Glenn Morton debates

[rmwilliamsll]

There is a very interesting thread on the origins topic at:
http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php ?t=87273

(cut and paste link, remove blank before ?
or use: http://tinyurl.com/yzud73)

I don't make it a practice to cross-post between websites, however GM is unique in his defense of "the days of proclamation" and this is a particularly interesting thread he started about debating Henry Morris III. I haven't seen GM around here in awhile so i don't expect him to post it here himself.

for those that don't know GM this is the best introduction to his thinking on the topic i have seen plus he links into his extensive webpages. worthwhile reading.

 

[philadiddle]

link doesn't work for me

 

[Mallon]

Link didn't work for me either, but I managed to trace through to the thread earlier (sorry, no link!).

Wow. The debate certainly sounded interesting from Glen's POV. Wish I could have been there. I think many of Morris' comments are quite telling. I wonder if he has posted his take on the evening somewhere?

Certainly some lessons to be taught from that night. Not sure that I'm quite as convinced as Glen that Genesis essentially teaches evolution, though...

 

[chaoschristian]

Just starting reading it. From here.

 

[artybloke]

Well, I read the whole thread, and very interesting it was. I still think trying to make a "literal" reading of the Genesis myths is barking up the wrong tree, but if it starts people thinking that there's an alternative to YEC that makes sense and is still "Biblical" then it's good stuff.

 

[busterdog]

Glenn used to post on raptureready.com also and had a few go rounds, which were pretty interesting. The guy is a serious christian and I commend him for trying to be literal (though I wish he were YEC).

I learned alot about varves by these discussions. Interesting stuff.

YEC folks really have to deal with GM and decide what to about about the fact that YEC cannot answer every example of rock that looks old.

 

[random_guy]

Glenn used to post on raptureready.com also and had a few go rounds, which were pretty interesting. The guy is a serious christian and I commend him for trying to be literal (though I wish he were YEC).

I learned alot about varves by these discussions. Interesting stuff.

YEC folks really have to deal with GM and decide what to about about the fact that YEC cannot answer every example of rock that looks old.

From what I remember from his posts, he did start out as a YECist, but since he was also a geologist, he saw evidence that the Earth was old everywhere. It's had to be a geologist and not accept an old Earth, just as it's hard to be a biologist and reject common ancestory.

 

[chaoschristian]

I really didn't see how his interpretation was a literal reading, but it is an interesting interpretation.

Well, I read the whole thread, and very interesting it was. I still think trying to make a "literal" reading of the Genesis myths is barking up the wrong tree, but if it starts people thinking that there's an alternative to YEC that makes sense and is still "Biblical" then it's good stuff.

 

[stumpjumper]

I really didn't see how his interpretation was a literal reading, but it is an interesting interpretation.

It seems to me he concedes literal inerrancy, though...

I would bet he believes in a form of verbal inspiration from what I've read...

Interesting debate though. It kind of reminds me of TE article I read online that went into the grammar in depth...

ETA: This is an interesting link written by a TE who holds pretty much to plenary verbal inspiration: http://www.solbaram.org/articles/genheb.html

 

[rmwilliamsll]

It seems to me he concedes literal inerrancy, though...

I would bet he believes in a form of verbal inspiration from what I've read...

Interesting debate though. It kind of reminds me of TE article I read online that went into the grammar in depth...

ETA: This is an interesting link written by a TE who holds pretty much to plenary verbal inspiration: http://www.solbaram.org/articles/genheb.html

BB Warfield is the theologian most responsible for modern inerrancy and the ideas behind plenary verbal inspiration. Warfield was an outspoken TE as well. curious lack of historical depth to this discussion. YECism is a modern movement. By 1910 basically all Christians were TE, it was only with the rise of fundamentalism and the alignment of TE with liberal churches that YECism began to be considered seriously in the church, again.

 

[stumpjumper]

BB Warfield is the theologian most responsible for modern inerrancy and the ideas behind plenary verbal inspiration. Warfield was an outspoken TE as well. curious lack of historical depth to this discussion. YECism is a modern movement. By 1910 basically all Christians were TE, it was only with the rise of fundamentalism and the alignment of TE with liberal churches that YECism began to be considered seriously in the church, again.

That doesn't neccesarily make Warfield's view correct, though... Yes, you can synthesize inerrancy with the theory of evolution... I personally don't of course but I that's fine...

But... You do run into problems in regards to geneologies and with regards to whether historical criticism and a four author view (JEPD) is more likely...

