Sadly for your response this is NOT a "he-said she-said" simpleton issue - this is a matter of what is actually in the text -- so glaringly obvious that even you admit that the text is talking about a real 7 day week even though it does not serve your interest to admit it.
Well, actually now, you have imported a concept from your external agenda that aligns you with typical creationists.
Up to now you have been arguing only that the biblical author intended to convey the 7 days as historical and this was also the typical way it was received by his audience. You have also argued the same about the non-biblical creation accounts--that both writers and those they were writing for understood the accounts as recorded history.
On this basis, all ancient creation accounts can be described as "historical narrative".
Most creationists however would draw a line between the supposed "historical narratives" of other peoples, labelling them falsehoods, myths, imaginary stories, not historical at all. Only the biblical account is typically referred to as "historical narrative" and is so called not primarily because of the author's intention, but because it is thought to be an actual record of real, objective history. IOW, had someone been there to film the events of these 7 days, this is what would show up on an undoctored, unedited film. It's not just a text. It is an account of actual, objective history.
By using the term "real" you align yourself with this position. However, you will find on re-reading my posts that I never took that position.
What I have admitted is the intention of the writer and the response of those he was writing to and for. I have not agreed that this intention-response concords with actual history outside of the text.
The text is one thing. History is another. There is no genre that guarantees a match between text and history.
How much more would the simple egyptian slaves 3500 years ago have taken the text at face value - that even you agree is most likely to be speaking about "six DAYS you shall labor...for in Six DAYS the Lord made" --- i.e. the obvious.
LOL. The irony is that you objected to my reference to a naive reading of the text, but you base your case on the same premise: that the people were too simple, by virtue of their generation and social position, to read it any other way.
And then you want to argue that this is necessarily the only correct way to understand the text? Why?
It is not even as if your argument is valid. We have no evidence that people of 3500 years ago were all simpletons. Nor that slaves are simpletons. True, there are simpletons in every generation; but there are also those who are wise in every generation. And in every social class as well.
In any case you already said it is most likely to be talking about 7 days - and in fact neither you nor anyone else makes a case against the 7 day week of Gen 1:2-2:3 and Ex 20:8-11 - FROM the text -
Quite right. In terms of the text, exegeting from the text, I don't think there is any case to be made against an ordinary 7-day week.
So, within the framework of the literary composition, we have 7 days. The issue is how the literary composition functioned within the Israelite culture and how it relates to the objective history of universe, planet and all peoples, not just the Israelites.
Your proposition, that the 7 non-figurative, non-symbolic days of the text are also real days in the chronology of the history of creation is not an exegesis from the text itself. It is an a priori meta-textual assumption about the nature of the text which you bring to bear on the text. It is you interpreting the text in light of your external agenda.
You keep arguing that intelligent reflection without any objection from biology, fossil records, radiometrics, geology was going to force the newly freed slaves of egypt to "invent" the text "Six days you shall labor...for in six indefinite eons of the Lord made..." no matter what the the actual text said to the contrary.
No, I am not at all. I agree the most probable understanding of the text for millennia was that it referred to an actual period of 7 days within the historic chronology of the created world. Personally, I am not aware of any questioning of the nature of the days until less than 2500 years ago. But there could have been oral discussions earlier. What we do have, in Philo, in Origen, in Augustine, etc. are clear indications that the nature of the days was a topic of discussion and this long before we had any physical evidence of deep time. So it was a strictly philosophical discussion about the text itself, without any objections from biology, fossil records, radiometrics, geology. But it was philosophic discussion among a highly-educated minority, not among those who actually participated in the Exodus some 1200-1500 years earlier.
Those who left Egypt following Moses were not able to study the text in detail, first because it had not been written yet when they met God at Sinai and also because they were largely illiterate anyway. (How many beside Moses could read and write? a few perhaps, but not more than a handful out of many thousands.) Written texts did not become a matter of significant study until the Exilic/post-Exilic era and only for the few (some 1-2% of the population) who had the education and leisure to do so.
What we can take from these philosophers is that it is possible, from a scrutiny of the text itself and the text alone, to conclude that the Genesis days were not ordinary days. And we can also recognize that this remained a fringe position until the physical reality of deep time forced the issue in the 18th-19th centuries. Now to the bare philosophical position grounded only in the written text, is added the testimony of the very creation itself. And clearly, this is a testimony a Christian cannot sweep aside and ignore.
We have also changed socially in that now most people are literate, and most people, even those with little formal education, have access to the ideas of theologians, scientists and philosophers and the means to discuss them widely. So what Philo could only discuss in a small circle of rabbis and circulate in written form to a few more now becomes grist for forums like these.
btw, I noted in another post that you describe yourself as a Young Life Creationist rather than as a Young Earth Creationist. How do you see a difference between these when the oldest available rocks on earth contain evidence of life?
