>> The days of proclamation which is what I believe Genesis 1 is, are
>> events prior to the big bang and as such occurred before time. God actually
>> created nothing--he spoke but didn't create. All the comments about 'and it
>> was so' are an editors statement not the statment of God.
>
> There is nothing in the text of Gen.1 to suggest such a separation between
>command & fulfillment, but there is another passage which seems even
clearer, Ps.33:9,
>which is speaking of the creation of heaven and earth by God's word (vv.6-8):
> "For he spoke and it came to be;
> he commanded, and it stood fast."
>(Poetic parallelism - the same idea is repeated in different words.)
Yes there is very clear logical necessity for placing a gap (of some
duration). Consider where to place the quotation marks in the following:
Genesis 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God
saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Do we place the quotations around everything after said? As illustrated here?
And God said, "Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the
light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. "
or do we punctuate it as follows:
3And God said, "Let there be light" and there was light. And God saw the
light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
The verse does not say,
And God said, "Let there be light" and there was INSTANTLY light.
The verse does not say,
And God said, Let there be light: and GOD INSTANTLY SAW THAT THERE was light.
Someone else said 'there was light'. It wasn't God.
To say that light was instantly there after God spoke is the traditional
interpretation, but it is an assumption unsupported by the text. It is an
assumption based on our ideas of how God must go about creating things. But
what if our assumption is wrong? What if there is a time between when God
spoke and when the fulfilment occurred. It is not ruled out by the text.
And I agree with Hayward's observation that God only speaks in Genesis 1.
He doesn't DO! God SAID "let there be light," it doesn't say God "MADE the
light" and it doesn't say that God MADE the light instantly. We believe
that he did that is all.
As to Psalms that you quote, once again, show me the word in that passage
that indicates instantaneous coming to be. The Psalms says that God spoke
and it came to be. It doesn't say God spoke and it INSTANTLY came to be.
SHoot, If everytime God spoke it instantly came to be, then we are
worshiping the wrong messiah. The messiah should have come in Adam and
Eve's day when the messiah was first spoken of by God. Even the YECs place
a 4000 year gap between the first speaking of the Messiah and his comimg.
And if you believe that Daniel's prophecy was of the messiah, then there is
a 600 year gap.
> Focussing on the 1st line, the Hebrew construction (waw consecutive: _ki
hu'
>'amar wayehi_) suggests that the action of the second verb follows that of
the first
>with nothing intervening. It would be good for somebody with greater
Hebrew expertise
>than I to comment on this both in regard to Gen.1 and Ps.33.
I too would be interested in hearing more of this.
> A less important but non-trivial point: How can one speak of "days" of
>proclamation if they occurred "before time"?
How would you tell someone of something that God did prior to time? Our
language itself requires one thought (one sentence) at a time and that
requires some temporality to the telling of a non-temporal event. And to
describe the proclamations as days is not unreasonable as there simply is
no way in our language to relate non-temporal events.
God is not bound by time in my book so He can do things before the
beginning of time. Your objection skirts along the edge of saying that we
can't communicate at all about anything that God did prior to the
universes' formation (this is different from the question of whether or not
we were told anything about it).
> .......................
>> >[A few passages in Gen 1 that imply evolution (nay even abiogenesis)]
>> >
>> >Gen 1:11,12 (Let the earth sprout vegetation,...and the earth brought
forth
>> >vegetation...)
>>
>> Absolutely this is why I think Genesis actually teaches evolution. IT WAS
>> THE LAND that did the creating not God directly! God ordered the land to do
>> the job but the land actually did it. Similarly with the water bringing
>> forth fish. God didn't create the fish--the water did.
>
> This is a very important point which needs continual emphasis: Genesis 1
very
>clearly pictures _mediated_ creation of living things. & it is
_creation_, as the
>connection of 1:20 & 21 (which uses the verb br' which only God can do)
shows.
>Messenger's detailed study in _Evolution and Theology_ demonstrated that a
number of
>important church fathers (Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, &c)
understood the
>creation of life in this way. That doesn't automatically mean evolution
(Ephrem, e.g.,
>thinks of the plants coming out of the earth full grown with (gasp!)
apparent age, but
>the idea of mediated creation is a crucial one for an evolutionary theology.
No it doesn't automatically mean evolution. But it is mediated creation
which then does fit into an evolutionary perspective if we need it to. And
we moderns need it to. If we moderns insist that Genesis was not teaching
evolution AND evolution is true, then God told us a falsehood. The
statement that the land brought forth life is the sort of simple but true
account of creation that I would expect God to deliver to us in order to
avoid the problems you and I debated a month ago in which if God tells us a
false story he isn't to be trusted. But if God tells us a simplifed, but
true, account of how life came to be, then He tells the truth, Genesis can
be true (and historical but not exhaustive), and we can then differentiate
this creation story from other creation stories like the pea-man.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution