The days of Genesis 1

In other words, he chooses to view it as a fairy tale and believe evolution - an idea with absolutely no scriptural support whatsoever - in it's place.

Othwise, he would be showing us how plant life on earth "evolved" before the sun in our solar system formed. He would be giving us a "non-literal exegesis" instead of dismissing Genesis entirely and interjecting evolution in it's place. </font>[/QUOTE]Very true. The atheist chooses NOT to believe the Word of God when IT says that EACH day of creation week is "ONE evening and morning" and they choose NOT to believe the Word when IT says "FOR IN SIX DAYS the LORD MADE the Heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them".

Oddly- some Christians choose to marry darkenss with light - to join atheism's account for "origins" to God's account (as if such a joining of clear opposites would be a "good thing").

Neither atheists nor Bible-believing Creator-trusting Creation-account-details-accepting Christians can go for that union of light with darkness.

You must EITHER reject the "details" of the junk-science called "evolutionism" OR you must reject the "details" of the "account" for origins that God gives.

Many have clearly made their choice here.

Obviously.

In Christ,

Bob

 

So Bob, as PastorGreg points out, to be consistent you also need to admit that the Bible, if taken literally, indicates geocentrism. Why don't you let us know on what basis you accept that the earth actually moves around the sun. Show us the exegesis for that or give us some other reason that you accept that the earth orbits the sun.

 

You have yet to give us a non-literal exegesis... you simply call it 'non-literal' as a pre-cursor to dismissing Genesis, and asserting evolution in place of any form of Biblical exegesis.

I haven't seen a great deal of convincing arguments for this. So far, geocentrists rest upon the figurative poetic language of Psalms.

Moreover, the earth may very well be at or near the center of the universe... that doesn't mean the earth is fixed or stationary. The universe is massively large... for us to be near the center of it is a pretty huge 'region'.

When the weather man says that 'the sun rises at 5:30am' that means that the earth turns so that we can see the sun starting at 5:30am. He uses figurative language to describe a literal event.

If the 'creation event' is not literal, than you view it as a fairy tale that never happened. If the language describing the 'creation event' is non-literal, that DOES NOT mean the event is non-literal, but that the language describing it is non-literal. Therefore a literal event occured (which you seem to claim you support) but it is described non-literally. In that case, the non-literal language of Genesis MUST represent something literal.

Of course this is all academic because Genesis uses literal language to describe a literal event. This claim of 'non-literal' is simply an excuse for evolutionist christians to dismiss the Genesis account of creation all together.

 

But you have not told us how you decide what parts of the Bible to take as figurative and which as literal. Give us the exegesis that lets us know that geocentrism is incorrect or admit that you know that it is incorrect for other reasons.

 

"If the 'creation event' is not literal, than you view it as a fairy tale that never happened. If the language describing the 'creation event' is non-literal, that DOES NOT mean the event is non-literal, but that the language describing it is non-literal. Therefore a literal event occured (which you seem to claim you support) but it is described non-literally. In that case, the non-literal language of Genesis MUST represent something literal."

You contradict yourself here.

In your first sentence, you say that if it is not literal, then it never happened. But then in the rest of the paragraph, you show that you understand that non-literal languange can be used to describe a real, literal event. One statement or the other must be false. You cannot say that both that non-literal means that it did not happen and that it did happen.

But the rest of your paragraph ends up being the right answer. God really is the creator of the universe in a literal sense and the Bible chooses to describe that creation in a non-literal manner.

 

Let me ask you - Does the following sentence have a LITERAL meaning - "Sunrise is at 5:30am". Coming from a meterologist who believes the earth rotates causing day and night... would you take this to mean that the earth is fixed, and the sun moves (or rises), or would you say that the language is figurative.

My guess is, you would say the language is figurative. BY YOUR REASONING THEN, because the language is figurative, THE SUN WILL NOT RISE, AND DAYTIME WILL NEVER HAPPEN. You see... by YOUR reasoning... because the language is figurative, it gives you reason to completely dismiss the literal event that the figurative language describes.

