Genre, seriously now.

Bird, like most who want to engineer a heterodox view of Genesis 1 so as not to offend the rampant materialism of our time (I mean philosophical materialism: the view, world view, to borrow Bird's label, that dust is all there is), tell us that on the basis of 'genre analysis' we don't need to take the text as conveying objective information; back to impressionism.

Genre...that is the 'type' of text: is it poetry, description, narrative, and so on. Its a great escape hatch.

However, we can through some biblical light on the question. We have a poetic response to creation. It is in Psalms 8 and 19 as great examples. We also have a list of events in Numbers 7.

A quick comparison tells one which Genesis 1 is more like: the list, of course.

Bringing a modern conception of information to Genesis 1, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a structured computer file of 6 records. Each record has a record opening field, an event description field, a count field and an end of record marker.

Nothing like poetry, nothing like an impressionistic account, nothing mystical. The closed thing we have to it today is a concrete list of events.

Moreover, the grammatical signals are of historical narrative, with consecutive constructions used throughout.

Additionally, the author's driving insistence on the passage of time is remarkable. In Numbers 7 (which also, like Genesis 1 states the first day differently to the subsequent days) the announcement of the day is quite simple. In Genesis 1, it is quite elaborate, as if to make quite sure that the reader understands what 'day' means, precisely. It is counted, it is described: a 'evening and morning' type day. Not a day of indeterminate time, or a day that is detached from our everyday experience of day.

World view

So, Genesis 1 is mainly about world view!

How would we know when we are assured that the account is, at best, impressionistic? It is only about world view (and I think that notion is itself contestable: the idea of world view operates within a non-absolutist ontology that the Bible does not partake in), if it gives a world view. Now, setting aside for the moment that there is such a thing as a world view, as one in a range of options, let's think: how does the Bible give us a world view that is not as fictional as the world views of those whose world view sets the Biblical data at nought and erects a world view on that basis? Their world view is clearly wrong, but, still...its a 'world view'.

We go in circles, of course. The Bible does not present a 'world view'. It tells us how the world actually, really, and concretely is. There is no alternative that aligns with what it is. It is our god-given  duty to have our thinking conform to the Bible, not to use it to generate yet another 'world view' option!

Of course, if the Bible does not tell us how the world actually, really, concretely is; then it is hardly able to provide even a 'world view'. We only have the impressionistic picture that I've already mentioned. This does not 'refute' Darwinism (which truly is a 'world view') because it is categorically different. Darwin claims to tell us what the world is truly. But it is wrong (for lots of reasons, including human experience). This is what refutes Darwinism, and every other 'world view' that denies that we are here by the loving agency of God who brings forth from nothing by his will.

The creation account relies upon and teaches this: its detailed list of events underlines two very important things by demonstration (not mere picture painting): The personal (God) in loving relationship, is fundamental to all being, in the most profound way, and that this personal God is concretely involved in events and substance of creation: he is directly and intimately connected to its outcomes, and not remote from then due to an intervening or mediating principle that is, itself, not God (that is, not Christ, the only mediator, but some other medaitorial, impersonal principle as is proposed in darwinian evolution).

Let me tell how it is...

A lot of what I've written to discuss Pahl's views would be applicable to Bird's; but why avoid writing when writing is such fun?

Here goes:

There's an old joke, at the expense of economists that has members of three professions on a desert island with only a can of beans for food. The first two puzzle over what to do...it comes to the economist who starts by saying "let's assume we have a can opener..."

Thinking that the Genesis creation account tells us something about God and creation without actually telling us anything that really happened is similarly empty. How can telling us something that didn't happen teach us anything about what did happen? How can a 'story' of what didn't happen respond to contemporaneous (and that I'd question) ANE tales which were also of what didn't happen (even tho' this confuses theogony and cosmogony)?

The idea is nonsensical. Its a Goon Show approach ( I recal one show where Neddy Seagood thought that a picture of a gun was an adequate weapon). Just like a mountain climber setting off with a picture of a rope: no actual rope, and the picture itself not even telling what a rope could do or how it could be used....that's the divide between concrete events and an account that does not encompas concrete events being asserted to lead us to conclusions about that which it fails to reveal.

More Hegel than Hegel...and nothing like the God who is concretely involved with his creation, where it is the details that make the general, and not the other merrily Platonic way around.

Darwin does it down

The cool TE crowd love to say that evolution was God's 'method' of creation...or the creation account is a culturally situated tale to tell us that God is creator. If it is not concretely real, of course, it teaches no such thing. But atheists are also unpersuaded:
From The Australia a few days ago.

