that the world which the biblical writers claimed to be created by God is the world we presently inhabit. I have seen some strange attempts to reconcile science and scripture by assuming Adam and Eve were originally created in some other dimension. Scripture gives no support to such speculation, nor science either. It is this earth that God gave to humanity as its habitation. Isaiah 45:18

The huge difference between ancient interpreters of scripture and creationists of modern times, is that in ancient times--given what they believed about the structure of the cosmos--there was a snug fit between the established (but not scientific) view of the cosmos and the biblical descriptions of the features of the cosmos: features like an earth set in place, fixed to foundations, within a circle drawn on the face of the waters of the abyss, a sky above like the covering of a tent or a dome set on pillars, a vault of heaven through which the sun, moon and stars moved, and so on. But in modern times, all these features have disappeared from the established (and now scientific) view of the cosmos and been replaced by a solar system in which the earth is a satellite of the sun, and the sun itself but one star in a vast galaxy which is but one of trillions of galaxies in an expanding space, and the history both of the universe itself and of the earth in particular is one of deep time, extending back billions of years, life also extending back billions of years and all forms of life on earth connected historically to each other. This is so far removed from the view of the biblical writers that there is no possible way in which both can be accurate physical and factual descriptions of the same cosmos.

Are we then to reject that God created the world we actually inhabit?

or alternatively, are we to reject scripture as revelation?

or do we have alternatives which allow us to embrace both revelations but in different ways, not expecting one to do the work of the other?

As I see it, by insisting that the features (or at least some selected features) of the cosmos as described in scripture are both actual and accurate descriptions of the world God created when understood literally, YECist have opted for the first premise. To accept YECism, as I see it, means that the world we actually inhabit is not the world God created, for it is nothing like the world described in a literal understanding of the biblical text.

3) CREATIONISM IS A RELATIVELY NEW INTERPRETATION v IT IS THE ORIGINAL INTERPRETATION
The fundamentalist strain of the Protestant Reformation is often blamed and especially its most recent American forms. The reductive Biblicism of the Reformers which stripped away the fanciful and allegorical interpretations of scripture are blamed for an impoverished understanding of the Creation account. However since the view is shared by many Orthodox faiths and was clearly the interpretation of those who created the Jewish and Orthodox calendars and early church fathers like Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian this view is clearly false.

The viewpoint of the Church fathers and their Jewish contemporaries were usually adopted for philosophical reasons and were not in conflict in any obvious way with their observations of the world. Modern YECism requires much in addition to the ancient view--notably a rejection of evidence-based conclusions, to be replaced by an unlimited number of ad hoc miracles to produce the cosmos we observe from a chronology which makes that impossible, cherry-picking of bits of evidence distorted to make it "supportive" of their reading of scripture and a marked separation, even opposition, of God and nature. None of this is to be found in ancient times. It is all endemic to modern YECism.

4) CREATIONISTS HAVE MISSED THE PURPOSE OF THE ACCOUNT versus THE TES have FAILED TO UNDERSTAND THE CONTRIBUTION OF ITS HISTORICITY TO ITS AUTHORITY
Citing a alternate view of the genre of the text and reinterpretations of the authors intent and the cultural context expounded on by comparative religious studies they suggest that this is a Hebrew clean up of a Babylonian view of creation that points us back to the one true God. It is not a scientific text book - true. But the TEs miss the significance of historical details and the necessity of Adam as a special creation especially. Why should we accept any historical claims in the bible if we fail to understand historical claims made at its very beginning?

Actually some TEs, including some in this forum, do accept the historical reality (and sometimes special creation) of Adam and Eve. That is not my personal position, but there is a spectrum of opinions on this among TEs and it should not be assumed that the rejection of Adam and Eve as historic individuals is a requirement of a TE position. Just as one should not assume that every anti-evolutionist agrees with YEC chronology. There are a number of people, again some on this forum, which follow a fairly literalist interpretation of scripture but accept the geological age of the earth in one way or another.

 

[mindlight]

Interesting phrase. Toward what goal do you think they are intended to work? Have you asked TEs if that is their intention in proposing these ideas?

I think TEs are for the most part deceived accomplices rather than actively working for the desired goal of an evolutionary mindset. But the devil Himself wishes to evolve to a higher position than God. This is not possible if Creationism is true.

There is a significant difference between those who accepted a fairly literal understanding of the cosmology of the bible in a pre-scientific era and those who do so today. Augustine and others of his time had basically only one alternative to a cosmos created relatively recently and that was a cosmos that was eternal. Many pagan cosmologies attribute eternal existence to the material world, but only immortal existence to their gods. The universe in these cosmologies has always existed, but the gods, for the most part, were born out of the primordial movement of the universe itself. And older gods begat younger gods. So although they were not subject to death, they did not exist from eternity.

