Am I really the only person here that thinks that two adults discussing whether a pixie in the sky did or did not exist/make the world is depressingly risible?

People wonder why Trump got elected, and why people still believe his lies. It appears that 45% or more of US adults believe in the account of Creation as presented in the bible, and if you believe that, believing Trump when he says he had a bagel for breakfast when there is a picture of him having toast is hardly a stretch.

Oh no, look who's back.

Aaron, this could have saved you a lot of typing:

I am linking an article from the creation.com website.

https://creation.com/should-genesis-be-taken-literally

The first part of the article details the various genres of literature found in Scripture (e.g. poetry, prophecy, historical narrative, wisdom literature, etc.) and concludes that Genesis is primarily historical narrative.

The next major section is called "Internal Evidence of the Book of Genesis." (i.e. internal evidence that Genesis should be taken literally)

1. "There is the internal evidence of the book of Genesis itself. As already mentioned, chapters 12-50 have always been regarded by the Jewish people as being the record of their own true history, and the style of writing contained in chapters 1-11 is not strikingly different from that in chapters 12-50.

"2. Hebrew scholars of standing have always regarded this to be the case.... [there follows a long quote from a Hebrew scholar]...

"3. One of the main themes of Genesis is the Sovereignty of God. This is seen in God's actions in respect of four outstanding events in Genesis 1-11 (Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Babel dispersion), and His relationship to four outstanding people in Genesis 12-50 (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph). There is thus a unifying theme to the whole of the book of Genesis, which falls to the ground if any part is mythical and not true history, on the other hand, each portion reinforces the historical authenticity of the other."

[to be continued....]

continuing....

EVIDENCE FROM THE REST OF THE BIBLE

"4. The principal people mentioned in Genesis chapters 1-11 are referred to as real - historical, not mythical - people in the rest of the Bible, often many times. For example, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah are referred to in 15 other books of the Bible.

"5. The Lord Jesus Christ referred to the Creation of Adam and Eve as a real historical event, by quoting Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 in His teaching about divorce (Matthew 19:3-6; Mark 10:2-9), and by referring to Noah as a real historical person and the Flood as a real historical event, in His teaching about the "coming of the Son of man." (Matthew 24:37-39; Luke 17:26-27).

"6. Unless the first 11 chapters of Genesis are authentic historical events, the rest of the Bible is incomplete and incomprehensible as to its full meaning. The theme of the Bible is Redemption, and may be outlined thus:

i. God's redeeming purpose is revealed in Genesis 1-11,
ii. God's redeeming purpose progresses from Genesis 12 to Jude 25, and
iii. God's redeeming purpose is consummated in Revelation 1-22.

But why does mankind need to be redeemed? What is it that he needs to be redeemed from? The answer is given in Genesis 1-11, namely, from the ruin brought about by sin. Unless we know that the entrance of sin to the human race was a true historical fact, God's purpose in providing a substitutionary atonement is a mystery. Conversely, the historical truth of Genesis 1-11 shows that all mankind has come under the righteous anger of God and needs salvation from the penalty, power and presence of sin."

[to be continued....]

You're the only person that I know of who thinks that either Aaron or I believe in "a pixie in the sky." Also, the debate is not about "who made the world." You might want to know what the topic of a thread is before responding to it in the future.

Thank you for sharing.

I'm going to have to take this in little chunks due to limitations on my time right now.

I find the argument against poetry to be rather weak. Here is how that section begins:

I take no issue with this. But I do take issue with the analysis:

So in fact, it undermines its own presentation. There is a poetic form that's described that the passage contains, but then negates the analysis on the basis of the preferred conclusion.

It's worth considering that if this were a historical narrative, it would be particularly odd to use the exact same phrasing to close each day. Writers of prose would use at least some variation in the language choice. The fact that there is no variation is a stronger argument for the classification of language as the use of repetition for poetic purposes than it is an argument for the use of language as statements of fact.

As a matter of prose, what is the value of declaring the end of each day? Doesn't the start of the next day already imply that the previous day ended? So there's not exactly a "logic" to having to repeat that each day ends and to use the identical phrasing each time.

Notice that this declaration itself reveals the question-begging. How was it concluded that it concluded that it's a statement of fact? Presumably, it was determined that the passage was not poetry. And on what basis is it decided that it's not poetry? It rejects the poetic repetition because it's assumed to be statements of fact.

Charles Hummel (Christian Evangelical Theologian) argues for the existence of poetic form in the passage of Genesis in his article that was published in a theological journal. It also (I believe rightfully) acknowledges that it's not quite as simple as just prose vs. poetry. I encourage a full reading of the article on its own as a demonstration of the level of thoughtfulness required to have a sufficient conversation on the topic.

https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1986/PSCF9-86Hummel.html

In general, I don't find the points made in the creation.com article to be remotely persuasive. In the same way that I could agree with statements of the sermon on their theological basis without needing to accept any particular historical claim, I expect my viewpoint on the linked article will be built around the same types of statements.

