Lutheran Church Tackles Creation Days

Christian Post has an article on the recent Lutheran Synod resolution involving the “creation days.” Michael Gryboski writes:

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod passed a resolution at their convention affirming the belief that God created the Earth “in six natural days.”

At the 67th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod on Tuesday, the theologically conservative denomination adopted Resolution 5-09A, titled “To Confess the Biblical Six-Day Creation.”

“We confess that the duration of those natural days is proclaimed in God’s Word: ‘there was evening and there was morning, the first day,’” resolved the resolution.

The resolution also declared that the creation of Adam as the first human being was a “historical event” and rejected the claims of the theory of evolution.

As noted in the article, there is some debate about what the word “natural” means in this context.

Another delegate expressed concern over the alleged “lack of clarity” on the definition of the word “natural” as used in the resolution.

Supporters responded that the term “natural” was defined by the Bible’s own words, describing the days as having an evening and a morning.

This has always struck me as a peculiar defense given how the scriptures actually reads:

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19, NIV)

Every translation reads pretty much the same way.  That happens on the fourth day. Without the sun and moon, you cannot have “evening and morning.”  There is no reasonable context for it.  To argue this implies that the entire universe revolves around a 24-hour earth day.  We know this is not so.

It is notable that the vote was 662 in favor and 309 against, so there is quite a bit of dissent about the resolution.  The rider involving evolution, while not taking center stage, is a slap in the face to those congregants who accept it.  The rising science of coalescence theory is hard to square with the idea of Adam and Eve being the first humans.   As Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight put it in their book Adam and the Genome,

As our methodology becomes more sophisticated and more data are examined, we will likely further refine our estimates in the future. That said, we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created independently of other animals or that we descend from only two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well supported that it is highly unlikely new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them: The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population.

I always find it somewhat interesting that these large denominations fight tooth-and-nail over social issues that are somewhat fluid in society, such as homosexuality and female ordination, and yet, for issues in which there is actually hard, scientific evidence, retreat to a very flat, conservative interpretation of scripture.

Interestingly, the new T-shirt being issued by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America celebrates both science and LGBT rights.  That is not true for the science part.

Crossway: Bible Reading Habits and Ken Ham's Reaction

Crossway conducted a survey to find out which parts of the Bible Christians read and how often.  The results are not surprising.  Most people, it turns out, read the New Testament and the epistles and Revelation.  Now, having said that, the survey is oddly constructed, with a dichotomy between "hardest to understand" and "read most often."  I know people who don't understand a bit of Revelation, and yet read it in order to try to understand it.  From the story:

Many Bible readers struggle to understand certain books of the Bible (especially the prophets) and turn their attention to easier-to-grasp sections (like the Gospels and the epistles). Though tackling some of the more difficult parts of Scripture can be challenging, we should attempt to spend time in each section, trusting that each part is divinely inspired and plays an important role in the biblical narrative.

Of course, as soon as I read the part about the Gospels being easy to understand, the first passage that came to mind was John 6:57-6:63, which completely vexed the disciples.  Nonetheless, It makes sense that most people gravitate toward the epistles as the expense of, say Deuteronomy and Leviticus, simply because they reflect the teachings of Christ through Paul and comprise the nuts and bolts of Christianity. Contrast this with the narrative of the early Hebrews, who God blessed, in spite of themselves.

Consequently, it is a bit baffling (and telling) that Ken Ham responded to the survey thus:

Crossway survey re Bible reading habits. One result shows people spend much more time reading towards the end of the Bible than at the beginning. illustrates a major problem in the church--many no longer understand the foundations in Genesis

How is it a major problem in the church for people to focus on the Gospels and the epistles?  As Christ points out, He was “The Way, the Truth and the Life.”  He is the focal point of Scripture.  What is the most commonly-cited scripture?  “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  All of the Old Testament points toward the New Testament and Christ.  Yes, the Old Testament is important for instruction (often what not to do) and we have it for many reasons, since it is the record of God's relationship to his people.  But Christ is the pinnacle.  For those of us who profess a faith in Christianity, He is why we believe.

