A New Look at Genesis by Scientists

[MormonVideoGame]

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A recent Protestant scholar, James R. Mook, summarizes this way:

A natural reading of the Church fathers shows that though they held diverse views on the days of creation, and correctly gave priority to the theological meaning of the creation, they definitely asserted that the earth was created suddenly and in less than 6,000 years before their time. They left no room for the ‘old earth’ views promoted by Ross and other moderns.

Roman Catholic scholar, Victor P. Warkulwiz, writes,

None of the Fathers of the Church believed in an ancient universe

Orthodox scholar, Seraphim Rose (1932–1982), who openly disdains conservative Protestant interpretation of Scripture, nevertheless writes

Some rather naive “theologians” try to say that the Six Days of Creation can be indefinitely long periods, that they can correspond to the different geological strata. This, of course, is nonsense because the geological strata do not have six easily identifiable layers, or five or four or anything of the sort. There are many, many layers, and they do not correspond at all to the Six Days of Creation. So that is a very weak accommodation. As a matter of fact—even though it looks as though it might be terribly fundamentalistic to say it—the Holy Fathers do say that those Days were twenty-four hours long. St. Ephraim the Syrian even divides them into two periods, twelve hours each. St. Basil the Great says that, in the book of Genesis, the First Day is called not the “first day” but “one day” because that is the one day by which God measured out the entire rest of the creation; that is, this First Day, which he says was twenty-four hours long, is exactly the same day which is repeated in the rest of creation. If you think about it, there is nothing particularly difficult in that idea, since the creation of God is something totally outside our present knowledge. The accommodation of days to epochs does not make any sense; you cannot fit them together. Therefore, why do you need to have a day that is a thousand or a million years long? The Holy Fathers say again with one voice that the creative acts of God are instantaneous. St. Basil the Great, St. Ambrose the Great, St. Ephraim and many others say that, when God creates, He says the word and it is, faster than thought. There are many Patristic quotations about this, but we will not go into them here. None of the Holy Fathers say that the creation was slow

https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/why-i-believe-in-24-hour-days/

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If God had wanted to say that creation took place in the past, while giving no real indication of how long the process took, there were ways He could have done it:

yôm combined with ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, would have signified ‘and it was a day of light and darkness’. This could be ambiguous because of the symbolic use of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ elsewhere in the Old Testament. However, yôm with ‘evening and morning’, especially with a number preceding it, can never be ambiguous.

eth (‘time’) combined with ‘day’ and ‘night’ as in Jeremiah 33:20 and Zechariah 14:7 could have been ambiguous. Likewise eth combined with ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ (a theoretical construction). If any of these forms had been used, the length of the ‘days’ of creation would have been widely open for debate. However, God chose not to use any of these.

http://creation.com/how-long-were-the-days-of-genesis-1

 

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[Marmonboy]

This is of course assuming that God personally wrote the Book Of Genesis in His own hand, and that nobody made any editorial changes throughout all later editions and translations, which I personally doubt. 

[MormonVideoGame]

7 minutes ago, Marmonboy said:

This is of course assuming that God personally wrote the Book Of Genesis in His own hand, and that nobody made any editorial changes throughout all later editions and translations, which I personally doubt. 

but what did the ancient Hebrews believe? Did they believe that Gen 1 was not literal? 

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[3DOP]

38 minutes ago, Marmonboy said:

This is of course assuming that God personally wrote the Book Of Genesis in His own hand, and that nobody made any editorial changes throughout all later editions and translations, which I personally doubt. 

For Catholics, the Word of God (Scripture) is like the Word of God (Christ in the flesh). There are divine and human attributes to both "Words of God".

Catholics don't think God has hands anyway, and we think He used the hands of men while inspiring them to write His Word. The Catholic Church accepts that the writings received in Apostolic times however they may have changed over the centuries are Scriptures.

If one believes that the history of the Catholic Church is a miraculous sign of its claim as the Mystical Body of Christ, who is the Head of the Body, His Church, it follows that we would trust the Church's judgment regarding what are the Scriptures in which we believe. It little matters how the writings accepted were anciently or more recently transmitted and/or preserved.

 

[ERayR]

4 hours ago, Johnnie Cake said:

Fox News???  Now that's fair and balanced...no bias or agenda there...

Thanks for your well thought out and unbiased reponse.

[clarkgoble]

4 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

but what did the ancient Hebrews believe? Did they believe that Gen 1 was not literal? 

Typically Gen 1-2 are considered later texts not achieving their form until around the time of the exile. The earliest creation account is typically seen as Psalm 104. Some prefer to see Psalm 104 as a commentary on Genesis 1 though. Often Psalm 74, 77, and 89 are all tied to creation and this battling with water. Job 9:13 is likely from that tradition as well. The idea is that in the earliest creation accounts God is battling the waters of chaos and creating through organization. This battle is cosmological and repeated at various ways throughout creation.