Daniel does it better

Daniel Dennet does it better, but this is more consice: a comment to an article by Bernard Salt in The Australian today:

Showing the bird!

According to Michael Bird, its not in how it reads, but in how you read it (this is called reader response theory, cooked up by one Stanley Fish):

In recent full page peaen to neo-orthodoxy (well, nothing to do with orthodoxy to my mind, so meta-orthodoxy might be a better term) in Eternity we get this:

I'll write about it later, but for the moment, let's think about Exodus 20:11, then Deuteronomy 5:32, and finally, reflect on Genesis 3:1, the serpent's words particularly.

For Bird, taking the word of God seriously means taking it not quite seriously enough and cutting it to fit the cloth of contemporary materialist ideas. Not on, as Deuteronomy 5:32 tells us, reflecting on the coupling of creation and statute in God's words in Exodus 20:11 and more emphatically in Ex 31:12-17

Now, some bright spark will tell us that God was really a Hegelian idealist when he was speaking, and was not referring to concrete acts in the actual real world, but a story about something else of which he did not reveal (as though the concrete events of creation were not in fact important to understanding God and us).

Bird courts a significant epistemological problem which he hides under the obfuscation of 'competing narrative'. Of course one cannot 'compete' against a non-truth by a factually decoupled narrative that merely paints an alternative but unsubstantiated picture; one must compete by the truth.

That's why in the army we don't use pictures of bullets, but actual real bullets.

Just not credible

Many of my Anglican friends ( I think of you, Michael Jensen) seem to want to hold two contradictory beliefs: that evolution is the proper description of the world, and that God is creator; of course with the two being divergent at every point, one of them has to give. It is always the idea of creation and its implications that gives.

Some like to think that they can proclaim a gospel split on these lines, but here's what someone outside our faith thinks:

Unger's [The Religion of the Future] view is that none of the old religions is credible any longer as regards claims about the origins of the cosmos, the nature of life, the history of humanity or the workings of the world. this is because of the findings of the modern sciences concerning the nature of the cosmos, the evolutionary realities of life and the knowledge of human evolution and archaeology acquired only in the very recent past.

Paul Monk, 'letters' Quadrant, June 2016.

Nothing in that quote points to the creator God, but away from him. Thus does the forlorn mixture of creation and evolution instantly collapse in the estimation of all but those who want to mix the two and deny the involvement of the creator in the concrete reality that he has made and described in early Genesis.

The Flood: a big 'so what'?

In a recent article I read that Greg Koukl, a US Christian talk show host, wonders what rests theologically on the extent of the flood.

Aside from the sense of the narrative and the language regarding its extent (fairly significant considerations), and the marks of the flood over the planet, there are theological issues that turn on the extent.

The flood is a counterpoint to the creation; as the creation is a total production that is 'very good' the flood is an 'unproduction' given the 'very bad' that God sees in rampant sin.

A local flood would make this literary and theological point nonsensical: the very good has become the very bad that God seeks to 'un create' at a significant level: to uncreate mankind.

This also builds the pattern of salvation: that God will and does rescue in the midst of that which rejects him, his love, and his nature (to love): despite the reaction to his love being rejected and denied (by sinful behaviour) in wanting to destroy: showing us the depth of betrayal, he acts to save, and does so. Salvation is a 'totalising' move by God and is rendered pointless by a local flood.

The big 5

On the Christianity Today site an article was run the other day on questions Christians need to face about creation.

I'll summarize:

1. Are we willing for the Bible to change our minds?

OR are we content to ride with the materialism that denies God's communication and seeks to deploy its mythology of evolution?

2. Does the timeline really matter?

OR should I deny the import of the coordinated chronology markers in the text and refer instead to a materialist dogma, noting that pagans have always sought long ages to disconnect themselves from any primary causal event.

3. Is your view a compromise to the spirit of the age?

OR does the creation account just not matter in its inspired detail?

4. Am I allowing the text to speak for itself?

OR am I retrospectively filling it with the documentary hypothesis and all this entails for its facticity?

5. Is there more to agree on that disagree on?

OR do I want to supress argument (in the good sense) so I won't have to explain how modern humanist-materialism is consistent with Adam's rejection of relationship with God?

If I get to it, I'll summarise the argument and comment over coming weeks (as I get time).

