Science and the evolution of Christianity - scope for understanding?

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Permalink Reply by Leonard T on November 12, 2011 at 5:35am

Grazer,

 

I believe that you want the truth, never questioned that, but like all of us we must ask questions of ourselves in order to make sure we are not getting in the way of that pursuit (this is not meant of you personally, but of us all).

 

I must examine how I approcah the text. Am I coming with a preconceived idea and thus trying to twist the Scripture into my way of thinking or am I open to the Scripture changing me. Two great examples of this is liberal theology and the time of the inquisitions. We can also ask ourselves by whom have we been influenced? Thus, am I thinking critically or am I simply a drone of someone else's teaching?

 

I must examine the literary style of the text in order to be able to truly understand it correctly. I need to examine who the passage is written to, the audience. I need to examine the quirks of the culture that relate to this text. I need to examine key words regarding the meaning and various usages in Scripture. Scripture defines Scripture and ths I need to be careful when trying to apply a dictionary definition to the word instead of letting Scripture define it. Remember that language is always in a state of flux. Look at the English language and how many words have changed or ceased to be used at all over the last 400 years. How much of this si true of the Hebrew and Greek language? I need to examing the passage in context which includes passage immediately before and after, as well as the book in which it is found. I lastly need to see how this one concept aligns with the totality of Scripture. If a verse seems to contradict the major teaching on a subject I can be sure that Scripture is not in error, thus my understanding must be off and need to continue to dig further.

 

Lastly, for me, I tend to take Scripture at face value, meaning at it's simplest meaning in the literary style in which is is found. Too many people try to play Scripture-judo with text IMO.

 

I will include one more thing :-) We need to regularly examing how are various doctrinal beliefs align with our other doctrinal beliefs. We must be in a self-editing mode to do our best to not be in error. This takes work. If I find that I have two seperate beliefs (doctrines) that do not align with each other then I must start dismantling my belief system until I find the area of disconnect. Then I can start to rebuild from there. We cannot simply continue to build on a structure that is full of wholes or weak points. It is better to know less solidly than more errantly.

 

Sorry fo the long rely. I realize that this is not exaclty what you were asking, but I felt led to reply in this manner.

 

Lord Bless,
LT 

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Permalink Reply by The evidence based Stig on November 12, 2011 at 5:43am

If I find that I have two seperate beliefs (doctrines) that do not align with each other then I must start dismantling my belief system until I find the area of disconnect. Then I can start to rebuild from there.

Yeah I've went through that process and still go through that process. The issue of evolution and science generally is one such area. I feel happy with where I am on that front. Just finished Lennox's book and it's given me a lot to think about. I'm trying not to simply follow what others think but their insights are very useful and valuable and deserve to be considered. 

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Permalink Reply by Leonard T on November 12, 2011 at 5:54am

Indeed, the insights of others is helpful, but always viewed under the light of Scripture. Lord Bless you on your quest for truth.

 

Lord Bless,

LT

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Permalink Reply by The evidence based Stig on November 12, 2011 at 11:45am

Have you noticed that despite having very different views on how to interpret Genesis re: age of the earth. we're both using the same arguments?

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Permalink Reply by Leonard T on November 12, 2011 at 6:39pm

Yes, I have. It all boils down to how we interpret the particular text.

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Permalink Reply by David Velasquez on November 13, 2011 at 8:39am

Grazer,

 

>>The likes of Collins, Alexander, Lennox, Polkinghorne have been shouting that evolution is purely a mechanism, it does not negate a designer of the mechanism, that purely Darwinian means is not enough since it pre-supposes a self replicator and would in fact need a designer

  

I have never heard Lennox Say that he subscribes to evolution. He shouts from the rooftops that it is purely a mechanism, but a mechanism t he does not believe to be true. In the circles that people like Lennox moves in, they have to be polite and give the benefit of the doubt to the evolutionist. But he and other scientist/theologians certainly do not subscribe to such nonsense. We all have a common ancestor. Yeah! His name is God, the creator.

