Review of +Wright’s “Scripture and the Authority of God”

So how does NT Wright’s rejection of inerrancy flow into his arguments about authority?  Inerrancy and authority are logically joined at the hip.  Rejecting the former usually demolishes the later.  In fact, I ran off to read the article expecting that dichotomy to be the main subject of the review.  Just curious how he squares that circle.

carl

carl,
A lot of this depends on how you define “inerrancy.”  Many who defend it take a rather broad meaning of the word.  I initially encouraged people to avoid the word or even not adhere to it, based on what I had been taught at one time about the meaning of this word.  However, looking at other ways that it is sometimes defined, it’s very acceptable to me.  It could be that Wright here is taking an earlier, less-broad usage of the word, and it’s that which he doesn’t agree with.  I don’t know, I haven’t read the book.

This is what I meant by ‘inerrancy.’

We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write.

We deny that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God’s Word.

Chicago Statement

carl

I have been hearing some criticism of Wright and looked forward to reading this review to find out why. After reading Windsor’s remarks, I can’t but help wonder if his criticism isn’t a mischaracterization: “The problem with this view is that it isn’t properly and biblically Christ focused.” How can the kingdom of God not be Christ-focused? I wonder if Wright is puzzled over this criticsim as well.

Windsor also seems to be infering that Wright mis-places the authority of Scripture: “Simply put, the Bible’s authority becomes subservient to a much grander theme for Wright: the ongoing mission of the (earthly) church.” This prompts me to ask, did Jesus come to earth, die, rise and ascend to produce the bible? Or do the scriptures have a purpose to fulfill in Christ’s mission? Jeepers creepers, there may be some legitimate criticism of Wright’s book but I think Windsor has missed the mark. Again, I have to say it, Jeepers Creepers. [sigh]

I think you’ll find that Windsor’s argument is that Wright has taken the primary focus off the work of Christ as a completed action and, instead, has switched to the work of God in the Church.
Thus, Scripture is no longer about that completed work but the story of the ongoing work. This, Lionel suggests, is incorrect and leaves Scripture “open”.

Well, wait a minute.  I’m working my way at the moment through the massive (but incredibly engaging; +W is a marvelous writer, even at his most academic) The Resurrection of the Son of God.  One of his main points there is that Jesus changed everything, as Windsor concedes.

But when we talk about “Biblical authority”, what we most frequently mean in the contemporary context is its moral authority, its authority as a guide to personal (and perhaps social) conduct.  If +W says that the Triune God speaks to us through the Bible, that implies that Jesus, the Second Person, speaks to us through the Bible.  This is hardly a failure to make Jesus central to our lives; the kids wearing WWJD bracelets can only answer that question through close Biblical study; private piety and meditation without a Biblical foundation can lead one badly astray (as we here in this ecclesial mess should be more aware than most).

As to God’s story being “finished”, it is on the one hand true that Jesus constitutes God’s final revelation to mankind, and I doubt that +W would argue against that.  But as to God’s “story” being finished, I haven’t noticed any parousia in the streets lately, and I would have expected it to be in all the papers.

I honestly think Mr. Windsor here is rather in the position of someone who has finished an engaging and educational book about hickory trees, and proceeds to criticize it on the basis that it says not a word about apples.

Carl #3,

When the overwhelming bulk of +Wright’s scholarly work amounts to demonstrating, using the usual methods and paradigms of historical scholarship, that the Bible is trustworthy on the matters of which it speaks, I’m not sure I understand your assertion.  Very few Anglicans, for example, are Creationists in the sense that the term is used in the popular press, yet we believe that Genesis is a fully accurate (and in that sense inerrant) guide to the relationship between God, Man, and the rest of Creation.  So your point is unclear to me; is +Wright supposed to be a Biblical literalist (in the real sense, not the sense used by the wild rhetoric of the gay lobby)?

I find myself in noticing that Bishop Wright oft comes to the same position that I do on matters of importance, even though he doesn’t claim to be the a ‘literal fundamentalists’. 

I don’t let his self-description bother me.  I’m encouraged by his arrival at the same conclusions.

David, I believe Americans would know the book you cite as “The Last Word,” for that is how Wright’s American publisher insisted upon titling it here, against his better judgment.

It is a great resource to share with parishioners, explaining in accessible language the ways in which Scripture is and must be authoritative for Christians.  In so doing, he answers both those who deny or dilute Scripture’s authority, and also those who confuse it.

I commend one chapter where he lists the major epistemological errors made on the left and the right and their consequences. 

It is understandable that some conservatives would criticize him, since he demonstrates why their approach to Scripture is rooted in exactly the same epistemological errors of modernity that their liberal opponents make.

Wright calls us instead to a way of reading Scripture that does not begin with a subtle form of supercessionism and that takes the entire sweep of both testaments and their integration seriously.  We are to read the Old Testament as though we are a detective at the end of a mystery novel, recounting the tale we have previously read, but this time with the key (the Incarnation) that make sense of all we have seen. Scripture is seen as a five-act play, and we find ourselves in an act that follows Jesus and precedes and ends in the victory of God, and our job is to improvise in our encounter with the world so that our lives point toward that ending, using Scripture as our script.

If you really want to “answer” NT Wright in a scholarly (rather than merely polemical) way, why not engage his explanation of the epistemological errors so often made by both right and left, and show how the specific epistemological errors to which he points on the right, which I believe you claim to defend here, are not actually errors?

[#7] Craig Goodrich

Very few Anglicans, for example, are Creationists in the sense that the term is used in the popular press, yet we believe that Genesis is a fully accurate (and in that sense inerrant) guide to the relationship between God, Man, and the rest of Creation.

This seems a polite way of saying “The account of creation in Genesis is factually incorrect, but conveys spiritual truth to man.”  There is no textual reason to make this assertion. Genesis is for example history, and should be read as history.  Instead, this assertion about Genesis reflects the application of an external standard to determine the veracity of the text.  There is the assumption that science is a higher authority than God’s revelation, and science has proven the account of Genesis could not have happened as written.

Once you introduce external standards, you have opened Pandora’s box as it were.  This is precisely the same methodology that homosexuals use to attack scriptural prohibitions against homosexual behavior.  They apply a superior external standard and “extract the true meaning.”  Any declaration of errancy allows for this.  Some standard must be used to determine the error.  But we will not able to control which standards are used.

We say homosexuality is a presenting issue in a larger conflict about the authority of Scripture.  But we must be consistent in our presentation.  If we allow ourselves to introduce external standards, then we must allow our opponents to do the same.  This is dangerous, though.  Liberals have been doing this already for two centuries, and so they are much better at it then we are.

carl

A quick look at Genesis can disabuse us of Carl’s (#10’s) idea that Genesis is “history” in the positivistic way we like to think of history.  There are evenings and mornings in Genesis 1 before there are sun and moon.  Perhaps, as some rabbis have taught, that means that Moses sat down and wrote that part of the story on the first day, second day, etc. 

This is not some external standard brought in to demolish the truth of Genesis.  What is so hard for us spirit-matter dualists to get is that there is a truth that is greater, and truer—higher—than physical science.  It is the truth that puts us in our totality, as spiritual/physical creatures of a creator God in the proper place in the story. This truth is not opposed to science, though.  It assumes—and subsumes—it.