Is the Primeval History important?  Of course.  It shows us that God created the heavens and the earth and He, alone, is God.  That is its purpose.   But, despite what Ken Ham says, it is also controversial.  Scholars over the centuries have been perplexed about how to interpret these passages.  It is hard to reconcile the simple words of Genesis with the fact that everywhere you turn, you are confronted with evidence of an incredibly old earth and not a shred of evidence for a world-wide flood.  How can they not be controversial.

Also, the Old Testament is clearly written for a select people.  When Christ came, he preached first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.  We have been included in His people.  That is the gift of the New Testament.  That is why it is so important. 

There are quite a few other aspects covered in the survey, including daily time reading habits and other demographic data.  Read the whole thing. 

Ken Ham: ‘If Christians don’t believe in a literal Genesis, they have no foundation for their doctrine’

Ken Ham gave a lengthy interview in The Christian Chronicle, conducted by Bobby Ross, Jr., in which he outlined why he believes in a young earth and a literal reading of Genesis.  Is he a “young earth creationist?”:

When people say, “Are you a young Earth creationist?” I want people to also understand that, you know, the reason we believe what we do is not because we’re young Earth creationists. It’s because we’re biblical creationists. As a consequence of taking the Bible as written, we believe in a young Earth. But we’re not young Earth first.

In other words, young Earth is not the issue. It’s just a consequence of the way we take Scripture. … We’re biblical creationists; we’re all about the Bible; we’re all about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This answer would be perhaps a tad more believable if a large chunk of the AiG website weren't geared toward dismantling old-earth and evolution arguments. The front page of the site contained, just a minute ago, no fewer than three articles on how to demonstrate young earth creationism.

Ham also prefers the term “biblical creationism” to ”young earth creationism,” suggesting that there is only one way to look at how God created the universe and only one way to interpret the Genesis creation stories (there are two). In their writings about this, there is a continual tendency to conflate the notions of a "biblical" creationism with a literal reading of the scripture.  They are not the same thing.

Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis has a post on what church thinkers through the ages thought about the creation days and the writer of the post, James Mook, manages to contradict himself within the space of two paragraphs.  First he writes:

In its first 16 centuries the church held to a young earth. Earth was several thousand years old, was created quickly in six 24-hour days, and was later submerged under a worldwide flood.

One paragraph later, we get this:

The Church Fathers (AD 100–600) were theologians after the apostles. Based on Scripture, they opposed naturalistic theories of origins. Some, including Clement of Alexandria (c. 152–217), Origen (c. 185–254), and Augustine (c. 354–430), interpreted Genesis 1 allegorically. To them, the six days were a symbolic presentation of God’s creation in one instant.

If they were a symbolic presentation of God's creation in one instant, then they clearly did not think that the creation played out over six 24-hour days. It is, further, unfair to argue that the church fathers were young earth creationists because they thought the earth was young.  Everybody at the time thought the earth was young. There was no evidence to the contrary.  Now there is, plenty of it.

When asked about whether or not the age of creation is a salvation issue, he appears to say one thing but mean another. 

Nowhere in the Bible does it connect salvation to the age of the Earth. Right? If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. Romans 10:9. In other words, salvation is conditioned on faith in Christ. Faith alone. Grace alone. Christ alone.

And so, then people say to me, “So, you can believe in millions of years and still be a Christian?” Well, I know many Christians who believe in millions of years. It’s not a salvation issue.

And then if people say to me, “So, it doesn’t matter?” I would say, “Yes, it does matter.” And the reason I say “Yes, it does matter” is because, ultimately, it’s an authority issue. In other words, where you get the millions of years from, you don’t get that in Scripture.

Not only that, but if you’re going to believe in millions of years, the idea of millions of years really came out of atheistic and deistic naturalism of the 1700s and 1800s, from people who wanted to explain the fossil record and natural processes without God. So, the fossil record was supposedly laid down before man. Now, the fossil record is a record of death. Now in the fossil record, there’s lots of examples of diseases and bones like of dinosaurs, cancer, arthritis, other diseases.

He is absolutely correct that nowhere in the bible is the age of the earth connected with salvation. Score one for Ham. The problems begin with what he says afterwards.  What he continues with reveals a very false understanding of the history of science and the denigration of the work of some very devout men of God.

