Question for non-literalists

[vossler]

Is that from the beginning of the creation of the world, or from the beginning of their creation? After all, Jesus is talking men and women here, not God creating the world.

Look at Matthew's take on what Jesus said. Matt 19:4 He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female. He was talking about how God made mankind not the planet.

I can go with the idea that He is talking about man, but in the end it could just as well be creation overall. The time difference was minimal. This doesn't in anyway change the idea of a recent creation.

I love that passage in John.

John 5:16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.
17 But Jesus answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I am working."

Apparently Jesus didn't take that passage in Exodus all that literally, and he should know. He and his Father never really rested on the seventh day. If the description of the seventh day in Genesis and Exodus wasn't literal, what basis is there to think all the other days do have to be literal?

Why do you presume that Jesus and the Father didn't rest on the seventh day of Creation? The Sabbath was given for man to follow, it was never stated to include God. Those days were most certainly literal, there is no biblical indication to believe otherwise. There is no basis, that I can see, to think they were anything but literal days.

From what I have read, there seem to have been a wide range of Talmudic approaches to Genesis 1.

• We have the straight literal six days,
• It was a literal six days and contain all the ages of the world, (how that work I don't know),
• It was a parable,
• That humans were around for 974 generations before Adam (because God's covenant was to a thousand generations and Adam was only 26 generations before Moses),
• Or that the six days of creation did not exist in time at all.

I'm not a student of the Talmud so I really can't comment on those other theories you espouse to. I will say though that by and large those alternate theories were in a distinct minority of rabbidic scholars.

Not even the fact that the description is a metaphor and God doesn't really get tired? That God isn't refreshed after having a rest?

The metaphor was solely for our benefit, not God's.

Each interpretation has seemingly valid points because the bible doesn't speak clearly on the issue. But there are lots of things the bible doesn't speak clearly on, and God timetable is just one example. People have been reading their bibles and interpreting clearly that the Lord was coming back very soon, since the first century.

I would go along with you if I didn't think the Bible spoke clearly on this issue, but it does.

Why should the bible be held in disrepute if it never meant to tell us how old the earth is, and that it was only a mistaken interpretation that said it was just 6,000 years old?

If He didn't mean to tell us, why did He give us the information?

2Pet 3:8 But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. It applies just as well to the creation, after all Peter is quoting Moses' creation psalm.

This verse is just saying that God isn't constrained by time, I don't know how we seem to make more out if it than that. Yet He was very specific when telling us regarding the creation timeline. Why would God, who isn't constrained by time, give himself such a tight timeline? Could it be to teach us something?

If you are not back in 5 days we'll send a search party.

I survived with my checkbook intact.

 

[shernren]

A quick check in Wikipedia for both Epicurean and Stoicism philosophy seems to indicate they were contrasting ideas of the single idea of one's personal social well being. They hardly appeared to be people concerned with creation or anything of that nature. Why do you assume that talking about the latest ideas somehow included creation?
Paul, rightly so, isn't concerned about 6 days here, that plays no role in what he had to say. His focus is on the Creator not His creation.

And yet one of the main Epicureans was Lucretius, who wrote an entire poem On The Nature of Things systematically describing why nature was not created by God and how man could have free will in a deterministic world. Besides, at Areopagus Paul would not have been speaking just to the Epicureans and Stoics who had engaged him but to all present.

More importantly, your own theologians are telling us that we cannot have a proper view of the Creator God without having a proper view of the six-day creation. Eg http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v3/i4/doctrine.asp :

Consider the discussion regarding Genesis 1–11 as to what type of literature this passage contains: myth, allegory, or true history. The record presented in this passage reveals God as the all powerful Participant. Since God can have no more complex counterpart of Himself, it is impossible to allegorise this passage. God's testimony is clearly set out—'God said', 'God saw', 'God moved', 'God divided', 'God called', 'God made'. To treat God's testimony literally is to take the creation of Eve for Adam's sake literally; also the meaning of 'day'.
Unless the foundation of Genesis 1–11 is literally what it says it is, many New Testament doctrines fall and the integrity of the whole Word of God is at stake. Furthermore, God's testimony concerning Himself as Participator is flatly denied. Surely a denial of God in one part of the Bible produces profound impact on our responses to other parts of His Word—and affects the way we think and behave.

And yet Paul not only preaches Christ without this "foundation", he manages to paint God as Participator without putting a single word in for how recent the earth is or the fact that it was created in six days?

What could this mean, other than that Paul did not consider these things fundamental?

With an evolutionary worldview I could see how in an effort to find something to support the theory one come to such a view. The way I see it, given his audience and their apparent openness to new ideas it would have been a wonderful opportunity to introduce the truth of the evolutionary process and God's role in it, yet he didn't. Given that his audience probably never even entertained the idea of an evolutionary process they would have probably been stumbling over one another in order to hear first hand such incredible news. The world was God's (through Peter) oyster, why didn't He take advantage of it? The timing couldn't have been better, right?

No, the timing wouldn't have been worse. If God had told them about evolution then would anybody have believed it? 1800 years before Darwin and Mendel and the discovery of DNA? This is precisely why the Bible never contains any scientific concepts which the people of their day had not already discovered.

That's good to hear; progress, however slow, is being made.

We have never had a problem with divine fiat.

Excuse my ignorance, but before I say something totally off base or not within the realm of your point, maybe you could explain to me exactly what you’re trying to prove here. Is it solely that in your mind Jesus took a lot of liberty with Scripture or is there more to it?

Well, if you want to put it as Jesus taking liberties, be my guest. Jesus seems so liberal with the Torah that next to him we evolutionists look like fundies.

That is part of my point, but "taking liberties" makes it sound like something one does without thought or reason, much as Bishop Spong would "take liberties" with the Resurrection while denying its centrality. But one thing that has been emphasized here is that God accommodates His revelation according to where His people are. If you were to ask "If the Big Bang really happened why wouldn't God have told us" our response would be "How could God possibly describe the Big Bang to a bunch of prescientific Hebrews?"

Their level of knowledge, remember, was such that they could not even smelt iron without Philistine help or approval during Saul's kingship. And yet you expect God to tell them about spacetime and DNA and all that?

The way I see it, when Jesus reveals a "moral accommodation" in the command (or permission) to issue a certificate of divorce it comes as an indirect confirmation. The biggest possible problem with the argument of accommodation would be that "How do you know God reveals in such a way?" Well, God Himself confirmed it right there. Jesus essentially tells the Pharisees that at the time, the Jews were not ready for a definitive treatment of the morality of marriage and divorce, and so God (or Moses) instead of giving them the most complete description of morality gives them a stopgap measure to curb the problem.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Jesus Himself says that Moses' commands concerning divorce were not complete or exhaustive, but only what was sufficient and profitable for a society with that given level of morality. And again remember that the whole purpose of the Torah is morality. So why is it such a big fuss when we say that Moses' descriptions concerning creation were not complete or exhaustive in a scientific sense, but only what was sufficient and profitable for a society with a given level of scientific knowledge - enough to tell them not to worship idols and to keep the Sabbath?

Even if this were true, it’s hardly a fair comparison. Jesus is entitled to make changes, man most certainly is not!

How did He reach the point where He knew how to make these changes? By being the Second Person of the Trinity? One must remember that Jesus was fully man, as well as being fully God. I believe that Jesus made these changes speaking from Spirit-assisted intellect, just as we today interpret the Scriptures from Spirit-assisted intellect.

