It’s astounding how people gullible enough to buy the idea that life was formed by no one’s design or intent when slime on the face of a rock was struck by lightning will be arrogant enough to call people who believe the Bible “naive” for that belief.

This post tonight is a bit of  a ramble but I wanted to get out my thoughts before they went into that netherworld I call my mind! Sorry in advance!

So tonight I watched this fascinating documentary on those who believe in Evolution vs. those who believe in Intelligent Design. It really got me thinking and I thought I would share some of my thoughts while they where still fresh in my mind.

I’ll start by speaking of the religious or creationist side of the debate. I do believe that there is something greater than ourselves that is beyond our ability to understand. I think that faith is what helps us get through life from day-to-day, the concept and comfort that perhaps this long path we call Life has reason.  Where I do not follow the mold, however, is the concept of putting a single specific name to what that might be. Some of us call him God, others Allah, others Jehovah. I think though what it comes down to in the end is that we all, regardless of our specific beliefs are seeking the very same thing, meaning and understanding for our existence.

On the evolutionist side, however, there is much argument to prove that we did indeed evolve. I cannot deny science that proves we’re seperated genetically from Chimpanzees by only 1%. I cannot deny the existence of dinosaurs or the almost daily news reports of a new species of animal having been discovered yet again. Without science the very accomplishments humanity has made would have come to a stand still so long ago.

I wonder, however, why there is not room for both. After all since the beginning of time it has been in our very natures to question, to learn, to grow. Think back to 10, 20, 40 years ago, the accomplishments and breakthroughs brought by each new decade seemed like dreams in the decade before. Science has driven us, faith has sustained us. They are opposing sides of a coin but the one side in many ways completes the other. I have to believe that  both have merit, have value, and deserve respect. After all fanaticism on either side only leads to the spread of more hate, more hurt, and more ignorance on everyone’s part.

In my every optimistic view on life, would it not be great if rather than tearing each other apart for what makes us different, we instead took the time to embrace what makes us the same. Our need to grow, to learn, to have hope in a better tomorrow. Regardless of what “side” of the coin you fall on, I like to think the middle is a much nicer place to meet.

Hopefully this post can live up to its title and actually be concise and to the point and not sprawling and wordy. Much of today relies on yesterday’s ideas about logic, so if you haven’t read that, go back and read A Few Thoughts on Logic.

Now that you’ve done that, we can more forward with an examination of Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The evidence for evolution. The typical evangelical response I would assume, is to write off the scientific data and given by Dawkins. I am going to propose though that this is wrongheaded for two reasons.

First, I do not know of anyone off hand who is competent enough in Dawkins’ discipline to ardently dispute data with him. I can already tell from the overall tone of the book that he is extremely peeved with people for trying this tactic. Evangelicals in general I think can be bad about this, since they are bringing in the assumption that Genesis 1 stands in scientific contrast to any evolutionary process whatsoever. And if that is your assumption then you would have to dispute any data given by an evolutionist.

Notice though that I have been focusing on the data, because the issue really lies with the explanation of the data, not the data itself. Which leads to reason two why it is wrongheaded to just write off Dawkins’ data and explanation…

If you remember from the post from yesterday, we noted that in scientific theory making, data always underdetermines a theory. So, why argue over the data anyway? No finite amount of data will ever prove evolution to be true. By that same token though, no finite amount of data can prove creation either.

When I say this, please understand I am referring strictly to data within the natural world, which a scientist committed to methodological naturalism would be restricted to. Methodological naturalism is not a bad thing, and in fact science relies on it to proceed in explaining natural processes. Trouble arises though when one moves from methodological naturalism to metaphysical naturalism, which is a philosophical position that claims only nature exists. I have dealt with this elsewhere, so I won’t get into it here.

So rather than just write off the data Dawkins’ presents, what are the options?

The book itself is an attempt to present the hard evidence for evolution to discredit the history-deniers (anyone who doubts evolution) and state what for Dawkins had seemed painfully obvious. In this case then, the book can tend to take a rather caustic tone to it. Evolution doubters are compared to Holocaust deniers (presumably for its emotional force, not because the analogy works) as well as in the opening paragraph to someone who would doubt that the Latin language ever existed (which fails as an analogy as well). In any case, after reading the book (and studying Genesis more) I can understand some of Dawkins’ frustration with creationists, even though he himself admits candidly toward the end of the book he doesn’t know how everything got started (although in his view this certainly does not open the door to an initial creation by a god, although the possibility of aliens is acceptable). that evolution is fact.

Dawkins ardently states over 17 times in the first chapter alone. He goes over just what a fact is and what a theory is and how evolution is clearly the former and more than just the latter. The book then proceeds to unfold the evidence for this claim, proceeding like so:

• If the theory of evolution is true, then we should observe certain data
• We observe certain data,
• Therefore the theory of evolution is true.

If you have studied logic at any length, something about the above should bother you. While you may not recognize the phrase, “affirming the consequent,” that is nonetheless the technical term for this logical fallacy. To put it in a different form, letting T be the theory of evolution and D be the data Dawkins presents, this is the reasoning:

• If T is true, then D should be present
• D is present
• Therefore T is true

Aside from the issue of presenting selective evidence, even if we just assume all the evidence Dawkins presents is all the possible, relevant evidence, it still does not prove that evolution is true or that it actually happened.Further, his reasoning is actually invalid and cannot prove the point anyway. Data always underdetermines theories, there are many other possible explanations for the data Dawkins presents, evolution just represents one such explanation.

At every turn, if one is reading for it, you can see how Dawkins’ underlying assumptions that evolution must be true lead him to the conclusions he makes from the data. None of the ultimate ideas of evolution are self-evident within any of the date he presents. With pre-conclusions about the veracity of evolution, one can make a pretty convincing stab at authenticating the theory, but it still, in spite of Dawkins’ protests, simply remains just that, a theory for origins that originates in naturalistic philosophy and was given a philosophical veneer by Darwin. And no amount of data can actually prove that it and it alone is the true explanation of the origins and development of life. Science unfortunately just doesn’t work that way.

Dawkins’ book covers much ground, from the basis for the ideas of natural selection, to the fossil record, to embryology, to radioactive clocks, to even plate tectonics. However interesting the content may seem, it does not in the end support the claims of evolution, that is unless you are willing to take the leap of faith into metaphysical naturalism and assume the conclusion before you look at the data. So in a sense, this book is just preaching to the choir, and will in effect only be convincing to anyone who has already accepted the philosophical commitments necessary to believe in evolution.

As a Christian, one should not be alarmed by the evidence Dawkins presents. Some of it may stand the test of time, some of it may not. However, none of it conclusively proves evolution and can just as easily be explained by the Christian as the evidence of how God works in the world, superintending the development of his creation. Nothing Dawkins presents can necessarily exclude that as an explanation, he just doesn’t see it as reasonable because of his background assumptions.

So in the end, the real issue is not the science, it is the background beliefs of the person engaged in science. This should help guide discussion away from scientific data issues to the heart of the issue, which is really the person’s unbelief, not their science. Dawkins is a brilliant scientist, but he is a poor logician and his fondness for atheism clouds his ability to be reasonable. Given his fallacious reasoning, one is not at all unreasonable in rejecting his conclusions while affirming his evidence. The logical thing to do in this case is not to agree with Dawkins, but rather to be honest about the data and realize that other explanations are certainly possible.

This basis of this post has been brewing for quite a while, but it didn’t seem like it would make a long enough post to actually do until now. This will have two parts, a brief discussion of the two common types of arguments and how they are misconstrued, followed by a discussion of which one science uses and why that is significant. So, let’s get started.

Most people have been taught that the difference between deductive and inductive arguments is that the former is a type of argumentation that moves from general principles to specific application, while the latter moves from specific instances to general principles. This is probably not news to anyone, I even found this categorization in an otherwise really good Christian educational psychology book Created to Learn.

I say otherwise good, because unfortunately, this is not actually the difference between the two types of argumentation. It is possible to create deductive arguments that move from specific to general and likewise is it possible to create inductive arguments that move from general to specific. They do in fact generally follow the above schematic, however, since there are exceptions, there is most likely a better explanation for the difference between them.

The difference, more accurately, has to do with the probability of the conclusion. In a deductive argument, the conclusion necessarily follows. In an inductive argument the conclusion only probably follows. So in other words, a deductive argument will always be a stronger argument, for if its premises are true and reasoning valid, it produces a sound argument that is rather airtight given the truthfulness of its premises.

The misfortune that most people are not aware of this, probably (reasoning inductively here) stems from the fact that most people do not formally study logic as part of their education. This is especially a vital study for people planning on entering ministry, yet very few pastors actually engage in a formal study of logic. Even my pastor committed a fallacy in reasoning this past Sunday in a sermon (although it was somewhat forgivable and related to etymology of a Greek word, which did not affect his overall point, if you’re curious ask me about it).

This is also why we have things like inductive bible study, which is based on the fallacious understanding of inductive arguments. While you may think that in an inductive Bible study you are gleaning principles to then stringently pattern your life around, those principles, if you were in fact reasoning inductively, only probably followed from the observations you made from the text, they did not necessarily follow like some people pretend that they do.

Not necessarily a reason to doubt what you glean from an inductive Bible study, but definitely a word of warning to not be too certain in your conclusions and always be open to re-evaluation as you grow, and also to not become legalistic in following your principles that may not be as transparent in the text as you feel that they are.

Anyway, all of this was to establish that difference between reasoning inductively and reasoning deductively has to do with how necessary the conclusions are. The reason this is important for where we are going in the larger context of this blog, is that science does not have a deductive method of proceeding. Science can at best offer inductive arguments for its ideas, but it cannot offer deductive ones, or at least it doesn’t in practice.

Science rather, proceeds usually by either one of two ways. Either it uses Emunerative Induction (henceforth E.I.) or it uses the Hypothetico-Deductive Method (henceforth HDM) which despite the name is not deductive, and actually isn’t even inductive either.

E.I. is something we all use, and in fact the basis of your sense experience rests on your use of E.I. That and your unprovable assumption in the uniformity of nature (natural laws are the same across all time and space). Basically, E.I. operates by repeated observation that under stable circumstances, an event repeatedly occurs. For example, you find that every time you kick a rock while barefoot, a painful sensation occurs in your big toe. Without fail, every time in the past this happened, it hurt like hell (if you’ll pardon the expression). You induce then, that any time in the future, this is probably what will continue to happen. (Note the use of “probably”)

This is how the aforementioned natural laws are formulated and how we understand the uniformity of nature, which should immediately alert you that neither are predictive in nature but are merely observations of what has been true in the past. In other words, there is no guarantee a law of nature will not fail at some point (or could be violated at some point), it is just unlikely given that it has not failed (to your limited knowledge) in the past.The uniformity of your past experience does not establish that uniformity of the present (which is itself just a different use of E.I.).

The inductive nature should be clear, in that nothing is absolutely certain. From the repeatedly experience of stubbing your toe, it does not necessarily follow that in the future this always be true, just like from the repeated evidence that gravity has worked in the past, it does not necessarily follow that it will always be the same in the future. In both cases it only probably follows. And although it is a high probability, it is nonetheless an act of faith on your part (and the scientist’s part) that what you observe in the past will be the same in the future.

And there is the rub for the whole science vs. faith issue. One might think that HDM can save the scientist from ultimately having to operate on the basis of faith (albeit faith in a different object than the Christian, but still an act of faith). Unfortunately, HDM is basically a form of abductive reasoning, which technically speaking, is an invalid form of reasoning. The conclusions it renders may nonetheless be true, but it is an invalid way to get there.

To somewhat see why this is, it is important to realize that in science, data always under-determines theories. Another way of saying this is that no finite data set can conclusively prove a given theory. There is always another explanation for the given data, and in fact, there is literally an infinite number of explanations for a given data set. Most of them might be ruled out as improbable, however they cannot conclusively be proven false in any sort of deductive fashion. Nor can one’s cherished theory be proven conclusively true by a given set of data.