 

God doesn’t need billions or millions of years to create. He speaks and it’s a thing of the past. Evolution is anti Christian and gives us a purely natural cause for the Universe. Christian evolution is a contradiction created by very liberal theologians and Scientists who testify to being Christians, but who definitely are not theologians.

 

Francis Collins

 

In your book, you say religion and science can coexist in one person's mind. This has been a struggle for some people, especially in terms of evolution. How do you reconcile evolution and the Bible?

As someone who's had the privilege of leading the human genome project, I've had the opportunity to study our own DNA instruction book at a level of detail that was never really possible before.

It's also now been possible to compare our DNA with that of many other species. The evidence supporting the idea (not a fact, but an idea) that all living things are descended from a common ancestor is truly overwhelming. I would not necessarily wish that to be so, as a Bible-believing Christian. But it is so. It does not serve faith well to try to deny that.

 

(ok it appeared in the past that the world was flat because of the evidence supporting that idea as well, but the world is round)

 

But I have no difficulty putting that together with what I believe as a Christian because I believe that God had a plan to create creatures with whom he could have fellowship, in whom he could inspire [the] moral law, in whom he could infuse the soul, and who he would give free will as a gift for us to make decisions about our own behavior, a gift which we oftentimes utilize to do the wrong thing.

 

I believe God used the mechanism of evolution to achieve that goal. And while that may seem to us who are limited by this axis of time as a very long, drawn-out process, it wasn't long and drawn-out to God. And it wasn't random to God. Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/News/Science-Religion/2006/08/God-Is-Not-T...

 

Common substance does NOT lock the case for evolution to have been a mechanism used by God to create. Yes we have common substance because One God made all of creation.

 

Francis Collins is not even close to being a scholar in theological matters. He is simply a believer, according to his confession of faith, but He is not a theologian. His opinion about theological matters doesn’t carry much weight. Is too bad that people who are renowned in one field think they have authority in another. Being a scientist does not make you a philosopher or a scholar in theology.  

 

Denis Alexander’s book, Creation or Evolution: Do we have to choose? Is a great work for theistic evolutionary theology in evangelicalism, some say. I say is rubbish.

 

The trouble is that this apologetic for evolutionism fails to start from the primacy of Scripture, even though the first two chapters ostensibly tackle scriptural issues. However, they do so by using the classic arguments to “explain away” problems of harmonising evolution with Scripture, rather than face up to the incompatibility of the two philosophies.

 

For example, in chapter two, Alexander repeats the tired old bromide that “the biblical understanding of creation is not primarily concerned with how things began, but why they exist.” Yet, a plain reading of Genesis 1 gives no reason why God made the world. It simply tells us how He did it! The reasons why God made the world can indeed be reasoned from the rest of Scripture, but the thrust of Alexander’s assertion is incorrect.

 

The reason for his assertion is so that he can place evolution on a higher plane than Scripture, while seeming to do the opposite. If this seems harsh, then we need to examine how Alexander uses issues out of context to suit this purpose. It is noteworthy that he starts the book with the comment “I . . . make no attempt in this book to defend the role of the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, but simply assume that this is the starting point for all Christians” (p11).

 

It should indeed be our starting point, but biblical truth should not be just a starting point—our whole philosophy and worldview should be submitted to the acid test of biblical authority. That includes our interpretation of scientific data. His inability to submit his ideas to Scripture have led to his adoption of non-biblical misunderstandings.

 

For example, he asserts that “Adam was brought by God in Genesis 2:19–20 to name all the animals” (p103). In fact, the verses do not say this. Adam was to name only a small number of kinds of animals brought to him by God. Alexander asserts that this must mean Adam needed to name about 20 million species; whereas, the Bible speaks of kinds not species. And he asserts that we have not yet fulfilled that command, whereas the Bible suggests that the activity in question was closed when God fashioned Eve from Adam’s side.