Jewish & Christian theology rejected this view and held that God and only God is eternal and it was God who created all else: even spiritual beings like angels. Beyond that, nothing in what Augustine or others observed at the time brought the apparent timetable of scripture into question. Indeed, Augustine's personal reason for considering the Genesis account an allegorical accommodation to human understanding was philosophical, not scientific: he believed creation actually occurred instantaneously.

IOW, pre-scientific readers of scripture generally experienced no cognitive dissonance between the world as it was known and the world as it is described in scripture. However, even in those days, there were what we might term generally accepted academic ideas that did not fit completely with scripture, and in regard to these, Augustine counselled against disputing these by an appeal to scripture, lest the holy writings of the church be brought into disrepute.

Modern young-earth creationists are in a very different situation, for we now live in a scientific age where knowledge is tested as to its reliability and claims that cannot be substantiated by evidence, or possibly not even tested at all, are given short shrift. We all know the discrepancies between a strictly literal reading of scripture and the cosmology now considered most accurate by every field of science. Cognitive dissonance is inevitable if one attempts to hold both as factual.

So it is rather disingenuous for modern YECs to try to conscript Augustine or any of the biblical writers or Church fathers or scholars of the pre-scientific era to their standard. We really do not know what they would have made of later discoveries; we certainly cannot assume they would have held to the easy acceptance of a literal reading which their own age made possible.

I think this depends on the valuation you attach to natural reason and observation versus acceptance of the scriptures and reasonings based on them. The Cognitive dissonance here is amongst those who accept a theory that distorts reality based on evidence that is not scientific in the strictest sense as it is not testible. They do not see reality as it is and must spend a considerable amount of thought and effort redefining it in evolutionary terms. Creationists trust the scriptures and hang loose on details. Augustines philosophising also led him into errors that resulted from his trusting of human reason and tradition over the word of God.

Other TEs suggest that Genesis might be considered Poetical even though it does not correspond to the Hebrew style of doing poetry (parallelism).
One thing that should be stressed for YECs and TEs alike is that "poetry" and "history" are not natural opposites. A poetic form is not a signal that the content is unhistorical. Nor is a prose form a guarantee that it is. One can certainly hold that Genesis 1:1-2:4a is both poetic and historical. In any case, one cannot use its poetic form to argue that it is not historical. Nor is there any validity to asserting that is cannot be poetic because it is historical.

The actual form of Genesis 1:1-2:4a remains the subject of much discussion. It is a unique form among biblical writings, found only here. It is not classical Hebrew poetry, but it is not simply mundane prose either. It does seem to have rhythmic and repeating elements that suggest it was written to be sung in worship.

Adam spoke directly with God and worship was probably a natural form of address in that context. He learnt the Creation story directly from its only eye witness and it was passed down in this oral format until it was written down. Yes it was a unique event and unlike with many other revelation events the source of revelation was direct. But it is written in a style that affirms its historical details. There was nothing, God created, he did it in 6 days and in a certain order, there was a garden of Eden in a certain place, Adam and Eve were created etc.

As long as one sticks to a literal interpretation (by which I understand using the basic common meaning of a word or phrase, without regard as to whether the text is prose or poetry, history or fiction) the contradictions are contradictions. The only way to eliminate them as contradictions is to interpret at least one text non-literally. I know a lot of work has been done by a lot of people to resolve contradictions, but remember, no resolution would be necessary if the contradictions did not exist in the first place.

What contradictions? TEs assert they are there but what are they?

Further, the biblical writers knew nothing of a rotating spherical earth. Even the Greek philosophers knew nothing of a rotating earth.

I think you misunderstood me here. It is precisely this ignorance which reinforces a literal understanding of the account. If you have a light source and the earth rotates before it then you have day and night much as we have today with the sun. You cannot have day and light without a rotating sphere. With 20-20 hindsight the biblical account seems to be affirming a rotating earth without the author having the slightest comprehension of one.

They believed day and night occurred because the sun moved around the spherical earth, not because the earth rotated in the light of the sun. Biblical writers had not even got as far as thinking of the earth as spherical yet. The biblical description of the earth is of a body of land set on foundations above the great deep. Biblical writers usually describe the cosmos simply as heaven above and earth below, and when they want to be more complete they add the waters below the earth. Reading the bible and seeing in it a rotating spherical earth is reading it with modern eyes, not the eyes of the writers. So even a "straightforward" reading gets complicated: whose straightforward reading? How much does the literal meaning of the text get distorted when read by moderns who automatically view the created world very differently from Jewish and Christian writers of an earlier age?

Most Creationists do not accept that that is the biblical cosmology. The waters under the earth were the fountains of the deep. A water vapour canopy lay above the earth.

