On Tue, 12 Mar 1996 20:06:48 GMT you wrote:
TJ>Well, first of all, I would like to thank everyone involved
>with this forum for allowing me to participate.
Welcome aboard Tony, and apologies for the delay in responding.
TJ>My interest in origins is a result of my belief in Jesus Christ as
>the supreme ruler of the universe, and my love of the Bible as his
>Word.
Amen brother! That is my (and I suspect many other's on this
Reflector) "interest" too.
TJ>My understanding of Scripture tell me that God created the earth
>and everything in it, including two fully formed human beings, in six
>literal days, and that this probably occurred less than ten thousand
>years ago.
this. The problem begins when one starts to relate one's Young-Earth
Creationist (YEC) worldview to the facts of the natural world. If one
wants to have a harmonious view of reality, has to integrate the
Biblical and scientific pictures into one worldview. There are
basically three ways of doing this:
1. Accept the Bible - Reject science
2. Reject the Bible - Accept science
3. Accept the Bible - Accept science
Option 1 will help ensure the believer will save his/her soul, but
he/she may not be much help to others. One will be forced to dispute
almost all of science, and great intellectual tension will probably
result, unless one simply closes one's mind and ignores science.
Option 2 unfortunately does happen to students from Christian homes
who have been taught the YEC viewpoint, but when they get to
High School or University, they discover that there is much evidence
for an old Earth and biological change over time. This is a
disadvantage of Option 1, from a parent's perspective.
Option 3 is the view that both the Bible and nature are "books"
written by God, and ultimately they must both tell the same story. It
is the view that I hold. Ramm says:
"If we believe that the God of creation is the God of redemption, and
that the God of redemption is the God of creation, then we are
committed to some very positive theory of harmonization between
science and evangelicalism. God cannot contradict His speech in
Nature by His speech in Scripture. If the Author of Nature and
Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually
recite the same story....We are to pay due respect to both science and
Scripture. Neither adoration of one nor bigoted condemnation of the
other is correct. We must be ready to hear the voice of science and
the voice of Scripture on common matters.......In contrast to
neo-orthodoxy, religious modernism, and hyper-orthodoxy (the first two
refusing to take the science of the Bible seriously and the latter
refusing to take science seriously) we defend a position which asserts
that a positive relationship must exist between science and
Christianity. It is as foolish for the hyper-orthodox to write off
science as it is for the religious liberals and neo-orthodox to write
off the Bible. The truth must be a conjunction of the two." (Ramm B.
"The Christian View of Science and Scripture", Paternoster: London,
1955, pp25-26).
TJ>My understanding of Scripture tell me...
You rightly say that it is your "understanding of Scripture". The
issue is mostly one of *approach* and *interpretation*. Firstly, if
we *approach* the Bible as a book that is going to make infallible
pronouncements on details of 20th century science, we must be clear
that that is what we are doing and why we are doing it. Secondly, we
must be clear in our own minds about the system of *interpretation* we
adopt. If we assume that literal interpretations are somehow better,
we are really making an assumption of what literary genres God would
use in speaking to an ancient, eastern, pre-industrial societies. Heb
1:1 says that "God spoke...through the prophets at many times and in
VARIOUS WAYS"(emphasis mine).
TJ>...God created the earth and everything in it, including two fully
>formed human beings, in six literal days...
Perhaps I can give my testimony? Nearly thirty years ago, I was
converted from atheism with no Christian background whatsoever. The
Baptist church which I was converted in, was fairly fundamentalist and
having come from a non-Christian home and an interest in science, I
started to come up against YEC pronouncements, which were totally new
to me and at variance with what I understood about the world. It was
starting to get me down, so I bought a Hebrew-English interlinear and
an excercise book and went through Gensis 1-2 word-by-word,
line-by-line, over the space of several weeks. I saw for myself that
the Bible does not actually say a lot of things that YEC conventional
wisdom say it does.
For example, nowhere does it say the days were 24-hours long. Indeed
the word "day" is used in Genesis 1 in a variety of senses, as it is
in normal English usage:
"In the first two chapters of Genesis the word day is used as follows:
(i) in verse 5 it means daylight and (ii) a day marked out by an
evening and morning; (iii) in verse 14 it means daylight in contrast
to night, and (iv) in the expression "and for days" it means a
twenty-four hour day; (v) in Gen. 2:4 it refers to the entire period
of creation." (Ramm B. "The Christian View of Science and Scripture",
Paternoster: London, 1955, p145).