Straw-Man Arguments

Many of Alexander’s assertions are of a similar type. His opposition to biblical creationism, outlined in chapter six, “Objections to Evolution,” employs many familiar straw-man arguments. In this chapter, he repeats his assertion that “virtually no biologist in the research community actually doubts evolution.” He has made this assertion before in both TV and radio debates with both Professor Andy McIntosh and me, and we have both corrected him on this point. Continuing to repeat this comment, he could be accused of disingenuousness.

 

He then goes on to repeat the claim that creationists ought to publish refutations of evolution in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as if such journals were neutral. We have explained why this cannot happen many times, and recent news events have underlined this difficulty, such as the hounding from his Royal Society post of the evolutionist Michael Reiss, who merely suggested that maybe school children with creationist views should be treated with a little respect by their teachers (see News to Note, September 20, 2008).

 

The “scientific” sections of Alexander’s book are problematic. They contain a strange juxtaposition of actual science that no one would disagree with (such as the development of species by natural selection) with a number of bald statements, which Alexander gives as “facts,” without any justification. Examples of the latter are numerous. On page 134, he suggests that “there are good reasons why the eye evolved not once but many times during the process of evolution,” but doesn’t give any of the reasons. On page 135, he says “the physical properties of the universe were defined in the very first few femtoseconds after the Big Bang,” even though he must know that there are significant numbers of non-Christian scientists who do not accept the big bang.

Cavalier Use of Scripture

Alexander’s use of Scripture is, to say the least, cavalier. For example, in chapter four, he offers a number of old bromides as supposed evidence for “evolution in action”—namely, peppered moths, sickle cell anaemia, and superbugs. All these supposed examples have been answered on this website. But what really “takes the biscuit” is that Alexander then claims scriptural evidence for this type of “evolution” by quoting Matthew 13, saying “Jesus himself used the same idea in his famous parable of the sower who needs to scatter far more seed than will ever germinate and lead to a good crop.” This is merely an artificial way of introducing Jesus into a godless argument.

 

Yet Alexander misses a more honest place to introduce Jesus. Later in the same chapter, he describes the well-known scale model of the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth crammed into 24 hours. When he states “Just two minutes before midnight hominids start to appear and a mere three seconds before midnight anatomically modern humans make their entry,” he fails to engage with how this fits with Jesus’ description of Adam being “at the beginning” (Matthew 19:4).

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v3/n1/creation-evoluti...

 

R.C. Sproul’s position on Creation. Here is his commentary on the Westminster Confession’s phrase “…in the space of six days.”

 

In the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good. In the Genesis account of creation, we read; “So the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5). This narrative proceeds from the first day to the sixth, each time referring to “the evening and the morning” and numbering the day. On the seventh day, God rested (Gen. 2:2).

 

In our time a considerable number of theories have arisen denying that the creation, as we know it, took place in twenty-four hour days. Common to these theories is the acceptance of the dominant scientific view that the earth and life on it are very old. Many consider the biblical account to be primitive, mythological, and untenable in light of modern scientific knowledge.

 

This crisis has resulted in several attempts to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation. We are reminded of the sixteenth century, when Copernicus and his followers repudiated the old Ptolemaic view of astronomy. They argued that the center of the solar system is not the earth (geocentricity), but the sun (heliocentricity). It was a sad chapter in the history of the church, which had believed for more than fifteen hundred years that the Bible teaches geocentricity, when it condemned Galileo for believing and teaching heliocentricity. Both Luther and Calvin opposed Copernicus’s views, believing them to undermine Scripture’s authority.

 

Actually the Bible does not explicitly teach geocentricity anywhere. Scripture describes the movements of the heavens from the perspective of someone standing on earth: the sun moves across the sky, rising in the east and setting in the west. We use that same language today. The church thought that because the Bible uses this kind of descriptive language, it was therefore teaching something about the relationship between the sun and the earth. This is a clear case of scientific knowledge correcting the church’s interpretation of the Bible.

