Re: Descendants of Wolves, Bovines and Adam

George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Thu, 19 Nov 1998 07:54:03 -0500

Glenn R. Morton wrote:
>
> At 07:41 AM 11/18/98 -0500, George Murphy wrote:
> >
> > & no one should say that Dante's Divine Comedy is invalidated by
> >the fact that it uses the Ptolemaic model of the universe as a setting.
> > Note that I say "should": I realize you will say that the Divine Comedy
> >is "just poetry" & therefore can be neither true nor false.
> > Determining literary genre by what you feel is needed for apologetics
> >gets things backwards. The fact that you need a particular type of
> account in >order for your argument to work doesn't mean that it is that
> type of account.
>
> Hi George,
>
> Dante's comedy did not represent itself as the word of God, telling mankind
> how to be saved and starting itself off by a description of how the
> universe was created by Dante. See I didn't say what you expected. I try
> to be surprizing once in a while. :-)

Indeed. But if any kind of truth can be conveyed such poetry which makes use
of cosmological models which are now obsolete, then why not God's truth?

> I keep finding it fascinating that the Bible says 'In the Beginning God
> created the heavens and the earth" and that is the only part of Genesis
> 1-11 we believe. But if all the rest of Genesis 1-11 is
> wrong/allegory/whatever, why should I believe that Genesis 1:1 is telling
> me of a real creation by a real God?

Who are the "we" who only believe the first verse of Genesis?
The first verse of the Bible is of course _not_ a statement which can be
verified by scientific or historical study. I'm not sure that in any reasonable way
you can claim that it conforms to your criteria for truth. Gen.1:1 is a theological
statement about God's relationship with the universe in space & time. In different
ways, so is the rest of Gen.1-11.

> glenn
>
> Adam, Apes and Anthropology
> Foundation, Fall and Flood
> & lots of creation/evolution information
> http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm

-- 
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/