What seems reasonable, or probable, is ultimately a function of the background assumptions a particular person brings to the data set. All HDM is really saying is that if this particular theory is true, we would expect to observe this particular data. However, the presence of the data does not prove the theory. It supports the theory, but another theory could just as easily account for the data and then one has to decide which is preferable, but at that point, you are no longer dealing with the data. You are dealing with your presuppositions (background assumptions), and that is really where the rub is when it comes to science.

It is simply wishful thinking to believe that scientist operate in some sort of rationalistic unbiased fashion as opposed to theologians who operate based on faith and the words of a sacred text. In reality, scientists operate on faith and the “words” of a sacred text, they’re faith is just in different place and their “text” is the book of nature rather than the Scriptures. But they are still operating with background assumptions, they are still engaged in interpreting a “text” and they are still ultimately dependent on faith based assumptions.

To see this in action, all we need to do is look at Richard Dawkins’ latest book. And we’ll do just that tomorrow.

Fifth in my series on annoying Canadian creationists and religiously rightwing party-poopers is

C. A. R. E. (Christian Apologetics Research & Evangelism) Ministries

Based in Winnipeg, this the first out of province purveyor of anti-intellectualism to be so honoured!

First of all a hat tip to my Facebook friend, Graham Microraptor, and his great post there on geology vs. creationist-rocks-in-the-brain and his good buddy  Erik who picked up on a few choice words G. M. used and coined a new label for Young Earth Creationists.

Instant Magic Earth Poofists™!

moar funny pictures

Now, the CARE I.M.E.F.s are dedicated to Defending the Faith against “[e]volution, empiricism, atheism, agnosticism, post-modernism, other religious worldviews, cults and the occult”.

Their “faith” they say, includes the idea that a “short time after the creation week, our first human parents willingly rebelled (sinned) against their creator and the consequence was death and decay.”

Lots more whatever this is after the break!

Now, most of the site is the standard apologetic rubbish, but that hasn’t stopped us at the Thinking Shop from having a bit fun before! Now, the neat thing about our CARE-bears, is that they also have a Creation Museum! HORRAY!

The museum is housed at the Oxford Bible Church at 621 Oxford Street in Winnipeg. It seems as if you have to book a tour through the museum, so don’t just show up and expect it to be open and serving brontosaurs burgers.

Stolen from Eric Skiff's collection on Flicker. Click for the original.

They also have a kids’ “Dinosaur Discovery Zone” but that part of the website isn’t up and running yet.

At the kiddies’ meeting, “[a]long with the singing, games and crafts, there will be a creation science lesson along with a spiritual message. Our intent is to let the kids know what the Bible says, and to give them plenty of good reasons to believe it.” WOW!

But what is in it? Try this: there is ”absolutely astounding verification of the Bible’s historic claims, particularly its claims regarding special creation in the relatively recent past ( < 10,000 years ago ) and a global deluge some 4,500 years ago”.

So, lets look some of their “evidence”, shall we?

Their museum site has an ark-load of connected photos and Scientifical Explanations™
“proving” that Darwin was a poo-poo head.

There are the usual suspects, each categorized into different “galleries”.

Falsifying the Geologic Column

According to evolutionists, the layers of the earth represent billions of years of geological history … What many don’t realize is that this column is actually a mental abstract THAT EXISTS NOWHERE IN THE REAL WORLD. There are many examples of fossils and artifacts being found in rock layers where they really don’t belong (according to evolution). Regardless, the geological column remains the evolutionist’s bible, and he is quite prepared to bend the data in order to harmonize with his “bible.”

So here we find the Paluxy River dinosaur and “human” footprints, instant fossilized stuff, and the like. Of course, what is lacking is any kind of real discussion of the science behind their production or proper handling of the likelihood that some are outright forgeries.

Linked from http://paleo.cc/paluxy.htm Photo: (C) 1984, Glen J. Kuban

“Taylor Site, Paluxy Riverbed, 1984, Glen Rose, TX The Taylor Site contains several trackways of largely infilled, metatarsal dinosaur footprints once considered human by many creationists, and a trail of deeper, more typical digitigrade dinosaur tracks.”        Kuban’s site is a treasure trove of I. M. E. P. debunking!

For a really serious look at the Paluxy River track, visit G. J. Kuban’s site (click on the pic above) and especially this article Taylor Site ‘Man tracks’ (originally published in Origins Research, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1986, pp. 2-10.).

The next gallery is Dinosaurs and Man. They boast of having six casts of the so-called Ica Stones from Peru. The casts were made by “ paleontologist Joe Taylor from the Mt Blanco Fossil Museum, and Creation Science Evangelism’s casting expert John Gusti”.

They allegedly depict dinosaurs and humans together (or people and space aliens). The stones actually number in the thousands and some may represent pre-contact Peruvian art. but very many, however, are  forgeries made for tourists, especially after the 1970s fascination with ancient alien contacts.

These two thumbnails say it all click ‘em to go to the originals on the museum’s site.   The one on the left is an “Ica stone”, a copy of one in the collection of world-famous tax evader/creationist Kent Hovind. On the right is a photo of fossilized dinosaur skin taken at the Royal Tyrrell Museum by the curator of the CARE museum. Here is what the photo’s caption says:

I photographed this fossilized dinosaur skin in the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Notice the large circle patterns throughout the specimen. Don’t they bear a striking resemblance to the circles on the Ica stone creatures?

No, frankly they do not. They look very different. Here is one from Creationwiki.

An Ica Stone dude holding a telescope (!), from Creationwiki

Gee, C.A.R.E., thanks for all the science!

Order Your Copy From Monsterland Toys Today!

The next gallery is on human evolution and it has a few pictures of replica fossils. A cast of Lucy’s skull is there and it is said to have a striking resemblance to a modern chimpanzee’s skull. Not a word on the evidence from Lucy’s preserved knee, which indicates she was bipedal: very un-chimp like. And this human evolution gallery has some pictures of a giant stone axehead, again with the input of Dr. Dino Hovind. Well, that really is a testimony to its proper interpretation.

There is a gallery devoted to each of the Old and New Testaments. The latter just has a bit of blither about Pilate and how the Church Fathers had the same New Testament that we have today. Somehow that refutes something scientific. Not sure what. The former has even less, with assurances that the Old Testament is reliable history. It suggests that  Pharaoh Akhenaton was running Egypt during the Conquest of Canaan. Take that, Darwin!

“The Creation Model” is probably the most interesting gallery and it blithers about how evolution requires the creation of “brand new [genetic] information”, something that cannot happen in nature. Yeah, that proves it.

Found somewhere on line. No idea where.

I liked the photos on the giraffe circulatory system. First, giraffes need a good heart to get the blood up to the head. And then they need some system to keep a flood of blood from rushing to their brains when they lower their heads to get a drink of water. And then when they lift up their head to run from a formerly vegetarian lion, they need a lot of blood to the brain instantly. Of course, no evolutionary answer could solve the puzzle of how the giraffe got all that plumbing to work properly all at once. The CARE folk simply can’t explain it evolutionarily. So evolution is wrong. There. Case closed…

Not being a biologist, I perhaps make a mistake and turn to wikipedia, but there one reads that the “rete mirabile” (a web of veins and arteries) are found in a number of vertebrates. Fish have one functioning as their swim bladder, mammals have them around their kidneys to help them pee. Other mammals have such masses of veins in their limbs to control temperature or to help them preserve oxogen in limbs used for climbing trees. And giraffes have them to help control blood pressure to the brain. Sounds pretty evolvable to me.

Giraffes also have to control air pressure too. This one probably has to take oxygen pills every morning.

There is another interesting thing about giraffe necks. Or at least the nerves in them. Indeed, they are one of God’s Greatest Mistakes.

The nerve ‘wiring’ of the mammalian larynx is also bizarre. Nerve signals for bodily operations travel from the brain down the spine, then branch off. Fair enough. The larynx is in the neck, so one might expect that the relevant nerve would come off the spine at the neck. And, it does: the recurrent laryngeal nerve originates from the spinal cord in the neck, as a branch of the vagus nerve. But then, bizarrely, rather than taking a direct route across the neck, it instead passes down the neck and into the chest, loops under the posterior side of the aorta by the heart, then travels right back up again to the larynx. Which is a waste of materials by anyone’s standard, but in the case of the giraffe, it implies a Creator so set on the mammalian Bauplan that an extra 10 to 15 feet of nerve is needed.

As Dawkins points out in The Greatest Show on Earth, this is easy to explain as the result of evolution working on a pre-existing species.