Before going on, I would point out that there are some arguments in the middle that are rather weak. In brief:

No. Meticulous details like this are not the stuff of authentic eye-witness testimony. And they don't have a ring of truth on that basis.

It's important to note the question that is being addressed in the next set of responses:

I disagree with the analysis in that the writing of Chapter 1 does seem quite different from the rest of Genesis. I would also argue that there is a shift from relatively brief episodes to an extended narrative that follows a single person. There may not be a "stylistic" shift, but there's definitely a narrative shift. There may not be "striking" differences, but there are definitely differences.

Linguistically, the word used for "day" definitely carries the primary meaning of a 24-hour day. The quote is right that this isn't in dispute. But does that mean that the writing was "written as a record of authentic historical facts"?

If you read a novel, and they talk about "days" we would also interpret the word to mean a 24-hour day. But does that in any way suggest that the novel was "written as a record of authentic historical facts"? Not at all. So this doesn't support the underlying question.

I don't know how God's sovereignty "falls to the ground" if some part carries primarily symbolic meaning instead of literal meaning. It's a lot like the argument, "If I can't trust this one thing, then I can't trust anything." It's a very poor generalization and a bad theological perspective to require oneself to be slavish in their understanding in order to keep the whole thing together.

As usual, thanks for your thoughtful response, Aaron. I'll try to respond to this by the middle of next week (hopefully earlier).

This is an odd one. Within any piece of literature, most characters refer to each other as if they were real. Moriarty was real to Sherlock Holmes. I'm not sure that the real-ness of those references implies real-ness of anything.

Culturally relevant references need not literally exist. I can talk about events that happen in episodes of the Simpsons as real things (like the time Homer went into outer space) without implying that Homer Simpson is a real person.

Again, I can accept the theological merits of the statements without needing to accept them as historical facts. I can accept the notion that humanity needs redemption without requiring a literal Adam. All I need is the theological truth that sin exists and that this theological truth is carried through the story of Adam and Eve.

So there still doesn't seem to be any necessity that everything contained in Genesis is to be understood as historical fact.

Sorry, I've been very busy and a bit "under the weather" lately. (I think my immune system decided to retire without telling me )

I'll post my response when I can. Thanks for your patience.

Lord willing, and the creek don't rise, I will respond this weekend. Thanks again for your patience.

"Old doctors never die, they just lose their patients."

Take your time. I'm going to be out of the country for a while without reliable internet access. So whether you respond this weekend or two weeks from now, I'm not going to be respond to it.

Thanks for the heads-up. Have a good trip!

From the peanut gallery: Requiring that something be necessarily true seems to be an excessively high bar due to the nature of this particular thread.

I'm not really paying that close of attention but I suspect Aaron's argument is something like this: Given that there is a tremendous amount of evidence against the proposition that Genesis is historical, it would seem to behoove Christians to accept the idea that its truths are not historical in the absence of some compelling reason to believe that it must necessarily be interpreted as historical (or else be rejected entirely). This is more or less the argument Augustine makes even in the 5th century, which Aaron referred to previously.

The premise that there's overwhelming evidence against the historical reliability of Genesis is important to the reasoning, it's not just demanding a particularly strict kind of demonstration. If someone thinks there's good reasons to believe Genesis is historically accurate than they definitely won't reason the same way.

I find the bolded to be problematic for two reasons. 1) It would behoove them more to ignore the evidence. 2) Belief based on what behooves one isn't exactly the stuff of intellectual honesty.

I find the rest problematic because it either requires that ancient people knew that creation stories are mythical/allegorical (read: fictional) in nature in the past or that God just had a case of the ****-arounds when dealing with ancient peoples.

"Haha!" the Lord proclaimeth as the early adopters of Judaism enter through the Gates of Heaven. "You really believed that rainbows are a sign from me to remind you of our Covenant? I really tricked you rubes!!! Hahahahaha! Let me show you this clever prism I have made out of glass! <in a cloud of smoke a prism appears> It will totally blow your minds!"

That is always a problem. They'll likely be talking past each other, each confident that he is correct, until several millennia after the Second Coming.

I wish I had more time to engage this, but it will have to wait a couple weeks. The irony of your analysis is that it's using a shallowness of perspective to criticize a shallowness of perspective (or at least, what you perceive as a shallowness of perspective).

