I come late to this discussion, but would like to respond to Vance’s comment that “And what did Jesus come to give us? What ‘death’ did Jesus come to ‘undo’? I believe it was spiritual life, eternal life with God. That is the only death that Adam and Eve suffered ‘on that day.’”

Vance, you may want to consider whether your interpretation is more Gnostic than Pauline – they believed that the main purpose of the gospel was that the true Gnostic be spiritually resurrected. Paul (who wrote a century before them) argued in 1 Cor 15 that no, it is the resurrection of the body, not just the spirit, soul, inner person, of whatever, that is the last act of Christ. Physical death is the “last enemy,” to be destroyed by physical resurrection.

Hence, the anti-Gnostic Apostles’ Creed – “I believe in the resurrection of the body” and only then “in the life everlasting.”

At the risk of saying something too late, after all it took me a long time to read through all this blog as “after the fact” I would like to clarify only one point though much else could be said in response to this blog.

I would point out that those who find serious difficulty in the supposed different creation accounts or differences between Gen 1 & 2 needed only to do a bit of homework on the hermeneutical level. Simply using the grammatical-historical method would have helped the debate, buit a simple “plain reading” of the text should still have alerted us to the point of the two chapters.
Notice how Gen 1 speaks of God and Gen 2 of “the Lord God”, God as elohim vs yhwh elohim. YHWH is the covenantal name of God for Isral and speaks of His relationship with His creation, that personal relationship. Whereas elohim is the God as Creator.
So Gen 1 speaks to God as Creator, whereas
Gen 2 speaks of his relationship to “mankind”. made in His image etc.
They are not as so many blogists and liberals have intoned, “different creation accounts”.

Well maybe I will say a second thing,

People who sprout evidence of Science ought to take up a course on the Philosophy of Science! Science has indeed evolved in it’s attempt to solve the glaring difficulties it has – through a method of hypothesus – to theory, to the approach of paradigms and so on. See Hempel and Popper and others. Yet they have still been unable to account for the uniformity of nature that is part of the bedrock that Science builds on.

Secular Scientists continually steal unacknowledged, the presuppositions of Science from the Christian Worldview – notions that the materialist Worldview just cannot supply.

If we read up a bit more on this then the nonsense Dawkins sprouts would have not fear for the average Christian.

Finally in this vein, there are no such things as brute facts, they are all interpreted, and that interpretation is within a particular framework. so appealing to evidence and the weight of probability is wide of the mark as
even the notion of probaility can only be accounted for within a Christian Worldview of the Bible.

Those that like the philosopher Moreland need to think that one through in relation to his philosophical schema. That is not to say he isn’t helpful – just that this needs addressing

in Christ
Gary

Aren’t you guy’s all Kent Hovind fans? Just kidding.

I am not a scientist, and I just got through teaching Genesis in Sunday school, we spent allot of time on the first 11 chapters, I received my conclusion from scriptures out side of Genesis, here they are …
Job 38:4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding”
We know actually very little of what God has done and how He did it even when we read scripture and dig up the earth, I know that God is omnipotent and omniscient, He can create in any way He chooses 6 Days or 4 billion years. He has the knowledge and power to do that. Theories are fun, God created us to explore, But I doubt that we will ever truly know until we sit before him and he tells us all the intricate details. until then I’ll obey Hebrew 11:1, 3 and 6. v.3 “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible”

I find it interesting that creationist are constantly accused of “not giving in” or not making concessions. I have yet to see an evolutionist statement saying, “oops, we were wrong about that one, sorry” when it is obvious that they are wrong, cover up, or imagine quite a bit of stuff that contradict there “therories”
I found this website interesting scienceagainstevolution.org
By the way, many of us “Fundamentalist” do believe in micro evolution without being “kjv only” people. we do not talk about it enough, we are taught to believe that “all evolution is wrong” which is sad because adaptation and variation is obvious and saying that makes look like idiots. I also get tired of being told that we “Fundalmentalist” do not think, as a Pastor it is my job to think and do research, our faith is based upon fact, and when Science and God’s word seem to contradict it isn’t always because one isn’t true, the interpretation of the the thing is what is in question.
Well, I doubt that I added anything profound here, but it is important, Paul used creation to witness to the Athenians in Acts 17. I use the Job passage and the Hebrews passage when I share my faith and come across this issue and admit that I nor anyone else REALLY knows the intricate details of Gods creation, but you will stand before Him one day and give an account, are you ready?

On the comment that YEC is actually a “liberal” interpretation of scripture, Robert Schadewald Author of “Worlds of Their Own : Insights into PseudoScience from Creationism to The End Times” has referred to Young Earth Creationists, Geocentrists, and Flat-earthers as the “liberals, moderates, and fundamentalists of the biblical literalists”. I would extend it even further into the OEC and EC camp as well, as many of them also believe they are interpreting the scripture “literally”. One of the Evolutionary Creationists that would take the literalist mantel is Dick Fischer of “Genesis Proclaimed” (www.genesisproclaimed.org). He chastises YEC for not being literal enough (See his paper “Young Earth Creationism: A Literal Mistake” at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Fischer.pdf).

Oh, I have definitely been all over True Origin as well as AiG. I probably have read more Creationist writing than any Creationist has. What I have found is that the best way to understand a side’s position, you need to read their own writing, not filtered and spun by those who are like-minded with you.

My experience over the years, and this may not apply to anyone here, is that those of the TE, OEC or EC persuasion have tended to read both sides pretty thoroughly, whereas the YEC has most often (with a few rare exceptions) read up on this stuff mostly from YEC sources. Again, that is just my general experience.