For a fantastic book on this which ends up sounding very Mormon I'd suggest reading Levenson's Creation and the Persistence of Evil. Fantastic book I recommend a lot.

As I've argued elsewhere I really don't think 'literal' is the right word to use in all this. It's misleading as it misses what's going on in interpretation. Rather I think the question is much more what the context is.

It's interesting that in the JST there's echoes of this as well. Say Moses 1:25 "Blessed art thou, Moses, for I, the Almighty, have chosen thee, and thou shalt be made stronger than many waters; for they shall obey thy command as if thou wert God." Why be made stronger than waters? Well in the earliest accounts that's significant. Likewise the revisions to Genesis 1, especially the way the JST treats the transition to the second creation account in Genesis 2 are pretty significant changes.

The way Joseph read Genesis 1:1 in the King Follet Discourse is also very much tied to this ancient tradition and differs in a few subtle but important ways from the received text. "Now, the word create came from the word baurau, which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize–the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos–chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory" This chaos is the waters of creation in the earliest accounts. Likewise he said "I want to analyze the word Berosheit. Rosh, the head; Sheit, a grammatical termination. The Baith was not originally put there when the inspired man wrote it, but it has been since added by an old Jew. Baurau signifies to bring forth; Eloheim is from the word Eloi, God, in the singular number; and by adding the word heim, it renders it Gods. It read first, “In the beginning the head of the Gods brought forth the Gods,” or, as others have translated it, “The head of the Gods called the Gods together.” . . . The head God organized the heaven and the earth. I defy all the world to refute me. In the beginning the heads of the Gods organized the heavens and the earth."

Edited March 11, 2017 by clarkgoble

[Robert F. Smith]

8 hours ago, snowflake said:

By rejecting the young earth position, would it be safe to say you also reject

1. No death before the fall of Adam and Eve

2. A global flood.

3. The genealogies in Genesis, Matthew and Luke.

4. The old ages men lived pre-flood?

I see that you are now changing the goal posts, which is what some people do when they have no answers for the issues under discussion.

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, Alan said:

Whereas you do of course.

I know your comment wasn't directed at me, but just to let you know, I am a scientist.

Glad to hear that you are a scientist of some sort.  Is your specialty geology?  If so, what is your geological evaluation of the Young Earth theory?

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

but you said "bible scholars" CFR that most Hebrew scholars agree.  

You'd have to be familiar with the field in order to make that statement.  Since you know nothing of biblical scholarship, it would be hard for me to make up for your lack of sophistication.  However, I stand ready to help you get started in your exploration of that field, if you are interested.  Since I have spent my entire adult life in that field, I do know what the consensus is.

[MormonVideoGame]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You'd have to be familiar with the field in order to make that statement.  Since you know nothing of biblical scholarship, it would be hard for me to make up for your lack of sophistication.  However, I stand ready to help you get started in your exploration of that field, if you are interested.  Since I have spent my entire adult life in that field, I do know what the consensus is.

You are right, I know nothing about biblical scholarship,  but see above.  

Did the ancient jews and church fathers believe in a old world interpretation? or that day was an unknown period of time? 

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[3DOP]

1 hour ago, MormonVideoGame said:

You are right, I know nothing about biblical scholarship,  but see above.  

Did the ancient jews and church fathers believe in a old world interpretation? 

VideoGame, you are the one who cited a reference that the church fathers held to a younger earth. It would seem peculiar if such a view followed a Jewish dispensation that argued for an earth millions and billions of years old.

---------------------------------

Part of my comfort level with a short period for man springs aside from faith and revelation and without religion. It comes from a regard for the human spirit. We make history. We remember our parents in a way that the lower animals don't. We make monuments with a desire to be remembered and not forgotten. There is no history going back millions or even many thousands of years. So-called humans who don't even communicate their past are little better than more intelligent animals like dolphins or elephants who also seem unable to keep up a genealogy. Any animal that might have resembled us, who was pre-historical, who left us no art, no music, and nothing to laugh about, and who failed to teach his children to remember him, seems to me be sub-human, and not made in the image of God. These considerations do not discourage me from the historicity of Genesis, and the idea that my first parents appeared only around 6,000 years ago. No science points to anything like us much farther back than that.

Edited March 11, 2017 by 3DOP

[thesometimesaint]

SEE http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/40000-year-old-cave-paintings-include-oldest-hand-stencil-known-to-science-9783840.html

[MormonVideoGame]

10 hours ago, 3DOP said:

VideoGame, you are the one who cited a reference that the church fathers held to a younger earth.

