Adam in the balance

A friend asked me to comment on this article:

http://theaquilareport.com/al-mohlers-literal-six-day-young-earth-creationism-and-the-state-of-the-question/

On thing I'd note at the outset is that Mohler is just a popularizer. If Evans is attempting to mount a takedown of young-earth creationism, he will have to train his guns against its most sophisticated exponents. 

It is not only possible but desirable that advocates of LSDYEC, Day-Agers, Framework proponents, and Analogical Day advocates join together in their common affirmation of the full authority of Scripture and discuss the merits and problems of the various positions—without anathemas and ad hominem arguments...

A problem with that recommendation Evans is oblivious to his own anathemas and ad hominem arguments. His article betrays a bristling animosity towards Mohler and other "fundamentalists." He needs to back up a few paces and cultivate the critical detachment to recognize in himself what he is so quick to fault in his opponents.

Although many young-earth creationists are "fundamentalists," Evans uses the term very loosely. For instance, it's my impression that many confessional Lutherans are young-earth creationists. Does that make Lutherans "fundamentalists"? Likewise, were the Westminster Divines "fundamentalists"? 

In his detailed study of Christian interpretation of the days of creation, Robert W. A. Letham concludes,

Before the Westminster Assembly there were a variety of interpretations of Genesis 1 and its days.  If the text of Genesis is so clear-cut, why did the church down through the centuries not see it that way? 

Well, that's a very broad question. For example, some church fathers espoused instantaneous creation. But isn't that a preconception they were bringing to the text of Genesis rather than a conclusion they were deriving from the text of Genesis? 

As I have argued elsewhere, a consistently intra-biblical hermeneutic is impossible—the biblical writers wrote to people who were expected to bring their knowledge of nature, history, geography, language, and the human condition to bear on the interpretive process.  Or, to phrase it more concretely, they wrote to people who knew what the city of Damascus, acacia trees, the Euphrates River, and human sexuality were, and they assumed that such knowledge would be utilized in interpretation.  At issue here is the crucial question of whether extrabiblical knowledge is relevant to the interpretation of Scripture, and the historic Christian tradition has answered this question with a resounding “Yes.”

There's some truth to that principle. However, there are two basic problems with Evans' appeal to that principle:

i) As we shall see, Evans (as well as Walton) merely pays lip-service to what ancient Near Easterners could know about their world. Evans doesn't make a good faith effort to project himself into the situation of an ancient Near Easterner. 

ii) There is also a bait-and-switch, as Evans substitutes the historical horizon of a modern reader for the historical horizon of the original audience. Take his appeal to "astrophysics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology." But it would be grossly anachronistic to bring those considerations to bear on the interpretation of Gen 1, for that's far removed from what the original audience had in mind. Those were not the operating assumptions of the narrator's target audience. 

Second, Mohler vastly underestimates the problems that ANE comparative studies pose for his LSDYEC position.  The problem is not simply that there are some superficial similarities between the creation narratives in the Babylonian Enuma Elish text and Genesis 1.  Rather, both these texts (and many others) assume a cosmology which was quite coherent to the ancients but which we do not (indeed cannot) share.  Wheaton College Old Testament scholar John Walton phrases the matter well:

So what were the cultural ideas behind Genesis 1?  Our first proposition is that Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology.  That is, it does not attempt to describe cosmology in modern terms or address modern questions.  The Israelites received no revelation to update or modify their “scientific” understanding of the cosmos.  They did not know that the stars were suns; they did not know that the earth was spherical and moving through space; they did not know that the sun was much further away than the moon, or even further than the birds flying in the air.  The believe that the sky was material (not vaporous), solid enough to support the residence of deity as well as to hold back waters.  In these ways, and many others, they thought about the cosmos in much the same way that anyone in the ancient world thought, and not at all like anyone thinks today.  And God did not think it important to revise their thinking (John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate [IVP, 2009], p. 14). 

