Glenn has certainly thought alot more about this than I have, so I just
throw out a few thoughts. In my opinion the great antiquity of Glenn's
solution is a decisive blow against it. I welcome his efforts though.
It appears that I am much more comfortable than he is with not having all
the answers to the conundrums of this business. Perhaps a quick answer to
one of Glenn's earlier questions to me is in order. He asked me about my
*bases* for believing scripture assuming that in my choice of the word
*bases* that I had more than just God. Do I for example trust the Bible in
part because of connections with historical events? The answer to that
question is yes. I think that the historical reliability of the gospel
manuscripts and the gospel accounts is very important. They reliably
communicate to me who Jesus was and what he did. Based on his word,
reliably established, I come to have the evangelical doctrine of scripture
that I have. Of course, this is humanly speaking--n the end the authority
of scripture is something that the Holy Spirit convinces me of. The
reliability of the Genesis accounts are much less central to my acceptance
of the authority of the Bible for several reasons: 1) the difficulty of
the genre--I'm not sure that any Biblical accounts are straightforward
didactic history; they all have some theological agenda that colors the
history; 2) the difficulty of dating both the Biblical account and supposed
historical correlates; 3) the tentative nature of the scientific claims; 4)
a belief that because of my creaturely (not even necessarily due to sin)
limitations that I may not be ABLE to piece together everything.
TG
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 40546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt