Re: Special Creation

I don't have an answer to your question, but what better forum to pose
such a proposition for comment!

I really just wanted to broach a slightly different matter regarding
Eden. Remember the old Dixie joke about living most of ones (Southern)
life before discovering that "yankee" was a word all by itself?
Well, I wonder if I'm the only one hereabouts who went most of my life
without registering a possible alternate significance of the "of Eden"
part of "the garden of Eden"!
I basically thought that this was the name of a garden in a place called
Eden, a place in itself.
What I didn't tumble to is that it might alternatively describe a garden
which is a part of a larger something called Eden.
To give credit where credit is due, Dr. John Walton of Wheaton mentioned
this notion in a recent lecture having to do with the ancients' way of
understanding and describing the Creation.
He went on to fill in a picture wherein Eden is the dwelling place of
God, an adjunct of which is the garden (created and spoken of in Genesis).
George, ...or others who might know more about this than I, ...Is this a
picture common or uncommon in the understanding of OT scholars?
It certainly portrays a more mythic or allegorical picture, but
plausible as a more complete analogic image of the environs for the
Creation.
It is an appealing idea, revisiting the idea of Creation as a fecund
place, a place of planting and development and ultimately pleasure for
the One who brought it into being.
JimA

David Opderbeck wrote:

>I'd like to ask a question that will probably sound completely wacky.
>I hope I can be free to ask it without folks thinking I'm advocating
>some kind of nutty view, or that I read too much science fiction
>(which, BTW, I do). Ok, so here it is: is there any literature that
>considers the possibility that the Fall and/or the Flood were
>cross-dimensional events? I've read (or tried to read) Schroeder's
>book about Genesis and time, but I'm thinking about something a bit
>more.
>
>What if something like the multiverse theory is true? Could the
>Garden exist in a parallell universe, with Adam and Eve being expelled
>across dimensions into a much older Earth? Adam and Eve are expelled
>from the Garden and a cherubim and a "flaming sword" are placed there
>to prevent them from accessing the tree of life (Gen. 3:24). The
>"tree of life" appears again in the New Jerusalem in Rev. 22. Could
>this suggest physical locations that are not currently accessible to
>us in ordinary space?
>
>And/or could Noah have experienced some kind of relative time aboard
>the ark, such that the Flood was ~5MYA but Noah experienced it as a
>year? Could the ark have been travelling through "Planck space"?
>
>Please -- I really am a rational guy, and I find all these discussions
>fascinating and troubling at the same time. No suggestion here that
>there's any reason to believe anything like the above. But maybe it's
>possible that the ongoing work in quantum physics and cosmology will
>provide options that we're not even dreaming about now?
>
>On 3/2/06, Michael Roberts <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>glen wrote
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>>There is absolutely nothing in the Plio-pleistocene that even remotely matches a flood as described by the Bible. The latest is the infilling of the Med and that actually would begin to sound a bit like the Biblical flood. IMO, there is little reason to remain literal believing in Adam and Eve if one has no flood. One might as well go allegorical/accomodationalist all the way to Genesis 12.
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>>That's your only solution Glenn, it is better than stretching genesis like an elastic band as Adam Sedwick said in 1858.
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Received on Thu Mar 2 12:50:42 2006