He claims that you don't get “millions of years” from scripture.  The problem is that you don't necessarily get six consecutive 24-hour days from scripture, either.  That idea was added by Wycliffe, in the late 1300s.  As pointed out above and by many different theologians, many of the early church fathers did not interpret the creation days literally.  These are people that lived within the first three centuries after Christ, who were integral in spreading the gospel.  And, somehow, I am supposed to believe that they are wrong and Ken Ham is right?  This is not an authority issue at all.  This is an issue of interpretation.

Additionally, with his “millions of years” quote, Ham is making a point of demonizing the people that earnestly tried to understand how the world worked and what clues it yielded about how it was created and when.  Many of the researchers who worked out the geological layers in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds such as Georges Cuvier, Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland were strong Bible-believing Christians who wrestled with the data that they uncovered, in an effort to understand how it fit with God's word.  Cuvier, who developed the idea of catastrophism, concluded that there had been many world-wide floods over a long period of time, of which Noah's flood was the last.  In his farewell speech to the Geological Society of Britain, Sedgwick, who was ordained Anglican minister and thorough evangelical said this about the great flood:

Bearing upon this difficult question, there is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established -- that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period. It was indeed a most unwarranted conclusion, when we assumed the contemporaneity of all the superficial gravel on the earth. We saw the clearest traces of diluvial action, and we had, in our sacred histories, the record of a general deluge. On this double testimony it was, that we gave a unity to a vast succession of phenomena, not one of which we perfectly comprehended, and under the name diluvium, classed them all together.

To seek the light of physical truth by reasoning of this kind, is, in the language of Bacon, to seek the living among the dead, and will ever end in erroneous induction. Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which lead many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.

Since Sedgwick's time, the evidence for a world-wide flood has not gotten any better. In fact, as Carol Hill, another Christian geologist points out, there is no evidence for it, whatsoever. For Ham to denigrate the work of these scientific giants as being the products of atheistic and deistic naturalism is not just incorrect, it is insulting.

It also reveals that he knows very little about the history of geology.  Further, he knew very little about the lives of the people he was denigrating.  Sedgwick remained an evangelical Christian throughout his life, as did Hutton and Cuvier. 

Theologians and scholars have wrestled with the Genesis creation accounts for centuries in an effort to try to understand them and their subtlety and breadth.  Ken Ham reduces them to a flat, bare bones account that holds little more than a sterile textbook.  It is a grand story of God's creation.  Whether it happened in six days or over the course of four billion years is irrelevant.

I would encourage you to read the whole interview, in which Ham pretty much condemns every view of creation that does not comport with his.  This, above all, is what makes Ham controversial.  He is, perhaps, the most divisive person in Christendom. 

Jesuit Review: Creationism Isn't About Science, it’s about theology (and it’s really bad theology).

Eric Sundrup has an editorial in the Jesuit Review about what is wrong with young earth creationism.  He has some very good observations: He begins:

The Creation Museum is a $27 million example of how Christians can lose their way fighting the culture wars. After spending time there this Christmas, I left convinced that as wrong as the museum’s science is, the most frightening driver of its “logic” is an impoverished theology, which is coupled with a desire to win moral arguments. This toxic combination propels devout people into strange and unnecessary battles with modern science.

This is a point that I and many different researchers have made over the years: young earth creationism misses the broader picture. It reduces the majesty, glory and awe of the Bible and the message that God is telling us in favor of a flat, sterile, superficial understanding of the passages in Genesis. He continues:

Mr. Ham’s motivations for founding the museum and its parent organization clearly grew out of the culture wars. Answers in Genesis argues for the inerrancy of the Bible and specifically for a literal interpretation of Genesis because they think this provides them a strong footing in public discussions. And that, I think, is exactly how this group of Christians got lost. They are trying to win moral and theological debates with what look like scientific arguments.

Strangely, in their attempt to provide definitive empirical answers to moral and theological questions, creationists like Mr. Ham have more in common with some of their most strident scientific opponents than with the broader Christian tradition. They are proponents of the strictest form of biblical inerrancy and literalism. And in this mode they are actually advancing a mirror-image of scientism, in which God’s revelation, both in Scripture and in creation, is meant to convey a list of facts.

