For Phil Till,
Thanks for the agreement and acknowledgement that this is a real issue, so many
don’t see it at all. I will start at an interesting point in your note
Phil Till wrote:
>>>However, I think you are tilting windmills, Glenn. You can't single-handedly
fix the stinking thinking of the entire human race. Why even try? "Don't
worry.....be happy." ;-)
Just kidding...I'm upset about a bunch of things, too, but I should leave more of
it with God and not worry about the things I can't change. Alas, I wish I were
doing so a whole lot better than I am!<<<<
Oh, I know I am tilting at windmills. I do it in my work and I often win. There
was a well once where every single expert system said there wouldn’t be oil.
Geochemists said the basin was too shallow and too cool, the geologists said the
rock type we were testing were always nasty rocks which produced little. But, what
I did like was the seismic signature—it was almost always indicative of oil. I
talked a company into funding this well. We drilled it, got good shows and fast
drilling rates. But the logs, when they came in said ‘no pay’. Many were saying
that we should pour cement down that well and move on. I argued for two more test
depending upon the rock cutting descriptions to make my case. The VP said he would
go with me but he really didn’t think it would work. The engineer when asked to do
the test, wanted to write a letter to someone to stop us from wasting the money,
but we went ahead did the first of the two tests. That test showed that the rocks
were tight and nasty, incapable of producing oil. Admittedly discouraged, I kept
thinking about the rapid drilling rate and the cutting descriptions. Basically I
was telling the investors to ignore the geochem experts, ignore the petrophysical
experts, ignore the engineering experts and believe and trust in me. What a lousy
position to be in! We did the second test, and got oil to flow into the test
receptacles fairly easily. This allowed me to make a case to perform a very
expensive test on the well, and it was productive. All the experts in multiple
disciplines were wrong.
Many thought I was tilting at windmills there too. Some thought I was risking my
career. Maybe I was, but that is where the fun is. One must know when to believe
experts and when not to. If the assumptions experts use are wrong, then their
conclusions will be wrong.
In this case, the expert theologians who believe that God can teach false history
but true theology are simply wrong. Logic won’t allow that. Which means that this
isn’t theology. The logy in theology is the same root as logic---theology is logic
applied to God. And when theologians engage in ill-logic, they are not doing
theology.
And if I leave it alone, who will fix it? Frankly, everything that gets done in
this world gets done by someone being persistent enough to finally bring about
change. I know I have a very small chance of success, but he, who cares.
>>>But I think there is another reason why you are fighting an un-winnable battle:
because the people you are arguing with are partly right but you aren't giving them
any credit. I get the feeling that you are set like concrete on what certain words
and phrases mean in the Bible, and you will never be willing to reconsider. (Of
course, **I'm** perfectly correct, so I am allowed to be set in concrete...) The
prime example is your argument against a Mesopotamian flood. I am surmising that
your **original** reason to come down against it is because geology denies a
mesopotamian flood could ever have been as widespread "as what the Bible
describes." But this depends entirely on your ability to have perfect
understanding of the words and phrases in the Bible where they describe the extent
of the flood.<<<
NO, it could not have been as widespread as believers in the Mesopotamian flood say
it was. My argument is not with the Biblical description but with the 20th and
21st century human interpretation of the Biblical description.
>>>Personally, I'm not sure we can be dogmatic about how widespread the Flood was
from the Bible's description. We certainly thought we could be sure in the past,
but our ealier YEC ideas have been falsified by science. Maybe the regional
mesopotamian idea is falsified, too. (I won't argue it since I'm not competent in
that topic.) But when the Bible says that all the tall mountains were covered, you
assume it means all the ones that Noah could have seen. But that is just an
assumption. The YEC's have their assumption about these mountains, too. Maybe
instead of either your or the YEC's assumption, the text meant only the highest
hills in the region where Noah's neighbors would have gone to escape a flood --
right next to the cities. The people of Mesopotamia were adapted to frequent,
localized floods and undoubtedly they had civic plans that during a flood you get
the flocks and go to the high ground. Maybe the text is simply telling us that God
took that option away from them and flooded all their tallest hills so that nobody
from Noah's city-state escaped. I can imagine that this is a perfectly valid thing
to say: that even though the Zagros mountains could be faintly seen on the
horizon, when the flood hit then the people retreated to the hills, but **all**
those people died, because **all** the tall hills were covered. Not the Zagros,
but the ones where the people went to escape the flood.<<<<
<<<<
Well, I will agree I have the personality of a wounded badger and will not engage
in political niceties easily. But let’s examine your statement about understanding
the words and phrases of the Bible. The Bible says that the ark landed on the Mtns
of Ararat. I have never heard anyone say that they are south of Iraq. They are
north of Iraq at quite an elevation. Sure, if I misunderstand where those
mountains are, then I will misunderstand where the ark must land.