This is exactly what you do with Genesis. You say - the language is non-literal, but then you give an entirely different/separate explaination for what you think happened (evolution). It would be like saying that sunrise was at 5:30am and then showing how darkness (night-time) started at 5:30am with the moon coming into the sky for the 'day' instead of the 'sun' dominating the sky.

If I say "my favorite baseball team got killed yesterday", and I don't meant that all the team members died... but there is a LITERAL meaning for the figurative language. The LITERAL meaning would be that my baseball team lost their game by a lot of runs.

In the same way... IF YOU CLAIM THAT GENESIS IS NON-LITERAL, you have to give an explaination of what LITERAL events the figurative language specifies. For example, if it says that God created plants on day 3, and then it says God created the Sun on day 4 - if that is 'figuratively speaking' .... what literal events does this figurative language correspond to?

Christian Evolutionists have absolutely no LITERAL exegesis for the "supposed non-literal language" of Genesis. They say that Genesis is non-literal, and then they make the massive leap to evolution as the truth. Indeed if evolutionists TRIED to show how evolution was true through a non-literal exegesis of Genesis, they would be soundly and thoroughly refuted. If Genesis is 'true' as they claim it to be... that means there is a literal meaning for the figurative language supposedly used. So far... no evolutionist has even attempted to offer an explaination of the literal events that the figurative language represents. They simply dismiss genesis by saying it's non-literal and make the giant leap to evolution.

 

So give us the literal exegesis that says that geocentrism is false.

 

Except that the Bible does not TEACH geocentrism as a FACT. There is a difference between what is presented in the scripture as FACT and what someone says from their OWN perspective. You cannot provide a single verse in which ANYONE (God, Christ, Moses, David, etc, etc, insert name here) proclaims with divine authority that the sun moves around the earth.

 

I supposed mentioning that you have yet to give us a credible reason to think that geocentrism is supported by the Word is beside the point?

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/docs/TJv15n2Geocentrism.asp

Many critics of creationists attempt to malign by suggesting that what creationists teach is akin to belief in a flat Earth. This attack is easy to refute, because the Bible does not teach that the Earth is flat, and virtually no one in the history of the church taught this. In fact, the belief in a flat Earth is a 19th century myth that was concocted to discredit critics of Darwinism. The supposed lesson of this myth was that the Church got it wrong before, so the Church has a chance to redeem itself by getting it right on the issue of evolution. This false lesson has been indelibly impressed upon common perception.

However, the Church did support the wrong side of a scientific issue four centuries ago. That issue was the question of whether the Sun went around the Earth (geocentrism) or if the Earth went around the Sun (heliocentrism, which could be called geokineticism since the Sun is not regarded as the centre of the universe either, as discussed below). Being based upon real history, creationists in theory could be accused of repeating this mistake by rejecting evolution.

...

Perhaps the best-known geocentrist in the world today is Gerardus Bouw, who has been a professor at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio for many years. He is founder and director of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, as well as editor of Biblical Astronomer. Both are organs for geocentrism. To distinguish modern geocentrism from ancient geocentrism, Bouw has coined the term ‘geocentricity’ for the former. Bouw has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Case Western Reserve University, so he certainly is in a position to know and understand the issues and literature involved. Given Bouw’s stature as the chief champion of geocentricity, we will use his book by the same name as the primary source on the topic.

Early in his book Bouw quotes the atheist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and the supposedly agnostic Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) on the supposed geocentric nature of the Bible. The appropriateness of quoting these two gentlemen apparently never occurred to Bouw. Since when did two mathematical logicians become authorities in Biblical exegesis (like most bibliosceptics, they were ignorant of Biblical languages and historical context.

Being antagonistic toward the Bible and Christianity, both6 of these men had a vested interest in discrediting the Bible. What better way to do this than for them to falsely claim that the Bible says things that are patently not true? This straw man technique is a very common strategy in attacking the Bible. A good example is the supposedly incorrect value of p in 1 Kings 7:23–24 and 2 Chronicles 4:2, a topic that Bouw addresses very well.