And do you have a problem with that as a general rule? You have already indicated that you accept a modern concept found no where at all in scripture: that the earth is a rotating sphere moving through space in orbit around the sun. Do you not therefore defend a re-interpretation of all the so-called "geocentric" passages of scripture away from their literal meaning to some other status?

A spherical earth going round the sun is provable with trigonometry and a spaceship. Evolution and abiogenesis is not. There is a place for natural reason but it is limited and it is out of scope when it comes to the question of origins and aspects of human nature for instance. On this matter we have only the scriptures as a reliable source.

I think you are overstating your case here. I am not aware of any generally accepted position among TEs that denies the miracles in scripture---in particular the incarnation and the resurrection. These are fundamental to Christian faith. And personally, I don't have a problem with Elijah calling down fire from heaven to burn his drenched sacrifice or Daniel exiting alive from a lion's den, or Jesus healing a man blind from birth and so on.

There are degrees of deception amongst TEs. BUt I have met TEs who have completely reinterpreted scripture on the basis of a rejection of the miraculous and have also adopted an existentialist reading of it.

What I find offensive is the apparent need of YECs to multiply miracles which scripture does not record for the sole purpose of trying to defend their interpretation of scripture. Everytime there is no possible alternative to a scientific conclusion, the YEC answer is to reach for a miracle. That is simply bad theology.

There is a massive Cognitive Dissonance between reality and an evolutionary mindset on the question of origins. If you set up the discussion with certain premises then your conclusions seem reasonable. However if you reject those premises then if you wish to supply an alternate explanation then you have to completly reinvent the terms of the conversation and then show how the facts cohere with your own interpretation. It is much like watching prosecution and defence lawyers at work on the same evidence. Creationists are faced with a scientific establishment which has outgrown the singular human brain. It is now an humanly unguided colossus with a momentum of its own. The fact is that when faced with a particular dilemma about origins the only honest answer is "I don't know'. Evolutionists can seize upon that vacuum to fill in the details with their own theories but these are fanciful and cannot be supported with certainty by a proper use of the scientific method. It is often a lazy answer to say it was a miracle as an alternate explanation but not always. However all of that said I believe God created what appears to be a mature universe and that the flood messed up a lot of stuff also. What can be said about our origins comes from scripture not evolutionary theory.

For me, this is a very important issue. I do think it is essential that we accept the best scientific understanding of the nature and history of the physical universe--not as dogma, for science is anti-dogmatic by nature, but always with the proviso that even the best science may be altered by evidence we do not currently have at hand, or by a paradigmatic shift in theory that lets us see the world in a new way.

But with origins it is not science. There is no repeatable experimentation by which you can demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab or macro evolutionary change.

Connected with this is the understanding that the created world is, in and of itself revelation, a revelation independent prophetic revelation and scripture. And this is testified to in scripture. It is the one revelation available to all. Special revelation, by contrast, comes to individual persons and to a chosen people and must be carried from the original recipients to others.

It is fairly clear that the world which the biblical writers claimed to be created by God is the world we presently inhabit. I have seen some strange attempts to reconcile science and scripture by assuming Adam and Eve were originally created in some other dimension. Scripture gives no support to such speculation, nor science either. It is this earth that God gave to humanity as its habitation. Isaiah 45:18

The huge difference between ancient interpreters of scripture and creationists of modern times, is that in ancient times--given what they believed about the structure of the cosmos--there was a snug fit between the established (but not scientific) view of the cosmos and the biblical descriptions of the features of the cosmos: features like an earth set in place, fixed to foundations, within a circle drawn on the face of the waters of the abyss, a sky above like the covering of a tent or a dome set on pillars, a vault of heaven through which the sun, moon and stars moved, and so on. But in modern times, all these features have disappeared from the established (and now scientific) view of the cosmos and been replaced by a solar system in which the earth is a satellite of the sun, and the sun itself but one star in a vast galaxy which is but one of trillions of galaxies in an expanding space, and the history both of the universe itself and of the earth in particular is one of deep time, extending back billions of years, life also extending back billions of years and all forms of life on earth connected historically to each other. This is so far removed from the view of the biblical writers that there is no possible way in which both can be accurate physical and factual descriptions of the same cosmos.

Yes we can learn things from the natural world the question is how much and in the case of origins very little I suspect. I do not find myself experiencing Cognitive Dissonance when I read scripture and reflect on what I actually know to be true and can test about creation. The dissonance occurs when various fanciful speculations are accepted as scientific facts. The rest I can deal with a simple "I do not know but trust God has the answers".

Are we then to reject that God created the world we actually inhabit?

or alternatively, are we to reject scripture as revelation?

or do we have alternatives which allow us to embrace both revelations but in different ways, not expecting one to do the work of the other?

