I fully agree that all our interpretations are fallible. But one thing
someone had as a sig file caught my attention. It said, "Everyone is
entitled to their private interpretation of the data, but no one is
entitled to their own private set of facts." Don't know who said this, but
it does capture what I see as the problem. Facts are defined as that which
is--the data of reality. I know that what I wrote would 'challenge' some
very good friends and dear Christians. And I knew (and was halfway hoping)
that someone would whack me for this. :-) But because of my view of facts
and interpretations, I simply find it very difficult to see how a
historical religion can be true, when it isn't true historically. God is
supposed to have caused a flood, in history, and this flood is supposed to
have wiped out nearly all of mankind. If what His word says is not what
actually happened, how can one be sure that it is God's word? To cite the
case of Ed Brayton from a couple of weeks ago, when I asked him why he
didn't believe that the Word was true if it didn't have any historical
content, and he said something to the effect that he didn't know what it
meant to be true but not historical. I am in that boat also with Ed (just
at opposite ends of the theological spectrum)
>
>I have no particular problem with an interpretation that holds the first
>part of Genesis unhistorical. That does not mean that it is, or is not,
>of course, just that that particular "issue" is too far down the
>importance list to really lose sleep over.
The importance of it lies in the difficulties that people like Ed and I
have when we are asked to believe that what is true has no historical
content. Our views of truth require that history be real.
To research it, as I have
>done a lot (I like your two books, even though I don't buy into (or
>disbelieve either) their thesis). They play almost no part, however, in
>my own Christian faith journey, one which continually expands every week
>into new and exciting (and origins-unrelated) areas. The message of my
>Lord was "love each other," not "hold to a proper view of origins," or
>even "hold to a proper view of the Bible."
First I want to publically thank you for the help you gave me with the
second book. Let me put it this way in a chain of logic. The command to
love one another is based upon the authority of Jesus to tell us that we
must Love one another. If Jesus was a nobody, then his command really
means nothing. Why do we beleive that He is somebody? Because of the
resurrection, and the subjective interaction with the Lord in our lives.
But the resurrection can only be known to be true based upon what we, today
read in the Scripture, which must accurately represent what happened. And
what happened is intimately related to the Fall. As H. G. Wells said,
"It was only slowly that the general intelligence of the Western
world was awakened to two disconcerting facts; firstly, that the
succession of life in the geological record did not correspond
to the acts of the six days of creation; and, secondly, that the
record, in harmony with a mass of biological facts, pointed
away from the Bible assertion of a separate creation of each
species, straight towards a genetic relation between all forms
of life, in which even man was included! The importance of
this last issue to the existing doctrinal system was manifest.
If all the animals, and man had been evolved in this ascendant
manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and
no Fall.. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical
fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the
reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching
based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house
of cards." H. G. Wells, Outline of History, (Garden City:
Doubleday,1961), p. 776-777
I have always felt that if there is no historical Adam and Eve, then Wells
is correct, the Christianity has problems.
Now, I can't verify Adam and Eve. There is no way. But one can verify the
flood and that is where the importance of the flood comes into play. It is
the oldest event in Scripture which has a realistic chance of being
verified by scientific methods.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm