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Part III of a review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve

In this third and final part of my review of John H. Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve, I will survey and respond to both Walton's response to biblical arguments for an historical Adam and Eve as traditionally conceived as well as his positive arguments that Genesis 2 should not be taken to be describing the de novo creation of Adam and Eve. Parts I and II are already posted. My review of The Lost World of Genesis One is here.

If any fans of Walton's work read these reviews, it is possible that they will think all kinds of things--that I am unqualified, that I am unfair, that I have misunderstood. However, I hope that one thing is clear: I have taken Walton's work, not to say his influence, with sufficient seriousness to devote many, many hours to a sincere and careful attempt to understand, represent, and respond to his positions. I submit that this work rates, at a minimum, due consideration rather than hasty dismissal.

Walton's one textual argument with any force

The only positive textual argument Walton musters (for the conclusion that there were many humans other than Adam at the time that God placed Adam and Eve in the garden) that has any force is the age-old question of where Cain got his wife and who the other people were of whom Cain was afraid and with whom Cain built a city in Genesis 4:14-17 (p. 64). For that matter, one could state part of this same question as where Seth got his wife, since even if Cain married a niece, the niece had to come from somewhere.

These questions are answerable from the traditional perspective, as Walton does recognize. For example, Cain and/or Seth probably married their sisters, and this concept should not be dismissed out of hand. (Sarah was Abraham's half-sister.) I have argued elsewhere that there would be an independent, functional reason (I beg the reader to understand what I mean by this) for God to have created Adam with extra genetic diversity (no, this is not a "belly-button" argument, see "independent, functional reason"). Hence Cain's and Seth's "sisters" may not have been their genetic siblings. As for who the other people were of whom Cain was afraid, Cain may well have been looking forward to the day when there would be more people, descendants of Adam, who would take blood vengeance (a concept well-known in the ancient world) for his fratricide. As for "building a city," why should we take it that this occurred immediately after Cain's murder of Abel? Given the long times that the people in these chapters are said to live, there would have been lots of opportunity in Cain's lifetime for there to be enough people for him to build a city with.

To be sure, these answers are not in the text, which is why this textual argument has any force at all and why it is a puzzle for the traditional view. When we're interpreting Scripture, though, we have to go with the force of all the evidence taken together. If this puzzle is the worst Scriptural problem the traditional view (that Adam and Eve were literally the first humans) has to deal with, that is not much considering the large amount of evidence that they were literally the first humans. Since Walton tries to explain away this other evidence as well, we have to ask whether he deals convincingly with it.

God was "using" false contemporary beliefs "as a framework"

As I mentioned before, Walton does not fall back on this rather desperate move very often. More often he tries to argue that the text would not even have been understood by its original author and audience to mean something material about the origins of man, the various aspects of the cosmos, etc. But occasionally he can't get around it.

This is what he does when it comes to Luke 3, Genesis 5, and I Chron. 1:

It would not be surprising if Israelites in Old Testament and New Testament times believed that Adam was the first human. The hermeneutical issue, however, is more subtle. Were they teaching that Adam was the first human being? Were they building theology on that concept? Or is God simply using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication?...[W]hile the Bible could be read as suggesting that Adam was the first human being, it is more debatable whether it is making a scientific claim that would controvert the possibility that modern humanity is descended from a pool of common ancestors as indicated by the genetic evidence. (p. 188-9 Bold is my emphasis)

He even goes so far as to use the language of God's "accommodating their current thinking" when he argues that, though he believes in an historical Adam (in some sense) he does not even think that such a belief is mandated by the doctrine of inerrancy.

If we simply say that inerrancy demands that we accept a histoical Adam because he is mentioned in the genealogies, we are failing to distinguish between that which the Old Testament authors may have incidentally believed and that which the Bible affirms as its authoritative teaching. Where might God be accommodating their current thinking? (p. 201, my emphasis)

It is to this notion of God's "accommodating" false current thinking that Walton is evidently alluding when he discusses the genealogies and makes his own interpretation--that Adam was historical but was not actually the first man.

It is rather surprising that Walton ever falls back on this notion, given that he has hammered at the beginning of the book on the idea that we ought to understand and accept the text as the original human author would have understood and intended it:

God vested his authority in a human author [LM: this is a very strong claim], so we must consider what the human author intended to communicate if we want to understand God's message. Two voices speak, but the human author is our doorway into the room of God's meaning and message. (p. 14)

But of course we have no reason to doubt that Moses, the author of I Chronicles, and in particular Luke did intend to communicate that Adam actually was the first man. In fact, since Walton talks about God's "using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication," he comes pretty close to admitting that the human authors would have intended to communicate exactly that. So, if what the human author intended to communicate is God's message, we should presumably take it that God intended to communicate (since, e.g., Luke apparently intended to communicate) that Adam was literally the first man. It is a pretty big switcheroo for Walton to imply that we needn't bother with the ideas of the original audience and author about whether Adam was the first man, because God was just using their (probably false) contemporary concepts "as a framework for communication."

Moreover, no one would even consider such an idea unless convinced that it is "indicated by the genetic evidence." In other words, the force of the textual arguments is what it is, and it is clearly in the direction of taking Adam actually to have been the first man. To be clear: I don't rule out the possibility that one could be forced, reluctantly, by scientific considerations to reinterpret a text in an unnatural way, but if so, one should just say that that is what one is (reluctantly) doing, not sugarcoat the matter or pretend that the prima facie meaning of the text does not really have the force that it has.

A similar problem emerges in Walton's discussion of Paul's statement in I Timothy that the man was formed first. The force of Paul's statement is quite clear and supports a physically made Adam. Walton's response to the passage, on the other hand, is radically unclear. He says (pp. 94-95) that there are three options. Either Paul is saying that "all men were formed first as Adam was formed first" (obviously false), that a male "by his created nature is first" (probably closer to what Paul meant but still not grappling with the straightforward issue), or that Paul is "using Adam and Eve as illustrations for the Ephesians," which is the option Walton says he favors. But what does that mean if Paul isn't actually taking it to be true that the man was formed first? Oddly enough, on these pages where Walton is allegedly discussing the passage in detail, he can't seem to bring himself to write clearly that one obvious option is that Paul was really saying that Adam was physically formed first. Perhaps Walton's claim is that Paul is "using Adam and Eve as illustrations" without actually intending to say that Adam was formed first (which is in direct conflict with the text) or that it doesn't matter if Paul really meant that Adam was formed first, because God was "working with" Paul's false concepts to make some point (er, that women shouldn't be pastors). Another possibility (which Walton may be hinting at obscurely on p. 100) is that he takes Paul to be alluding to Adam and Eve as figures in a partly non-literal story which the author and his readers both know, as we might refer to Robin Hood's bow or William Tell's apple. This, again, is nowhere hinted in the text and would be an obviously ad hoc dodge. In fact, it is difficult to see how Paul could use Adam and Eve's formation as an argument against women's ordination if in fact he did not think Adam was formed first! One normally would not make an argument from a purely literary allusion. In fact, to answer Walton's question above, yes, Paul is building theology on the claim that Adam was the first human being and formed before Eve.

Reinterpretation of Genesis 2

Genesis 2:7 says, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The chapter goes on to tell of the naming of the animals by Adam and the forming of Eve, which I will discuss below. Prima facie, these forming accounts sound very much like physical special creation. Even if one takes it that there may be some degree of metaphor involved in "forming out of the dust of the ground," what this does not sound like is merely describing God's "forming" Adam in the womb of a mother (p. 76). (Indeed, if Adam was one of a group of hominids who were given the image of God, as an ensoulment view would suggest, Adam was presumably "formed" in the womb of his mother as a non-human animal; hence his initial "forming" in the womb cannot be archetypal for all human beings! Walton does not seem to have considered this glitch and never addresses it.)

There is no slightest hint in Genesis 2 or in chapter 1 of Adam's mother being around or of a lengthy pre-existing process by which he came into physical existence. Moreover, the statement that Adam was formed from the dust of the ground and that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, in the absence of any textual reason to think of Adam as being born by a natural process, makes the description of Adam's "forming" quite different from statements elsewhere in Scripture that God forms or molds other human individuals. (E.g. Psalm 139, Job 10:9)

Walton, however, insists at length that, in the words of his chapter title for chapter 8, "Forming from dust and building from rib are archetypal claims and not claims of material origins." Here are a few of his arguments that Genesis 2 doesn't actually describe the material creation of man:

Walton claims (pp. 72-73) that the text would not claim that man was formed from dust if a "hands-on" interpretation were intended:

A common alternative to thinking in terms of chemistry is to understand the statement in the text as referring to craftsmanship. In this way of thinking, the imagery is of a 'hands-on' God who has fashioned his creature with loving care and then bestowed on him the breath of life. [LM: Yep, sounds just about right.] The major problem with this is that the ingredient chosen would not make sense if the main idea were craftsmanship. One shapes clay, not dust. The latter is impervious to being shaped by its very nature.(p. 73)

But this is mere caviling. If we are to get into the dusty nitty-gritty, one can of course add water to dust. I doubt that anyone has ever thought that the text was using, to imply divine craftsmanship, the picture of God trying to shape completely dry dust into a form! This is a really trivial complaint. Second, it is quite remarkable that Walton should make this argument given that in the very next chapter he talks about ANE accounts in which humans are said to be formed from clay by the gods. Walton states that these accounts, too, show "an inclination to think about human origins in archetypal terms in the ancient world" (p. 83). In fact, back in TLWOG1 he has also talked about the forming of man from clay in ANE accounts and explicitly argued, "These ingredients communicate instead [of communicating what man was made of] the important issues of identity and relationship." (TLWOG1 p. 32)

So it doesn't matter whether clay is said to be the element or not! Walton draws a conclusion about archetypal or functional origin accounts as opposed to material origins either way! Hence, his complaint about dust rather than clay is shown to be just another part of his ad hoc approach--whatever the text says, clay or not-clay, absence or presence of pre-existing material (see review of TLWOG1), the conclusion is always the same: This is not about material origins!

Besides this argument about dust rather than clay, Walton also argues that the Hebrew word translated "formed" in "God formed man out of the dust of the ground" would be better translated "planned." "God planned the human from the dust of the ground." Therefore, it should not be taken to indicate the de novo creation of Adam. (p. 218, note 4) To support this Walton does a word study of the Hebrew ysr (which I will transliterate in the more common way as yatsar for ease of reading) used for "formed" in Gen. 2:7. Walton's modus operandi here is similar to his approach to asa, discussed in the review of TLWOG1.

He points out that yatsar is used in a number of places in Scripture to refer to God's preparing or ordaining things (like all the days of our lives, the nation of Israel, a series of events) or making something immaterial (such as the human spirit), all of which is quite true. However, just as Walton did not explain that asa is used as a verb repeatedly (even more than yatsar, as it happens) to describe literal human craftsmanship and artisanship, as in the making of the furnishings of the tabernacle, so here he leaves out of account relevant information about yatsar.

Strong's exhaustive concordance defines yatsar as "to mould into a form; especially as a potter; figuratively, to determine (i.e. Form a resolution)." What this strongly (pun intended) suggests is that yatsar considered as a verb is much like our English word "fashion." The concept of craftsmanship is primary. Uses of the word to mean "determine" or "plan" are the derivative or figurative uses, as when we say, "He fashioned a plan." It is precisely backwards to take the figurative use, to treat it as if it is the primary meaning, and to apply it in a case where the text explicitly states that something was "formed/fashioned from" some other substance. That context suggests that it should not be translated as "prepared" or "planned"! In the context of Genesis 2:7, the translation "formed" or even "fashioned" is obviously correct, not some sort of anachronistic aberration. That is presumably why that is how English translations uniformly translate the word in that place!

In Isaiah 44:9-10, the word yatsar is used for fashioning an idol or graven image. Isaiah 44:12 uses the word for a smith's fashioning a piece of metal over heat by pounding it with hammers! Extremely relevant is Psalm 95:5, which says of God, "His hands formed the dry land." No, I am not suggesting that God (aside from the Incarnation) has hands. I am, however, pointing out the association of "formed" with "hands." Yatsar appears to be a hands-on word, and this fits very well with its use in Genesis 2:7--"formed man from the dust of the ground." Like many hands-on words (such as "fashion"), yatsar can be used figuratively. But Walton's references to places where the figurative translation like "ordain" or "prepare" is suggested by context merely causes confusion and misdirection regarding Genesis 2, where the context suggests "formed," precisely as in, "His hands formed the dry land."

There is more linguistic evidence to this effect. Yatsar can also be used as a noun, and as a noun, it means "potter." It is used to mean "potter" again and again in the Old Testament (Isaiah 29:6, 30:14, Jeremiah 18:4, Zechariah 11:13, and others). Again, this fits very well with the "hands-on" nature of the verb. As "baker" in English is "one who bakes," "potter" in OT Hebrew evidently was a "hands-on fashioner." A relevant verse here is Isaiah 45:9, where it is used in a metaphor of God as the potter and man as unruly clay (!) talking back to God:

Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker-- An earthenware vessel among the vessels of earth! Will the clay say to the potter, "What are you doing?" Or the thing you are making say, "He has no hands."? (NASB)
Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands? (KJV)

This information about yatsar makes Walton's caviling about the use of dust rather than clay and his insistence that "dust" must mean completely dry dust, incapable of being fashioned, all the more obviously a distraction. Genesis 2:7 uses a verb that means to fashion, as a potter fashions clay, and it describes a physical substance out of which man is said to be fashioned. The information about yatsar, taken as a whole, is quite consistent, and the hands-on implication of the verse could scarcely be clearer.

Moving on to Eve: Genesis 2 says,

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

Here Walton does a word study on the word tsela, translated "rib" in most English translations. In this case he is fairly thorough in his presentation of data, but his conclusions are tendentious and unjustified. Walton points out that the word in Hebrew and its cognate in Akkadian more often refer to a side of something, such as the side of the tabernacle in descriptions in Exodus, or as we would use the phrase "a side of beef," than to a single rib. He states that in Akkadian the word refers, though rarely, to "a single rib." He also admits that in the Bible the word is sometimes used to refer to planks or beams of a building (which to my mind fits pretty well with taking it to mean "rib" in Genesis 2). He also points out that older translations, such as the Aramaic targums, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate use a word for translating this verse that can mean either "rib" or "side."

Remarkably, from this mixture of evidence Walton concludes that we must take the word to mean that God cut off Adam's entire side if the verse is taken to refer to the material creation of Eve! "[W]e would have to conclude that God took one of Adam's sides--likely meaning he cut Adam in half and from one side built the woman." He then uses this extreme and narrow interpretation to ridicule any material interpretation of the formation of Eve (p. 79).

But why should the fact that tsela can mean the side of a building or half of a rib cage be used to derive this radical interpretation of the passage and then make an argument? The fact that the word can also mean a single rib, can mean some boards or planks (or even one board or plank?) combined with the careful description in the passage of removing one tsela and closing up the flesh at that place indicates that God's taking a rib or, at most, a portion of Adam's side, is a perfectly legitimate interpretation.

Walton also argues (p. 77) that, since Adam says that Eve is "flesh of his flesh" as well as "bone of his bone" the word tsela cannot refer to "a rib." But this, again, is a kind of caviling. Even from the most narrowly literal perspective, one can speak of beef ribs that also include some flesh with them! Moreover, the entire phrase "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" means that Eve was made from Adam's body. Indeed the word for "flesh" can be translated to mean "body," as in the very next verse, Genesis 2:24, where man and woman's coming together is said to make "one flesh," which of course does not mean to refer to molecules of flesh as opposed to bone! Obviously "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" is an example of Hebrew parallelism (Hebrew, especially poetry, uses parallelism all the time) to emphasize Eve's physical derivation from Adam. To use it against the translation "rib" in the previous verse is not a responsible argument. And against the translation/interpretation "part of his side" (given in one modern translation), this weak argument cannot even be mounted in the first place.

Walton takes these weak arguments about tsela and uses them, together with the fact that the Bible says that God placed Adam into a deep sleep, to argue for the following extremely strange and textually unmotivated conclusion:

From these data it is easy to conclude that Adam's sleep has prepared him for a visionary experience rather than for a surgical procedure. The descriptions of himself being cut in half and the woman being built from the other half (Gen 2:21-22) would refer not to something he physically experienced but to something that he saw in a vision. It would therefore not to describe a material event but would give him an understanding of an important reality, which he expresses eloquently in Genesis 2:23. Consequently, we would then be able to conclude that the text does not describe the material origin of Eve. (p. 80)

Walton's additional piece of "data" is that being cast into a deep sleep can describe the prelude to a vision. He instances the following: Gen. 15:12, Job 4:13, Job 33:15, Daniel 8:18, 10:9. What Walton does not take account of is this obvious fact: In every single one of those verses the person who falls into a deep sleep is said either to be having a vision or dream (the Job verses are explicit) or to be spoken to by God or a divine messenger after falling into sleep (all the others). None of this is true of Adam! The text does not say that he was cast into a deep sleep and that God or a messenger of God then talked to him, and it does not say that he was having a vision. The entire "vision" idea is Walton's own construct, not remotely hinted at in Genesis 2. Walton argues that the Israelites "knew nothing of the use of anesthesia" (p. 79). In the interview he says, "Israelites aren't thinking surgery." (around minute 35 1/2) Considering that the use of opium may have been known in ancient Egypt and that there is evidence of very ancient skull surgery, the absolute confidence with which he makes these unqualified declarations that the Israelites would not have understood this in any surgical sense only serves to suggest that Walton is prone to make overstatements about ancient peoples. In any event, any Israelite hearer who is not simply stupid could recognize that placing into a deep sleep before opening a side would make sense, even if it did not lie in their previous actual experience. Moreover, even the idea that there may be some degree of metaphoric statement in these verses hardly justifies the wholesale construction of the theory that Adam was having a vision!

Interestingly, Walton insists on p. 128 and elsewhere that we should be very careful not to "read the text as if it is communicating in the world of Adam and Eve's knowledge because, as mentioned in previous chapters, we have an Israelite storyteller communicating to an Israelite audience." But his "vision" theory of the forming account of Eve in Genesis 2 switches without justification to the idea that the text is about something communicated to Adam.

All of these ideas--that the forming of Adam in Genesis 2 is compatible with his being born naturally and that the forming of Eve refers to a vision Adam had--are extremely strained interpretations of the texts. One simply cannot sustain the idea that the text does not clearly appear to be recounting the original, de novo formation of Adam and Eve. In fact, so clearly "hands-on" is the text, with detailed discussions of forming man (using the word used for a potter's formation of clay) from pre-existing materials, breathing life into his nostrils, taking out something from his side and making a woman, and so forth, that one has to wonder: What would Walton take to falsify or even disconfirm his view that Genesis 2 is not describing God's de novo, physical creation of man? If he can explain away all this evidence (and other evidence like the use of asa in chapter 1), what is there that he cannot explain away? Just how much more explicit and hands-on would the text need to be, if it even could be more explicit and hands-on, to communicate the physical special creation of the first man and woman?

Conclusion

People have various reasons for accepting full-scale theistic evolution of man with, at most, ensoulment for humans. Generally, these reasons are considered to be scientific. Christians may attempt to find reflective equilibrium by reinterpreting Scripture in a way that is somewhat strained in order to accommodate what they believe to be the requirements of science. What John H. Walton has attempted to do is to argue that the text of Scripture itself, and Christian theology rightly based thereon, do not actually support the traditional view. These arguments are supposed to show that it does not actually require strained interpretations of Scripture to accommodate the present claims of evolutionary science.

In that project, I have argued, he has failed. If you are a full-scale theistic evolutionist concerning mankind, I conclude that John H. Walton has not provided evidence to support your position beyond what you already had before he wrote a word of these books. If you were uncomfortable about your decision before, you should be just as uncomfortable after taking Walton's books into account. Walton has not provided new, expert reasons to bolster theistic evolutionism and show it to be "faithful to Scripture." Whatever your reasons are for it, they should be independent of Walton's arguments, for those arguments are weak reeds to lean upon.

To return, then, to my point in the first post in this three-part review: If you have read or listened to John H. Walton because you were wondering whether Scripture really requires you to challenge "the consensus of science," why not do something else now? You could ask whether solid empirical evidence really requires you to abandon the traditional view of the historical Adam. I submit that this would be at least as profitable a use of your further research and reading time.

A review copy of The Lost World of Adam and Eve was provided free of charge by Intervarsity Academic. A positive review was not required.

Comments (89)

Walton is married to a biochemist. I wonder if that has a lot to do with it (it is mentioned in his faculty page).

Honestly, I'm being _extremely_ careful not to make any claims about motives or "where this is coming from" or anything. As I mentioned in Part I, his "go-to" books on the scientific issues (in his footnote on the science) are by people such as Francis Collins (noted critic of intelligent design), so if nothing else, it seems that he has not had the opportunity to encounter challenges to the alleged consensus of science on these matters. I have linked to such discussions for my readers in the previous parts of this review. I will say that it does bother me a bit that Walton moves back and forth between saying (in the interview for example) that the science is entirely beyond his pay grade, etc., while in the book saying that the scientific evidence is "compelling" on one side of the matter. Either it's beyond his competence or it isn't. Now, I don't actually think it _is_ beyond the competence of an intelligent layman to have an opinion on this, and I urge intelligent laymen to investigate. But let's not try to have it both ways or dance back and forth between, "Leave the science to the scientists; I couldn't possibly say" and "By the way, all you who take Adam to be the first man, you _really can't_ make that square with the science." Yet Walton has several pages in this second book in which he argues precisely that!

Lydia, a lot of times what a person means by claiming that "the science" is beyond his pay grade is really something more like, "I couldn't win an argument with an actual scientist who disagreed with me." And honestly, I feel the same about many subjects on which I have settled (or at least semi-settled) opinions, like the labor theory of value. I'm prepared to assert that economic history since the 19th century has showed Marx to be wrong, but I'm not prepared to engage in a scholarly debate about it with an economist, because it's deeply technical material.

I don't know the context of the remark you mention, but it could have been in response to some in-the-weeds question about evolutionary biology, or something like that. Maybe he expresses himself sloppily, but maybe there's a defensible intellectual posture lurking beneath the sloppiness.

I only speculate in that direction to give Walton every possible benefit of the doubt. I haven't read or heard the quotes in question.

Some professing Christians have an oddly compartmentalized plausibility structure. For instance, I've read things by Stanley Jaki on Genesis, Lourdes, and Fatima. Jaki rejects the traditional interpretation of Gen 1-3 on naturalistic grounds, yet he takes Lourdes and Fatima very seriously. What makes Lourdes or Fatima credible, but Gen 1-3 incredible?

Sage, such quotations come up whenever the interviewer brings up any issue relevant to the science at all. E.g. "Could it have been that man evolved in Africa and then migrated to the Middle East, where the garden and the tree of knowledge was located, and where the Adam story took place." Now, in that case, Walton actually _should_ say something, because at one point in the book he says that the literal week of Gen. 1 should be taken as in "the same general time period" as the story of the garden. (I didn't happen to quote that in the main post.) A lengthy migration based on an "out of Africa" hypothesis wouldn't seem to fall within "the same general time period." But it doesn't even occur to him that there is any overlap between his views and the science, because he has been at extreme pains to try to separate the Scripture from the science. So he just says that that lies entirely beyond his abilities. Moreover, the interviewer states that the science should be left to the scientists, and it at least _appears_ that Walton agrees. Or, for example, he states at one point (Walton brings this one up himself) that he is completely incapable of saying whether homo sapiens shares the imago dei with neanderthals. So he definitely gives a very strong _impression_ of prescinding on all scientific questions when he desires to give that impression, but in the book he is quite definite (on the basis, IMO, of a fairly one-sided survey) that the science rules out the traditional view of Adam and Eve.

I don't actually _mind_ his or anyone else's having an opinion on that subject. In fact, I'm encouraging everyone to do so. But again, putting this into the overall context, Walton is widely taken to show that Christians don't _have_ to look into this stuff and can just "leave it to the scientists." Of course, at that point the question, "Which scientists?" arises rather pointedly. I find myself frustrated by an approach that is made to appear neutral but in fact has a pretty decided bias in favor of whatever evolutionary theorists are presently telling us about genetics or what-not.

But by all means: If Dr. Walton and/or his followers _do_ want to have a scientific opinion on these matters, I encourage them to take that up. I simply encourage them to survey a wider array of arguments on the scientific side.

Jaki rejects the traditional interpretation of Gen 1-3 on naturalistic grounds, yet he takes Lourdes and Fatima very seriously. What makes Lourdes or Fatima credible, but Gen 1-3 incredible?

Presumably the available evidence. Though I suspect, and probably agree with, the response.

I think it's probably the phrase "on naturalistic grounds" that is relevant in Steve's characterization. I mean, if one is going to insist that "God wouldn't do it that way" as far as miracles in creation, it does begin to be rather arbitrary to say that God _would_ perform miracles at, e.g., Fatima.

Without by any means getting into an evaluation of the evidence for the Fatima miracles (!) which would certainly be OT, I agree with Steve Hays that there is a _huge_ problem with compartmentalization. The early chapters of Genesis are taken to be _off limits_ for divine miracles. I have addressed that issue in this post.

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2015/02/creation-doesnt-have-to-be-different.html

To be strictly fair to John H. Walton, he doesn't (fortunately) say anything like that in either of his books. For example, he doesn't try to argue from divine simplicity (which I have seen attempted) that God must have created by gradual means. He doesn't try to argue that creation must be "fully gifted" (a phrase of the formerly Christian Howard van Till). Rather, Walton's _approach_ is exegetical rather than a priori. It's just in my opinion...not at all well done exegesis.

Lydia, very well done. Thanks for these reviews.

I would think Mr. Walton would interact with your arguments, I would be interested in his thoughts. At the very least, it would sharpen his defense of this position.

An exchange of that sort would be interesting. It is not going to happen, I gather. See here:

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2015/03/review_of_john_h_waltons_the_l.html#comment-298507

I admit to skipping ahead after being afk for a while.

On the eve of the Annunciation, it just seems to me that the Incarnation is meaningless if "humanity" is essentially spiritual.

Very well said.

Thanks so much, Lydia, for this important review and analysis of Walton's book. I read the book about 4 months ago after a number of folks (J.W. Wartick, Nick Peters are two that come to mind) spoke highly of it.

I read it with interest and an "open mind", being willing to be led by his argument if it cohered. But, I was just troubled by his logic. I so appreciate your hard work and how carefully you have weeded through the book to distill the essential problems. I discerned the same issues but could not quite say exactly why I was bothered. Your work has clarified that for me.

I briefly looked at Walton's response, and am puzzled why he would not have taken the opportunity to respond to the few issues you brought up. You made it easy by distilling it down to just a few points of contention. Walton could have avoided the emotional irritations and just defended his thesis. We all would have benefited greatly by that, including I'd say, perhaps even Walton himself.

I do regret the way that his initial comments were responded to by folks on this forum. Perhaps, rather than an attack, a calmer response might have been an encouragement to him.

Anyway, Lydia is doing a valuable work, and I so appreciate and benefit from it. I think there's an ongoing effort to question, reinterpret, and explain away the meaning of scripture. Using science to do so seems a category mistake. I found Walton's book convoluted. There just seemed to be an agenda, based, I have to assume, on his view of science, that just bothered me. I think it's misleading stuff and so I am thankful for Lydia's work.

Thank you very much for your kind comment. He does bring arguments from Scripture, but I cannot see that they have any force.

What I think would have to be admitted at this point is that the Scripture is quite clear on one side of these issues. One might decide that its clear meaning _must_ be reinterpreted for scientific reasons, but obviously one should work to avoid that conclusion.

I had heard of Walton's work quite some months ago when a Facebook acquaintance was annoyed when I used some phrase like "the natural interpretation of Scripture" concerning the origins of man. He based his response on Walton's work. The interesting thing is that this friend's annoyance could not have been based on TLWOA&E, because that did not exist in print yet. In TLWOG1 Walton himself was still saying, if only on one page, that he was theologically committed to some _material_ discontinuity for man. In any event, I gather that the idea is that those who hold to the traditional view can no longer correctly say anything such as that the natural meaning of Scripture supports their view, because of Walton's arguments. I have, I believe, supported the conclusion that we should still say exactly that.

This series has really made me reconsider some beliefs I've held about the importance the historical Adam and I greatly appreciate it. I would like to push back a little on your comments about Cain's wife. I agree that this mystery alone is not warrant enough to posit en masse creation. Moreover, your independent functional justification seems coherent to me. The concern I have is that these arguments tend to focus on the practical prohibitions on incest (i.e. genetic harm). It seems to me, however, that the prohibitions on incest in Lev 18 and elsewhere are elements of the moral law and thus, are universally applicable and not purely practical (although there certainly are practical considerations). I can see how an en masse argument can be built by saying it would be immoral for God to command "go forth and multiply" when that would directly entail incest. It does seem biting the bullet and re-categorizing Lev 18 would be a really high burden to bear for these folks (and it's something that weighs heavily on me, too). I'm not sure Abraham can get us off the hook here since his having concubines at least prima facie seems to undercut his status as a role model for marriage. So, how does one deal with the moral considerations of incest?

Right, to clarify: I was not stating that Abraham is a role model per se but rather that incest (at least with a half sister) does seem to have been viewed rather differently, which would reflect in turn on the probable originally understood meaning of Cain's and/or Seth's wives.

If in fact Adam and Eve's children were not biological siblings, that seems to take care of the moral problem by purely physiological means. In other words, it would literally not be incest for these non-siblings to intermarry. It is even possible that they had inklings of this fact by observation or that it was revealed to them.

Also, at the risk of opening a can of worms, I am willing to say that I think we have it precisely backwards if we regard male-female incest as "the next stop on the slippery slope" _after_ homosexuality. The latter is in fact far more readily seen as _strictly unnatural_ and _absolutely contrary to the moral law_ than the former.

Let me point out that several of the prohibitions in Leviticus 18 are against sexual relations with people who are not blood relatives. The prohibition against having sexual relations with one's aunt by marriage is an example, here. Also one's daughter-in-law or one's father's wife (presumably, including a second wife who is not one's own mother). Now, note that if one met these same people when they were _not_ married to relatives and never had been, there would be no problem. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if a man had a young aunt by marriage who was widowed (the uncle died), it wouldn't be at all obviously and absolutely wrong for them to be married subsequently, yet Leviticus 18 appears to prohibit it. I think that casts Leviticus 18 in rather a different light as far as its relation to the absolute moral law and incest, since some of the prohibitions are _not_ matters of absolute sexual prohibition related to physical relationships but rather connected solely to marital relationships. The prohibition against sex with one's sister is put into this context, which is a mix of blood and sociological relationships. And the prohibition against sex with one's sister (or mother, for that matter) is made no stronger than the prohibition against sex with one's aunt by marriage. One could then argue that Leviticus 18 is sorting out a complex set of kinship relations rather than making prohibitions for all time concerning sex with particular individuals. That leaves the question of which _are_ the prohibitions for all time in all contexts, part of the absolute moral law, to be decided on other grounds.

So there are a number of lines of approach to that question concerning incest.

In reply to Zachary:

i) "Incest" is a vague designator inasmuch as the term itself fails to distinguish between parental incest and sibling incest. Although parental incest is intrinsically evil, that doesn't mean sibling incest is intrinsically evil.

ii) In addition, the Levitical regulations combine purity codes with a penal code. That's because ancient Israel was a theocratic nation-state. Like any nation-state, it has a penal code. Many laws are moral laws.

But additionally there is a focus on ritual purity, due to Israel's cultic holiness. These don't concern intrinsic good and evil. Rather, their function is emblematic.

Some laws are tied to the unique redemptive-historical status of Israel, whereas other laws regulate or sanction the kinds of social behavior that any nation-state must legislate.

MarcAnthony:

"Presumably the available evidence."

That raises a host of interesting questions:

i) Many times, we have no evidence for a historical event over and above historical accounts of the event in question. Sometimes there may be independent corroborative physical evidence, but oftentimes not.

What's our evidence for the Battle of Waterloo? Historical accounts.

Depending on one's view of Scripture, the account of Gen 2-3 is, itself, evidence for the occurrence of what it records.

ii) There are people who think Gen 2-3 is literally ridiculous, but implicitly believe that a consecrated wafer contains the entire body, blood, soul, and deity of Christ. Seems like an oddly segregated belief-system to me.

iii) Normally, humans are the product of a human male impregnating a human female. But if the Virgin Birth is true, then that's an exception–just as the creation of Adam and Eve would be exceptional.

Now, if you did a full medical workup on Jesus, I assume he'd be indistinguishable from someone conceived by procreation. If, however, God bypassed ordinary natural processes in the conception of Jesus, the available evidence will be consistent with either a natural or supernatural origin. Both interpretations are empirically adequate and empirically indistinguishable–but only one is right.

Suppose I arrive late at the feeding of the five thousand. I see a crowd eating fish and bread. I assume fishermen caught the fish in the nearby lake, while bakers produced the loaves of bread. And that's a reasonable operating assumption, given my limited evidence.

If, however, Jesus miraculously multiplied fish and bread, then my inference was wrong. It didn't take that factor into consideration.

iv) Apropos (iii), how we evaluate the evidence depends, in part, on presuppositions that we bring to the evidence. Presuppositions that lie outside the evidence proper–although there may be evidence for our presuppositions.

If the effect is the end-result of allowing nature to take its course, then that's one thing. If the effect is the immediate result of supernatural agency, that's another thing. And it may not be possible to retroengineer the cause from the effect. We may be able to retrace the process provided that it was a normal process. But what's the evidence for the proviso?

To take a comparison: in robotics it's possible to make a robot that can make other robots like itself. Most robots will be made by other robots. But the initial robot in the series must be designed and constructed by an engineer.

steve hays, I completely understand where you are coming from on the purity law angle and this was my default position for a while. I have reconsidered it because of verses 24-25 which seem to say God judges the other nations according to this metric: "Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. 25 For the land has become defiled, therefore I have brought its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants.

So, I find it really difficult to say these laws were applicable only to Israel. Verse 19 about menstruation is usually considered a purity law which also gives me pause (you could say meno-pause haha, okay I'm done). At best, I think you can say that Lev 18 is a mix of different laws like you suggest but that leaves the incest categorization still up in the air.

