creation – Page 3

Billions of Years? Part 4: Approaching the Question

September 21, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

If the Bible’s account of creation is historical narrative and should be read straightforwardly, and if it says that creation occurred over a period of 6 “days” with “evenings and mornings,” and if the biblical genealogies place Adam a few thousand years ago, then we have a clear conflict between the biblical story and the broadly accepted modern evolutionary account. How do we respond to that conflict?

Assume that the science is settled, and the Bible is wrong?
Try to reconcile the two accounts by a creative reading of the biblical text?
Declare that Science Is Evil and move in next door to Simeon Stylites?

I see serious problems with all these approaches.

First, there is no statement more unscientific than that “the science is settled.” Science is never settled. Scientists regularly and correctly observe that errors are revealed and that models are constantly revised as new discoveries occur. Science, they tell us, is the ongoing, never-ending search for truth. I’m happy to accept their word on that. Question everything.

Second, my earlier posts (as linked above) have argued that there is no textual basis for getting hermeneutically creative with the biblical account. It is what it is.

Third, the fact that God is the Creator renders it impossible that genuine science could be in conflict with revealed truth. The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19.1), and the study of the heavens will not contradict God’s declarations about their origin. So I’m not going to live the rest of my life sitting cross-legged on my Luddite pillar. I’m going to study science as one more avenue toward increasing my knowledge of God.

As I’ve stated before, the demonstrated supernatural character of the Scripture requires that I give it the benefit of the doubt in any supposed conflict with science. That means that scientific “discoveries” that conflict with the biblical account have some serious burden of proof. I’m going to need more than consensus or, worse yet, allegation to bail on the biblical statements.

So I’m going to have to evaluate the evolutionary model to see just how rigorous it is. I recognize that that’s a risky business, since I’m not a scientist. In my graduate studies I learned what it means to acquire the specialized research skills necessary for a specific academic field, and I don’t take lightly the risk I’m taking on by evaluating a scientific model without those tools. I invite informed criticism. But I also note that name-calling is not rigorous rebuttal.

I’ve asked secular scientists about many of these things, and I haven’t gotten coherent, reasonable, validated answers—nothing even approaching the level of proof that I’m requiring if I’m going to reject the biblical account.

So the next few posts contain my thought process on evaluating the evolutionary model. Take it for what it’s worth, and refute it if you can.

To begin with, we need to note that there is no single “evolutionary model.” The modern secular view of cosmogeny requires at least 2 distinct phases: the beginning of the universe, and the beginning of life on earth. These phases require completely different mechanisms. The popular view is that the universe began with the so-called “Big Bang” more than 13 billion years ago, followed by material condensation into nebulae, stars, and galaxies, while biogenesis on Earth began about 4.5 billion years ago and has followed a mostly Darwinian process of mutation and natural selection since then.

How strong are the logical and observational bases of these processes? Strong enough to override the biblical account? We’ll begin by thinking about cosmic evolution, including both the Big Bang and the succeeding mechanism of star formation.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 3: Genesis Data on the Age of the Earth

September 18, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1 Part 2

Last time we demonstrated that the Creation account in Genesis 1 is Hebrew narrative, which means that we should read it straightforwardly. We then demonstrated that it speaks of a personal agent who created the cosmos from nothing over a period described as 6 “days.” Before we begin to evaluate the claims of the old-earth position, however, we need to answer a second question from the text: how long ago did these 6 “days” occur?

The text reports that on the sixth “day” Elohim created a man, named Adam (“man”) (Gen 1.27; 2.19) and his wife, named Eve (“living”) (Gen 2.22; 3.20). Later in the narrative we’re given the same Adam as the starting point of a genealogy, including lifespans and progeny dates for everyone involved. Genesis 5 gives the data for every generation from Adam to Noah and his sons, and Genesis 11 gives the same data for every generation from Noah’s sons to Abraham. The lifespans and progeny dates from Abraham through David, whose life dates are generally agreed upon, appear throughout the biblical text up to the book of Samuel.

Thus we have numbers that can be manipulated to yield a calendar year, or thereabouts, for the creation of Adam. There are variations in this date for several reasons, including some textual variants in the Hebrew manuscripts and some interpretational questions. (For a detailed analysis of the interpretative history of that question, see the dissertation of my former PhD student Ben Shaw [free registration required].) The most restrictive date would yield a creation somewhere around 4000 BC, as calculated by James Ussher in the 1600s, while textual variants might allow a date 1000 years or so earlier.