This is not without precedent. When Jesus performed miracles, He may have pronounced His divinity, but He was employing His humanity. If He could do miracles only because He was the Son of God, then we (not being the Son of God) obviously would never be able to do what He did. And yet there are miracle workers among Christians. The only conclusion is that Jesus' miracles were the result of the Holy Spirit operating through an ordinary (yet sinless) human, just as miracles today are the result of the Holy Spirit operating through ordinary humans.

In the same way, I believe that Jesus understood Scriptures not as its Author but as a man with Spirit-assisted intellect. The Holy Spirit prompted His intellect to see certain things that were present or latent in the Scriptures as He knew them and He expressed these things. While I will not go so far as to say that TEism was whispered into my ear by the Holy Spirit I will say that thus far God does not seem to have an issue with me holding to it.

 

[Assyrian]

I can go with the idea that He is talking about man, but in the end it could just as well be creation overall. The time difference was minimal. This doesn't in anyway change the idea of a recent creation.

The passage doesn't challenge a recent creation, sure, if Jesus was talking about the beginnings of the human race, and the world was created just six days before it, it was in the same general period. Of if the world had been created 4.5 billion years before God made man, then talking about that beginning of mankind didn't include the creation of the world. But this passage is used by creationists to try to contradict an old earth. It simply doesn't apply. Jesus was talking about the creation of man.

However if people insist, without any basis in Jesus words or in the context, that Jesus was talking about the creation of the world, then you run into the contradiction. Man was not created in the beginning of creation but at the end.

No, Jesus was simply talking about God creating us.

Why do you presume that Jesus and the Father didn't rest on the seventh day of Creation?

I presume it because that is what Jesus tells us. John 5:17"My Father is working until now, and I am working."
The Triune God never stopped for a rest six days after creating the world. Hebrews tells us there is a rest, the one God rested on the seventh day, and it is still there for us to enter by faith. So the rest on the 'seventh day' was not literally God stopping work as the Exodus metaphor suggests, and it wasn't a 24 hour break, but it is a spiritual relationship God is calling us into, that continues today, or rather, while it is called 'Today' (Heb 3&4).

The Sabbath was given for man to follow, it was never stated to include God. Those days were most certainly literal, there is no biblical indication to believe otherwise. There is no basis, that I can see, to think they were anything but literal days.

The Hebrew Sabbath was certainly literal, though the Law also had weeks of weeks, a sabbatical year every seven years, and even a year of Jubilee every seven weeks of years, so I don't think God felt the six day creation analogy only applied to human days.

I see no solid basis to say the days were literal. the only reference to a six day creation, as I said, are in the middle of a metaphor where God identifies himself with the weary labourer. But God doesn't grow weary.

Meanwhile Genesis doesn't say the world was created in six days and the days mentioned don't seem to fit literal Hebrew calendar days.

I'm not a student of the Talmud so I really can't comment on those other theories you espouse to. I will say though that by and large those alternate theories were in a distinct minority of rabbidic scholars.

Perhaps, though the Rabbis were deeply into allegorical meanings.

What we can say is that allegorical interpretations of the Genesis creation account were quite common in first century Judaism. Unless you want to argue that it is sheer coincidence that the two most famous first century Jewish writers, the only two both of us have really come across, just happen to be the wild exception of Jews who thought Genesis was allegorical.

The metaphor was solely for our benefit, not God's.

The six day part was for our benefit too. People desperately needed the rest. The command was not about the Sabbath being Holy because that was the day God rested. The command was about social justice. Look at one of the two other used that

The word 'refreshed' that God uses to describe himself in the metaphor is only used two other places where the bible. We also see it in Exodus 23:12 Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed. God was concerned about the foreigners, the children of the lowliest woman servants, even the animals, out working in the fields in the hot sun, day after day. He was identifying with them in their need for rest.


Look at he command in Deuteronomy.

Deu 5:12 "'Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you.
13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

Again with the anthropomorphic metaphors, God doesn't get tired and he doesn't have arms and hands. But see the reason for the sabbath? It is for the servants. The Israelites were to remember when they had been slaves and treat their servants well.

Of course if you read the account in Genesis and Exodus literally, the reason the Sabbath is Holy is because God rested the seventh day. But Jesus didn't take it literally. Not only God keep on working 'until now', but he completely contradicted the literal reason given in Genesis and Exodus. Mar 2:27 And he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Sabbath observance was not instituted because God rested seven days after creation the world. The Sabbath was instituted because people needed it.

I would go along with you if I didn't think the Bible spoke clearly on this issue, but it does.

But we don't have a clear statement, we have metaphors which some people think should be taken literally.

If He didn't mean to tell us, why did He give us the information?

What information? That he has arms and hands? that he was refreshed after a rest? Why should we think our work schedule is anything like God's?

This verse is just saying that God isn't constrained by time, I don't know how we seem to make more out if it than that. Yet He was very specific when telling us regarding the creation timeline. Why would God, who isn't constrained by time, give himself such a tight timeline? Could it be to teach us something?

Is the 'day of the Lord' a tight timeline? God is outside time, he also operates in time, and he uses time figuratively throughout the bible.

I don't see how Creationists can take such powerful statements of God's relationship with time, given in both Old and New Testaments, obviously something God thought important, and the one thing Peter told us not to overlook, and go and make it as vague and woolly as they do. Of course I know the reason they do, because these two verses totally sink any insistence that the six days have to be six literal 24 hour days.

It doesn't just say God is not constrained by time. It says his days can be very different from our days. They can run on a completely different timescale to ours. And both Peter and Moses brought the subject up in the context of the creation of the world. Moses was the only in the whole bible one to mention a six day creation. You really should listen to what he has to say, especially when he is talking in the context of creation.

I survived with my checkbook intact.

Ah good

 

[Assyrian]

We have never had a problem with divine fiat.

A Divine FIAT.

Is that something like a Popemobile?

 

[vossler]

And yet one of the main Epicureans was Lucretius, who wrote an entire poem On The Nature of Things systematically describing why nature was not created by God and how man could have free will in a deterministic world. Besides, at Areopagus Paul would not have been speaking just to the Epicureans and Stoics who had engaged him but to all present.

I won't begin to even act like I know much of what Lucretius believed or didn't believe, I'm not learned enough of those times to make any sort of an accurate assessment. I'll defer this area to you...

More importantly, your own theologians are telling us that we cannot have a proper view of the Creator God without having a proper view of the six-day creation. Eg http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v3/i4/doctrine.asp :

[/color]Consider the discussion regarding Genesis 1–11 as to what type of literature this passage contains: myth, allegory, or true history. The record presented in this passage reveals God as the all powerful Participant. Since God can have no more complex counterpart of Himself, it is impossible to allegorise this passage. God's testimony is clearly set out—'God said', 'God saw', 'God moved', 'God divided', 'God called', 'God made'. To treat God's testimony literally is to take the creation of Eve for Adam's sake literally; also the meaning of 'day'.
Unless the foundation of Genesis 1–11 is literally what it says it is, many New Testament doctrines fall and the integrity of the whole Word of God is at stake. Furthermore, God's testimony concerning Himself as Participator is flatly denied. Surely a denial of God in one part of the Bible produces profound impact on our responses to other parts of His Word—and affects the way we think and behave.

First of all a bit of a disclaimer...I don't particularly like to align myself with any organization, no matter how alike our philosophies are. I support AiG and what they are trying to do, but that doesn't mean I necessarily support everything they do, although in this case I agree 100%.

And yet Paul not only preaches Christ without this "foundation", he manages to paint God as Participator without putting a single word in for how recent the earth is or the fact that it was created in six days?

If the foundation is well known among believers and non-believers alike, it wouldn't appear to be a subject that needed much discussion.