I absolutely think that you are quite correct that the whole YEC/OEC debate is one that we really should not be having... Long before Darwin, Christian geologists showed that the earth was much older than 6000 years...

I wouldn't put all of the blame on liberal Church's though as secularism/scientism (views like Dawkins on back through years) have played a part too...

 

[rmwilliamsll]

That doesn't neccesarily make Warfield's view correct, though... Yes, you can synthesize inerrancy with the theory of evolution... I personally don't of course but I that's fine...

But... You do run into problems in regards to geneologies and with regards to whether historical criticism and a four author view (JPEG) is more likely...

I absolutely think that you are quite correct that the whole YEC/OEC debate is one that we really should not be having... Long before Darwin, Christian geologists showed that the earth was much older than 6000 years...

I wouldn't put all of the blame on liberal Church's though as secularism/scientism (views like Dawkins on back through years) have played a part too...

my point is that the alignment of:

literal=YECist POV=only verbal plenary inspiration choice is a modern equation. until the reaction of fundamentalism against liberalism (theologically) and the view that liberalism=evolutionary, people with a high view of Scripture saw no conflict between their position on biological evolution and inspiration.

it is the historical myopia of YECists who believe that their viewpoint has been the consistent conservative POV that i am pointing out. YECism is a modern mid 20thC movement, not a consistent remnant viewpoint as is proposed by them. It is a reaction to liberalism and the alignment of liberalism with higher criticism, relativism and evolutionary theory.

I think that there is good reason that these things happened. In a class i wrote on the history of American Presbyterianism i use the term progressive rather than theological liberal, because i find this strand of thought the most important one for them. Evolution fits into the system just fine and rather synergistically encourages the progressivism. It is a reaction to this whole package that makes fundamentalism primarily YECist and not OEC.

 

[stumpjumper]

my point is that the alignment of:

literal=YECist POV=only verbal plenary inspiration choice is a modern equation. until the reaction of fundamentalism against liberalism (theologically) and the view that liberalism=evolutionary, people with a high view of Scripture saw no conflict between their position on biological evolution and inspiration.

Oh... I agree. I would certainly say that fundamentalism is a reaction against theological liberalism and that you do not need to be theologically liberal or take a historical critical approach to scripture to accept evolutionary theory...

I've always liked Karl Barth's essay on the authority of scripture...

Categories like liberal/conservative really only go so far...

 

[rmwilliamsll]

Oh... I agree. I would certainly say that fundamentalism is a reaction against theological liberalism and that you do not need to be theologically liberal or take a historical critical approach to scripture to accept evolutionary theory...

I've always liked Karl Barth's essay on the authority of scripture...

Categories like liberal/conservative really only go so far...

I absolutely think that you are quite correct that the whole YEC/OEC debate is one that we really should not be having... Long before Darwin, Christian geologists showed that the earth was much older than 6000 years...


i think you are right. the debate over the age of the earth should not be occurring. it is as if the pendulum of reaction in the fundamentalist camp "overshot" the stable and defendable position (OEC) in it's desire to counter theological liberalism(progressivism). The issues were primarily:
miracles and the supernatural (see Machen's the Virgin Birth), the german higher criticism/JEPD and the inspiration of Scripture, and the uniqueness of humanity. somehow the age of the earth got thrown into the mix and poof we have this debate.

The great divide is between supernaturalists and naturalists, the divide among supernaturalist is something to do with how you expect God to operate in the world, creatively and constantly intervening or providentially through 2nd causes. since the biggest miracle would be making the world just 6Kya when it certainly looks much older, the most extreme position won the day.....

history is an odd thing. it certainly makes for strange fellowtravellers...*grin*

 

[busterdog]

From what I remember from his posts, he did start out as a YECist, but since he was also a geologist, he saw evidence that the Earth was old everywhere. It's had to be a geologist and not accept an old Earth, just as it's hard to be a biologist and reject common ancestory.

That's also what I remember.

He had this view of the realization (Adam) that the mutated hominid was a still birth (as it usually is) and that God breathed life into this still born hominid to make him a man.

(However, I was never quite sure how God did the whole rib thing in GR's view.)

Interesting ideas.

I admit that it is not easy to reconcile everything with YEC. It is easier just to be ready for anything to be true. (However, I do have my own bag of YEC tricks to show how it works.)

But, without asking for a concession that YEC is correct, don't these views of Glenn's just kind of rankle a bit? As a work of interpretation, does it really fit the Bible completely? Don't you feel like these shoes are a little cramped for walking?

