The Genesis telescope

We've all heard the hoary old error that there are two versions of creation in Genesis: chapters 1 and 2.

Part of the problem we modern readers have is that the Bible was not written in 'chapters'. It was written in 'books'. Any chapter divisions are artificial, and as they say in legal documents, the headings (the chapters) do not form part of the contract.

Ignore the chapters, and the verses. They are just a location grid imposed on the organic unity of the books.

Besides, if one want's to talk about separate creation accounts in Genesis, I count three:

Genesis 1:1, 2

Genesis 1:3-2:4, and

Genesis 2:5-25.

However, not so.

This passage (Genesis 1-3) is composed like a journalist's telescope (or how I was taught to write governmental documents). It moves from the chief message to a sequence of more detailed elaboration.

Genesis 1:1, 2 is the grand revelation of God's creating.

Genesis 1:3-2:4 is about the cosmos in detail in terms, and elaborated on earth itself: the home of man-in-God's-image.

Genesis 2:4-3:8 focuses on man-in-God's-image and the relationship with God, coming to a jarring climax and crushing disruption in 3:8.

3:8 shows that this is the domain of God in fellowship with Man: God seeks Man. Man hides from God. This verse is where the idea of material evolution springs from: creation without God, without Word, wisdom, knowledge or understanding (Proverbs 3:19, 20); without purpose and without persons a creation where Man hides from God and puts Fortune and Destiny in his place (Isaiah 65:11),

The remainder of 3 is the denouement: man has rejected God. God leaves man to confront his choice, but yet acts to save (3:21).

All of this is the creation account. It tells us how and why we have arrived where we are.

Get crackin' Joe

 Letter to a theologian:

I've read a number of your pieces on the interpretation of Genesis 1, and while I largely agree with the position that you defend (for example, against the so-called 'framework hypothesis'), I cannot recall any conservative theology about Genesis 1.

God created in six days. So?

There's a vast theological richness in these short verses that we need to explicate. The fantasists (who engage in a view that Genesis presents fantasy, not fact) have no theology and can have no theology, because they claim that Genesis tells us nothing in the real world and therefore can mean nothing in the real world. But we do.

For example, the 6 days of creation are vital to our understanding of who God is, what the creation is and our relationship to both.

Above all God working in 6 days is not about duration or lighting conditions, per se, but a demonstration that he is present and active in the world he created for the congress of God and man. He is here, able to achieve his ends, working as we do, with the constraint of time that fixes the tempo of our lives. God shows that he works Real-ly in the space-time-event-material cosmos. He doesn't work in  Platonic forms, he doesn't work in symbols, or in some remote unreachable Mt Olympus, but, as Jeremiah teaches. He is hear, and he shows it

Of course, if the days are merely a 'framework' one has to wonder what they are a framework of; because if nothing related happened, then the framework suggests that God tells us what didn't happen to inform us about something unstated that did happen. Worse even than gnostics!

Lots flow from God's domain overlapping his created domain of time and space, where he demonstrates a collocation of persons: he the divine, we the contingent, but loved and in his image. Word is prior to material, minds are real and can know and be known, our from God's word to its result in the production of our world and our experience of our world in consistent rational categories is of a continuous ontology breeding a real epistemic. We can know things truly and act on that knowledge reliably.

 

When did the idea of 'evolution' start?

I mean the idea of Darwinain type from dot to Dot evolution.

The start is documented in the Bible!

It is Genesis 3:8. The very end of the creation account, the demonstration of it's termination.

Darwin's fake theory

 Notes I found while going through my old papers.

I didn't date the note or attribute it, so all I know is that I have it. I can't even remember making it, let alone photocopying it.

Nevertheless, here it is:

Darwin's theory is 'evaluative', based on observations of species (or single species -- a number of them). It is not a theory; that is, a priory explanatory but forms itself a posteriori -- observation without considering alternative explanations and without experimental or observational support of its central thesis which is derivative: derived from the evaluative component which itself is purely verbal, or literary, not scientific.

Interestingly, the engine of Darwin's theory: natural selection and chance variation is depletative. It was also identified by Edward Blythe as the engine of change in organisms: but not beneficially accumulative.

Ok, I know what it says, but what does it mean?

We seem to have one of two basic approaches to Genesis 1 in the church (although this itself is part of the whole of 1-3). Either it is said to convey information by telling us something that didn't happen. Or it is understood to be telling us what happened, but only as a mechanical curiosity.

The latter party tell us that 'days mean days', God spoke everything into existence and it was very good. And that's it. The former tell us that days aren't days, but some framework construction...but not why.

Tim Challies' part 7 of his series Basic Christianity is a case in point for the second group. Reading it prompted me to the following.

Once we know what happened, we also learn what is and how it is, who we are and of our relation to God, and who God is.

There is a theological richness in Genesis 1 that seems to be set aside by both approaches. The former, because if it didn't happen, it can't teach us anything Really (that is, in or about the real world where we live). The latter because the story ends with factual assent, just a string of facts.