Get yourself a copy, it's a great read.

~~~~~~~

The neatest thing about the CAREful Instant Magic Earth Poofists’s museum is their attention to the idea that in the garden of Eden, every critter was a herbivore. Of course, that is a perfect explanation for why some animals are so well adapted to catching and eating other animals.

Now, what would have happened to turn some lovely, friendly happy vegan tigers and hyenas into savage predators? You guessed it, Eve ate an apple!

moar funny pictures

That’s right! HUMAN SIN caused the tummies of lions, crocodiles frogs, robins, mantises, seals, wolves, stoats, snakes, gila monsters, tyrannosaurs, and hedgehogs to instantly change from an exclusive vegetarian to a carnivorous diet. Yeah, that’s cause God hates human sin SO MUCH he decided to make matters worse and make all  sorts of non-involved innocent creatures lunch for all sorts of other critters.

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Actually, it makes about as much sense as bobbing for crocodiles.

Pic from Panda's Thumb

Now, let’s be clear on this. We are talking NO PREDATION before the “Fall of Man”. That means bunny eating cows are OUR FAULT! How does that make you feel? Just think, the Easter Bunny gets his milk for Easter chocolate from the cow. The cow then eats the bunny. It is YOUR DAMN FAULT if you don’t get any chocolate eggs next Easter. I hope you are happy, heathen!

One of the ways our care-taking Instant Magic Earth Poofists demonstrate this is pretty mdental.

First, they show some pictures of Sabre Toothed Tigers. Here is a photo I took at the Royal Tyrrell of such a little wee kitty cat.

Some more of my R. T. M. pictures are posted here and here.

Anyway, the gist of the CARE-bears’ claim is that one should not deduce from those evil looking fangs that this animal is a natural born killer. Before the fall, it was a herbivore, but what was it doing with those damn teeth?

The answer is to be avoided by referring to the Chinese Water Deer, an itsy bitsy little beastie that likes a nice salad but has giant teeth, too. Here is picture of one (they  were imported into Britain and now a mess live as feral sabre toothed bambis).

http://espvisuals.blogspot.com/

Telegraph.co.uk

Nasty looking little begger, isn’t he? The caption on the CARE site’s deer skull photo says:

Beside our saber toothed Tiger skull we have placed the skull of the Chinese water deer for comparison. This deer lives today and as you can see, also sports a pair of huge fangs, yet this creature is completely herbivorous. This is just another example of how impossible it is to tell what an animal’s diet was or is by looking at its teeth alone. Other examples of vegetarian creatures with carnivorous-looking teeth are the fruit bat and the panda bear. Yes, even a dinosaur with sharp teeth like the Albertosaurus was once a peaceful vegetarian!

Yeah, right. Now, what is interesting about Chinese Water Deer is that the big teeth on the females are not nearly as big as the ones on the males. Is this a sexual selection thing? Sounds like evolution to me. And besides, what self-respecting biologist would determine diet of any species based solely on TWO teeth and not all the teeth available for inspection? And besides, the inspection would be careful and detailed, not C.A.R.E.fully superficial. Basically CARE has no argument.

The same Telegraph article I pinched the above photo from also has this:

This is dog. It lost a fight with a Chinese Water Deer. Yes, the whole thing was YOUR FAULT YOU DIRTY ROTTEN SINNERS! The poor pooch would not have been chasing the little deer and the little deer would not have been forced to bite the dog if humans hadn’t sinned. Feel like repenting, yet?

http://www.carewinnipeg.com

All of this raises an interesting point alluded to above. Why did all the now predatory animals in the Garden have all the biological hardware to hunt, track, run down, ambush, maul, kill and eat other animals – and to avoid being eaten  - in the garden? Why were were armadillos given their protective armour? Why did porcupines have quills, or tigers just happen to  have teeth well suited to their eventual career as predators?

For an unholy good mess of creationist cartoons, just click the pic

And what the hell do fruit bats prove? A little wee fruit bat I can see having pointy teeth. Some fruit could be tough for a little animal (has Ray Comfort ever contemplated pineapple?).  Surely there was no fruit in the garden that required those kind of teeth of an animal the size of a tiger (let alone an Albertosaurus). But why for Pete’s sake why are there POISONOUS animals? Did their poison instantly develop (along with their instincts for using it) the minute Adam and Eve got the boot? And did all the kitties’, and wolves’ and crocodiles’ digestive systems instantly change, too?  The whole lame theory is predicated on superficial observation of animals, a ridiculous (and fuzzy) notion of animals not changing their “kind” (based primarily on appearance), and a whole lot of ignorance.

Anyway, while we are on the subject of teeth, some people do find them sexy (told you it was a sex thing). I know, it is kind of batty.

Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter!

Holy Crap (pun intended)! Lets have some more!

AND NOW, LET’S HAVE SOME MUSIC!

They Might be Giants!

Here are the links to the rest of the Know Yet Nuts Series.

1. Creation Truth Ministries / Alberta Dinosaur Museum

2. Big Valley Creation Science Museum.

3. Creation Discovery Centre

3. (addendum) Larry Dye the Troglodyte Shakespeare Guy!

4.   Holy Prancing Pachyderms: Concerned Christians Canada

Technorati Tags: creationsim, evolutionism, Darwin, Christianity, Fall+of+Man,, creation+museum, human+evolution

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the life of others."

‘A MILLION HAPPY LANDINGS’ – A LONG AVIATION CAREER   :

Captain. R. R. Rao, Aviation Consultant, SKYCARE Aviation Society ( India ) as a pilot, General Secretary of the Indian Commercial Pilots Association, a Manager, and as a Flight Instructor, won the hearts of several thousands of pilots, colleagues, and students. His dedication for aviation and his constant drive to improve safety of flight will forever remain his greatest contribution to all pilots and the flying public.

A   PSALM   OF   LIFE   :

“Tell me not in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.”

( Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882 )

‘THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM’ – AN ENCOUNTER WITH REALITY AND AN ILLUSION  :

Myself, and my friends, while I was ten years of age, walked eight miles to view a single engine, fixed wing aircraft that had arrived at an airfield in Rajahmundry.

During 1958, this airfield at Madhurapudi, Rajahmundry was not providing any civil aviation service.

During the academic year of 1958-1959, at about ten years of age, I was a 9th Grade ( IV FORM ) student at Danavaipeta Municipal High School, Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh, India. Amongst other subjects, I was  studying Physics and the Laws of Physics that operate in the physical world. One day, myself, and a few of my classmates saw a small airplane circling in the sky over Rajahmundry. At that time, we had no Airport in Rajahmundry. The airfield at Madhurapudi had one runway and had no terminal building. It is located 8 miles away from Danavaipeta. Myself, and my friends had spontaneously decided to physically see this aircraft and had walked all the way to the airfield under the hot Sun. Fortunately, the plane had returned and we found it parked on the runway. We found the pilot relaxing under the shade of the plane. Captain. R. R. Rao, my uncle was that pilot. As far as my memory goes, that was my very first time I was meeting him during my life and it was also the last time that I had met him during my life. During that brief and purely chance encounter, he had asked me to climb into the cockpit and had guided me in checking the instrument panels, operate the wing flaps and the tail while explaining a few basic aspects about flying a plane. Apart from this reality of meeting my pilot uncle at Madhurapudi airfield, I had also witnessed for the first time in my life the illusionary phenomenon known as Mirage. Rajahmundry gets very hot but we do not get the right atmospheric conditions to actually witness a highway or a hot road Mirage. I had learned about it in my Science class but the actual sensory experience of this illusion in the natural world is really memorable.

THE PERCEPTION OF PHYSICAL WORLD  :

This 'FULL MOON' exists in the sensible, manifested, perceived World. While living upon planet Earth, we perceive the waxing and waning phases of the Moon. The appearance of the Moon changes, but in reality it is one and unchanging. To understand the unchanging reality, we need to understand the problems of Perception.

Human perception is the process and experience of gaining sensory information about objects and events of the natural world. The process of perception translates sensory stimulation into organized experience. That mental impression or percept is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process which involves the intuitive and rational parts of the brain. However, a real, physical world exists independent of man’s experience. A real, physical world has existed long before man’s arrival and man’s  physical interaction with the elements of nature. The branches of Physics concerned with electromagnetic energy, optics, and mechanics describe the apparent physical world. When physical energy such as light interacts with the perceiving individual, percepts are formed. The degree of correspondence between percepts and the physical objects or events to which they relate also depends upon certain other external factors beyond human control. There could be a difference between Real World and the ‘Perceived World’. Sometimes, man perceives physical objects or events that may not exist in reality, and yet other times man fails to perceive physical objects or events that may actually exist and the manner in which they really exist. These perceptual problems are not attributable to the sense organs and are not due to inadequate sensory endowment. Apart from the basic Four Fundamental Forces that operate this physical world, there is another Fundamental Force that alters or transforms human perception. The Force of Gravitation gives the man the ability to experience his body weight and like all other objects in the environment, man exists on the face of Earth according to the Laws of Motion and the influence of Gravitation.

FLYING  AND  PERCEPTUAL APPRECIATION OF REALITY  :

Flying demands an acute awareness of the physical world. Man interacts with his physical environment using his sense organs of vision, hearing, touch, and smell. To move effectively, we must perceive our own movements to balance ourselves. The eye is by far the most effective organ for sensing. Movement detectors exist in the human brain. The vestibular organs located in the inner ears provide us with the sense of balance and equilibrium apart from other kinesthetic sensations from muscles, tendons, and joints. A visual field containing familiar objects provides a stable framework against which relative motion may be judged. For purposes of path recognition and navigation while flying in air, the pilot requires reliable perception of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. Preservation of perceptual constancy for the vertical and horizontal dimensions during the flight are based on the parallel activity of vision and the vestibular sense of balance or equilibrium. Even in flying small aircraft it has been shown that the pilot becomes disoriented unless he preserves visual control of the horizontal dimension. The movement of an airplane produces centrifugal and centripetal forces, particularly as the plane tilts or changes direction, which easily mislead a person’s vestibular( balance ) receptors. For this reason, in high-altitude flying the horizontal line of the surface of the Earth is simulated for the pilot by an optical display unit. When an aircraft takes off to begin the flight, and when it returns to land at the end of the flight, the perception of depth and distance are of critical importance. The perception of depth and distance depends on information transmitted through various sense organs. Sensory cues indicate the distance at which objects in the environment are located from the perceiving individual. Man has the ability to differentiate his own body from the surrounding environment. Man has the ability to perceive his own movement, and also the movement of other objects in his physical environment. But, man has no sensory perception of the reality of the movement of his earthly home in space. Man only recognizes relative motion of objects in his visual field. Just recall the illusion that your train is moving, when in reality, it is really the moving train alongside that is seen through the window; and the moving train on the adjoining track is falsely accepted as the visual frame of reference.

PERCEPTUAL  CONSISTENCY  AND  CONSTANCY  :

The intuitive and rational parts of brain interact to modify sensory information. In these images, the moon is of the same size but is perceived differently.

Spatial perception tends to ensure that a person experiences the continually changing circumstances of the environment in which he moves and lives with some degree of stability or constancy. Some degree of selectivity in perception is required for the survival of the individual. The individual gradually learns about the significance of observable ( empirical ) spatial cues. There is a well known apparent difference in the size of the moon when it is at the horizon and when it is fully risen. The horizon moon, though it is actually further away from the observer, looks much larger than it does when it is high in the sky and closer. The retinal images in the eye of the high moon and the horizon moon are about the same, but the perceived size of the moon differs grossly. Indian thinkers have always asserted that ‘TRUTH’ and ‘REALITY’ have the qualities of consistency and constancy and hence are not subject to sensory perceptions which tend to vary because of external influences.

THE  NATURE  OF  ILLUSIONS  :

Stimulus Distortion Illusion - A visual or optical illusion produced by the refraction or bending of light rays as it passes from one substance to another in which the speed of light is significantly different. A ray of light passing from one transparent medium(Air) to another(Water) is bent at the surface where the air and water meet.Thus the pencil standing in water seems bent.

Mirage is an illusion that depends on atmospheric conditions.

The vision of a pool of water is created by light passing the layers of hot air above the heated surface of the land. The cooler layers of air are denser and refract the sun's rays at different angles than the less dense strata of heated air. The result is the appearance of water where there is none.

This Illusion depends upon the 'Perceiver' and his selection of figure and ground.Illusion of organizational phenomena caused by perceptual distinction between figure and ground.

