As I tried to make clear it’s less a question of truth and falsity, than of the kind of questions that interest researchers, and the kind of answers they are willing to accept from nature, and how they develop those.
Even within our western scientific tradition, there has been some interesting work done on the profound differences between national traditions of science, and how they can be influenced, or eclipsed, by questions of politics and language.
Russian science, for example, was isolated in the Soviet era, and largely ignored when Communism fell because it was “Soviet Science”, but also because not many people were interested in reading Russian. And that’s within Europe in our lifetimes.
True, but I still haven’t been convinced that the order matches what we know from science that well, or that Moses would have been particularly interested in that aspect.
Well, in 2020 it’s getting harder to consider the order of events irrelevant. But taken overall, I would certainly say that Revelation is not ordered chronologically, because apocalyptic tends not to work that way. The question one must always ask is “Am I being expected to interpret this chronologically, and if so why?”
My answer would be that inevitably one ends up with Scripture being at the mercy of the current state of science, and I don’t mean in the sense that science might prove Scripture “wrong.”
Read any old, pre-scientific commentary, and for the most part (there being no reason to question otherwise) the Gen 1 account is taken at face value propositionally. But the discussion immediately becomes why God did it that way, what spiritual lessons the creation has for us, and not matching it up with “evidence” of its veracity.
Indeed, Augustine assumed that “in fact” the whole creation would have been instantaneous, given God’s nature, and the text is as it is because of that spiritual didactic purpose.
The same is true if, for whatever reason, one ascribes literary or theological motives to the construction of the text (such as the cosmic temple understanding, originally spotted by Cosmas Indicopleustes in the 6th century, and by a couple of Jewish exegetes, but only rediscovered in recent decades and now mainstream).
Note that your two criteria for day 3 refer to the first exemplars of seed plants or angiosperms, while your two criteria for day 5 refer not to the first birds or fish but to a time of great diversity. That’s more cherry-picking.
Now you’re just creating a match by definition. I suppose the sun is the one that exists after the emergence of seed-bearing plants too.
This is the very definition of cherry-picking. If you choose data specifically in order to match a prior pattern, well of course it will match that pattern. But does it mean anything at all? No.
But what are “creatures”? Orders, families, genera? Makes a big difference.
This is a meaningless question. There was no day 5. You might as well ask if there’s a character in Sponge Bob who more closely resembles Abraham Lincoln than Squidward. If there is not, it’s obvious that Sponge Bob is a show about U.S. Presidents.
It isn’t Genesis that’s cherry-picking. That’s all you, and it makes no sense whatsoever. The way forward is to acknowledge that Genesis 1 is not a historical account. The days are, if anything, topical, not chronological.
Jon, it appears you are merely throwing a vague politicized haze over science in general terms to give yourself latitude to accept or reject anything you want to from science depending upon whether if fits with other ideas you have conceived. At least, that’s how it seems. It comes across as jaded, as if you are peeking out through the fog of fear. I’m not saying you are completely wrong, but I would caution the use of biased distrust to try to filter for scientific truth.
The way I research issues is to try to find the journal articles, multiple on a topic from different research groups. Often these are from different countries. Peer-reviewed articles sometimes have rebuttals; those are worth reading too. Study an issue over time. Articles spanning 10 or 20 years or more, etc. Ask what the trend is in the research. Dig in.
Isn’t it a question of whether God was interested in communicating order? I realize that is also hard to answer, but it is inspired, right? So it’s God’s purpose that ultimately matters.
I like this understanding, but I would hardly call it mainstream. I’ve heard a lot of presentations and sermons on Genesis 1 and 2 and the cosmic temple idea has never come on my radar before reading John Walton and this discussion site. It’s not part of the mainstream of US Pacific Northwest conservative evangelical churches in any case. I’ve also studied the catechisms of the Greek, Roman, Anglican, and Reformed churches for a project I did last year and it still seemed like a new idea to me when I read it in Walton.
Genesis 1 is written as a sequence of events. There is an explicit numbering of days and they are compared in Exodus to a “week”. Days of the week follow chronologically. Pretty simple. That’s a reason. Would have to have a justification for not taking them chronologically.