Until we read the actual text. turns out Genesis is the real one - and the pagan options simply aren't much of an option even for theistic evolutionists - if they are Christian.
No. Reading the actual texts tells us nothing about which is "real". If one is Christian, one gives preference to the Genesis account, but not because of the text itself. The preference comes from being Christian. So it is an appropriation based on faith and has nothing to do with knowing this text is correct from textual exegesis itself. It is another aspect of an external agenda. Christians hold that the texts of the Old and New Testaments are divinely inspired and the pagan texts are not. That is creed, not knowledge.
On the contrary all of them [creationists] admit that the Pagans are trying their own historic timeline alternative for origins to the one that Bible provides.
True, but they still do not refer to them as "historical narratives" because they don't consider them to be true history.
You yourself admit that the author was writing about a real 7 day week -- when one takes a look at the actual text.
No, I grant that the author was writing about a literal 7 day week which he probably believed was real. I don't grant that it was a real 7 day week.
You brought up the subject of motion and then when the point does not hold up by modern methods of science you want to bail??
It was your point to start with.
Physics is not my bailiwick. I always turn to someone with more expertise to handle issues of physics. And that was not my point.
My point was that the inclusion of stars in Gen. 1:16 means the Genesis account refers to the whole visible universe, not just our local system as you previously averred.
Then you simply are not reading the material. That explains a lot.
You dumbed-down the objective to the point of being an objective-to-prove-nothing.
On the contrary--you are reading people who misrepresented the purpose of the experiment, adding in claims that were never originally made for it.
Take abiogenesis. Could abiogenesis occur through the operation of the natural laws with which God imbued his creation? At this point over 60 years after the Urey-Miller experiment, we still have no answer to this question. If there is such a possibility, the process must have been complex enough to require many stages. No single experiment could demonstrate the reasonableness of abiogenesis via natural laws of spontaneous chemical interactions.
However, a single experiment can demonstrate the unreasonableness of such a process. Take a single crucial step in such a process and see if it can happen. If it cannot, the natural process of abiogenesis is unreasonable.
One such crucial step is the self-assembly of organic molecules, any organic molecules, in an inorganic environment.
That is what the Urey-Miller experiment was about. Had no organic molecules of any kind been produced in that experiment or any variation on that experiment, the conclusion would be that the eventual production of life via natural process was highly improbable.
The natural production of organic molecules in an inorganic environment is a necessary step if abiogenesis is to occur naturally. But it is by no means a sufficient step. Many other things would have to occur as well. This experiment showed that one thing which must have happened for natural abiogenesis to be plausible could have happened. But it also tells us only about that one thing. So it was a breakthrough of some significance in the research on the origin of life.
But it was no guarantee that life could have a natural origin. That will only come if and when all steps have been shown to be possible: likely only when an artificial biological form is actually produced in a laboratory.
then when nothing results you proclaim success??
The spontaneous production of even one single organic molecule in an inorganic environment is a huge success for science! And many more than one molecule was produced.
There is a bazillion steps between having wood and having a 100 story building.
Exactly. That is why the experiment never was an all-out complete description of a process of abiogenesis. It has always shown that one crucial step was an actual possibility and no more than that. But it is a hugely crucial step. Without this step, no natural means of abiogenesis exists. Without it, one might as well close up shop on research into the origin of life. But with it, one can consider other crucial aspects of a possible route from non-life to life through natural means.
There is even more between having 22 amino acids -- and actually being able to build something with them - that is along the way to a single living cell.
They failed to even produce the 22 amino acids and the ones they did produce were loused up in chiral orientation ratio -- so even they would not work as viable material.
Again, true, but the point of the experiment was not to produce a living cell. It was to see if a totally inorganic environment could produce organic molecules.
Nor was the point of the experiment to produce all 22 amino acids used in biological entities. It would be enough to produce one of them. And it actually produced more than one.
Nor was the point of the experiment to produce the chiral relation of amino acids found in biological entities. It was to see if any organic molecules at all could be produced from an inorganic environment.
No scientist familiar with the history of the Urey-Miller experiment would claim it answered all the questions about the origin of life. There is certainly on-going research on many other relevant issues. But no scientist would describe the Urey-Miller experiment as less than a resounding success. The experiment produced the results actually sought for at the time in spades and gave a huge boost to continued origin of life research.
Your pseudo-history of the Urey-Miller experiment is a typical straw-man construction filled with pseudo-claims never proposed by the scientists involved at all.
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