Yes, but one reference doesn't prove much, and it is mostly appeal to authority. 

10 hours ago, 3DOP said:

 It would seem peculiar if such a view followed a Jewish dispensation that argued for an earth millions and billions of years old.

It is very important to know what the ancient jews and church fathers believe about "day" in Gen 1. Many theologians say "day" in Gen 1 means a period of time, but their opinion irrelevant because it is very easy to get creative and find solutions. What matters more is what the ancient jews and church fathers believed about their sacred texts.  

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[thesometimesaint]

Our understanding of the earth is so very much different than the ancients thought it is a serious misunderstanding to claim an actual 6 "day" creation.

[MormonVideoGame]

18 minutes ago, thesometimesaint said:

Our understanding of the earth is so very much different than the ancients thought it is a serious misunderstanding to claim an actual 6 "day" creation.

So is Gen 1 relevant? 

Quote

If God had wanted to say that creation took place in the past, while giving no real indication of how long the process took, there were ways He could have done it:

yôm combined with ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, would have signified ‘and it was a day of light and darkness’. This could be ambiguous because of the symbolic use of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ elsewhere in the Old Testament. However, yôm with ‘evening and morning’, especially with a number preceding it, can never be ambiguous.

eth (‘time’) combined with ‘day’ and ‘night’ as in Jeremiah 33:20 and Zechariah 14:7 could have been ambiguous. Likewise eth combined with ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ (a theoretical construction). If any of these forms had been used, the length of the ‘days’ of creation would have been widely open for debate. However, God chose not to use any of these.

http://creation.com/how-long-were-the-days-of-genesis-

 

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[Robert F. Smith]

14 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

You are right, I know nothing about biblical scholarship,  but see above.  

Did the ancient jews and church fathers believe in a old world interpretation? or that day was an unknown period of time? 

Your category mistake is to read the biblical text as a history or science text, which it was not, and never intended to be.

The Jewish scribes and rabbis, along with the ante-Nicene Fathers of early Christianity, passed along the received text, translating it into a variety of languages, and commenting on it, just the way scholars do today.  The difference is that our modern scholarly sense of perspective is much broader, our understanding of the languages much better and more inclusive.  Archeological recovery of many similar texts in even earlier languages than Hebrew have helped us see that there is nothing really new in the Bible, and that other cultures strongly influenced the nature of the biblical text.  One arresting example is the use of the Babylonian Creation story called Enuma elish, which was celebrated as liturgy each New Years Day in Babylon and in Asshur (in a temple in each of those capital cities).  The verbiage in that account is very similar to that in the Bible, the order of creation of each item the same, and the creation in each case from pre-existing material.  In addition, it is clear from the variant accounts which we now possess that a good deal of redacting and editing of the biblical material took place anciently, including composition of the Flood Story (which has many parallels in Mesopotamian literature).

You might find all that (and more) easier to understand by reading David Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament: Part One, Genesis-Deuteronomy (SLC: Kofford, 2014).  He summarizes the modern consensus.

[MormonVideoGame]

32 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Your category mistake is to read the biblical text as a history or science text, which it was not, and never intended to be.

CFR. How do you know? 

32 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

 Archeological recovery of many similar texts in even earlier languages than Hebrew have helped us see that there is nothing really new in the Bible, and that other cultures strongly influenced the nature of the biblical text.  One arresting example is the use of the Babylonian Creation story called Enuma elish, which was celebrated as liturgy each New Years Day in Babylon and in Asshur (in a temple in each of those capital cities).  The verbiage in that account is very similar to that in the Bible, the order of creation of each item the same, and the creation in each case from pre-existing material.  In addition, it is clear from the variant accounts which we now possess that a good deal of redacting and editing of the biblical material took place anciently, including composition of the Flood Story (which has many parallels in Mesopotamian literature).

Does the Babylonian Creation story clarify that "day" means a period of time? or that it is not history? or wasn't meant to be history? some evidence? 

32 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

The Jewish scribes and rabbis, along with the ante-Nicene Fathers of early Christianity, passed along the received text,

or what about the Death Sea Scrolls. Evidence in the death sea scrolls that Gen wasn't meant to history?  

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the creation in each case from pre-existing material.

Yes, our church teaches the same thing, but many Mormons believe animals and humanity are only 6,000 years old.

Quote

it is clear from the variant accounts which we now possess that a good deal of redacting and editing of the biblical material took place anciently, including composition of the Flood Story (which has many parallels in Mesopotamian literature).

Mesopotamian flood story a local flood? 