While I adhere to a certain version of inerrancy myself (the Bible, interpreted properly, does not produce error) I find it hard to see why, if God took such pains to insure that 21st century notions of positivist “truth” are not violated in the Bible’s original autograph, he would not be somewhat more careful to see that the text itself was preserved from error in its transmission.  Shocking to that sort of wooden inerrancy is that the Word gets translated every which way—from Hebrew to Greek and from Aramaic to Greek—every instance of which brings in the feared “external standard,” namely, the skill and art of translation learned apart from the Bible itself in the secular world.  Also,readings are contested due to conflicting manuscript evidence.

Nothing is more damaging to explicating the Bible today than the ridiculous idea of extracting “spiritual truths” out of the actual words.  Some call this discovering “principles” in the Bible.  As we all know, these “principles” turn out to be jejune and infinitely flexible.  Genesis is not “factually incorrect” except from a point of view that sees history and the material world as inert and unconnected to our true selves.  But Genesis is mystical in that it speaks of truths and realities about us and about the world we inhabit that cannot be plumbed merely by the scientific method.  Genesis is not understood apart from prayer and devotion to the triune God, and its final meaning awaits the revelation of Christ in glory.

I don’t disagree with Carl that external standards are brought in to understand Genesis.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise, and physical science (laden with plenty of unproven assumptions) can take its place alongside linguistics and philosophy as we sit down to read it right.  But I’m afraid that Carl gives too much authority to physical science by giving it the power to demolish Genesis.  It hasn’t yet, and it won’t, because it can’t.  Then, after bowing before a certain kind of science and the certain kind of history it has spawned with its mighty power to demolish the Word of God, Carl then appears to banish the same from the reading room thus stealing from them their opportunity finally to bring all of their thoughts captive to Christ.

Carl writes…

This seems a polite way of saying “The account of creation in Genesis is factually incorrect, but conveys spiritual truth to man.” There is no textual reason to make this assertion. Genesis is for example history, and should be read as history.  Instead, this assertion about Genesis reflects the application of an external standard to determine the veracity of the text.  There is the assumption that science is a higher authority than God’s revelation, and science has proven the account of Genesis could not have happened as written.

I’m not sure what you’re claiming, Carl.  Is it…
1) That there is just no way to avoid the conclusion that Genesis 1-2 is an historical text
2) That, regardless of the view you take on what kind of story Genesis 1-2 is meant to be, you shouldn’t argue against it’s historicity SIMPLY on the grounds that there are other “authorities” that seem to contradict what it would say, if interpreted historically?

I would disagree with 1, and think that there is a natural reading of the creation accounts as something different from straightforward historical texts.  For example, the fact that a division into days with “evening and morning” before mention of the creation of the Sun would seem to indicate that we can’t interpret the language in the ordinary fashion.  Likewise, I don’t think we’re required to suppose that Jesus’ parables refer to actual people and events.  (As is implied by his own spiritual interpretations of them giving “the meaning of the parable”.) 

With respect to 2, I agree that if push came to shove between my best understanding of Scripture and my best understanding of what scientific evidence seemed to suggest, I would feel bound to side with my best understanding of Scripture until the problem could be resolved.  But the situation might also cause me to question whether I was interpreting Scripture aright. 

Much (most?) of Christian hermeneutical tradition has, I think, followed Augustine’s “On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis” in believing that some of the texts early in Genesis are to be interpreted solely in terms of their spiritual meaning.  One standard I employ here is that of whether the literal interpretation matters to our faith.  It seems to me that it does matter whether the events of Exodus are historically accurate, and certainly matters a great deal that Jesus died and rose from the dead.  By contrast, the question of whether “Adam” and “Eve” are supposed to be the names of two historical individuals makes a bit of difference to how we are to be saved.  (Though it matters for some THEORIES of sin and the fall.  But I don’t need a particular theology of sin to believe we are fallen and need to be saved.  THat seems abundantly clear from experience.)

But perhaps I misunderstand the nature of the concern.

If Adam were not ‘real’ then how would by one man, the first Adam, come sin and death into the world?

Were the creation to the fall not a short span how could it be that death did not intrude until after the fall?

“I think you’ll find that Windsor’s argument is that Wright has taken the primary focus off the work of Christ as a completed action and, instead, has switched to the work of God in the Church.”—to this I think Craig Goodrich’s remark is appropriate—Hickory and Apple.

“Thus, Scripture is no longer about that completed work but the story of the ongoing work. This, Lionel suggests, is incorrect and leaves Scripture “open”.”—My real problem is with this “Thus”. Scripture is no longer—[according to Wright]—about that completed work? Again, I think Wright would be surprised to discover that his writings mean this.

Craig Uffman’s remarks strike me as one’s that do not impose some foreign inference upon Wright’s book but portray it accurately and therefore are more helpful. Thank you.

Doug Taylor-Weiss, #11

There are evenings and mornings in Genesis 1 before there are sun and moon.

Um, no. Try Gen 1:3.  It was the existance of the Sun that caused the first evening and the next day.

Not that I’m addressing the rest of your text at all, but here, specifically, you’ve misread your Bible text.

PAX

Antique wrote…

Um, no. Try Gen 1:3.  It was the existance of the Sun that caused the first evening and the next day.

Genesis 1:3 is “let there be LIGHT”.

The sun is not mentioned until 1:16: “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”  This is part of the FOURTH DAY. (v 19)

DoctorSteve,

Yes, I concede you are correct. I was, however, taking LIGHT to be from the Sun and in that context, the Sun was present on day 1.

I did a poor job of explaining and took it for granted my comment would be read in the light of Carl’s assertion and Doug’s reply. I should have kept my mouth shut (or fingers off the keyboard).

But since I’ve drug myself into this thread, allow me to post my view.

When I read Moses, I see a lot of hyperbole, exaggeration and figures of speach. Take for example his statement that God blew through one (1) nostril to part the Red Sea.

Well, now, I don’t dispute that. Perhaps that was indeed the case. Maybe, maybe not. But consider:

Did you ever play the silly game as a child wherein someone hands you a lit candle and you hold it at arm’s length in front of you? You then open your mouth as wide as you can and exhale as hard as to you can, trying to blow out the flame. Doesn’t work, does it?

But then you’re told to purse your lips and blow. Ah hah! Success! The flame goes out.

How much harder would it be, then, to blow out the candle by exhaling through a nostril?

I think here, regardless of whether it’s “fact” or not, Moses is trying to impress us with the omnipotence of God. It’s as if Moses is saying, “Look, God is so immensely powerful, so incredibly the master over all the world that he can do this HUGE thing like parting an ENTIRE sea, simply by breathing through ONE nostril!”

I tend to take Genesis in the same light. Moses is not only accounting for how we got here and why, but he is making the point of how powerful God is. Six days. Everything in six days. “Could you,” (he might have asked) “build that mountain over there in six days? Could all of us working together build it in six days? No? Well listen up, folks. God not only built that mountain in six days but he built the whole of Creation in that time as well!”

If we wish to take innerency as word-literal, does that mean Solomon’s temple has arms and legs? I ask, because we learn (in some translations) that when the Queen of Sheba first saw the temple, “it took her breath away.” Does this mean the temple stood up, walked over to the queen, reached down her throat into her lungs and removed the breath from her?