I think that this is one of the reasons that young people are leaving the church. Not only do they discover that they have been fed bogus science that doesn't stand up to even the barest scrutiny, when they have issues that require them to reach deeply into their faith, there is nothing there, just cold, impersonal facts. 

Mr. Sundrup's analysis is also not so unlike Joel Edmund Anderson's, in that, in his book The Heresy of Ham, Anderson notes that by focusing on science (or their understanding of science, anyway), Ham and other young earth creationists have, like their atheist counterparts, held up science as the ultimate arbiter of faith.  Modern science HAS to conform to the biblical passages.  If it does not, we are all lost.  This is nonsense for one simple reason: if biblical scripture in Genesis conforms to our understanding of 21st century science, then they are necessarily out of step with 20th century science, 19th century science, 18th century science and so on.  Since young earth creationist arguments don't change (except to move the goalposts), every new scientific discovery has to be shoehorned, manipulated, mangled and adjusted to fit the prevailing narrative. Scientific integrity be damned.  It never occurs to them that the narrative, itself might be wrong.

Newsweek Dabbles in Young Earth Creationism

Kastalia Medrano, of Newsweek, has written a post describing the discovery of a fossilized Antarctic Forest.  The piece starts off innocuously enough:

Scientists announced the discovery of the fossilized trees in Antarctica’s Transantarctic Mountains in November. They believe the forest is the oldest one known to exist in the southern polar region, according to Breaking News Israel. They proposed that the ancient trees preserved a record of a large-scale global die-off event, which raised the planet’s temperature to dangerous extremes and turned its oceans acidic, and ultimately wiped out 95 percent of species on Earth. But they were left with the question of what exactly was the catalyst for those changes.

Then comes the sharp turn:

At least one biblical scholar believes he has the answer: The die-off event was the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis.

“This discovery should be no surprise to those who take Genesis as literal history,” Tim Clarey, a geologist from the Institute for Creation Research, wrote on the ICR website. “The Bible clearly describes a global flood that affected all land masses—why should Antarctica be an exception?”

The problem, of course, is that the Permian extinction is only one of five mass extinction events, and it is not even the first one. It is the third, behind the Ordovician and late Devonian extinctions.The one that took out the dinosaurs was the late Cretaceous extinction.  Furthermore, there are many, many layers of sediment between each extinction event.  So the question: why would this particular extinction event signify the flood?  Why not the most recent one?  Also, isn't it generally thought by young earth creationists that the ENTIRE geologic column represents the flood deposits?  Clarey does not mention this at all in his column.

Part of the interpretation hinges on the discovery of fossil cells, which are explained by an extremely rapid burial, an explanation that Clarey doesn't buy.

Clarey then received a critique from a biblical scholar, Brent Landau, as Medrano writes: 

If you’re not persuaded by the secular community, take it from the religious community. Brent Landau, a biblical scholar from the University of Texas at Austin, told Newsweek that Clarey is “espousing a form of religiously motivated pseudoscience, and a relatively unsophisticated one at that.”

Landau explained that Young Earth Creationists arrive at the idea that the planet is only 10,000 years old through methods like adding up the ages of people written about in the Book of Genesis, and that there’s no need for religious scholars to take that kind of evidence more seriously than the “vast amount of scientific data” pointing to the Earth being around 4.6 billion years old.

“Notice that he links the destruction in Antarctica to the Flood, but insists that the scientists’ date for this catastrophe of 280 million years ago must be incorrect,” Landau wrote to Newsweek over email.

As Carol Hill pointed out, there simply isn't any defensible evidence for a world-wide flood. Even if the fossilized trees were entombed very rapidly, there are many other natural formations that show clear signs of slow deposition. You simply cannot extrapolate one localized area to the entire world, yet this what young-earth creationists continually do.

Discovery of Chinese Burial Ground: The Nephilim Are Among Us!