Perceptions accord more often with object’s properties than with the sensory stimulation. Perceptual constancies cause one to perceive the world more correctly than would be expected from sensory stimulation. Illusions are perceptions where perception accords neither with how the sensory receptors are stimulated nor with the characteristics of the objects themselves. Illusions are pervasive phenomena. Such experiences have been regularly and consistently reported by virtually everyone. Illusions are defined as special perceptual experiences in which information arising from “real” external stimuli leads to an incorrect perception or false impression.An illusion is not a simple error in perception. Illusions have features whose nature it is to evoke an incorrect perception. Illusions describe subjective perceptual experience that contradicts objective reality. Some of these false impressions arise from factors beyond an individual’s control. Bending or refraction is a property of light rays. We seek light energy for its ability to provide a realistic experience. When the illumination is insufficient, such as in a dark room, a rope could be misinterpreted as a snake(“Rajju Sarpa Bhranti”). The moment the room is illuminated with light, the darkness is gone, and the misconception is destroyed. Indian traditions encourage individuals to avoid the products or results of an illusionary experience. A rational individual would not chase a mirage to find water. When we use sensitive instruments, we take care to avoid optical errors while recording our observations. Any impression that contradicts the ‘facts of reality’, or fails to report the ‘true’ character of an object or an event should be discarded. The apparent daily motion of the Sun and stars across the sky is an illusion that we experience all through our existence. This illusion is not caused by any of the Four Fundamental Forces that operate in the universe. Gravitation is the universal force of attraction that affects all matter and it could explain the consistency of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Gravitation is not the force that is mediating the mechanism that gives us alternating periods of darkness and light while the reality of Sun is different.

Sunrise, Sunset, and the apparent motion of Sun across our sky is an illusion with which we exist all of our lives.

MAYA  IS  A  FUNDAMENTAL  FORCE  :

The most important motion of the Earth is its rotation or spinning on an axis. This is the motion that gives us the experience of alternating days and nights while in reality, the Sun shines brightly all the time.The speed of the earth’s rotation can be described in two ways, the angular speed and the linear speed( of a point on the surface of the Earth). The angular or Omega speed of Earth is 0.00007272 radians per second or about 0.5 degrees of rotation in two minutes. The Linear speed or the Linear velocity on the surface of the Earth is 0.278 miles per second or about 1,000 miles per hour. It is surprisingly a very fast motion. While it spins on its axis, the Earth orbits the Sun at a speed of 18.6 miles per second( 30 Kms/Second ). On an average, Earth travels about 66,660 miles per hour and in a year Earth travels about 584 million miles. Earth also partakes of the Sun’s motion as a member of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Sun revolves around the galactic center at a speed of about 155 miles per second( 250 Kms/Second ). We exist upon this planet Earth with no sensory perception of the physical motions of the Earth.We exist in a universe without knowing the reality of our physical movement and position in a system that is constantly in motion. However, the periodicity of man’s earthly existence depends upon Earth’s spin. Man’s fundamental biological functions are synchronized with the rhythmic phases of environmental changes caused by Earth’s rotation. Apart from ‘Sleep-Wakefulness’ Cyles, man seems to be unable to live without some concept of time. Through conditioning to time, and by way of biological rhythms ( Diurnal Rhythm, Solar Rhythm, or Circadian Rhythm), human physiology provides a biological clock that offers points of reference for temporal orientation. The biological clock induces age related changes. As long as Earth is spinning, it would cause both environmental changes as well as physical changes in our bodies. Since, we do not have the ability to stop the Force/Power/Energy that is causing the rotational spin, we are encouraged to dissociate our sense of ‘Identity’ with our physical body which is subject to physical changes such as old age and death. To perceive is to become aware of a stimulation in the present. The present is only a point along the continuum of becoming an instant when future is transformed into past. As the Earth is constantly spinning beyond man’s control, the instant known as ‘present’ gets transformed into ‘past’. Indian tradition claims that ‘ reality’ could not be an experience of past, present, or future. Reality has to exist in a state that is unchanging and eternal. A Fundamental Force that moves the Earth and contributes to this spin governs man’s earthly existence. Man is virtually ruled and dominated by this Force/Power/Energy which causes the rotation of Earth on its axis. No other planet that we know today exhibits an Earth like spin. The length of day and night is totally different on planet Venus. One day on planet Venus is equal to 243 Earth days. Moon spins with the same speed as it revolves around the Earth, one face always points towards the Earth. The Moon rotates on it’s axis and revolves around the Earth in 27  1/3 days. Because of the rotation and revolution speed being the same, man never sees the dark side of the Moon. Man celebrates ‘Full Moon’ Days when in reality Moon is never fully lit. Man marks his Lunar Calendar with important events with his limited knowledge about the waxing and waning phases of Moon. Man is literally trapped to exist upon Earth and live in accordnace with the changes it brings while it is spinning. These are the trappings of the Fundamental Force which I would like to describe as “MAYA” which provides the man with an illusionary sensory experience of Sunrise and Sunset. The physical world is real. Sun is a real object. Darkness and Light are actual, real visual experiences. But, Sunrise and Sunset, in reality are not actual events in man’s life and existence. The reality of man, the reality of man’s identity does not belong to the material realm where man perceives the physical world in which he exists. “Maya” is also described as “AVIDYA” which contributes to ignorance and it would not let man gain true knowledge of his identity. Man gains true knowledge when he gets away from the trappings of Maya and recognizes that there is no dawn or dusk and he has the same identity of that Light described as “PARAM JYOTI” which shines with constancy and consistency and is the Ultimate Reality. 

Man's perception of Reality is changed by the external Force/Power/Energy known as Maya. "MAAYA MAYA MIDAM AKHILAM HITVAA"

The only Force/Power/Energy which can help man to overcome “AVIDYA”, the Force that causes the Illusion of Sunrise and Sunset, is the Force that I have described before as “KRUPA”( Krupa – A Force to Preserve Human Existence, published on August 10, 2009). I have described the importance of Gravitational Force in my post titled ‘Earthly Existence – Enjoy the Fragrance’ published on November 20, 2008. Man should realize that he is not the perceiver. He is not the organ of perception. What has been perceived does not describe his true identity or the ‘Real World’. Since its time of origin, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Sun, and Earth have existed in a state of motion. The universe is still expanding, the Galaxies are moving apart and we do not know our precise location in this ever changing universe. As long as man is attached to his physical body, man would experience the changes in his environment and also in his body that causes old age and death. He need to illuminate his mind with a light that illuminates the three planes of human existence, the physical, the mental, and the causal or spiritual dimensions in a constant and consistent manner.

Gayatri Maha Mantra connects the person to the illuminating power of Light, a power that shines constantly and consistently and this illumination is not associated with the property of refraction that contributes to illusions.

Lord Rama's earthly journey is celebrated according to a calendar which is created by the Force of Maya. The position of Sun, Moon, Planets and Stars that describe the major events of 'RAMAYANA' in reality are not actual positions but are only apparent postions perceived by man. Man needs the Force of "KRUPA" to overcome the trappings of "MAYA".

The personality of Rama had an earthly existence. The name of Rama is identified as Eternal Truth. His name is associated with the power to destroy the Force of illusion that causes old age and death.

Jayatu, Jayatu Mantram, Janma saaphalya Mantram,

Janana marana chheda klesha vichheda Mantram,

Sakala nigama Mantram, sarva saastraika mantram,

Raghupati nija Mantram, Raama Raameti Mantram.

Because of chapter divisions, I’m not going to actually dig too much into to Day 7 here, although we should at least finish the narrative before moving on.

Day Seven

I find John Walton’s summary of the state of things prior to Day 7 to be helpful, especially in light of viewing the creation of the universe as emphasizing the establishing of functions and order, rather than just bare material creating.

Here’s the quote (from The Lost World of Genesis One):

In days four to six, the functionaries of the cosmos are installed in their appropriate positions and given their appropriate roles. Using the company analogy, they are assigned their offices, told to whom they will report, and thus given an idea of their place in the company. Their workday is determined by the clock, and they are expected to be productive. Foremen have been put in place, and the plant is now ready for operation. But before the company is ready to operate, the owner is going to arrive and move into his office. (pg. 71)

We will come back to this point at the end of chapter 2, but it is interesting on the front end to note that deities generally in the ANE only take up office in temples. Now consider the text of Day 7:

The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing (Asa), and he ceased (Shabat) on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing (Asa). God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased (Shabat) all the work that he had been doing (Asa) in creation.

I included the Hebrew verbs for you, to see how the idea of resting here in relation to work is not necessary one of ceasing from activity completely. What was the work God had been doing? He had been appointing functionaries and ordering the materials of the universe. Once that was done, God didn’t stop working and is now leisurely resting off in heaven somewhere. Rather, God is engaged in ruling his creation without any obstacles, as he sits on his throne in heaven (analogous in Walton’s quote about sitting in his office managing the affairs of the company).

Some of this was intended to be accomplished through his representative, the physical image of Himself that he placed on earth. This is not the sole meaning of the Imago Dei (image of God) but it is certainly included within it. For God to place an image of Himself in the garden was to not produce a physical depiction of what He looks like, but rather was to have a physical manifestation of His personal presence, and thus be a vehicle for His activities on earth.

We’ll return to this later when we unpack the metaphysical significance of being created in the image of God, but a brief comment seemed in order.

Conclusion of Genesis 1 Narrative

I think in some measure, it is helpful here to emphasize what I am not saying:

• I am not saying that evolution is more or less plausible by removing the science from Genesis 1.
• Also, I am not denying a historical-literal-grammatical interpretation of the text in favor of a more allegorical or symbolic one.
• I am not denying that God created materially the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.
• I am not denying the presence of material creation in Genesis 1.
• I am not undermining inerrancy or inspiration by pointing out parallels in the ANE background that Moses might have used in authoring Genesis 1.

Here though are some points to be made about this kind of understanding of Genesis 1:

• The philosophy underlying evolution is negated by Genesis 1:1, however, this says nothing about the potential age of the earth, or the process by which our modern species have come to be. Given the immense diversity of life that we now see, and if we take Noah’s Ark as factual, then everything we have now can potentially be traced back to a single pair of ancestor animals for its species. Evolution on a micro level does happen, which Darwin helped bring to the table. However, on the macro level, there is no evidence of say a modern kangaroo and a modern tree frog sharing a common ancestor, which is exactly what individuals like Richard Dawkins will argue for (I’ll talk more about this in another post, it doesn’t fit here).

• Rather than denying a historical-literal-grammatical interpretation, I am arguing for actually taking seriously the historical and the grammatical rather than fixating on the literal like most interpreters of Genesis are prone to do. In order to interpret it historically, one needs to know the historical background, the contemporary literature at that time, and the cognitive environment of the original author and his audience. Understanding all this, that the Israelites (and the rest of the ANE) had a radically different cosmic geography, wrote about origins in a non-scientific fashion, lacking a strictly historical chronological ordering of events, and conceived of existence in terms of function, purpose, and naming is necessary to understand Moses’ intentions in Genesis 1.

• As for the grammatical, everyone is reliant on someone who understands Hebrew grammar to unpack the OT for you. You can learn it yourself, or depend on someone who already has, but those are the only two options. The Holy Spirit can illumine the spiritual truth for you, but I am not aware of a case of the Spirit illuminating the background culture (or the grammar and syntax, for that matter) without conscious effort on the interpreters part. As such, you can spiritually grasp the point of Genesis 1 (God made and rules everything, and you should worship him as such) without understanding the cognitive backdrop of the text. But you can’t interpret it at the level that most people attempt to, unless you understand more of the original context and language.

• While Genesis 1:1 stands as a rather clear affirmation that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing), the Hebrew “bara” does not mean that on its own. That is to say the context gives the word that nuance, and even within the text of Genesis 1, it only appears outside v.1 three times. Once in relation to the giant sea creatures, and then twice in relation to man. Were these the only two beings directly then created ex nihilo?

• In the case of man, you might be tempted to say yes, but remember what happens in Genesis 2, man is not created ex nihilo, but it fashioned out of dirt and then given a spirit. The creation of man as an entity was certainly by divine fiat (by God’s spoken word), but even that does not necessarily equal creation out of nothing. Once again, it is not the material aspect that is in view, but the creative power of God to establish functions, order, and exercise power and dominion over everything.

The bottom line, and this is what is hard to swallow, is that we do not know in a literal sense how God made everything. We know who created (Yahweh) and why he created (to provide a dwelling for fellowship with man and to display his glory), but the Bible is not meant to illumine how or when in the way that we want it to. Certainly some aspects of creation were made out of nothing, for there was a time when all that existed was the Triune God, and then there was a time when there was something else. We do not know when exactly that took place, or exactly how it took place, but we know that it did.

Genesis 1 then serves as an inspired piece of literature, written by Moses depicting God’s creative activity in a manner that is not scientific and is not a strict chronological historical account of exactly how everything took place. A quote from Scott Horrell’s class notes for ST103 (here at DTS) might be helpful:

Like all biblical authors, God inspired Moses in light of the language and thought forms of his culture(s) and education. Yet while incorporating certain pagan imagery, Moses was directed by God to speak against distorted cosmologies and false deities so highly revered by the sophisticated cultures of his day. Moses was inspired by God to speak of primal creation, or original “very goodness” of Adam and Eve’s creation, and the fall perpetrated by the Serpent of old that broke human fellowship with the Creator. This same God breathed language continues throughout the Old Testament and continues on in the New.” (emphasis original)