Quote

One arresting example is the use of the Babylonian Creation story called Enuma elish, which was celebrated as liturgy each New Years Day in Babylon and in Asshur (in a temple in each of those capital cities).

Yes, and we teach Gen 1 in Sunday School, that doesn't mean most Mormons don't believe it is history. 

Edited March 11, 2017 by MormonVideoGame

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

CFR. How do you know? 

Does the Babylonian Creation story clarify that "day" means a period of time? or that it is not history? or wasn't meant to be history? some evidence? 

or what about the Death Sea Scrolls. Evidence in the death sea scrolls that Gen wasn't meant to history?  

Yes, our church teaches the same thing, but many Mormons believe animals and humanity are only 6,000 years old.

Mesopotamian flood story a local flood? 

Yes, and we teach Gen 1 in Sunday School, that doesn't mean most Mormons don't believe it is history. 

You desperately need to read some introductory texts, such as I have cited for you.  You are utterly confused about the nature of biblical texts, and you come up with such elementary misunderstandings that it is clear that you really do not want to understand.  Sincerity is a requirement, not an option.  Nothing I can say will substitute for that sine qua non.

[The Nehor]

11 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

Yes, but one reference doesn't prove much, and it is mostly appeal to authority. 

It is very important to know what the ancient jews and church fathers believe about "day" in Gen 1. Many theologians say "day" in Gen 1 means a period of time, but their opinion irrelevant because it is very easy to get creative and find solutions. What matters more is what the ancient jews and church fathers believed about their sacred texts.  

Why? Unless they were the authors or knew specifically what the author meant they are reading (or interpreting) the text just like anyone else. Their understanding of linguistic meaning and culture might be useful as they are closer to the author but would not be definitive.

[clarkgoble]

Just to be pedantic but if you say ancient Jews you're covering a period from 2000 BC - 400 AD. Pretty wide spread of views in there with relatively little known of what Jews were like prior to around 700 BC. Lots of signs that Genesis 1 was affected by Babylonian captivity. As I mentioned if you want to turn to an account turn to Ps 104. What the history of the text is we can't say. I tend to think it's pre-exilic with a lot of exilic coloring. But what did people say prior to the Babylonian captivity think about days as symbols? Hard to say. Most of the interesting bits on time and symbols come after or during the exile. That's not to say it's not earlier but working out what is what is much trickier. I'll confess it's not something I've really researched but I bet it turns out that things are tied to pre-exilic festivals. We know that the number seven is pretty old and that making an oath is tied to the number seven. (In semitic languages 'to swear' means 'be bound by the holy seven') As I recall there's a view that there was a conflict between seven tied to sabbath and then more lunar based systems. The lunar ones seem older but with Genesis we have the sanctification of a week apparently influenced by Babylonian concepts. That doesn't necessarily mean it developed in the exile though despite it's place in Ezekiel (20:20). I believe the argument is that if the days came from Babylon then why would it be a symbol for Ezekiel and deutero-Isaiah of God separating Israel from the world? That suggests pre-Babylonian. 

But as interesting as those days are, and my strong suspicion Genesis 1 has a ritualistic context (as it does in our church), it's hard to say much.

[thesometimesaint]

22 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

So is Gen 1 relevant? 

 

Gen 1 is relevant only in the sense that it is a religious belief.

[MormonVideoGame]

On 3/11/2017 at 1:19 PM, Robert F. Smith said:

Your category mistake is to read the biblical text as a history or science text, which it was not, and never intended to be.

Here in the USA we celebrate Christmas, doesn't that mean that mark and luke were not history? Can someone can point to an ancient creation story that wasn't intended to be history?

[MormonVideoGame]

17 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Why? Unless they were the authors or knew specifically what the author meant they are reading (or interpreting) the text just like anyone else. Their understanding of linguistic meaning and culture might be useful as they are closer to the author but would not be definitive.

Can you point to an ancient creation story (Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese) that wasn't intended to be history? 

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, MormonVideoGame said:

Can you point to an ancient creation story (Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese) that wasn't intended to be history? 

Sure, all of them. Prove me wrong by showing a record by the author claiming they were meant to be taken historically. Can you?

[MormonVideoGame]

18 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Sure, all of them. Prove me wrong by showing a record by the author claiming they were meant to be taken historically. Can you?

No, it was more like a game of telephone and oral tradition. I wrote, "Here in the USA we celebrate Christmas, doesn't that mean that mark and luke were not history?"  So why take the New Testament literally, but not Genesis?

Or Exodus, why believe the story of the exodus as history, but not Genesis?

No one knows what the in the author's mind, perhaps revelation? The real question is, what is the evidence that creation myths were not intended as history?

 

Edited March 13, 2017 by MormonVideoGame