Evolution in business

In their book Competing for the Future, Hamel and Prahalad write:

Palace coups make great press copy, but the real objective is a transformation that is revolutionary in result  and evolutionary in execution.

Great! I wonder how many businesses would succeed following an evolutionary path:

• random changes that might or might not produce a useful result
• meandering adaptation, most of which are discarded by the environment,
• large numbers of which have no discernable benefit or detriment and one or two that might be good, but we won't know if they are good until other changes make them good: so energy expended into features that may not, probably won't be of ultimate benefit, and no particular end result in view...

That's evolution for you.

Hubble

A letter sent to Peter Jensen, many years ago:

-->

Dear Dr Jensen,

I would have loved to have been at the lecture by yourself and Dr Hubble. I read the report in the Herald, which while it probably was but a pale reflection of the event, nevertheless, I take indicated the lines of argument used by yourself and the other gentleman.

If you permit, I would like to 'weigh in' on your side.

Firstly, Dr Hubble's four points are very simple to deal with:

The Earth was no longer considered the centre of the heavens

Whether the earth is 'considered' to be the centre of the universe or not is beside the point. The earth is, by assumption, taken to be not the centre because the universe is assumed to be isotropic (that is the same everywhere). This is an assumption of convenience. But there is nothing in the scripture, as far as I know, that requires the earth to be geometrically centred in the universe. All we are told is that the earth was created first: big insult to the cosmological 'principles' which themselves, are mere ideas. Hubble is probably referring to the Ptolemaic astronomy taken up by the medieval church; but there is nothing scriptural about that.

The discovery of mammoth fossils proved extinctions

I don't see how this is relevant to Hubble's view. He appears to think that the Bible requires fixity and permanence of species (a misunderstanding emerging from the church's long infatuation with Aristotle). It does not. Genesis tells us that creatures reproduce 'after their kind' which is exactly what we see. This says nothing about our particular intellectual construct of 'species'. We know species emerge and sucumb to extinction; the latter of which we expect given the fall and the calamity it was for all life; bringing death to this universe. I wonder what answer Hubble had to the problem or the fact of death? What does he offer his fellow humans who face death and, in his terms, are mere arrangements of matter of no particular 'real' signifciance.

Rock sedimentation shows the planet is millions of years old rather than a few thousand

Naturally, rock sedimentation shows nothing of the sort, but sediments are interpreted on the basis of naturalistic assumptions to give this view. This approach to geology commenced in the 19th Century with geologists who intentionally put aside the history we have in the Bible on the basis of naturalism being their operating cosmogony. Of course, cosmogony derived from human assumptions (or fallen predilictions) that seeks to cut itself off from what history we have (and I take it that we have such history from the Holy Spirit in Genesis, for the very reason of providing us with the basis for a true, godly and ultimately salvific cosmogony) will be off the rails from the 'get go'. It is interesting to consider that we have examples of strata build up were we know multiple strata over tens of metres depth to have been laid down in a few hours, throwing into question the conventional view of strata as necessitating great periods of time. The examples are at the Mt St Helen's volcano explosion of the 1980s where we saw gross geological transformations occuring within seconds, hours and days. One of these was a mudflow which cut a rock canyon in a number of hours!

No credible proof has been found of the Great Flood.

It is amusing that he refers to rock sedimentation in the 'breath' before he denies evidence of the flood. Sedimentary rock is rock laid down under water. There are thousands of feet thickness of this around the world, full of water bourne and other fossils. I think this is astonishing evidence for the flood. Only the conventional (naturalist) view inserts vast periods of time between strata. There is no independent evidence for these time periods, incidently, only an elaborate circular argument, with the unspoken naturalist basis underlying it and needing rebuttal.

I applaud what you are reported as saying about Genesis, but I would go further. Much that is said about Genesis by modern theologians is said in commission of the error that the medieaval church committed. That is, it takes the lens of Greek philosophy (in practical terms, neo-platonic idealism with an admix of Stoicism) and reads the Bible through this. In Genesis this means that what God reveals as a succession of events in time (thus in obstinately anti-mythic terms) gets converted to 'ideas' about the cosmos or God's relation to the cosmos. This usually results in the vacuous claim that evolution is God's method of creation and leads to neo-gnostic 'theories' of Genesis such as the 'framework' hypothesis, 'days of revelation' and the like.