Some figures of speach are obvious. Some are not so obvious. It is the writer that we must get to know. Jeremiah seems to have been very much a literal writer, whereas Moses uses quite a lot of colorful language. This is not to be construed as we can’t take Moses seriously, only that we have to delve deeper into a meaning with him that we must with other writers.

Jesus himself used parables and figures of speach which, if taken at face value, are rather pointless. Should we understand his parable of the wedding feast as merely a story about some dude who couldn’t get anyone to show up at his son’s wedding? Perhaps that story actually happened. Who is to say? Is it impossible that it might have happened, somewhere, someplace? But I think if we look deeper, we’ll find the “literal” meaning may not be wrong but is hardly the point.

Thus I stand on the Creation account. I don’t dispute it, but given Moses’ tendency to emphasize God’s infinite being, I think we take ourselves into an argument between Believers that need not be argued in the first place.

And then we can get into the differences between the OT LXX and the Masoretic texts (and others), not to mention the problems with all the various oddities of the NT Greek manuscripts.

Which original text is the “right” one?

Fortunately, God has delivered his message consistantly, regardless. My personal opinion on debates such as this is that they are harmful to the Church, divisive and take our efforts away from evangelizing. Instead, we spend centuries debating a point that, in the end, does not change God’s purpose nor our relationship with him.

I know traditional/catholic Christians who come down on opposite sides of the Creation debate (was it six days or six thousand years?) and none of it matters in the end. They are all God’s faithful children, and whatever their take on the text makes no difference to their ability to recite the Creeds nor their Christian charity to others. and yet they harbor anger toward each other over this point. Which is to say, they are gracious and helpful to non-believers but haven’t the time of day for a Christian who takes a differing view of exactitude of the Creation account.

This debate has been raging, I’d wager, since the day Moses read it aloud in the wilderness. Somewhere at the back of the crowd, 2 Jews were probably listening to this and their mumbled conversation went something along these lines:

“Here that, Fred? Six days. All this,” (he gestures broadly at the expanse of desert mountains around them), “in six days. What a load of crap.”

“Au contraire, mon frere,” replies John. “It’s six literal days.”

“Yeah? well, I think you’re full of it. It can’t be six literal days. It has to be six ages or something like that.”

“That’s blasphemy, John. Shut yer yap or I’ll shut it for you.”

“Yeah, you and what army?”

Then the fight broke out and they never spoke to one another since. Yet God and his People marched on.

DoctorSteve

I’m not sure what you’re claiming, Carl.

Well, let me try again, then.    My concern is centered on the motivation behind considering Genesis 1-2 a non-factual account of Creation.  The book of Genesis presents itself as history.  Working backwards through Joseph, Jacob, Issac, Abraham, Noah, and Adam, we are given a factual record of the lives of men.  The Old Testament presumes this to be true.  The Lord Jesus presumes it to be true.  The Gospel writers presume this to be true.  The Apostles presume this to be true.  The authors of the Epistles consider this to be true.  There is nothing in any of the 66 books of the Bible (sorry, Paula) to indicate Genesis should be considered a metaphor, or a poem, or anything other than a factual record.  So why then do we feel impelled to alter our understanding?  God being omnipotent certainly could have created all things just as indicated in Genesis 1.  Why then do we insist it didn’t happen that way?

The answer (nervously spoken) is that ‘the scientific record’ is not compatible with the factual account presented in Genesis.  And so people are attempting to ‘rescue’ the authority of Scripture from this unfortunate difficulty by saying “Well, the scripture is only inerrant about Spiritual matters.”  But there is a false assumption in play - that science is sufficient to judge the veracity of the Genesis account.  Creation is a unique event, and unique events cannot be investigated by science.  Except for testimony, we would have no knowledge of creation, and only God was there to give the account.  Once again, I ask the question.  Why do we doubt?  What is the motivation?

Man is not sufficient to judge the truth of God’s revelation.  What standard do we apply God?  How do we give Him correction?  Were we there when He formed the Earth?  Do we have an arm like His?  And yet we say to Him “We have science, so God, you can sort of fill in the interstitials that science leaves behind.”  I don’t accept this.  What does the Scripture say?  “Let God be true and every man a liar.”  I will not presume to judge the truth or falsehood of Scripture based upon an arbitrary standard of “whether the literal interpretation matters to our faith” in order to placate some external standard that demands my obedience. Who am I to take upon myself such a responsibility?  And by what authority would I do so?  It is a dangerous game to play - one that has lead liberals to question the very resurrection itself on the same grounds that some conservatives question the creation.

carl

i really enjoyed “the bible and tomorrow’s world” quite a bit. but i really didn’t find this “rebuttal” to deal with most of what wright discussed. i haven’t read “scripture and the authority of God” but it seems to me from reading this review and wright’s piece, that he uses the book only as a sort of basis of assumption from which he launches his larger understanding of the authority of scripture in the world. i found his overall emphasis on orthopraxy being on par with orthodoxy to be refreshing.

that said, i also thought this review was a pretty good take on things; but then it could certainly be construed as unfair. to say wright starts out correctly with his “correctives” and then misfires himself seems consistent with the possiblity that wright has set up yet another vast and hermetic hermeneutic that spends just as much time foisting an interpretive lens on the reader as fundamentalism or mainline hermeneutics.

it’s a damn good one, i think, in a lot of ways. it deals with a LOT of issues the church is facing now, the crisis of the either-or of mainline vs. fundamentalist many christians feel as though they have to choose between…and i would much rather spend time debating this, which i feel could lead down a LOT more constructive paths…

but again, it is exerting a hermeneutic that can exclude obviously true things from time to time, or lead to a slightly nutty understanding of certain passages of scripture (i find wright’s arguments about paul interesting, but strained at times…perhaps it’s just a matter of time until he or some later person works these out).

overall, though, i think to say that wright is not christ focused enough is a little silly given the corpus of his work, but i could definitely see how somebody might start with wright’s understanding of scriptural authority and go in a completely separate interpretive direction. there seems to be nothing that compels us to begin with with “scripture and the authority of God” and move into the rest of Wright’s work. but somebody else would have to speak to that, as i’m only going on this review here

this also reminds me, of the way poets often talk about poetry, not so much about what it “says”...what it’s “content” is…but what it “does.” how does a line accomplish, i.e., DO, what it SAYS?

Carl #18, #10—

I understand your concern.  But I think that unless we apply some kind of externally-derived principles to our reading of the Bible—not to “judge” it; as has been repeatedly emphasized, our experience is judged by the Bible, not vice-versa—we will not fully understand what God is telling us.  The reason is that our Enlightenment, fragmented, (over-?)rationalistic culture builds a mindset radically different from that of the people to whom God was revealing himself in Genesis (and throughout the Bible).

Revelation is communication; the Bible is a record of God’s communication with His people and His personal interventions in their history.  Like any communicator, God—the Perfect Communicator—stayed On Message without allowing irrelevancies to interfere with getting the Word out.  Communication involves both the speaker and the hearer.  Or, as my Bethel Bible Course teacher (wearing a large “Think Hebrew” button) used to say, “The important thing is not whether serpents in the Garden could talk; the important thing is what the serpent in the Garden said.”

If you look, to take just one example, at 1 Kings 7:23, you will have to come to one of three conclusions:<ul>
<li> The value of pi was different 2600 years ago.
<li> Modern mathematics is deeply flawed and heretical.
<li> The ancient Hebrews weren’t much for precise geometry; that was the Greeks across the Mediterranean, who were quite sure the earth was round by the time of the Peloponnesian War.  3 was close enough for a practical tribal people.</ul>

But as soon as we pick the last alternative above, we’ve brought external considerations to bear on our reading of Scripture.  It is quite literally inescapable for us.  (It was not so for, for example, the denizens of a feudal fiefdom, who probably grasped e.g. Christ’s parables much more easily and readily than we moderns do, since their society—overwhelmingly subsistence agriculture and husbandry, with an enormous weight of shared values and cultural consensus—was much more like that of the ancient Middle East than ours is.)

So it is with Genesis: God gets His message across—that He is the Creator of the cosmos (not part of it, as the neighboring sun- and moon- and earth-worshipers believed), that He has created Man with a certain purpose, that men and women have an intended relationship to each other, to Him, and to Creation, that the Fall occurred because of Man’s failure to follow orders, and so on—without the kind of lengthy and (to the Hebrews) incomprehensible digression into cosmology that a factually accurate presentation would have required.  How long would it have taken to get the idea of billions of years [pace St. Carl of Sagan] across to a people that regarded the number “144,000” as impossibly huge and essentially infinite?

<font size=-2>Anyone who thinks this amounts to “judging” Hebrew culture as inferior, somehow, to our own should be set immediately in the middle of a very large desert with a couple of sheep, a stick, and a small piece of cheese.  By the time he makes it back—if he does—perhaps he’ll understand the concept of “cultural priorities” a little better…</font>

So in order to understand the Message, you have to try to put yourself in the place of the original audience, assuming what they assumed and pruning away concepts that would have been completely foreign to them. 

Returning (with great relief) to the real topic of this thread, this is what +Wright, as a historian, has been trying to do in all of his publications:  explicate the context of the original audience, as an aid to discerning the real content of the Message.  Yes, indeed, at the word “context”, given the pathologically ludicrous eisogesis we’ve heard over and over from GLBTwhatnext apologists, most of us automatically reach for the barf bag.  But without some appreciation of the culture and mindset of the original receivers of the Word, we are very likely to be misled.

Option 4 for the ‘measurement issue’:
The diameter (outside to outside) and circumference (on the inside of the brim) are different, because the ‘circle’ isn’t the ‘magic one of mathematics’ but a real one with width, and with a little work we can deduce the thickness of the brim….

Bo #22—Won’t do; the 30 cubits is clearly an outside measure; if the 10 cubits is an inside measure, then the thickness of the brim is negative.

More—The point is, I guess, that there is some imprecision in what looks like very precise language here.  Perhaps the diameter was really nine-and-a-half cubits, give or take the thickness, or the outside was sloppily measured and if a Greek had been doing the job he would have determined thirty-one and a half cubits, or the top of the container was flared slightly outward, but the measuring string was passed around it below the flare and above the knops (gourds, whatever), or that the guy whose forearm was used to measure the diameter was a shrimp and the one whose forearm measured the diameter was a giant—the point is, though, that however we interpret this we bring additional assumptions to bear on the passage.  My point exactly: it’s inescapable.  And my second point: the difference between 30 and 31.4 cubits (about two feet in the circumference of Solomon’s large hot tub) is irrelevant to anything God is actually telling us.  It was, as they say, close enough for government work.

How long would it have taken to get the idea of billions of years ... across to a people that regarded the number “144,000” as impossibly huge and essentially infinite?

I said that people reject Genesis 1-2 as factual because they judge it deficient according to some scientific standard.  And here my assertion is confirmed just as I said - “billions of years.”  But of course science has not proven the age of the Earth to be “billions of years.”  In fact an assumed age of “billions of years” is predicated upon evolutionary assumptions.  There is simply no reason to reject Genesis as factual on the basis of the text of Scripture.  We have decided it must be read through the eyes of another external authority.

carl

On what basis do you determine the the 30 is ‘clearly’ the outside of the ‘rim’ and not the interior?  I don’t see ‘outside’ in the text…

(By the way I have no troubles with ‘close as they cared to count’....)

I happen to be an Engineer, and Engineers use pi all the time.  So the question arises.  “What is the correct value of pi?”  But this is the wrong question.  Pi is irrational, and cannot be absolutely determined.  Instead the question to be asked is “What accuracy do I require in my answer?” 

Consider some examples: a) 3 b) 3.1 c) 3.14 d) 3.142 e) 3.1416.  None of these answers are wrong.  All are approximations that will induce error to a greater or lesser degree.  But any one of the three will suffice depending upon the required accuracy of the answer. 

Sure we all learn 3.14 as kids.  And we all get pi to 9 decimal places on our calculator.  But that should not trick us into thinking 3 is an invalid approximation of pi.  It is the most inaccurate approximation.  But I guarantee you - Engineers use inaccurate approximations all the time.

carl

Carl,

Careful about using (a)—if pi=3, the wheels on your car will all turn hexagonal.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
(another techie type)

Oh, for Heaven’s sakes!  #26 Bo, OK, try running a string “to compass it round about” on the inside of a hot tub.  #28 Carl, I’m aware of that; nearly two decades ago an aerospace engineer and Fortran hacker used to tell me that five significant figures got you inside a two-meter circle on the moon.  OK; the verse clearly indicates two significant figures, except that the Hebrew writing system made it much easier to say “30” than to say “31”; like the Greek system of the time, it worked on much the same principle as Roman numerals, but even more complex.  This is absurd. Uhura: switch to private message mode.  <font size=-2>

Yes, captain. Hailing ...</font>

[30] Craig Goodrich

Uhura: switch to private message mode.

Well, I judge by your above comment that we can at least agree Kirk is much better than Picard. 

carl

Alert from Starbase Five, Captain—“All Federation starships in the Alpha Crucis sector: Alert. Robulan troll-ships have been sighted near S. Firma.  These are known to be equipped with powerful tractor beams that have confined several unwary ships to very tight trajectories for prolonged periods, leading to falling objects and crew nausea.  Starbase 5 out.”

Cheers,

Captain Pike

If its 15 foot across on the outside and adorned, and your purpose is to show its capacity by the measure of if circumference, the inside is where you’d better place the string.  (Assuming that it was measured by a string to compass it round about..)

Don’t go fundamentalist on me (that’s more my role, ain’t it?) - I’m not saying that option 4 is the ONLY TRUE OPTION - I’m just suggesting it as a possible, consistent understanding that doesn’t do any violence to the text.

(I Already mentioned that ‘close as they cared to count’ is also ‘valid’ and does no violence to the text.)

Anyone here able to ‘do the math’ and tell me approximately what the thickness would be if the 30 was inside and the 10 was ‘outside to outside’ ? (I’m pretty sure it isn’t just the 1.42, that would be too easy)..

tell me approximately what the thickness would be if the 30 was inside and the 10 was ‘outside to outside’ ?