Bouw does quote an anonymous evangelical source on the geocentric nature of the Bible, but one must ask if that is indeed what Scripture teaches. There are few Biblical texts that in any way even remotely address the heliocentric/geocentric question. In each instance there is considerable doubt as to whether cosmology is the issue. Some of these verses are in the poetic books, such as the Psalms. It is poor practice to build any teaching or doctrine solely or primarily upon passages from the poetic books, though they can amplify concepts clearly taught elsewhere. It is also important not to base doctrines upon any passage that at best only remotely addresses an issue. That is, if cosmology is clearly not the point of a passage, then extracting a cosmological meaning can be very dangerous.

The Galileo canard
In the middle ages and well into the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church did teach geocentrism, but was that based upon the Bible? The Church’s response to Galileo (1564–1642) was primarily from the works of Aristotle (384–322 BC) and other ancient Greek philosophers. It was Augustine (AD 354–430), Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) and others who ‘baptized’ the work of these pagans and termed them ‘pre-Christian Christians’. This mingling of pagan science and the Bible was a fundamental error for which the Church eventually paid a tremendous price.

Confusion persists to today in that nearly every textbook that discusses the Galileo affair claims that it was a matter of religion vs science, when it actually was a matter of science vs science. Unfortunately, Church leaders interpreted certain Biblical passages as geocentric to bolster the argument for what science of the day was claiming. This mistake is identical to those today who interpret the Bible to support things such as the big bang, billions of years, or biological evolution.11 Therefore, any evangelical Christian misinformed of this history who opines that the Bible is geocentric is hardly any more credible a source on this topic than an atheist or agnostic.

Biblical support for geocentrism?
In the second chapter, Bouw also develops what he considers a Biblical model of the Earth’s structure.15 Others would legitimately question the soundness of his Biblical argument here. Much of this model and what follows in the next chapter is based upon a distinction of the words ‘world’ and ‘Earth’ in the KJV. While this distinction is generally true, it is not obvious that the distinction is universal, and it is the original languages of Scripture that matter, not any translation.

‘ … it cannot be moved’
Bouw quotes part of Psalm 93:1 from the KJV, ‘ … the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved’.16 He claims that ‘stablish’ is the proper translation as opposed to ‘establish’, that is used in most modern translations. He states that the former word means to stabilize, while the latter means to set up. However, none of the English dictionaries (including the Oxford) I consulted support this distinction. All of the dictionaries revealed that ‘stablish’ is an archaic variation of ‘establish’. Bouw further alleges that this subtle distinction is also present in the Hebrew. This is patently not true, as can be demonstrated with Strong’s Concordance.17 The Hebrew word used in Psalm 93:1 is kûwn, which is translated as ‘stablish’, ‘stablished’, and ‘stablisheth’ only one time each outside of Psalm 93:1. The same word is translated as ‘establish’, or ‘established’, 58 times elsewhere in the KJV. A closely related Hebrew word, qûwm is translated ‘stablish’ three times and as ‘establish’ or ‘established’ 28 times in the KJV. Indeed, kûwn appears twice in 2 Samuel 7:12–13, but is rendered ‘establish’ and ‘stablish’ in the same passage. Thus the distinction that Bouw claims in these two words does not exist in either Hebrew or English.

Bouw uses this unfounded distinction to draw some questionable meaning from 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 96:10,18 where the word ‘establish’ is used in the latter verse. These passages declare that the world is not to be moved, from which Bouw concludes that the world does not move.

This is fallacious. The Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (mowt) is in the niphal stem, which often refers to the passive voice, as indeed it does here. This is reflected in the English translations—to be moved or not to be moved suggests the action of an external or causative agent to bring about change in position, but does not exclude the possibility of motion apart from an external agent. Bouw frequently chides those who disagree with him on Biblical passages that speak of the rising of the Sun by claiming that they accuse God of being a poor communicator. Therefore, we may apply Bouw’s standard to his own work: the Lord could have rendered these passages to read, ‘… the world does not move’, if that is what He intended. As is, these passages are hardly geocentric.