I see how it fits much of the evidence of our eyes. But, really, is that the test of what Scripture says? What we see and what makes sense to how we understand the world?

At what point do the TE guys step back from conventions about how the world is? ever? They must. GR believes in a literal resurrection. His realization is also miraculous. But, I would also expect that this is not completely comfortable. There is too much cherry picky to determine when the Bible is literal and when it is not.

If I am going to have a point of discomfort, quite frankly I would rather have it in the area of my conflict between my literal view and what the world says is possible.

 

[Assyrian]

At what point do the TE guys step back from conventions about how the world is? ever? They must. GR believes in a literal resurrection. His realization is also miraculous. But, I would also expect that this is not completely comfortable. There is too much cherry picky to determine when the Bible is literal and when it is not.

If I am going to have a point of discomfort, quite frankly I would rather have it in the area of my conflict between my literal view and what the world says is possible.

Ah yes the YEC nuclear option. If we are going to deny a six day creation, lets take out the resurrection as well, Dr Strangelove was a theologian.

It is not 'conventions about how the world is' that motivates TEs, but a commitment to truth. That should be one of the fundamentals of Christianity. We want to know and believe the truth about origins, regardless of church traditions we may have been taught.

Does this extend to the resurrection? Should it extend to the resurrection? If the resurrection did not happen, we would be pitiable idiots to believe it. At least that is what Paul says. 1Cor 15:17-19 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... we are of all people most to be pitied.

In the first century the resurrection was disprovable, though not know. All the Sanhedrin had to do was drag Jesus' body from the tomb. The principle remains. Our faith is based on the fact Jesus rose from the dead. If that did not happen then there is no point in believing it did.

What science tells us about the resurrection is what people knew already back in the first century. Dead exsanguinated bodies don't rise for the dead, not naturally anyway. Science doesn't say that Jesus did not rise from the dead and it simply cannot comment on what would happen on whether or not an omnipotent God could raise him from the dead or not.

Science hasn't shown that God couldn't create the world 6000 years ago. It has shown that it isn't what happened. The earth is much more than 6000 years old.

 

[shernren]

Here is a theologian who at once sounds both more "liberal" and more "conservative" than the typical TE:

... No matter how many fine and fancy meanings we may be able to draw out of [Adam and Eve's] historicity, it must also have a plain meaning: somewhere along the line, some people had to have shown up at a real time and place as the first of a race of priestly beings.

I feel I am about to lose my audience. I shall give you one disclaimer. I am not at all concerned here with whether those people were a lonely he and she, or a crowd, or whether they were made in one shot or gradually pasted up over millions of years. The only point I want to make is that if you seriously intend to see history as a real web, then the web itself must have a beginning, and that beginning must be discussed historically. No one should be exempted from the attempt to write Genesis; and no one ever is. Admittedly, neither scientists nor theologians have reporters' notes on the event, so everybody has to do the job imaginatively; but it is precisely that job that everyone has to do, scientists as well as theologians. There is no real choice about Adam and Eve. The only open question is whether we will do them, and the rest of history that follows from them, justice.

I bring this up because a great deal of solemn nonsense has been bandied about on the subject. In the interest of making a hasty accommodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said by all kinds of people. On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures. The first have, mercifully, met the fate they deserved; but the second are still with us. They have such a fear of sounding like Genesis that they end up sounding like gibberish. They are so afraid of making Adam and Eve particular human beings that they forget that, if history is real, some particular people will have to turn out to have been Adam and Eve. In the day of judgment we may find out that they called each other Oscar and Enid and that they lived on a Norwegian fjord; but those will be only details. They themselves will have existed. And the essential historical fact about them will be not simply that our biological inheritance came from them but that all the threads of the web began with them. It is precisely the rest of history that you lose if you unload Adam and Eve.

- Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles

Now he is by no means a biblical literalist: he envisions Romans 9-11 as a mad dash down a dark alley of failed theological images instead of being "inspired" and says that 1 Corinthians has 16 chapters only because "the Holy Spirit, having pity on endless generations of future commentators, decided at that point to put Paul to sleep." And yet quite apart from any form of biblical literalism he concludes both that YECism is rot and that to call Genesis completely non-historical is also rubbish.

Reading him reminded me that the origins debate is by no means polarized into a simple "us Scripture - them science" difference, it may not even be a matter of different positions on a single Scripture-science line with flat-earthers on the left and Bishop Spong on the right. There are more dimensions to the debate than a single, linear "Scripture-science" difference.