Assume pi = 3.14.  A circle of circumference 30 has a radius of (30/3.14) or approximately 9.55.  The difference between the diameters of the two circles is therefore 10 - 9.55 = 0.45.  If a cubit is 18” that means a distance of approximately 8”.  Divide by two because the excess occurs on both ends.  That leaves a thickness of approximately 4”.  But I think Craig Goodrich is correct.  This is just a case of approximation. The answer is within allowable error.

carl

It would seem to me the next logical destination for this thread would be to discuss how Mr Spock saved the Enterprise by forcing the ship’s computer to calculate Pi to the last decimal place.  It’s late, I know.  And I should go to bed…

carl

carl,

It would seem to me the next logical destination for this thread would be to discuss how Mr Spock saved the Enterprise by forcing the ship’s computer to calculate Pi to the last decimal place.

Simple.  His program calculated it backwards.  ‘Night.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Y’all are wrong, of course. 

<span style=‘font-family:Symbol’>p</span> are round.

37, Brownies are Square…..

34, Thanks! I don’t know if it is a matter of approximation, (Good Enough of Water Pot Work!) of if the pot had walls about 4 inches thick. I’m willing to place it in the ‘uncertain things’ category just fine, its not a matter worth not breaking bread over. 

However I do get my dander up a touch when folks aren’t willing to see that the text doesn’t REQUIRE the Jews to have been ‘sloppy’ when measuring water-pots…

Craig,

Feel free to reply either in the comments or privately, but if you reply in the comments, please quote the relevant parts of this to provide context (there’s that word again!)

Since you gave me permission, I have decided to move this topic back on thread. 

But the evidence for the age of the Earth (and the solar system, etc.) being in the billions of years is simply overwhelming.  Geological (carbon-14 dating etc.), fossil, astronomical (movement of the stars and galaxies since the Big Bang), and so on all basically confirm the scientific account of the universe’s nature and behavior since the moment of Creation.  If you wish to maintain that this is all some sort of hoax by God to test our faith, you’re welcome to:  that assertion is unanswerable.  I prefer a simpler and more traditional explanation.

It is axiomatic.  An estimate is only as good as the model used to derive the estimate.  But a good model of a natural process can only be based upon observation, and must be validated against expected outcomes.  Where is the man who has observed a process for 18 billion years?  Who collected the data to build and validate the model?  In fact, we build our models by assuming data points are separated by a certain amount of time, and then we use those models to ‘prove’ the age of the universe.  We sample a process over a very short period of time, and presume to extrapolate backwards on the assumption that nothing changes.  But things do change.  Two intervening events have changed things radically.  The first is the Fall.  The second is the Flood.  Both are discontinuous events that fundamentally changed creation. 

I am curious how far you will push this.  Was there really a Noah?  Was there really a flood?  Was there really an Adam?  What is the origin of sin and death?  If you spiritualize Genesis, these are the next questions in line to be addressed.  And every assertion you have made about ‘spiritual truth’ vs. ‘factual truth’ can be used to overturn the next part of Genesis in turn.  Others have already argued on this thread that Adam may or may not have been real.  So how do you intend to stop the corrosion once it has been started?  Was there really a Moses?  Was there really an Exodus?  Did God really part the Red Sea?  On and On it goes - always with the attending claim being made that “What really happened isn’t important.  What is important is what God said.”  And isn’t that the exact argument Liberals make about the reality of the physical resurrection?

carl

Craig, I got to thinking I should have posted the whole of your message.

Science hasn’t proven “billions of years” for the simple reason that science never proves anything.  That’s not how science works.  Science accumulates evidence, formulates hypotheses to account for the evidence, lays the hypothesis out for public view, formulates theories to include the hypotheses, and so on.  Any scientific theory can in principle be shown to be false or inadequate a dozen times before breakfast tomorrow morning, given solid evidence.  (That is also the way contemporary theology works, as you can tell from the arguments.  The point is that the arguments proceed according to accepted rules of the game, which vary from discipline to discipline.)

But the evidence for the age of the Earth (and the solar system, etc.) being in the billions of years is simply overwhelming.  Geological (carbon-14 dating etc.), fossil, astronomical (movement of the stars and galaxies since the Big Bang), and so on all basically confirm the scientific account of the universe’s nature and behavior since the moment of Creation.  If you wish to maintain that this is all some sort of hoax by God to test our faith, you’re welcome to:  that assertion is unanswerable.  I prefer a simpler and more traditional explanation.

In traditional theology, there is the recognition that we have two “books” of Revelation: Special Revelation (the Bible) and General Revelation (the nature of Creation, accessible even to pagans).  I prefer to believe that they do not contradict each other.

Best and blessings,

Craig

Re the age of the Earth:

Aquinas insisted that there is only one kind of truth, and that if one could only argue (i.e. philosophise) long enough, one could find it.

There is massive evidence that the Universe is old.  This is primarily physical and geological—the classical example being angular unconformities between rock strata, which show that the upper rocks were laid down on top of the eroded surface of the lower rocks.  (This is what led to the revolution in geology in the 1840s.)  Nothing to do with dinosaur bones. 

The population statistics and chemical composition of stars is another very strong line of evidence, whose consistency is clear across hundreds of thousands of examples, from globular clusters (old) to H II regions and Wolf-Rayet star clusters (just forming).  So unlike organic evolution, we can see the entire process laid out.  No monkeys are needed.

The same is true for galactic evolution—the further out you go in space, the further back in time (due to the finite speed of light).  New (distant) galaxies are brighter and bluer than old (near) ones, and have spectral features characteristic of much more dust and gas—material that has largely been consumed or swept out of nearer galaxies, including ours.  No imaginary missing links here—it’s all laid out in a time sequence, observable today.

I accept all of Scripture as being the Word of God written. If there were no faithful alternative, I’d have to accept that all this evidence is mistaken, or misinterpreted, or (to my mind much worse) that the God of all truth, whose glory the heavens declare, would deliberately deceive us by putting those things in place looking old like that.

But there is an excellent alternative, which preserves the inerrancy of Scripture and the honesty of God.  The young-Earth position doesn’t rest merely on the Word, but also on a particular interpretive tradition, namely reading Genesis as reportage.

Scripture contains many different genres, however.  If we identify Genesis up to at least the calling of Abraham as having the genre of a divinely-given origin myth, most of the troubles go away.  [Don’t get mad at this point—I don’t mean ‘myth’ as in ‘silly made-up story’, but in Lewis and Tolkien’s sense, namely a story that retains its power regardless of the words.  The story of Orpheus and Euridice, for instance, has the same power in Cliff Notes as in Pindar.  Another example is the Prodigal Son, who we all agree never really existed.] 

If we look at the problem from God’s perspective (so to speak), Genesis 1-3 gets across an amazing amount of true material about God and Man—who God is, His triune nature (Creator, Word, and Spirit), His creation of everything that exists, His placing His image on humankind, the equality in honour of men and women, the first covenant, the existence and character of the Enemy, the Fall, and trouble, pain, death, and separation from God being consequences of the Fall.  It does this in a form easily understood and remembered by nomads and space travellers, and all in three pages.

Other things get cleared up in an edifying way too—e.g. the punishment of all the descendants of Ham.  So it’s not Scripture but a particular, recent (and in my view mistaken), interpretive tradition that needs to be adjusted. 

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

There isn’t anything to the angular nonconformity that can’t be properly understood within a younger earth, the flood happened, Adam ate the forbidden fruit understanding.

Determining the age of stars by where they fit in a predefined life cycle, then using that as evidence that the whole process is laid out is a bit of circular reasoning isn’t it?