What could this mean, other than that Paul did not consider these things fundamental?

I don't know, that's an interesting question that doesn't have an easy answer. I believe that like today, we don't start with Genesis but with Christ. Now after we teach Christ it is then that Genesis comes into its proper place as the foundation to which Jesus and His ministry is built upon, but Jesus should come first.

No, the timing wouldn't have been worse. If God had told them about evolution then would anybody have believed it? 1800 years before Darwin and Mendel and the discovery of DNA? This is precisely why the Bible never contains any scientific concepts which the people of their day had not already discovered.

He didn't have to come out and tell them about evolution, at least not with a frontal assault. There could have been a hundred ways to bring the idea into the realm of possibility, yet not a single one was used.

We have never had a problem with divine fiat.

Only certain divine fiats!

Well, if you want to put it as Jesus taking liberties, be my guest. Jesus seems so liberal with the Torah that next to him we evolutionists look like fundies.

That's pretty extreme, I don't know if you should go there.

That is part of my point, but "taking liberties" makes it sound like something one does without thought or reason, much as Bishop Spong would "take liberties" with the Resurrection while denying its centrality. But one thing that has been emphasized here is that God accommodates His revelation according to where His people are. If you were to ask "If the Big Bang really happened why wouldn't God have told us" our response would be "How could God possibly describe the Big Bang to a bunch of prescientific Hebrews?"

Probably a bad choice of words, sorry but that was what came to mind. If, as you say, God accommodates His revelation according to where His people are, then you're saying His people couldn't have handled Genesis 1 to say something not nearly as specific as "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" what could possibly have been wrong with "and that was the end of a long period of time, the first era" or something like that? People most certainly could have comprehended that.

Their level of knowledge, remember, was such that they could not even smelt iron without Philistine help or approval during Saul's kingship. And yet you expect God to tell them about spacetime and DNA and all that?

No nothing specific like that, just the truth.

The way I see it, when Jesus reveals a "moral accommodation" in the command (or permission) to issue a certificate of divorce it comes as an indirect confirmation. The biggest possible problem with the argument of accommodation would be that "How do you know God reveals in such a way?" Well, God Himself confirmed it right there. Jesus essentially tells the Pharisees that at the time, the Jews were not ready for a definitive treatment of the morality of marriage and divorce, and so God (or Moses) instead of giving them the most complete description of morality gives them a stopgap measure to curb the problem.

I'm alright with this, nothing too out of the ordinary here. God told us the accommodation, man himself didn't have to develop one.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Jesus Himself says that Moses' commands concerning divorce were not complete or exhaustive, but only what was sufficient and profitable for a society with that given level of morality. And again remember that the whole purpose of the Torah is morality. So why is it such a big fuss when we say that Moses' descriptions concerning creation were not complete or exhaustive in a scientific sense, but only what was sufficient and profitable for a society with a given level of scientific knowledge - enough to tell them not to worship idols and to keep the Sabbath?

It isn't a big fuss for me, I'm content with what we got. The problem only comes in when we attempt to change that which is said to accommodate our own feeble desires.

How did He reach the point where He knew how to make these changes? By being the Second Person of the Trinity? One must remember that Jesus was fully man, as well as being fully God. I believe that Jesus made these changes speaking from Spirit-assisted intellect, just as we today interpret the Scriptures from Spirit-assisted intellect.

Here's where we begin to deviate again.

This is not without precedent. When Jesus performed miracles, He may have pronounced His divinity, but He was employing His humanity. If He could do miracles only because He was the Son of God, then we (not being the Son of God) obviously would never be able to do what He did. And yet there are miracle workers among Christians. The only conclusion is that Jesus' miracles were the result of the Holy Spirit operating through an ordinary (yet sinless) human, just as miracles today are the result of the Holy Spirit operating through ordinary humans.

No matter how you look at it, Jesus was anything but ordinary. Granted, we have been given some of the same powers He had, but never with the same insight or heavenly authority.

In the same way, I believe that Jesus understood Scriptures not as its Author but as a man with Spirit-assisted intellect. The Holy Spirit prompted His intellect to see certain things that were present or latent in the Scriptures as He knew them and He expressed these things. While I will not go so far as to say that TEism was whispered into my ear by the Holy Spirit I will say that thus far God does not seem to have an issue with me holding to it.

There are many people who just like you would say the same thing, Jim Jones, David Kordesh to name but two. Not to say TEism is on par with those extremes but just that we all like to say that we're led by the Spirit. The only real test is to check the fruit first.

 

[shernren]

BTW, you could always wiki Lucretius, I had no idea what he believed in either until this morning.

First of all a bit of a disclaimer...I don't particularly like to align myself with any organization, no matter how alike our philosophies are. I support AiG and what they are trying to do, but that doesn't mean I necessarily support everything they do, although in this case I agree 100%.

I know what you mean, but to my knowledge AiG is one of the most reputable creationist organisations around with more well-thought-out comments than most others, so if I ever say "creationists believe this" and need to cite something I would normally turn to AiG.

I don't know, that's an interesting question that doesn't have an easy answer. I believe that like today, we don't start with Genesis but with Christ. Now after we teach Christ it is then that Genesis comes into its proper place as the foundation to which Jesus and His ministry is built upon, but Jesus should come first.

Fair enough.

That's pretty extreme, I don't know if you should go there.

I was only playing off your phrase of "taking liberties". Liberties -> liberal. I'll grant that what I said there was a little loose.

Probably a bad choice of words, sorry but that was what came to mind. If, as you say, God accommodates His revelation according to where His people are, then you're saying His people couldn't have handled Genesis 1 to say something not nearly as specific as "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" what could possibly have been wrong with "and that was the end of a long period of time, the first era" or something like that? People most certainly could have comprehended that.

Yes, that's what I'm saying, that God's people would not have handled it well. Remember that up till about two or three centuries ago people had little notion of processes that occur on geological time-scales. They did not realize that mountains move, or organisms evolve, or that the light reaching us in the sky must have taken billions of years of travel time, or that radioactive elements decay over millions of years. AFAIK, the first conception of geological time-scales was when Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the earth to be 100 million years in 1862 - and that is 1/45 of the age we accept today.

The result is that people had no mental handle on which to hang the idea of a long, but finite, period of time. This is because (again, AFAIK) they connected time to physical processes, even as we do today. Today we define a second as the amount of time light takes to cross a certain (very short) distance. In the past, people might have defined an hour as the time over which a certain candle burns a certain amount, or a waterwheel turns a certain number of times. They would have seen a day as the time from one sunrise to another. They would have counted months by the phases of the moon and years by the passing of the seasons.

But would they have recognized any process by which they could mark off, say, 2 million years? Hardly. Today we can somehow imagine one continent moving away from another at, say, the rate of 10 meters per 1 million years; in their time, they could only recognize the mountains and the valleys and the skies as unchanging - so unchanging that they could compare God's love to the mountains surrounding Jerusalem.

I am making a long trip here, but my destination is that most ancient cultures either had a recent, catastrophic creation or a world which had existed infinitely and had never been created. They could not imagine a process which would have changed the world over 2 million years (because they could not even imagine 2 million years), and so if the universe had lasted that long then it must always have been the way it is today, i.e. there was never a time when it was different and thus there was never a point when it was created. (This is precisely the position of the scoffers in 2 Peter 3: if nobody created the universe how could anybody destroy it?) On the other hand, if the universe was created then it must have been created recently, as seen in the many creation myths of the world (of which few, AFAIK, put the creation of the world as an event in the distant past).

