I've been having some great conversations with friends lately about Genesis 1, creation verses evolution and young earth/old earth. I'm confused about one aspect of the debate and wondering if anyone can help clear it up:
My understanding of Genesis 1 is that it makes one large argument and uses a poetic rhythm to make it. The large argument is "One God created the heavens, the earth and everything in it including people." The author of Genesis goes on to clearly claim that humans are created in the image of God.
Genesis is a stunning book and I'm always impacted by reading it.
The poetic rhythm is the cycle of days and God's pleasure. The author uses the phrase "there was evening and there was morning" and the wonderful understatement "and God saw that it was good."
So this brings us to the argument of evolution verses creation and the "days" being either literal 24 hour days or metaphorical days.
But added to this debate is the age of the earth. do we live on a "young earth" of approximately 6000 years or an "old earth" of up to billions of years.
What confuses me is how we've co opted this argument with Genesis 1. I don't see Genesis 1 giving any attention to the age of the earth.
Isn't the young earth argument based on geneologies and people taking geneologies through the Old Testament, alongside a calculator and inferring that the earth is young VERSES geologists and archeologists using carbon dating, earth samples etc to argue for an old earth?
am I missing something here?
Hey, by this point you may well be thinking "who cares" and fair enough. But while I am somewhat of a hack Bible scholar, I like to think I'm a careful one and I'd like to hear from people on both sides of the fence on where they base their argument.
happy Thursday
Thursday, 2 October 2008
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2 comments:
I don't presume to be an expert on these matters but I think you've summarised correctly. Of course the next debate is to what extent Christians can "adopt" pieces of the evolutionary theory without "selling out". I'm reading a Christian apologist who buys the whole evolutionary process but argues that God is behind it all. Maybe. Personally I can't quite go that far but I certainly don't argue adamantly in favour of a literal 6 days. The possible convolutions of explanations is infinite so I'm happy to attribute the brilliance of the phenomenon of creation to God and bail out of the fine details.
You should know upfront that I have very little knowledge in either the scientific or Bible portions of this question, but I thought I'd share my thoughts anyway ...
Your assessment of the Young vs. Old is the same as mine so I’m no help there. However I’ve always thought it odd that there are only two predominant views. I mean, why do most big questions have to be boxed into only one of two possibilities? It seems like God’s creativity might be much more far reaching than that.
Regarding an issue with such a broad scope as this, my opinion is that both our science (or scientific theory as the case may be) and the Biblical information that we have is far too myopic.
So, I offer my own third possibility (even though I’m sure people much smarter than I am can blow many holes in my theory): What if the pace of existence is not constant but rather is varying, maybe cyclical. What if there are and were times when God moved and changed existence at a very rapid pace (like the Flood?), perhaps even on a molecular level and times when the pace of change or existence is much slower? If this were the case then our concept of taking one metric (carbon dating or geologies or whatever) and applying them linearly throughout all history just wouldn’t make sense and would also give us different, erroneous and inconsistent results.
I think much of the feelings and thoughts behind my idea is that we seem to be able to perceive (and especially record and test) such small portion of existence compared to God that I have a very low level of confidence that we are really seeing anything more than the leaf on the proverbial tree let alone the tree itself or the forest beyond.
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