In other words, Dr. Mohler doesn’t interpret Genesis 1 in a consistently literal way, and neither does anybody else today as far as I can tell.

i) It's revealing to see Evans quote this passage with evident approval. For Walton's position surrenders the inerrancy of Gen 1. On Walton's view, Gen 1 asserts a false conception of the world. That's because the narrator was scientifically ignorant. He didn't know any better. Likewise, that's the position of Paul Seely and Peter Enns–among others. So Evans is tacitly admitting that he must sacrifice the inspiration of Scripture to defend his alternative. 

ii) Walton is trying to ride two horses. On the one hand, he attributes the depiction of Gen 1 to antiquated cosmological conceptions. On the other hand, he promotes a cosmic temple interpretation. But if the narrator is depicting the world in terms which foreshadow the tabernacle, then isn't that the controlling paradigm rather than ancient cosmology?

iii) Did ancient Israelites not know that the sun and moon were farther away than flying birds? What that claim reveals is not how unobservant ancient Near Easterners were, but how unobservant Walton and Evans are. If you spend much time watching birds in flight, or gazing at the sky,  you'll notice birds flying across the face of the sun. Likewise, at night, you can see bats or nocturnal birds fly across the face of a full moon. Therefore, ancient Near Easterners were certainly in a position to gauge relative distances in that regard. Walton and Evans aren't making a serious effort to see the world through the eyes of an ancient Near Eastern observer. Rather, they make unexamined and untested assumptions about the original audience. Walton and Evans are clearly out of touch with the natural world. 

iv) To take another example, if ancient Near Easterners thought the earth was flat, how did they account for seasonable variations in the angular distance of the sun between sunrise and sunset? 

v) To take another example, wasn't Tiamat a sea goddess? Isn't she a personification of the sea? If so, wasn't she made of salt water? If so, how could a metal dome be constructed from her body? 

Likewise, when ancient Near Easterners looked up at the sky, did they see the naked body of a giant woman overhead? 

vi) You can see rain issuing from rainclouds. When you see rainclouds on the horizon, you can often see clear sky above the clouds. So the rain isn't coming through sluicegates in the sky. 

Likewise, if ancient Near Easterners thought the world was like a fish tank, how did rain water drain away? Wouldn't see level continue to rise after each rain? 

Did ancient Near Easterners really think the "solid dome" of the sky rested on mountain ranges? From certain vantagepoints, it might look that way if you lived in the same place all your life. But, of course, some ancient Near Easterners travelled widely on trade routes. Consider the far-flung travel itinerary of Abraham. Many ancient Near Easterners knew as a matter of experience that the world continued on the other side of the mountain range. It didn't come to an abrupt end at the edge of the mountains. 

Third, as we have seen, Mohler contends that literal six-day creationism necessitates a young earth.  But this is simply not the case—there are those who with perfect consistency hold to LSD and an old earth—unless one also insists that the genealogies in Genesis be interpreted as precise, complete, and sequential (i.e., with no gaps or symbolic numbers).  As William Henry Green, a splendid Old Testament scholar of Old Princeton with a high view of Scripture, demonstrated, such a literalistic reading of the genealogies involves one in many insuperable difficulties. He rightly concluded that the genealogies were simply not intended to provide the basis for a scientific chronology and that interpretations based on such an erroneous expectation were unsound (see William Henry Green, “Primeval Chronology,” Bibliotheca Sacra(April 1890): 285-303. 

That's true as far as it goes. But gaps in the genealogies won't buy millions or billions of extra years. 

Furthermore, Mohler does not shy away from suggesting that those who adopt non-literal interpretations of Genesis 1 do so in order to accommodate Scripture to modern science and the spirit of the age.  But it is at least interesting to note that a good deal of impetus toward the Framework Hypothesis has come from intra-textual exegesis of Genesis 1.  For example, it has long been noted that there is correspondence between days 1-3 and days 4-6 as days of separation followed by days of filling.  Moreover, Meredith Kline’s well-known argument for the Framework Hypothesis is basically an intra-textual argument (see Meredith G. Kline, “Because It Had Not Rained,” WTJ 20 (1958): 146-157).

i) To begin with, the chronological interpretation can easily accommodate that observation. God creates the habitats before he creates the inhabitants. That's perfectly consistent with a chronological sequence.

ii) The framework hypothesis cuts against the aural grain of the text. The text is directed at the ear rather than the eye. Most members of the target audience would hear the text rather than read the text. Hearing is linear, sequential. 