In the whole sweep of scripture the creation is essential. It provides to us the identity of God: creator. This identity is God's 'credential' for our worship of him. This is God's 'worth' to us.

As God's first act in history it places the creation events in the continuity of our history. It shows an underlying continuous reality (ontologically unified) of God's word/action, the world we are in and the 'life-world' we live. It does this by God creating with decisive effect in the days that we live in. He enters into our event-space. He starts with the basic physical constituents of our STEM (space-time-event-material) world, organises them into a living space and places man in it in his image to reflect his glory in the creation through real knowledge of it and continuing his loving care of it all in communion with the creator.

So, its very, very important and fundamental to our relationship with God in all its complex flow: 'very good' to fall (Genesis 3:8 is the signal result: man hiding from the creator who is to be worshiped), then redemption, resurrection and new creation. Worship characterizes our relationship with God, and worship is what we are made for. Being in his image (and in communion with him) is how we do it (Romans 12:1 cf 1:25).

God makes the first move in relationship, of course. Not only in creating us and the domain of that relationship, but in the way he creates.

He enters into our time-space world and works within its constraints; within the same constraints we work within. And he works the same way we do. Not by 'chance and destiny' (Isaiah 65:11) but by word and wisdom (Logos, expanded in Proverbs 3:19, 20). God shows himself in our world: active with decisive effect, available, proximate to us and our domain, sharing his being with us in the domain he creates for that very purpose. This is utterly unlike the pagan fantasies of distant gods to whom man is a slave and whose origin, status and place is lost in the mists of mythic imprecision. God is here, he speaks and shows us the nature of the creation he has made for us. Hebrews 11:3 reinforces this (and eliminates materialist speculations). There is in this an intimate commutative relationship that is beyond astonishing in its implications.

God 'endorses' his creation by working directly to effect and within its constraints honouring us in that these are the constraints God put around us as he made the place where he would come to us in fellowship.

He shows that even using our constraints that he is Lord of creation and what he says happens, effortlessly.

God shows in his creative activity being done in the very terms of our experience of the creation (creating ontological and causal continuity between his Logos and our episteme) that our experience of our 'life-world' is real experience of a real place where real fellowship with God occurs.

I've touched on the next thing Genesis 1 teaches. Logos is prior to 'techne' and produces 'episteme'. Materialism has it the other way: techne (the self-crafting of material) produces episteme (knowledge) that Logos is merely a response to. Yet we do not and cannot live that way because that's not how it really is.

Lastly, we are taught what the Real is. God in direct creation by the effect of his word shows us a rational causality, shows us the categories of reality and shows us there is nothing hidden that's more real outside God's bringing together heaven and earth (that is his domain - heaven, over lapping and interpenetrating ours - earth) in the creation.

He creates the world in the terms of the world that he creates: It will be full of life. He creates the life. To figure out what the life is we don't need to drift off to a Platonic 'form' or Aristotelian 'perfection'. The perfection is the relationship with the God who is.

This world is concretely real, and Genesis 1 demonstrates its concrete reality.

The 'days' are vitally important in God's action: they are as it were, the signature of his action. To hold otherwise is like saying to the hand-builder of a car that he really only drew a sketch and some other unknown process built it. An insult. They are also important as the secure God's action in our Space Time Event Material world  This is not the some other 'world' of the pagans, where people are enslaved to the whims of mini gods (and often in a world that is at some level taken as given) a world shrouded in occulting vagueness and dislocation from the real world.

OTOH, if nothing in Genesis 1 happened. Then it teaches us nothing about the world, ourselves or God and God is pushed away to make room for materialism, a project that started in Genesis 3:8 and just like the pagan stories, the cosmos 'just is'. No author, no meaning and of no consequence of any significance to us.

Not a morality club

I came across this article on the importance of Genesis 1 in giving society its 'moral' compass (like that will save anyone).

I offered this comment:

Moral standards are indicative of people's understanding of what it is to be human...or as we say, to be truly in God's image. But also let's remember that following Jesus of Nazareth is not to join a morality club. It is it seek to conform to him, the exemplar of true humanity: true imageness of God. It is also about looking forward to being in the unalloyed presence of God forever in his new creation.

It was not published!

It seems that Christian faith has been reduced to moralising for too many people. But first the gospel. Behaviour follows redemption.

It's what I say, not what I do.

Symbolists, in their view of Genesis 1, want us to understand what God did by an account of what they claim didn't happen.

I'm still waiting to hear how their view can have any weight over here in the real world.

The Neddy Seagoon fallacy

Now, just what is, the Neddie Seagoon fallacy?

It is this:

In a Goon Show script Neddy Seagoon offers a picture of a gun as his bit to fight a battle. Nice, but useless in the real world.

It is the term given to any assertion where an image of something is said to have an effect in opposition to an actual something else.

It is similar to turning up to a gun fight with a knife.

Here's an example of its use.