New early hominid fossil...

[<3God]

I must sleep now. I really appreciate the conversation, even though we did disagree.

 

[gluadys]

So basically, It doesn't matter what God says in Genesis because we can interpret it any way we want to, to fit what we know today?

Another common misconception from people who don't have a strong background in literature. That metaphor can be interpreted "any way we want to." Actually metaphor--especially the extended metaphors we call "myth" --has some pretty strict rules about interpretation. That is why for a millennium and a half, Christian scholars interpreted scripture, not just metaphorically, but allegorically, with very standard, interpretive methods. Practically every sentence, word and symbol in scripture was parsed to the nth degree to determine the correct allegorical interpretation.

In fact, the excessive use of this style of allegorical interpretation led to the reaction of a "common sense" reading of scripture, which was a precursor to a strictly literal reading of scripture.

But while there were certainly problems with medieval interpretations, it wasn't a problem of anyone being able to interpret scripture "any way we want to."

The problem with a "common sense" reading is that what is "common sense" to us today was not "common sense" to the biblical readers, so we cannot rely on modern "common sense" to make sense of scripture. We have to go back and find out what was "common sense" then. And we still have to allow for a lot of use of metaphor, because people then used metaphor extensively, just as we do today.

In that case, if we cannot understand the word of God to any certainty in Genesis, why can we assume that we can understand the word of God with any level of specificity anywhere?

What if your general conclusions dont match up with my general conclusions? How can we say who is right?

I expect this is where the Church comes in. I am not arguing for an authoritative magisterium, but perhaps for something along the lines of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Both the historic tradition and the present consensus of the Body of Christ ought to play a role in what my personal general conclusions are. (Not so different from scientific consensus).

If you take Genesis as literal, it conflicts with evolution. If you try to take the story as an allegory for evolution - well what's the allegory that lines up creation with evolution?

There is no allegory of evolution in scripture. But that doesn't mean that scripture is an objective report of how creation took place either. The creation stories are metaphorical presentations of creation because that is all the biblical authors had to work with. Think of them as divinely-inspired myth (in which case "myth" ought not to be considered "falsehood".)

If the 1st chapter of Genesis is real and evolution is real, they should line up just fine.

If they are real in the same sense i.e. as empirical, historic, chronological reports of what happened on actual days in the history of planet earth, yes, they should line up just fine.

But they don't.

So either one of them is not real OR one of them is not an empirical, historic, chronological report of what happened on actual days in the history of planet earth.

The question is, does the latter still give us a truthful view of creation?

If you think that only the first type of description is "real" you are, in effect, saying that the only way we can know reality is through the lens of the scientific method. In the words of geneticist Richard Lewontin (an atheist often cited in ant-evolution literature) "Science is the sole begetter of truth".

Do you really believe that? Because that is the only reason to insist that the Genesis account of creation is a scientific description of how God created. Only if science is "the sole begetter of truth" do we have to insist that the truth of Genesis is true scientifically.

But if science is only one window on the truth, if truth can be revealed in many ways besides science, there is no reason to tie the truth of Genesis to the wagon of science. The truth of Genesis can be just as real as scientific truth without being scientific truth.

How can you even abstractly get evolution from Genesis Chapter 1?
What would seem to make more sense,
1. Taking Genesis Chapter 1 as an abstraction (figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another)
2. Accepting it as literal
3. Thinking some dudes made it up 2000 years ago because they didnt have good science and couldnt understand why things got the way they were

For #1 - It doesnt use figurative language it reads as a list of events

The story "Bridget Jones' Diary" doesn't use figurative language either, and it even cites real dates. Yet the days are not "real". The lack of specifically figurative language within a literary framework doesn't mean the framework itself is not figurative.

 

[laconicstudent]

How can I not be fixated on Hell? An eternity of torture and if I died right now I can't say god would judge that i accepted his redeeming Grace to absolve my sins and not send me to hell.

As I said, this fixation is totally out of proportion. If you have gotten this from your church, I recommend looking into switching immediately.

It's not that I don't want to believe. Even if you're right and I just don't get it(which I don't admit- but for sake of argument) and god judges that i dont believe when i die my fate is any eternity of pain. So if I die right now there's a good chance I would go to hell. Shouldn't i be scared?

As I said. If your Christian life is based on fear, and your belief has developed as a result of your church, change churches immediately. You have posts and posts worrying about God's judgment and hell and so forth, and not a single one that so much as mentions His Love.

Honestly, no offense intended, but your view of God seems very warped. If you have gotten this view of God and level of fear from your Church, change. Churches that have to control what you think and believe through fear and hellfire sermons are usually not scripturally based and have a huge assortment of problems. If you didn't get it from your Church, talk to your pastor.