On what basis do you make claim 1? Most likely, you've already applied an evaluative framework to reach your conclusion that is not properly capable of understanding the discussion at hand. The last sentence of your post demonstrates this perfectly:

You're not *actually* paying attention to the framework provided or the discussion itself, and you have used your presuppositions to attempt to knock down an irrelevant statement. At a certain level, it has behooved you to ignore the evidence of the written record of discussion because it runs contrary to your ideas. You are now free to continue on in your ignorance of the actual discussion rather than engaging with reality, and raise poor/weak criticisms of it.

On what basis do you make claim 2? What is the goal of belief? In what way is that goal of choosing "behooving" beliefs necessarily intellectually dishonest? Are you assuming that the only beliefs that "behoove" are those that are merely intellectually confirming false beliefs? Might it also "behoove" someone to reinforce true beliefs with further knowledge and information? Or might it "behoove" someone to re-evaluate their beliefs based on new information? It seems quite clear to me that believing based on "behooving" can be perfectly intellectually honest.

Both objections you raise seem to lack merit. The second one seems particularly shallow.

You can find lots of things problematic. I find false dichotomies to be problematic for those who make them.

My short response to this is the following:

The literalist position has a high bar to clear because it is erecting a high standard that needs to be justified. All I need to demonstrate is that it is not necessary to interpret the Bible literally. In particular, I only need to argue that it is not necessary to read the book of Genesis as a being composed entirely of literal facts.

That has to be the worst wish ever.

I was simply replying to well named. He didn't present a full argument, I responded with some brevity to draw out further argument from him.

I'm keenly aware that my perspective is just as shallow as the next guy's.

My basis for claim 1 is my extremely limited personal understanding of "faith" (I can define it and use it in a sentence, but have very little personal experience with it) along with my more extensive knowledge of the benefits of internal coherence of beliefs and the obvious social benefits of having a shared framework of belief.

Again, I was responding to well named. I've not memorized your earlier conversation with lagtight. Did he summarize your position adequately?

No need to JAQ me here. I made the broad assumption that when he said "Christian" he meant "Christian with all that entails, including a strong sense that having faith is important and difficult."

I'm never deep.

I'll stand by it for now. When you get time, present other options.

It is entirely possible that we weren't ready to know that the story was a fictional allegory until we got some internal combustion engines. Or something.

Given that your initial reply was contextualized in a conversation, it might behoove you to at least read into the context of what was being responded to. His response is relatively straight-forward because it's not clear why a "full argument" needs to be presented.

You questioned why a particular bar was erected.
Well named gave a reasonable explanation of it.
You challenged the idea of "behooving" beliefs.

It's not clear why "behooving" beliefs need to be elaborated upon for you to understand the reason why a particular bar was erected.

So your perspective is that society functions better when people ignore evidence and information, and that we should sit around and simply agree with each other to maintain internal coherence?

You also might want to make at least a cursory attempt to understand the concept of "faith" if you want to engage in a discussion of it. I would suggest that you should discover that it functions in similar and meaningful ways for both religious and non-religious persons, so trying to treat it as a completely foreign concept is likely disingenuous.

LOL at "memorized." Basically nobody does that. However, it's not clear if you've *read* the conversation. In the second post of the thread, he affirmed that we agreed on the nexus of the discussion:

From that point forward, he has presented a couple arguments in an attempt to justify a literalist interpretation, and I've challenged those points. I've mostly sidestepped presenting a positive argument in favor of a non-literal reading of the Bible. I gave a couple brief comments early on and linked out to a wikipedia page that discusses the age of the universe. But beyond that, it's mostly been lagtight attempting to justify his position.

So there's been very little argument from me for him to summarize.

There's a lot of irony in claiming that you've made a broad assumption that includes "faith" but that you don't really have a sense of what that means. You got JAQed because your objection is so weak it's as if you had not even stopped to consider the types of objections that could be raised.

Conflating "mythical" and "allegorical" with "fictional" is an error of understanding genres of narratives. Have you never read a book that contains a narrative that is not "history" per se (that is, a fictional narrative) but carried content of "true" themes that are relevant to the society in which it was written? "Of Mice and Men" didn't actually happen, but you could use it as a framework to relate to true struggles that existed during the Great Depression. Or if you want to stay in the realm of religious writings, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory (fictional narrative) that functions as a true representation of a particular set of values.

So there are easy ways to break the dichotomy that you've presented.

Surely those taking Genesis as literal history are worse offenders against both (1) and (2) than someone who takes a more liberal approach to interpreting Genesis. Perhaps you think the special creation delusions of Christians fundamentalists are more intellectually honest than Christians who try to make the facts of science consistent with their religious beliefs through reinterpreting their scriptures? I don't - the "book of nature" is authoritative for Christians along with special revelation, so one way or the other the Christian is forced to reject a literal interpretation of the evidence. There is no fact of the matter about how to interpret a text, so it seems to me less harmful to a person's other background beliefs to change that rather than attempt to persuade themselves to reject facts about the world (especially since these hermeneutic changes are typically segregated to religious texts).