Science Alert (among other outlets) is reporting a news story about a discovery in Shandong Province of a 5,000 year-old graveyard of individuals that are tall, relative to the people currently living in the area.  Peter Dockrill writes:

Archaeologists in China have made a stunning discovery, finding graves bearing the ancient remains of a 'giant' people buried approximately 5,000 year ago.

The bones, uncovered during an excavation in Shandong Province in south-east China, reveal at least one male individual who would have reached 1.9 metres (6 ft, 3 in) in height, along with others measuring 1.8 metres (5 ft, 11 in) tall – making them giants in their time who would have towered over their neolithic contemporaries.

The current residents of the area are the Han Chinese, who are, on average 5'7". There have been numerous migration waves out of steppic Asia over the last ten or so thousand years, so it is not out of the question that one of these groups would have undergone genetic drift if genes for increased height took hold.  So, is this unusual?  Yes.

But then, Breaking Israeli News got a hold of the story.

Here is the headline: Discovery of Biblical 'Nephilim' Remains Opens Questions Over Giants' Roles in End of Days

Here is the first paragraph:

Archaeologists have discovered a collection of 5,000-year old graves in China that contain remarkably tall skeletons, a description strongly reminiscent of the Biblical Nephilim who are believed to also play a significant role in the Final Battle on Mount Zion at the End of Days.

Throughout Eastern China in the Jiaojia village, archaeologists have been excavating the ruins of houses, graves, and sacrificial pits, unearthing more than 200 graves. The evidence of their discovery leads the experts to believe that the males in the village averaged a height of six feet, three inches.

First off, they don't even get their facts straight.  They didn't "average" 6'3".  There was one individual that may have been that tall.  Second, how can the village of Jiaojia be "throughout Eastern [sic] China?"  It is throughout eastern China or it is in the village, but not both.  Then there is this:

The skeletons found in China are consistent with the giants found in the Biblical narrative who were remarkably tall but still able to breed with human women. This is precisely the role Nephilim played in the beginning of the Bible preceding the story of the flood in the time of Noah. The text implies an unnatural sexual relationship between the Nephilim and human women.

The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. Genesis 6:4

According to the text, Nephilim survived the flood and later reappeared in the Land of Israel. When the spies were sent to scout out the land, they were met by Nephilim who were so large that they deeply intimidated the Children of Israel.

First off, no they are not consistent with the size of the Nephilim, unless my son Marcus is a Nephilim also. It is not unheard of, or even necessarily that unusual for people to be that tall.  It is estimated that the Lake Turkana skeleton of the 1.3 million year-old adolescent was close to six feet tall. 

The passages involving the Nephilim are terribly confused in the Bible.  First off, they are mentioned before the flood as being sort of demigods, which God then wipes out in the flood. The scripture is very clear in Genesis 6:

¹⁸But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. ¹⁹You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. ²⁰Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. ²¹You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”

²²Noah did everything just as God commanded him. [NIV]

So, no, they couldn't have survived the flood.  Not unless God meant “you, your sons and their wives and, uh, oh, these evil people over here that I am going to hold onto for now.”  The contradictions are stark.  Either God wiped out the evil people in the flood or he didn't.  If he didn't, why did he say that he had?  If he didn't, what was the purpose of the flood?

Now, one might argue that the word “nephilim” simply means ‘very large person,’ but the context from Genesis 6 is clear: these were the offspring of the daughters of men and the sons of God (upper case).  Further, the passage in Numbers 13 reads: “We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim.”  This passage indicates clearly that the Nephilim are a distinct group of individuals and that the term is not a simple description of size.

Now one might argue that they were not part of the flood narrative at all.  As Carol Hill notes, there is no evidence of a world-wide flood. It is possible that Joshua and his spies were simply mistaken about what they saw and that other people groups who were not affected by a more localized flood in the Mesopotamian hydrological basin were in the general area.  Given the specificity of the Genesis narrative, this might be a stretch, though. 

It is difficult to not see the set of passages in Genesis as being within some sort of mythological context.  Unfortunately, the hyperbolic prose from Breaking Israeli News is not atypical of much young earth creationist thought and would not be out of place on the Answers in Genesis web site. 