At best, I think you can say that Lev 18 is a mix of different laws like you suggest but that leaves the incest categorization still up in the air.

That's good enough, though, isn't it? The other Scriptural evidence _for_ the historical Adam in the traditional sense (no other humans besides Eve to kick off the human race) is _not_ up in the air. It's a sound hermeneutical principle to use clear Scripture to help to interpret where the status or point of other Scripture is less clear.

Zachary, I also looked at part of the problem if sibling incest here. I think it is an adequate answer to one of the 3 reasons incest is sometimes declared bad, as perhaps even contrary to the natural law. Let me review the 3:

(1) It's due to genetics: sibling sex have too high a chance of producing genetically damaged kids.
(2) It's due to sin: given disordered desires and great opportunity, unless there is a strong social standard against sibling marriage, sibling pre-marital sex will (if it comes out because the girl is pregnant) be covered up by forced marriage. Thus firm rules against sibling incest are needed to pose a barrier to sin.
(3) It's for social diffusion: marriage is supposed to diffuse the goods of family and friendship beyond merely the closest kin, extend those and cement larger society together by stronger ties than mere strangers in a land.

My answer linked above answers (3), but briefly: if there SIMPLY IS no larger society yet, because there is only your parents and your siblings (Adam and Eve & kids), then the need for (3) simply disappears. In fact, in that case the need to HAVE a larger society actually insists that sibling marriage is good! (All other things being left off the table.)

The problem with (1) and (2) is that they are not posed in a way that obviously makes them part of the natural law. For example, if Adam and Eve had been created perfect by God, with no genetic damage, and genes started to get damaged only after the fall, the danger of their kids breeding causing birth defects would have been vanishingly small - certainly negligible. To put it another way, a problem due to genetic defect isn't "part of the natural law" unless genetic defect is actually part of human nature. But by hypothesis (on taking Genesis as an account of direct creation of Adam and Eve perfect) it isn't.

(2) is subject to the same as (1) about not being wrong due to the natural law: a problem that only comes up because of sin isn't a problem DUE TO NATURE. It wouldn't, for example, had been a social problem if Adam and Eve (and their children) had never sinned (both because the intra-family temptations to disordered sex wouldn't exist, and the temptation to cover up for sin would not apply), so it's from something extrinsic to human nature.

It is also undermined by assuming the conditions of Adam and Eve's household. There would be no "hiding" incest by "forcing" marriage if from the beginning of the family everyone knew the brothers and sisters were going to be marrying. It would simply be "pairing off" into marriage. Whether that happened at earlier ages than it would in marriages outside the family, because proximity breeds desire, is pretty much moot when you consider that this was an inherently unique family and household. "Earlier" wouldn't mean "wrong" by itself.

So, of the 3 most common reasons given for why incest OUGHT to be against social and legal rules (and IS against the moral law as applied to us here and now), none of them are very strong as applied to Adam and Eve's family. And none of them clearly set forth a basis for saying it is "against the natural law" in a way that applies equally to all families including the first family God created.

Fr Jaki's arguments regarding Genesis are much more involved than "naturalistic grounds". He did write "Miracles and Physics" to belabor both who deny miracles a la Hume and those that think that quantum mechanics provides a way to explain miracles.

A short excerpt on Jaki's interpretation of Genesis 1:
Genesis 1 is not a scientific cosmology, not even a myth or legend but most probably a kind of metaphoric biblical exhortation emphasizing that all things were made by God, and they were good, nay, very good; that man has a special position in the universe with the duty of devotion to the Lord of the Cosmos to be manifested in praising Him by the observation of the Sabbath. In accordance with the ancient views of the chosen people the universe is to be conceived as a cosmic tent. By ancient means of rhetorics, parts can be mentioned for the whole (pars pro toto) or the whole characterized by parts (totum per partes). This is how the biblical phrase "heaven and earth" stands for "everything". Erecting a "tent" needed, of course, conditions such as light, created on the first "day", while the two main parts (heaven and earth i.e. the roof and the floor) came into being on the second and third "days" (opus divisionis) (plants were sprouting from the earth), all was ornated with the celestial bodies as well as fish and birds on the fourth and fifth "days" (opus ornatus). Terrestrial animals appeared on the sixth "day" and from them Adam emerged by direct creation, and an equal status was given to Eve. Finally, God rested from all his work on the seventh "day". He is rightly to be praised by the Universe as Psalm 148 is resounding in a similar sequence.


In connection with biblical interpretation, Father Jaki often referred to the principle descending from Saint Augustine that if solid experiences were coming up against the Bible, the latter should be reinterpreted. Unfortunately, even the bishop of Hippo himself, had not been consistent in insisting on this principle. Father Jaki's interpretation of Genesis 1 is totally and deliberately independent from modern cosmology, not to suggest any kind of concordism or creationism, and it does not yield to the fashionably biased opinion of intelligent design either.

To give another example of Fr Jaki's thought, he denies that the Big Bang hypothesis informs us about God's creation of the universe.
The Big Bang hypothesis, being a scientific idea, correlates one material configuration with another; it says and can say nothing about creation of the universe out of nothing.

It is plain silly to characterize Fr Jaki's objections to something as being grounded in "naturalistic grounds". He knew, probably far better than most everybody, what exactly these "naturalistic grounds" are.

steve hays,
Fr Jaki presumably believed in Fatima and Lourdes because he was convinced by multiple eye-witness accounts of these events. And he believed in Transubstantiation because he accepted the Catholic dogma.
But as a Catholic, he was not obliged to believe in the literal meaning of Genesis 1. It is clearly not an eye-witness account, clearly not a scientific account. He interpreted Genesis 1 as a fable (so did Belloc who called OT a collection of Hebrew fables) that carries two important ideas
1) that God created everything
2) that it is important to keep Sabbath.

Fr Jaki also entertained the idea of Genesis 1 as a quite late addition to Genesis. Not Moses at all.

He interpreted Genesis 1 as a fable (so did Belloc who called OT a collection of Hebrew fables) that carries two important ideas 1) that God created everything 2) that it is important to keep Sabbath.

Bedarz, as a fellow Catholic I have a lot of sympathy for Fr. Jaki. I would love to be able to say "See! There is a fellow who is a thoroughly modern scientist who also believes in the Bible, including in Genesis." And I have accepted individual points he makes as useful.

But the above point is not so good. Not from the Catholic perspective, and (I would submit) not from any Christian perspective. If Genesis 1 and 2 cannot be used to establish MORE than those 2 points, then we Catholics have a major problem. For Pope Pius XII said that it is definitive Catholic teaching that Adam and Eve were our single first parents.

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

I am not focusing only on the specific point of content - that of Adam being our first father - but on the hermenuetic of interpretation here. There has to be a mode of approaching to Genesis (including 1 and 2) in which we are able to say which elements are "fabulous" or otherwise "not part of what the author was trying to convey" and which elements are critical, necessary, included specifically in the mind of the human author as "what he was getting at." If Jaki's approach to Genesis is that it is a Hebrew fable and THOSE 2 points are the sum total of what the author was trying to get across by Genesis 1 and 2, then Jaki rejects Pope Pius XII's doctrinal teaching. Which, I am pretty sure, Jaki would not like to say outright in so many words. But at least this: his mode of interpreting leaves something to be desired.

To give another example of Fr Jaki's thought, he denies that the Big Bang hypothesis informs us about God's creation of the universe. The Big Bang hypothesis, being a scientific idea, correlates one material configuration with another; it says and can say nothing about creation of the universe out of nothing.

This is another example of drawing too harsh a conclusion, this "says nothing about".

Let us accept Jaki's initial position for the sake of the argument: that Big Bang theory is good science, and that it "correlates one material configuration with another." This particular account has a one-sidedness to the correlation that does NOT OBTAIN in other scientific accounts: We can say with some confidence what material configuration at 10^(-15) seconds correlates to the configuration at 10^(-14) seconds. And with expanding theory, we can keep pushing that knowledge further back, toward 10^(-30), etc. What we do not have is any strong confidence of the EXACT configuration at the actual 0 point, nor of any configurations before that. All the existing proposals are hypotheses and not very solid ones at that.

Accepting that picture, though, does in fact "tell us something" about creation - in a negative way. The Big Bang theory points to an epistemological discontinuity. It tells us that there is a place, (or rather a time) with respect to all later possible moments and configurations are (or may be, we don't yet know) are quite different epistemologically. For all later moments, we can use science to formulate clear cause-effect chains that point to prior conditions. For all later moments than the 0 point, we would have to say "if God had created the universe at THIS moment X, with given configuration X', we would have to conclude that the logically inferred "prior" configuration was just an ad-hoc seeming that God just built into the initial configuration X' for no discernible reason." We don't have to say that about the epistemological discontinuity of the 0 point. That's what a discontinuity gives us. It gives us a basis for saying: here's a point in time not LIKE all the others, so far as we know." We don't know (yet) whether it can be "accounted for" like all the later moments by a prior configuation. If it is ACTUALLY the moment of creation, it is probable that science itself, operating on its own, could never prove that the configurations following from it imply that it is the moment of creation, but science can at least say "we can't say creation at that moment generates a definite 'prior configuration' conundrum." That negative knowledge would make acceptance of creation more reasonable.

Tony, thanks for saying those things so that I didn't have to.

On the narrow points of content, it is obvious that neither Jesus nor St. Paul nor St. Luke (in writing the genealogy) regarded the real existence of a real Adam, the first man, as a fable. Paul is so explicit in his discussion of the man's being formed first in the epistle to Timothy that wiggle room is absolutely eliminated, and Jesus is extremely explicit on the origins of marriage.

It would be easy enough to speculate as to motives for a harsh and absolute denial that Genesis can possibly tell us _anything_ about these people or that the genre of the early chapters of Genesis is such as to have _any_ empirical implications. But even if one meticulously refrains from such speculations, that position is simply not sustainable. Not only the original passages but also the New Testament passages are just too clear.

As for taking the entire Old Testament to be a series of Hebrew fables, there are so many things wrong with that--hermeneutically, historically, and theologically--that I wouldn't know where to start. In fact, for all that John Walton is pretty good at making things out to have "nothing to say" about any empirical discipline, he does _not_ attempt to say that and even draws the line at completely denying the historicity of someone like Adam.

since Walton talks about God's "using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication," he comes pretty close to admitting that the human authors would have intended to communicate exactly that.

I don't see this. The phrase "using their contemporary concepts as a framework for communication" is pretty vague in itself. It could mean something as innocent as what you yourself said in response to one of my comments back in Part I:

they probably had such-and-such a false concept, but the text isn't communicating that.

On the other hand, it could, theoretically, mean

The human author definitely intended to communicate P. The human original audience definitely understood P. P is false. But that's okay, because we can now divine that theological truth Q was what God was _really getting at_ by inspiring/allowing the human author to write a text that, on the human level, _definitely said and communicated something false_.

But it seems unlikely that that's what Walton meant. Especially when he says such things as you quote, "God vested his authority in a human author." The only thing I could see that would press in the direction of interpreting Walton as "coming close" to saying the latter is your claim that Luke "did intend to communicate that Adam actually was the first man." But I can't see any reason to think that Walton would agree with that. I certainly don't. It was not Luke's intention to address the question of whether Adam actually was the first man. On the contrary, he simply presupposed that he was and that his audience would presuppose the same. To be sure, when you presuppose something in saying something else, the something else is often (but not always) such that it couldn't be true unless the presupposed thing is true. If Luke's statement were like that, then there would be a very short logical inference from what he intended to communicate to the conclusion that Adam actually was the first man. Or if he wasn't, then what Luke said is false. But, as with the heliocentrist examples I used before, not every statement someone makes that presupposes something requires the truth of the thing presupposed in order to be true itself. To determine which class Luke's statement falls into, further argument is needed.

Tony,
You are being unfair to Fr Jaki. He wrote his book about Genesis 1.It is there in the title itself. He does not discuss Adam and Eve and I believe he would not contradict the Catholic dogma at any point.
Genesis as collection of Hebrew fables is Belloc and not Jaki. However, we need to appreciate the genre of various stories in Genesis. Jaki does not use the word "fable" anywhere that I have read.

The Big Bang theory points to an epistemological discontinuity.
In physics language, the time t=0 is a singularity in Big Bang theory.
Singularities are not uncommonly met in physical theories. They imply that
the current theory does not apply and needs to be refined.
That is all the Bing Bang singularity at t=0 means.There isn't a real
singularity or discontinuity at t=0 that can be asserted by physics.

To determine which class Luke's statement falls into, further argument is needed.

Christopher, it's very difficult for me to know precisely how to respond to this, because you're an excellent commentator, always patient, smart, and good to dialogue with. But the idea that Luke is, in any slightest regard, not being clear about whether Adam was specially created just seems to me...so incredibly, so obviously, so blatantly false that I almost do not know how to address it. Here he writes an entire genealogy with relationships of physical descent, and finally he gets back to Adam, and what does he say? Adam is described in a way that is different from everybody else in the entire list (even Jesus, for that matter). He says that everybody else was the son/descendant of some human, but Adam was the son of God. And, yes, _of course_ he would have know that his audience would take that to _be a reference to_ Adam's being specially created. Not just "presupposing" it, but taking him to be _saying_ it. And what possible reason could we possibly have for thinking he is "not addressing it"? What burden of proof there might be is amply discharged _by the locution itself_, which could scarcely be more obvious. What in the world more could one want? For Luke to say, "Adam, who was the son of God, for as the Scripture says, God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul"? Would that be enough? Oh, wait, Walton tries to explain *even that* away, too. And since it is dead-level obvious that Luke knew that his audience would take him to be referring to that *very verse*...well...at this point I begin to regard any position that says, "The Bible doesn't say that God specially created Adam" as unfalsifiable. It seems that anything the Bible says will be interpreted as, "Oh, no, this text doesn't mean physical creation" or "Oh, this author is merely presupposing that, but isn't actually _saying_ it" even when he says it.

As far as I'm concerned, Luke's utterance counts as just saying it, especially given the textual background in Genesis itself and the fact that every other textual indication concerning Adam himself points to the same conclusion. This is a strong part of a strong cumulative case.

Bedarz, the creation of man is also in Genesis 1. So if there is dogma about the creation of man, then any generalizations about Genesis 1 need not to be too sweeping in their separation between science and religious dogma.

Bedarz:

"You are being unfair to Fr Jaki. He wrote his book about Genesis 1.It is there in the title itself. He does not discuss Adam and Eve…"

He also wrote Bible and Science.

"And he believed in Transubstantiation because he accepted the Catholic dogma."

So he believed in transubstantiation on the authority of the church (i.e. Church of Rome).

Well then, what about believing Gen 1-3 on the authority of Scripture?

"He interpreted Genesis 1 as a fable (so did Belloc who called OT a collection of Hebrew fables)."

Is that supposed to be an argument from authority? Belloc called the OT a collection of Hebrew fables, therefore it's okay to believe that? What makes Belloc your religious authority? What makes his opinion sanction that view of Scripture?

Does the NT treat the OT as a collection of fables?

steve hays,
Scripture possesses no authority by itself. All authority flows from the Church.
It would be of personal interest to myself if you could point out any instance where Fr Jaki contradicts a Catholic dogma.

Belloc is no authority but he is quotable for concision in expression. The full quote is
OT is a collection of Hebrew fables that we believe on the authority of the Church.

I think that most clearly expresses the Catholic (and as a non-sectarian person myself, the most rational) approach to OT.

So the OT had no authority until the day of Pentecost–or whenever you date the founding of the church of Rome and/or the papacy. That's your position?

Moses had no authority? Jeremiah had no authority?

Likewise, St. Paul had no authority? St. John had no authority?

What about authority flowing from divine inspiration?

What about divine authority flowing from a divine commission, viz. God sending Isaiah or Ezekiel to announce his message to Israel?

Evidently, that doesn't figure in your religious epistemology.

Moses had authority over Hebrews whom he led to freedom. It is not obvious how and why he came to have authority over 21st century world by himself.
Independent of the Church, OT is merely a book of the Hebrew people, of no more relevance to Europeans than Gita.

Putting it rather dryly, it could hardly be said that Bedarz is articulating anything remotely like a high view of the authority of Scripture. Which Walton himself claims to hold, even going so far as inerrancy. Btw, "the church" in its earliest years regarded the Old Testament as having authority. One has only to read the epistles of St. Paul to see this quite clearly. Or the words of Jesus, without whom there would be no church.

I doubt that Walton or those who are his target audience would at all care to resort to, "Oh, well, the OT is just a bunch of fables unless the church has declared some particular bit authoritative." Indeed, his entire argument is to the contrary: Oh, _no_, of _course_ not. You can believe that there was sin and death before the fall and that there were thousands of first people besides Adam and still hold that the Bible is _totally_ authoritative, including Genesis.

It was this that I was concerned to debunk. If someone else is going to come along at this point and say that it all doesn't matter because the OT is just a bunch of Hebrew fables and Moses writing it had no authority, and that _this_ is why we needn't worry about who Adam was, that merely makes my point for me.

Moses had authority over Hebrews whom he led to freedom. It is not obvious how and why he came to have authority over 21st century world by himself. Independent of the Church, OT is merely a book of the Hebrew people, of no more relevance to Europeans than Gita.

