@deuteroKJ, @Ronald_Cram, @Jordan, @Philosurfer @Ashwin_s
The other thread on Genesis prompts me to put out a different idea. This isn’t about concordism, but more about inerrancy and “literal” readings of genesis.
Let me assert that Genesis speaks in the language of ordinary perception (phenomenological), from the view point of a person with feet on the ground. That is the only way to understand “mornings” and “evenings”, because from space there are no mornings and evenings, even if we think its speaking from a geocentric perspective (which I am not convinced of). So it seems these really are “ordinary days”, not day-ages, or so it seems.
I wonder if it is valid to see it as a “six-ordinary day telling” of the creation story. A couple clues are the fact that there are mornings and evenings before the sun exists. The story does seem to evoke notions of the beginning of everything, but also seems to describe phenomena that show the earth already exists (the Spirit of God over the water). Also, no human was around to see all this in the first place, so some how it was conveyed.
What if it is that God told the story, perhaps even performing it, in six ordinary days?
In this case, each day would literal days (not ages), that also refer to larger periods of time. It would be like watching a play or a movie of a much longer event. For example, imagine we are watching a 2 hr movie about the Civil War. We might accurately say that the Gettysburg address takes place on the 10th literal minute of the movie, which refers to the real Gettysburg address which actually took place in 1863. We could then watch the Civil War play out over the course of 95 literal minutes, even though this is referent to a much larger period of time.
In this way, the days in Genesis would be both ordinary days, and long ages. More precisely, they would be ordinary days that refer to long ages.
The details that are difficult to line up with science might actually be 100% accurate in what happens in the telling, an inerrant description of what happens in the telling. It might be understood as a play-byplay account of the telling, which has been reworked for human perception. For example, we can’t even really perceive the inflationary membrane from which the Big Bang begins. So it makes sense that God would just symbolically show this as His Spirit moving over the waters. It is not that he his teaching us of the Big Bang, but He is telling a story which is faithfully and in-errantly recorded, and like all stories, has a multilayered timeline (e.g. the timeline of the story and the referent) and meaning (e.g. the actor and the character the actor plays).
So, my question is, how plausible or crazy is a six ordinary day telling?
) and I’m committed to inerrancy (at least in the original autographs that I take we have really good copies of comparatively to the rest of the texts in the ancient world).