Pope Francis: Big Bang and Evolution are True

The Toowoomba Chronicle is reporting a story out of the Vatican that Pope Francis has declared evolution and the big bang to be scientifically accurate and not threats to faith.  Andrew Withnall writes:

THE theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not "a magician with a magic wand", Pope Francis has declared.

Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the "pseudo theories" of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator - arguing instead that they "require it".

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said.

"The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

"Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve."

This follows a pattern in recent years of the Popes accepting evolution that goes all the way back to Pope John XXIII.  I am quite sure that if the Hammish one gets wind of this, he will denounce it, forthwith. 

Henry Lee Poe On Why Young Earth Creationism is Not Biblically Supportable

Last year Henry Lee Poe wrote a paper for the American Scientific Affiliation publication Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith called The English Bible and The days of creation: When traditional conflicts with text.  In it, he notes that, while “enormous energy” has been spent on how the Hebrew word yom should be translated, this misses another very important point: the historical addition of the definite article “The” to the opening passages of Genesis. He writes:

In the Hebrew text of Genesis, the days of creation occur sequentially, but not necessarily as consecutive days. January 1 and February 1 come sequentially, but not consecutively because other days intervene between the two days. It is even possible that the fourth day is intentionally placed out of order chronologically. Instead of describing the first act of creation as happening on “the first day,” Genesis states that it happened “one day.” The action does not occur on the first day. It happens one day. A cardinal rather than an ordinal numeral is used.

He uses an example of this to illustrate why this is so important for understanding the creation story in Genesis:

One day I was born.
A second day I started preaching.
A third day I started being married to Mary Anne
Whitten.
A fourth day I started being a father to Rebecca
and then to Mary Ellen.
A fifth day I started living in Minnesota.
The sixth day I started working at Union.
The seventh day I die.

The second part of the article is a fascinating study in how the definite article “The” got into the passages in the first place, showing up in the Wycliffe Bible, in 1394.

Given this, he argues, that the text allows, and even supports vast periods of time for the creation process, in direct contradiction to the young earth view.  It certainly does not support one week of 24-hour days. 

Stormy Seas For Darren Aronovsky and "Noah"

Somehow I missed this.  Darren Aronovsky is directing a big-budget movie adaptation of Genesis 6-9 and is running into difficulties with the studio and his audiences.  Amanda Taylor of The Deseret News reports:

Remakes are difficult enough, but when you're creating a film based on a story from the Bible that happened eons ago, the challenges increase.

Director Darren Aronofsky is creating a blockbuster version of the epic tale of Noah and his ark. Of all the problems that have arisen, the latest seems to be a clash between Paramount and the director over audience reactions. The studio has asked Aranofsky to make some changes, but he doesn't want to budge on his vision, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

An anonymous source told THR, "Darren is not made for studio films. He's very dismissive. He doesn't care about (Paramount's) opinion."

The specifics about the film remain unclear, but reactions from Jewish, Christian and general audiences are reportedly "troubling" enough for Paramount to request some alterations.

Brian Godawa, a Hollywood screenwriter referred to in the story, is extraordinarily critical of the screenplay, and writes in his movie blog:

Though God has not spoken to men or angels for a long time, Noah is haunted by recurring dreams of a rainstorm and flood that he surmises is God’s judgment on man because as Noah says, “At our hand, all he created is dying.” The trees, the animals, and the environment. “If we change, if we work to save it, perhaps he will too [save us].” Or as grandfather Methuselah reiterates, “We have destroyed this world, so we ourselves will be destroyed. Justice.” Oh, and I almost forgot, they kill people too, but it’s not really as important. In another place, “We have murdered each other. We raped the world. The Creator has judged us.” The notion of human evil is more of an afterthought or symptom of the bigger environmental concern of the great tree hugger in the sky.

Although it might reasonably be assumed that these sort of actions on the part of the humans at the time would constitute "evil," that is clearly not the primary focus of God's anger in the Genesis story.Godawa writes as much in his article, which is smack on the money in many ways.  The film is supposed to be out March 28 of next year.  It cannot possibly be as bad as the John Voight, Mary Steenburgen, "Noah's Ark" miniseries that was put out by Robert Halmi, Sr. fourteen years ago. 