That's not the Catholic view of the OT, Bedarz. The OT was used by God to set the scene for Jesus, so that Jesus's life would fulfill the prophecies. Without authoritative prophecies, his fulfillment of them would not be the sign, the proof, that he was Who he said he was to the Jews. As is all over Matthew and John and Paul's epistles. Also, Jesus quotes the OT because it is authoritative. The OT is not "authoritative because the Church grants it that status", the OT's authority precedes that of the Church.

To say that the OT is "merely a book of the Hebrew people" is to cut Christianity off from its own root. Before Christ came into the world, there was one and only one true religion, that of the Jews. After Christ ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, there is one and only one true religion, that of Christianity built out of the foundation of the Abrahamic chosen people and God's revelation to them. Christ, as the Word of God, did not come to eradicate the OT, but to fulfill it. Therefore the full revelation of God to the world is not Jesus alone, but Jesus in the full context of God's action in establishing covenants with Abraham, David, etc.

The terms "authority" and "authoritative" need to be completed by by the information "authority for whom" and "authoritative" over whom".

OT had authority over the Jews and God-fearers but surely a Greek would not recognize OT as having any authority over him at all.

So, even now OT is authoritative for non-Jews in a way Gita is not is only and entirely due to the authority of the Church.

That "The OT was used by God to set the scene for Jesus" is we know and accept only and entirely due to the authority of the Church.

I do not see how otherwise we could have information on these matters.

Lydia,

it all doesn't matter because the OT is just a bunch of Hebrew fables and Moses writing it had no authority,

I take it that you are not unduly perturbed about the "days" and the "firmament" and how creation of vegetation on Day 3 precedes creation of the sun on Day 4 but you are very much concerned to establish uniqueness of Adam and Eve. Why do you privilege one statement of the Genesis over others?

Of course all of those are very interesting questions and puzzles. For example, one idea is that the "making" of the sun on Day 4 means that it was caused to appear visible, while it was created and its light brought to the earth on Day 1. These sorts of puzzles, including the meaning of the word "yom," are questions that people discuss precisely _because_ they are concerned about the authority of Scripture, because they do _not_ simply say that it is a matter of fable. As I pointed out, even John H. Walton is not taking some simple-minded "fable" view, which is why he goes to such lengths.

The literal, physical nature of Adam and Eve and their relation to the human race, and _that_ interpretation of the relevant points of Genesis, is "privileged," as you call it, for the reasons I have taken time to write out at length--reasons involving both the language of the initial texts and also many references in and connections to other texts, including the words of Our Lord.

When a contributor writes several lengthy posts arguing that very point, it is extremely annoying, not to mention rude, to come along and put up a comment saying, "Why is this important?" or "Why do you give special attention to this interpretation of this point?" as though no such argument had been given. You should not do that.

The point that I am trying to make is
1) Concordism in the sense of trying to match Genesis 1 text with current science (or non-science) is unproductive except for puzzles which can be solved scientifically or extra-scientifically (as your suggestion of the sun that was caused to appear visible on Day 4.).
What spiritual insights are led to by these kind of puzzle-solving?
2) Do you maintain that Genesis 1 provides the "How" of creation? and that too in literal, non-metaphoric language?
3) The influence of the Catholic dogma that maintains the uniqueness of Adam and Eve but does not insist on the literal reading of other events depicted in Genesis 1.
In fact, a plain reading of Genesis 1 would not cause one to suspect that the Christians maintain that God created the world out of nothing.

Do you maintain that Genesis 1 provides the "How" of creation? and that too in literal, non-metaphoric language?

I think the text almost certainly indicates the use of miracles in the creation of the entities in the world and is certainly about God's material creation. There are more natural and less natural interpretations of the text, but I am willing to draw final conclusions (e.g., on the meaning of the term "day") based on a combination of all evidence, which will include scientific evidence. Sometimes that requires taking a less-than-natural reading of the text; as I've said in the entries (which you persistently write as if you have not bothered to read), ne should not pretend in that case that one is doing something else--as in Walton's, "This is the literal reading" talk concerning his extremely strange readings.

In fact, a plain reading of Genesis 1 would not cause one to suspect that the Christians maintain that God created the world out of nothing.

Here, again, you show your complete unawareness of the discussions of scholars on these points. For example, the Hebrew _bara_ has _often_ been taken by scholars to indicate ex nihilo creation. I do not myself know whether that is correct in every single place where it is used--e.g., is there significance in the fact that _bara_ is used for the great whales but not for the plants?--but it is just false to say that a plain reading of the text does not suggest ex nihilo creation. In fact, the very first verse of the chapter appears to suggest exactly that!

In any event, if you agree that the special creation of Adam is important, then it is mysterious as to why you are repeatedly carping on theses entries, which are about Adam and Eve, in case you had not noticed. Moreover, a sweeping statement that Genesis 1 is a fable hardly amounts to a rousing affirmation of the unique creation of man.

For Luke to say, "Adam, who was the son of God, for as the Scripture says, God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul"? Would that be enough? Oh, wait, Walton tries to explain *even that* away, too. And since it is dead-level obvious that Luke knew that his audience would take him to be referring to that *very verse* ...

Exactly. Walton surely would agree that Luke intended to refer to that *very verse*. And since he thinks he can "explain away" (as you put it) that verse, there's every reason to believe that he would also "explain away" (if you must put it like that) Luke's reference to it in the same way. So Walton does _not_ "come close to saying" that what Luke said was false but God still used it to communicate a true message.

Regardless of how obvious you think your interpretation of the text is, and even if you are right about that, you can't attribute that interpretation to Walton when you have positive evidence that he wouldn't agree with your "obvious" interpretation.

As for the question of whether your interpretation is obvious or not...

A similar argument could be made, similar arguments were made by geocentrists: "The earth is fixed, it can never be moved." We know the Psalmist and his audience believed the earth was literally motionless. This text clearly adverts to that belief, and doesn't merely presuppose it, but says it. Will you say this is just "observational" language? But the Psalmist wouldn't have made that distinction. True enough, he was describing what he observed, but it's just as true that he believed things actually were as he observed them to be. He really believed the earth was fixed. So did his audience. And yes he clearly did express that belief in that verse.

This line of argument is not unreasonable, which is why reasonable people (I think Martin Luther among them) took this position. Likewise, your interpretation of Luke is not unreasonable, but neither is it obviously true.

While the Psalmist had an unreflective belief in the fixity of the earth, a belief contrary to heliocentric theory, and while he did in some sense express that belief in the Psalm (we wouldn't write those words, because we don't think of the whole earth as being fixed) nevertheless, it was not his purpose to address the question of whether geocentrism was true. No one had ever raised that question. The question he is addressing is not whether but why the earth is fixed: Whose power established it in the condition in which, he presupposes, it stands?

Once we make this observation, we still aren't out of the woods, because on the face of it, it sure seems as if his answer to that question, viz. "It is the power of Jehovah that made the earth fixed so that it can never be moved" could only be true if in fact the earth is fixed so that it can never be moved, which sure seems to contradict heliocentrism. However, we might say, "that boulder is so massive no one will ever be able to move it." And if that boulder seems hard to move what about Mt. Everest. What could be more immovable than that huge mountain? Well, what about the whole earth? And we have arrived at the distinction between observational language and scientific language which enables us to see how what the Psalmist said is compatible with heliocentrism. We can apply that distinction here at the theological level where _we_ are trying to discern what is or isn't logically consistent with what the Psalmist said. It would not be appropriate to apply it on the exegetical level, reading that distinction into the text when that distinction isn't one the Psalmist would have made.

I want to say a bit more about the difference between what is said and what is presupposed. Does Paul's statement, "God raised Jesus from the dead." say that God exists? No. It presupposes it. Paul wasn't addressing the question of whether God exists. He was writing to people who all agreed that God exists, so there was no occasion to address that question. Now, obviously enough, it doesn't take much argument to see that Paul's statement couldn't be true unless God exists. But that is an inference, even if a very direct one.

On the other hand, when Paul spoke at the Areopagus, he perhaps was addressing that question. Although most of the philosophers believed in divinity of some sort, nevertheless Paul was probably aware that atheism was at least on the table in the philosophical discussions of the Areopagus, and even though he was primarily addressing those who would presuppose the existence of divinity, one aspect of his intended meaning may well have been to affirm (not just presuppose) that there is a divine being. It was a question he might well have been addressing, even if it wasn't the primary question he was addressing.

So I hope it's clear from that example that I'm not reducing the passage's assertions to some minimal "main point". On the contrary, I believe in the infallibility of all of the Biblical authors' assertions, including Gricean implicatures that aren't literally expressed. But they must be matters that the authors intended to address. On other matters, the best we can have are inferences. Which is certainly good enough in many cases.

Consider Stephen's speech in Acts 7. Stephen probably wasn't addressing the question of whether the Exodus acutally happened in history. He and his hearers both presupposed it, and there was no occasion to address it. Theories of so-called higher criticism would not be proposed for many centuries. Although I suppose it's possible someone with knowledge of Greek rational historical methodology might have called into question the historical truth of the Exodus, this was probably not on the radar for Stephen when he gave his speech. So the claim that the Exodus really happened in history is not affirmed but presupposed.

But in this case we are, I believe, on firm ground in claiming that what Stephen said could not be true unless what he presupposed is also true. The Hebrew religion is historical in its very essence. It was based on a Covenant that God made with Israel. The basis for this Covenant relationship is God's mighty act of delivering the people from Egypt. If God never actually did this in history, then the Covenant is based on a fiction, and a Covenant based on a fiction cannot stand. The nature of the Covenant requires at least this much historical referentiality: There was a historical Exodus from Egypt.

That's the sort of thing I mean by "further argument". (I also happen to think the critics' historical case against the Exodus is pretty weak, but that's a separate question from "what did Stephen say, and what follows from that?")

I hope this clarifies the distinction I'm drawing between what is said and what is presupposed. With that distinction in place it is far from obvious that Luke says the Adam was specially created.

So Walton does _not_ "come close to saying" that what Luke said was false but God still used it to communicate a true message.

I disagree. He could, for example, have said instead, "Since I have argued that Genesis 2 would not have been understood to be about physical creation, and since Luke would have been taken by _his_ audience to be alluding to that verse, neither Luke nor his audience would have understood this portion of the genealogy to be saying that Adam was physically created by God." In my opinion, what Walton says is rather strikingly different from that. Even falling back on the "they may have had false ideas but..." defense, when the text appears quite clearly to be articulating those very ideas, does exactly what I said it does. It "comes close" to admitting that what the author _meant_ was false but that God used it to communicate a true message. Walton is a master of weasel phrases, and as you yourself noted, his phrase about "using as a framework" is pretty darned unclear, which is why I used the phrase "comes close" myself. But he could have said something far more clearly in line with his "this is how _they_ would have understood it" claims re. Genesis 1 and 2, and he chose to do something quite different instead. I think that is significant, and I therefore stand by what I said.

I hope this clarifies the distinction I'm drawing between what is said and what is presupposed. With that distinction in place it is far from obvious that Luke says the Adam was specially created.

I understand what you are saying, and I stand by my claim. What Luke says about Adam's being the son of God, in the context both of what he and his audience would have taken him to be saying and in the context of the passage itself and the distinction it draws between Adam and the other human beings therein (including Christ, who did have a biological mother), could not be true unless it were true that Adam was specially created by God.

we wouldn't write those words, because we don't think of the whole earth as being fixed

Every St. Patrick's Day I sing "I Bind Unto Myself Today" which includes the phrases "the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old eternal rocks." I do not take myself to be affirming heliocentrism there and doubt that whoever wrote the words originally took himself to be affirming it either. Nor the literal eternity of rocks.

But the Psalmist wouldn't have made that distinction. True enough, he was describing what he observed, but it's just as true that he believed things actually were as he observed them to be. He really believed the earth was fixed. So did his audience. And yes he clearly did express that belief in that verse.

a) I think it is going too far to declare with great confidence that the Psalmist would not have made the distinction concerning observational language, considering that we ourselves today (concerning the sun) use observational language all the time and do not consider it inaccurate. b) Supposing this argument to be correct, then there is an error in the text, but it's not a big deal. I have said myself repeatedly that I am not an inerrantist in the Chicago Statement sense, and quite bluntly, I would rather declare myself open to thinking that there is an (unimportant) error in Scripture than go through a lot of gymnastics to say that the text isn't actually affirming an error when it is.

Moreover, that Adam was not actually specially created by God is not an unimportant matter, and insinuating that the gospel author was wrong about that is not a minor matter. I have argued this repeatedly. It is an important matter for reasons that go beyond the issue of inerrancy--for deep theological and anthropological reasons. All the gyrations in the world, all the (in the case of Luke and Adam, questionable) distinctions between what the author was "presupposing" and what he was "addressing" and all the rest of it simply will not get around that point.

I want to say a bit more about the difference between what is said and what is presupposed. Does Paul's statement, "God raised Jesus from the dead." say that God exists? No. It presupposes it. Paul wasn't addressing the question of whether God exists. He was writing to people who all agreed that God exists, so there was no occasion to address that question. Now, obviously enough, it doesn't take much argument to see that Paul's statement couldn't be true unless God exists. But that is an inference, even if a very direct one.

The very back-and-forth of this paragraph shows how dubiously helpful the distinction between "addressing" and "presupposing" is as you are using those terms, Christopher. Such a use is bound to create confusion theologically and exegetically rather that clearing anything up. By this way of using the terms, one could say that when St. Paul says, "Jesus, in the night in which he was betrayed, took bread..." Paul "isn't addressing the question of whether Jesus existed." But it would be _extremely_ misleading to tell anyone who did not know the contents of the Pauline epistles, "Paul never addresses the question of whether Jesus existed," because such a locution would definitely imply that passages like the one in I Corinthians do not occur! To use "addresses" in this excessively narrow sense, so that Paul is only "addressing" the existence of God if he thinks his audience is questioning it or only "addresses" the existence of Jesus if he anticipates the existence of Jesus-mythers and addresses his comments _to such an audience_ merely darkens counsel. In a very important sense, *of course* Paul is "addressing" both the existence of God and of Jesus of Nazareth.

The excessive and unhelpful narrowness of this use of "addresses" is very evident in the attempt to make it questionable as to whether Luke is saying that Adam was created. Indeed, if anything, it is even more evident, since grammatically speaking, the actual _topic_ of Luke's assertion in the clause is the origin of Adam!

When a homicide detective questions a suspect, assuming the suspect did it, the dilemma for the suspect is that he knows more about the crime than he ought to if he didn't commit it. He must avoid giving answers that inadvertently reflect knowledge of the crime to which only the perpetrator would be privy.

The challenge confronting the homicide detective is to trip him up. Catch him making a statement that's more informative than an innocent suspect would be in a position to make.

Not only did the suspect not intend to divulge this information, he intended not to divulge this information. But because of how much he actually knows about the crime, he may slip up when answering questions. Even though the whole point of the exercise was not to let on how much he knew, his answers may still be incriminating–in spite of his best efforts to conceal his knowledge.

If that's true in the greater case, then a fortiori, a Bible writer can make constantive claims about incidental facts, facts implicit in their statements, even if they didn't consciously intend to teach that.

Not to mention the fact that any interpretive approach that would treat the existence of God itself as a fact "not stated" when Paul says that God raised Jesus from the dead is of extremely limited value. Perhaps negative value.

It is an important matter for reasons that go beyond the issue of inerrancy--for deep theological and anthropological reasons. All the gyrations in the world, all the (in the case of Luke and Adam, questionable) distinctions between what the author was "presupposing" and what he was "addressing" and all the rest of it simply will not get around that point.

I'm not trying to get around that point. I accept it. My beliefs regarding human origins are, I think, closer to yours than they are to the typical Biologos position, for some of the same reasons you gave (I would myself emphasize the doctrine of original sin more that you did in Part I).

Walton is a master of weasel phrases, and as you yourself noted, his phrase about "using as a framework" is pretty darned unclear, which is why I used the phrase "comes close" myself

I agree that Walton's word choice is vague and unhelpful. That's a valid criticism. But I find the phrase "comes close to saying" a bit weasly itself. It seems like you wanted to plant in the reader's mind the idea that this is what Walton is getting at, but you wanted to be absolved of the duty of interpreting him responsibly. And I'm thinking of those fans of Walton whom you mentioned in the main post,

If any fans of Walton's work read these reviews, it is possible that they will think all kinds of things--that I am unqualified, that I am unfair, that I have misunderstood.

Haven't you giving them a handle, needlessly? We must interpret unclear statements in a charitable manner, consistent with everything else the author says. But your procedure seemed to be quite opposite. You interpreted him in the less charitable manner, and then noted, "It is rather surprising that Walton ever falls back on this notion, given that he has hammered at the beginning of the book on the idea that we ought to understand and accept the text as the original human author would have understood and intended it: 'God vested his authority in a human author. ...'" And instead of modifying your interpretation accordingly, you insisted on attributing to him the less charitable meaning on the basis of what _you_ believe Luke was intending. And then complained that _Walton_ was engaged in "a pretty big switcheroo ... to imply that we needn't bother with the ideas of the original audience and author." I'm no fan of Walton myself, but I can sympathize with those who might think this procedure unfair.