My middle way is a lot nearer to revelation than yours. But science that can be tested by scientific methods is a valid reading of Gods book of nature.

As I see it, by insisting that the features (or at least some selected features) of the cosmos as described in scripture are both actual and accurate descriptions of the world God created when understood literally, YECist have opted for the first premise. To accept YECism, as I see it, means that the world we actually inhabit is not the world God created, for it is nothing like the world described in a literal understanding of the biblical text.

What aspects of the world that Creationists assert are demonstrably false?

The viewpoint of the Church fathers and their Jewish contemporaries were usually adopted for philosophical reasons and were not in conflict in any obvious way with their observations of the world. Modern YECism requires much in addition to the ancient view--notably a rejection of evidence-based conclusions, to be replaced by an unlimited number of ad hoc miracles to produce the cosmos we observe from a chronology which makes that impossible, cherry-picking of bits of evidence distorted to make it "supportive" of their reading of scripture and a marked separation, even opposition, of God and nature. None of this is to be found in ancient times. It is all endemic to modern YECism.

We live in the same universe as the early church fathers. Has the intellectual exercise of considering our place in the universe really changed that much. The degree of confidence placed in "evidence" that is actually speculation is the real issue here.

Actually some TEs, including some in this forum, do accept the historical reality (and sometimes special creation) of Adam and Eve. That is not my personal position, but there is a spectrum of opinions on this among TEs and it should not be assumed that the rejection of Adam and Eve as historic individuals is a requirement of a TE position. Just as one should not assume that every anti-evolutionist agrees with YEC chronology. There are a number of people, again some on this forum, which follow a fairly literalist interpretation of scripture but accept the geological age of the earth in one way or another.

The rejection of a literal Adam and Eve raises massive theological conundrums. But there are degrees of deception amongst TEs.

 

[Armoured]

Proof.

 

[random person]

YECs are raising a big fuss over soemthing that begs deeper hermeneutical analysis and study.

There is alot of flexibility and pliable and allegorical subject matter in the Genesis creation account. Very poetical.

Such as the word used for "Adam" (#120) can mean either man or mankind itself.

Or that the word used for deep sleep in Genesis 2:21, "tardemah" (#8639) is the exact same word used in Genesis 15:12, when Abraham has his visions. Eve wasn't literally taken surgically from Adam's side, he had a vision of his significant other and aid. When he awoke, there was Eve. This is obvious allegorical in nature and very beautifully poetic I might add.

Or that dust is "aphar" (#6080) has multiple meanings such as dry earth, dust, ashes, morter, clay, mud, powder, etc.

It is obviously a description of mortal substance.

The fundamentalists and literalists are chopping right at the root of the richness of these Hebrew words and their allegorical character.

And it is counterproductive to winning souls of those that are hardborn atheists, skeptics, and agnostics.

In fact, it is downright antagonistic where one is challenging the intelligence of the other.

 

[Aman777]

YECs are raising a big fuss over soemthing that begs deeper hermeneutical analysis and study.

There is a lot of flexibility and pliable and allegorical subject matter in the Genesis creation account. Very poetical.

Such as the word used for "Adam" (#120) can mean either man or mankind itself.

Or that the word used for deep sleep in Genesis 2:21, "tardemah" (#8639) is the exact same word used in Genesis 15:12, when Abraham has his visions. Eve wasn't literally taken surgically from Adam's side, he had a vision of his significant other and aid. When he awoke, there was Eve. This is obvious allegorical in nature and very beautifully poetic I might add.

Or that dust is "aphar" (#6080) has multiple meanings such as dry earth, dust, ashes, morter, clay, mud, powder, etc.

It is obviously a description of mortal substance.

The fundamentalists and literalists are chopping right at the root of the richness of these Hebrew words and their allegorical character.

And it is counterproductive to winning souls of those that are hard born atheists, skeptics, and agnostics.

In fact, it is downright antagonistic where one is challenging the intelligence of the other.

I cannot agree since God's literal truth, which agrees in every way, with every discovery of Science and History, is harder to find, than changing what is actually written into myth, fable or fiction. Anyone can do that, but few can find the literal truth which is clearly shown in Genesis.

That's the problem with TE doctrine. God tells us that He made man with His own Hands from the dust of the ground, long BEFORE any other living creature. Gen 2:7 TEs tell us that we evolved from other living creatures. The Truth cannot be both.

iOW, The TE view does NOT agree with Gen 2:7 nor History and cannot explain How or When evolution placed Adam's superior intelligence, which is like God's, Gen 3:22 inside the prehistoric people who were already here when Noah arrived on our Earth.

Jesus:>>Mat 15:8 This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me. Mat 15:9 But in vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.