By contrast, proponents of the framework hypothesis rearrange the events to form a vertical pattern of matching pairs rather than a horizontal pattern of successive installments. They even include graphic depictions, in which the days are placed side-by-side in two columns. But that's not how the original audience processed the text. So I find the framework hypothesis psycholinguistically implausible. 

John Walton has begun to address this problem with his interpretation of Genesis 1 as an account of functional rather than material origins, and of the cosmos as God’s temple (see Walton, Lost World of Genesis One, pp. 110-111).

But as many critics have pointed out, it's arbitrary to insist that Gen 1 is only concerned with functionality rather than material origins. Why assume ancient Near Easterners operated with that false dichotomy? 

In fact, the evidence for an old earth is insistent and overwhelming.  It comes to us from astrophysics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, and so on, and simplistic postmodernish appeals to worldview are not sufficient to discount this.

i) One problem with that appeal is that Evans needs to disambiguate the ostensible evidence for an old earth from the ostensible evidence for human evolution. To some degree, the ostensible evidence is intertwined. Inasmuch as both young-earth and old-earth creationists must challenge the scientific establishment, both groups are in the same boat, even if they occupy different–sometimes overlapping–sections.

ii) A basic problem with dating the origin of the universe is that we use natural processes to clock natural processes. If certain cyclical or periodic processes are already in place, then (assuming a uniform rate) we can use these to clock other processes. But when dealing with the absolute origin of the universe, those processes are not a given, for those processes are the result of God's creative fiats. You can use a watch to clock the passage of time if you have a watch, but if the watch is under construction, you can't use the watch to clock itself. 

iii) In addition, if creation ex nihilo is true, then there's no natural starting-point. God could make the world at any stage in the process. So you can't just run the clock backwards in time, for you don't know when God set the clock. 

iv) The measurement of time presupposes a temporal metric. but that, in turn, raises the question of whether time itself has an intrinsic metric, or whether any metric we use will be extrinsic to time. And since you have to use a temporal metric to measure time, you can't derive the temporal metric from time.  Empirical evidence won't settle that question, for the evidence presuppose an operating metric. As one philosopher explains, summarizing the argument of a great physicist and mathematician:

The second half of Poincaré’s essay ‘The measure of time’ is the more famous because of its connection with special relativity. But I will concentrate here on the first half, where Poincaré begins with the problem that we do not and cannot have a direct intuition of the equality of successive time intervals (equality of duration of successive processes). This is not a psychological point. Two successive periods of a clock cannot be compared by placing them temporally side by side, that is why direct perception can’t verify whether they lasted equally long, Bas Van Fraassen, Scientific Representation (Oxford 2008), 130. 

In the case of two sticks we can check to see whether they are equally long (at a given time) by placing them side by side; that is we can check spatial congruence (at that time) by an operation that effects spatial coincidence (at that time). We can check whether two clocks run in synchrony during a certain interval if we place them in spatial coincidence. These procedures do not suffice for checking whether two sticks distant from each other in time or space are of equal length, nor whether distant clocks are running in tandem, nor whether a clock’s rate in one time interval is the same as some clock’s rate in a disjoint time interval. But in physics, criteria for spatial and temporal congruence are needed. Poincaré is concentrating on this need, ibid. 130-31. 

What measures duration is a clock, and physics needs a type or class of processes that will play the role of standard clocks. What type or class to choose? One answer might be: the ones that really measure time, that is, mark out equal intervals for processes that really take equally long. While certain philosophers or scientists might count his demand as intelligible, it must be admitted that there could be no experimental test to check on it. We cannot compare two successive processes with respect to duration except with a clock; but clocks present successive processes that are meant to be equal in duration. This is similar to Mach’s point about thermometry: whether the melting of ice always happens at the same temperature, or the volume of a substance expands in proportion to temperature increase, can be checked only with something functioning as a thermometer–and thus cannot be ascertained in order to check whether thermometers are ‘mirroring’ temperature, ibid. 131. 