But it could be that I'm oversensitive because folks I care about have been affected by the fallout of an accusation of heresy, where the person accused was not a heretic, but did, in my judgment, say things in vague and unhelpful ways, things that could be interpreted as heretical. (Actually, he was saying basically the same thing as Walton's statement about "using as a framework"). A scrupulous adherence to the principle of charity in that case might have prevented unnecessary suffering.

It would be _extremely_ misleading to tell anyone who did not know the contents of the Pauline epistles, "Paul never addresses the question of whether Jesus existed"

Would it be misleading to say, "Paul never addresses the question of whether Jesus existed; he simply presupposes that Jesus did exist."?

If you take my words out of context, then you can use them to say something misleading. Sure. So what? If you really think the term "address" can't sustain the narrowing of my precisification, I'm happy to use a different word. I'll even let you chose my terminology for me.

As for the distinction itself ... Some kind of distinction of this sort must be made.

Do you believe the Bible is God's word?

Does God assert falsehood?

You and I both recognize that there are things the human authors of the Bible believed, beliefs that they in some sense expressed or indicated in the Scriptures, that are false.

Now you can either say the Bible isn't God's word, or only some parts of it are and some parts aren't, or you can divorce the divine intention from the human meaning (in which case I'm at a loss to know how you figure out what the divine intention is), or you can make some distinction within the human meaning, which preserves the truth of everything the Bible actually says, as I have tried to do. I think this is in the spirit of the old Princeton theologians who originally defended the terms "infallible and inerrant".

All I have heard regarding your commitment to the truth of Scripture is the claim that the errors in Scripture concern "unimportant" matters. So you're committed to the truth of the Bible only when it comes to important matters? That, I venture to say, is an extremely vague and subjective criterion.

Is the six-day timescale of creation an important matter? Many thousands of YECists think it is.

If you have a more principled criterion that you've been holding back, I'm all ears. Maybe you'll convince me it's superior to mine. But if all you can do is recommend that I abandon my commitment to inerrancy, without any clear alternative doctrine of inspiration, I'm afraid I must demur.

It seems like you wanted to plant in the reader's mind the idea that this is what Walton is getting at, but you wanted to be absolved of the duty of interpreting him responsibly.

Well, I think that I have addressed this: Walton really does have _very different_ approaches to various passages. It is one thing to say, "This isn't how the original audience or author would have understood or intended this anyway, so no worries" and it is a very different thing (admittedly somewhat vague, but clearly a different response) to say, "Even if the original audience understood this by this passage, and even if the original author thought that, it doesn't matter, because God was using their (false) ideas as a framework."

One might decide to use those different approaches with different passages, as one considered them justified or otherwise. But they are _different_ approaches, and one cannot use both of them on the _same_ locution in the _same_ passage concerning the _same_ alleged difficulty. My "comes close to saying" sentence to which you object was intended to point out the difference in these two approaches. You seem to be insisting that I subsume the second approach to the first, but that just doesn't make sense. Those just aren't the same method for dealing with a difficult biblical passage or an alleged conflict between a passage and, e.g., science.

If you have a more principled criterion that you've been holding back, I'm all ears. Maybe you'll convince me it's superior to mine. But if all you can do is recommend that I abandon my commitment to inerrancy, without any clear alternative doctrine of inspiration, I'm afraid I must demur.

If a commitment to inerrancy is going to make people dance around and pretend that the text isn't saying things that it clearly is saying (e.g., that it's just _so hard_ to tell whether Luke is _saying_ that Adam was specially created), then frankly, a commitment to inerrancy is causing intellectual corruption, and the sooner it is abandoned and we can all be more straightforward and honest about textual meaning, the better.

Despite my saying that, I think my position has some strange affinities with that of Norm Geisler, who is the inerrantist extraordinaire and believes that all these twists and turns are b.s. of a sort that he and his inerrancy statement co-architects tried their dangedest to rule out _explicitly and carefully_ as incompatible with inerrancy.

He'd consider me something of a heretic, no doubt, and I'm sure he'd try to get me blocked from the faculty at any evangelical school where he had influence, but he'd probably consider me a more intellectually honest heretic than some who are now hanging onto the label "inerrancy" while arguing that the text isn't saying what it is saying.

And frankly, I know where he's coming from. And in an odd way, while I disapprove of some of his bullying methods, I sympathize with his frustration.

You and I both recognize that there are things the human authors of the Bible believed, beliefs that they in some sense expressed or indicated in the Scriptures, that are false.

Now you can either say the Bible isn't God's word, or only some parts of it are and some parts aren't, or you can divorce the divine intention from the human meaning (in which case I'm at a loss to know how you figure out what the divine intention is), or you can make some distinction within the human meaning, which preserves the truth of everything the Bible actually says, as I have tried to do. I think this is in the spirit of the old Princeton theologians who originally defended the terms "infallible and inerrant".

I'll admit that I don't know what the old Princeton theologians said or meant.

But I won't admit to saying "there are things the human authors of the Bible believed, beliefs that they in some sense expressed or indicated in the Scriptures, that are false."

At least in the Catholic view of inerrancy, God so imbued the human authors with inspiration that they did NOT err in what they were intending in their writing. They may indeed have believed false things, but those erroneous beliefs were not the things they wrote as if true in the works that were inspired.

Sure, I will accept that this needs to be qualified, or at least clarified. When an author is writing a parable, he isn't intending that the literal passage of events depicted actually happened - it's not history - so any mis-alignment between the events depicted and real history is not an error in his mind nor in his writing. He is not intending to convey a correlation between the depicted events and history. The truth (or not-error) that we assert is the correlation between the author's mind as his own PRIMARY sense of his words written, and the real thing he is asserting or speaking to. We claim that God's own "meanings" within, alongside, or behind the human author's meaning, are present through the validity of the human author's intended meaning, so that any divine meaning that somehow excuses human author's error (regarding his own primary meaning) would be hopelessly damaged by that error.

It would be like making a prophecy, coming out wrong but not VERY wrong, and saying "well, I was wrong, but the fact that I was close proves that I was inspired to make that prophecy by God." God cannot use an almost correct prophecy to show forth his power.

Christopher, since you and I (I'm gathering) both believe the earth is old, presumably you _agree_ with me and _disagree_ with the YECs on whether that is a dire theological concession. So I presume you have some way of deciding that "The fact that the earth is old is not an important problem in theology or biblical interpretation," and it can't be your approach to interpretation. After all, your approach to interpretation would be no more comforting to a YEC than mine is! It's not as though the term "inerrancy" is all a YEC cares about! You yourself have to distinguish between _important_ "presuppositions" of the text, as you use that term, like the existence of God (!), and what you view as unimportant presuppositions of the text (as you interpret it, geocentrism). So I guess you are able to make the important/unimportant distinction after all. So there's no point in acting like that is an issue that is a unique problem of mine or one to which there is no answer.

Tony,

For the record: since you say don't know the Old Princeton position on the inspiration of Scripture, here's a representative exposition:

http://www.bible-researcher.com/warfield3.html

Lydia,
While I agree with you regarding Walton and the special creation of Adam, I am curious as to your own principles of interpretation. So, perhaps I am being off-topic.

the text almost certainly indicates the use of miracles in the creation of the entities in the world and is certainly about God's material creation.

Is thw word "miracle" even appropriate?. Miracle implies a rare exception to ongoing natural processes. But the commencement of the natural process can hardly be miracle in this sense.
Why do you think the author of Genesis 1 was interested in "how" of creation?

the Hebrew _bara_ has _often_ been taken by scholars to indicate ex nihilo creation.

Following or preceding the Church's pronouncement of the dogma of ex nihilo creation?

By the way, I meant by "plain" reading, not a scholarly nuancing but what a layman might read and understand on his own.

But the commencement of the natural process can hardly be miracle in this sense.

One might ask that question about something like the Big Bang--the commencement of _all_ natural processes. But Genesis 1 communicates a definite idea of things happening at spaced intervals--however long one thinks those are. The animals come later than the plants, for example. And it definitely is a miracle for God to _do_ something to make plants grow in a world that previously was going along but didn't yet have plants. Or birds fly when there were no birds flying before. Or great sea creatures.

By the way, I meant by "plain" reading, not a scholarly nuancing but what a layman might read and understand on his own.

Well, yes. I think many laymen have gotten this out of the text in that way (verses 1 and 3, for example), though in some places (such as the creation of man in chapter 2) it is pretty explicit that God is creating from pre-existing materials.

You and I both recognize that there are things the human authors of the Bible believed, beliefs that they in some sense expressed or indicated in the Scriptures, that are false.

By the way, Christopher, I'll just say that _nobody_ who says that has a right to go on for pages and pages about the _immense_ importance of understanding the text as its original audience would have understood it and basing our understanding of God's intended message on that understanding. (Walton even gets rather condescending about it at times, implying that this understanding of the original author's meaning within the original cultural context is something to which he, as an expert, has unique access previously unknown to all mere laymen and even many scholars.) And _nobody_ who says that should also write: "God vested his authority in a human author, so we must consider what the human author intended to communicate if we want to understand God's message. Two voices speak, but the human author is our doorway into the room of God's meaning and message." At least, not if he wants to be considered minimally methodologically consistent.

The latter is what John Walton has done. The first is a quotation, of course, from one of your recent comments, Christopher. If John H. Walton believes that "there are things the human authors of the Bible in some sense expressed or indicated in Scripture that are false," then that is flatly inconsistent with many of his strongest and lengthiest methodological statements. It's entirely possible that he himself doesn't realize this. Nothing would be more likely, in fact. Careful consistency is not one of his attributes as a writer and thinker. But he really cannot have it both ways, and neither can you. However, I doubt that you would make such strong methodological statements.

Tony, I'm basically in agreement with you.

I will accept that this needs to be qualified

It's the need for such qualification that I was referring to when I spoke of "beliefs that they in some sense expressed or indicated." The "in some sense" is meant to severely weaken the import of "expressed or indicated." I would not assert that sentence without the "in some sense" since I fully agree that

The truth (or not-error) that we assert is the correlation between the author's mind as his own PRIMARY sense of his words written, and the real thing he is asserting or speaking to

Among the false things believed by the human authors of Scriptures, some leave no trace in the Bible. Others are reflected therein, but not asserted. Everything asserted is without error.

The only thing in your comment that might conflict with my views is

those erroneous beliefs were not the things they wrote as if true in the works that were inspired

And maybe not even that. It depends on what you mean by "wrote as if true." I'm not familiar with any history behind that phrase as a piece of theological terminology, so all I have to go on is what you tell me you mean by it. Is it supposed to include more than what the author intended to assert? If a geocentrist, as all OT authors were, writes about the earth being fixed so that it will never be moved, is he "writing as if geocentrism is true"? In one sense it seems obvious that he is, but perhaps not in the sense that you intend.

Lydia,
DO you hold that Genesis 1 "is a sort of technical account of the construction part by part, step by step of the world edifice"?

"Nothing in fact has brought so much discredit to the Bible as the continued efforts to reconcile it with science"
Fr Jaki "The creator's sabbath rest"


Christopher McCartney:

"If a geocentrist, as all OT authors were, writes about the earth being fixed so that it will never be moved."
Ironically, I think that's a good example of filtering the passage(s) through a much later debate which has nothing to do with the original. Because modern readers are so conditioned by the history of the "Copernican Revolution," we automatically assume that the Bible writer is talking about the relationship between celestial bodies. That, however, is highly anachronistic. Minimally, Ptolemaic astronomy represents a synthesis of Mesopotamian star charts with Hellenistic mathematics.

But that's just not on the radar of the OT writers. In context, "the earth" doesn't refer to the planet, but the surface of the earth where humans dwell.

"Motion" refers, not to the revolution or rotation of the planet, but to seismic activity. A stable physical environment for God's people.

DO you hold that Genesis 1 "is a sort of technical account of the construction part by part, step by step of the world edifice"?

I take it that this is a quotation from Jaki? I hold that any such locution is a part of a self-evident false dichotomy, set up by an author quite deliberately so that, if one agrees with a "no" answer, the next step is supposed to be, "Oh, well, then, what possible objection could one have to saying that Genesis 1 is a fable that corresponds a full evolutionary origin of species?"

Not being a mug, I don't fall for false dichotomies.

Lydia,
How would you account for biological similarities and continuities between species, including man,at deep levels, such as genetic code, cell structure and overall organization.

PS Jaki does not say that Genesis 1 is a fable. He calls it "scholastic treatise" intended by the author to emphasize that all creation is created by God and the importance of sabbath, g

Steve hays makes an important and necessary point. The "earth" of genesis 1 misleads and should be rendered as "land".
Thus, what genesis 1 means is "in the beginning, God created sky and land."
Meaning that God created everything. The phrase "sky and land" means precisely "everything".

Now, a layman might cavil that it might mean that God did not create underworld. People so conditioned by centuries of Church dogma, of course, will never interpret as meaning so but a literal-minded Hindu might well do.

How would you account for biological similarities and continuities between species, including man,at deep levels, such as genetic code, cell structure and overall organization.

Well, first, I wouldn't use the term "continuities," which is rhetorically confusing. Similarities I will grant. Your toaster and your refrigerator also have similarities. Which does not mean that they evolved by natural processes from a common ancestor. It means that some ways of doing things and broad types of underlying structures and "nuts and bolts" work well across various (in other ways quite different) types of entities.

Indeed, the vast phenotypical differences among species make it quite clear that whatever genetic similarities exist _cannot_ be the most important part of the story of how and why we have the variety of species that we do have. Just how informative is it to say that an elephant is "closely related" to a rock hyrax? Not very. Moreover, alleged similarities stated in terms of percentages (e.g., the infamous "98% similarity" claimed between human and ape genes) are highly misleading in the sense that the percentage you come up with depends greatly on how one chooses to count and categorize. Did you know that humans "share 40% of their genes" with radicchio lettuce? Yeah, that's real revealing biologically.

All of these things have been addressed at length in other venues by people with better scientific credentials than mine, I might add.

When composing my comment, Steve Hays, I had actually considered replacing "geocentrist" with some longer phrase that would have anticipated your objection, but in the end I decided in favor of conciseness.

It would indeed be anachronistic to treat the ancient Hebrews as if they held a considered opinion on the debate between the Greek Astronomers Ptolemy and Aristarchus. They did however believe things that are logically incompatible with heliocentrism. They did believe the earth was at the center of the cosmos with the heavenly bodies revolving around it. And they believed that the earth itself did not move.

"the earth" doesn't refer to the planet, but the surface of the earth where humans dwell.

"the earth" means what's beneath your feet. Modern astronomers call it a planet. But the thing they are calling a planet is the very same thing that was beneath the feet of the ancient Hebrews that they called "earth". That earth beneath their feet is what they believed didn't move, in contrast with the heavens that they observed to rotate, or the seas that ebb and flow and have no stable form. We know now that _that very earth_ is in fact hurtling through space in a roughly elliptical path around the sun.

In general, when an ancient text speaks of motion, with the earth being the subject, seismic activity is indeed a likely candidate for what it's talking about. But that doesn't work here, because the Psalmist says "it shall never be moved," which would be false if it were about earthquakes: the earth does sometimes move in that way, and the OT authors knew it. And it's not as if ancient Semitic people had no cosmology of any sort. On the contrary, they _did_ remark upon the ordered structure of the "heavens and the earth", and in particular, the Hebrew monotheists when praising their God often referred to his creative power as that which had established those ordered structures they observed, in particular making the earth beneath their feet a firm and fixed thing in contrast to the heavens above and the waters below: Genesis 1.9-10, Job 38.1-6, Psalm 24.2, Psalm 93.2, Ps 104.5 etc.

If you're saying that no beliefs of theirs that conflict with heliocentrism are in any way reflected in any of these verses, then I think your interpretation is just not reasonable. But maybe you aren't meaning to make such a strong claim, in which case we might not be that far apart. For I of course agree with you that the authors of these verses were not addressing the issue of heliocentrism v. geocentrism, nor, I would add, the issue of whether those beliefs of theirs based on common-sense observation are true in the sense in which they unreflectively took them, or whether they are true only in the more limited sense that makes them logically compatible with heliocentrism.

That earth beneath their feet is what they believed didn't move, in contrast with the heavens that they observed to rotate, or the seas that ebb and flow and have no stable form. We know now that _that very earth_ is in fact hurtling through space in a roughly elliptical path around the sun.

If I may say so, Christopher, it seems that what you say here is an attempt to _avoid_ the "observational language" interpretation that I have suggested. It's worth remembering that the whole question "does x move" is believed by physicists to have a strongly relativistic component--move relative to what? To insist that the ancient Hebrew authors were writing things that "reflected" (your word) false scientific beliefs, when in fact it is *true* that the earth does not move *relative to us* when it spins on its axis and around the sun, looks like an attempt to force a problem where none need exist. Whereas the conflict between what the Hebrews, St. Luke, St. Paul, and arguably Jesus _believed_ about Adam and the theory that he evolved from ape-like ancestors and was actually only one of a group of "first men" is _blatant_. Yet again and again those who wish to defend the latter view as orthodox will bring up the former type of issue (heliocentrism, or in Walton the claim that the Hebrews literally believed that the intestines were the seat of personal identity, whatever precisely that means), where there is quite reasonable question as to whether the text is expressing anything false, as though these are parallel cases. It should be quite clear that they are not alike at all.