This really all we are getting at here. Don’t read Genesis 1 expecting it to answer the questions you bring to it. Don’t expect to find a scientific basis there to refute evolution (because it is not a scientific argument anyway) and most of all, don’t read it without pondering what is meant by what the text itself clearly affirms. That God created everything in the universe and is sovereign over all of it. You as a human are representing God on the earth, either accurately or inaccurately. If you worship this God as you were originally intended to do, you will have fellowship with and him and reflect His presence in the world. If you refuse…well…we’re getting a couple of chapters ahead now aren’t we?

Maybe, just maybe, I can get one of these Genesis posts to come in under 1000 words. That’s always the goal, but I usually fail in meeting it. Let’s see if this one can do the trick.

While Days 1-3 established functions, Days 4-6 install functionaries. This should immediately alleviate a problem in your mind that generally arises in a view of creation that is overly focused on the material. It is the issue of how we have light in Day 1, but the stars are not created until Day 4.

Or are they?

Day Four

The two words (in Hebrew) that are used to depict God creating in Genesis 1 are “bara” and “asa.” They have some level of semantic overlap (they can be glossed in English with the same word in some cases), but they are not interchangeable terms.  The former refers to “creating,” or “designing,” and is exclusively a divine activity. “Asa” on the other hand can be rendering “make,” or “do,” and is something both God and man can do. It appears later in this narrative talking about the work that God had done (“asa”).

“Asa” is the verb that is used here in Day 4:

God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate the seasons and days and years, and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights – the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made stars also. God placed the lights in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth, to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day.

Notice that the overwhelming emphasis here is on God “appointing” two great lights to a specific function. From a scientific standpoint, there are all kinds of issues:

• The two great lights are not consider stars, even though one is (and the other isn’t even a light)
• All of them are being depicted as placed inside the expanse, or in other words, they are stuck inside the dome, not outside it in any kind of atmosphere.
• The stars in a strict sense do not indicate the change of the seasons, when seasons refer to autumn, winter, spring, summer (but the moon phases do help indicate planting/harvesting seasons to a culture that follows a lunar calendar)

Not to hammer home the point too far, but notice that the emphasis is on the lights (which are inanimate objects installed into the sky by God) serving a purpose and having a specific function to make life on earth habitable. There is no sense in which this is giving us any kind of scientific explanation, nor does the text demand that the sun, moon, stars could not have already been materially present and are now being literarily depicted on Day 4 as installed by God to their proper role. This is because it fits the flow of the narrative Moses is crafting to drive home a point other than the strict chronological order of material creation. Think for a minute how this would strike a people coming out of a culture that deifies the celestial bodies, specifically the sun.

Now you’re maybe seeing what Moses is getting at.

Day Five

There’s not as much of a point to make in Day 5, but in light of the ANE background there is something to take note of:

God said, “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.

I am not going to deny the presence of material creation here (nor are we ultimately denying material creation at all in Genesis 1) but again, it’s just not the focus of the narrative. Day 5 though installs functionaries into the arena that was fashioned on Day 2. To see it conceptually it would look something like this:

• Day 1: Heavens || Day 4: Objects to function in Heavens
• Day 2: Sky/Ocean || Day 5: Animals to function in Sky/Ocean
• Day 3: Land || Day 6: Plants/Animals/Man to function in the Land

It is interesting though to note why the giant sea creatures are singled out. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? The reason, so far as I can see, is that typically in the ANE giant sea creatures are symbols of chaos, and several creation myths involve a deity vanquishing one of these creatures (ending chaos) before then creating (or ordering) the cosmos. I won’t get into it here, but check out Psalm 74 sometime for this motif attributed to Yahweh (and also ask yourself why no one scientifically tries to explain that one). Also, re-read the end of Job again, see if parts of it make more sense now.

The point it seems is that in God’s world, sea creatures are not chaotic and they simply are part of God’s creation, placed by Him in their place and then given a function to serve God (being fruitful and multiplying). This further underlies the denial of the chaos motif in Genesis 1, even though it is prominent in other Mesopotomian sources. The point could be that it either doesn’t figure prominently in the Egyptian creation accounts, or that Moses is just making the point that ultimately, there was no initial chaos before God created the heavens and the earth (of before he ordered them starting in v.3).

Day Six

The creation of man in Day 6 is a huge break from other creation accounts, as in those man is either created by accident (like in Enuma Elish) or as an after thought (in Egyptian ones if I remember correctly), usually to be a servant of the lesser gods (Enuma Elish again and to a lesser extent the Egyptian).

We’ve already seen the functional idea in the chart above, and since I could spend an entire post on the meaning of man being created in the image of God, we’ll stop here and pick that idea back up in a later post.

The take-away at this point is the idea that the focus of creation thus far has been on establishing functions and installing functionaries. We’ll look in the next post how this wraps up in Day 7 (including what the function of man is, which we left alone here) and some issues related to reconciling Genesis 1 and 2.

Only 165 words over. Not bad I guess.

Creationists and evolutionists are interesting groups of people.  It would seem that both sides of this debate are so passionate that the sound of the blood pumping in their ears prevents them from really hearing the other side very clearly.  Oh, I know, it is all about “intelligent conversation,” but if we are honest there are too many times that both sides are at fault for giving in to subjectivity.

A friend sent me a link to the following article just today.  While there are plenty of issues that I have no doubt will be hot points for debate, there is an excellent sentiment in the tone of the article as well as the challenge to discussion at the end.  The author, Alan Dowd, suggests that his fellow creations speak respectfully, humbly (yet boldly), intelligently, and personally.  He is quick to acknowledge that the debate, as much as we want to say is completely academic, is of such concern on both sides of the table that it is sincerely difficult to have apart from emotional context.

Click here for the full text of the article.  Then come back here and comment until your heart’s content.

It’s not often I write a post that is basically adapted from a powerpoint presentation, but since I’ve been teaching this in small group, I am basically just expanding on my own slides. Given that the slides themselves are derived from Dr. Johnston’s class notes and John Walton’s books, you might expect things to get a bit convoluted but don’t you worry. If you’ve followed this discussion so far, this post should make perfect sense, although I’ll be honest, it may be a bit hard to grasp at first since it varies from what people usually understand to be going on in Genesis 1.

We touched on the opening verses in the last post. I find it best to take v.1 as an overarching summary statement, and if you want to see a material creation, this is the verse to see it in since the immediate next verse has matter in it. One should note however that the watery deep is a motif from ANE creation accounts symbolizing either chaos, or here in Genesis, lack of order and differentiation.

Day One

So, the stage is set for God to start setting up and ordering the universe, making it a suitable place for humanity to dwell. Here’s Day 1 as it appears in the NET Bible:

God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, making the first day.

Walton’s thinking on this passage got stimulated by considering the seeming anomaly of God renaming “light.” At first glance, we probably don’t actually think much about this, but just pause for a moment and consider why here in Genesis 1 God renames “light” (Hebrew “or”) to “day” (Hebrew “yom”) while in the rest of Genesis, “light” (“or”) is still called “light.”

Along those same lines, consider that “light” is never treated as a material object in the ANE. They didn’t have our physics yet, so for them, “light” wasn’t a thing, it was a condition. So in other words, “light,” in our understanding of modern physics, is not what is in view here. This should be obvious from the fact that in terms of physics, you cannot actually separate light from darkness. (Although I realize God can transcend his own natural laws, the point is that no one in the ANE could have possibly understood this concept).

However, you can separate periods of light from periods of darkness. “Light” in this sense is functioning as a metonymy (a part substituted for the whole) as is “darkness.” This would lead to a rendering of:

God said, “Let there be a period of light.” And there was light! God saw that the period of light was good, so God separated the period of light from the period of darkness. God named the period of light “day” and the period of darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, making the first day.

In this sense then, what is God creating on Day 1?

He is establishing the function of time. Alternating periods of light and darkness is the basis of time, at least as it is primarily conceived from a human vantage point. There was no need for time prior to creation, but Moses’ description of God’s creative activity starts with Him establishing the function of time.

So on Day 1, God established Time.

But what of Day 2?

Day Two

For anyone seeking to lobby hardcore for a material creation in view, Day 2 presents some serious difficulties:

God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening and there was morning, a second day.

I’m just going to cut to the chase here. The reason God called for an expanse in the midst of the water and then separated the waters (notice the waters were already there and they hadn’t been created on Day 1) is that in the ANE, the sky was conceived of as holding back a heavenly ocean. This is an obvious deduction from the experience of rain, and also the fact that the sky is the same color as bodies of water on the earth are (or at least were back then). Everyone conceived of the sky in this way.

So, here then you have God accommodating their cosmic geography and not only establishing a “heavenly ocean,” but also placing a hard vault-like translucent dome in the sky. The expanse (Hebrew, “raqia”) is always conceived of as a solid object and it was common even through the period of the apostolic fathers to view the sky as a dome like object holding back a heavenly ocean.

Some attempts, most notably the vapor canopy theory, have attempted to explain this object scientifically, but this simply ignores the face value reading of the text in light of the ANE background.

Think Truman Show. It’s not the best analogy, but the ancients viewed the sky as a more or less translucent dome that sometimes opened to allow parts of the ocean to fall down on them. In this sense then, the sky (as God then named the expanse) served as the basis of the second thing that is vital to human existence: weather.

On Day 2 then, we have God establishing the function of weather, as mediated through the expanse, which God named sky.

Day Three

In order to finish up, we’ll have to power through Day 3. At this point, if you have started thinking in terms of functions it might be a bit easier, but let’s look at it quickly:

God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” God saw that it was good. God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And it was so. The land produced vegetation – plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning, a third day

There’s a lot to digest here (which is a pun you’ll see in a minute), so I’ll try to be pointed in my observations. In Days 1 and 2, God is differentiating cosmic space (the heavens) while now in Day 3, His attention is turned to terrestrial space. Notice again, nothing is really materially made (at least in an “ex nihilo” out of nothing fashion as normally construed).

God establishes though water sources, soil, and the seed cycle. All of these underlie the basis of food. You should see a noticeable progression here. God is establishing the foundations of life, starting with time, which underlies weather, which then further underlies the possibility of planting and harvesting food to nourish life.

Notice that this is what God re-affirms to Noah after the flood, which itself was a return to the watery disorder of Genesis 1:2. Consider Genesis 8:22:

While the earth continues to exist, planting time and harvest [food], cold and heat and summer and winter [seasons, i.e. weather], and day and night [time] will not cease.

So in the “recreation” of the world after the flood, God promises Noah that the foundations of life will never be annulled (they hadn’t really completed ceased) and in a sense, Noah exiting the ark is picking up at day four all over again. Which is where we’ll be looking in the post.

At this point we are actually getting a bit closer to moving through the narrative. This hopefully will be a shorter post that highlights the structure of the account before we move into looking at the actual days, probably grouped together 1-3 and then 4-6.

Genesis 1 itself is a form of prose, although it is not quite like the historical narratives encountered elsewhere in the Bible. Collins (in Genesis 1-4, mentioned last post) sees it as exalted prose narrative, which I think is rather fitting given the literary structure of the passage. The literary agenda of Moses helps form how the narrative is structured, which in turn implies that is not account strict historical fact. This is not necessarily saying the events in Genesis 1 didn’t happen, but it is saying that Moses’ agenda in authorship was not necessarily a chronological rendering of the events of creation. The high level of patterning we will see as we break this text out seems to demonstrate that the six day work week and ordering of events is part of a larger literary device rather than an attempt to explain to us just exactly how God created the heavens and the earth.

Now, as Collins also notes, and if you can read Hebrew, you could note just as well, we can tell this is a narrative because Hebrew narratives rely on a chain of verbs called preterites to make the backbone of the progression of events. These verbs can alternately be called wayyiqtols, but I like preterites better and that was what Dr. Webster called them in Hebrew 1 and 2. Also, the name preterite implies what the verbs themselves are, basically past tense verbs of action.