But to substitute 'ideas' for events, one has to set aside the worldview of the Bible: that concrete events in time are substantial and real, to instead utilise a species of Greek idealism, where the concrete reality is set aside or substituted by an overarching idealist fancy. This is something we must guard against with all our vigour. And it is the challenge the church has always faced: gnostics have always wanted to make the concrete non-real, or less real, than abstractions, ideas, or intellectual figments. The Bible stands squarely against this. Our salvation is real, because of real events in a real world, brought about in real time, and quite recently, in which there was a real fall which had real consequences. As soon as we reject the Bible's realism and the chronology which underpins it we walk away from the biblical 'world-view'. The very purpose of the Biblical chronology is to make sure we understand the concrete realism of the revelation: only myths rely on dateless vagueness. To toy with idealism in gnostic fashion, we join the classic 'liberals' on their Kirkegaardean slope of paganising Christ and endorsing the materialist explanation of reality.

The unhappy amalgam of 'theistic evolution' is grease on the slope. The 'hypothesis of God' in this construction is unnecessary in evolutionary terms. Occam's 'razor' would cut it out without a second thought. Its superfluousness denigrates God and his revelation. Going the other way, the notion of evolution adds nothing to our knowledge of God, but detracts from it. It is moreover contradicted by the clear words of Scripture, as I imagine you appreciate.

It surprises me that the philosophical and kerygmatic riches to be found in Genesian realism have not been tapped by Christian theologians. These have ramifications for our approaches to ontology, epistemology, ethics, soteriology and theodicy, giving to these studies a rigour, a realism and a substantialness which makes their idealistic counterparts appear to be hand-waving sophistry which help keep men bound and under subjection to evil principalities and powers. Paul on Mars Hill gives the great illustration of a scriptural realist reaching out to idealists with a gospel of concrete salvation in a concrete world given credibility by the God who saves being the creator of this world. It occurs to me that the very point of God revealing that he created in 6 definite dateable days in recent time, is to eliminate all the alternative cosmogonies by which people cut themselves off from him. We see people using their cosmology to cut themselves off from God, today, in spades: the New Age movement, the last gasps of modernist humanism (of which Hubble appears to be a devotee) and in so much theology and evangelising which unconsciously adopts pagan constructs to deny the Scripture's embarrasing discord with our contemporary paganism.

In your talk at the Engineering school, I would look forward to your tracing the revolution in thinking that the reformation brought in. True, it was tinged with elements of Grecian approaches to thinking, but Luther's great revolution was that we can think for ourselves, without 'authorities' because the Bible gave us insights into what truly is. The whole ediface of modern science is built on this. Engineering rides the wave of the success of Luther's revolution which comes from his taking the Bible's challenge, the challenge of the real world, of which the Bible tells us against the unrealism of the authoritarian idealism of his day. Everything in the modern West starts from this.

Mysteries

We are often told by theistic evolutionists, or 'head-in-sand-proto-creationists' that creation is 'a mystery'.

Here's what Jeremiah has to say about mysteries:

17:5

Thus says the Lord,
“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind
And makes flesh his ^[a]strength,
And whose heart turns away from the Lord

And 33:2,

Thus says the Lord who made ^[a]the earth, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name, call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know. ['great and mighty' is translated 'mysteries' in some versions].

Dear Seth

A recent letter to Seth Godin, of 'Seth Godin' fame.

Dear Seth,

There was an error on your post. You wrote:

"The world is not flat. Gullible actually is a word. The ice is melting. The world is not 5,000 years old. Stevie Wonder, is, unfortunately, blind."

I don't know if anyone thinks that the world is 5,000 years old, but plenty think that it is 6,000 years old. You don't clearly, along with many people, but truth is not established by vote (nor should it be silenced by opinion).

The point that you don't explore is that very long ages of 'earth life' have a long tradition stemming back to the dead hand of pagan beliefs; those who cannot locate mind as a reality in the world have to resort to great age in the hope that THAT will give mind a place. It doesn't however, because time plus material just gives us material. You will have to look elsewhere for mind.

OTOH, those who hold a short age for the world (indeed, the universe) do have a place for mind and hold that mind is the source of creative power...so the improbability of a short age disappears. Of course, once a long age is held to, conclusions will be constrained to that belief as proponents merrily question beg their way to deeper error.

One amongst many

In the film 'Superman v Batman', one of the protagonists...it might have been Lex Lother, or even Alfred (Jeremy Irons) said:

Since Darwinian evolution, we are not special, just one life form amongst many.