Effectively, then, these were the choices available to God: to tell the Israelites that the universe had existed for an infinite age and had never been created, or to tell them that the universe had been created in a very short time recently. Guess which He chose?

No matter how you look at it, Jesus was anything but ordinary. Granted, we have been given some of the same powers He had, but never with the same insight or heavenly authority.

Shall we leave the Incarnation for another day?

There are many people who just like you would say the same thing, Jim Jones, David Kordesh to name but two. Not to say TEism is on par with those extremes but just that we all like to say that we're led by the Spirit. The only real test is to check the fruit first.

Yes, check the fruit. When I argue for TEism I rarely cite "I think the Holy Spirit is okay with it" as a main reason; having said that, it is true for me at least, and so I brought it up.

 

[relspace]

Many Christians hold the view that the Creation story was myth. I believe God created the earth in seven literal days, placed Adam and Eve in the garden where they sinned.

I believe the first chapters of Genesis is mythical in the sense that it is not a first hand eye witness account but either an inspired homiletic description or a story passed down in oral traditions so long that it includes more symbolism than historical accuracy. This is not a "creation for dummies" book to explain how God created the world. Its purpose is to explain the basic nature of mankind's relationship to God. God is our creator and the creator of our world and through disobedience to God we have brought suffering upon ourselves.

I do not believe in the creation of the universe in 7 literal days and I do not believe in the creation by God of the things of this universe by magic spells, snapping fingers, wiggling His noise, or any other fanciful hollywood movie special effects. God could create the world and everything in it because He knew how to do it.

I do not believe that God used necromancy to create Adam as an animated golem of dust or Eve as a reanimation of someone's body part.

My question is for those who don't believe in a literal creation...Do you believe in the Adam and Eve story?

I believe in a literal Adam and Eve, two homo-sapien infants adopted and raised by God to understand themselves to be person's rather than animals. By fulfilling the role of parent to Adam and Eve, God created the human mind which is created by the information that is passed from parent to child ever since this time.

Effectively, if Adam never existed, then there is no need for Christ. God never "made" man perfect and in His own image...we just evolved. To evolve, means to better yourselves in a way. We go from unintelligent apes to intelligent humans and we keep getting smarter and smarter until we eventually become perfect.

I agree absolutely!

However, Genesis NEVER said Adam and Ever were perfect only "very good". If they were perfect it is only in the sense that they were exactly what God desired when He set out to create the universe: they were His children. This is part of what it means when it says that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. For when you create that which is like yourself you are creating children.

But there is another sense in which Adam and Eve were created in the image of God and that is as a mirror image: finite beings with infinite potentiality as the perfect image of God's infinite actuality. Adam and Eve were perfect for an eternal relationship with God, in which God could give to them without limit and Adam and Eve could receive from God without limit.

Actually all life is in the image of God in THIS sense. And for a very long time God nurtured, raised, cultivated, bred, shepherded, and taught living things to help them achieve their greater potentiality. God's intimate participation in the development of life, finally achieved a form of life with the ability to support mental life which God could communicate with directly and teach as the children of His mind.

That's not what's happening. The bible states God created man in His perfect image, then through sin, man begins to go backwards. Though technology is improving, our morals and way of life is going backwards.

Yes indeed! With the gift of mental life, man was given an order of life and freewill which dwarfed that of the rest of life on the planet to near insignificance. But with that power came responsibility which mankind, from the first two representatives refused. Power without responsibility and the guidance of God led to the inevitable corruption and degradation of everthing mankind did and touched.

And so God was brought from saying that EVERYTHING god created was "very good", to saying that God was "sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart." In order to redeem the potential of mankind he had no choice but destroy everything and begin again with the one man on the earth who was different.

But this is not something He is willing to do again: "never again will I curse the ground for the sake of man, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy the every living thing as I have done." So since that time God broke up humanity into peoples seperated by language and culture encouraging diversity, so that there would always be those who are different like Noah was, and so that mankind would never again create a united dominion of evil over the earth.

Instead, God could use the forces of history to raise up not just individuals who were different but a whole nation set apart in whom the promise of mankind's buried potential could be kept alive. Well I am sure that God worked His will among many peoples and cultures to do this, but in Israel at least He caused there to be kept an honest record (what other history of the sins of a people is there?) to tell the story of His work of redemption to the world.

Simply speaking, if we're just evolving, we don't need Christ. If there was no Adam, sin never entered the world. What do you non-creationist believers say about this?

Science studies only the objectively observable and measurable, and by doing this it has achieved a great understanding of everything which has this property of being objectively observable and measurable - namely all which is part of the physical world. But God and spirit are niether objectively observable nor measurable. So when science looks at an animal it sees a very sophisticated machine. And when science looks at the process of development of life on this planet it sees a mechanical process we call evolution. Science by its very nature cannot see the role of God in this process.

So it is was never just evolving. All living things have the innate capacity for creativity and learning, but creativity and learning does not occur in a vacuum. God was always there, nurturing, raising, cultivating, breeding, shepherding, and teaching in the participatory process in which all living things must be created in order to be alive.

But Adam and Eve were truly the children of God. Their bodies were indeed primates descended from the beginnings of primitive live on this planet raised up by the work of God and His angels. But in mind they were the direct descendents of God, adopted and raised as his children no less so than children have been raised by human parents ever since.

But the process of parenthood must take the child from the state of infancy, where the parent prevents the child from doing anything in which the child will come to harm, to the state of responsibility where the child knows the dangers he must avoid and cares for himself. Absolutely the only way to do this is through an intemediate state where the parent gives the child a command and trusts the child to obey.

A parent does not do this frivolously with a test. God's commandment was essential and unavoidable. I believe Lucifer acted within his instructions to encourage all living things to realize their greater potentialities. But all depended on Adam and Eve's obedence to God in order to learn responsibility. Adam and Eve's disobedience made things more difficult, but their denial of responsibility and assigning the blame to Lucifer was devastating. As a result God pursued the only course possible which would keep the potential of mankind alive, while Lucifer and his angles were transformed from angels of God into parasites feeding off the resulting distortion of human life. Thus the first man and woman brought the seed of evil into the world, which has indeed grown like a thing alive ever since.

 

[Assyrian]

He didn't have to come out and tell them about evolution, at least not with a frontal assault. There could have been a hundred ways to bring the idea into the realm of possibility, yet not a single one was used.

How about saying 'let the earth bring forth living creatures'? How about describing the creation as 'the genealogy of the heavens and the earth'?

That's pretty extreme, I don't know if you should go there.

I think Shernren has a point. Jesus was not just the disciples' Lord and Saviour. He was also their Rabbi teaching them how to read and understand both the OT scriptures and his own figurative language.

Probably a bad choice of words, sorry but that was what came to mind. If, as you say, God accommodates His revelation according to where His people are, then you're saying His people couldn't have handled Genesis 1 to say something not nearly as specific as "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" what could possibly have been wrong with "and that was the end of a long period of time, the first era" or something like that? People most certainly could have comprehended that.

Then we would miss out on our own Sabbath rest as well as the beautiful picture of God identifying with our human frailty and weariness.

There are things I would have liked the bible to say differently. As an ex-Catholic, Jesus saying 'this is my body' seems like a bad move. But however God inspired the scriptures, people would find a way to misinterpret it, and God always seems more interested in revealing deep truths through figurative illustration than worry about people misunderstanding. Besides there has always been enough in Genesis for people who really think about what it says to figure those can't be literal days.

It is worth pointing out that 'accommodation' also explains why the bible uses geocentric language.