In the Spirit of Kent Hovind...

A reader sent me a link to this story about a man who is daring anyone to "challenge the literal interpretation of Genesis in court." Eric Pfeiffer of Yahoo News writes:

And for a man wanting to debate the very nature of human existence, Joseph Mastropaolo is taking a decidedly happy-go-lucky approach, saying he hopes the contest will improve future discussions on both sides of the argument.

"The evolutionists thereafter could read that transcript and make their case a bit stronger on the next one they contend against and we can do the same," Mastropaolo told the Guardian. "We can read the transcript and not have to go through the same process over and over and over again without any let up, without any resolution."

Mastropaolo’s plan is to put $10,000 of his own money into an escrow account. His debate opponent would be asked to do the same. They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates. Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be “scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated."

Although the trial would have no legal standing, Mastropaolo wants there to be a judge that would adjudicate matters and award the $10,000 to the winner of the trial. I am curious to see if anyone will step up. This is not so unlike the proposition that Kent Hovind put forth in the 1990s, except that Hovind defined the opposing side in such a way that the only person who could have marshalled the necessary evidence would have been God, Himself. That didn't stop Hovind from crowing that nobody would take up his challenge. That is, until the authorities hauled him off to jail.

Slacktivist Has an Interesting Point

Slacktivist has a post on the Genesis “Account.” He writes that it is no such thing:

An account is testimony, witnesses telling what they have seen. The speaker or writer -- the one giving the account -- does not need to be a direct witness herself. She may be a journalist or a historian compiling the testimony of others. But without some basis in such testimony from actual witnesses we haven't got what we can call an account.

When I point this out -- that the story in Genesis 1 is not an "account" -- the creation-ists get upset with me, as though I were attacking the book of Genesis. But I'm not attacking it, I'm defending it. Genesis 1 does not itself claim to be an account. It does not present itself as such and it does not willingly comply with those who would treat it as such. To read the story as it is, in the way that it presents itself, cannot be an attack. It's far more hostile to the text to declare, with no basis from the text itself, that it must be read as something it does not and cannot claim to be.

He also notes that other examples of accounts in the Bible have eye witnesses, especially the acts of Jesus, while the creation story does not. Is this semantic? Perhaps not since it goes to the heart of the “Were you there?” argument of Ken Ham's, who then states that we have God's account. In point of fact, no one was. While I have no doubt that the book of Genesis is what God handed down to Moses, in a sense, we are taking Moses' word for it.

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Pete Enns on the Creation Stories of Genesis

Pete Enns has an excellent series on the creation stories in Genesis over at BioLogos. The first of these is here. He has since expanded the series into three posts. The true value of these posts lies, of course, in that they show us how Genesis was written down and what is likely the proper way to interpret it. He writes:

The book of Genesis includes two very different creation stories. The first, “Genesis 1” runs from verse 1:1 to the middle of 2:4 (2:4a). The second, “Genesis 2,” runs from verse 2:4b to 2:25.

Beginning in the 18th century, European Old Testament scholars discussed this point in earnest. The next two centuries brought the discovery of numerous creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan. With the discovery of these creation stories, scholars could now see clear evidence to support a nonliteral reading of the Genesis texts, since each biblical story shares characteristics of different Near Eastern stories.

Pete's analyses and those before his give us a clear understanding of the role of humans and their relationship to God. This is a spiritual relationship and the entire purpose of both creation stories is to tell us that God dwells on high but that He created humans to be among them. There is no science here and those who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 that way completely miss the point.

That these and other analyses will be ignored by the leading young earth creation sites is a given. Such analyses are, in a sense, time-inspecific. In this construct, when the earth was created is almost irrelevant, as is how it was created. How humans appeared is only important in the sense of the fact that they are created by God to relate to him. These chapters show that they are not scientific accounts of anything.

I have often thought that this kind of analysis should be central to Sunday school teaching about how we are to relate to God such that the richness of the scripture can be felt. It might also be a way of alerting people to the scriptural vacuity of young earth creationism.

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Biblical Literalism or "Is That Really What It Says?"