 

There are two spheres of revelation; the Bible (special revelation) and nature (general revelation). In the latter, God manifests himself through the created order. What God reveals in nature can never contradict what he reveals in Scripture, and what he reveals in Scripture can never contradict what he reveals in nature. He is the author of both forms of revelation, and God does not contradict himself.

 

The church has always taken the position that all truth meets at the top, and that science should never contradict Scripture. Scientific discoveries, however, can correct the theologian’s faulty understanding of Scripture, just as biblical revelation can correct faulty speculations drawn from the natural order. When the scientific consensus on a particular point is on a collision course with the unmistakable teaching of Scripture, I trust Scripture before I trust the speculations and inferences of scientists. That is consistent with the history of the church and Christianity. We believe that sacred Scripture is nothing less than the Creator’s truth revealed.

 

We have a problem not only with a six-day creation, but also with the age of the earth. Is the earth a few thousand years old or billions of years old (as scientists today insist)? Although the Bible clearly says that the world was created in six days, it gives no date for the beginning of that work. It would be a mistake to become embroiled in too much controversy about the date of creation.

 

In a Massachusetts college I taught Introduction to the Old Testament to two hundred and fifty students. Because the class was so large, we met in the chapel. Once I opened the old pulpit Bible to Genesis 1, and at the top of the page I read “4004 B.C.” I did some research to see how that date had been determined. In the seventeenth century an archbishop, James Ussher, made some calculations based on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 and other chronological clues in the Old Testament. He even pinned down the day of the week and the time of day when creation occurred. I hasten to tell my students that we must be very careful to distinguish between the text of Scripture and additions to the text. In defending the biblical authority, we are not obligated to defend a theory based on the speculations of a bishop in times past.

 

If we take the genealogies that go back to Adam, however, and if we make allowances for certain gaps in them (which could certainly be there), it remains a big stretch from 4004 B.C. to 4.6 billion years ago. We also have the problem of the antiquity of the human race. It seems as if every time a new skeleton or skull is discovered, scientists push back the date of man’s origin another million years.

 

Scholars have proposed four basic theories to explain the time from of Genesis 1–2:

1. the gap theory,
2. the day-age theory,
3. the framework hypothesis, and
4. six-day creation.

 

Gap Theory

The gap theory was made popular by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which more than any other single edition of Scripture swept through this country and informed the theology of an entire generation of evangelicals. It became the principal instrument for propagating dispensational theology throughout America. In this Bible, Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and verse 2 reads, “And the earth became without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Other Bibles read, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Verse 2 describes what most scholars consider to be the as-yet-unordered, basic structure of the universe—darkness, emptiness. Then the Holy Spirit hovers over the waters (v.2) and God says, “Let there be light” (v.3). Thus came the light and then the creation of the heavens, fish, birds, animals, and so on.

 

The Hebrew word in verse 2 translated “was” is the very common verb hayah, which ordinarily means “to be.” Hayah means “to become” only in special circumstances, which are not present here. The Scofield Reference Bible translates verse 2 as “became” instead of “was” in order to facilitate the gap theory. As a result, only verse 1 refers to the original creation. Verse 2 then refers to a cosmic catastrophe in which the originally good and properly ordered creation became chaotic, dark, and fallen. After this period of darkness (the “gap”), God recreates the universe which could have been created billions of years ago, followed by a gap of billions of years (including the “geologic column” of immense ages), after which God returned to his distorted creation and renovated or reconstituted it relatively recently. The gap theory has also been called the restitution hypothesis, meaning that the creation narrative in Genesis is not about the original creation, but about the restitution of a fallen creation.

 

An entire generation was fed this theory through the Scofield Reference Bible. However, Scripture nowhere explicitly teaches that the original creation was marred and then after many years reconstituted. The broader context of the whole of Scripture militates against the gap theory.

 

Day-Age Theory

According to the second approach, the day-age theory, each “day” of Genesis 1 may be an age. After all, one day in the Lord’s sight is like a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8). Also, expressions like “in the days of Noah” and “in Abraham’s day” can refer to open-ended periods. The Hebrew word yom, translated “day” in Genesis, can mean something other than a twenty-four-hour period, as it must in Genesis 2:4, which refers to “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” Accordingly, each “day” in Genesis 1 may refer to a thousand years, and perhaps even to millions of years. This will at least ameliorate some of the difficulties we have with those who argue for a gradual evolution of life-forms on this earth.

 

However, the day-age theory, like the gap theory, ignores the immediate context as well as the large biblical context. It ignores the fact that each of the six days of creation consists of an evening and a morning. If yom here means something like ten million years, then we need to give the words evening and morning the same kind of metaphorical meaning. From a literary, exegetical, and linguistic perspective, the day-age theory is weak. As a Christian apologist, I would not want to defend it.

 

The day-age theory tends to accommodate a theory of biological macroevolution that is incompatible with the Bible and purposive creation—the creation of all living things by the immediate agency of the sovereign God. Macroevolution teaches that all life has developed from a single, original cell, and that this happened through a somewhat fortuitous, chance collision of atoms, without an intelligent planner or Creator orchestrating the emergence of these species. Those who favor the day-age theory often link themselves with a position called theistic evolution, which grants the basic premises of biological evolution, but says that God, not chance, guided the process of evolution.

 

Macroevolution differs from microevolution. While the former teaches that all living things have developed from one original cell, the latter teaches that, over period of time, species undergo slight changes in order to adapt to their environment. Microevolution is not in dispute, either biblically or scientifically. Macroevolution has never been substantiated by observation or experiment, and it places its faith in an endless string of extremely improbable, yet beneficial chance mutations.

 

A frequent argument for macroevolution is the principle of common structure. All forms of life are made up of the same basic substances: amino acids, proteins, DNA, and that sort of thing. Because all living things have similar constituent parts, the argument goes, they must have developed from common ancestors. A common substance or structure, however, does not necessarily imply a common source. The fact that all forms of life are made of the same basic building blocks neither negates the possibility of evolution nor substantiates it. One would expect an intelligent Creator to have made all life-forms with a similar design—one that works on this earth.

 

When teaching a university course to thirty upper-level philosophy students, I asked who believed in macroevolution. Almost all the students raised their hands. I then asked them to explain why they believed in it. Their only argument was “common substance, therefore common source.” Most said they believed it because they had been taught in school, and they assumed their teachers knew what they were talking about.

 

Macroevolution, in the final analysis, is not a question of biology or natural science, which rely upon experimented verification, but of history, which tries to interpret evidence left from the past in a coherent fashion. The discipline of paleontology, which studies the fossil record, claims to put evolution on a scientific footing, but it performs no experiments to substantiate evolutionary processes. It simply lines up similar fossils and infers that one creature must be related to another by common decent.

 

In the recent past in Russia, leading international scholars who favor macroevolution met. While comparing notes, they found that the weakest evidence for their theories is the fossil record. I remember reading the Royal Society’s bulletin at that time and thinking, “What other source matters?” The fossil record is the one that counts, and yet that is the one that militates against their theory. I read an essay recently in which a professor argued for macroevolution on the basis of certain geological formations. He argued for an old earth on the ground that stratifications in the rocks contain fossils, which indicates a uniformitarian process that took millions of years to produce the whole formation. He then determined the age of each stratum by determining the kinds of fossils contained in each. This is a blatant example of what logicians call begging the question. It is circular reasoning to date the fossils by the rocks, and then date the rocks by the fossils. That just will not work.