In the context of the indecisive good v evil of this singularly religious movie, we are dumped into the metaphysical materialism that the church fails to understand and therefore cannot bring the gospel against. The film deals clumsily with some classic topics in the philsophy of religion on the good v evil line but is hoist with its own petard; having no possible resolution, but a hopeless universe where there is no compass, and none possible; just where most Christians are as they trudge through the mire of theistic evolution, unwittingly intellectually equipped by Darwin to Dawkins.

Who's time?

From Siedentrop, Inventing the Individual, p. 54 (Penguin edition):

The Jewish sense of time was different. It was unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events. Had he not led his people to the promised land, and saved them repeatedly? The Jewish God expressed himself in time. Nothing would ever be the same as before. That was the nature of time. Is it fanciful to trace this sense back to the experiences of a nomadic people in the desert, aware that wind blowing across the sand transformed their landscape from one day to the next?

The critical idea for my purpose is in bold: The Jewish God expressed himself in time.

Today we are immersed in the Jewish concept of time and it is very difficult to step outside it and feel what a contrast it would be to pagan concepts, so we miss the importance of the chronology markers in Genesis 1: these are profoundly significant for the sense of Genesis 1 and for its implications for our understanding of creation as God's acts in time to found his relationship with his creation.

To defer to other time-concepts, or to radically set them aside with the pretence that they merge with pagan concepts is to turn one's back on the Biblical conception of time (that is, how time really works) and with it the Biblical information about creation. Creation founds worldview, another concept of 'creation' founds another world view.

Today the worldview of choice is metaphysical physicalism (even though physicalism itself cannot give rise to a metaphysic, meaning tha the metaphysic produced falls victim to post-modern accusations of (mere) narrative).

Shamans of the day

The question of time and the tempo of events often pops up in discussions about Genesis 1. Should we take seriously the timing of events, the tempo of action, that is ostensibly in the text, or should we sideline it as irrelevant?

Those who want to make room for materialist dogma and confer credibility on the idea of evolution will typically vote to sideline the timing as irrelevant.

This is a mistake. If we take our lead from Paul, all scripture is profitable...so, where is the profit in the tempo of creation.

To answer let’s look at it the other way around. Where is the detriment in denying that the tempo is in any way related to what has really happened in our time-space domain?

If the tempo is disconnected from the real world, then there are gaps in the flow of God’s relationship with us. If evolution is deferred to as describing what *really* happened, then the gaps are immense, and the very flow of creation bears no relation to reality. On these grounds it can teach nothing: it is empty, or at least entails vast stretches of emptiness where the touch of God is absent. If the one who is love is absent, what takes his place?

The vacuum gets filled pretty quickly (which is one of the motives of materialism in ousting the supernatural): not with the one who is love and acts in love, but with myths and tales of demons who are not love in action, but the reverse. These gap fillers pave the way for the shamans of the day to use the power thus given to them against us, keeping us from knowing ourselves in relation to God.

Rowan?

A friend sent me this comment on Rowan's article:

1. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.”

“And Satan said to the woman, “Has God indeed said,…”

Coincidence or what?

2. Rowan Kemp said, “was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden?... but maybe they did not 
occur precisely as they are described to us.”

However, the Spirit of God says, “And they HEARD the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I HEARD your voice in the garden”

The scientific explanation? Two possibilities: a. It never happened the way Satan's,  I mean, Rowan’s thought bubble said it did, or b. The forbidden fruit was actually psilocybin fungi and Adam and Eve (or maybe it really was Steve!) just hallucinated it all. Why not?

3. “What Peter has helpfully done is show how there is space within the (ultimately authoritative) Scriptures themselves for the integration of science and God’s revealed truth.”

Yes, yes, of course…but only after science, so-called, has first managed to salvage as much as it could for its valuable contribution.

We're now officially **cool**

As we approach CMS Summer School Season, I was browsing past articles on this venerable Sydney tradition, and came to a piece by Rowan Kemp.

He gushes for Peter in this piece, and distressingly, his general comments betray some huge lacunae in the education of Christians. That questions of the relation of the word of God to the world could elude a paid Christian for so long are shown in this paragraph:

Bible-honouring Christians can feel boxed in. If I embrace science and its findings I’m sometimes made to feel I’m betraying Christian belief in creation and respect for God’s Word. On another front if I suggest that there is intrinsic value in the arts, science, culture or work I run the risk of being told I’ve inappropriately elevated the merely temporal—the only thing of real value is evangelism and ministry.

 What?

This was not covered in Old Testament 1? Surely!!

