RE: [asa] A parable of three investors

Iain,
 
You wrote,
 
130 years after Adam's birth, he becomes the father of (ancestor of) Seth.
It then says he went on to live another 800 years. * * * (2) So we can't
believe a 130 year old could father a child (probably not even be alive as
the commonly understood life span in those days was 40 years. So there are
gaps in the genealogy that account for the 130 years. * * * What on earth
is the significance of quoting an exact figure of 130 years? And what is
the significance of the remaining 800 years of Adam's "life"? * * * The only
option that makes any sense of the figures and what we know of lifespans is
(2).
 
 
This doesn't make sense to me. If Glenn's option (3) can't be true because
of doing injustice to the text concerning Adam's life, how does option (2)
do any better? If we must allow for gaps in the genealogies for the 130
years, because lifespans were only 40 years (in general), then what about
the 800 years that it says Adam lived after begetting Seth? The narrative
in this case goes, "And Adam's offspring lived 130 years and one of them
begat Seth, and Adam's offspring lived 800 years after the birth of Seth."
This does injustice to a literal reading of the text in a similar way to
Glenn's, only without so many thousands of generations being required.
Still, what was the point of the 130 and the 800, if not literal years of
Adam's life?
 
If "preferring the Bible to be false" means making the text speak contrary
to the clear intent of it, by proposing a concordist/accomodationist
approach, I think such a criticism applies to inserting either dozens or
thousands of generations. I agree, though, that proposing a literary
concordism, such as figure of speech, numeric symbolism, etc., doesn't
necessarily warrant the charge of "preferring the Bible to be false", at
least no more than the efforts at scientific concordism. That same
criticism is levelled by YEC against all such non-literal readings,
including Glenn's.
 
 
Jon Tandy
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Iain Strachan
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2006 4:07 PM
To: Glenn Morton
Cc: ASA
Subject: Re: [asa] A parable of three investors

On 10/28/06, Glenn Morton <glennmorton@entouch.net> wrote:

I just find it so difficult to understand why people prefer the Bible to be
false to having at least a hope that it contains some history--real history.
As I said to Iain in the discussion about Yeled in Chapter 5. Atheists too
want the Bible to be false. For us to play their game is insanity. Like
Henry or Bob

Glenn,

You are studiously ignoring the point I'm trying to make. Please make some
attempt to answer it and stop making insulting suggestions that I'd "prefer
the bible to be false". If you want Adam to be 2.5 Million years ago or
whatever then YOU are making the figures in the genealogies false (or as I
would put it, not literally true), so really this is the pot calling the
kettle black.

Let's go through the whole argument again.

130 years after Adam's birth, he becomes the father of (ancestor of) Seth.
It then says he went on to live another 800 years. How does one interpret
these figures?

(1) As literally true. Adam got to age 130 and then fathered a child and
called him Seth. This pattern leads to the 4000 BC time for the birth of
Adam.

(2) So we can't believe a 130 year old could father a child (probably not
even be alive as the commonly understood life span in those days was 40
years. So there are gaps in the genealogy that account for the 130 years.
In other words, 130 years after Adam was born, Seth was born to one of
Adam's descendents. This allows for a believable generation time. However,
it still means the timescale gives 4000 BC.

(3) 130 years after Adam was born, an unnamed descendent of Adam was the
father of another unnamed descendent, whose distant descendent was Seth. To
give a millions of years timescale, this would be a span of around 1000
generations.

Option (3) is the only one that allows the timescale to be stretched out to
the distance you want it to be. But option (3) seems ludicrous. What is
the point of indicating that 130 years after Adam's birth an unnamed
descendent had an unnamed son that several hundred generations later was
Great-great- .... (several hundred times repeated) grandfather to Seth.
What on earth is the significance of quoting an exact figure of 130 years?
And what is the significance of the remaining 800 years of Adam's "life"?

None of this (it appears to me) makes any sense if you want Adam to be
millions of years back. The only option that makes any sense of the figures
and what we know of lifespans is (2). And that puts Adam back at 4000 BC.

Furthermore, the "gap" in genealogy theory can't apply to Noah (500 when
became father of Ham Shem and Japeth). They can't be distant descendents as
they interact with Noah after the Flood (Gen 9).

Please stop ignoring my points, accusing me unfairly of "preferring the
bible to be false" and explain how you can reconcile your theories with the
data given in the genealogies?

(For my part I'm inclined to think the numbers are symbolic ( e.g. 777) and
don't correspond to actual timespans, but I'm guessing you're going to say
that means they're "false").

Iain

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Received on Mon Oct 30 12:43:11 2006