The only ‘needful things’ with the ‘young earth’ position - to my min - are that Adam and Eve (as referenced by Christ) the original parents, Adam’s sin bringing death into the world (Romans), and the flood of Noah’s time that destroyed the world being real (2 Peter).

This ‘young earth versions’ have plain text interpretations in the new testament.

If you can get ‘day-age’ and still have no sin nor death before day 6, fine by me.  If you have death in the world before Adam’s sin, you’re plainly in disagreement with an Apostle, and no matter how well I could organize my disputation with you, I’m better off saying ‘Saint Paul the Apostle Rebuke You!’.  Likewise if you deny the flood destroyed the world, I’ll suggest that you take that up with St. Peter.  In the same vain, but to a higher degree, if you deny the first parents, I’ll remind you Christ believed, and taught their realness.

On the ‘Ham thing’ I’ve yet to see it ‘defended’ from scripture rather than prejudice…

Bo,

Are you a troll, or what?  You have lots of assertions and very few arguments.  I’d love to discuss it further if you’d just back up a few of the things you say. 

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

[41] CryptoCatholic wrote:

If we identify Genesis up to at least the calling of Abraham as having the genre of a divinely-given origin myth

So now we have driven the unreality of Genesis all the way up to chapter 11.  We allegedly have true material about God described in events that never actually happened.  No Adam.  No Garden.  No fall.  No original sin.  No righteous Abel.  No Cain.  No Noah.  No flood.  Does the Scripture affirm this?  No.  The reader will search in vain for any such textual evidence.  Instead an alternative source of binding truth is held up, and Scripture is warped into its mold.  Science is considered logically prior. 

If I would say that science has established beyond reasonable doubt that dead things do not return to life, who on this board would gainsay me?  And yet the center of our faith is the resurrection.  But we have just established that science is logically prior - at least for the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  How then can we consistently make extra-ordinary claims about the events described in the Gospel?  Why are they not likewise true material presented about God in events that never actually happened?  Ask John Dominic Crossan this question: “Was there really an empty tomb?”  What do you think his answer will be?

This has been an incredibly clarifying discussion.  My opponents will assert the age of the universe is established beyond reasonable doubt.  I will respond that the evidence for age is predicated upon unprovable models that find their origin in materialist presuppositions about the nature of the universe.  We will reach a stalemate of competing authorities.  And that is really what this argument comes down to.  Which authority is rendered subservient to the other?  Which must give way to opposing truth claims?

carl

Carl,

If you think I said any of what you claim, you have misunderstood.  The world is not divided into the categories of reportage and lies.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Phil Hobbs wrote…

The world is not divided into the categories of reportage and lies.

Bingo.

Or maybe slightly differently, those aren’t the only types of TEXTS there are, even in the Bible. 

In fairness, there are difficulties in deciding just where in the Pentateuch it starts to be history.  (Or at least purported history, since we’re talking about type of text, and things like parables and psalms shouldn’t be read so as that their statements even have a truth value.)  Personally, I think things start reading very differently in the Abraham narrative, but that’s just a conjecture from the galleries.  But I also think this coincides with whether the historicity some of the details MATTERS to the nature of the faith.  If God DIDN’T call some individual who was the ancestor of the Hebrews to be in a special relationship with Him, that starts to really mess with things.

Me a troll?

Not at all,
Which things do you want me ‘back up’?

Bo,

I’m relieved to hear you aren’t a troll.  Your habit of entering the scene from underneath a bridge is obviously a coincidence.

Let’s start with your first two assertions.

There isn’t anything to the angular nonconformity that can’t be properly understood within a younger earth, the flood happened, Adam ate the forbidden fruit understanding.

Okay, show me.  How do you reproduce an angular unconformity between different types of rock, with widely different metamorphic alterations, in a young Earth scenario?  I don’t mean arm-waving, I mean real natural philosophy.

Determining the age of stars by where they fit in a predefined life cycle, then using that as evidence that the whole process is laid out is a bit of circular reasoning isn’t it?

Not at all.  Why do you think so?

We can leave the other things to subsequent posts.

Cheers,

Phil

Phil wrote:

Bo,

I’m relieved to hear you aren’t a troll.  Your habit of entering the scene from underneath a bridge is obviously a coincidence. wink

Bo Wrote:
It may have more to do with my residence being a non permanent feature under the bridge….
Phil wrote:

Let’s start with your first two assertions.

  There isn’t anything to the angular nonconformity that can’t be properly understood within a younger earth, the flood happened, Adam ate the forbidden fruit understanding.

Okay, show me.  How do you reproduce an angular unconformity between different types of rock, with widely different metamorphic alterations, in a young Earth scenario?  I don’t mean arm-waving, I mean real natural philosophy.

Bo wrote:
Both the breaking forth of the fountains of the deep during the flood and the ‘resettling’ of the earths surface (following the destruction of the land’s surface during the flood)into its present configuration would have caused Upthrusts the deep rock layers/bands formed either by the sediments of the flood (under higher pressures than currently expressed, but water deep enough to over-top mountains would exzert serious pressure), or as part of the ‘original status’ of the earth’s upper mantle. —Basically, the same ‘forces’ (with the addition of the of the ‘upward force’ of the ‘breaking of the fountains of the deep’, as are used in the ‘long time planet’ - the primary difference being that the ‘rate of plate movement, and other formative processes’ need not be uniformatarian, in other words, during the cataclysm, things happened faster…
Phil wrote:

  Determining the age of stars by where they fit in a predefined life cycle, then using that as evidence that the whole process is laid out is a bit of circular reasoning isn’t it?

Not at all.  Why do you think so?

?  Because it seems to be reasoning in a circle, not from a ‘proven’ - the given in this case becomes part of the proof!

These are younger because we think they are, and see we also have ones that are older because we think they are, (no one having seen any stellar birth certificates)..

Phil Wrote

We can leave the other things to subsequent posts.

Cheers,

Phil

Actually I’d like to see reconciliation of the ‘young earth’ with new testament statements about events in the book of Genesis, and then we ‘march on together’, having reconciled the ‘revelations’ with ‘special’ taking the authoritative position.

Bo,

That’s all arm-waving.  You can’t make metamorphic rock even at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—which is *much* deeper than Everest is tall.  The bottom of the Marianas Trench is ordinary mud—not even sedimentary rock.

And ancient wrecks from the bottom of the sea are also embedded in plain old mud—even though they go back halfway to the putative date of the Flood.  There’s no perceptible tendency to turn to rock.

And you haven’t understood the argument about the astronomy.  The usual young Earth argument against Darwin is that nobody has ever seen one species turn into another.  Well, in astronomy that isn’t the case—we have a time sequence due to our ability to observe at a great distance, and we have a stop-action sequence of very very similar objects—stars—at different stages of their development.

In addition, we have observations of how they behave today—their luminosity, the motions of their ejecta, and detailed theoretical models of their internal structure.

Where’s the circularity exactly?

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

[46] CryptoCatholic

If you think I said any of what you claim, you have misunderstood.

I am certainly open to correction.  But I am not the one who compared the first eleven chapters of Genesis to the parable of the Prodigal Son.  I have not heard clear answers to these questons:

1. Was Adam a real person?

2. What is the origin of sin and death?

3. Was Noah a real person?

4. Was there really a flood?

And I am still waiting to hear why I should not likewise spiritualize the resurrection on exactly the same grounds that you have spiritualized the creation account.

carl

Metamorphic rock isn’t currently being made at the bottom of the trench.