Christopher McCartney:

"They did believe the earth was at the center of the cosmos…"

I don't know the basis of your self-confident claim. What makes you suppose they believed the earth was the "center" of the cosmos? Even on a flat-earth model, the basic orientation is up/down, top/bottom, and not "center."

"Center" evokes the image of an object with space around it–like a chair in the middle of a room, or the center of a spherical body.

"But that doesn't work here, because the Psalmist says 'it shall never be moved,' which would be false if it were about earthquakes: the earth does sometimes move in that way, and the OT authors knew it. And it's not as if ancient Semitic people had no cosmology of any sort. On the contrary, they _did_ remark upon the ordered structure of the "heavens and the earth", and in particular, the Hebrew monotheists when praising their God often referred to his creative power as that which had established those ordered structures they observed, in particular making the earth beneath their feet a firm and fixed thing in contrast to the heavens above and the waters below: Genesis 1.9-10, Job 38.1-6, Psalm 24.2, Psalm 93.2, Ps 104.5 etc."

Your analysis goes awry at multiple points:

i) In Ps 93:1-2, the implicit metaphor is the earth as God's throne or footstool. It's a figurative way of saying God's rule cannot be toppled. The frame of reference isn't the moving stars, but the stability of God's reign.

ii) In Ps 104:5, you have an architectural metaphor involving a solid foundation or firm foundation. Could be like pylons.

Point is, the "earth" can never be knocked off its foundations.

iii) In addition, both Psalms contrast the dry land with the sea. That's the immediate frame of reference.

iv) Keep in mind that the "earth," especially in the Psalter, which is the "hymnal" for the public worship of Israel, often signifies, not the whole earth, but Eretz Israel. Haaretz: the land of Israel. That enjoys special protection.

v) You need to distinguish between earthquakes generally and eschatological earthquakes. In Biblical usage, cataclysmic earthquakes are part of the stock, end-of-the-world imagery.

"I would add, the issue of whether those beliefs of theirs based on common-sense observation are true in the sense in which they unreflectively took them."

i) Since geocentrism and heliocentrism are observationally equivalent, I don't know why you assume that observation selects for geocentrism.

ii) In addition, there are "common-sense observations" that don't cohere with a flat-earth model. Why would the sun rise and set farther apart on the horizon in summer and closer together in winter? Why the seasonal variation? That's something attentive observers would certainly notice. But if the earth is flat, the position of sunrise and sunset ought to be uniform throughout the year. At the very least, it would be puzzling to acute observers. It's these quirks that gave rise to ancient astronomical debates in the first place.

a commitment to inerrancy is causing intellectual corruption, and the sooner it is abandoned and we can all be more straightforward and honest about textual meaning, the better.

Lydia, do you also recommend that I give up my belief that the Bible is God's word?

Peter says,

the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. (2 Peter 3.5b-7)

If any of the dismissive mockery of expressed in your "dance around and pretend that the text isn't saying things that it clearly is saying (e.g., that it's just _so hard_ to tell whether Luke is _saying_ that Adam was specially created)" is deserved by those who disagree with you about Luke, it is surely also deserved by anyone who would "pretend" that Peter isn't "_saying_" that the great flood was global. I also think you believe the great flood was local, not global (if I'm wrong, sorry).

What am I to do with this? I believe the Bible is God's word. This is in the Bible. (I suppose the cannonicity of 2 Peter could be questioned with some show of reason, but I am convinced the book is cannonical, and unless I hear otherwise I'll assume that's not in question). The doctrine that the Bible is God's word is an important one. It's a central teaching of the Christian faith. Paul tells Timothy, "_all_ Scripture is God-breathed," Jesus said, "Scripture cannot be broken." Shall I "pretend" that all he really meant was that Scripture cannot be broken in important matters"? It's not at all obvious to me that Jesus would allow that there are things Scripture says that are not important.

For me it would be "pretending", that is, it would not be intellectually honest of me to say that I am a follower of Christ, but I believe the Scripture contains errors in what it asserts. I'm not saying it's intellectually dishonest for you, since you may well have thought of things that I haven't that would make such a claim reasonable. But you can hardly blame me for not knowing about them when you haven't told me. And since I don't know about them, when I face problems like how Peter talks about the flood, I look to those who _have_ given me a carefully worked out theory, and Hodge and Warfield are those in my own tradition who have done the best I know of in addressing this. It's from them that I receive the term 'inerrant'. And I would argue that they were faithfully clarifying what was already present in the tradition they received from Francis Turretin and he from Calvin, Bucer, Vermigli, and the other Reformers.

You refer to Geisler and his Chicago Statement. I did read it some years back and I don't remember seeing anything very objectionable in it, but then I don't remember very much about it at all. So if Geisler would say I'm outside its boundaries, as it seems he would, I'm happy to plead nolo contendere and accept whatever opprobrium follows upon that. I certainly make no secret of my disagreement with what seems to be the recent mainstream conservative evangelical understanding of inerrancy, which, while I guess it was influence by old Princeton, has a greatly narrowed undertanding of what the doctrine allows. For instance, the weakness you confess to in your own reading of Genesis, the bit about Cain talking as if there are a bunch of other people around, is something my reading has no problem at all with. I affirm that the way the narrative in Genesis 4 presents things, there are a bunch of other people around. But I also say that the way the narrative in Genesis 2 presents things, Adam and Eve are the first people. Where is the contradiction? There isn't one. They're just different stories. They are only contradictory if you assume that both narratives are claiming a certain degree of historical referenciality for themselves. But that's just the kind of claim that these narrow innerantists think is somehow included in the doctrine of inerrancy. Indeed they pretty much think that any passage that isn't like a parable or something is 100% historically referencial in every detail, and they treat any denial of that as a denial of inerrancy. (But that very difference between chapters 2 and 4 is _evidence_, if you believe the Bible is God's word, that that level of historicity is not being claimed.) By contrast, while Hodge or Warfield might argue against my interpretation of Genesis, they would do so on exegetical and hermeneutical grounds, they wouldn't try to make the doctrine of inerrancy do the exegesis for them.

I really mean it when I say I'm open to hearing your alternative doctrine of inspiration. I do recognize that even the old Princeton doctrine is not without difficulties. But from where I stand now, it seems to me that the universal Christian teaching of the divine inspiration of Scripture does entail _some_ sort of inerrancy doctrine. So when I find passages in Scripture that seem to say things that I know to be false, I have to do something about that. I can of course ask whether I really know them to be false. But in some cases that won't really solve the problem. I really do know that the earth goes around the sun. And I really do know that the cosmos is much much more than six thousand years old. I'm also not willing to make wildly implausible claims about how the original audience would have understood something, claims which fool no one, since its clear to everyone that what's driving the interpretation is the interpreter's belief in claims of modern science, not an honest attempt to hear the original author in his own context. What then am I to do? I'm looking for a principled way of saying what it is in the Bible that I am obligated to believe? To say that I'm obligated to believe only the important things seems to me to be entirely unprincipled.

there's no point in acting like that is an issue that is a unique problem of mine or one to which there is no answer.

There is indeed a unique problem for you, or there is if you own the characterization of your commitment to Scripture as, "committed to the truth of the Bible only when it comes to important matters." I rather expected you to disown it. Or at least give some indication of a principled way of distinguishing important and unimportant matters, thus undermining my claim that that's a vague and subjective criterion. Perhaps you will yet. But so far all we have on the table is your tu quoque. While I happen to agree that question of whether the time-scale of six days is asserted as historical is not terribly important, for me that can be a vague and subjective statement because on my theory nothing hangs on whether something is "important" or not. I'm committed to the truth of everything asserted in Scriptures, regardless of whether I happen to think it's important.

You yourself have to distinguish between _important_ "presuppositions" of the text, as you use that term, like the existence of God (!), and what you view as unimportant presuppositions of the text (as you interpret it, geocentrism)

I emphatically am not basing my claims about the authority of Scripture on a distinction between important and unimportant presuppositions. I say that, strictu sensu, no (mere) presupposition is asserted by the passage that (merely) presupposes it. But in addition to that, my commitment to the truth of the assertions in Scripture includes a commitment to whatever follows logically from those assertions (again, whether those logical conclusions are things I think important or not) and that includes most of the things presupposed. When it does and when it doesn't depends on the logic of the reasoning involved, not on a subjective determination of importance.

While some things, like the existence of God, can be said to be important uberhaupt, most things are important in some contexts and not important in others, important to some people, and, legitimately, less important to others. It's perfectly OK to have words in our language that are vague and subjective, But I object when a theory of inspiration would limit our commitment to the truth of Scripture to those things that we deem important.

an attempt to _avoid_ the "observational language" interpretation.
Well, are we talking about how the human author thought about what he was saying, or are we distinguishing what he thought about what he was saying from what he actually affirmed? I do want to avoid the former, but I fully endorse the distinction applied in the latter way.
the earth does not move *relative to us* when it spins on its axis and around the sun.
In short, yes it does. An appeal to Einstein's theory of special relativity is of no use here, because the relativity of that theory only applies to non-accelerating motion. The earth's rotation is not of that sort, which is why coriolis forces have an effect on the weather. Or did you mean to appeal to the more complex theory of general relativity? Although I took a course on general relativity in college, I must confess I am quite far from having thoroughly understood it. Nothing in what I do understand of it would, as far as I can see, provide a solution to this problem if one were not already available to those who lived between Copernicus and Einstein. But I do think there is such a solution already available.
where there is quite reasonable question as to whether the text is expressing anything false.
If 'expressing' means affirming or asserting then I agree. Ditto if 'express' also includes obvious logical consequences of what is affirmed or asserted. I would only disagree if 'express' is taken in an extremely broad way: it is unreasonable to hold that the author would not have thought about his statement in a manner incompatible with heliocentrism as understood between Copernicus and Einstein.

By the same token, I think there is quite reasonable question as to whether that particular text in Luke is expressing anything directly incompatible with a theistic evolutionary account of human origins. Unless, again, 'express' is taken in that very broad sense. In that sense I agree that it would be unreasonable to deny that Luke thought about what he said in a manner incompatible with that theory.

Our disagreement, as regards the interpretation of Luke, then, concerns the narrower sense of 'express'.

I affirm that the way the narrative in Genesis 4 presents things, there are a bunch of other people around. But I also say that the way the narrative in Genesis 2 presents things, Adam and Eve are the first people. Where is the contradiction? There isn't one. They're just different stories. They are only contradictory if you assume that both narratives are claiming a certain degree of historical referenciality for themselves.

Wow, I didn't know you would go that far with your "historical referentiality" concept. At this point, I'm afraid that we are very, very far apart in our notions of hermeneutics. I'm afraid that that permits you to get pretty arbitrary with your assignments of "historical referentiality." Why, in that case, could someone not argue that perhaps Abraham never existed at all and that this is perfectly compatible with Scripture, since we don't know that the "Abraham narrative" is "claiming a certain degree of historical referentiality for itself?" Why pick out the story of Cain or of Adam for special doubt on this point? Mind you, I'm not saying there _couldn't_ be answers to this in particular cases. For example, the difficulty in locating the land of Uz and other play-like characteristics of the book of Job _may_ be indicators that the author did not intend the audience to take it to have "historical referentiality." But there have to be such reasons, and I find nothing in the narrative of the creation of Adam and Eve or in the story of Cain that justifies taking them to be "different stories," neither of which has any clear degree of historical referentiality. All the less so given all of the other Old Testament and New Testament reasons for taking it that Adam _was_ specially created and that Adam and Eve _were_ the first people, which I have outlined.

But in addition to that, my commitment to the truth of the assertions in Scripture includes a commitment to whatever follows logically from those assertions (again, whether those logical conclusions are things I think important or not) and that includes most of the things presupposed. When it does and when it doesn't depends on the logic of the reasoning involved, not on a subjective determination of importance.

I think that's going to make it pretty hard for you to avoid being committed to the truth of the existence of an historical Adam, the literal first man, for reasons of interpretation related to quite a few Scriptural passages. If you insist that someone can avoid it, then I will just quote back to you your own words:

I'm also not willing to make wildly implausible claims about how the original audience would have understood something, claims which fool no one, since its clear to everyone that what's driving the interpretation is the interpreter's belief in claims of modern science, not an honest attempt to hear the original author in his own context.

And I'm not willing to make wildly implausible claims that Scripture is not "asserting" things that it clearly is, or that things that clearly do follow logically from those assertions really don't, claims which fool no one, since it is clear to everyone that what's driving the interpretation at that point is the interpreter's belief in claims of modern science. After all, if it were a proposition that _didn't_ (allegedly) contradict modern science (like, I dunno, the "presupposition" of umpteen chapters in Genesis that Jacob was a real person), it would become obviously absurd to make the slightest attempt to say that a commitment to inerrancy doesn't require one to believe in the existence of a real Jacob, the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel.

L: The earth does not move *relative to us* when it spins on its axis and around the sun.
CM: In short, yes it does.

L, again:

In short, you're simply wrong. We and the earth are within the same acceleration frame of reference, because we are _on_ the earth, walking around on it. We are accelerating with the earth, which is why the earth doesn't fly out from under us. This problem was posed to Galileo long ago as a challenge to his views, and he pointed this out with the thought experiment of a ship. Look, Ma, no Einstein necessary, much less any esoteric Einstein.

And, no, I am not claiming that the Biblical writers believed explicitly in Galilean relativity of motion. I'm pointing out that the claim that it is _false_ to say that the earth is _stable_ is _shaky_, because there is a very important sense (indeed, the most important sense for daily action) in which the world _is_ stable--namely, relative to those of us who have to walk around on it.

By the way, Christopher, if you are going to take the fairly easily harmonized differences between Cain's statements and the implication that Adam was the first man to be indications of a lack of "historical referentiality," I'd hate to see what you would do with real witness testimony in court!! To real historical events, like holdups and such-like. I have recently been reading J. Warner Wallace's _Cold Case Christianity_ in which he gives _repeated_ examples in which witnesses to events that are *indubitably* historical, giving testimony that is *unquestionably* supposed to have "historical referentiality" make statements which _frequently_ appear to contradict each other. In a surprising number of cases, it turns out that the accounts really are both true for some reason that one just needed to think of or know about. Sometimes, of course, witnesses do actually make minor errors. But to abandon even the fairly simple attempt at harmonization needed in the case of Cain's statements in favor of a conclusion that these are "just different stories" and that the difference is a clue that they aren't supposed to be taken to have full "historical referentiality" is a principle of interpretation that would doom you to treating as "not historically referential" a lot of historical, eyewitness, veridical testimony. _Anyone_ who knows much about historical investigation or even criminal investigation will tell you that a _much_ more vigorous willingness to harmonize accounts is well-justified, based on a lot of experience of real events and real accounts thereof.

Concerning 2 Pet 3:5b-7, one thing a modern reader must guard against is unconsciously substituting his own mental picture of world geography for the Bible writer's or the ancient audience he was addressing. Peter doesn't have the same picture in mind that we do when he talks about "the earth." He doesn't have the same sense of scale. He's not thinking about N. America, S. America, Japan, &c.

He's thinking about the known world, and the descriptions of Gen 6-9. From his vantage point, that could well be local, for that's the part of the world he envisages.

Keep in mind, too, that Peter is likely using "world" here in an anthropological rather than geographical sense, as a shorthand expression for the human world. Consider the parallel passage in 2:5.

It is not clear to me that it indicates any sort of high view of Scripture to be so hasty to accept every alleged Bible difficulty that comes down the pike, not even attempting fairly simple harmonizations (whether between passages or with currently known science), and then trying to solve all problems that arise thereby by saying that the Bible isn't really "affirming" everything it is "indicating" or "presupposing" and by willy-nilly tossing passages where such alleged difficulties arise into the "historically non-referential" basket. Whether or not one affirmed inerrancy, it would both be a sign of a higher view of the authority of Scripture and would also be better exegesis to be a little more tough-minded, and even more flexible in one's interpretations. If one is going to do what Christopher has just done with the Cain passage, one is going to end up doing that for pretty much all of Scripture. There are _many_ alleged "contradictions" in the Gospels, than which nothing of a more historical genre can be conceived, but those differences are precisely _not_ "evidence...that that level of historicity is not being claimed." In fact, most of the alleged contradictions in the gospels are fairly easily resolvable, but one isn't even going to try if one so tamely accepts the smallest puzzle about a passage as an indication that it isn't intended to have a high level of historicity!

I'm afraid that that permits you to get pretty arbitrary with your assignments of "historical referentiality.
I think you answer this yourself with
Mind you, I'm not saying there _couldn't_ be answers to this in particular cases.
You want any claim for a low degree of historical referenciality to be supported by reasons. Good. I agree. I also think claims for a high degree of historical referenciality need to be supported by reasons. But you seem to think exegesis should begin with a default assumption of 100% historical referenciality, and apparently you think there is a pretty high bar that has to be met for that default assumption to be overcome: as long as harmonization is _possible_ the default assumption stands. I entirely disagree. It is you who are being arbitrary by making that very assumption.

