Doctrine of Creation: Excursus on Creation and Evolution Part 4

we've been talking in our section on doctrine of creation about various competing interpretations of the opening chapters of Genesis and we looked at the literal interpretation of Genesis which says that this is a quasi scientific narrative of God's creation of the universe and of life in six consecutive 24-hour days and I argued on the basis of certain hints in the text itself that that interpretation is not incumbent upon the bible believing christian and the on the contrary there are some very good reasons to think that the author of genesis 1 was not intending us to

understand him to be teaching six consecutive 24-hour creative days now let me ask if there's any further discussion about the literal interpretation before we go on to the second interpretation that i'll survey the gap interpretation it's not a question bin yes okay down here Steve we need the mic for Ben okay as you might know this is like the one area out of your three-year Sunday school curriculum that I still feel like there's more biblical and scientific evidence for young earth but I'm not dogmatic about that at all and I'll limit myself to one comment

and one question I promise but we didn't get to the lesson last week but two weeks ago you're saying one of the main one of the big problems was that light was created before the Sun Moon Stars and that you'd heard the explanation that the clouds just moved out of the way I think that's kind of a silly explanation for it for like explaining that away but I think that if in Genesis 1:14 when it talks about lights in the Hebrew that's light-bearer's yes and that's isn't in most of our Bibles and the size of

light bearers and so it I think it's important that the light was created before the light bearers like throughout the Old Testament in the New Testament you know God has seen in visions as light and then in Revelation it talks about the new earth that there will be no Sun Moon and stars because God will provide the light so I don't think it's a problem that the light was created before the Sun Moon and stars and then it also says that they were created as signs of the days and years so it seems like days

and years because it could have existed before the Sun Moon and stars because God had already established what those were a sign can only be of something that was already established beforehand yes there's a sign of something so I don't think there's a problem with it being there him having decided days in years and all that before the Sun Moon and stars were there to help us mark it make sense so I just want to say those quick things and then my question was would you agree with me that theistic evolution which typically does not

believe in a little Adam and Eve is not compatible with Christianity whereas Old Earth Creationism that typically does believe in a literal Adam and Eve is compatible well I want to hold on that question until we get to that I think that's it's too early yet to ask that question Ben so let's hold off on the historicity of Adam and Eve I did indicate already that I thought that the principal players in this drama are presented as historical characters principally God himself he's clearly not a mythological symbol he's an actual agent who creates the world

and then as I said Adam and Eve though these are symbolic of humanity the name Adam means man nevertheless they seem to be historical individuals in that they are connected by genealogies and descendants to indisputably historical persons like Abraham so I think that the interpreter to be faithful to the text has to deal with the fact that these principal characters are presented as historical individuals now whether the theistic evolutionist can do that well or not let's talk about that later with respect to the light it wasn't so much that there's light before the Sun and

the moon but that these are 24-hour days there's evening and morning which would imply the rotation of the earth on its axis as it orbits the Sun and so the if you do say there's light prior to the creation of the Sun then that would seem to suggest that these aren't 24-hour days after all that in fact we're not talking 24-hour periods of time so I think that the young earth creationist who takes that route is going to have trouble then defending his view that these are literal 24-hour days since that is set up by

the Sun and the moon or the Sun now with respect to what you said about them serving assigns I made this same point myself back when we talked about the doctrine of karati Oh ex nihilo where I pointed out that the passage actually says let the lights be for the purpose of marking seasons and days and seasons and years and so forth so that it may actually presuppose that they already exist and weren't created on the fourth day but then this again means that you're going to be interpreting the text in a way that is

not just literal when it says God made these things and it was evening and it was morning the the the fourth day so I think that while that's is a legitimate option that you're raising I question how well and comfortably that fits with the literal 24-hour day interpretation okay some other question Don I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel one night and it was dealing with the earth and the creation and all this stuff and they were talking about how the fossil record they've gone into the fossil record and they followed the fossil

record back and they hit a level boom and below that level there are no fossil records and they even came up with a term for it they coined it the Cambrian explosion right okay my question is this is there anything in Scripture that could indicate that the 24-hour day was the day of creation but they were not consecutive days oh there was a planet when that firms a very nice segue into the next interpretation we're going to talk about which is the gap interpretation and then the day gap interpretation which is going to put gaps

of time in between the creative days so hang on to that I'll address it in just a minute so so you knew I was gonna ask that question before I did you're just thinking the way many interpreters are trying to think of how might we understand this text okay Brad thank you since I'm I'm back to you know I'm Lee Jung yes and I'm back to that the perfection of the writing of Genesis 1 I don't think indicates that it's poetry I think it indicates the author and last time we talked we talked about the

indication that when there's a number with day throughout the the Bible it tends to be a 24-hour day and we talked about Hosea yes and I went back and looked at Hosea and I think the the to day and three day are very short periods of time but it uses a poetry technique called a chiasm and you're probably familiar with that it really indicates Hosea was poetry and it's very similar to like job they're from six calamities he will rescue you from seven no harm will come it's an N and an N plus one that

