Here I really do have a beef with Doug Wilson. And this time I'm not being jocular. What he says in this post is very foolish. Let me be clear: It's not his young-earth exegesis that's foolish (just incorrect). It's the atrocious interbreeding of a slippery slope with an ad hominem, along with his intolerance w/r/t adiaphora, that makes him come out sounding like a fundamentalist.
Here are some (mostly) reasonable comments from those tolerant of the old-earth position:
Is there any wiggle room for a non-literal 24 hour day since the sun and moon were not created until the 4th day? When did God set the earth in motion? I also see no problem with God creating each plant and animal in two's and allowing them to go forth and multiply in the same manner that humans did (according to their kind). Prior to sin and death entering the world, this would still take awhile. Secondly, I think the Genesis account is more concerned with informing us that Jehovah created the heavens and earth. That man was once in perfect fellowship with the Lord and now he is a fallen sinner in need of redemption. Trying to turn the Bible into a scientific textbook presents many interpretive problems for the inerrancy defender. By what standard do we maintain that the "four corners of the earth" is symbolic and yet Isaiah's "circle of the earth" presents us with Biblical scientific insight? Lets leave wooden literalism to the dispys. I agree that unbelief is the root of the problem but differances in interpretation are not necessarily all springing from this root. Or are all amillenialists who do not beleive in the literal 1000 years suffering from the sin of unbelief too? One can assert that the Earth is more than 6000 years old without damaging the orthodox soteriological position. (Chris Maluta)I think you have to admit that many evangelicals are not merely assuming an old earth by default but actually believe it for what seem to them (okay, us) good reasons. Maybe we're wrong and if so it might be because we're blinded by the spirit of the age but isn't it possible at least some of us aren't? It's true that the desire to avoid looking stupid militates against embracing a young earth. So what? There are desires pushing both ways, some noble and some not. And even if you perfectly understood the motives behind every opinion it wouldn't tell you anything about the age of the earth.
I would love to hear your arguments for a young earth. They'll go down easier if they're not mixed with accusations of bad faith. (Rob Steele)
Unfortunately not all defenders of the old-earth position are reasonable. Some are trying too fool around with Relativity in order to have God saying something true about how long it took to create the earth from the perspective of an inertial reference frame zooming about in space, even though it took much longer as measured in an earth-bound reference frame. Xon's response to this nonsense is pretty good. Yet I think he hasn't quite got everything right. He says,
I think the issue of "scientific correctness" misses the point, though. The fact that the Scriptures are true (even in a "literal" sense) doesn't mean that they are providing a "scientifically correct" way of describing things. We still to this day talk about a "sunset", rather than a more scientifically-correct "earthturn" (as Doug pointed out in a Credenda article/book a long time ago). And this is a perfectly accurate way to describe reality. Our realm of experience involves a sun that moves across our field of vision. The Bible is generally written in terms of appearances, not in terms of some "deeper" scientific truth of what is "really" going on. And the "appearances" are not mirages or falsehoods, mind you. They are completely accurate and appropriate. As true as anything else.Is my table a solid continuous object or not? Science says it's "really" an electron cloud, but that isn't how it looks and it's not how I interact with it. And people are communicating quite effectively and can gain a fine understanding of the world by thinking of tables as being something pretty close to what they appear to be. The "real" physico-chemical explanation of electron clouds is interesting for science class, though. But it doesn't trump the appearance to learn the science.
So this seems like a rabbit trail to me, although it has been interesting. God revealed to us that the world was made in six days, and that is a communication to us in terms of how we perceive things. Which, frankly, shoots the Hugh Ross old-earth view in the foot. God is telling us about a pattern that He is building into our world of experience, so if there is some both/and thing going on then the youth should still be on the side of our planet and the age should be from the "perspective" of the universe. But the view endorsed by Jon Beck and others in this thread has things the other way around.
Genesis clearly makes a claim about this world of our experience when it describes creation, not the universe taken in its totality from a perspective that no human will ever have. The Bible is not a science text; it is a covenant document in which the maker of the world reveals things to His people. Thus, the revelation is directed to our minds in terms of the world we actually live in experientially. Scripture tells us nothing of atoms or other microscopic particles, for instance. It also doesn't give us dates and times in terms of some "universal" perspective that is completely meaningless to us here on Earth. The point of revealing dates and times is to teach us something about this world in which we live. Not the abstract totality of everything.
And so when we turn around and take those dates and times and either a) deny them in any sense whatsoever, b) say that they don't matter as long as we just stick with the "big picture" that God made everything, or c) make them true from some universal perspective but not from our own living-life-where-God-put-us perspective (which is what the Hugh Ross-style "Old and young" view does), then we are simply not taking the text seriously on its own terms. There is no inconsistency here between the "traditionalist" reading of Joshua's account of the sun and Genesis's account of creation. In both cases, the text communicates to us in terms of our perception of the world. From that perspective, the world took six days to make (where a "day" is a length of time familiar to us, not some cosmologically-adjusted super-time), the entire world (at least since the creation of the light on Day One) has only existed for under 10,000 years, and the sun stood still in the sky one day while the Israelites fought a battle. What's the problem? All perfectly clear and adequate revelations of events from the perspective of our field of vision, which is the field of vision into which God is speaking when He reveals Himself to us (otherwise we it is hardly "revelation").
The problem is that science tells us that the world CANNOT be so young, and so we try to play a shell game to salvage respectability. But the thing about the modern academy and all its certainties is that it is dying. At this point, there is hardly anything that the philosophers (and they always lead, don't you know) would stand up for as absolutely undeniably true, and that includes any particular account of the world's origins. If anything, standing up and saying something different than the last 150 years of scientific orthodoxy is kinda cute, really, like when visitors come from a faraway country and don't know how traffic lights work. It's all perfectly innocent, in this patronizing "postmodern" world we live in. So trying to find a "workaround" for Genesis so that the academy will take you seriously is a serious miscalculation of the way the winds are blowing, in my opinion. Nobody takes anything seriously anymore in the academy, so it just doesn't matter.