I can’t make rocks - period.

On the above we are in agreement,

1)  But with a ‘pressure slam’ from below of erupting fountains, and the ‘hold in place’ weight of the 14 miles of sea, who knows what would happen to that mud? 

2) You only ‘attacked’ the ‘possible addition’ - does that mean that the “rate of plate movement may be variable, and could have been markedly higher during and immediately post the flood” isn’t something you would consider ‘hand waving’ - or are you going to dismiss non-uniformity as ‘hand waving’ as well?

The ‘Time sequence’ is determined by what means?

The ‘stop action’ is of differing objects - not like ‘stop action’ of the opening of a single rose….

And any detailed ‘model’ of the inner working of the stars is sure to its detractors…

Carl,

Well, how about responding to my actual argument, instead of blowing it off and presenting me with a list of your questions?  I’ll take one of those to begin with, but I’d love to hear a reasoned response to what I actually said in my post.

Was there an Adam?

This question presupposes the same reportage vs lies dichotomy I mentioned earlier, so it doesn’t have a simple yes-no answer.  I think that yes, God set his image on two real individuals, and that, yes, when presented with the choice of obedience and rebellion, they chose rebellion, leading to all the consequences of the Fall.  Do I think that this happened a few normal 86400-second days after the creation of the Sun?  No.  I also don’t think that the sequence of appearance of plants and animals matched that in Genesis.

I also don’t think that the sky is blue because of the waters above the sky, held apart from the waters beneath by the vault of the firmament.  People have gone up there, and there isn’t any water—or much of anything else.  It seems to me that you should be more worried about Project Mercury than about whether I believe in the Resurrection. 

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Bo,

If all you can do is throw rocks, I don’t see any point in continuing.  You have no idea of any of the physics you’re describing—in fact your style of argumentation about science is exactly the sort of “well who knows what’s really true—-why don’t we all make up our own minds” stuff we’ve been fed by the revisionists on the subject of sexuality.

Using diamond anvil cells, people have measured what kinds of pressure and temperature are needed to make metamorphic rock.  It isn’t anything that doubling the depth of the ocean is going to reach, sorry.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I don’t think I’ve thrown any rocks (I think I may need to dodge a few though). 

From what I’ve read the minimum pressure for the formation of metamorphic rock is currently thought to be 1500 bars - the pressure of the water at the bottom of the Marianas trench is around 1086 bars.

If I’ve read correctly, simply adding half again to the depth would result in a pressure of of 1629 bars, which is above the threshold.

Uh, Phil, your uniformatarinism is showing again.  The ‘waters above’ aren’t there anymore, they fell during the flood.  You do believe in the Flood during which the world that then was perished don’t you?

[54] CryptoCatholic

It seems to me that you should be more worried about Project Mercury than about whether I believe in the Resurrection.

First let’s deal with this.  I am not questioning your belief in the resurrection.  I am questioning your consistency.  The argument that you make about Genesis can be (in fact, has been) used by liberals to question the resurrection.  You have to explain why it would be wrong to use this argument against an historic understanding of the resurrection even though you use the exact same argument against the historic understanding of creation.  The answer cannot be “Because it reduces Christian theology to scrap metal.”  That argument has been advanced by others in this thread, but it amounts to nothing more than special pleading.

Well, how about responding to my actual argument, instead of blowing it off and presenting me with a list of your questions?

I am not sure what argument I have not responded to, other than I have ignored your assertions about age of Earth calculations.  Produce a validated model and perhaps you will have something to talk about.  Until then, what is the value of these statements.  Anyone can make a model which extrapolates a process back 18,000,000,000 years.    Fire up MATLAB and have at it.  But you then have to prove the model has something to do with reality.  How do you show that?  You make a fundamental assumption of continuity in the processes.  Are they?  Do you have 18,000,000,000 years worth of data to prove it?  I can’t credibly extrapolate a navigation solution 30 seconds without observations and you wish me to go back 18,000,000,000 years?

This question presupposes the same reportage vs lies dichotomy I mentioned earlier, so it doesn’t have a simple yes-no answer.

This gets to the real problem that I want you to address; the problem you and your allies have studiously avoided on this thread.  How do you parse out events that really happened in Scripture from events that didn’t really happen?  You seem to have no appreciation for the danger of applying an external standard to make this decision.  I asked you: “Was Adam a real man.”  What if I had asked you “Was Christ really raised from the dead?”  You would not have said:

This question presupposes the same reportage vs lies dichotomy I mentioned earlier

You would have said ‘Yes.’  But you wouldn’t have a consistent reason why. 

carl

Carl,

We clearly aren’t going to get anywhere on the scientific points because we don’t share enough by way of inductive and logical apparatus.  You insist on an impossible standard of evidence, and then dismiss the whole scientific enterprise because it can’t meet your artificial standard.  You can certainly do that if you want, but it isn’t likely to convince anyone not already of your party, I don’t think.

Back to the exegesis.  Isn’t it obvious to you that the Epistles read very differently from Genesis or the Psalms?  Surely you wouldn’t put taking the wings of the morning in the same class as bringing Paul’s cloak from Troas? 

Do you really not think that there are different genres in Scripture that have to be read differently?  A certain amount of literary sensitivity—and literary experience outside the Bible and modern writing—is needed even for laypeople to interpret Scripture without finding mares’ nests and hens’ teeth.  It’s as necessary as grammar and punctuation.

You and Bo appear to be committed to a tradition of biblical interpretation that is both very recent—100 years old or thereabouts—and not widely shared within the Church.  The tradition of allegorical interpretation of Scripture goes back to the Church Fathers—including especially Augustine and Irenaeus—who can hardly be accused of being modern revisionists.  Their apparently fast-and-loose treatment of the OT would curl your hair, I expect, and yet their theology forms a big part of the bedrock of your own tradition—the idea that we all inherit the Sin of Adam comes from Augustine, and the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity from Irenaeus.

I wouldn’t read the NT the way I read Genesis, because it isn’t the same kind of material.  The Gospels have all sorts of externally verifiable details—viz. the whole corpus of NT archaeology, not to mention Roman inscriptions and the writings of Flavius Josephus and other historians of the time.  The Apostles allowed themselves to be martyred, one by one, rather than abandon their teaching of the Resurrection, to which they were eyewitnesses.  Miracles on a huge scale are well attested, as are a great number of martyrdoms in the immediately sub-Apostolic age, starting with Polycarp, whose writings are still extant.

It astounds me that you think there’s any point of contact between that interpretive problem and Genesis 1-11, which has very great similarities in form, and some similarities in matter, with other ancient Near Eastern creation stories.

To decide whether the first part of Genesis is reportage or a divinely inspired—and therefore true in what it intends to teach—creation myth, first you have to read some creation myths and some ancient reportage.  After deciding on the genre, it’s time to pull out the appropriate set of interpretive tools.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Bo,

From what I’ve read the minimum pressure for the formation of metamorphic rock is currently thought to be 1500 bars - the pressure of the water at the bottom of the Marianas trench is around 1086 bars.
If I’ve read correctly, simply adding half again to the depth would result in a pressure of of 1629 bars, which is above the threshold.

