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October 3 - October 4, 2018
John Calvin, on the other hand, clearly believed that the earth was fixed: “By what means could it [the earth] maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it?”
“scientific” world-pictures than between science and religion.
Many historians of science conclude that the Galileo affair really does nothing to confirm the simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.
In each of these examples we see how the word literal can turn out to be inadequate and even misleading, since there can be different levels of literality.
It is therefore common nowadays to reserve the word literalistic for an adherence to the basic, primary meaning of a word or expression, and literal for the natural reading as intended by the author or speaker.
However, this usage of literal is not agreed by all, which often leads to confusion. We must, therefore, be careful with our use of literal.
As a general point, it is worth recalling a perceptive remark made by Henri Blocher: “Human speech rarely remains at the zero-point of plain prose, which communicates in the simplest and most direct manner, using words in their ordinary sense.”5 What Blocher means is that we all use metaphors in our ordinary conversation. How colourless life would be without them.
would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.
Were these differences simply driven by a desire on the part of the moving-earth faction to fit in with advances in science; or were they the result of intransigence and antiscientific attitudes on the part of the fixed-earth faction? Did the moving-earthers necessarily compromise the integrity and authority of Scripture?
But there is another snag with Gould’s view. We cannot keep science and Scripture completely separate, for the simple reason that the Bible talks about some of the things that science talks about. And they are very important things—like the origin of the universe and of life. They are also foundational both to science and to philosophy. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) and “God created man in his own image” (Gen. 1:27) are statements about the objective physical universe and the status of human beings, with very far-reaching implications for our
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However, saying Scripture has scientific implications does not mean that the Bible is a scientific treatise from which we can deduce Newton’s Laws, Einstein’s equations, or the chemical structure of common salt.
Indeed, one of the fascinating tasks we are encouraged to do in God’s universe is to do just that — to find out many things for ourselves. Remember, according to Genesis, it was God himself who told the first humans to name the animals: he was not going to do it for them (Gen. 2:19–20). That is very interesting, because naming things is the very essence of science (we call it taxonomy); and so it was God who started science off! It was for this kind of reason that the brilliant scientist James Clerk-Maxwell had the words of Psalm 111:2 (KJV) engraved on the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge:
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Science is constantly changing, developing, standing in need of correction, although (we trust) becoming more and more accurate. If the biblical explanation were at the level, say, of twenty-second-century science, it would likely be unintelligible to everyone, including scientists today.
He wished his meaning to be accessible to all.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about Genesis is that it is accessible to, and has a message for, everyone, whether or ...
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Indeed, Augustine (354–430) had already had the same thought a thousand years before Calvin: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said that I send to you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and the moon, for he wanted to make Christians and not mathematicians.”
Rather than scientific language, the Bible often uses what is called phenomenological language — the language of appearance. It describes what anyone can see. It talks about the sun rising just as everyone else does, including scientists, even though they know that the sun only appears to rise because of the rotation of the earth. Saying that the sun “rises” does not commit the Bible, or a scientist for that matter, to any particular model of the solar system.
of the reasons none of us would maintain a base-level literalistic interpretation of the foundations and pillars of the earth: we don’t wish to appear scientifically illiterate12 and bring the Christian message into disrepute.
The take-home message from Augustine is, rather, that, if my views on something not fundamental to the gospel, on which equally convinced Christians disagree, attract ridicule and therefore disincline my hearers to listen to anything I have to say about the Christian message, then I should be prepared to entertain the possibility that it might be my interpretation that is at fault.
It is Scripture that has the final authority, not our understanding of it.
In connection with the motion of the earth, we accept Augustine’s advice because we can now see that, although the Bible texts could be understood to support a fixed earth, there is a reasonable alternative interpretation of those texts that makes far more sense in light of our greater understanding of how the solar system operates.
Even though our interpretation relies on scientific knowledge, it does not compromise the authority of Scripture. And this is the important point. Scripture has the primary authority.
The Galileo incident teaches us that we should be humble enough to distinguish between what the Bible says and our interpretations of it. The biblical text might just be more sophisticated than we first imagined, and we might therefore be in danger of using it to support ideas that it never intended to teach.
Another lesson in a different direction, but one not often drawn, is that it was Galileo (who believed in the Bible) who was advancing a better scientific understanding of the universe. He was doing so, as we have seen, not only against the obscurantism of some churchmen, but (and first of all) against the resistance (and obscurantism) of the secular philosophers of his time, who, like the churchmen, were convinced disciples of Aristotle.
Lack of belief in God is no more a guarantee of scientific orthodoxy than is belief in God.
Finally we see that there are two extremes to be avoided. The first is the danger of tying interpretation of Scripture too closely to the science of the day, as the fixed-earthers did — even though, as we have seen, it is hard to blame them in light of the fact that this view was then the reigning scientific paradigm. Indeed, it is for this reason that I prefer to speak of the convergence between interpretations of Scripture and science at a particular time — for example, the current convergence that there was a beginning, which we shall consider in due course.
The opposite danger is to ignore science.
