12/26/06 I am reading The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers.   He says that the majority in earlier years followed the old earth and variations of the ‘gap theory.’

It seems to me that the main difficulty might be a hardening of the doctrine of inerrancy. There was something I read about the book The Battle for the Bible by Lindsell that suggests this. 

“Lindsell flatly argues that the Bible ‘does not contain error of any kind’ — that it may be absolutely trusted in all its references to history, cosmology, science and so forth.” (D.W. Congdon blog)

This makes people say things like the ‘days’ must be 24 hour days. I heard someone say this recently, it might have been Nipsqueue.

Another thing I read recently by Davis A. Young, ‘The Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race Revisited’ talks about the antiquity of the human race as well as the idea of a local flood.

‘If the data in Genesis 4 are correlated with the cultural setting of the Neolithic Revolution in the ancient Near East about 8000 to 7500 B.C., then the biblical representation of Adam as Cain’s immediate father suggests that Adam and Eve lived only about 10,000 years ago. The fossil record of anatomically modern humans, however, extends at least 100,000 years before the present. ‘

I lean toward Enn’s view (Inspiration And Incarnation: Evangelicals And The Problem Of The Old Testament), that is has to do with an enculturated Scripture, telling the story in a way the users can understand.

I was just reading an interview with the author of The Language of God, Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, who says that evolution as God’s process.

1/2/07 Yes, that book by Numbers is quite fascinating.  The 6000 year old earth was really not held to even by old theologians like Hodge and Warfield or the fathers, some of whom assumed a longer period – it is a more recent development, growing out of Adventism and the visions of Mrs. Ellen White.  The book tells the story of the whole movement.  Before I was at Dallas, I think it was 1972 or something, Morris of Whitcomb and Morris was the speaker for their big lecture series.  The Genesis Flood had has had pervasive influence.

I think the problem is really hermeneutical.  Do you insist on claiming that a day must be a 24 hour day, or that the generations listed after Adam are all there are.  If you do then you are locked in to the short cosmology.  It becomes for them an issue of inerrancy and the integrity of the bible.  I think inerrancy has been distorted in this regard.

This one guy in the Creation Science organization of the 1970s (I don’t know if it is still around) came along and advocated a model with the earth at the center of the universe (Psalm 93:1 – ‘the world also is established, that it cannot be moved’).  If you are going to insist on complete literalism it’s logical I guess.  It is a question of whether ‘the book of Nature’ is going to have any weight.

But somehow to me the bigger problem is the way this kind of treatment creates or reinforces a bifurcation between the spiritual world and the real world, as if they are two realms that have nothing to do with each other.  This is a bad thing.  We attack ‘postmodernism’ with its idea that two people can have two opposite views and both be right,’ but we reinforce a similar sort of gulf.

Another factor is that this type of circumstance causes the credibility of the leaders to be compromised.

I am leaning toward the idea that the genesis account is not a coded explanation (to be interpreted by someone like Hugh Ross or the gap theory or the day-age theory) but rather a literary construct.