It’s a strong function of temperature—you need something above 10 GPa (~10,000 atmospheres) at 1500 C or thereabouts.  You can’t do it at ordinary temperatures—otherwise there’d be metamorphic rock at the center of every mountain in the world, and there isn’t.  Similarly, deep drilling doesn’t find all the rocks going metamorphic even at depths of 3-4 km.  If the land had been covered with water at even 90C, let alone 1500, there wouldn’t have been any olive branches for the dove to find—they’d all have turned to papier mache long before.  Not to mention what it would have done to Noah and Co.

Also note that I said that there are angular unconformities whose rocks have very different metamorphic modifications right on top of each other—like a few feet apart.  And those rocks are not at the bottom of the ocean, they’re exposed at the surface.  The Jedburgh unconformity, which gave Hutton the idea of deep time in the first place, is of this character, I think.

But how much special pleading are you prepared to pile up in defense, not of Scripture, but of your particular—and recent—interpretive tradition?  You don’t seem to have a clear idea of where one ends and the other begins—not one that you’ve expressed, anyway.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

CryptoCatholic,

You insist on an impossible standard of evidence, and then dismiss the whole scientific enterprise because it can’t meet your artificial standard.

Demanding you verify your models is hardly the equivalent of appealing to an artificial standard.  In my world, it’s sort of required. (It’s my job, in fact.) Mis-modeling is a fast and sure path to poor estimation.  So if you have some independent observation of existence 18,000,000,000 I should very much like to see it.  But don’t try to tell me that your unvalidated models are an accurate representation of a world you have never observed.  They represent a model of a world which might exist if the assumptions which underly the model are in fact true.  That is a big ‘if’ when you have no way to establish the truth of those assumptions.  You can’t even independently prove there was a world 18,000,000,000 years ago.

Do you really not think that there are different genres in Scripture that have to be read differently?

Of course I understand this.  Can you give me some internal textual reason to read Genesis different from Exodus?  Or Joshua?  Or 1 Kings?  The answer is ‘no.’  Your reasons are all external.  You simply think Genesis is too fantastic to be true.  That isn’t a credible reason.

The Gospels have all sorts of externally verifiable details

So the truth of Scripture is subject to external confirmation.  You will believe Matthew is factual because there is in your mind evidence to support it. You reject Genesis as factual because in your mind you think there isn’t evidence to support it.  You have become your own standard.  But man receives the Word of God.  We do not test it.  We are supposed to submit to it.  Scripture is the norm of all norms.  Scripture is true because it finds its origins in God.  It is true even if all men say it is false.  Man is a limited finite creature, and he is incapable of judging the truth or falsehood of the revelation of an Unlimited Infinite Creator. 

carl

<font size=-2>Captain, our effort to avoid cluttering the thread has been unavailing.  Sensors indicate we are passing through a cloud of disintegrating logical debris.

Thank you, Spock.  Scotty, take us out of warp and prepare for maximum rhetorical impulse.  Uhura, switch to comment mode. 

Aye, cap’n.  <font color=red>Yes, captain.  Hailing ...</font></font>

This discussion is completely out of hand, though I appreciate the efforts of CCath, Steve, and others.  The topic is—or should be—+Wright’s views and their validity vis-a-vis accepted interpretive paradigms in moral theology, Catholic or Calvinist or Barthian or whatever.

Given, though, that I am no less a fallen creature than anyone else, I have to make a final point about the accusation of circularity (Bo #50).

This displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of scientific epistemology.  In a purely deductive system, yes, circularity is a problem.  But in the scientific paradigm, not only is it not invalid, it’s inescapable.  Suppose (since I’ve been immersed in this sort of thing for a while) +Wright argues as follows:

... but if we interpret Paul’s statement X, agreeing with what he clearly seems to be saying in passage Y, to mean Z, then the apparent contradiction with the W passage in the Book of Daniel disappears.

This is the typical form of scientific/logical/inductive argument:  Phenomenon X contradicts currently accepted theory.  However, if we modify the current theory in way Z, then Z now implies X and the contradiction disappears.  This is not circularity; it is the construction of increasingly comprehensive theories, which is basic to the way science works.  Of course, they remain theories, however well-confirmed they may become over the course of time; human knowledge of Creation is neither closed nor certain.  Likewise our understanding of God’s revelation is neither closed nor certain (the Reformation demonstrates that 1500 years of close study was not enough; it would be intellectual arrogance to claim we are sufficiently advanced to have inaugurated some sort of intellectual or scientific parousia)—though the conclusions relevant to the Christian’s everyday moral decisions are so well-established that the burden of proof on any denier is overwhelming.

Scientific epistemology is not the only valid source of knowledge, of course—that is the Enlightenment mistake—but it’s gotten an undeserved bad rap recently due to junk arguments by PR types who misuse scientific language in precisely the same way 815 misuses God-talk.  And I’m tired of it.

<font size=-2>Scotty, maximum warp.  Mr. Sulu, get us out of here. </font>

The ‘deep time’ theory isn’t needed if the rate of rock formation and plate movement isn’t ‘steady’. 

I’ve not called for the ‘surface temperature’ to be high, only that where the ‘fountains’ burst forth would likely have been ‘high’ - the existing geothermal vents have temps well above the ‘normal’ boiling point of water, and they’re not causing the surface temp of the ocean to be all that high…

I’m not going to spend much more time on ‘special pleadings’, after all, my attempt was only to show plausibilities, which without an ability to recreate the events is all we ever have..

Unlike you I don’t claim to have an ‘answer’, I claim only to have ways ‘it might have happened’, the stresses of a world in its death throes as the flood (with the fountains of the deep, and the waters above the firmament combining to destroy it) aren’t likely to be repeated anytime soon.  I think the ‘usually processes’ under those ‘very unusually conditions’ might have do it, but I’ll not attempt to ‘prove it’ If you’re unwilling to accept it as a possibility, there isn’t much I could produce that would change your mind…

I will however ask you:
- How do you reconcile your ‘old earth’ with death coming into the world by the one man Adam?
- Do you accept the reality of the global world destroying flood (as described in 2 Peter)?

If so, would you share how that works with me?  I’d love to be able to show others that an acceptance of these facts doesn’t require that they join me in believing in the ‘young earth’ - it would help me witness to the truth of the Flood (and its proof of a God that judges evil, and by extension the coming judgment by fire), and of the nature of man’s rebellion (and its centrality in death) without the ‘baggage’ of the ‘Young Earther’ I currently carry….

The ‘means of formation of the metamorphic rock’ are definately not in the ‘needful things’ category.

The truth of Scripture - Man’s Sin bringing Death, the Judgment of God being sure - these things are…

Craig,

Yup.  Starbase 5 out.

Cheers,
Phil Hobbs

I take it then you’ve no intention of answering how you reconcile your interpretation of general revelation with the plain text of the special revelation of God.

Tom Wright’s interpretation of the 2 dispensations: Israel before Christ’s incarnation and the Church is meaningless and contrary to Scripture. There is only one dispensation: The Pleromic Blood, of which St. Paul speaks, which is Reality. One is either in Christ or not in Christ; connected to the Life-giving reality or not connected. Was Abraham not connected?  Was his Faith a symbol of a diferent dispensation or the Faith into which we are grafted?