Not at all - though science currently has big problems with politicisation and commercial influence. I think anybody studying the public science on COVID over the last 9 months, as I have as a medic, will be somewhat jaded.
But my point was simply that science is always partial and cultural. It is not a growing body of knowledge slowly filling the gaps, but a series of islands of understanding in a vast sea of phenomena, some of which join together and some of which do not. Whole groups of those islands have been forgotten over time. Any culture is always interested in a relatively small range of questions, and the study of the history of ideas shows that clearly. The Bible, however, is intended for all cultures.
I suggest it’s never a good idea to assume others’ intellectual positions to be due to fear. It’s seldom true.
Funnily enough I almost wrote “the Holy Spirit” instead of “Moses,” but decided it might be contentious. But remember that both authors were, in the first instance, writing for the people of Israel at the birth of covenant nationhood. But I agree Genesis has myriad hidden depths, as Augustine stressed - though his criterion for valid interpretations was that they be “according to the rule of faith.”
I agree with this. I don’t see a necessary contradiction between Genesis 1 being a cosmic history of some sort and conveying ideas of a cosmic temple. I think these ideas can potentially coexist. Each concept is worthy of testing and development in its own right.
No. I contend elsewhere that Genesis 1:4 “God separated the light from the darkness” on Day 1 is an example of synonymous parallelism with the phrase “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separated the day from the night” used on Day 4 1:14.
God separates the light from darkness is equal to the lights separate light from darkness, because God created the lights.
What’s happening on Day 4 is a flashback utilized in a chiastic structure:
“Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate day and night,
and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years,
and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.”
What you see here is that the chiastic structure refers back to events that began on Day 1 but add in a novel component on Day 4: namely marking time.
So the sun and moon were created on or before Day 1 but their ordained function was not fully realized at that time.
While the rotation rate of the Earth has gradually slowed over time, the length of each of the Days in creation is not necessarily the same. Therefore, during the first three days of creation, the earth slowed dramatically from about 6 hours per day. About 100 mya the rotation rate of the earth had become about 24 hours per day. Since Days 4, 5, and 6 each happened in the last 100 mya or so, the change in Earth’s rotation rate has been much slower relative to how much it changed during Days 1,2 and 3. Since about 66 mya, the rotation rate of the Earth has stayed within the accuracy of the biological circadian rhythm which is about 15 minutes per 24-hour periods.
Maybe. But according to https://www.pnas.org/content/106/10/3853 cherry-picking might have first become possible during the Cretaceous. The Rosid clade, to which cherries belong, comprise 25% of all angiosperms. Furthermore, Rosids comprise most lineages of extant temperate and tropical forest trees. So, I would say it would be possible to compare modern aves (birds) with modern rosids (fruit trees). In both cases there is a comparable “most lineages of extant” birds and fruit trees in play. Rosids rapidly diversified into major lineages in less than 15 million years or perhaps just 4 to 5 million. Time range for this is around 100 mya.
If you want, you can compare the phylogenetic origin time of “orders of extant birds” with the origin time of “orders of extant fruit trees” and sync up the criteria.
I think there is similarity in the rapid diversification and proliferation of the two groups (birds vs fruit trees).
If one were to then look a the origin time of orders of extant mammals, this would largely fall after the origin time of orders of extant birds.
At least, that is a common criteria that could be used. Again, I don’t believe the biblical use of the word “kind” exactly corresponds to any particular phylogenetic level. Also, I’m not sure that “order” when used for animals really corresponds to “order” when used for plants. But it could be worth a try.
Talk about being “parochial”. In my own field of forestry and soil science (and in our lifetimes), “Soviet Science” was, and remains, essential reading.
I think what you have described is the very essence of cherry-picking, and it’s not something to embrace proudly.
Nothing you say in that post is actually present in Genesis. That’s what I mean when I say that you are forced to distort both scripture and science in order to match them up. What makes you think there ought to be a match in the first place? Why bother with any of this?
But taken overall, I would certainly say that Revelation is not ordered chronologically, because apocalyptic tends not to work that way. The question one must always ask is “Am I being expected to interpret this chronologically, and if so why?”