 

[vossler]

BTW, you could always wiki Lucretius, I had no idea what he believed in either until this morning.

I was reflecting on how much of what I supposedly know is nothing more than what someone else, like me, posted on Wiki. Does that make it true? Maybe, but then again maybe not. The only truth that I can truly rely on is God's Word, everything else is just varying degrees of speculation of one sort or another.

I know what you mean, but to my knowledge AiG is one of the most reputable creationist organisations around with more well-thought-out comments than most others, so if I ever say "creationists believe this" and need to cite something I would normally turn to AiG.

I understand, I do the same thing.

I was only playing off your phrase of "taking liberties". Liberties -> liberal. I'll grant that what I said there was a little loose.

Gotcha.

Yes, that's what I'm saying, that God's people would not have handled it well. Remember that up till about two or three centuries ago people had little notion of processes that occur on geological time-scales. They did not realize that mountains move, or organisms evolve, or that the light reaching us in the sky must have taken billions of years of travel time, or that radioactive elements decay over millions of years. AFAIK, the first conception of geological time-scales was when Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the earth to be 100 million years in 1862 - and that is 1/45 of the age we accept today.

What would have made the example I provided "and that was the end of a long period of time, the first era" so hard to understand? There isn't anything scientific or difficult to grasp.

The result is that people had no mental handle on which to hang the idea of a long, but finite, period of time. This is because (again, AFAIK) they connected time to physical processes, even as we do today. Today we define a second as the amount of time light takes to cross a certain (very short) distance. In the past, people might have defined an hour as the time over which a certain candle burns a certain amount, or a waterwheel turns a certain number of times. They would have seen a day as the time from one sunrise to another. They would have counted months by the phases of the moon and years by the passing of the seasons.

I hear what you're saying but I can't really grab a hold of it. I can't see why people in biblical times couldn't grasp long periods or unknown periods of time. Why couldn't they grasp that something took many moons to complete, no number needed to be attached just the notion of a long period of time. Instead what they had was a short, very defined period of time, something they, and by extension us, could easily identify to. Now here we are attempting to say that this precise period of time is no longer true but only a metaphor for something else. How someone can, without some strong contextual evidence, mentally put their arms around that is difficult for me to see.

But would they have recognized any process by which they could mark off, say, 2 million years? Hardly. Today we can somehow imagine one continent moving away from another at, say, the rate of 10 meters per 1 million years; in their time, they could only recognize the mountains and the valleys and the skies as unchanging - so unchanging that they could compare God's love to the mountains surrounding Jerusalem.

There really wasn't a need to mark off large periods of time, just an indication that large periods of time were used.

I am making a long trip here, but my destination is that most ancient cultures either had a recent, catastrophic creation or a world which had existed infinitely and had never been created. They could not imagine a process which would have changed the world over 2 million years (because they could not even imagine 2 million years), and so if the universe had lasted that long then it must always have been the way it is today, i.e. there was never a time when it was different and thus there was never a point when it was created. (This is precisely the position of the scoffers in 2 Peter 3: if nobody created the universe how could anybody destroy it?) On the other hand, if the universe was created then it must have been created recently, as seen in the many creation myths of the world (of which few, AFAIK, put the creation of the world as an event in the distant past).

Let me ask you this, why should God's Word be read entirely different today than it was yesterday? Isn't God the same yesterday, today and tomorrow? Do we, because of scientific discoveries, change the way we read God's Word? I hope not!

God's Word is timeless, it transcends everything, nothing can dilute or change it's meaning ever. Yet man is constantly trying to change it, especially in modern times. Never before has His Word been under the barrage of attack that it is presently enduring. The sooner we grab hold of that unchanging truth, the better we'll all be off.

Effectively, then, these were the choices available to God: to tell the Israelites that the universe had existed for an infinite age and had never been created, or to tell them that the universe had been created in a very short time recently. Guess which He chose?

Essentially what you're saying is either He could have told them the truth or lied and because He didn't think they could handle the truth He lied.

Yes, check the fruit. When I argue for TEism I rarely cite "I think the Holy Spirit is okay with it" as a main reason; having said that, it is true for me at least, and so I brought it up.

Of course you'll speak of those things that you believe the Holy Spirit has led you to, as will I.

 

[vossler]

The passage doesn't challenge a recent creation, sure, if Jesus was talking about the beginnings of the human race, and the world was created just six days before it, it was in the same general period. Of if the world had been created 4.5 billion years before God made man, then talking about that beginning of mankind didn't include the creation of the world. But this passage is used by creationists to try to contradict an old earth. It simply doesn't apply. Jesus was talking about the creation of man.

Which happened to coincide with the creation of the world.

However if people insist, without any basis in Jesus words or in the context, that Jesus was talking about the creation of the world, then you run into the contradiction. Man was not created in the beginning of creation but at the end.

A few days at the beginning when looking at through the context of thousands of years doesn't in any way confuse me or lead me to believe that an event wasn't at the beginning, why should it?

I presume it because that is what Jesus tells us. John 5:17"My Father is working until now, and I am working."
The Triune God never stopped for a rest six days after creating the world. Hebrews tells us there is a rest, the one God rested on the seventh day, and it is still there for us to enter by faith. So the rest on the 'seventh day' was not literally God stopping work as the Exodus metaphor suggests, and it wasn't a 24 hour break, but it is a spiritual relationship God is calling us into, that continues today, or rather, while it is called 'Today' (Heb 3&4).

I'm sorry but I can't follow you here. Of course God is working today and everyday. God doesn't need rest, but He chose to demonstrate it to us so that we would recognize it's importance to us. Since that time there is no indication that God rests anymore, hence John 5:17.

Meanwhile Genesis doesn't say the world was created in six days and the days mentioned don't seem to fit literal Hebrew calendar days.

What kind of calendar do they fit?

What we can say is that allegorical interpretations of the Genesis creation account were quite common in first century Judaism. Unless you want to argue that it is sheer coincidence that the two most famous first century Jewish writers, the only two both of us have really come across, just happen to be the wild exception of Jews who thought Genesis was allegorical.

You obviously know a lot more about what people thought than I'll ever know. It appears that I'm just not able to see things as clearly as you are able to. It's a though we're looking through different perscriptive lenses and you're seeing things entirely different than I am. Given that my lense can't focus on what you're saying, I'll just have to leave that alone and not attempt to comment further.

The six day part was for our benefit too. People desperately needed the rest. The command was not about the Sabbath being Holy because that was the day God rested. The command was about social justice. Look at one of the two other used that

The word 'refreshed' that God uses to describe himself in the metaphor is only used two other places where the bible. We also see it in Exodus 23:12 Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed. God was concerned about the foreigners, the children of the lowliest woman servants, even the animals, out working in the fields in the hot sun, day after day. He was identifying with them in their need for rest.

I agree the command was about rest, but it was also about the Sabbath being holy and set apart. This includes acknowledging God and His work in our lives. It means far more than just not working.

Of course if you read the account in Genesis and Exodus literally, the reason the Sabbath is Holy is because God rested the seventh day. But Jesus didn't take it literally. Not only God keep on working 'until now', but he completely contradicted the literal reason given in Genesis and Exodus. Mar 2:27 And he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

I don't believe He contradicted anything. It would appear to me you're making this more complicated than it is. It was simply an edic in order for us to step away or rest from our daily concerns and to remember Him.

But we don't have a clear statement, we have metaphors which some people think should be taken literally.

It's clear to me.

What information? That he has arms and hands? that he was refreshed after a rest? Why should we think our work schedule is anything like God's?

No, the information for us to figure out the age of the earth by tracing back the genealogies.