What is interesting about all of this is that this chain of verbs does not start until v. 3, so this makes vv. 1-2 background material. In this sense, if one were going to insert a gap into things, it would be between vv. 2-3 not vv. 1-2 as the gap-theory usually argues for. This argument also relies on seeing v.1 as an initial creation event, and then the world falling into ruin somehow/somewhere before the start of v. 2. Besides the fact that this is rather speculative, it in large part depends on an understanding of v.1-2 that is hard to sustain in light of the ANE background.

Rather than seeing the phrase, “without form and void” as meaning some kind of disrepair had fallen upon the initial creation, a semi-thorough reading of other creation accounts would reveal that this is the general motif that they most always start with. That is to say, all creation accounts tend to start with a state of disorder and formlessness from which the deity then establishes order and functionality to a previously disordered unformed universe.

Notice, this has nothing to do with material creation. While v.1 can still stand as an initial creation event if you want to see creation ex nihilo in this passage, the rest of the account then is a matter of God “creating” the universe in the sense of establishing the functions it will have and then appointing functionaries, all to provide a suitable place for man to inhabit.

In this sense, we are not in any way denying creation and would still affirm God created everything that is in existence as that is affirmed thoroughly throughout the rest of the OT and into the NT, with the places in my mind being Paul’s apologetic defense in Acts 14 and 17 and then his letter to the Colossians, in the 1st chapter.

The question is not whether God created, the question we are asking is whether Genesis 1 is describing “how” God created in a material sense, or whether it is a literary account describing God’s creative acts in more of an establishing sense. This would mean God is being depicted as creating the universe much in the same way a person creates a college, to use Walton’s analogy. Interestingly enough, this is also seen in Exodus 40 where Moses “creates” the tabernacle, but we’ll come back to that once we’re done. (If you wanna set the stage a bit, read Genesis 1 and Exodus 40 side by side and see what you think).

As to the actual structure of the account, “in the beginning” is most likely referring to the first moment, although it could also give our sense of “once upon a time,” although really, if we are seeing it as the first moment of real time creation, then “once upon a time” doesn’t work. The Egyptian account we’ll see below starts with “the first occasion.” Not just for this reason, but from the other parallels as well, it seems best to see Genesis 1 as using the structure of the Egyptian creation accounts but in a way that undermines them and advances their concepts. What follows below comes from observations that Dr. Johnston made in his ETS paper, and is relying on Egyptologists work in examining Genesis 1.

They are a total of 4 different cultic centers in Egypt that had a creation account: Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Memphis, Thebes. You might could make a case for 5 and add Elephantine, but the relevant ones we’ll look at briefly are Hermopolis and Memphis. I’m gonna just put the parallels below and you can examine for yourself whether or not it might be likely that Moses, after just leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, might like to supplement the oral tradition with a polemic against the Egyptian deities.

Here is how Hermopolis tradition goes, as reflected in their Coffin Texts and Pyramid Texts:

• Starts with lifeless chaotic watery deep
• Breath/wind (the god Amun) moves upon the waters
• Creation of supernatural light (generates god Atum)
• Emergence of a primordial hill in the midst of Nun (the water goddess)
• Procreation of sky (god Shu) when Nun raise over earth
• Formation of heavenly ocean (goddess Nut) by separation
• Formation of dry ground (god Geb) by separation
• Humanity accidentally created by tears of Atum
• Sun created to rule the world as image of Re (or Ra)

Note the similarities, dis-similarities in this account. Realize as well that Enuma Elish, while providing some thematic/conceptual parallels does not provide any sort of structural parallel at all to see as a backdrop for Genesis 1.

It gets more intense though, as you can see when we compare the events narrated in the Shabaka Stone, which represents the Memphite theology from the New Kingdom period of Egypt:

• Pre-creation condition: lifeless chaotic watery deep
• Breath/wind (the god Amun) moves upon the waters
• Thought and word of Ptah creates light (god Atum)
• Emergence of a primordial hill in the midst of Nun (the water goddess)
• Procreation of sky (god Shu) when Nun raise over earth
• Formation of heavenly ocean (goddess Nut) by separation
• Formation of dry ground (god Geb) by separation
• Sun created to rule the world as image of Re (or Ra)
• Earth sprouts plants, fish, birds, reptiles, animals
• Creation of god’s statutes, cult sites, food offerings
• Ptah completes activity and rests in satisfaction

Now what is interesting in these accounts is that the Egyptians could never get to a “First Cause.” So in this account, Ptah is the creator god, but the origin of Ptah is not accounted for, and he likewise creates other gods which are manifest through the natural elements (remember our last discussion about backgrounds). We do not have time and space here to investigate Egyptian theogony (origins of the gods) but just realize they were unable to explain the ultimate origins of the gods, much in the same way that current evolutionary biologists and physicists can explain the progression and devlopment of life, and can even get to within several thousandths of a second prior to a supposed Big Bang, but cannot explain how it started.

The genius then of Moses, or rather, the glory of God in inspiration through the Holy Spirit, is manifested in the highly developed narrative in Genesis 1 that presents God as the ultimate first cause who was uncreated by another god and who then creates the entire universe. We’ll come back to this point later as we wrap up Genesis 1, but given the parallels with the Egyptian accounts, we are arguing not that Genesis borrowed the Egyptian account, but that Moses used their structure for describing creation, entered into their cultic dialogues about creation and one-upped them in a way that they could not recover from.

John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One and the commentary I will cite below are the main sources I am relying on for discussion, as well as an unpublished paper by my Hebrew professor, Gordon Johnston on the Egyptian influence on Genesis 1. Dr. Johnston first introduced me to viewing Genesis 1 differently over this summer in Hebrew 3 class. Previously I had been part of the young earth creationist tradition as influenced by teaching at Word of Life and Liberty University. For matters related to the Hebrew text itself and the background of the ANE, I no longer find that interpretation viable. But we’ll get to that below and in forthcoming posts.

Before we dig into Genesis line by line (or in reality we’ll go day by day) there are a couple of hermeneutical issues to further square away. This is typically were a particular group’s interpretation gets off on the wrong foot and then most of what is said beyond that is either unfaithful to the text in terms of either saying too much or not saying enough.

Both Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism make the text say too much, because both of them are attempting make Genesis concord with modern science. It should amuse you in some way that two very opposing groups of interpretation make basically the same hermeneutical error. It also illustrates the point that when you are trying to make the Bible mesh with science, the real question is “Who’s science?”

The framework hypothesis doesn’t quite say enough with the text, but for this reason, it just needs to be filled out more rather than actually overhauled like the previous two groups. This approach may be unfamiliar to most readers. It is represented well in a commentary I would recommend and am actually going to relying on here called Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary by C. John Collins.

The other option is to mishandle the text completely, either linguistically or literarily. The ruin-reconstruction theory  or “gap theory” is an example of this and fails on both accounts to interpret the Hebrew accurately (we’ll get to this in the next post).

Now as far as interpreting the Hebrew goes, this brings up an interesting point, and one that tends to make people a bit uncomfortable. In order for someone who does not know Hebrew to interpret the Old Testament, they have to rely on some Hebrew scholar to facilitate their understanding in some way. There is no qualitative difference between  me and you in this respect, rather it is one of degree. For those who might protest the validity of needing a Hebrew scholar, simply pick up your Bible and look at the list of translators inside the front cover and those are the particular scholars that are facilitating you. Like I said, it’s a question of degree not quality. The less knowledge of Hebrew you have, the more dependent you are on someone else to interpret the Hebrew for you, whether that is in a commentary and you have some knowledge of Hebrew, or whether that is in your own pages of the Bible and you have no knowledge of the Hebrew at all.

The reason this discussion is even probable though is that I am in some sense an intermediary. I am no Hebrew scholar by any means, but I know enough to read the Hebrew itself with just a few lexical aids and I have first hand contact with the scholarly world and can access information and make it available (and hopefully understandable) to those who do not know much, if anything of Hebrew language and grammar. In a sense, this all I am really doing in this blog series.

Now that in mind, we need to look briefly at a hermeneutical task that  most people fail at in interpreting the Bible, especially the Old Testament. This is mainly the case if they are studying it on their own, or at least without studying it a little more in depth and accessing background sources to aid their understanding of writing from a culture that is almost totally foreign to them.

The concept itself actually comes from cognitive linguistics and particularly speech act theory. I will try to simplify this as much as possible without losing the vital content. If you want a more in depth treatment, you can check out a book by John Searle called Speech Acts, or something a little newer like Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.

Basically, whenever you are looking at a text, there are three things in play:

• Locution = the surface content of a statement
• Illocution = the performative function of the the statement
• Perlocution = the intended effect of the statement

The easiest way to break this out is to see it in action in the following scenario:

Suppose Ali tells me as we crawl into bed that she is cold (a locution). Her purpose in telling me is not to keep informed of her relative body temperature, but to get me to do something about it (the illocution of her statement), which I then actually do by getting up and turning off the fan (the perlocution she had in mind). We see this also in the Bible in the book of Ruth. When Ruth asks Boaz to spread the corner of his blanket over her, she is asking for a bit more than just to stay warm. The force of her question is one of consummation of marriage right then and there. But that is for another discussion (if you are interested in Ruth further, check out discussion here Whether or not this will be addressed, I cannot say).

We do this kind of thing all the time in what would technically be termed as indirect speech. If you are a single male in college and the girls there are nice, this is the way they will generally turn down your advances. If you ask a girl out and she gives a flat excuse without offering another option, the intended perlocution she has in mind if for you to leave her alone, not to keep asking for other options. She’s not that in to you, but she’s at least being nice about it (until you keep badgering).

Now to bring this back to bear on reading Genesis. If this is indeed how people communicate (and it is) then we should expect to untangle these different aspects of communication in Moses’ writing. The surface content of Genesis needs to be interpreted, but all that gives us in the locutionary force of the text. We additionally need to ask what the illocutionary force of the text was (and there can be more than one). That is to say, we need to inquire what Moses was getting at by what he was saying. Lastly, we need to discern the perlocution Moses had in mind by his description of creation in Genesis 1 (and 2 for that matter). What does Moses want us to do in light of what he wrote? Did he intend for us to use his locutions as a scientific treatise to combat evolutionists?

Probably not. Again, the questions we are trying to answer with Genesis are not even on the radar screen of the ancient world. The main problem with a scientific reading of Genesis is that it is missing the illocutionary force of the text and making a wrong inference from the surface content.

Let me repeat that in a more concise way: a reading of Genesis 1 that seeks to reconcile it with modern science is missing the point of the text.

Generally speaking as well, it is not even making proper sense of the locutions before misconstruing the illocutionary force into something Moses could not possibly have intended. This of course does not undermine inspiration or inerrancy, but removes completely a criticism that is frequently lodged against the Bible. We’ll get into that more as we explore Genesis, but on this reading our ability to defend inerrancy to an unbelieving world is stronger rather than weaker. And additionally, our ability to defend creation in the face of evolution is stronger as well as we are moving the argument into a different arena entirely, one that not even Dawkins with all his “evidence” can compete in, and to which he frankly admits he has no answers.

Removing science from Genesis 1 does not give ground to evolution. Genesis 1:1 still stands, no matter how you read the rest of the chapter, and to that we will turn tomorrow.

Hopefully we won’t need a (C) to unpack the context of Genesis 1. As I remember, point (C) can tend to stir up controversy.

The fundamental point from the last post to keep in mind as we go on is that for something to exist in the ancient world, it had to have a name, function, and a purpose within an ordered system. An interesting side note to this is that laws in the ANE were aimed at maintaining order, not necessarily conforming to an abstract sense of right and wrong. That is, not until the giving of the law on Sinai, but that is a discussion for another post.

Alongside the idea of having a function based ontology (as opposed to our own material based ontology) in the ANE there was no such thing as a distinction between natural and supernatural.

With just a moment of pondering you can see how this changes the picture somewhat. In the ANE, no one doubted the existence of deity. The mere existence of the universe functioning like an ordered system pointed to either a deity that ran the cosmos or was inherent within in it. The latter was the view in Egypt, the gods were not so much the elements in nature, but were what the elements did (see the functional emphasis?) as manifested in nature. For instance, with Nut, the sky goddess depicted in reliefs as arching her star dotted body over the ground god; she was not so much the sky, but what the sky did (see Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt for more discussion). The gods did not “intervene” within an otherwise natural world, that idea would have been nonsensical to the average person in the ANE. Were the gods to simply start the world up and step back, unplugging themselves from it in some way; it would cause the whole universe to collapse.