Daniel Harlow wrote a paper a bit back called Creation According to Genesis: Literary Genre, Cultural Context, Theological Truth. The paper emanated from an origins symposium in 2006 at Calvin College. Initially, he asks the question of why the age of the earth, creation and evolution are such contentious subjects. His answer?

Religious and philosophical worldviews influence cultural values, which in turn shape both political policies and social behaviors. The value we place on human beings; the way we treat both the unborn and the born; the dignity we grant the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled; the stand we take against racism and sexism and other forms of social injustice; the steps we take to preserve endangered species and otherwise protect the environment; the positions we hold on stem-cell research, genetic engineering, and cloning––all these issues and others besides are connected deeply with how we think at the most basic theological level about the creation and the place of the human creature within it.

For many people, this is not a scientific issue, it is a moral one. Even when having conversations with my wife, it is not uncommon for her to say that she understands the evidence and accepts it but that the ramifications make her uncomfortable. Indeed, both the ID side and the new atheists write that "Darwinism" is dangerous. The reasons are similar but the motives are different. Both argue that it leads one away from faith.

Here, Harlow does not tackle the modern manifestations of science and their implications but, rather, the problems inherent in a literal (mis)reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. In so doing, he says something at once profoundly true and profoundly incendiary:

God did not write Genesis. He inspired ancient Israelites to write it, and they did not do so in a cultural vacuum. Following from this, if we take divine accommodation seriously, then Genesis must not be made to say anything that would have been unintelligible or irrelevant to the ancient author and his audience. Modern concerns and concepts must not be foisted anachronistically onto the biblical text. Genesis is God’s word to us, but it was not written to us.

This is the start of the "slippery slope" argument that is soundly resisted by most purveyors of the YEC model—Genesis must be read literally or else there is no barometer for how we should read scripture at all. Troy Lacey writes in AiG:

Of course, it is no surprise that Genesis 1–11 is denigrated by the secular scientific community. But these chapters are the foundational truths of the revealed Word of God, and if the foundation can be destroyed, then the rest of the Bible can also be discarded as a collection of nice stories with no practical value or moral authority.

Many OT historians and theologians have stated that a completely literal read of the creation accounts is facile at best and leads to serious misinterpretations of scripture. That this warning has been around since the time of Augustine and perhaps earlier has very little traction among the recent earth supporters. Ken Ham famously asks "were you there?" when confronted by skeptics. (Of course, neither was he but that is not the point.) Ham replies that God was and he left us his Word, which is clearly understandable. Hmmm. Just what did God leave behind, exactly? According to Daniel Harlow, it is this:

If we were to insist that the Bible gives an accurate picture of the physical cosmos, then to do so with integrity, we would have to believe that the earth is flat, immobile, and resting on pillars; that the sky is solid and has windows in it; that the sun, moon, and stars are set in the sky and move along it like light bulbs along a track; that the sun literally rises, moves, and sets; that there is an ocean of water surrounding the earth; and that beyond the waters above the sky is the very heaven of God. That’s what the Bible says.

Clearly, this is not what your average young earth creationist thinks. In fact, it is not clear to me that anyone within the western or Judeo-Christian perspective thinks this. They probably did around the time that this was written down but we simply know more now than we did then. As time progresses and our understanding of the world increases, hanging onto the literal, YEC viewpoint becomes increasingly difficult. As Conrad Hyers points out:

The literalist, instead of opening up the treasurehouse of symbolic imagination, digresses into more and more ingenious and fantastic attempts at defending literalism itself. Again and again the real issue turns out to be not belief in divine creativity but belief in a particular theory of Scripture, not faith but security. The divine word and work ought to have better handles!

Instead of a different way of interpreting scripture, it is now the only way to do so—with Gary Parker, among others, arguing that such a reading is a salvation issue. That such a one-dimensional read of the scripture has become the de rigueur one for the evangelical community is unfortunate.

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Michael Shermer Rewrites Genesis

Michael Shermer suggests that if creationists have their way and it is taught as an alternative to evolution, the standard Genesis story will have to be, shall we say, redone. Its a howl. Here is a short section:

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.

Read the whole thing. A tad irreverent but, given the violence the creationists do the scripture, I think it is warranted.