Getting most of your information about an old earth or evolution from a Creationist source is like trying to learn about Christianity from an atheist.

Hawke,

Thanks for the link. (maybe the other guys might read it too!!)

With all these links to talk origins (which I read occasionally) I thought I would throw in another link similar to the AIG mindset (not that I totally agree with them).

http://www.trueorigin.org/

I concur that the testimony is strong for Christ’s resurrection, in which I think we all would agree.

Interesting discussion indeed…

tnahas, some links that might interest you…

http://www.fixedearth.com/
http://www.geocentricity.com/

Just in case you don’t actually visit these links, I’ll post some highlights:

“…the reformers such as Luther, clearly saw that the embracing of heliocentrism would weaken not only science, but also the authority of the Bible.”

“Here [in Joshua 10:13] the Moderator of Scripture, the Holy Ghost Himself, endorses the daily movement of the sun and moon. After all, God could just as well have written: ‘And the earth stopped turning, so that the sun appeared to stand still, and the moon seemed to stay … .’ That wording would be no more ‘confusing’ to the reader than anything in Job chapters 38 through 41.”

“There are those who would claim that the language used is phenomenological, that it was not meant to convey the truth of the matter. They like to equate Joshua 10:13 with verses like Isaiah 55:12 where the trees are said to ‘clap their hands.’ The problem with that is that everyone since Adam can understand that Isaiah 55:12 is a literary device; but there is not a clue to tell those before Copernicus that Joshua 10:13 is not to be taken literally.”

“After all, if God cannot be taken literally when He writes of the ‘rising of the sun,’ then how can He be taken literally in writing of the ‘rising of the Son?’”

“In other words, either God writes what he means and means what he writes, or else he passes off mere appearances as truths and ends up the liar.”

“The ultimate issue is one of final authority: is the final say God’s or man’s? This is brought home again and again by humanists, such as the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell and astronomer Ivan King, who point to the church’s abandonment of geocentricity as having ‘freed’ man from the ancient God-centered outlook on life to the modern man-centered outlook.”

“How can one ever determine which is the truth? Only by going outside the universe and taking a look around can one ascertain the truth of the matter. Without that ability to ‘look around outside,’ physics cannot resolve the debate. However, since God does know what is beyond the universe, should His word not be taken as the final authority? It is the testimony of God as found in the Bible which constitutes the foundation of modern geocentricity. May it ever be so!”

I think in order to be consistent in your position, you need to forget about AiG and ICR (they are liberal) join these groups! But if you do not feel that these statements accurately reflect your understanding of the cosmos, then on what authority do you reject them? Be careful how you answer this – if you choose to answer it at all.

But we did address those issues very early in the discussion. I thought we had moved on to the science involved, and I am pretty sure it was a creationist who brought it up by asserting that the science just didn’t work. It will not do to bring the science itself into the discussion and then cry foul when it is discussed. Did you actually read that article I linked to? If so, what parts of the science in particular do you think are incorrect?

As for the Scripture and theology, we can go over that again, I suppose. You may not agree with the alternate views either, but it would be wrong to act as if the matter is just ignored.

As for Adam, sin and death, there are at least two different views here, possibly more. First, almost all OEC’s, and some TE’s still think Adam was literal, that he was either a representative (just as Christ is a representative for us on the cross), or he was the literal ancestor of the Israelites and that he was the first in that line who broke a covenant with God, thus sinning. Others view Adam as figurative (“Adam” means “Mankind” in Hebrew, so this linguistically could work pretty easily), and that he was a type or symbol for what happened to Mankind as a whole, the Fall. There is no absolute problem associating a single person Jesus with a figurative single type of Adam, representing the whole of Mankind. Also, there was the whole analysis of spiritual death being very possibly what is referred to, not physical death, which to my mind fits much better Scripturally and theologically.

As for the texts as science and history, most ANE scholars recognize that people at the time of the ancient Israelites would not have read such texts as strict literal historical narrative, but as a figurative and symbolic telling of past REAL events. True history, just in a different literary genre. Also, regardless of that, such presentations would necessarily have to be presented in the language of the science of the day and, since the text is not making any strict science claims, when properly read, this would not be an error. The solid firmament, geocentric presentation, the moon as a second source of light, etc. Only a literal reading makes those errors.

The restoration issue is not really a problem for me, either since I don’t see any Scripture (and, again, this was all discussed before) which require that the New Heaven and Earth be a full restoration of the pre-Fall universe. I do think that it will definitely be the completion of what God intended, which got seriously derailed at the time of the Fall.

These may not be satisfactory answers for you, and they definitely do not have all the answers, any more than a young earth approach does (no death before the fall just doesn’t work, as far as I can see), but it would be a misrepresentation to say that we just ignored these issues.

The problem is when we REQUIRE absolute answers to things that were not meant to be given to us absolutely.

Vance and Gordon,

I am so glad you were not able to convince me of any possibility that evolution was used by God to carry out creation. As we continue talk over, around and pass each other, none of my scriptural references were ever addressed which is the starting place and final resting place of any Christian and none of the issues concerning (I’ll repeat them for the fifth time, I think) sin, death, redemption and restoration and the total framework of the gospel and the rest of Scripture.

Please no philisophical or science goobleygook, just the plain answer to Romans 5, Gen 1, Rev 21 and 22, Col 1, Eph 1, Psalms etc etc etc .

May God bless your journey and this is my sign off here.

Thanks for the non-dogmatic discussion, it was inspiring!