Glenn's posts have re-opened, in his words, the "Great Genesis Debate." :-)
There are a variety of ways to interpret the language of Genesis 1 to
yield a nearly-literal reading of the "days of creation": 6-day recent
creation; gap theory; day-age view; overlapping-day-age view; and the
"days of proclamation" view. The latter two views have no problems
reconciling the ordering of the 6 days with what we know from cosmology,
geology, and biology. However, all of these views gloss over an
important (IMO) difficulty -- the flat-earth cosmology of author.
The author of Genesis 1 (and the authors of the flood story, Job, and
numerous passages in the Psalms and the prophets) clearly had a
flat-earth, "sky sandwich" cosmology in mind. (The primeval waters
separated vertically to create an expanse, the sky, which held the sun,
moon, and stars; the "gates of heaven" kept the "waters above" in place.
"... God is enthroned above the floods....") The language of the second
and third days of creation (and of the flood narative) indicate what the
author believed to have have been literal, physical features of this
cosmology. Calling it "language of appearances" is, I think, too easy of
an out. The ordering of the six days makes a great deal of sense IF you
follow the author's cosmology.
Glenn quoted from John Mark Reynolds' article, "The Bible and Science:
Towards a Rational Harmonization." JMR raises a very good question: "If
evolution is true, why didn't God relate a roughly evolutionary account of
creation in Genesis 1?" But this leads immediately to another question:
"Why didn't God relate a spherical-earth account of creation in Genesis
1?" Although a heleocentric view may not have been available around the
time of the completion of Genesis, a spherical-earth view almost certainly
was. Yet God allowed his revealed truth to be couched in the cosmological
imagery of the author's culture, without first correcting that imagery.
So it seems unlikely to me that the passage's essential revealed truth has
much, if anything, to do with the actual "formative history" of creation.
I'd be most interested someone has answers to this difficulty.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This is my own personal observation | Loren Haarsma
and may bear no resemblance to reality." | lhaarsma@opal.tufts.edu
(--Me, 1992) |