There are a number of views of Genesis 1 that fall into a basic conceptual approach to the text. It is this: the information contained in the passage is not factual. It does not correspond to events in the real world in either sequence or substance. However, Genesis 1 does teach that God is creator, that he is (somehow) sovereign over creation and that he has created a cosmos that is consistently well ordered, predictable and is subject to uniform causal regularities.
What is not explained by this basic view is how all this fact is derived from something that is non factual on its face!
It seems that to hold that one can draw the factual from the non-factual; denying that the material on its face conveys facts, but that somehow underneath it reveals something that it does not do on the surface, in the direct meaning of the text, is not a mark of thought, but of conjuring!
What is pretty obvious to me, is that this program requires the material to be sorted into that which has objective meaning and that which does not, not on its own grounds, but by some criterion that is private to the interpreter.
But how would we know that interpreter A, in rejecting that the direct reading of the text is factual, is able to know that other matters in the text, not directly accessible to the direct reader, are where its facticity lies? Indeed, how would we know that interpreter A has anything of value to say against interpreter B who responds to the text on its face? Or is it just that one garners credentials from the occult act of finding something beneath the text (occult here referring to 'hidden')? What is the basis either in the text or by reference to something outside the text to say that a fact can be deduced from a text which itself contains no facts?
That doesn't sound like even a rational reading of a text, let alone a spiritually responsive one!
So, lets get it straight; most modern post/neo/quasi evangelicals would say that Genesis 1 teaches us that God is creator, but does not provide any factual material, any reliable content, which communicates that! So where does the idea that God is creator come from if that creator cannot communicate the basis of the attribution to those he created in language which is the medium presumably created for communication between persons, or, if the Bible is right, is ontologically basic?
This is a particularly pointed question when most such PNQ evangelicals fall into line with the idea of evolution being thoroughly (or not quite thoroughly) explanatory of origins; an idea which in itself seems to feel no epistemological deficiency; and actively denies that personhood is basically real, but rather, that material is; personhood being a mere outworking of an assembly of material.
John Dixon, who I mentioned in my previous post might be one of these non-facts teach facts chaps. I'd ask him: by what criterion do you draw from a text whose facticity you deny, conclusions which are only validly available by reference to the very text you deny can provide them.
The decision to claim that some facts are established in the face of the rejection of their medium is arbitrary; those who espouse it don't have any substantial ground to reject the contrary view, that the fact they claim is carried only by the facts that convey it. To deny this is more than perverse, it is crazy.