I'm sure some of what I'm about to say overlaps with OrP and Aaron, so forgive the repetition.

I think that your (1) requires the implicit premise that "scriptural authority" (however conceived) must be epistemologically superior to the "reason and experience" that Augustine mentions. But I would argue that not only is such an epistemological hierarchy unsustainable, there's also no injunction to hold to such a view in the Christian tradition. Certainly not in the Biblical texts, but also not among important theologians.

There aren't really any early Christian philosophers who deal with epistemology this way, so maybe you could say it's ambiguous at best, but then I'm with OrP: it's not clear to me how it's less intellectually honest to reach a conclusion on the basis of the strength of the evidence (i.e. to conclude that Genesis cannot be history) than to reach the conclusion that all the evidence must be dismissed.

As an aside, I think it's interesting that Indian philosophers did address this kind of question. There are various systematic schools of orthodox Hindu philosophy that assign various priorities to different kinds of evidence, with Śruti (scripture) generally being given a lesser weight than perceptual evidence. There's an aphorism from Mīmāṃsā that goes something like: "if a thousand scriptures tell us that fire does not burn, we will not believe them." I have it somewhat in mind when I say that the implicit assumption you make in (1) is probably unsustainable.

Well, we know that Augustine was comfortable with allegorical readings. So was Gregory of Nyssa, one of the principle authors of the trinitarian doctrine. He writes a defense of what he calls "anagogical" readings in the preface to his homilies on the Song of Songs. There might be less direct evidence for the tolerance for this kind of hermeneutic among very early Christian writers, but I think you can see indirect evidence of it in lots of places. You can also see evidence of literalism. I think both properly belong to Christian history. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are and were many Christians who believe in the literal story of the Flood, but also that there are and have been many who did not think it problematic at all to read it as something else.

I'm not Christian so the problem of rationalizing the Bible as divine revelation doesn't worry me, but I think liberal Christians can arrive at some kind of coherent view simply by acknowledging the human authorship of the texts -- regardless of their inspiration. Basically you just have to give up the idea that God dictated them word for word. My recollection is that this view of scriptural inspiration also exists among Christian theologians. Aquinas appeals to a principle that emphasizes the active role of the human intellect in receiving revealed truths, as it were. On this point I think he borrows heavily from Pseudo-Dionysius.

So, basically, rather than reasoning that God was playing tricks on ancient people who took the stories literally, the liberal view would be that the people who recorded those stories filtered some kind of Divine Inspiration through their limited understanding, but that the symbolic, metaphorical, or spiritual power of the texts is not diminished by that.

I also think to some extent that our tendency to view the Bible as either literal history or else valueless, and even to hold that the Bible alone is the only source of knowledge, owes a great deal to the protestant reformation. "Sola scriptura" is a Calvinist innovation that Gregory Nazianzen would have rejected. So I think you have to keep in mind that as a historical phenomenon Christianity is more diverse in its views of the proper role and interpretation of scripture than you might think if you were raised in a protestant tradition.

+1

I did skip over most of it since nitpicking (even correct nitpicking is not a good read).

Well named doesn't tend to waste words. If something seems odd or out of place, of course it needs questioned for clarity.

That doesn't follow at all from what I said. Especially the second clause. I'd not be on the internets at all if I believed we should sit around and simply agree with each other.

I do maintain that if lagtight isn't putting his roof under his house or hooking up his plumbing backwards, that it simply doesn't matter. It would probably be best if he didn't pursue a career as an oil and gas exploration scientist, but we've got plenty of those.

I do understand it on at least an academic level in regards to religion. If you are suggesting with your suggestion that you would suggest that it is similar to other areas in which I (as a nonreligious person) have faith, I will put out there that I do generally have faith that my wife won't stab me in my sleep.

I'm not sure if that exactly qualifies as faith, since I have a fair amount of empirical evidence on how humans generally behave and how she specifically behaves. It might be interesting for you to expound on how faith works outside of the realm of religion.

I glossed through it. The specifics of this particular conversation apparently didn't stick since it was mostly just stuff I've already read elsewhere. Dunking on YECs isn't exactly a fun sport to watch.

Would it be a fair summary of your actual beliefs and justification for those beliefs? I understand that you haven't actually had to state your beliefs and your justification for them in this thread.

I'd probably be more interested in hearing from you why you aren't a YEC. A long conversation about why he isn't necessarily right is no more interesting than me telling you that you aren't necessarily right.

See above.

Some things fit into several categories. I cannot understand your complaint here. If your complaint is that I sounded dismissive, I can assure you that if you read my words in my tone of voice that you'd not find it dismissive: I liked Of Mice and Men a lot even though no actual bunnies were killed in its making.