RE: [asa] the Way Science Works/

Thanks for your thoughts. The faq there looks revealling, but I am too tired, too.

skrogh <panterragroup@mindspring.com> wrote: I am tired. I just got from the bicycle races. I hit send too soon before I got the reference in.
  This was a paragraph from Gordon J Glover's presentation on http://www.blog.beyondthefirmament.com/
   
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  Rather than give the Hebrews a new Cosmology, which would have been totally worthless to them, given their situation, God inspires Moses to reassure his people using the familiar terminology of M.E. creation stories, in which the gods bring order to the primordial chaos, that YAWHEH is sovereign over the forces of nature and the HE will protect them as they enter the wilderness. So basically, the Hebrew creation narrative was God’s theological rebuttal to the Egyptian creation mythology, not necessarily a scientific rebuttal to ANE cosmology. So to read modern science into it completely misses the point. As soon as [they heard the words regarding] the Spirit of God hovering over the formless and empty waters of Gen 1:2, that generation of Hebrews who received Genesis, would have instantly understood that Moses was about to give them, a creation story that would rival anything that they received in Egypt. So naturally, any passing references to the cosmos would be
 consistent with ANE science and have nothing to do with modern 21st century science. To expect Genesis to provide modern Christians with a scientific description of creation that meets our post-enlightenment standards of material objectivity is extremely arrogant and self-centered. It completely overlooks the seriousness of the situation in which Genesis was given, and instead, replaces these weighty spiritual matters with our petty scientific arguments over things like the age of the earth or alternate celestial centricities. Once we start demanding that Moses answer these types of questions, we have completely missed the point of the creation narrative.
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Received on Sat Jul 28 02:00:22 2007