I got the H1N1 right now by the way.

Unless you have HIV, are an infant or an elderly person, you will almost certainly not die. H1N1 is less lethal then the seasonal flu. Where do people get this bizarre belief that H1N1 is serious?

Jeez. Talk to your doctor. Unless you are in high-risk population, you'll be sick for a while and be fine. I swear, the whole "OH MY GOD Swine flu will kill us all!" is a hysterical LIE.

 

[gluadys]

"the biblical authors did not have a concept of evolution in mind"
God couldnt vaguely explain it?

Of course, he could. But unless it has salvific relevance i.e. re, what would be the need? Do we need to know of our evolutionary history to understand that we are alienated from our Creator by our sin and stand in need of God's redeeming grace made known to us in Christ?

There is no need for God not to accommodate the important message of salvation to the less important cosmological understanding of the time.

If he had vagely explained evolution we could look back now and say - How can you not believe in God? No one had any idea of evolution at the time, yet there it was - ready to be understood fully thousands of years later - circumstancial evidence for God's existance.

Why would this be of any importance? The biblical writers were not writing to us. They were writing to their contemporaries. The onus is on us to understand what they were saying in their own time to their own audience.

Perhaps revelation is neither literal nor figurative, perhaps it was invented by man to scare and control people.

That, of course, is the Marxist dictum. "Religion is the opium of the people." designed to keep them in complacent obedience to their rulers. Sometimes religion is---even when it is cloaked as Christian religion.

Would you send someone you love to be tortured eternally?

First, the word translated into English as "hell" does not have the meaning in the original Hebrew or Greek that it has in modern English. That came from medieval theology--and from popular depictions of hell in works of art and literature such as Dante's Inferno.

Second, God does not "send" anyone to hell. Hell is the free choice of the soul. If you do not choose hell, God will not send you to hell. If you do, even God cannot remove you from hell. (For a good discussion on this see The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis).

Not directly, but if evolution did convince me that the God of the bible isnt real, I couldn't accept the sinfulness of man, and the need for God's redemptive Grace.

Even if Im going about it wrong and evolution says nothing about God, if i was wrong and it caused me to not believe in god I would be eternally tortured, just for being wrong about my idea.

That is a horribly twisted theology. God does not condemn people for mistaken ideas, but for choosing darkness rather than light. (John 3:19) If mistaken ideas were condemnatory, there is no hope for any of us. A mistaken idea is not an evil deed for which one desires the cloak of darkness.

 

[gluadys]

Would you dispute that God knows all though?
If he does, he knew when he created me that I would end up not believing in him and be eternally tortured in hell. Why just not make me in the first place? Id take not being created to an eternity in torture

Most people would. But I am not convinced that eternal torture is a biblical teaching in the first place.

Your first question is more intriguing. And that comes down to whether God made a future that is open or closed. If the future is closed---if there is only one possible future--it makes sense that God knows all. But that also takes away free will and with it moral agency. (In fact, some atheists who are strict determinists hold that free will is non-existent.)

But if God made us to be free, moral agents, doesn't that mean that God made an open future which we ourselves share in creating? In that case, although God may know all possible futures, how can God know which future will be realized until we make our choices?

An interesting question that probably belongs more in apologetics than in this forum. In any case, the matter of evolution does not touch on it one way or another.

 

[Assyrian]

I must confess, I am losing my faith. Im trying my best to put on a tough facade.
Evolution makes perfect sense to me and it describes the variety of living things in the world extremely well.

It conflicts with Genesis though. It does - theres no reasonable reading of Genesis that gives you evolution. They cannot both be true. Theres no metaphor that can link Genesis with evolution, that couldnt be better explained by the biblical God just not having a hand in it at all.

I want to believe but its really hard.

Thanks for your honesty sharing this with us. I would say our relationship with God is based on faith, on trust. Creationist are often told trusting God means trusting in Genesis in spite of all that science tells us, but what we really need is to trust God when our understanding of Genesis falls apart, that God who inspired the bible is bigger than any problems we have reconciling the bible with what we know from science.

I think the big problem with the creationist interpretation of Genesis is that it is a very modernist approach assuming it must have been written as a literal history and science text. I simply don't get that looking at the way Genesis is handled and understood by other writers in the bible. The person who composed the various texts into the book of Genesis, whether you see that as Moses or a later editor, took two very different creation accounts with very different orders of creation and placed them together in the start of Genesis without seeing any conflict, which to me means he simply didn't read the texts as literal chronologies.