First point (of agreement, I think): the division "literal" versus "metaphorical" is far too facile and blunt to do what almost everyone wants it to do in discussions of this sort. "Literal" just means someone isn't using a figure of speech. Thus a novel is filled with literal discourse. That doesn't mean that the novelist is lying. It's not presented as a true story. Similarly when Jesus uses literal discourse in a parable we don't have to say he's telling a true story. What he's saying is true. But not in the way a "true story" is true. [this isn't quite right. What he said is just as true, and true in the same sense of "true", as a true "true story"; but he didn't mean what you think he meant if you think he was claiming that it was a "true story".] Interpreting according to the author's intent (insofar as that is discoverable from the text) means reading something intended as parable as a parable, not history. Jesus isn't claiming that those things actually happened at some time in the past, so we aren't giving him the lie when we say they didn't actually happen at some time in the past.
Second point of agreement: the Bible is not aiming at scientific correctness. Nowhere in Scripture does God intend to assert "such and such is scientifically correct." So we aren't (yet) giving God the lie when we say that something in the Bible isn't scientifically correct.
Third point of agreement: it's not good exegesis to treat Genesis 1 as saying just that God made everything. It's saying lots more than that. The question is what all is included in that "lots".
And here we have a problem. Xon wants to read Genesis 1 as saying something about the past (which it does) and, more than that, making a claim about the "world of our experience". It describes the past, Xon says, "in terms of our perception of the world. From that perspective, the world took six days to make (where a "day" is a length of time familiar to us, not some cosmologically-adjusted super-time), the entire world (at least since the creation of the light on Day One) has only existed for under 10,000 years, ..." The problem with this is twofold.
First: certain (well-established) scientific claims have implications for the world as we perceive it, implications that seem to contradict a young-earth reading of Genesis 1. Scientific correctness and ordinary experience are not two entirely disjoint universes of discourse. Scientific claims must, at some point, connect with what can be observed in a laboratory, and in ordinary life (the universe doesn't operate differently inside and outside laboratories). We don't live in two different timelines, a scientific timeline, measured by clocks, and a timeline of "our perception of the world." There is one timeline, which can both be measured by clocks and can be experienced without clocks. An hour long stretch of time can seem like more or less than an hour. But there isn't that much variation. If a day (as we experience it) means a stretch of time that seems to be about as long as the time that it (presently) takes to get from one sunrise to the next, then old-earth cosmology implies that the earth is very much older than 10,000 years.
Now, for a postmodernist, this is no problem. Some postmodernists have gone so far as to say we do live in a multiplicity of worlds, and a cacophony of mutually inconsistent narratives is simply to be rejoiced in. But 1) I think Xon is wrong to say that postmodernism is triumphing in the academy. On the contrary, while some of the postmodern criticisms of modernity have ceased to be shocking and are now generally accepted, postmodernism as a whole has already lost a lot of steam. In some disciplines, it never did have much influence. In others it's now regarded as passe (yup!). Perhaps it's still holding on here and there. But a great many scientifically minded philosophers still wear the title "naive" as a badge of honor; it's their way of scoffing at idealists, postmodernists, and all other soi-disant sophisticates. And plenty of ordinary working scientists have a similar attitude. (The scientists who write popular quasi-philosophical books aren't a representative sample.) And 2) Even if Xon's right about academia, it's irrelevant. Because we old-earthers (contra DW's ad hominem) aren't interested in pleasing academia. We're interested in getting to the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter is: post-modernism is wrong. We live in one world. Scientific claims and "ordinary experience" claims are capable of contradicting each other. They don't do so as often as some wooden modernists think (the table really is solid, and the sun really did rise this morning), but they do sometimes.
Second problem: It's not clear what it means to say that Genesis 1 ("clearly"!) makes a claim about the "world of our experience when it describes creation." In fact this is a very queer claim. None of us were there at creation (at least not till day 6). What then could it mean to say it describes creation as we experience it? That we would experience it as six days if we were transported back there in a time-machine? That hardly fits with Xon's (laudably) contextually sensitive approach to the Bible.
I have no problem talking about the earth as being made in six days, just as we talk about sunrises rather than earthturns, nor with the claim that such talk is true (and not a metaphor). Similarly the earth is fixed; it shall never be moved. If you think this boulder is hard to move, imagine trying to move Mt. Everest! What's more immovable than Mt. Everest? How about the whole earth! Most of us modern people, when we get to the level of the whole earth, switch out of our common-perception picture-thinking and into quasi-scientific picture-thinking (a ball zooming through space). But it doesn't take all that much cultural sensitivity to get what the Hebrew poet was driving at. But to say that the earth is less than 10,000 years old is something else entirely. Scripture doesn't say that. That's an implication drawn on the basis of treating Genesis 1 as historical and chronological. And if you do that, then you are going to have scientists contradicting you.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to read Genesis 1 as making a common-sense claim (you know how long six days is, right? Well that's how long it took) that contradicts currently accepted scientific cosmology. Not unreasonable, just wrong. But it's a difficult question, on several levels. Simply having (in principle) a contextually sensitive attitude toward the Bible isn't enough to answer the question. We have to get our hands dirty and actually take a look at the specifics of the literary and cultural context of Genesis. I wrote something on that about a year ago, and I suppose I'll dust it off (or not) and make it my next post, assuming I can find it.
Posted by mccartney at July 13, 2008 8:18 PM | TrackBack