Some have noted that it was traditional in ancient genealogies to omit generations that were considered unimportant; some interpreters have suggested, for example, that the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1 has omitted some generations in order to yield 3 sets of 14 generations each (Mat 1.17), for easier memorization. It’s true that omitting generations did occur, but you’ll note that the Matthew list does not include the math; on the other hand, the Genesis genealogies include ages and sums that simply do not add up if generations are omitted. The omission suggestion introduces far more difficulties than it solves.

And of course, to get from 4000 or 5000 BC to 4.5 billion BC, you’d be omitting 1 million generations for every generation you mention. Some suggestions are just silly on their face.

So where does the text itself leave us? You have an earth and its contents created intentionally by a personal agent a few thousand years ago.

Given earlier evidence that the Bible exhibits characteristics of extraordinary origin, you’re going to need an extremely high level of proof to set that obvious declaration aside.

Does the old-earth view meet that level of evidence—something more substantial and logically compelling than “but everybody believes this!”?

On to that question next time.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 2: Genesis Data on the Creation Event

September 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger 5 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Part 1

As noted in the last post, I’m starting with the demonstrated premise that the Bible is a supernatural book—the Word of God—and therefore authoritative. Further, it should be interpreted based on genre, like any other literature. In narratives, it should be read at face value unless the text itself give us reason to do otherwise. And once we’ve extracted its meaning, we shouldn’t torque it around unless we have a stronger reason to do so than “a whole bunch of people believe something else, and they’ll make fun of me if I don’t come around.”

It makes sense, then, to start our investigation into the age of the earth by taking a look at what the Bible actually says about the topic.

To begin with, the Creation narrative and the genealogies of the human race are clearly narrative, not poetry, as old-earth proponents used to suggest. The clearest indication of this is the style of the text itself; perhaps the most reliable predictor of Hebrew narrative is the waw consecutive, which is simply the use of and to connect verb clauses in a string. This form dominates Genesis 1; here’s a copy of the text with the waw-consecutive verbs highlighted in red. By contrast, a poetic description of the same Creation event appears in Psalm 104, and there’s hardly any red in it at all.

It’s no surprise, then, that a leading expert on Hebrew literature, Robert Alter, identifies the first poetic passage of the Bible as Adam’s description of his wife all the way at the end of Genesis 2.

Some old-earth proponents, facing this clear evidence that Genesis 1 is not poetry, have suggested that it is “exalted, semi-poetic prose.” I’ll observe that there’s no such genre recognized by Hebrew scholars. This is a whole new level of category error—ascribing a phenomenon to a category that not only is incorrect, but simply does not exist.

So Genesis 1 is narrative, not poetry. That means we’re going to take it straightforwardly, barring evidence in the text itself that the author intends us to read it otherwise. So what does it say?

- There is a Creator, named Elohim, who is the subject of most of the verbs. He speaks throughout the passage, and he thinks through a planned action (Gen 1.26-27). This means that he has intellect and will. And since he evaluates his work throughout the process, calling it “good” repeatedly (e.g. Gen 1.4)., he appears to have emotions as well. He’s a full-orbed person, not merely a natural force of some kind.

- His creative work takes place in stages. He begins by creating the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1)—or perhaps this is a summary statement that encompasses the description that follows. Then he brings material objects into being by simply speaking, with no source material mentioned. Specifically, he speaks to create light (Gen 1.3); a “firmament” (Gen 1.6-7 KJV), which separates upper waters from surface waters; the sun and the moon (Gen 1.16); and marine and avian life (Gen 1.20).

- He apparently creates some things out of existing material; for example, perhaps land animals come from the dirt (Gen 1.24; note the verb “bring forth” here), and man certainly is fashioned from clay (Gen 2.7), while the woman is fashioned from one of the man’s ribs (Gen 2.22). It appears that the waters already exist in Gen 1.6 (does this mean that Gen 1.1 is not a summary statement after all?) and that dirt exists in Gen 1.9, before it appears after a gathering of the waters.

The periods during which Elohim performs these actions are described as “days,” with “evenings” and “mornings.” This language would lead us to assume diurnal, quotidian days, though we can’t be sure that all 6 creation days were precisely the same length, given that the sun does not exist until day 4. (I note, however, that the text gives no hint of a significant difference in length between day 3 and day 4. It seems obvious that there is a source of light for the first 3 days that would provide a definitional function similar to the sun. Note that the Bible ends with a new creation in which there is no sun, just as was the case in the very beginning. In that half of the inclusio, John reports that “the glory of God” and “the Lamb” are the light [Rev 21.23], and “the Lord God gives them light” [Rev 22.5]).