Have you ever been in a discussion with someone of a different theological persuasion than yourself in which he treated his own position on, say, baptism, for example, as if it were true by default? Not only that, but he treated your exegetical arguments as if they had no evidential weight whatsoever as long as he could explain them away in a way that wasn't completely absurd? This is not a reasonable, even-handed way of evaluating evidence, don't you agree?

I recognize that the difficulty with Cain is not so great that harmonization is exegetically impossible. Lots of things are possible, but we're concerned with which reading is the most reasonable. To determine this we must weigh all the reasons even-handedly. The fact that Cain's statement is evidence against a certain degree of historical referenciality does not mean it might not be overweighed by contrary evidence on the other side of the scale. But even if it is overweighed, it still constitutes evidence. The fact that you described it as "Walton's one textual argument with any force" led me to believe that you would recognize this. As you put it, "When we're interpreting Scripture, though, we have to go with the force of all the evidence taken together." Walton's interpretation is deeply flawed at the semantic level, for the evidence is abundant that Genesis 2 portrays Adam and Eve as the first people. The difficulty present to your interpretation by Cain's statement pales in comparison to the difficulties Walton has. But at least as regards this one point, my interpretation is superior to both, for it fits easily with both the facts you adduce to prove that Genesis 2 does portray Adam and Eve that way, and the fact that Cain's statement is most plausibly read as implying that there are other people around. There are of course other facts to be considered.

all of the other Old Testament and New Testament reasons for taking it that Adam _was_ specially created and that Adam and Eve _were_ the first people, which I have outlined.
Those reasons are filtered through your hermeneutic which, as you have noted, is rather different from mine. So it shouldn't surprise you that I don't find them entirely convincing. However, many of them I think are in some way on the right track. Many of them might be capable of being disentangled from those hermeneutical assumptions, and while, in my view, they wouldn't then prove quite what you want them to, they would prove something significantly similar. To wit:
I think that's going to make it pretty hard for you to avoid being committed to the truth of the existence of an historical Adam, the literal first man, for reasons of interpretation related to quite a few Scriptural passages.
I _am_ committed to the truth of the existence of an actual first man, created without sin, whose disobedience - an actual event occurring some time in the past - cast all his natural posterity into our current state of woe. For reasons of interpretation related to quite a few Scriptural passages.
I'm not willing to make wildly implausible claims that Scripture is not "asserting" things that it clearly is,
Nor should you. Nor am I, though there apparently are things you think wildly implausible that I do not. You seem a bit more ready to cast beliefs that differ from yours into that category than I am.

Did you think I was implying that _you_ are making wildly implausible claims? Just in case, let me clarify: I was agreeing with you that many of Walton's claims are wildly implausible.

After all, if it were a proposition that _didn't_ (allegedly) contradict modern science (like, I dunno, the "presupposition" of umpteen chapters in Genesis that Jacob was a real person), it would become obviously absurd to make the slightest attempt to say that a commitment to inerrancy doesn't require one to believe in the existence of a real Jacob, the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel.
It's not obviously absurd to say that at all. I'm more certain of the existence of a first man than I am of the existence of Jacob. Although I'm not aware of any good reason to doubt Jacob's existence, I don't say the doctrine of inerrancy requires it. What degree of historical referenciality the patriarch narratives have is an exegetical question, and the doctrine of inerrancy doesn't do your exegesis for you. At least the old Princeton doctrine doesn't. You seem to be assuming that the narrow Geislerian sense of inerrancy is the only possible meaning the term can have, in spite of everything I said above.

In short, you're simply wrong. We and the earth are within the same acceleration frame of reference, because we are _on_ the earth, walking around on it. We are accelerating with the earth, which is why the earth doesn't fly out from under us. This problem was posed to Galileo long ago as a challenge to his views, and he pointed this out with the thought experiment of a ship. Look, Ma, no Einstein necessary, much less any esoteric Einstein.
Galilean relativity only applies to non-accelerating reference frames, that is, rectilinear motion. The motion of the earth is not rectilinear. The earth _is_ flying out from under us, but that's counteracted by the force of gravity, which is much stronger. Nevertheless, the force by which we are attracted downwards is very slightly less than it "should" be, given the earth's mass, because of the cetrifugal force that arises from its rotation. Also there are the coriolis forces as I mentioned before.
And, no, I am not claiming that the Biblical writers believed explicitly in Galilean relativity of motion.
Explicitly? Do you think they believed it implicitly?
I'm pointing out that the claim that it is _false_ to say that the earth is _stable_ is _shaky_, ...
Did I claim it is false to say the earth is stable? I'm not sure what you think you're arguing against here. Not only do I agree that "the earth is stable" as spoken by you or me, is true, I would also use that observation to explain how "the earth is fixed, it can never be moved" as spoken by the Psalmist can also be true. But there are differences between the two cases. The way the Psalmist thought about what he said is different from the way you or I think about "the earth is stable".
there is a very important sense (indeed, the most important sense for daily action) in which the world _is_ stable--namely, relative to those of us who have to walk around on it.
I absolutely agree with this. Not because of anything in physics, but because of how ordinary non-technical language works.
I'd hate to see what you would do with real witness testimony in court!!
First, the very fact that they are giving testimony in court is proof that they are intending their words to be historically referencial. They can of course be lying or prevaricating or they may be guilty of honest mistake, but if they are mentally competent to give testimony there is simply no question of what degree of historical referenciality their testimony claims for itself.

Second, discrepencies in testimony _can_ sometimes be indications of error or falsehood. Whether they are or not depends on the specifics of the case.

Third, although I want to avoid reading our speculative harmonizations into the text, as I have often heard done in sermons, I nevertheless agree that on the level of apologetics it's perfectly appropriate to point out that this or that harmonization is possible, and not implausible, and that's an perfectly good weapon to have in our apologetic arsenal, particularly in cases where a high degree of historical referenciality is known to be required, but also in cases where the degree of historical referenciality _may_ be high. Including the case before us.

It is not clear to me that it indicates any sort of high view of Scripture to be so hasty to accept every alleged Bible difficulty that comes down the pike, not even attempting fairly simple harmonizations (whether between passages or with currently known science), and then trying to solve all problems that arise thereby by saying that the Bible isn't really "affirming" everything it is "indicating" or "presupposing" and by willy-nilly tossing passages where such alleged difficulties arise into the "historically non-referential" basket.
Why does Cain's statement constitute a "Bible difficulty"? Are we supposed to just assume that your interpretation is true by default? and any problem for your interpretation is supposed to be automatically a problem for the Bible itself? and anyone who regards this problem as evidence against your interpretation should be deemed to have a low view of Scripture?

No, this is not automatically a problem for the Bible, it's a problem for your interpretation. Is it a big problem? No, absolutely not. It's a small problem. It's one small piece of a cumulative case that I would make for regarding the early chapters of Genesis as having significantly less than 100% historical referenciality (I would also argue that a significant degree of historical referenciality remains). I didn't try to make the full case in the comment, because it didn't seem sensible to write that many pages in support of what was essentially a parenthetical statement.

... the Gospels, than which nothing of a more historical genre can be conceived, but those differences are precisely _not_ "evidence...that that level of historicity is not being claimed."
It depends on which alleged contradictions we're talking about and what level of historicity. I believe the discrepencies in the descriptions of Jesus cursing the fig tree _are_ an indication (defeasible, as always) that the Gospels aren't intended to have 100% historicity in every niggling little detail. But that doesn't undermine the claim that the Gospels are intended to be, as C. S. Lewis put it, "pretty close up to the facts." There are plenty of other "problems" skeptics have alleged that are just silly and don't indicate anything. I don't regard the differences in the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew as providing any substantial evidence for any lack of historicity in either of those accounts.
If one is going to do what Christopher has just done with the Cain passage, one is going to end up doing that for pretty much all of Scripture.
A slippery slope argument. Lewis also wrote, "the earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical". (this is a more liberal attitude to the OT than mine; I don't endorse it). Yet he argued strenuously against Bultmann's claim that the Gospels were legends. Why didn't he slide down your slippery slope? Because the reasons for thinking the Gospels have a high degree of historicity are much stronger than the reasons for thinking the same about the book of Genesis.

There are more sophisticated models of inerrancy than Norman Geisler's paradigm. Proponents like Vern Poythress, Darrel Bock, and John Frame furnish a more astute standard of comparison.

i) There seems to be some serious confusion here about the nature of inerrancy. Inerrancy does not imply that Cain is an inerrant speaker.

According to inerrancy, the biblical narrator is inerrant. And a normative character within the narrative may be inerrant insofar as his statements coincide with the narrative viewpoint. Some characters speak for the narrator.

However, there's no presumption that every speaker or character within the narrative is inerrant.

To take a comparison: in Acts, the narrator (Luke) is inerrant. Apostolic speakers within the Lukan narrative are inerrant.

However, many speakers are pagan Gentiles or Jewish opponents. They are not inerrant.

ii) Even assuming that Cain's statement is true, it would be proleptic. Indeed, Genesis contains many proleptic statements.

Adam and Eve had other children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, &c. According to Genesis, the predeluvians lived for centuries.

So his statement, if true, foreshadows his siblings and their descendants (e.g. 4:17,25-26; 5:4).

Lewis also wrote, "the earliest stratum of the Old Testament contains many truths in a form which I take to be legendary, or even mythical". (this is a more liberal attitude to the OT than mine; I don't endorse it). Yet he argued strenuously against Bultmann's claim that the Gospels were legends. Why didn't he slide down your slippery slope?

A) Lewis was wrong about Genesis. He was far from infallible.

B) Actually, no, I didn't make a slippery slope argument. Rather, I made an argument about the _ease_ with which you accepted a _minor_ puzzle about harmonization concerning Cain as an indication of "non-referentiality" and pointed out what that _actually would mean_ if applied consistently as a hermeneutic method.

C) Lewis was a smart guy, knew literature and memoir, and was knocked down by the obviously memoir-like nature of the gospels. So he admitted the evidence.

D) Plus, Lewis could see for himself how alleged "scientific" arguments against the possibility of miracles were question-begging, whereas he couldn't see for himself how poor the evidence was for full human evolution from ape-like ancestors, so, being a non-specialist, he thought he just had to accept the latter as "the settled result of science" and make his exegesis conform to it. A feeling I am trying to disabuse other people of having.

What degree of historical referenciality the patriarch narratives have is an exegetical question, and the doctrine of inerrancy doesn't do your exegesis for you. At least the old Princeton doctrine doesn't. You seem to be assuming that the narrow Geislerian sense of inerrancy is the only possible meaning the term can have, in spite of everything I said above.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree that the doctrine of inerrancy won't do all of one's work for one. However, I think the Geislerian sense is not stupid and makes a certain amount of sense practically speaking, because otherwise someone can do precisely what I think you are doing (namely, accepting _far_ too tamely the notion of "historical non-referentiality" and the idea that the Bible writers were "indicating" scientific falsehoods, and therefore making little if any attempt at harmonization), which results in an exceedingly Pyrrhic victory for high-minded phrases like "the Bible is God's Word." Which, presumably, is why Geisler et al. tried to anticipate and rule out such sweeping uses of genre claims of non-historicity to "resolve" alleged difficulties.

Believe it or not, Christopher, based on your approach to the Luke text, I'm inclined to think that at a practical level I have a higher view of the authority of Scripture than you do, precisely because I am more stubborn about such things and try to take a common sense approach to a question like, "Was Luke asserting that Adam was specially created?" After all, once one has admitted that Luke _thought_ Adam was specially created and was _alluding to_ or "indicating" that view by what he says in the genealogy, and that that is what his audience would have taken him to be saying by his words (!), the conversation should be over. At that point, I have to say that further attempted distinctions between "affirming" and "presupposing" (which as you yourself have admitted lead to the conclusion that a biblical statement that God raised Jesus from the dead isn't "affirming" or "asserting" the existence of God!), appear pretty sophistical. I'm rather surprised that you don't see that yourself, since I believe you to be entirely sincere.

Do you think the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on presuppositions are being sophistical? The distinction between what is presupposed and what is directly said arises naturally in the philsophy of language. It's not some ad hoc distinction I'm making up. One of the examples they lead with is "The author is Julius Seidensticker," which they say presupposes "Julius Seidensticker exists." While in some sense one who asserts the former sentence has "said" the latter, can't you see that it's at least a little bit odd to speak that way? It's perfectly natural to want to say, "He didn't exactly say that, he presupposed it." This isn't sophistry, its just normal philosophy of language.

once one has admitted that Luke _thought_ Adam was specially created and was _alluding to_ or "indicating" that view by what he says in the genealogy, and that that is what his audience would have taken him to be saying by his words (!), the conversation should be over.
I like that. I don't agree, but I like it as a clear statement of a plausible position and I recognize that it presents a real challenge for my view. But I don't think it's a challenge you are in a position to make. Why does it even matter what Luke said and how his audience thought in the first place? It matters only if we regard that as constituting divine revelation. The opinions of a first century church leader regarding the historicity of an Old Testament text have little authority, not enough to serve your purpose. You mean to appeal to the authority of the Holy Spirit. The theory that what the Biblical authors thought and alluded to or indicated in the Biblical text where that's what their audience would have taken them to be saying by those words constitutes divine revelation is plausible on its face but impossible given the evidence, since, as you yourself recognize, the Biblical text, taken in that way, contains falsehoods. God does not assert, and require us to believe, falsehoods. Therefore that theory of what constitutes divine revelation is incorrect. QED.

"One of the examples they lead with is "The author is Julius Seidensticker," which they say presupposes "Julius Seidensticker exists."

The author is Anonymous. Therefore, Anonymous exists :)

The author of, A Scandal in Bohemia is Dr. John W. Watson. Therefore, John Watson exists.

Got to be careful, there...

The Chicken

Do you think the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on presuppositions are being sophistical?

I think it would be sophistical to try to apply that narrow point in philosophy of language in a context where a phrase like "what is asserted" tells us something extremely important about what we are supposed to believe or say. For example, suppose that someone piously declared, "I will not publicly contradict anything that you assert" and that this were extremely important for some reason--say, international diplomacy. And suppose that you then said in a political speech, "The author is Julius Seidensticker" and that your assistant, who had solemnly sworn not to contradict publicly anything you asserted (because, say, it might very well start a war if he did so) went out and immediately published a book denying the existence of Julius Seidensticker. The assistant's career would, rightly, be over, and he would suffer whatever legal penalties followed from breaking his word. And it would, rightly, not help him if he quoted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I suppose, while we are getting geeky about philosophy of language, I could point out that on a Russellian theory of names this distinction collapses in quite a few instances, including, "God raised Jesus from the dead."

But the more important point is that geekery about philosophy of language is not really helpful when we are talking about practical matters or even theological commitments that are allegedly of vast importance. The picture of your asking me indignantly whether I think that "the Bible is the Word of God" and quoting "All Scripture is God-breathed" and then turning around and shrugging off what _you_ view as an apparent contradiction between Genesis 2 and 4 on the grounds that "they are just different stories" is rather breathtaking. Talk about taking away with the left hand what you give with the right! And taking away more, really, because I'm the one who would balk on admitting that these are contradictions anyway.

The theory that what the Biblical authors thought and alluded to or indicated in the Biblical text where that's what their audience would have taken them to be saying by those words constitutes divine revelation is plausible on its face but impossible given the evidence, since, as you yourself recognize, the Biblical text, taken in that way, contains falsehoods.

A) In fact, for most of the examples (all?) that you have tried to bring up that you claim show this and that you think I'll be forced to agree with, I don't recall that I've agreed to a single one. It's been a long thread, but I know that I've resisted that conclusion again and again, while you seem almost eager to draw it.

B) That statement does not precisely express my view. I would say rather that what the Biblical authors thought and alluded to or indicated in the Biblical text where that's what their audience would have taken them to be saying by those words prima facie constitutes divine revelation, and that we should be reluctant and sparing in setting aside that prima facie supposition, because we do want to treat Scripture as special and authoritative (based upon the example and words of our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles), but that there could in principle be exceptions where the prima facie case is defeasible. There may even be a few such exceptions in minor details deliberately permitted by the Holy Ghost, especially in the New Testament, in order to give the narratives the epistemic and historical force of independent, eyewitness testimony, which sometimes _does_ contain errors in small details. It also turns out that sometimes apparent errors and contradictions are no such thing when all the facts are known. The entire issue of differences in eyewitness testimony is a fascinating one in which I have a professional philosophical interest.

Where, however, the apparent revelation is deeply woven into the warp and woof of doctrine and morals, as attested elsewhere in Scripture (esp. in the New Testament by clear apostolic teaching or teaching of Christ) and/or by the natural light, we should be _overwhelmingly_, probably _indefeasibly_, reluctant to consider that apparent revelation to be no revelation at all but rather in error.

I would point out the inherent problem with trying to draw a distinction between "what the human author thought was true" and "what he intended to convey" and "what his words actually convey" as if this provided a ground for some so-called "escaping" biblical difficulties. The problem is that God apparently intended to work his revelation through intelligent, willing, cooperating secondary agents. It is a very, very odd thing to suppose that God intended that truth A be conveyed as the primary truth of the passage, but that Moses or David or Luke did not know that truth. Or, worse yet, that they were left to convey that truth through words whose meaning, in the mind of the human author, was an objective error. That's not the kind of God-breathed inspiring that we think happened. (At least not me.) God breathed into the mind and heart and will of his human cooperating agents the wisdom, knowledge, and understanding such that the human author's primary meaning was VALID in the words and sense that human author wrote it. The truth in the secondary layers, the truth of the anagogical and spiritual senses, RESTS ON the truth of the primary sense, which is nothing else than what the human author understood that he was conveying by the words he chose.