Is the 'day of the Lord' a tight timeline? God is outside time, he also operates in time, and he uses time figuratively throughout the bible.

No the day of the Lord is simply a loose description of time.

I don't see how Creationists can take such powerful statements of God's relationship with time, given in both Old and New Testaments, obviously something God thought important, and the one thing Peter told us not to overlook, and go and make it as vague and woolly as they do. Of course I know the reason they do, because these two verses totally sink any insistence that the six days have to be six literal 24 hour days.

One thing I don't do is take God's Word and "make it vague and woolly." Usually when one is accused of being a literalist, the last thing your charged with is being vague.

I've never seen 2 Peter as something that sinks six days, far from it, it actually reinforces it. It shows how powerful and awesome God is that even though He isn't constrained by time, he allowed Himself to be just so we could learn His principles.

Moses was the only one in the whole bible to mention a six day creation. You really should listen to what he has to say, especially when he is talking in the context of creation.

Did anyone else need to mention it? It is precisely because I listened to what he and the Holy Spirit had to say that I have learned the context and meaning of the story.

 

[vossler]

How about saying 'let the earth bring forth living creatures'? How about describing the creation as 'the genealogy of the heavens and the earth'?

Alright, if I were an evolutionist I could see this as you do, but what about those that aren't and are not looking for the Bible to support a scientific theory?

I think Shernren has a point. Jesus was not just the disciples' Lord and Saviour. He was also their Rabbi teaching them how to read and understand both the OT scriptures and his own figurative language.

I would most certainly agree that Jesus wasn't just their Lord and Saviour, they actually knew Him primarily as their Rabbi. Yes he taught them to read and understand the OT and how to understand and interpret some of it's figurative language, but to take that truth and apply it throughout Scripture and somehow presume all of it is figurative is a bit presumptive, wouldn't you say?

Then we would miss out on our own Sabbath rest as well as the beautiful picture of God identifying with our human frailty and weariness.

True, I guess that eliminates evolutionary theory from being a viable story.

There are things I would have liked the bible to say differently. As an ex-Catholic, Jesus saying 'this is my body' seems like a bad move. But however God inspired the scriptures, people would find a way to misinterpret it, and God always seems more interested in revealing deep truths through figurative illustration than worry about people misunderstanding. Besides there has always been enough in Genesis for people who really think about what it says to figure those can't be literal days.

I'm sure all of us have parts of the Bible we'd like God to have written differently. Yet as time goes on, it's quite amazing how those examples seem to become fewer and less of a problem. Isn't the Holy Spirit pretty cool!

 

[rmwilliamsll]

Let me ask you this, why should God's Word be read entirely different today than it was yesterday? Isn't God the same yesterday, today and tomorrow? Do we, because of scientific discoveries, change the way we read God's Word? I hope not!

God's Word is timeless, it transcends everything, nothing can dilute or change it's meaning ever. Yet man is constantly trying to change it, especially in modern times. Never before has His Word been under the barrage of attack that it is presently enduring. The sooner we grab hold of that unchanging truth, the better we'll all be off.

If God's Word is changeless, then why aren't all Christians reading it in Greek and Hebrew ONLY. Just the fact that we are reading translations means that it is not changeless.

Why should attributes of God, such as changelessness and perfection be transmitted into Scripture? Where does it say in the Scriptures that they share in these attributes of God?

If Scripture is timeless, then why is it so bound up with a time and a people? with a specific people and a specific person? why isn't it written as an abstract philosophy book rather than a history and a narrative? the form itself is very bound to time, bound to a specific place and time.

I suspect what you really are arguing is that the meaning transcends time and place, but that is certainly not what you are saying. What you are saying is that the text itself transcedences time and place and that is certainly not true . Mythology and stories put into the distant foggy past can transcedent time, Hanzel and Gretel transcend time but Isaiah and Jeremiah are very time bound, and to understand them requires understanding that specific time. There is little cultural context to fairy tales, yes some, but nowhere never the social.political.cultural context required to understand the Bible.

 

[shernren]

I hear what you're saying but I can't really grab a hold of it. I can't see why people in biblical times couldn't grasp long periods or unknown periods of time. Why couldn't they grasp that something took many moons to complete, no number needed to be attached just the notion of a long period of time. Instead what they had was a short, very defined period of time, something they, and by extension us, could easily identify to. Now here we are attempting to say that this precise period of time is no longer true but only a metaphor for something else. How someone can, without some strong contextual evidence, mentally put their arms around that is difficult for me to see.

Simply speaking, since those people could not comprehend processes spanning a long, but finite, period of time. Within their frameworks, they would have interpreted it as an infinite time (or a period of time so long as to be practically infinite). Which of the cultures of the Middle East ever conceived a universe with a long, yet finite, age?

And what I have said, of course, altogether sidesteps the significance of the order presented in the six days. Why present creation as a tasteless blancmange of processes operating unceasingly over uncountable years (possibly spilling over into infinity), when a framework of six neatly expresses it and fills it with theological wonder?

Essentially what you're saying is either He could have told them the truth or lied and because He didn't think they could handle the truth He lied.

Well, if you want to call it a lie, that's your prerogative. But I do not see any deception in what I believe God has done.

Let me ask you this, why should God's Word be read entirely different today than it was yesterday? Isn't God the same yesterday, today and tomorrow? Do we, because of scientific discoveries, change the way we read God's Word? I hope not!

Why does God's immutability imply that our interpretations of Scripture must be similarly immutable?

God's Word is timeless, it transcends everything, nothing can dilute or change it's meaning ever. Yet man is constantly trying to change it, especially in modern times. Never before has His Word been under the barrage of attack that it is presently enduring. The sooner we grab hold of that unchanging truth, the better we'll all be off.

"God's Word is timeless." I agree fully that Jesus coexisted/coexists in eternity past, present and future with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

But can we say the same of the Bible? There was a time when the Jews did not have Samuel and Chronicles. There was a time when the exiles did not have the Gospels. There was a time when the early Christians did not have the Epistles. Since when has the Bible claimed to be timeless? The Bible has clear beginnings; its authorship can be traced to specific people writing in response to specific needs, even when they are considered to be writing under the ambit of a divine compulsion to produce Scripture.

The Bible is a collection of words. Nothing less (words are powerful, and Jesus chose to be called a Word) and nothing more. A word is powerless without context or language or reality to be anchored in. Right from the beginning the meaning of the Bible hangs precariously on our knowledge of the world around: we cannot know what it means to say that "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." until we know what the heavens are and what the earth is, any more than we can gain anything from hearing Paul exposit the "baptism for the dead" in 1 Cor 15 without knowing what exactly the baptism for the dead is.

To the Jews, the "heavens" God created may well have been a solid, brassy firmament over their heads onto which stars were pasted and colored above by waters above the firmament.
To the early Christians, the "heavens" God created could have been the crystal spheres on which the planets were said to take their course around the earth.
To the modern Christian, the "heavens" God created are essentially vacuum dotted with dust and gasballs performing fusion.

Why is man constantly trying to change God's Word, especially as he becomes more and more modern? Why is it that science attacks what the authors of Genesis clearly intended to express, that the heavens are cast solid above us and that beyond them are a layer of water?

Because the more we learn about the world, the more we know about what our words mean. Why should we be surprised that our scientific appraisals of Scripture change over time, considering how our scientific appraisals of the world have changed over time as well?