 

[busterdog]

Ah yes the YEC nuclear option. If we are going to deny a six day creation, lets take out the resurrection as well, Dr Strangelove was a theologian.

It is not 'conventions about how the world is' that motivates TEs, but a commitment to truth. That should be one of the fundamentals of Christianity. We want to know and believe the truth about origins, regardless of church traditions we may have been taught.

Does this extend to the resurrection? Should it extend to the resurrection? If the resurrection did not happen, we would be pitiable idiots to believe it. At least that is what Paul says. 1Cor 15:17-19 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... we are of all people most to be pitied.

In the first century the resurrection was disprovable, though not know. All the Sanhedrin had to do was drag Jesus' body from the tomb. The principle remains. Our faith is based on the fact Jesus rose from the dead. If that did not happen then there is no point in believing it did.

What science tells us about the resurrection is what people knew already back in the first century. Dead exsanguinated bodies don't rise for the dead, not naturally anyway. Science doesn't say that Jesus did not rise from the dead and it simply cannot comment on what would happen on whether or not an omnipotent God could raise him from the dead or not.

Science hasn't shown that God couldn't create the world 6000 years ago. It has shown that it isn't what happened. The earth is much more than 6000 years old.

Well, its not really a nuclear option. It may make people uncomortable, but that is only a standard where people justify censoring Christian news anchors or public school teachers. I think you need to reconsider what I said.

GR does think differently about the resurrection as opposed to Gen. 1&2. There are two different models of hermeneutics here. There is a tension between them. So my question is, when do look to convention to guide you and when don't you. That is a fair question not easily answered.

That there is discomfort does not mean someone is a heretic. It means that there are shades of gray, probably, where nuts like myself ought to have a foot in the hermeneutical door.

The process of human reason is not a neat system of proofs here or elsewhere. GR has an intractible problem in his hermenteutics because of the differing systems of reason applied to different Scriptural issues. Obviously, we all do this. For example, I have personally "filled myself with good things and sent the poor away empty." There is no easy dividing line here between sensible financial planning and responsbile giving. There are only man-made constructs full of conflicting logic. This is just one of many areas where that happens.

 

[shernren]

Well, its not really a nuclear option. It may make people uncomortable, but that is only a standard where people justify censoring Christian news anchors or public school teachers. I think you need to reconsider what I said.

GR does think differently about the resurrection as opposed to Gen. 1&2. There are two different models of hermeneutics here. There is a tension between them. So my question is, when do look to convention to guide you and when don't you. That is a fair question not easily answered.

That there is discomfort does not mean someone is a heretic. It means that there are shades of gray, probably, where nuts like myself ought to have a foot in the hermeneutical door.

The process of human reason is not a neat system of proofs here or elsewhere. GR has an intractible problem in his hermenteutics because of the differing systems of reason applied to different Scriptural issues. Obviously, we all do this. For example, I have personally "filled myself with good things and sent the poor away empty." There is no easy dividing line here between sensible financial planning and responsbile giving. There are only man-made constructs full of conflicting logic. This is just one of many areas where that happens.

I don't know if grmorton thinks that there are two different models of hermeneutics here. But I don't: http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=23643223&postcount=46 Essentially, the kind of evidence we demand for creation and a global flood is merely quantitatively different from the kind of evidence we demand for the Resurrection. Qualitatively the same kind of evidence is needed for both.

 

[busterdog]

I don't know if grmorton thinks that there are two different models of hermeneutics here. But I don't: http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=23643223&postcount=46 Essentially, the kind of evidence we demand for creation and a global flood is merely quantitatively different from the kind of evidence we demand for the Resurrection. Qualitatively the same kind of evidence is needed for both.

Understood.

To me that disagreement represents a really interesting issue. Not only is it of academic interest, but I think it really affects everything we do.

To be clear, the amount of science for the proposition that people don't come back from the dead is virtually equivalent to the amount of science that teaches that human beings aren't constructed in a day. To overlook one body of evidence, but not the other is inconsistent thinking. There may be reasons for it, or exceptions, but it does appear to be different types of thinking, if inconsistency.

How about this analogous example. For example, "Be not anxious for tomorrow"is not an entirely reasonable proposition. There are any number of very good reasons to be anxious about tomorrow or the 2008 election, about the beginning of the social security payments to the first cohort of baby boomers. I think there are very different standards of evidence for our eternal security and our immediate situation.

Maybe another thread someday.