There is no need to assume that God so moved the human author to understand all truth, only the truth that the passage includes as its primary meaning. So there should never be a divergence between what the passage itself means primarily and what the human author understood by the passage. The passage had to mean something TO HIM, and that meaning must be protected as inerrant.

It is, as a practical matter, extraordinarily dicey to attempt to parse out of a passage "What the author (probably) thought about some matter *not actually asserted* but sits as a pre-supposition to what he asserted" and "what he MEANT BY a passage". It would be, generally, much safer simply to claim that the author meant by the passage something other than what we may have thought at first glance - due to evidence that overturns what we may have thought at first glance. An example would be reading Genesis 1 and at first glance thinking that "day" means the normal period comprised by sunrise to sunset, or sunrise to sunrise (or, given the Jewish culture, sunset to sunset) - and then re-evaluating that because you had "evening and morning" from the first day but you didn't have the sun until the 4th day. The textual evidence itself suggests that maybe the author DIDN'T MEAN sunset to sunset for day 1. It makes far more sense to suppose that the author didn't mean the standard sunset to sunset period by "day" than to suppose that that is exactly what he had in mind, but when he wrote "evening and morning" he didn't EXPLICITLY MENTION sunset and sunrise and so what he had in mind and what he wrote diverge and have different meanings.

My position is being badly misconstrued here.

There are several things at issue:

1. What assumptions are appropriate regarding the historical referenciality texts claim for themselves, whether Cain's statement constitutes evidence against a high degree of historical referencialty being claimed by the author(s) of the early chapters of Genesis, and whether I'm just cravenly caving to an easily harmonizable supposed problem and thereby demonstrating a low view of Scripture.

2. Whether it is necessary to draw a distinction within what could reasonably be regarded as being involved in the human meaning of Biblical texts, a distinction as to what constitutes divine revelation and what does not, so that what is known to fall on the non-revelatory side should not be taken as being required for us to believe, even if we don't have solid proof that it's false.

3. Whether my "geeky" way of drawing that distinction is mere sophistry.

Before addressing these let me respond to

The picture of your asking me indignantly whether I think that "the Bible is the Word of God" ...

It was not my intent to sound indignant. If my negligence in how I chose my words caused that impression, I ask your forgiveness. The substance of the criticism, apart from its tone, was, I believe, legitimate at the time, because you had recommended I give up my commitment to inerrancy without [then] offering an alternative. But you have now answered that sufficiently.

1. On the historicity of early Genesis

shrugging off what _you_ view as an apparent contradiction between Genesis 2 and 4 on the grounds that "they are just different stories"
The idea that _I_ view the difference between Genesis 2 and 4 as an apparent contradiction is the polar opposite of what I said. I don't start with a presumption that the text is historically referencial and then flop at the rather mild puzzle presented by Cain's statement. If there were a heavy presumption in favor of a very high degree of historicity then it would indeed be irrational and weak-minded to flop at that small puzzle. But that's not my approach. I don't start out with a default presumption one way or the other. I think our position on what degree of historicity is being claimed should derive from what we see in the text itself, together with what we can learn about the historical context in which it was written; there should be no default. From that vantage point, there is no apparent contradiction between Genesis 2 and 4. The most plausible reading of Genesis 2, absent any assumptions about historicity, has Adam and Eve being the first people. The most plausible reading of Genesis 4, absent assumptions about historicity, is that there are already other people around. Absent any assumptions about historicity no contradiction even appears to be present. If we were to draw a conclusion about historicity at this stage, all we could say is that the textual evidence we have so far considered slightly favors a lower degree of historicity, since that view fits best with the most plausible reading of both passages. But really that's only a small piece of evidence, not enough by itself to draw any really confident conclusions. We really need to consider more evidence before coming to a conclusion.

I feel in order to forestall further misconstrual of my position I need to give some rough indications of the cumulative case I would make here, but please don't think what I will say here represents the sum total of my reasons for not assigning a high degree of historicity to these chapters. The point here is just to show that there are other considerations pointing in this direction. For instance, how long after the first existence of the human race was the author of early Genesis living? (Please note that I am _not_ asking this as if to raise a difficulty for the text). If the human race began to exist within a relatively short period of time from when the author wrote, then it could be that he got his information about its beginning by oral tradition that could easily have preserved quite accurate account of the events of that time. On the other hand, if the time-scale involved is much too long for accurate oral tradition to passed down non-miraculously, then we will have reason to believe the text does not represent a historical memory unless we have reason to believe such a miracle occurred. Absent any other considerations that lead us to believe in a high degree of historicity, nothing I see in the text gives any indication that such a miracle occurred. Nor is there any indication in the text that God directly dictated the historical facts to the author. Most divine inspiration of the Scriptures does not occur by dictation, but by God using the ordinary natural powers of his creatures to bring about the text that he intends. Absent any presumption of historicity, there is no indication that this text is an exception. Now, do we know anything about when the human race originated. Yes, I think we can say, first, it was at least 40,000 years ago: it would be truly absurd to say that the folks who created the cave paintings at Lascaux were mere animals. The paintings themselves amply demonstrated the humanity of the painters. And there are many other examples of artifacts from the upper paleolithic from which we can draw the same conclusion. Now the culturally advanced upper paleolithic humans are no different, anatomically, from earlier humans going back to 100,000 years ago. Given all the philosophical reasons to reject the ensoulment view (even before considering the Biblical reasons) it's not really plausible to claim humans are _only_ 40,000 years old. I would even go further and argue that the most plausible date for the origin of the human race is well before that 100,000 year date for the earliest "anatomically modern" humans. But that's beyond what I would say we _know_. What we do know is that humans are more than 40,000 years old and probably at least 100,000. Too long for the transmission of accurate historical oral tradition by natural means. So, from what we have so far seen, it is most plausible to regard the account of Adam and Eve as _not_ being a record of historical testimony, human or divine.

This does _not_ mean that we must regard the text as having zero historical referent. Perhaps the author of this text knew on theological grounds that God created humans in a state of sinlessness (because God is not the author of sin) and that we are now in a position of rebellion against Him. Rebellion is the sort of thing that must originate in an act, and the only person who could have done an act of rebellion that would cast the whole human race into sin would have been someone like the character in our text. In other words, the author could have known, and intended to assert, the actual existence of a first man, and the fall as an actual event, even if his knowledge of the events did not come by way of historical testimony, human or divine. But this postulate does result in the narrative having less than 100% historicity.

On the other side of the ledger are the genealogies. Apart from the genealogies it might be plausible to interpret Adam as a mere personification of the human race, but the genealogies seem to indicate a higher degree of historicity. However, they really point in both directions, for if we take them as historically accurate we would get Adam being only a couple of thousand years before Abraham, making the human race only 6,000 years old, which we know is not the case. It's possible that there was a 6,000 year old person with whom God made a covenant that recapitulated or reenacted a much older covenant God had with the whole human race, and the author of Genesis may have conflated the two. But this is all very conjectural, not something I would recommend as an interpretation of the text. All we can really say regarding historicity at this point is that there are indications pointing in both directions.

Other reasons for regarding Genesis as having an intermediate level of historicity come from looking at the historical intent in similar origins literature of other ancient peoples.

Yet others come from looking at the rest of Genesis: in particular some of the arguments of higher criticism have some force. Although many of their arguments, perhaps the majority of them, are highly overrated, when those are removed some sensible arguments remain.

2. On what constitutes divine revelation.

what the Biblical authors thought and alluded to or indicated in the Biblical text where that's what their audience would have taken them to be saying by those words prima facie constitutes divine revelation, and that we should be reluctant and sparing in setting aside that prima facie supposition, because we do want to treat Scripture as special and authoritative (based upon the example and words of our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles), but that there could in principle be exceptions where the prima facie case is defeasible.
This is excellent. You have convinced me that you _are_ in a position to offer the challenge to my view that I earlier said you weren't in a position to offer. I can see how it is reasonable to say, "We know that X is not what constitutes divine revelation [my syllogism does show that], but X is an approximately correct theory, and in the absense of any more accurate account of what does constitute divine revelation, we should assume that things that fall into class X are divinely revealed, and only make exceptions in particular cases, where we have to say, 'I don't know why this particular thing doesn't count as divine revelation, but I have overwhelming evidence that it is false, so it must fall outside of what counts as divine revelation, even though the best theory I have would include it as being divinely revealed.'" That makes sense. However, it also makes sense to go beyond this if we can. God has put us in a position to see that many of the beliefs of the people through whom he gave his special revelation to us are false. They contradict what God has revealed to us in general revelation. Now, if the prophets were merely taking dictation, this would not be an issue. But we know, from what we actually find when we look at the Scriptures, that that was almost never the case. The human authors spoke with their own voice, and their own beliefs and worldviews are reflected in the Biblical text. This includes many of the false beliefs they held. If we can, it makes sense for us to learn something from this so that we can have a more accurate account of what does and does not constitute divine revelation.

3. On presuppositions and sophistry.
Your objection is not to the distinction itself but to how I'm applying it. But I'm not applying it in anything like the way you imply. If I were doing what you represent me as doing, that would indeed be brazenly sophistical, I certainly do see that. But you're misrepresenting me. If I were to use the distinction between what is presupposed and what is directly said in order to say I have no obligation to believe anything that isn't directly said in Scripture, that would be a horribly sophistical way of using that distinction. Does it follow that the distinction itself can be of no possible usefulness in this context? Not at all. Abusus non tollit usum.

Suppose someone tells you, "The man drinking champagne over there is a spy." That man over there is drinking something that appears to be champagne and that you and the speaker both unreflectively take to be such. Later you discover some reasons that seem to indicate that it wasn't champagne but some other beverage in his champagne glass. It's perfectly reasonable to think that the speaker did not intend to make a point of what substance the guy's champagne glass contained. Rather the point of the speakers statement was to identify who the spy was, and he did that perfectly well and correctly. His speech-act succeeded entirely in its purpose, and was not in error in that respect. Let's suppose further that you have reason to believe that the speaker's statements always constitute divine revelation, but you also know that other things the speaker has said seem to in some sense "contain" falsehoods, but those falsehoods are always things that don't undermine the main propositional content of what the speaker says (including all Gricean implicatures). Given those conditions, it's reasonable to be less than 100% confident that the beverage certainly must have been champagne, even if your reasons for thinking it wasn't champagne are less than proof positive.

To see whether this analogy is appropriate to our debate we must answer 2 questions:
1) Do we have reason to believe other statements by Biblical authors "contain" falsehoods (but ones that don't undermine the main propositional content of what they said)? This is our debate over geocentrism in the Psalms.
2) Is Luke's presupposition about the special creation of Adam like the presupposition in our example, or is it more like the other kind of presupposition, the sort that, if false, would undermine the main propositional content, like how the non-existence of God would undermine Paul's claim that God raised Jesus from the dead? The answer to this, I contend, is not clear. It may be that, once we fully investigate Luke's theology and come to a full account of his intentions in saying what he said, we may conclude that what he said does logically require that Adam be specially created. But that takes argument. It's not a direct and obvious implication like how "The author is Julius Seidensticker" directly and obviously implies that Julius Seidensticker exists. And that's why I take issue with your "the conversation should be over".

The human authors spoke with their own voice, and their own beliefs and worldviews are reflected in the Biblical text. This includes many of the false beliefs they held.

I would prima facie assume this to be _false_. I certainly don't think one should take it to be prima facie true. I have a few cases where I consider myself forced by other considerations to suspect, if not conclude, that it is true, but I don't think that "many of the false beliefs they held" are "reflected in" the biblical text. In fact, several of the cases where I _suspect_ that the text "reflects" a false view on the part of the author, it isn't even a matter of worldview at all but a simple matter of memory failure or of not having some highly particular information. (E.g. St. John may have misremembered precisely when Jesus saw the multitude approaching on the occasion of the feeding of the five thousand, so that he says that they were already on the mountain when they saw the people coming, whereas Mark, I believe it is, says that they were disembarking from the boat on the Sea of Galilee.)

One of the only cases where I _suspect_ error that reflects something false on the level of worldview is the strong implication in the text that God ordered the slaughter of infants and women among the Canaanites.

In general, however, I just don't think it's true that the Bible reflects "many" false views on the part of the human authors. Why should I?

Christopher McCartney"

"For instance, how long after the first existence of the human race was the author of early Genesis living? (Please note that I am _not_ asking this as if to raise a difficulty for the text). If the human race began to exist within a relatively short period of time from when the author wrote, then it could be that he got his information about its beginning by oral tradition that could easily have preserved quite accurate account of the events of that time. On the other hand, if the time-scale involved is much too long for accurate oral tradition to passed down non-miraculously, then we will have reason to believe the text does not represent a historical memory unless we have reason to believe such a miracle occurred. Absent any other considerations that lead us to believe in a high degree of historicity, nothing I see in the text gives any indication that such a miracle occurred. Nor is there any indication in the text that God directly dictated the historical facts to the author. Most divine inspiration of the Scriptures does not occur by dictation, but by God using the ordinary natural powers of his creatures to bring about the text that he intends. Absent any presumption of historicity, there is no indication that this text is an exception."

Which overlooks the fact that visionary revelation is a very common medium by which God conveys information. And several commentators on Exodus think the terminology used with reference to God "showing" Moses a replica of the tabernacle indicates visionary revelation. Hence, there'd be Pentateuchal precedent for that revelatory modality in reference to the early chapters of Genesis. By the same token, revelatory dreams figure in Genesis (e.g. Joseph, Pharaoh, Abimelech).

God has put us in a position to see that many of the beliefs of the people through whom he gave his special revelation to us are false. They contradict what God has revealed to us in general revelation. Now, if the prophets were merely taking dictation, this would not be an issue. But we know, from what we actually find when we look at the Scriptures, that that was almost never the case. The human authors spoke with their own voice, and their own beliefs and worldviews are reflected in the Biblical text. This includes many of the false beliefs they held.

Christopher, much of what you say seems sensible, but when you get to this, I have to object.

If we suppose that "The Jews" thought some cosmology was true that we have now shown is not valid, does not mean that when Moses (or any other Jew) was writing Genesis, that they thought the Jewish cosmology was true. It is of course possible that they DID think that, before God inspired them. It is also possible that they ceased to think that, but when they were trying to convey something that really was true about creation to Jews, they used descriptions as near as could be intelligible to their audience to depict the truth, and it isn't how we would depict that self-same truth that we now theorize by science. For instance, if God were to inspire the writer of Genesis to show forth creation, through a dream vision, and if the first moment of creation really were the Big Bang, it is not impossible that an early Hebrew writer would speak of a "day" in which God produced light, where light was the only thing produced that day - without a sun or stars.

My point isn't "that's what Genesis 1 means." My point is that it is pretty presumptuous of us to just assert that the author could not have had the truth in mind when writing what they wrote about creation - as if our standards of how to tell one small, limited truth that we know are the measure of how THEY would have to present a truth that they know, that is related.

CS Lewis on the spirit the medieval people read their books (from The Discarded Image):

"I am inclined to think that most of those who read 'historical' works about Troy, Alexander, Arthur or Charlemagne, believed their matter to be in the main true. But I feel much more certain that they did not believe it to be false. I feel surest of all that the question of belief or disbelief was seldom uppermost in their minds"

It is also possible that they ceased to think that.
Possible? Sure. Plausible? Not so much. I maintain that our theory of inspiration ought to be responsive to what the Scriptures actually look like under the most reasonable interpretation of them independent of assumptions about what they are "supposed to" look like according to an a priori theory of inspiration.
if God were to inspire the writer of Genesis to show forth creation, through a dream vision, and if the first moment of creation really were the Big Bang, it is not impossible that an early Hebrew writer would speak of a "day" in which God produced light, where light was the only thing produced that day - without a sun or stars. My point isn't "that's what Genesis 1 means."
Good, because that's not what it means.
My point is that it is pretty presumptuous of us to just assert that the author could not have had the truth in mind
I don't assert that the author could not have had that truth in mind. I assert that he didn't. Claims about what "could have" been the case based on implausible interpretations of the text aren't really to the point.

Hi, Lydia. So sorry to be late to the party here, but I thought I'd simply chime in from the perspective of an Old Testament specialist, and say that your critiques of John Walton's views have lots and lots of merit. Just to pick out one in particular, your discussion of "form" in Genesis 2:7 is spot on (in my judgment as a lexicographer).

I expect that John has become sensitive to critiques that descend into ad hominem, since he has received plenty of that. But yours is vigorous and bracing, without the ad hominem -- I am afraid that I can’t say the same for all commenters, but that’s of no consequence for what you have written. John, and those who find his approach attractive, would do well to heed what you have said -- and (IMHO) change their minds!

There is more to be said to commend particular arguments you have made, but I considered it better to say something now (even late) than to say nothing because I couldn’t carve out the time to say a lot!

Thanks for what you have done and for what you do!

Jack Collins, Professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St Louis, MO

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