If we read Psalm 90 ascribed to Moses, not only do we see God's days interpreted non literally in a psalm about the creation, but we see a stream of imagery from Genesis interpreted allegorically describing our relationship with God. Psalm 104 follows the order of creation days in Genesis 1, but reads it as a celebration of creation in the world now, God causes grass to grow but it is for livestock, God makes the moon and the lions creep out a night to hunt for prey, when the sun rises the lions steal home and man (adam) come out to work, Leviathan whom God created is playing in the sea while ships go by. Jesus quotes Genesis and the creation of male and female but he reads it again as a lesson on the unity of marriage. Paul quotes Adam and Eve but tells us he sees Adam as a figure of Christ, Rom 5:14, when he talks about Adam and Eve it is as a lesson on marriage and the relation ship between husband and wife, or even as an allegorical picture of Christ and the church. The writer in Hebrew (ch 3&4) reads the seventh day when God rested, not as a literal day off God to a few thousand years ago, but as an ongoing rest we are called to enter into 'today' (Today if you hear my voice Heb 3:715 & 4:7, another not very literal interpretation). What I don't find is people reading Genesis as a literal time table of Creation the way creationists think is the only way it can be read.

How can you read that Adam and Eve evolved to become Adam and Eve - even through metaphor?
God said he created Adam from dust after he created the animals - how could this be even imagined as a metaphor for him having evolved from homo etrectus?

This is actually a very common metaphor through the bible, we are dust, we are made from clay, God is the potter who formed us. But it is never meant as a metaphorical description of how God formed us, it is a metaphor describing that God formed us, the care, skill and purpose of God forming us and our relationship as his workmanship to our maker.

Also there had to be humanoid females before Adam and Eve, but God said he created Eve from Adam's rib - how's this a metaphor that explains anything about evolution?

You keep thinking it has to be a metaphor about evolution, but that may not be the point God is trying to get across at all. If you read the text after it talks of Eve being made from Adam flesh and bone, Genesis throws in a really odd conclusion, Gen 2:24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The rib is a metaphor, but it is not a metaphor for evolution, it is describing the intimacy of the union of husband and wife.

 

[<3God]

Originally Posted by <3God

"the biblical authors did not have a concept of evolution in mind"
God couldnt vaguely explain it?
​

You - "Of course, he could. But unless it has salvific relevance i.e. re, what would be the need?"

It would save a lot of people who rely on empirical evidences to make up their minds on everything.

 

[Willtor]

So basically, It doesn't matter what God says in Genesis because we can interpret it any way we want to, to fit what we know today?

No. I think we should try to interpret it as it was intended and not try to make it support or refute evolution. Rather, just try to understand what the author means to communicate and let the baggage go.

@Willtor, I dont understand what you're saying in relation to my post.

 

[<3God]

I try to approach the Bible without the automatic assumption that it's true. I try to find evidences in that explain the world better than what the people understood at the time. I would expect to find knowledge of the world greater than bronze age man from a perfect God.

 

[Willtor]

Originally Posted by <3God

"the biblical authors did not have a concept of evolution in mind"
God couldnt vaguely explain it?
​

You - "Of course, he could. But unless it has salvific relevance i.e. re, what would be the need?"

It would save a lot of people who rely on empirical evidences to make up their minds on everything.

This is too short-sided. It wouldn't save anybody anything. Today the stumbling block is evolution. Yesterday it was the shape of the earth or whether the earth is fixed in space. Tomorrow it will be something else. You think that without communicating these things explicitly, God has made a mistake. But I said earlier that the Bible would be enormous -- and to the detriment to the message of salvation. Could you imagine if in learning about redemption and grace, we first had to come to grips with a proper cosmological framework? Even if science is basically right, today, almost nobody understands it all very well. It would make the barrier to salvation too high.

 

[Willtor]

I try to approach the Bible without the automatic assumption that it's true. I try to find evidences in that explain the world better than what the people understood at the time. I would expect to find knowledge of the world greater than bronze age man from a perfect God.

This cannot be correct. Did bronze-age people value knowledge about the world the way we do? Does God? There are a lot of leaps of reasoning, here. It might be better simply to try to understand the text than to look for easter eggs.

 

[<3God]

" I try to find evidences in that explain the world better than what the people understood at the time"

Although this wouldnt be conclusive proof for a Biblical God it would back up the idea.

Why would a God that condemns us to be tortured eternally If we cannot accept him, leave no physical evidence for his existence?

"Did bronze-age people value knowledge about the world the way we do?"

