Copy of a letter I sent following on from
this sermon.
I was recently reminded of a part of your sermon on Genesis 1 that I had not discussed with you. Your reference to ANE cultures forming their conceptualisation of reality by creating stories about it (much like, and precisely as useful as Aboriginal 'dream time' myths), and this being the function of Genesis 1 (if I recall it accurately) came back to mind as I read a review of a book by Walton "The Lost World of Genesis 1" (
reviewed here, which covered this very topic. The review, I think, deals reasonbly well with Walton's failure to comprehend the biblical data on creation, but it doesn't go far enough in philosophical terms, and lets Walton get away with his framing the creation account on a materialist basis, rather than a biblical one. This is dangerous territory as it immediately gives materialism primacy in our approach to the scriptures, and fails to use the scriptures prophetically to instead unseat materialism and make the way for their repentance.
As I read it, Walton effectively makes the Genesis account a 'story' that socially realises the cosmos and our lives and relationships within it. This is reminiscent of the much more circumscribed thesis of Berger and Luckman's book 'The Social Construction of Reality', which does have some applicability to social systems, but does not, however, apply to the external objective world.
The reason I say that Walton defers to a materialist basic philosophy in his work (although as far as I know he's a creationist, of sorts), is that his approach to Genesis 1 is conceptually congruent with one of the most significant implications of the evolutionary world view: that there is no necessary connection between our sense perception, our mentalisation of sense perceptions and the external real world. This arises because the evolutionary world view has as its only essential reproductive success, everything else is an accident, including the viability of our sense perceptions and the accuracy of their mentalisation! This of course is the unavoidable 'self-defeater' of materialism.
But the biblical world view is contrary to this, and it sets a necessary connection, not just an accidental correlation, between external real world constituents, features and relationships and our sensory-mental response to them. Therefore, in a biblical world view, things in the world have existance and relationship to other things even before they are named, and our perception of them is reliable. While we use langauge to identify objects, categories (and only in the social world, might we 'create' them in Berger and Luckman's terms) and relationships, naming is only used to identify particular charcteristics of relationships for specific purposes (e.g. Adam names the animals, but doesn't find a companion); the limit of naming is that it presumes the prior existence of the things named, their external relationships and the external real world that they occur within. It has a 'concrete realist' (as opposed to an 'idealist') conception of the world because the creation account sets out that this is the actual real world and how it works; Adam's 'naming' episode is an event within and predicated upon the real external world. The naming is to pursue a much more limited objective than a grand cosmogony: identifying his companionship need.
Walton's claim might be true of pagan ANE cultures, but I don't think he's provided evidence, either biblical or historical, that these cultural practices were applied to Genesis 1. Indeed, the fact that we see an instance of naming and construction in Genesis 1, and in highly circumscribed terms against a context of external objectification, indicates, I think, that Walton's appraisal is misplaced even on textual grounds, let alone by the philosophical abyss that he leaps into.
Walton has failed to deal with the materialist-evolutionary world view which has in fact been the basis of his thinking (every thought not being conformed to Christ: [
Roms 12:2), and which sets out in question begging fashion to actually deny the biblical world view, so when taken up theologically, it sets aside the base data of theology, relying on a stance that denies that there is any theological data at all. Naturally, Walton ends up with the conclusion he does, because he starts from an assumption that only leads to that conclusion.