 

We now have good evidence that stratification of rocks proves the antiquity of nothing. Within days after the Mount St. Helens explosion had subsided, scientists discovered that the cataclysmic upheaval of that volcanic explosion had laid down exactly the same rock stratification that had been assumed would take millions of years to develop. In other words, Mount St. Helens proved that catastrophic upheavals can produce the same empirical data as twenty million years of gradual deposition. We will not get into uniformitarianism or catastrophism here, except to say that they have been attempts to accommodate macroevolution. This tends to support and popularize the theory of theistic evolution, and it also uses the day-age theory of Genesis—a dangerous thing to do.

 

Framework Hypothesis

The third approach, called the framework hypothesis, was originally developed by the Dutch scholar Nicholas Ridderbos. He argued that the literary form of the book’s first few chapters differs from that of its later chapters. Certain basic characteristics found in poetry are missing from historical narrative, and certain characteristics found in historical narrative are missing from poetry. For example, the book of Exodus, with its account of the Jewish captivity in Egypt, has genealogies, family names, real historical places, and an unmetered literary style (i.e., lacking a particular rhythm), making it clearly prose and historical narrative. After the account of the exodus, the book’s author inserts the song of Miriam, which is in metered rhythm and is therefore clearly poetry. The literary structure before the song manifests all the characteristics of historical narrative, as does the structure following the poem.

Therefore, it is usually not difficult to distinguish between poetry and historical narrative in the Old Testament. But the opening chapters of Genesis, according to Ridderbos, exhibit a strange combination of literary forms. On the one hand is a discussion of the creation of a man and a woman who are given names that thereafter appear in genealogical accounts. In Hebrew literature this clearly signals historicity. The Garden of Eden is said to be set among four rivers, two of which we know were real rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. The style of writing is not metered or rhythmic, as Hebrew poetry normally is. All this indicates that the opening chapters of Genesis are historical narrative.

 

There are some anomalies, however. We find trees in this garden with strange names: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and “the tree of life” (Gen 2:9). Had they been apple or pear trees, there would have been no problem. But what does a tree of life look like? Is the author of Genesis telling us that a real tree was off limits, giving it a metaphorical meaning as the tree of life? We are also introduced to a serpent who speaks. Because of these two features, some have argued that the literary structure of the opening chapters of Genesis was self consciously and intentionally mythological, or at least filled with legend and saga.

 

Ridderbos contended that the beginning chapters of Genesis are a mixture of historical narrative and poetry, with part of the poetic structure being the repeated refrain, “So the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen 1:5), and so on. Ridderbos concluded that Genesis gives us not a historical narrative of the when or the how of divine creation, but a drama in seven acts. The first act ends with the statement, “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” The author of Genesis, then, is trying to show that God’s work of creation took place in seven distinct stages, which incidentally fit remarkably well into the stages identified by the modern theories of cosmic evolution.

 

Therefore, the framework hypothesis allows one to step into a Big Bang cosmology while maintaining the credibility and inspiration of Genesis 1-2. This is not history, but drama. The days are simply artistic literary devices to create a framework for a lengthy period of development.

 

In America Ridderbos’s work was widely disseminated by Meredith Kline, who for many years taught Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, then at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and then at Westminster Seminary California. Because Kline endorsed the framework hypothesis, many people, particularly in the Reformed community, have embraced it, provoking a serious crisis in some circles. Some Reformed pastors today hold to a literal six-day creation, while others hold to the framework hypothesis, and yet they otherwise hold to the same system of orthodox theology.

 

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One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1-2.

 

Six-Day Creation

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four-hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1-2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days.

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Permalink Reply by dean burrows on November 13, 2011 at 10:45am

Very interesting piece of literature.  Have to agree  6 days that is what it took for God to create earth. and I have to believe it took Him that long because He choose it to be so. One thing I find interesting though is the taking this literally according to man's understanding I find myself with a question.  Genesis 1: 11-12 we see a land flourishing. Plant life reproducing. No reason to doubt this is possable. Then man is created . Genesis 2:5 we are told no shrub or plant sprouted until God sent the rain and created man. If we are to take Genesis 1 and Genisis 2 literally I see some contradiction there.