I would expect they would value knowledge of the world even more so than we do today. People died from germs that people couldnt understand and this scared them into making up reasons for it. They certainly wanted to understand why they were dying. People were starving in much greater numbers back then and the search for knowledge of ways to combat that starving must have been very important. Theres more examples but u get what im saying

 

[<3God]

ttt

 

[Willtor]

" I try to find evidences in that explain the world better than what the people understood at the time"

Although this wouldnt be conclusive proof for a Biblical God it would back up the idea.

Why would a God that condemns us to be tortured eternally If we cannot accept him, leave no physical evidence for his existence?

This is the catch-22 of Judaism/Christianity/Islam. You can certainly ask for evidence of a god from, say, the Roman or Greek Pantheon. They were basically super-beings. In principle, one could look for evidence of them as one would look for evidence of alien life. But God is the Lord of nature. Even natural things are His handiwork. So it's difficult to ask how things would look different if He were not real.

Interestingly, I think this is one of the important pieces of the Genesis creation account. The Babylonian story of creation, for example, has their god, Marduk, contending with the world to bring it into order. In the Hebrew account, God merely commands it to be so because it is His creature and it obeys Him. Thus, I say, one could look for evidence of Marduk because evidence of Marduk stands out from nature. But one could not look for evidence of God in that way.

"Did bronze-age people value knowledge about the world the way we do?"

I would expect they would value knowledge of the world even more so than we do today. People died from germs that people couldnt understand and this scared them into making up reasons for it. They certainly wanted to understand why they were dying. People were starving in much greater numbers back then and the search for knowledge of ways to combat that starving must have been very important. Theres more examples but u get what im saying

That sounds plausible. But it isn't so. If you read some of the competing accounts of creation from other societies, for example, you'll begin to get the sense that the writers were far more interested in understanding the meaning and purpose of things than they were of the cold, hard facts. You might be interested to read some of the early histories and see the progression from meaning to facts. In ancient histories, for example, even as the facts began to become important, it was still seen as the role of the historian to interpret those facts and present the reader with meaning.

 

[<3God]

"So it's difficult to ask how things would look different if He were not real."
For me If God wasn't real people would die in childbirth, natural disasters would strike randomly regardless of beliefs and hilter would be able to murder millions without being stopped by an all knowing all loving god.
- Thats a description of the world

"You can certainly ask for evidence of a god from, say, the Roman or Greek Pantheon. They were basically super-beings"

I do and I bet you do too. And probably for both of us the lack of evidence leads us to reject those gods.

Why shouldnt we reject the biblical god on the same basis?

 

[<3God]

ttt

 

[<3God]

last try ttt

 

[gluadys]

I try to approach the Bible without the automatic assumption that it's true. I try to find evidences in that explain the world better than what the people understood at the time. I would expect to find knowledge of the world greater than bronze age man from a perfect God.

Why would you expect that in communications to bronze age people?

 

[gluadys]

"So it's difficult to ask how things would look different if He were not real."
For me If God wasn't real people would die in childbirth, natural disasters would strike randomly regardless of beliefs and hilter would be able to murder millions without being stopped by an all knowing all loving god.
- Thats a description of the world

"You can certainly ask for evidence of a god from, say, the Roman or Greek Pantheon. They were basically super-beings"

I do and I bet you do too. And probably for both of us the lack of evidence leads us to reject those gods.

Why shouldnt we reject the biblical god on the same basis?

Do you notice how far away you have come from talking about evolution?

The arguments you are presenting for atheism now are as old as humanity and suggested either atheism or gods who were cruel not loving and will do so for as long as this world persists.

To believe in the face of incomprehensible chance like natural disasters and unspeakable evil like the deeds of Hitler, that God is, that God loves, that God is in control has always and will always take faith because it means believing in a reality that is denied by the empirical evidence.

 

[<3God]

"To believe in the face of incomprehensible chance like natural disasters and unspeakable evil like the deeds of Hitler, that God is, that God loves, that God is in control has always and will always take faith because it means believing in a reality that is denied by the empirical evidence."

Why should i deny reality that is supported by empirical evidence and take faith in something that seems to be opposed by reality?

"Why would you expect that in communications to bronze age people?"

Try to imagine, you're all powerful and you've decided to come to earth. You see people suffering all over the world. You see people starving all over the planet, you see people in pain needlessly. You could give them ideas of technology and help lessen their suffering or you could sacrifice you to yourself ( he could have just said - the world is absolved of sin without making them see a man suffer) and walk on water and heal a handful of people compared to what explaining the germ theory of disease would have healed. Also, you could have given them advanced ideas of crop rotation theory that weren't available at the time that would have saved millions.

Which one would you do?