Meanwhile the core of spiritual truth which undergirds and binds together the Bible waits patiently as we squabble over the isolated outcroppings it makes into the real world of science.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

hear what you're saying but I can't really grab a hold of it. I can't see why people in biblical times couldn't grasp long periods or unknown periods of time.

since those people could not comprehend processes spanning a long, but finite, period of time.

try to explain the difference between alepha-null and alepha-one to someone on the street today.

it really isn't an easy proposition without an immense amount of background knowledge. knowledge that the ANE simply did not have.

 

[shernren]

This is the first time I have seen someone say that "God's Word is timeless", and while I know that the strict sense of "uncreated" is not meant here, I wonder how familiar this mindset would be to fundamentalists:

Many prophets have brought messages from God to various peoples which were inscribed into sacred books. Four books well known to Muslims are the Torah revealed to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Gospel (Injil) to Jesus, and the Quran to Muhammad. Jews and Christians are considered “People of the Book” because of the original revelations to Moses and Jesus.
However, Muslims believe the Torah and the Gospel have been changed and corrupted over time. Consequently, the Quran was needed to correct the errors in the corrupted books. It finalizes the truth from God as transmitted from the archangel Gabriel, recited by the prophet Muhammad, and written down into the Arabic language.
Traditional Islam considers the Quran as identical with the “mother of the book” in heaven. The Quran contains the very words of God (Quran 85:21-22; 43:3-4; 13:39). God’s revelation came not through a person but through a written record. Islam then is a book religion. It was revealed from Gabriel to Muhammad in the Arabic language. Arabic thus becomes intertwined with the revelation itself. Any translation into another language loses its original authenticity.
Traditional Islam views the Quran as a miracle. Therefore literary or historical criticism of the Quran is unacceptable. To question or defame the Quran is to do the same to God. Orthodox Islam has generally affirmed that the Quran is uncreated. It is God’s word and a quality of God’s nature. Some scholars teach that Muhammad’s speech in delivering the Quran verbally iterates divine speech.
The Quaran is composed of 114 chapters or suras, and each chapter has verses or ayas. There are 6,616 verses and 77,934 words. Muslims are challenged to memorize all of it and to recite it in the mosques and in daily prayers. Eighty-six chapters were revealed in Mecca, and twenty-eight in Medina.
​

from http://www.apologeticsindex.org/273-perfect-quran

We need to remember that the Bible's first title for Christians was not "people of the Book", but "followers of the Way"; that our ultimate revelation is not a book but a Person.

 

[CaliforniaJosiah]

Many Christians hold the view that the Creation story was myth. I believe God created the earth in seven literal days, placed Adam and Eve in the garden where they sinned.

My question is for those who don't believe in a literal creation...Do you believe in the Adam and Eve story? Effectively, if Adam never existed, then there is no need for Christ. God never "made" man perfect and in His own image...we just evolved. To evolve, means to better yourselves in a way. We go from unintelligent apes to intelligent humans and we keep getting smarter and smarter until we eventually become perfect.

That's not what's happening. The bible states God created man in His perfect image, then through sin, man begins to go backwards. Though technology is improving, our morals and way of life is going backwards.

Simply speaking, if we're just evolving, we don't need Christ. If there was no Adam, sin never entered the world. What do you non-creationist believers say about this?

Just some thoughts (that's all)....


1. Many accept the Bible as infallible, inerrant - even literal. But they don't necessarily accept that every verse is to be taken in EVERY possible way. Follow? In other words, a Scripture may have ONE meaning - to be taken in ONE way, not necessarily in every possible way some one can envision.


2. There is also the issue of whether the Bible should be considered in the context of the time/culture/mileu in which it was written (the author's) OR if it should be considered in the context of the time/culture/milaeu of which it is read (the readers). Was it written primarily to a certain audience and we should see it through that context or was it written primarily for us? There are people on both sides of this issue - and it strongly impacts this question.


3. I'm a senior in college, majoring in Physics. Science (as we embrace it) is pretty new. Roots can go back as far as 300 BC in Greece (maybe - that's really stretching it) but most would place it's beginnings perhaps in the 17th century. We have bought into it. STRONGLY. The mindset - with all it's assumptions - is taught (unquestioned) in preschool and throughout our education. We are a material, physical, scientific people. It's very, very much a part of our "world view." And it is for Christians, too. It is a part of the "glasses" we all wear. I think it "colors" what we "see." We just tend to assume that what SEEMS like modern science, is. That what SEEMS like geology, biology, physics, is. I think that should be examined. There are MANY Scriptures that can CLEARLY be interpreted as teaching the world is small, square and flat. And IF we assume that they are addressing earth science, astrophysics, etc. - that they are science - that interpretation is the most obvious ("literal"). But are they teaching geology? Is the issue science? OR are these verses teaching theology? Ah, we have all those many, many verses - and since we KNOW the world is round and since we now "see" that these aren't addressing science but rather God, we nearly all conclude that they are NOT teaching that the world if small, square and flat - in fact, they aren't teaching ANYTHING AT ALL about science. Some would conclude the same is true with the account(s) in question here.


4. A close examination of Gensis 1-2 is interesting.

1:1 This verse, like many others, celebrates God as the Creator.

1:2. Creation is already here. The Earth is here. It's an ocean, with no dry land.

1:3-25. Each category of creation around us is celebrated. God is the creator. It is GOOD!

1:26-31. God creates people - a special creation.

2:4. This paralles 1:1.

2:5 Creation is already here. The Earth is here. It's a desert with no water.

2:6. God brings water to the surface.

2:7 God creates man (but not woman) from dust

2:8 God creates paradise.

2:21 God creates woman. From his rib


Just some thoughts...


Pax


- Josiah

 

[EnemyPartyII]

Of course God's word changes. How else do you account for the difference between the old and new Covenant?

 

[Assyrian]

Which happened to coincide with the creation of the world.

Sure. As long as you are right about that six day thing. But it doesn't matter because Jesus was talking about the creation of man.

A few days at the beginning when looking at through the context of thousands of years doesn't in any way confuse me or lead me to believe that an event wasn't at the beginning, why should it?

I thought the creation of the world was supposed to last six days? How many thousands or billions of years followed doesn't make any difference. Day one was at the beginning of creation and the sixth day was at the end. If you think Jesus said man was formed at the beginning if the creation of the world, then he got it wrong. According to the six day timetable man was formed at the end of the creation.

I'm sorry but I can't follow you here. Of course God is working today and everyday. God doesn't need rest, but He chose to demonstrate it to us so that we would recognize it's importance to us. Since that time there is no indication that God rests anymore, hence John 5:17.

Jesus didn't just say God has been working since his rest on the seventh day of creation. God never stopped working.

And while God doesn't need rest, he described himself as though he were a weary labourer who rests for a day and is refreshed after it. But it is a metaphor, just as God ceasing work is a metaphor.

What kind of calendar do they fit?

A metaphorical one.

Hebrew calendar days begin in the evening. But the evening of each day in Genesis, that is, the begining of each day comes after all the work of that period of creation has taken place. Hebrew calendar days don't line up with a six day creation.

If we take them as literal days, then we have a period of creation followed by each of the six days. So creation occurs over a much longer period, and while the six days act as some sort of markers, they are not consecutive days. Seasons, days, years, pass between each of six days.

If you want to read it as Moses said in Exodus that the world was created 'in six days', then that doesn't fit the days in Genesis. After all the heavens and the earth were created before day one even began. It only works if you read the Exodus days figuratively, so for example, the days of creation cover not just the six days, but each of the days also refers to the whole period that went before.

Or you can say that the contradiction between the Genesis days and the Hebrew calendar day, which after all was based on the Sabbath and God's rest, tells us that the days in Genesis weren't meant literally. Literal days would fit the biblical calendar.