they use called a chiasm that indicates its poetry and it was for memorization purposes so I still come back to with the exception of that poetry wherever you have a number and a day I think it it does indicate 24-hour days and then the last thing is how if God wanted to communicate to us that this is it was indeed 24-hour day this is how I did it what other words would he use I don't think it's a matter of vocabulary Brad first with regard to the structure the chiasm that you mentioned if if you

look at Genesis 1 it has all kinds of structures like this written through it I mean this is precisely what distinguishes this chapter is so carefully crafted look at Bruce Walt Keyes commentary on Genesis for example where he lays out a lot of the sort of parallel structures that he sees in Genesis one that would be exactly indicative of the kinds of concerns that you would think are perhaps indicative of a more poetic kind of narrative now as to the ordinal number indicating always a 24-hour period of time as I said when I deal with

this in class that could simply be an accident of how much extant Hebrew literature we have that you don't have very many cases where someone says the second day or the fourth day and they're not talking about a literal 24-hour period of time there's nothing grammatically in Hebrew that requires that when you have an ordinal number with day that it has to be 24 hours period and in Hosea 6 - I think as I said you you have an exception to that so it could just be an accident of the extant literature that we have

and then the final point that I want to reiterate again I don't think this even begins to address the question of whether or not a 24 hour day couldn't be used as a metaphor I'm actually inclined to agree with you actually Brad but the days in Genesis 1 are intended to be 24 hour days but I don't think that that means that they're not metaphorical or or that they have to be literal I I suspect that the use of the expression it was evening and it was morning is indicative that the author is using the

notion of 24-hour days and I'll say in response to the day age interpretation for example but it doesn't seem like he's thinking of ages here rather than days so I'm almost rather inclined to agree with you but I don't think that even starts to address the question couldn't someone use a 24-hour day as a metaphor for something else rather than literal all right let me take one more question from t1 and then we'll proceed to the next interpretation the New Testament and Old Testament starts oh wait when I just remembered I didn't answer Brad's last

question how might God do it well he might provide a historical narrative that reads more like saying the chronicles The Book of Chronicles are Kings where it clearly is just a sort of straightforward historical narrative rather than a theological e and literary a stylized piece of writing like Genesis one is as walki says this is not just a science report or a historical report like you would have say in the book of kings or or something of that sort okay now t1 well the Old Testament beginning and the New Testaments beginning may have some parallel

where the light was created and then the governing bodies in the heaven in New Testament the word was there and then the embodiment of the word so in that sense and also talking about there's plants first and then the sun moon and star it's almost like a it's almost like you know God created Adam and Eve and then there's a new beginning with Noah's family because it's almost like there is beginning of his design and then to someone and start kind of start kicking and take over as a new beginning the the rhythm of the

natural law take place so that's how I thought I would that be in support of a non-literal interpretation I think I think it's 24 hour days because what you said didn't sound like it was supporting a literal interpretation it sounded to me more like making that the author was making a theological point because you know even with chapter 5 talking about Adam was 130 years and he had a he bore a son but when he was born he was not a infant so 100 years does that add the ears that before he was even existed

so God is able to do anything and then catch up with whatever yeah it takes a while honest is raising a really interesting point that is sometimes referred to as the I'm follows theory which asked the question did Adam have a bellybutton did Adam have a navel because he was never born right he never had a placenta so if he did if Adam had a navel then that meant that God created him with the appearance of age he looked like he was 30 years old when he was only five seconds years old for example and

so could it be that God has created the world with the appearance of age but not with actual age and that is this so-called on follows theory which appeals to God's ability to create things that have the appearance of age I'm not going to say anything about that because that's not really a hermeneutical approach to Genesis 1 that's more sort of theory of a parent age that is a modern attempt to explain how the universe could be very young even though it looks very old let's go on to the gap interpretation this is a view

that was popularized by the old Scofield reference Bible it holds that there is a gap between verses 1 & 2 of Genesis chapter 1 in the beginning God created the heavens in the earth and then there's this huge gap of time before God begins to work upon the earth and produce life and it holds that during this gap that's when there was a kind of primordial world and all of the existence are all of the evidence of fossil life extinct life form and so forth were of an ancient world that existed prior to verse 2

and which came under God's judgment and was then destroyed and so what's described in verse 2 for words is God's recreation in effect of the world after a long gap so this view would say that all of the evidence that we have scientifically and historically of ancient geological periods prehistoric life and antiquity is from that pre gap world that was destroyed by God prior to verse 2 now what might we say by way of assessment of this theory well I think that there could well be a gap of time between verses 1 & 2 in