If, therefore, we can learn things about God as Creator from the visible universe, it is surely incumbent upon us to use our God-given minds to think about what these things are, and thus to relate God’s general revelation in nature to his special revelation in his Word so that we can rejoice in both.
The word creationist, however, has changed its meaning over time. Originally it meant simply someone who believed in a creator, without any implication for how or when the creating was done; nowadays, creationist is usually taken to mean “young-earth creationist.”
Genesis is, of course, a text that comes to us from a time and culture very different from our own. It is from the ancient Near East, so we cannot simply read it as if it were a contemporary Western document written to address contemporary Western concerns.
Those who, like the present author, are convinced that Scripture is God’s revelation are also aware that God used human authors who wrote in terms of their own culture and surroundings as they conveyed God’s Word to the world.
Knowledge of ancient Near Eastern culture can certainly help us a great deal, but the central statements of Genesis have got that timeless quality about them that means they can be understood in 1000 BC or AD 2000.
interpretations in our list, the framework view, prioritises logical order over chronological. More than two centuries ago it was suggested by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) that the Genesis days form a literary or artistic framework.10 In this view days 1–3 form a triad that corresponds to the triad formed by days 4–6:
The first triad concerns giving form or structure to what was initially formless, and the second concerns filling the newly created but empty forms. Light, then, is created on day 1, and day 4 tells us about the light bearers: sun, moon, and stars. The sky and seas occur on day 2, and on day 5 the sea is filled with sea creatures and the sky with winged creatures.
What then should we think of the different interpretations? Well, the first thing we should note is that they are different interpretations of the same text.
That much is obvious. But it has a very important implication, which is that we shall need to think hard about what the text says before trying to decide which interpretation makes most sense of it. Now this is sometimes easier said than done, since all of us bring preconceived ideas to the understanding of any text. Yet experience shows that problems in interpreting a passage often spring from failing to see exactly what the text says because we are impatient to get at the meaning.
If we believe in the inspiration of Scripture, we must take the text seriously because it is Scripture that is inspired and not my particular understanding of it, as I said earlier.
This movement towards a goal accords with the later statement in Isaiah to the effect that God did not create the world empty but created it to be inhabited. That is, emptiness was the initial stage, but not the final stage.
There were several stages in reaching the goal, each of them seen by God to be good because each of them had fulfilled the purpose God determined for it.
The words for “day” in New Testament Greek and in English, as well as Hebrew, have several primary meanings, and “daytime” is one of them.
A further grammatical point should be made. In many English versions of the Bible the days of Genesis are rendered as “the first day, the second day,” and so on, each having the definite article. However, even though the Hebrew language does have a definite article (ha), it is not used in the original to qualify days one to five. Basil, a fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, thought this significant: “If then the beginning of time is called ‘one day’ rather than ‘the first day,’ it is because Scripture wishes to establish its relationship with eternity. It was, in reality, fit and natural to
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This means that, according to the text, day 1 begins in verse 3 and not in verse 1. This is made clear in the original text by the fact that the verb “created” in Genesis 1:1 is in the perfect tense, and “the normal use of the perfect at the very beginning of a pericope22 is to denote an event that took place before the storyline gets under way.”23 The use of the narrative tense begins in verse 3.
This implies that “the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 did not necessarily take place on day 1 as is frequently assumed. The initial creation took place before day 1, but Genesis does not tell us how long before. This means that the question of the age of the earth (and of the universe) is a separate question from the interpretation of the days, a point that is frequently overlooked. In other words, quite apart from any scientific considerations, the text of Genesis 1:1, in separating the beginning from day 1, leaves the age of the universe indeterminate.
It would therefore be logically possible to believe that the days of Genesis are twenty-four-hour days (of one earth week) and to believe that the universe is very ancient. I repeat: this has nothing to do with science. Rather, it has to do with what the text actually says. There is a danger of understanding the...
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At each stage of creation God injected a new level of information and energy into the cosmos, in order to advance creation to its next level of form and complexity26
Yes, but when I mentioned this statement from the law, I pointed out that there were not only similarities between God’s creation week and our work week, but also obvious differences. God’s week happened once; ours is repeated. God’s creative activity is very different from ours; God does not need rest as we do; and so on. So it is not possible to draw straight lines from Genesis to our working week. God’s week is a pattern for ours, but it is not identical. Thus Exodus 20:8–11 does not demand that the days of Genesis 1 be the days of a single week, although it could of course be interpreted
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It would be a mistake, of course, to overemphasise the differences between some of the views mentioned in this chapter. No major doctrine of Scripture is affected by whether one believes that the days are analogical days or that each day is a long period of time inaugurated by God speaking, or whether one believes that each of the days is a normal day in which God spoke, followed by a long period of putting into effect the information contained in what God said on that particular day.33
In that chapter we found that understanding the foundations and pillars of the earth as referring to the stability of the earth is not a compromise position, but a perfectly reasonable understanding of the text that does not undermine the authority of Scripture, even though this interpretation relies on (new) scientific knowledge.
It involves in essence a simple reality check: does our interpretation make sense in the real world?
So, regarding science informally as organised knowledge inferred from experience of the world around us, we see that science helps us to decide what meaning to go for in both of the examples given.