But I DO KNOW THIS WITH CERTAINTY. Water flows down hill. And that means water in
the Tigris Euphrates river valley flowed towards the Persian gulf. The pressure
wave of the influx of water into the Persian gulf will travel at 5000 ft per second
(approximately a mile per second) in about 10 minutes, the pressure wave is at the
strait of Hormuz and water is flowing out of the Persian Gulf at the same rate as
it is flowing in. So, the Persian Gulf can’t fill up with water.
And that means that the ark, floating on the waters, will be propelled south.
Dick’s suggestion of people polling the ark upstream against the current is simply
physically impossible.
Now we can do what you do and redefine the mountains of Ararat to be tiny hills
which maybe that is what happened, but then since we all know that the truly dead
don’t rise, do we have to do the same for the resurrection? Do we need to redefine
the word, 'resurrection'?
>>>>I don't see this kind of retreat from our earlier assumptions as being
accomodationalist. It is our **DUTY** to always re-assess what the words and
phrases in the Bible actually meant to the original writer. A communication means
what the writer meant it to mean, not what the reader takes it to mean. If my wife
tells me to take out the trash, then I can't tell her "well, to me that means have
a coke and watch the game." It is always the duty of the listener to expend effort
trying to understand the meaning of the speaker. Yes, it is the duty of the
speaker to try to be clear, but after he has spoken, then the listener can't shirk
his duty either. This is true of all communication, not just biblical
interpretation. Bibilical interpretation just happens to be an extreme example of
this because of the vast distances between speaker and listener.
Like it or not, it's just a fact that we don't understand all the language and
context of these early documents. We shouldn't think that we are the first people
since the 4th century BC to finally get it all right. We know that all our
predecessors in the church were mostly wrong in interpreting certain parts of the
Bible. Undoubtedly **we** don't completely understand the full mindset of the
Biblical writers, either. Apparently, God doesn't care if we are wrong on a lot of
these things. I think that this is a verifiable fact. God doesn't care enough
about what you think of the flood to make sure you get it right. Either God isn't
there, or else He is the type of God that will let you believe false things about
the flood. I'm sure it's the latter.<<<<
I would agree that we are unlikely to have gotten it right, but as I said, my
argument is with those who claim things for the flood which are observationally
falsified, yet they believe it anyway by changing the definition of what is true
about the account.
I would also ask, if God is the type who would let us beleive wrong things about
the flood, which I can test against observation, how do I know he isn't a god who
would let me beleive false things about theology? I simply don't see why God's
willingness to prevaricate or to prevaricate by omisson stops at theology's edge.
>>>>So the challenge isn't to understand how the flood could have been geologically
widespread by finding a part of the world to put it in. That's getting it
backwards. In fact, that is making the same mistake you see in others, because
that is denying the observational **facts** that we have in the mesopotamian
literature. Geology isn't the only honest, intellectual pursuit in the world, you
know. The assyriologists are probably quite good at what they do. So I think the
honest challenge is to find out whether the Bible is **false** in regard to its
statements about the extent of the flood (and hence untrustworthy in its theology,
too) or are we simply misinterpreting the words and phrases of its original
writers. (...again, I don't want to argue over the geology of the flood, so I won't
list that as an option here...). If I could beg you to consider just one thing it
would be this: please be willing to loosen up on your interpretation of the Bible
and consider that maybe we just don't understand the context of some parts of it
all that well. I agree with you that it is inerrant in teaching science, but it is
just hard to understand the language sometimes.<<<
Let me point out something that I have tried, not always successfully, to follow.