the first chapter verse 1 describes as we've seen God's creation of the universe as a whole that the heavens and the earth is the way the Hebrew person would describe the universe as a whole and then in verse 2 the focus radically narrows down to God's activity upon the earth and the earth was without form and void and it describes how God transforms the earth from a desolate uninhabitable waste to a place that is fit for man to live in so that there could well be a gap between verse 1 God's creation of the world

as a whole and then his transformation of the earth into a habitable ecosystem for human life but the idea that there was a prior life world before this one is just utterly foreign to the text the text is describing God's initial creation of the biosphere and on each occasion it pronounces God's work as being good God saw it was good and the idea that all of this is just a repeat of something that he's done before has absolutely no warrant in the text remember all of this is supposed to be pre flood this is not

flood geology this is prior to Noah it's saying that prior to verse 2 there was this prehistoric world of animals and geological epochs and so forth maybe even ancient civilizations that was all destroyed by God and there's simply nothing in the text to support a view like that in fact I think that this gap interpretation seems to be an example of Concorde ISM at it's very worst you remember Concorde ISM is the hermeneutic of trying to read modern science into the text to try to read the text in accord with modern science rather than reading

it as it would have been originally understood and written it seems that under the pressure of the scientific and historical evidence of prehistoric life and geological time one reads into the text something that was not at all intended by the author and so I find this interpretation to be hermeneutical II unsupportable any comments or questions on this gap interpretation pardon me Atlantis yeah it does make you wonder exactly who these people were and so forth yeah any other comments or questions on that yes back here have you ever heard that Genesis one can be interpreted

as INSAT summit God fattened again at in summit God fattened like the beginning is really ancient Hebrew for in the height God fattened and fatten is the same root word that they Eli his sons were fattened with them illegally taking the fennel and Baroque no I'm not familiar with what your you're talking about Steve but it would it would I guess this will be contrary to X Neeley Oh God created it would be saying there were previous realms and this whole universe is created after one and that the all night and well they goes back

to your interpretation to verse 1 and in the section on create a o ex nihilo we talked extensively about whether or not verse 1 is an absolute beginning in the beginning God created or is this a subordinate clause meaning when God in the beginning created the earth was without form and void and so forth and I argued extensively that in fact what you have in verse 1 is an absolute and not a subordinate clause it's a main clause that does affirm that God has created everything not out of pre-existing matter or prior worlds but that

this is the absolute beginning and then the idea that there is something in between 1 and 2 that was destroyed by God seems to me to be just completely unsupportable from the text it's I think the result of trying to read science back into it any other comment on this viewed drew did you have a comment go ahead so I take it you're not I guess not as much about using the book of nature then to sort of add information to the biblical text that's I mean that is Concord ISM is that you're okay jurors

question was Kant or what what is is is what is Concord ISM is using the book of nature to illuminate the biblical text Concord ISM I think that the project of looking to the book of nature as you put it to see how it occurred with scripture is the task of the systematic theologian not the biblical theologian the biblical theologian I think needs to look at the text and interpret it according to the the genre of literature that it was what we can determine about how the original author and his audience would have understood it

and tried to understand what the text meant for him and that audience and then the question of how does this fit into the book of nature and what science tells us about the universe we live in is a second project that will be part of systematic theology where you try to integrate the Bible with the discoveries of modern science and history and all the rest so right now we're focusing just on this hermeneutical project and we're going to talk about this other project later on about how to look at the book of nature and see

if we can make sense of things in light of it and the teaching of the biblical systematic theologian then could then hold to these views or give these interpretation that's a good point in other words the systematic theologian could hold to these views but he wouldn't claim that this is what the original author meant he would say this is the way I'm going to reconstruct how the universe came to exist but he wouldn't be making a hermeneutical claim but this is what the text is teaching see that's very different it would be like Isaiah sevens

virgin right it might be I mean in the similar way the Virgin device is seven it seems it seems like Matthew is being a bit Concordia in this interpretation of well now there you have a question of how a New Testament author interpreted an Old Testament text that that's different than what we're talking about here where a systematic theologian reads the book of nature right and tries to integrate that with the biblical text to produce a biblical view of the world and in one sense maybe I'm being unfair to the proponents of the gap interpretation

maybe this wasn't really offered as a hermeneutical interpretation of Genesis 1 maybe it was what you just described a theory about how to integrate Genesis 1 with modern science and that's a legitimate project so long as you're not offering it as a hermeneutical claim that this is what the original text said and meant and how it was understood and and so if it's not meant to be an interpretive affair but the secondary project then that than my objections here that it is unsupported in the text wouldn't be relevant but my concern here is first and

foremost how do we understand the meaning the the right interpretation of Genesis 1 and I think that this gap interpretation frankly is just preposterous the the idea that between 1 & 2 there was some prehistoric world that came under God's judgement and and was destroyed there's just nothing in the text to suggest that that's what the author thought all right next time we're going to take up the day gap interpretation which is a slightly different sort of gap theory that puts the gaps in between the creative days so that will be next time