You obviously know a lot more about what people thought than I'll ever know. It appears that I'm just not able to see things as clearly as you are able to. It's a though we're looking through different perscriptive lenses and you're seeing things entirely different than I am. Given that my lense can't focus on what you're saying, I'll just have to leave that alone and not attempt to comment further.

That's ok. I'd recommend having a look at some of the stuff the Church Fathers wrote, or Josephus and Philo. Not to try and find passages that support this or that pov, but simply to get an idea of how people in another culture thought, a culture much closer to to the NT we love. Some of their ideas and arguments seem frankly weird. But as they say, the past is another country, and travel broadens the mind

I agree the command was about rest, but it was also about the Sabbath being holy and set apart. This includes acknowledging God and His work in our lives. It means far more than just not working.

Sure. But God had a habit of ignoring his people's holy behaviour when they ignored social justice and people were being oppressed. Now in the NT the Sabbath is optional. Rom 14:5 One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. The real Sabbath is the rest we are called to enter in God (Heb 3&4). Like other OT laws the Sabbath was a shadow of the reality in Christ, but the shadow was given in a way that brought social justice and rest of the down trodden. That principle doesn't change.

I don't believe He contradicted anything. It would appear to me you're making this more complicated than it is. It was simply an edic in order for us to step away or rest from our daily concerns and to remember Him.

If you read Genesis and Exodus literally, the Sabbath was instituted because the seventh day was Holy ground. God rested on the seventh day and that meant the seventh day was holy. As a result the Israelites were obliged to keep it holy.

When Jesus said The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, he completely contradicted the literal interpretation.

It's clear to me.

Show me a plain non metaphorical statement that the world was created in six days.

No, the information for us to figure out the age of the earth by tracing back the genealogies.

Assuming they are literal, and without gaps, that only brings as far as Adam, and out of any human history.

Then we have the Sabbath commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy. If you want to read both literally, then God created the world in six literal days, and he freed the Israelites with one literal arm and one literal hand. And he got tired after creating everything, but that is alright because he was refreshed after having a rest.

So which of these are literal information about God?

No the day of the Lord is simply a loose description of time.

As are the days of Genesis.

One thing I don't do is take God's Word and "make it vague and woolly." Usually when one is accused of being a literalist, the last thing your charged with is being vague.

I've never seen 2 Peter as something that sinks six days, far from it, it actually reinforces it. It shows how powerful and awesome God is that even though He isn't constrained by time, he allowed Himself to be just so we could learn His principles.

With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. How does that tell us God constrained himself? The days in Genesis were days 'with the Lord'. The time was as Moses put it 'in God's sight'. We cannot say, not if we listen to Peter and Moses, that God's days can only be literal 24 hours days.

Did anyone else need to mention it? It is precisely because I listened to what he and the Holy Spirit had to say that I have learned the context and meaning of the story.

I do think other people in the bible need to mention it. Jesus said John 8:17In your Law it is written that the testimony of two men is true.
2Cor 13:1 I am coming to you this third time. "In the mouth of two or three witnesses every matter shall be established."
Your interpretation only has one witness, Moses, and he contradicts your claim in Psalm 90:4.

Alright, if I were an evolutionist I could see this as you do, but what about those that aren't and are not looking for the Bible to support a scientific theory?

In the early church it was read as God giving the earth the ability to spontaneously generate life. Isn't that what Evolution says happened over billions of years?

I would most certainly agree that Jesus wasn't just their Lord and Saviour, they actually knew Him primarily as their Rabbi. Yes he taught them to read and understand the OT and how to understand and interpret some of it's figurative language, but to take that truth and apply it throughout Scripture and somehow presume all of it is figurative is a bit presumptive, wouldn't you say?

Who says all scripture is figurative? But Jesus would have expected his disciples to learn how to interpret scripture.

True, I guess that eliminates evolutionary theory from being a viable story.

A beautiful picture in scripture means evolution isn't viable? How do you work that out?

I'm sure all of us have parts of the Bible we'd like God to have written differently. Yet as time goes on, it's quite amazing how those examples seem to become fewer and less of a problem. Isn't the Holy Spirit pretty cool!

It's really great when those 'problem verses' suddenly fit into place. A whole new understanding opens up in areas we had never thought of before

 

[shernren]

It's spelled "milieu". Spelling in English is already quite nonsensical (I can't remember who, but there was once a suggestion that the word "ghoti" should be pronounced "fish": "gh" of rough, "o" of women, and "ti" of tradition), and when one has to spell words introduced from French, it becomes downright hazardous. Having said that.

3. I'm a senior in college, majoring in Physics. Science (as we embrace it) is pretty new. Roots can go back as far as 300 BC in Greece (maybe - that's really stretching it) but most would place it's beginnings perhaps in the 17th century. We have bought into it. STRONGLY. The mindset - with all it's assumptions - is taught (unquestioned) in preschool and throughout our education. We are a material, physical, scientific people. It's very, very much a part of our "world view." And it is for Christians, too. It is a part of the "glasses" we all wear. I think it "colors" what we "see." We just tend to assume that what SEEMS like modern science, is. That what SEEMS like geology, biology, physics, is. I think that should be examined. There are MANY Scriptures that can CLEARLY be interpreted as teaching the world is small, square and flat. And IF we assume that they are addressing earth science, astrophysics, etc. - that they are science - that interpretation is the most obvious ("literal"). But are they teaching geology? Is the issue science? OR are these verses teaching theology? Ah, we have all those many, many verses - and since we KNOW the world is round and since we now "see" that these aren't addressing science but rather God, we nearly all conclude that they are NOT teaching that the world if small, square and flat - in fact, they aren't teaching ANYTHING AT ALL about science. Some would conclude the same is true with the account(s) in question here.

I think you've raised a very important point. I would go further and say that science as it is publicly perceived (lab coats, microscopes nuclear physicists, atom bombs, spaceships, lasers which people can dodge ) isn't much more than 150 years old.

The very word "electron" was only coined in 1894, a mere 112 years ago, or roughly three generations ago. Thomson only isolated it as a subatomic particle in 1897, and Millikan only measured its charge in 1909.
The proton was discovered by Rutherford only in 1918, in his alpha particle experiments. The neutron only started showing up in the 1930s, and even then it was first mistaken for gamma radiation. And while we're at it, the first conclusive scientific argument for the atom came from John Dalton in 1808, a mere 198 years ago or something like 5 generations ago.

Think about it. The atom is merely two centuries old; the electron, just over one. Never mind the veritable zoo of subatomic particles that came since then, or the incredible mind-bending paradoxes of relativity and quantum physics. And yet the way we teach science and interact with the world it's as if atomic theory is as old as fire and caves. The idea that the computer I'm typing on is actually composed of gazillions of minute specks of mass and charge dancing around in empty space is probably younger than my grandmother, at least in the public mind, and yet we often act and think as if there was no other alternative way to view the world.

The lesson? Let us be cautious when we assume that we can fully understand the culture and philosophy of earlier times, seeing how quickly and systematically we have forgotten how they viewed the world.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

try to explain the difference between alepha-null and alepha-one to someone on the street today.

<cough><sputter><cough>
Harumph!

Be very glad I have good self control or I would have had to send you the bill for cleaning coffee out of my keyboard!

I occasionally try to teach my children math that is several years ahead of where they are in school. When their school math courses come to what I've gone over with them they say "OH! That is what Dad was trying to say", while most of the rest of their classmates are totally confused.

I suppose it is time to go over aleph null and mapping functions.

<evil grin>