As a consequence of this, there were no laws of nature (in the sense we use them), there were ways that deity rule the cosmos; there was absolutely nothing natural about their world. Nor really should there be within ours. The distinction we tend to make between natural and supernatural is a rather recent artificial sort of distinction that is not in any way shared by the authors of the Bible or the cultures the Bible was written to. God does not interevene, God is always there, always working, the difference is in our perception of His hand at work. The line between deism and atheism really isn’t much of a line at all.

Now what is more interesting is when we apply this function mentality to the structure of the cosmos itself. In addition to discussing the meaning of existence, one also needs to investigate the cosmic geography of the cultures in the ANE. In light of existence between tied to function and not substance characterized by material properties, the physical aspects of the cosmos did not define its existence or importance; they were merely the tools the gods used for carrying out their purposes, and the latter was the main interest of the ancients (Walton, 167).

This is where the flat earth idea mentioned comes back into play. Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Canaanites, Hittites, and Israelites all thought of the cosmos in terms of tiers: the earth was in the middle with the heavens above and the netherworld beneath (Walton, 166). Even to the point of the 1st century world, this idea still persisted, and Jesus himself never sat the disciples down and offered to correct them (think of the Ascension, is heaven really up? They certain thought so.)

Now we will get into this further as we look at the text in detail, but please realize, just like us, the ancients had their own understanding of how the universe was structured, but it was vastly different than ours. Not necessarily less scientific (in the sense of scientific knowledge being the product of “reading” nature) but was not as advanced in the sciences as our understanding is. Ideas like a round earth, the sky not being an ocean, the stars being suns, the earth rotating the sun rather than the other way around are all relatively new on the scene.

This is a very important point to realize, especially if you are keen on the young earth creationist views that seek to find concord in the Biblical text and the views of modern science. Think Answers in Genesis, and the History of Life class at Liberty University. There are great men of God who work for former and teach at the latter, but that does not mean they are necessarily making the best sense of the text of Genesis as it stands in context. This is not a slam on any of them personally, but it is an argument against their view.

The effort itself is doomed for failure and strips one of credibility to answer the questions that a lost world is asking. After just finishing Richard Dawkins’ latest offering, The Greatest Show on Earth, most of his diatribes against creationists are for this very reason. They are trying to find scientific truth in the Bible instead within an advanced study of nature itself. Now what to make of the evidence within nature is a different point and your philosophical presuppositions will drive your interpretations, but we’ll get to that later on. But just a caveat before moving on. I am in no way vindicating Dawkins’ evolutionary views, however, he is making a point that we should heed.

Stop trying to use/read Genesis 1 scientifically.

From his perspective it is bad science (and he is right) And from a Hebrew scholar’s perspective (Walton, and Johnston my own prof) it is not an accurate reading of the Hebrew text itself in its ancient context.

So in a sense, a scientific reading (in light of our science) of Genesis 1 fails in two arenas. We’ll look more into why this is so, and why this does not actually in any way give the evolutionist a foothold (like I said, I just read Dawkins’ book and did not find his own evidence very convincing of his point, but again more on that later).

Just to drive the point home a bit further in closing, here are some thoughts from Walton’s book (The Lost World of Genesis One) on why you should not read in Genesis 1 in light of modern science:

“If God were intent on making his revelation correspond to science, we have to ask which science. We are all well aware that science is dynamic rather than static. By its very nature science is in a constant state of flux. If we were to say that God’s revelation corresponds to “true science” we adopt an idea contrary to the very nature of science.” (pg 17)

He goes on to point out that is God aligned revelation with one particular science, it would have been unintelligible to people prior to the time of that science and obsolete to those that came after. Rather, we should look at the descriptions of the universe throughout the Bible (and specifically in Genesis 1) as culturally relative notions, not transcendentally true “science.” Throughout the Bible, there is not a single instance of God revealing to Israel a science beyond their culture (pg. 19). As such, it does mean they are false statements, they are simply statements that the individuals receiving them would have immediately understood as “speaking their language.” The cosmic geography of modern science would have been unintelligible to the ANE and was obsolete for God to make his point.

And it is the point we will see, that over-rides both the evolutionary claims of modern science and the religious claims of the rest of the ancient world. Some of what has been said here will need to be vindicated within the text itself, so if the preceding dialogue was a blow to your view of Genesis, just be patient and see if the text itself can clarify matters.

Before we can really meaningfully understand what is going on in Genesis, we need to establish some sort of context. The book itself makes the most sense as the introduction to the rest of the Pentateuch as written by Moses. I realize there are other options for authorship, but to be frank, most are ridiculous ad hoc explanations derived from some sort of higher criticism source theory. If you want to argue, we can argue, but for clarity sake, let’s take the traditional view that Moses wrote this sometime between the Exodus and his death. I am surprised with all the fanciful options out there, no one has yet proposed that Moses wrote this after his death.

So Moses wrote Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch and that gives us a date of somewhere around 1400BC for the writing. That is a rough enough estimate to work for our purposes here, but it brings up a significant observation. With this kind of date for authorship, it is by no means the first written account of creation. Indeed, as far as Ancient Near East (from now on ANE) backgrounds go, the actual writing of this account comes after most other accounts.

Now, the critical scholarship assumption is then that the Biblical authors borrowed from these other myths, making itself rather mythological. However, this does not necessarily follow from the above, and there are two other viable options.

First, Moses came from a similar cognitive environment as the other authors, specifically those in Egypt. This will become very crucial to remember in a moment, so file it away for a little bit. Beyond just Egypt though, Moses and the Israelites would have shared a way of thinking about reality that was in common with the other cultures around them. They were certainly unique in many aspects, but they were also very similar, and in one particular way that is necessary to clarify when talking about creation accounts.

Before anyone can meaningful discuss creation, you must establish what it means to create, and in order to do that, you must establish what is means for something to exist. We in the 21st century have our own ontology (metaphysic or philosophy of being) and what we generally fail to realize is that we import it into our reading of the the first chapter of Genesis.The failure on our part is to realize we do not share the same understanding of ontology as the ancient world.

We have a substance or materially based metaphysic. We are primarily concerned with the essence of something, something to us exists when it occupies space. It has some kind of material substance that can be classified in some way.

In the ancient world on the other hand, they had a function-based ontology. In other words, something existed when it had a function in an ordered system, or when it had been given a purpose and a name. For this reason, all their creation accounts generally move from chaos to order and from an undifferentiated unity to a plurality of things with names and functions. It is not so much an idea of nothing material existing and the something then being materially created. That is how we are prone to think of creation, but that is not what the ancients had in mind. A quote by John Walton may help to summarize:

“Creation takes place by giving things order, function, and purpose, which is synonymous with giving them existence.” Ancient Near East Thought and the Old Testament, pg 185.

In another book by Walton (Lost World of Genesis One, 2009), he surveys the major creation accounts from the ANE and points out that in all of them, nothing is materially made (at least in any sense ex nihilo). Of note in this survey was the Egyptian writings (The Memphite Theology, Papyrus Leiden I 350, as well as various Pyramid and Coffin texts that talk extensively of creation) as well as the more well known Enuma Elish.

The question then is not whether or not Genesis 1 breaks the mold and presents the first and only account in the ANE that demonstrates material creation, but rather, could the Israelites have even understood such a concept? Given the function/purpose based ontology that pervaded every other ANE culture, it is not likely that God revealed a metaphysic to Moses that turned the flat earth of the Israelites upside down (we’ll return to that later), but rather God contextualized his revelation in way that the Israelites would have easily understood.

All of this way to show that similarity in creation accounts does not have to mean borrowing or copying, but rather the creation accounts all reflect a common cultural background and understanding of reality that was function based rather than material based. As such, the creation accounts end up coming out sounding similar, which is also due to a similar style of writing.

Now the second option to consider is one of polemic. In this instance, we are going to argue that Genesis is intended as a polemic against the Egyptian creation account. As such, it can (and will) be shown that Moses used the structure of the Egyptian accounts, but with major revisions, new ideas, and disastrous indirect implications for the Egyptian deities. He used their form, but said something entirely different than we were saying. Moses entered into the dialogue that was going on between rival cultic centers throughout Egypt (Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Memphis, Thebes) and as they had attempted to one-up each other, he struck the decisive last blow to which they could not even offer an answer.

This summarizes to some extent the main point to keep in mind about the disjunction between our modern understandings of existence and the ancient one. Also, creation accounts should be seen as written in some kind of dialogue with one another, none of them so far as I can tell, were written in a vacuum. They were aware of the other stories out there, Moses specifically so, and would use some of their language and imagery to make different points, or to undercut the other culture’s story. This is precisely what Moses is up to in Genesis 1, but before we get to that, we need to clarify a bit further the background from which Genesis emerges before we start examining the text itself.

To that end, we need to discuss cosmic geography (how one understands the world) before we can talk about cosmogony (how one understands the origin of the world), and that will be taken up in Backgrounds (B).

Rather than blogging over the last week, most of my attention was diverted to the comment thread on Idolatry: Pharisees (C). If I wanted to I suppose, I could highlight most of my arguments throughout and use as an example of apologetics, both in the historical sense of apologetics from history and in the philosophical sense of challenging the underlying philosophy of unbelief.

I’ll probably spend some time gathering thoughts and reading further on the former, but on the latter, I’ll go ahead here and say a few words. It is interesting to note though that the evidences necessary to validate Christianity historically are typically what Pelagian7 was intent on attacking. Whether or not he himself realizes this, the historical facts upon which Christianity is based are actually of prime importance, at least it was to Paul. If the unbeliever can undermine the historical claims central to Christianity (the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as presented in the Bible) then there is little point of arguing further. This is why Paul thought that is Christ had not been raised we were to be most pitied. For unlike any other religion, Christianity rises or falls on the legitimacy of its historicity.

But I will return to that later on.

For now, you might be intrigued, or at least unsure of what I am getting at in the title. An enthymeme is simply an argument containing an unstated proposition (Introduction to Logic,  Copi/Cohen, 2005, 279ff). Everyday discourse relies heavily on them, so there is nothing particularly wrong or sinister about them. However, if you browse back through the comment thread I mentioned earlier, you will see that they occur rather frequently in Pelagian7’s discourse and the reason for that is particularly wrong and sinister. Maybe not intentionally on his part, but nonetheless, it is poor logical form and the unstated propositions in these types of arguments are specifically the ones that need to be addressed.

That is probably the main reason the comment thread went as long as it did. It was a combination of failure on my part to always address them, and a continued effort on Pelagian7’s part to suppress the controversial parts of his argument into unstated premises. Now, I can’t completely be too hard on Pelagian7 as some of the authors he is fond of reading do just that particular thing frequently (a la Bart Ehrman) and he more or less was just parroting what he had read.

To see Ehrman’s enthymemes exposed, check out either Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ or Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus” for a highlight just on Ehrman as it applies to NT textual criticism.

Paul, as well as seeing the necessity of a sound historical apologetic, also recognized the basis of an enthymeme of unbelief in Romans 1:18-19:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

Now I realize Paul is not explicitly talking about suppressing a premise of your argument when trying to justify your beliefs, but it does seem to be alluding a principle that is at work in the minds of unbelievers.

This comes out frequently as an un-argued bias against either the Christian faith, the life of Christ, or the authority and inspiration of the Bible. In my seminar on Ancient Near Eastern literature, we discuss this often as we come across writings in the ancient world that seem very similar to parts of the Bible. Many times scholars will argue that this undermines the Bible, the suppressed premise being that similarity must mean copying on the part of the authors of Scripture, not vice versa, or the more likely option, they all simply shared a similar cognitive environment that we 3000-4000 years later do not.

Anyway, this typically comes out when arguing with atheists would like to presume that all Christians are biased and that somehow they themselves are not. The un-argued premise again is that they themselves are neutral. It is rarely stated so bluntly as that, which can make it hard to detect, but a quick glance through of the comment thread on Pharisees (C) shows just that. The scholars Pelagian7 continually cited were presented in an un-argued manner as being neutral and objective, while anyone I quoted was biased and did not count.