Once again I agree 6 days. Six days according to God's time not neccessarily man's.

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Permalink Reply by Amanda on November 13, 2011 at 11:19am

Genesis 2 >> Barnes' Notes on the Bible

This verse corresponds to the second verse of the preceding narrative. It describes the field or arable land in the absence of certain conditions necessary to the progress of vegetation. Plant and herb here comprise the whole vegetable world. Plants and herbs of the field are those which are to be found in the open land. A different statement is made concerning each.

Not a plant of the field was yet in the land. - Here it is to be remembered that the narrative has reverted to the third day of the preceding creation. At first sight, then, it might be supposed that the vegetable species were not created at the hour of that day to which the narrative refers. But it is not stated that young trees were not in existence, but merely that plants of the field were not yet in the land. Of the herbs it is only said that they had not yet sent forth a bud or blade. And the actual existence of both trees and herbs is implied in what follows. The reasons for the state of things above described are the lack of rain to water the soil, and of man to cultivate it. These would only suffice for growth if the vegetable seeds, at least, were already in existence. Now, the plants were made before the seeds Genesis 1:11-12, and therefore the first full-grown and seed-bearing sets of each kind were already created. Hence, we infer that the state of things described in the text was this: The original trees were confined to a center of vegetation, from which it was intended that they should spread in the course of nature. At the present juncture, then, there was not a tree of the field, a tree of propagation, in the land; and even the created trees had not sent down a single root of growth into the land. And if they had dropped a seed, it was only on the land, and not in the land, as it had not yet struck root.

And not an herb of the field yet grew. - The herbage seems to have been more widely diffused than the trees. Hence, it is not said that they were not in the land, as it is said of field trees. But at the present moment not an herb had exhibited any signs of growth or sent forth a single blade beyond the immediate product of creative power.

Rain upon the land - and man to till it, were the two needs that retarded vegetation. These two means of promoting vegetable growth differed in their importance and in their mode of application. Moisture is absolutely necessary, and where it is supplied in abundance the shifting wind will in the course of time waft the seed. The browsing herds will aid in the same process of diffusion. Man comes in merely as an auxiliary to nature in preparing the soil and depositing the seeds and plants to the best advantage for rapid growth and abundant fruitfulness. The narrative, as usual, notes only the chief things. Rain is the only source of vegetable sap; man is the only intentional cultivator.

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Permalink Reply by dean burrows on November 13, 2011 at 11:32am

Sounds like a reasonable interpretation but again not literal.  Genesis 1: 11  Then God said "Let the earth sprout VEGETATION, plants yielding seed , and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them, on the earth " and it was so.

this diescription covers pretty much all plant growth. Yet I do see what you mean by cultivated plants and again we must do some interpretation. As the literal sense left me wondering why the difference. Not that it effetcts my faith and/or belief in scripture.

 

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Permalink Reply by Amanda on November 13, 2011 at 1:09pm

The literal sense should actually help you understand this.

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Permalink Reply by Amanda on November 13, 2011 at 2:41pm

Perhaps this will shed a little more light for you, Dean. There is no contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2, literally.

Why are there two different Creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1-2?

There are also several more links to articles at the end of this article which are well worth reading to the one who is honestly searching for the absolute truth regarding Creation.

 

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Permalink Reply by Amanda on November 13, 2011 at 11:25am

Dean,

In this comment you say you have not declared that you believe in 6 literal days or longer:

http://www.allaboutgod.net/forum/topics/science-and-the-evolution-o...

The fact is I haven't declared that it took longer than 6 literal days nor have I declared creation took any shorter

But here you seem to be stating that you agree to 6 days but not literal 24 hour periods. Why do you think God's time is not man's time? God created time for man, didn't He?

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