Poincaré wishes to reveal by these examples two problems that arise in developing a measurement procedure for duration. The first is the initial one, illustrated with the pendulum: we cannot place successive processes side by side so as to check whether their endpoints coincide in time. So there is no independent means for checking whether successive stages of a single process are of equal duration: the question makes sense only after we have accepted one such process as ‘running evenly,’ ibid. 132.

Continuing with Evans:

Or perhaps we could argue, with Bill Dembski in his 2009 book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World, that “the Fall had retroactive effects in history.” 

Why would Evans oppose mature creation but tout retrocausation? Dembski's retrocausation is designed to save appearances. How is retrocausation essentially different from an omphalism or Last Thursdayism? All these theories go behind the physical record.  

Finally, Mohler’s explanation of the apparent age of the earth as due to God’s having created it with the appearance of age raises more problems than it solves.  The problem here, in short, is that in the cosmos we see not only things in a “mature state,” but also evidence of events in the past.  It is as if God not only created Adam as a mature man, but also created him with the scars incurred during his growing up years (years which never actually happened).  Suggestions of this sort, such as the notion that God embedded fossils in the rock strata in order to create the impression of great antiquity, are unworthy of God and subversive of the doctrine of common grace.  

i) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that mature creation is deceptive, Scripture sometimes depicts God duping humans. Cf. R. Chisholm, "Does God Deceive"? BSac 155:617 (Jan 1998), 11-28. Is that "unworthy of God" according to Biblical standards?

ii) Other than Philip Henry Gosse (or P. G. Nelson), who says "God embedded fossils in the rock strata in order to create the impression of great antiquity"? Evans is conflating omphalism with young-earth creationism, but these are hardly equivalent. Has Evans actually bothered to study the most astute exponents of young-earth creationism, viz. Jay Wile, John Byl, Jason Lisle, Andrew Snelling, Steven Gollmer, Kurt Wise, Todd Wood, John Sanford, Jonathan Sarfati, Marcus Ross?

iii) But let's play along with omphalism for the sake of argument. Would that be "unworthy of God"? Take period dramas. The Western genre is a case in point. Take Pale Rider. The movie jumps right into the 19C, skipping over all of the intervening centuries. It's as if time began in the 19C. There are mountains in the background, but Pale Rider never depicts the origin of the mountains. It's as if they sprang into existence the moment before the director shouted "Lights, camera, action!" Logically speaking, Preacher had to have parents. His parents had parents. Their parents had parents. But in the movie, Preacher rides into town out of the blue, like all the other characters. 

What if the world is like a period drama? What if God wanted to make a world which was set in a particular historical context, even though that's a cosmic stageset which only came into being an instant before? Would that be "unworthy of God"? Or would that be analogous to how many human storytellers begin their stories?

iv) What about miracles like Jesus healing the man born blind (John 9)? By restoring his vision, Jesus erases the prior evidence of his congenital blindness. It now looks like he was born sighted rather than sightless. Is that deceptive? Is that unworthy of God? 

...he would do well to heed these wise words of Herman Bavinck:

It is nevertheless remarkable that not a single confession made a fixed pronouncement about the six-day continuum, and that in theology as well a variety of interpretations were allowed to exist side by side. 

Don't the Westminster Standards pronounce on the timespan? 

Just as the Copernican worldview has pressed theology  to give another and better interpretation of the sun’s “standing still” in Joshua 10...

Remember that the audience to whom Joshua was originally addressed knew nothing of Ptolemaic astronomy. That imports later models of geocentrism into a text that antedates those debates.  Josh 10 doesn't contrast geocentrism with heliocentrism. It isn't based on Greek astronomy.  The "Copernican revolution" simply stripped away an interpretive layer that postdates Josh 10 by centuries.