The correct way to precede in these sorts of arguments is not to deny your own bias, since as a Christian you should be biased, you are not meant to seek to be objective or neutral in your reasoning. Truth is not up for grabs and given to the best argument. If you reason your way into Christianity then you can just as easily reason your way out. Your faith should not rest on your ability to reason. This is not to say reason is worthless, it is just a tool (or as Martin Luther would say, a “whore”) that will serve any master.

As a Christian, you submit your reasoning to the Scriptures and to Christ, and because of that, you lost objectivity and neutrality. But be quick to point out, your unbelieving friend is not neutral either, and your job remains to expose the bias, and to uproot the enthymemes of unbelief buried in their arguments.

All this to say, this comes out very significantly in the creation vs. evolution debates, and since we are getting ready to explore Genesis, this serves as a good hinge between the past posts and the upcoming ones. At some point we will delve into the philosophical arguments against the tenets of evolution as we move the arena away from Genesis, at least in the way it is normally taken there. Genesis plays a role as we will soon see, it is just the part it is meant to play is different than certain groups of evangelicals would like it to be, but in the end, our argument against evolution and against atheism is stronger, not weaker.

So let’s dig in.

Howard Hendricks, who is a much distinguished teacher of Christian Education here at Dallas Seminary has been quoted as saying that “In the midst of a generation screaming for answers, Christians are stuttering,”

Unfortunately, this is painfully true in more areas that just one. However, one area that is becoming increasingly embarrassing for Christians in the public square is the views of Genesis that we are staunchly defending.

While this may not seem to be the most significant areas in which Christians are stuttering, it is at least one area where evangelical Christians are yelling non sequiturs to the questions that are being asked. And in doing so, we are not just losing the argument, but are failing to adequately defend the faith in the face of deep philosophical and ideological opposition.

And what is worse, we may be rabidly defending ideas and positions that the Bible is not even attempting to address, much less teaching in an unequivocal manner.

In defending the wrong things, we are failing at our charge to preach the word and are not suffering for our faith in Christ, but are suffering for our faith in our poor interpretations of the Biblical data.

I realize this is vague so far, but this is more or less an introduction to a series that will cover further explorations in Genesis, but will also start to move forward the Metaphysics series. It will unite the streams of Creator and creation and then move forward with creation, specifically in relation to Genesis 1-2.

In doing so, we will answer questions that bear on the creation vs. evolution debate, or at least as it is construed in evangelical dialogues. We will however, put forward the idea that maybe we are arguing the wrong points, and that those points may not even be taught in the Bible. We will evaluate the merits of arguing over the following:

• The age of the earth
• The structure of creation in Genesis 1-2
• The necessity of all creation taking place only within the 7 literal days (and was something “created” in day 7?)
• The sequence of creation (which is presented in other places than Genesis 1-2)
• The scientific nature of the descriptions in Genesis 1-2 (and whether there is any)
• The ancient near eastern background and its relation to Genesis

Hopefully in the end, we will have a view of Genesis that is more balanced in its treatment of the actual Hebrew text, as well as connecting it to its background context and removing the 21st century questions we are demanding that an ancient text answer satisfactorily.

I would suspect though, as a word of warning, almost everyone that reads the following posts will have some view of Genesis, cherished or not, overturned by the evidence either within the background, or within the text itself. Some may even be offended at the removal of some ideas from the text of Genesis as not having a legitimate basis.

It is important to distinguish though between removing an idea for the whole corpus of Scriptures, as opposed to just removing it from play in Genesis. I will try to be clear when I am saying that something is not taught in the Bible at all, or whether it is just not taught in Genesis like you may have been led to believe.

More so than usual, you the reader, should expect to encounter ideas here that you have not before and should welcome the opportunity to expand your understanding of a very important text of Scripture that has very significant ramifications in public dialogue today in our culture. If you feel you have all the answers already, then you have no need to read any further in this series. If however, you do not feel you have all the answers then please read on and hopefully you will find some answers to questions you didn’t even know you should be asking, and may also find that the key to the creation vs. evolution debate does not lie within science per se, but lies elsewhere as we will soon see.

So, be warned, the things I say about what Genesis does or does not teach may be offensive to you, but judge the content based on its merits within the evidence of the background literature and the text of Scripture itself, not against the emotional reaction such ideas may being to you. In doing so, you like I have, may grow in your understanding of Genesis and its role in both the dialogues in the public square and in the foundation of what we as Christians hold to be true.

News Flash!!! The “Missing Link” has been found!…again!

OK. To be fair, it isn’t so much that the “Missing Link” has been found as it is that Ida has been replaced — replaced by Ardi.

Of all that’s being said about the newest addition to the evolutionary hall of fame, ”Ardi”, the simple fact is that all the facts are not in. Nevertheless, the people who are speaking the most matter-of-factly about  Ardi are not creationists, proclaiming that Ardi means nothing. The people who are most sure of themselves are the evolutionists, proclaiming that Ardi means everything.

I guess we’ll see if Ardi does “change everything” and proves to be the “evidence Darwin only dreamed of”, or if it will go the way of its predecessors. (You know the other “missing links” such as: Aegyptopithecus Zeuxis,  Dryopithicus africanus, Ramapithesu brevirostris, Orrorin tugenensis, Australopithecus ramidus, Australopithicus anamensis, Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, Kenyanthropus platyops, Lucy, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Java Man, and Rhodesian Man.) While all of these are facinating finds, they have all fallen short of being the silver bullet for proving Darwinian evolution as fact.

Here’s what some experts say:

From Answers in Genesis:

•  Meet “Ardi”
• Dr. David Menton was interviewed on Moody Radio about Ardi.

From Apologetics Press:

• Ardi Joins a Long, Infamous List of Losers

From the Institute for Creation Research:

•  The Artistry of ‘Ardi’
• Did Humans Evolve from ‘Ardi’?

Who (or what) is Ida? And, what’s the big fuss?

The History Channel advertized a special about Ida running the punch line, “This changes everything.” That statement pretty much sums up the attitude behind all the hype. That’s how big they think this is.But, the thing is, if Ida ‘changes everything’ then what was Darwinian evolution before Ida? Evolutionists have treated their ideas as settled fact for decades. Ida should only confirm what they say has already been proven. But, the Darwiniam mainstream is acting as if now they’ve really got something. Now they really have it settled. Now they can relax.

This ought to show us something - how insecure Darwinianism really is despite being hailed as fact. And, because the theory is insecure, the theorists are insecure as well. The Christian, on the other hand, can rest assure that what’s found inside of a rock cannot destroy the Rock of our faith.

I, in no way, claim to have expertise in this field (or pretty much any other field for that matter). So, I defer to all the scientists who do have that expertise. Here are some of the many helpful articles I’ve found that are all about Ida.

From Answers in Genesis:

• Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Missing Link at Last?
• Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Real Story of this “Scientific Breakthrough”

From Apologetics Press:

• Ida – A Missing Link?
• Following Up On a Messy, and Still Missing, Link

From the Institute for Creation Research:

• Ida: Separating the Science from the Media Campaign
• Ida Missed Her Link to Humans

So, here I am, busy scribing away on a serious blog post, and what shows up  in my in box?

THIS!

You know who you are who sent it to me (for the rest of you, it’s not who you think)! You are evil!

A few months ago I wrote a post in response to the lecture that I witnessed at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY.  The talk was titled “The Ultimate Proof of Creation,” but was actually an attack on the moral character of atheists.  Seated among a predominantly atheist audience, I was appalled and embarrassed at what was being said.  In my post I made quite a feeble attempt at a response, but wrote out of anger and with a lack of substance.

In the lecture, Dr. Jason Lisle asserted that there is no morality outside of Christianity, and further that an atheist has absolutely no reason to be moral because he does not believe in God.  As the king of logical fallacies, Dr. Lisle has been stewed in his own soup with this assertion.  It is quite easy, in fact, to discount his claim and give full credence to the atheist on her ability to choose to do the right thing in every circumstance without God’s divine direction.

A Brief History of Morality

In ancient Babylon, approximately the year 1790 BCE, the leaders of that ancient civilization needed to keep order in the kingdom.  If left to their own devices, people would likely continue to violate the rights of others, steal personal property, and murder their neighbors for taking food.  It was obvious, apart from any sort of divine guidance or intervention, that order needed to be enacted.  It was decided that a moral code would be written to instruct people on what was right and wrong.  This “document” was called the Code of Hammurabi, named for the king, and carved on a seven-foot four inch tall stele.  Several copies have been unearthed including some on smaller stone tablets.

For context, this code was written nearly 400 years prior to God giving the Mosaic Law that is contained in the Hebrew Bible.  There is no mention of God handing down or writing another moral code.  My critics may remind me that the Bible teaches that every good thing comes from above, and I agree.  However, the point here is that in contrast with the giving of the Mosaic Law, the civilization in which the Hammurabi Code was developed and written was not a society based on the belief of the Judeo-Christian God.  Christian author Dr. Michael Horton agrees by making this a prominent point in his book Christless Christianity and cites several similar examples of moral codes outside of and prior to the Mosaic Law.  In Romans 2:12-16, even the Apostle Paul admits that people who have not heard nor been instructed in the Law still “do by nature things required by the law.”

We can even talk about morality that even predates written language. In his book The God Delusion renowned author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins talks about memes, units of cultural inheritance.  The idea is that just as genes transmit biological information, memes transmit social information, specifically in terms of moral codes and moral laws.  In the most primitive of civilizations people could easily figure out how to get along with each other and some basic principles that can help make life better together.  These good ideas were transmitted by several different means including oral, written, and by example.  No doubt personality traits and biological factors played into this as well, but either way you slice it these are adequate explanations for the development of a moral code apart from the express involvement of the divine.

Christ Not Required

Christianity is a religion, indeed, and religion seems to have become synonymous with “rules for living” or “how to become a good person.”  The tragic thing is that at the heart of Christianity, it is really anything but.  Rather than taking a perspective of having the full capacity of being good and doing the right thing at all times, throughout the Scriptures it is very clear that this is impossible.  In fact, even in the Old Testament there were provisions for sacrifices that a person could make “just in case” there was a sin that he forgot or she did not intend (Leviticus 4).  That does not sound like a system that left any possibility of a person being flawless.

Ah! But Jesus changed all of that, didn’t he?  Of course, he did.  Jesus did the wonderful service of setting up yet other impossibilities that made the Mosaic Law look like a visit to grandma’s house.  While the Law of the Old Testament followed much of the moral codes that predated it, emphasizing action or prohibition of action, Jesus claimed that sin was when you had the thought of committing the action.  He said that if you hate then you are guilty of murder (Matthew 5:21-26).

The next scandal has been one that has stumped theologians for centuries.  Jesus said that the Law and the prophets are summarized in love for God and for others.  I have had an increasing number of debates with people about this.  They insist that preaching a law of love is so “spiritual” and that it is “freeing” because it eliminates the power of legalism in our lives.  But Jesus himself (these are “red letters”) said that love is the same thing as the Law (Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-28) .  If we follow the Law then we love and if we love we are following the Law.

Have you ever tried to love someone perfectly?  Is it even possible?  Loving someone perfectly means that you could never disappoint them and that you would always work to the good of the one you love.  Preaching love is not making anything any easier on anyone; it only helps people have a “feel-good legalism.”

Not Morals, Just Christ

The Gospel message is not a message of moralism.  The Gospel of Christ is simply this: it doesn’t matter what you have done or what you will ever do.  Jesus Christ, God incarnate, came to earth for the full intention of sacrificing himself to make payment for the sins that we have and will commit (Romans 5:1-11).  Christ made it so that we do not have to be perfect.  In fact, knowing that this was impossible his teaching emphasized this fact so that he would draw all people to himself.  Jesus made it possible to have a relationship with God again.  He covered our spiritual and moral nakedness with his robes of righteousness.  Nothing else is required.

Dr. Lisle, make this clear in your mind: if you think that Christianity is a moral code, then you do not know what Christianity is.  If you think that Christianity is doing the right thing and learning how to be a good person, you do not know what Christianity is.  If you think that if you work hard enough then you will get to meet God, then you can pick any other world religion, but you will not have Christianity.  A moral code does not make Christianity unique.  What separates Christianity is a God who comes, a God who cares, and a God who sets things right.  Every other faith makes you work for that relationship.  The Gospel is free.  Period.

The Gospel is even powerful enough to save Christians.