Re: [asa] RATE revisited

> In particular, I'd be interested in adding theological material. So far, we
> focused only on the science. Yet someone should address the RATE teams
> biblical interpretation. Their chapter on that topic contributed a detailed
> statistical analysis of verb-form usage to show that Genesis 1 had to be
> interpreted as a historical narrative and therefore literal. If any of you
> know good material to address that, please let me know.

This is the same sort of silliness as the attempts to claim that Paul
couldn't have written the Pastorals because some words appear more
often in whatever letters are attributed to Paul than in the Pastorals
and vice versa. (Exactly what Paul wrote is probably off-topic, but
the fact that this is not a very good method is.) There are two major
problems. First, it's obviously post hoc. No one has come to Genesis
1-2 with a blank slate, performed grammatical analyses, and concluded
that it points to a particular interpretation, just as the rather
selective choice of purported discrepancies, ignoring many
similarities, betrays a prior commitment to non-Pauline authorship in
the latter.

The more fundamental problem is that grammatical analysis is not the
way one determines whether a particular passage is literal or
figurative (of course, few passages will be 100% one or the other).
Instead, context and knowledge of the actual physical world (or what
the author believed about the physical world-cf. the discussion on
Seely's paper) are what actually tell us what is literal and what is
not. Figurative language seems likely to have a wider range of
grammatical usage than literal, not a more restricted usage.
Vocabulary and grammar do form a part of the context and are not
totally irrelevant, but the claim that a particular word or
grammatical element can never occur in a figurative usage is almost
certainly wrong. Many verbal aspects of Genesis 1 have few or no
direct parallels, making comparisons statistically meaningless. For
example, I've seen the claim that the phrase "evening and morning"
indicates literal days, but the only close parallel I could find in a
concordance was in one of Daniel's visions. There are plenty of
people who claim to know with absolute certainty what time interval is
described in those visions, but I don't believe them. Again, the
number of plausibly figurative passages that talk much about days,
etc., is relatively limited, so much of the vocabulary of Genesis 1 is
likely to appear more in more literal contexts than more figurative
contexts. This is equally true of "the trees clap their hands". The
passage in question, not other usages, must be the ultimate
determining factor. Similarly, a given author is likely to have
significant continuity in vocabulary, but different topics, a
difference of several years, stylistic considerations, and other
factors will produce significant differences. There are a lot of
words in my papers on fossil marine mollusks not in those on my DNA
studies on modern freshwater mollusks and vice versa.

I think that it is important to address the claims about Biblical
interpretation, as they underlie the acceptance of the bad science.
People who think that creation science is _the_ Biblical approach
aren't going to listen to the scientific data (advocates of creation
science themselves being prime examples). The comparison to
theologically "liberal" challenges to the authorship of particular
sections of Scripture would be of value in appealing to the target
audience for YEC claims of Biblical authority.

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