Re: [asa] Re: Day 7 and beyond

>
> After all, Genesis 2:1-4 says ALL the heavens and earth were already
> finished, Genesis 2:5 says God had already created every plant of the field,
> and every beast of the field in Gen 2:19. There doesn't seem to be any room
> for any new species to be created.

One YEC approach is to try to equate the kinds that are supoosedly
unchanging entities separately created in Genesis 1 with some higher
taxonomic level. This makes for fewer things to squeeze into the ark and
allows for the observed evolution of new species, etc. This effort founders
Biblically on the fact that categories as used do not equate with modern
taxonomic categories (on the one hand, conspicuous and/or familiar taxa are
recognized as different kinds at the species level; on the other hand, the
categories of Genesis 1 are much broader than typically accepted for
evolution by YECs and cut across modern taxonomic concepts-plants, swimming
things, flying things, crawling things, big land animals, people, etc.), in
addition to scientific problems such as that the ark would still be
overcrowded and that it's hard to explain a way for evolution to happen so
fast as they envision for the rediversification after the Flood.

It doesn't help when the the different "kinds" of flesh in I Cor. 15 are
invoked as proof of separate creation of "kinds". Paul's point is that you
would have grounds for complaint if you ordered a hamburger, chicken
sandwich, and filet o' fish and then couldn't tell which was which, not
anything about how they got to be that way. Also, the climax of the
passage, "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed" is not a
warning to prospective volunteers for the Corinthian nursery but rather is
an assertion that God will transform our earthly natures to heavenly ones.
To infer from the passage that God could not possibly have transformed one
earthly type to another is thus seriously astray.

On the problem of day 7 still being with us, one could invoke the lack of a
concluding "evening and morning" in Genesis 2:1-3 as evidence that it was
different from the other 6. This doesn't get around the use of the 7th day
as a model for one day a week of rest, however-if the 7th day is non-24 hour
and yet forms the model for the key aspect of the citation of 7 days in the
commands regarding the Sabbath, then the value of the commandment as proof
of a 24 hour creation day is lost. The two repetitions of the commandment
in Exodus are the only canonical passages outside of Genesis 1 that
specifically invoke the seven days of creation (as opposed to a more
allusive invocation in other passages, which do not generally support an
extreme literal chronological approach due to variations in sequence and
other details, or to 2nd Esdras-for which Luther's approach has much to
commend it, or to the reiteration of the Decalogue in Deuteronomy, which
does not mention the days of creation as a model for the sabbath).

> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"

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Received on Thu Oct 5 12:57:06 2006