But worse is to come:

Moreover, careful attention to the detail and nature of these chapters shows that we are not obliged to adopt a literal ‘six days’ or ‘young earth’ position in order to be faithful to Scripture. As Peter Jensen observed these opening chapters contain hints within them that suggest God is revealing truths selectively and sometimes symbolically. We’re not told everything that is going on everywhere: the old question of from where did Cain find a wife? Maybe there were other humans around—the text does not preclude it. Sometimes it seems the truth is being communicated to us in ‘parable-like’ form: was the LORD really ‘walking’ through the garden? Maybe the communication of truth in these chapters is like Jesus’ parables or the prophet Nathan’s parable to King David: it’s true, it concerns real events, but maybe they did not occur precisely as they are described to us.

 The damage done in this passage to the Biblical doctrine of creation is lived out every time a paid Christian does similar homage to the dominating materialism of our day: that is, God is, in effect, within the 'creation' and not the external author. This occurs because what really happened at creation is left to materialism: modern evolution is touted as the real 'creation' account. After all, if Genesis is not real events temporally located, then it is about nothing and can teach nothing, because its references are void. The vanity of this type of exegesis is astounding.

Careful attention to detail in Genesis 1 indicates that we are being provided a summary of events, but of events; actual real space-time events delineated by the repeated cross-referencing temporal references: I wonder how more clearly could an author communicate the passage and pace of time.

The most amusing comment is on Cain's wife. Of course there were other humans. The text does not merely preclude it; it states it: Genesis 5:4 does the job. I also refer to an article on the topic.

However, the greatest mash up is the 'parable-like' form. We have a word for this: metaphor!

At base, the escape hatch for materialism is in the philosophical idealism that allows a reality to be real in some way that is not temporally apparent. This is pagan nonsense. We need to take our philosophical bearings from the concrete realism of the Bible, with the compass being provided in the creation account as the starting point for our understanding of who God is; who we are; what the world is; and how it all relates together.

Nature...where it all starts

Quote from an article in Quadrant, quoting Camille Paglia:

Camille wrote her PhD at Yale, supervised by Harold Bloom, and in 1990 published Sexual Personae, which begins: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem.

TE-ers fall into the Paglia's observation: God from nature; nature first, nature sets the ground rules.

But, we look at Genesis 1, and we see, no, 'tis the other way; God sets the ground rules in his identity and action.

When we reject the face reading of Genesis 1, we end up party to Paglia's world; it is not the world of Christ our maker!

Story

Letter I sent to 'A Just Cause'

Dear Scott

I am studying your booklet Boundless Plains to Share? with my home group and must thank you for your work in this topic.

It was all going smoothly until I came to the phrase 'the creation stories'. I wondered what this could imply. Generally the word 'story' is used in lieu of the word 'account' to impute some lack of factuality in the subject text. If this is the case here, then the usage undoes all the good that your book seeks.

If the creation passage (I  disagree that there are two accounts) is not directly connected to the world we inhabit, and is not sufficiently explanatory of events to allow us to invest in it, then we must go elsewhere to develop an understanding and appreciation of our world, ourselves and, indeed, of who God is and what he represents to us.

Indeed, if the account is best described as a 'story' then it is not obvious that it provides a basis for anything in fact because what is finally real is elsewhere.

The basis in fact would only come from what is really factual, and this, if the creation account is set aside, defaults to the dogma of organic evolution.

A basic premise of this dogma is that the world is constituted as a field of competition and destruction (and this is basic to the world and not the result of the fall) where inevitably the strong will outdo the weak. This puts the 'real' world in direct conflict with how God calls us to think and act.

Of course, in evolutionary terms, those who seek our help (or access to our wealth and freedom) are weaker than us and it is our vital duty to outdo them; because reality is that way, and the strong will do this. There is a grand determinism that is inescapable.

Better, I think, to take the scriptures as directly congruent with the world and factually related to it, setting aside materialist stories as pagan obfuscation.

The dogma also takes us back to the ideas of eugenics and to race selection doctrine: that some people and some 'races' are inferior. Arguably those 'races' that have produced repellent cultures are inferior to those that have produced attractive cultures, and it can only be 'right' (that is, congruent with how things really are) to oppose benefiting them.

On the other hand, of course, maybe your use of the word 'story' in connection with God's revelation of the actual setting between him and us is not meant to diminish the content of the Genesis account and detach it from the world we live in.



If so, it seems odd that you would use the deprecating term 'story' when if there is a 'story' it is the materialist story of evolution that sets us in a pagan world of a random and depersonalised universe.