If Genesis 1:26-31 and 2 are to be taken as referring to the
same events on the sixth day", then the indications are that more than
a 24-hour period is intended, as Hayward explains:
"Finally, there is strong evidence that the sixth day of creation 164
must have lasted more than 24 hours. Look how much took place in that
sixth day! To begin with, God created the higher animals, and then
created Adam. After that:
And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden . . . And out of the ground
the LORD God made to grow every tree . . . (Genesis 2.8, 9.) Then
every animal and every bird was brought to Adam for naming.
In all that long procession of living things, Adam saw that 'there
was not found a helper fit for him'. (Genesis 2.20.) So God put
Adam to sleep, created Eve, and presented her to Adam, who
joyfully declared:
This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. (Verse 23.)
All commentators are agreed that the expression translated 'at last'
in the RSV means just that. They usually express the literal meaning
of the Hebrew as 'now, at length', and some of them quote numerous
other passages in the Old Testament where this Hebrew word carried the
same sort of meaning. Thus the Hebrew indicates that Adam had been
kept waiting a long time for his wife to appear - and all on the sixth
day."
(Hayward A., "Creation and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from
Science and the Bible", Bethany House: Minneapolis Minn., 1995, p165)
TJ>...and that this probably occurred less than ten thousand
>years ago.
Again, this assumes that the Biblical genealogies were intended to
teach length, rather than line. The Bible makes no attempt to add up
the genealogies, and in fact this apparently did not occur to anyone
to do it until Bishop Ussher did it in the 17th century. Therefore
this falls into the category of "the traditions of men" rather than
the "commands of God" (Mk 7:8).
TJ>Originally I had wanted to contact Phillip Johnson. I enjoyed his
>books tremendously, but I was curious about two points. 1) His
>apparent belief that God may have somehow used evolution to get us
>to the point where we are today
No. Phil does not believe in "evolution" (ie. macro-evolution),
although he does concede that God could have used natural processes in
His creating, that could be called "evolution". To avoid making
his view an issue that would distract attention from Darwinism Phil
avoids stating specifically where he stands on the creation -
evolution spectrum. But by elimination it seems clear that Phil is a
Progressive Creationist.
TJ>and 2) his apparent acceptance of an "old" earth.
While Phil does not criticise YEC, it is clear that he does not
support it either. He believes the important question is whether God
created, not how long it took Him to do it:
"When we understand how secularists think, the next step is to
understand what the primary issue is so we can focus on that and leave
secondary issues for later. Deciding what is primary and what is
secondary is often difficult, but in the case of evolution, it was
easy for me. The primary point is not how long it took God to create,
or whether he created things abruptly or gradually, or whether the
first chapters of Genesis are to be interpreted literally or
figuratively. These are all important issues in their way, but they
are secondary. The primary issue is whether God created us at all."
(Phillip E. Johnson, "Shouting `Heresy' in the Temple of Darwin",
Christianity Today, October 24, 1994, p26)
You might be interested that the ICR's Duane Gish says that the issue
of a young age of the Earth is not essential even to Creation-Science:
"The subject of the age of the earth and the cosmos is certainly a
very important subject and is frequently discussed in books and
articles by creation scientists. There are two reasons why that
subject will not be dealt with here. The first, and primary reason,
is that the scope of this book is limited to the how of origins. This
focuses attention on the core of the creation/evolution question.
Secondly, SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS OF both conservative theologians
AND CREATION SCIENTISTS HOLD TO AN OLD AGE OF THE EARTH
AND LONG TIME INTERVALS BETWEEN THE MANY ACTS OF CREATION.
Thus creationists take both sides of the controversy over the age of
the earth and the universe...." (Gish D.T., "Creation Scientists
Answer Their Critics", Institute for Creation Research: El Cajon Ca,
1993, p260 emphasis mine)
TJ>My question is, if one is a Christian and believes in the
>inerrancy of scripture, how does one defend one's belief in either
>or both of these ideas?
As above, the issue is not "the inerrancy of scripture" but rather
the *interpretation* of scripture.
TJ>I am particularly interested in the old earth arguments used by
>Christians who have training in geology.
I have no "training in geology", so I will pass. But for what it's
worth, the following appear decisive to me as a layman:
1. Evidence for ordinary rate processes 100 years before Darwin were
sufficient to establish that the earth was millions of years old.
2. Then radiometric dating established that the earth is thousands of
millions of years old. Even if radiometric dating is partly wrong, it
would have to be *several million times wrong* if the Earth was really
10^3 years old, when it appears to be 4.6 x 10^9 years old.
3. The universe appears to be between 8 and 20 billion years old,
based on red-shift observations and star burning rates.
4. There is no positive evidence that the Earth is 10,000 years old.
Dates that YECs use to discredit radiometric dating, for example,
still yield ages far in excess of 10,000 years.
I hope this has been of some help.
God bless.
Steve
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