Hey vossler! It's good to know that you're still hanging around here, although you must not like what's been going on - or else you wouldn't lurk.
I follow the Literal Principle which goes in line with my own signature line. I'm not 'clinging' to anything other than God and His Word.
Do you really follow the Literal Principle of your own signature line?
David Cooper: "When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, literal meaning, unless the facts of the context indicate clearly otherwise."
As someone studying science I have personal friends who use evolutionary science in the lab, day in, day out. To them evolution is as much "common sense" as the fact that you need to push the power button to turn your computer on. I have friends involved in ecological studies, and for them common sense would dictate that you can't take two (or seven) per family (not even species, says AiG!) of animal, stuff them onto a wooden boat, and expect the world's ecosystems to recover from just that. If the population of Asian elephants alive in the world were reduced to a mating pair, you wouldn't get the recovery of the species, you'd declare them extinct and wait for the last family to die out.
In fact, I think Cooper trusts common sense too much, don't you? Common sense, after all, tells us that people don't rise from the dead. Common sense tells us that people who see dead people are hallucinating, unable to cope with the stress. In what sense is believing in the resurrection of the dead "common"? A stumbling block to all. So we must discount the first clause of your signature line; clearly something modulates the use of common sense in interpreting Scripture.
Might it be "context"? But what, exactly,
is context? That is not an easy thing to define. For example, nowhere does the Bible describe what a crucifixion is. You need outside sources to figure out that it means nailing someone to a cross and leaving them to die; even the
how of that dying (other than by the usual hunger and thirst) isn't obvious without modern medical science. Does that mean Herodotus and Josephus and all those others form part of the context of Luke? But then wouldn't Enuma Elish and Stephen Hawkings then form part of the context of Genesis? How do you delineate context?
Take for example:
And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.
(Genesis 1:14-18 NIV)
This passage creates two hermeneutical difficulties for YECs: one less obvious (because I have never heard a cogent answer to it before
) and one more obvious.
The less obvious one is this: if the lights are in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night, what was separating day from night on days 1-3? And what can "evening" and "morning" even
mean without the Sun and Moon? After all, when we meet Day and Night on Day (hehe) 1, they are
phenomena; only Day 4's renovations turn them into periods of time.
The more obvious one is if God formed the stars on Day 4, and creation is only 6,000 years old, how can their light have reached us? So creationists of all sorts and shapes propose many ingenious solutions. Maybe it's a description of appearance, and in reality thick clouds of vapor that had been swaddling the earth parted to show stars in the clear sky. Maybe God not only created stars, He created all the little light photons between us and them in that same instant of time. Maybe Russell Humphreys' strange white hole cosmology thingo works (actually, it doesn't, but that's a different thread). Maybe the earth and the universe
are old after all? Maybe the speed of light was a little different when it all got started.
But you know, the creationists in doing this have assumed all kinds of godless scientific nonsense
that the Bible never teaches anywhere. For example, the question only makes sense if you believe that the speed of light is finite. I doubt anybody before the birth of Christ believed that. When you light an oil lamp, you instantly see the light. You can use reflecting mirrors to make signals with the Sun's light, and they reach the other end as soon as you turn the mirror the right way. So why should it be remarkable that as soon as God "turned on" the stars, the Earth could see it? Oil-lamp light doesn't take that long to reach me; why should 2,000 years be too long for the light of the stars? That would have been what the biblical writers believed. Why isn't this accessible to modern creationists any more? Have they sold out to science?
Another godless scientific fact the creationists have assumed is that the stars are far away. Indeed, the Bible explicitly teaches that ancient people believed otherwise:
Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
(Genesis 11:4 NIV)
Let's ignore all the talk of ziggurats (who decided that
they were in the context, anyway?) and see this clearly: those people thought stars were things you could reach with brick and tar! And why not? After all, you've never seen the hard vacuum of space and neither have I, so why should I believe that it isn't air all the way? And nobody has been to Alpha Centauri; who are the godless atheistic astronomers to tell us that it's 4 light-years away? (And what's a "light year"? The Bible doesn't teach us that light has a finite speed, remember?) And so if the stars aren't that far away, doesn't it make sense that the moment they turn on, their light would reach us?
And yet I have never met a single creationist who teaches that modern science is wrong in that light has an infinite speed and the stars are very close by. Never mind that those were almost certainly what the biblical authors believed; never mind that the Bible never teaches the opposite anywhere; never mind that it simplifies the interpretation immensely.
So: what, exactly,
is the context of Genesis 1 and 2? Concepts as arcane as the speed of light and the distance to the stars certainly are, since no creationist I know denies them in interpreting the creation stories. So why not evolution? If you go to the museum you can actually see fossils for yourself; if you have enough influential paleontologist friends you can touch them with your bare hands. Evolutionists can breed mice and fruit flies by hand; they can distinguish mutants from normal organisms at sight, sometimes. When Feynman (??) said "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting" I think he was just having a case of sour grapes, since biology is the most hands-on science you could ever have.
So you and all the other creationists in the world will trust a bunch of equations written by a guy none of you know (Maxwell), describing a bunch of physical quantities almost none of you understand (electric fields, displacement current, permittivity and permeability etc.) so much that the "Biblical alternative" isn't even in the picture. But you won't trust evolution, even though you can see experiments on it in the lab every day and plenty of Christian luminaries in the sciences like Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller defend it. Is the difference really between what's Biblical and what's not? Is it really about finding the plain meaning of the text?
Or is it really just because it happens to be more socially acceptable right now to diss Darwin than to diss Einstein?