It is logic. Examine the assumptions of a logical chain of inference. If you can
believe the assumptiosn, believe the conclusion. If the assumptions are doubtful,
don’t believe the conclusion. Now, I don’t doubt that there is a flood in
Mesopotamian literature. But then in Irish literature there are stories of
leprechauns. I don’t believe the Irish got reality right so I don’t believe their
stories. Why would I believe assyriologists who tell me there was a big flood in
Mesopotamia (from the documents), when the physical evidence is lacking every bit
as much for this flood as the physical evidence is lacking for the existence of
leprechauns?
I will probably not loosen up on my pursuit of tight logical chains and good
assumptions going into those deductions. To do so, would mean a reversion to the
irrationality I engaged in as a YEC.
I will answer your Ancient near east note here because it actually fits here.
Phil Till wrote:
>>>Let me give an example how I think the ancient culture was "accomodated" in the
Biblical account yet without any compromise of scientific truth.
One Day 5 God created the sea creatures including the "great tanninim". The word
tanninim always refers in the Bible to reptiles -- either snakes or "dragons",
without exception. So Day 5 says God made great big water-dwelling reptiles. What
were they?
Those who teach ANE accomodation say that this is a reference to the Canaanite myth
of Leviathan, which was a dragon that lived in the sea and was part of the
polytheistic mythology. It is mythology found in the Bible, according to that
view.<<<<
Why is this evidence of accommodation rather than evidence that the Bible is simply
false? See, you are actually playing the game of assuming the Bible is right and
then explaining any discrepancies. This game never allows the Bible to lose or be
wrong. Why can’t another religion do the same thing and play the same game?
>>>Here is an alternative view. Many ancient cultures in addition to the ANE
cultures had myths about dragons. Why? Partly because myths percolate very
effectively around the world so that the good ones get shared and propagate
quickly. But more to the point, the whole dragon concept started because ancient
peoples were acquainted with dinosaur skeletons that could be found on or near the
surface. (I understand that in China people even made tea from the ground up dino
bones so that they could drink the "magic" of the dragons.) So the dragon myths
began in truth -- there really were these giant creatures walking the earth at one
time. The Leviathan myths were also grounded in that truth. So the ancient
Hebrews needed to know about Leviathan. Are the Canaanite myths true? Just as we
get preoccupied with evolution and other modern issues at the edges of faith and
culture, so here was an issue that they wanted answers for. Where did Leviathan
come from?
When Moses penned Gen.1, he gave them the answer. He explained that Leviathan was
not created by the primeval sea goddess to defeat the 2nd generation of gods or any
such thing as taught in the myths. Instead, the transcendant God Yahweh created
these great reptiles. This provides the theological framework that the original
audience needed to interact with Canaanites and survive as monotheists in their
culture. And yet this "accomodation" is not bad cosmology, because we know that
the dinosaurs really were living creatures and that God really did bring them into
existence as a part of all the other living creatures on Day 5.
So I don't think "accomodation" and "truth" are mutually exclusive. I don't think
God taught any bad science. <<<<
I actually like your explanation but I don’t think it is accommodation.
Accommodation is precisely teaching bad science for the greater good of teaching
true theology. If the tannin was an explaining that god created the monsters seen
in the rocks, it would be an explanation of reality, not bad science, and thus not
accommodation.
>>>I think that we need to get into the language and mind of the original audience,
and understood through their language we will see that it communicates truth at
every level, not just theological. If we don't get into their mind and language at
all, then we will read bad science into the text like the YEC's do. But if we get
only part way into their mind, then we will end up with bad accomodation. I think
the problem with accomodation is that it doesn't go far enough to see the truth;
if finds the theological answers and then declares victory and stops looking.<<<
I wouldn’t say you are an accommodationalist.
Received on Sat Jun 3 13:36:18 2006
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