What we’re left with from a natural reading of the narrative, then, is that a supernatural rational being created the material universe from nothing originally, over a period of 6 days of roughly 24 hours each. Nothing in the text itself leads to any other conclusion. If another narrative requires a very long period of time, then reading that back into this text is going to call for an extraordinary level of evidence.

Before we can begin to evaluate that evidence, however, we need to answer one more question: how long ago did these Creation “days” occur? We’ll consider the evidence for that in the next post.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 1

September 11, 2017 by Dan Olinger 6 Comments

**Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here**

Once you’ve decided that the Bible is a supernatural book, I suppose the next step is to learn and evaluate the arc of its story. That’s especially important these days because the story starts with divine creation, and today’s culture completely rejects that idea. The peer pressure in academia is completely opposed to the biblical creation story, and believing it is pretty much suicide for a well-regarded academic career.

In the 1940s several leaders of evangelical Christianity made a considered decision to moderate their stance toward the academic community and to seek “a place at the table.” By the mid-1950s one leading evangelical scholar, Bernard Ramm, had publicly embraced old-earth creationism in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture, and evangelical scholars quickly followed suit. Today it’s difficult to find anyone on the Bible or science faculties of the mainstream evangelical colleges and seminaries who takes the Genesis timeline at face value. Millard Erickson, a conservative Southern Baptist and the author of a standard systematic theology, views young-earth creationism as indefensible in the light of modern science; you get the idea he classes it with “lost cause” Southern sympathizers who are still saving their confederate money.

Even with the upswing in talk of “intelligent design” in recent years, academics are still overwhelmingly old-earth. The ID leadership such as Michael Behe and William Dembski hold to an old earth, as does the “progressive creationist” Hugh Ross and, most famously, Biologos founder Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Research Project.

For what it’s worth, while academia has embraced the geologic timescale, and while a great many conservative evangelical academics have as well (though they may quibble over the use of the term evolution), the American populace has not followed along. Evolutionists are generally dismayed to find that after decades of indoctrination through the public school system, according to Gallup, in 2017 twice as many Americans believe in direct divine creation as believe in atheistic evolution; and as recently as 1999, the ratio was more than 5:1.

But despite that, publicly embracing young-earth creationism is generally counter-productive to an academic career, and I find its ranks shrinking among my evangelical academic peers.

So what am I still doing in a rapidly emptying room?

I’ll observe, at the risk of sounding judgmental, that the primary reason for bailing on a natural reading of Genesis 1-11 seems to be peer pressure—or more precisely, the behemoth of “scientific consensus” that Darwinian evolution, or one of its descendants, has been demonstrated true in its basic propositions. (“The science is settled!”) After a while, you go along, or you feel like the guy on the street corner with the sandwich board announcing that The End Is Near. Nobody wants to be that guy.

I can’t judge motives. Ramm argued for his change of heart from the compelling scientific evidence—though I didn’t find his evidence compelling at all, and I finished his book thinking, “You bailed on Genesis for that?!” Perhaps some are just intimidated by the size of the crowd and the uniformity of the arguments. Perhaps others just don’t want to face the ostracism and go along for the sake of their salaries and their pension plans. And perhaps some of them work backwards from that to find the evolutionist arguments more compelling than they really are.

I can only speak for myself. But once I have determined that the Bible is a supernatural book, I’m going to take it as straightforwardly as I would any other literary work, fiction or non-fiction. I’m going to read history as history, and poetry as poetry, and visionary apocalypse as visionary apocalypse, and do my best to find out what the divine author of this remarkable book says.

And if something comes along that asks me to do a wholesale reinterpretation of what the book says, I’m going to need it to be seriously convincing, beyond the social penalty of Not Going Along With The Crowd.

So far, I just haven’t found the science, or the accommodating theology, compelling or even mildly believable. I’m not about to bail on The Book for a bunch of biased brains. Or a boondoggle.

So here I am, in the padded room our culture has graciously provided for young-earth creationist academics, watching the room get roomier by the academic year.

I’d like to take a series of posts to lay out my thought process, for what it’s worth. I’m not a scientist, but I talk to a lot of them, and I’ve skimmed a little cream off the brains of each. I’ll start explaining my reasoning in the next post. See you then.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10