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The creation story revisited 8/1/2018 2:31:50 PM
A scientist and a theologian discuss the disconnect between science and religion and how translations have added to it in trying to make ancient Hebrew words fit the 21st century. God, Sky & Land, 2011, 190 p.
God, Land, and the Great Flood, 2017, 211 p
Brian Bull and Fritz Guy, Adventist Forum, publishers.
These two scholars address the disconnect between creation and science that has existed since the 16th century. They do this by reminding us that what the ancients read (represented by Moshe) and what a 21st-century reader hears (Ian).
I have been reading both but not chronologically and may have missed or misrepresented an opinion stated by the authors. I am neither a theologian nor scientist, though have an interest in both. I review it as a lay person.
The authors present facts about translation that could clear up our questions. The translations by later writers attempted to make it fit our known world. A few Bibles are changing that. The ancients told what they saw; but so do we; they are different worldviews. That doesn’t make us smarter—still more than 90% of the cosmos is a mystery as are the strange workings of quantum mechanics.
It doesn’t seem heretical to accept the scholars’ research on words. The Hebrew word interpreted “earth” should be “land.” The biblical scribes had no concept of a spherical world. Their land was their life. They had no reason for or knowledge of modern science. All regular and irregular incidents were either done by humans or God.
But there are difficulties with other conclusions the scholars make having to do with the alleged borrowing from the Babylonian texts about the flood. They write as if no believers existed before the Hebrews, and the Babylonians had the original source. God had a people after the flood and they were the original source. God chose Moses to put it in writing. Pre-flood people and sometime after didn't use writing because they didn't need it. They remembered everything as do some rare persons today—such as Mary Lou Hemmer and others. This is not unheard of now.
The Bible doesn’t say creation was in a 24-hour day but evening and morning. Evening/night, the scholars say, represents the chaos the land was in before creation. The morning symbolized its ending. The ancients wanted a shield between them and the chaos/water above, thus we have the vault/dome. . My take is that the creation days were normal ones since there is no indication of long time periods. However, the land (earth to us who recognize science) already existed from the “big bang” or a previous creation
Of course, when the flood started with the first rain, this cemented the idea of the dome, for the “windows of heaven” were opened and the waters (chaos) above came down. It is natural that the first ancient believers used the word “vault” because that is what they saw. They saw sun and moon and stars that appeared to be in the dome. God set them aside as time keepers for l He lived outside of human time. And then came all the plants and animals at their specified days and then humans. And then rest—a rest that would one day symbolize rest from works (for salvation) through Jesus Christ represented by the Lamb first sacrificed by Abel. After sin, women were subjected to men and the many daughters of Adam aren’t given names but neither are the many other children. The couple produced and multiplied as God commanded. God sent Abel away (perhaps he was already a tribe by then or at least had a family) rather than eliminate him.
The world or land at the time was limited to the Middle East, and they didn’t go far from it. The idea of a round world did not occur to them. Millennia later humans still believed one could sail off the edge of the earth; this in spite of a few Greek philosophers who got it right but were ignored.
The flood could have been local—but still covering lots of land—because humans hadn’t spread very far. If so, they saw it as their land being destroyed--their whole world. But we don’t know this. It’s irrelevant to the story. The writers believe it was local, citing scientific laws.
The flood occurred not as a punishment, but to save the human race that would have lost contact with God after the passing of Noah and his family. Even Noah had flaws, but he had faith and acted on It.—he believed and trusted God. We would later call this righteousness of faith. Without the ark, humans would have sold out to Satan who would take over the world and humanity would ultimately self-destruct without God. The scholars present this as an act of God’s love.
Meanwhile, large animals could have existed in other parts of the world where humans did not exist. These could have been mutations developed by Satan. By taking already-existing life, he could mutate it into these ugly beasts. Their remains are found in the arctic regions telling us the whole earth was warm at one time. The floods could have caused so much chaos of volcanic ash, earthquake, and at some point even “stars”/ asteroids fell (through those “open windows”) etc. The earth did not have enough sun, causing the ice age. These strange animals lived before the flood chaos. Dating them may not be accurate as the laws of decay differed before the chaos. Science still follows the law of uniformity for the cosmos and that life evolved extremely slowly.
Of course, these are my speculations and an attempt to bring evidences of science and religion together realizing that our worldview is quite different from those who first heard the story of Genesis.
This does not keep my from believing the Bible; the writers were inspired and not their words. Every believer seeking truth needs to pray for discernment in interpreting the Bible. God holds the Book of Life; “the big computer”; the records and spirit-breath of all of us. He hears our prayers quickly as quantum physics suggests. We long for the day when sin and the great sinners of history will be thrown into the lake of fire, outer darkness, destroyed. As the martyrs cry out from the ages, their killers will be no more. All the original creation will live again.
