From: bivalve (bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:07:54 EDT
>Looks to me as though you are doing a revision to get concord. How can you equate "grass, herb and fruit-tree" as Young has it, with the express notion of seed in the fruit, with cyanobacteria and algae? Also, you are totally neglecting the firmament with the waters above.<
I agree that this approach has plenty of problems. However, macroalgae seems to me most likely to fall under the general heading of plants. Thus, light appears before the earth, which existed before macroscopic "plants" (macroalgae, over 1 billion years ago; macroscopic aggregations of cyanobacteria much earlier), which appear before macroscopic aquatic animals (ca. 570 million, Ediacaran faunas), which appear before land animals (large things at least got onto the beach in the Cambrian, 544-500 million).. If someone were to claim merely that the earliest example of the general kind listed on each day of Genesis 1 were created in the same order as the days of Genesis 1, then I think that day 4 is the only problem for this specific claim (ignoring questions such as whether it is missing the point of the passage). There is a general correlation between the sequences from Genesis 1 and from geology/astronomy, but not a very exact one. The problems of this approach are inde!
ed one reason why I prefer a more symbolic or framework approach.
I'm not really sure what the firmament is, as far as assigning a date to it. Taking Genesis 1 as a scientific description in each detail seems to make the firmament into something that rockets should crash into just after they pass the sun, moon, and stars. If I wanted to defend a concordist view, I would probably take the firmament as simply phenomenological language rather than an actual object. I suppose one might stretch the interpretation and claim that it referred to something like the microwave background, which appears beyond the stars. This approach provides scientific language at the expense of an implausible interpretation of the intent of Genesis 1.
Dr. David Campbell
Old Seashells
University of Alabama
Biodiversity & Systematics
Dept. Biological Sciences
Box 870345
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0345 USA
bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com
That is Uncle Joe, taken in the masonic regalia of a Grand Exalted Periwinkle of the Mystic Order of Whelks-P.G. Wodehouse, Romance at Droitgate Spa
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:00:53 EDT