It is important to note that the same Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (môwt) in the same niphal stem is used in Psalm 16:8, ‘I shall not be moved’. Presumably even Bouw wouldn’t accuse God of poor communication if he didn’t believe that the Bible taught that the Psalmist was rooted to one spot! Rather, the passage teaches that he would not stray from the path that God had set for him. If that’s so, then it’s impossible to deny that ‘the world … cannot be moved’ could mean that Earth will not stray from the precise orbital and rotational pattern God has set for it.

In both 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 96:10, the word ‘shall’ appears, which Bouw obviously and correctly takes as an imperative. However, the next passage that he discusses, Psalm 104:5,19 reads, ‘ … laid the foundations of the Earth that it should not be removed forever’.

Bouw notes that the word ‘should’ is a conditional that does not necessarily reflect things as they are. While it is true that many people today use the word ‘should’ in this sense, this is not the correct and original meaning of the word (the usual intended meaning when many people say ‘should’ is better conveyed by the word ‘ought’). The word ‘should’ actually is the past tense of ‘shall’, and as such has the same imperative meaning that that word has. Here Bouw makes much ado about the dictionary meaning of the word ‘remove’, but he is very selective in the use of the dictionary, as he apparently did not bother to consult the meaning of the word ‘should’. As an aside, the words for ‘shall’ and ‘should’ are understood but absent in Hebrew and were inserted into English to make the passages intelligible. As such, the choice of when, where, and which word to insert is a matter of preference or sense of the translator, and ought never be used as the basis for any doctrine.

Sunrise and sunset
Much of the case for geocentrism relies upon many Biblical passages that refer to sunrise and sunset. Geocentrists argue that since the Bible is inspired of God, then when He chose to use such terminology, the Lord must mean that the Sun moves. By this reasoning, virtually all astronomers and astronomical books and magazines are geocentric, because ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ is exactly the language that such sources use. Anyone who has spent much time watching the sky can testify that each day the Sun, moon, planets, and most stars do rise, move across the sky, and then set. Such observation and description do not at all address what actually causes this motion. However, the geocentrists will have none of it, insisting that language and usage must conform to their standards. For instance, Bouw has suggested the words, ‘tosun’ and ‘fromsun’20 for sunrise and sunset to better acknowledge what heliocentrists mean. It is extremely unlikely that these words will catch on, because the terms sunrise and sunset work so well.

The attempted coining of these new words demonstrates the desperate attempt to argue the point here. Quoting Bouw:

‘Either God meant what he wrote or he did not mean what he wrote and would, presumably, revise his original writing as well as write differently if he were to write today.’21

No, He would not, because there is probably not a language now or ever in existence that has simple expressions that concisely and accurately describes the heliocentric rising and setting of the Sun. Why do we need such expressions when the ones that we now possess work so well and are understood in all cultures?

Elsewhere Bouw suggests that those who disagree with him are virtually accusing God of being a bad communicator or grammarian. Of course, we do not. However, Bouw has painted himself into a corner: if Bouw is wrong, then he is the one who has made this accusation against our Creator. What he misses is that cosmology is not being addressed at all in these passages. This extremely literal approach to the Bible is reverently intended, but it badly misses the mark. At some points it almost reads as a parody (and sadly it’s not much different from those of bibliosceptics).

Firmament
Bouw makes a similarly poor case for his Biblical model for space. Light is a wave. All waves require a medium. For instance, sound waves travel in air and water waves obviously use water as a medium. What is the medium in which light travels, given that light apparently can travel through empty space? In classical physics the medium for light is called the ‘ether’ or ‘aether’. However, modern physics takes a different approach, which will not be discussed here.22 Bouw maintains that modern physics is in error, and that the classical aether indeed does exist. He further insists that the firmament first mentioned in Genesis 1:6 is to be equated with the aether, going so far as to claim that the firmament is God’s chosen name for the aether.

Physics aside for the moment, is this good exegesis? Hardly. First, there is a problem with the use of the word ‘firmament’ in the King James Version. The Hebrew word is raqiya‘, which is a noun that comes from a verb that means to beat out as into a thin sheet. Gold is a good example of this process. Gold is so malleable that hammers and other tools can be used to flatten and stretch the metal into very thin sheets that can be applied to objects to gild them. The question is, what property or properties are intended by the word raqiya‘? If one wants to get across the hardness of the object, usually a metal, being beaten out, then ‘firmament’ may not be a bad translation.

However, what if the intended property is the stretched out nature of the raqiya‘ rather than hardness? This is consistent with the terminology of Psalm 104:2, which speaks of the stretching out of the heavens, though admittedly the Hebrew word used there for heaven is shamayim. However, Genesis 1:8 explicitly states that God called the firmament (raqiya‘) heaven(s) (shamayim). Therefore, there is contextual Biblical evidence for equating these two Hebrew words, at least in some cases. If the stretched out nature of the raqiya‘ is what is intended, then ‘firmament’ is a bad translation, while ‘expanse’ used in many modern translations is very good.

How did the KJV come to use ‘firmament?’ The Septuagint rendered raqiya‘ as stereoma, which gives the meaning of something very hard. This was an obvious incorporation of Greek cosmology current at the time of the Septuagint translation. That cosmology had the Earth surrounded by a hard crystalline sphere upon which were suspended the stars. In the Vulgate, Jerome followed the lead of the Septuagint and used the Latin equivalent firmamentum. The KJV translators merely anglicized this.

There are at least two ironies in Bouw’s insistence of the correctness of the word firmament. The first is that Bouw severely criticizes both the Vulgate and the Septuagint as being terrible translations, going as far as to express doubt that the Septuagint even existed before the New Testament.23 The second is that Bouw completely trashes ancient Greek philosophy, but blindly accepts the heavy influence of the same ancient Greek science on this point.

A second problem with Bouw’s equating the raqiya‘ (firmament) with the aether is how the firmament is further discussed in the creation account. The first appearance of the word is on Day Two of Creation Week when the waters were separated above and below and with the firmament between. On Day Four, the Sun, moon, and stars were set in the firmament. On Day Five, birds were made to fly in the firmament. It is quite a stretch to conclude that the firmament must be all of space or even any stuff that may fill space. The most obvious conclusion is that the raqiya‘ is the Earth’s atmosphere or the sky. If this is true, then much of Bouw’s case is destroyed. [Ed. note: see also Is the raqiya‘ (firmament — KJV) a solid dome?]

The various issues briefly discussed here are just a few of the many examples of how poorly Bouw handles Biblical matters. But these key issues are enough for readers to question Bouw’s credibility on Biblical matters and his insistence that the Bible is geocentric.

 

so then.. the literal exegesis would be to say that the figurative statement "the earth shall not be moved" in Psalms doesn't mean the earth is fixed in space, but rather this is a poetic expression of literal verses such as Gen 8:22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

 

A fascinating exercise in taking the literal meanings of the words and reinterpreting them to fit a more modern understanding. Nobody would ever even think of taking the phrase "it cannot be moved" and interpret the passive sense to mean an external agent cannot move it but it can move of its own accord and then say the earth can move . . it is far more natural to just say it means the earth is stationary! But we have a convoluted "rescue interpretation", as usual in such cases.

Convoluted "rescue interpretations" can be devised to make the scripture say anything you want! By way of example, some of the serious YEC posters on this board - including BobRyan and Helen - have even had the temerity to assert that some stars were created before day four! They justify this because the "sentence" that refers to the stars being created doesn't, they claim, literally require being connected with the day that is described wherein the sentence is embedded!


I notice an absence of any discussion of the Joshua passage, where the scripture plainly and literally states that the sun stopped its motion.

The rise of modern science has shown us another way to decide truth - evaluate the evidence and show you can make predictions. Science has been able to do this in spectacular fashion, including the sciences of astronomy, geology, and biology. When somebody tries to use a convoluted interpretation of words unrelated to reality in science - they are quickly shown to fail in their predictions and the convoluted interpretations must fall aside. (remember "cold fusion?")

It is an advantage that science has over religion.

 

Indeed... however neither science nor religion have any advantage over the absolute truth and infallibility of the Word of God - aka the scriptures.

 

This example is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. This was clearly a MIRACULOUS event and therefore trying to use it as a prooftext to say the Bible does or does not teach geocentrism is absurd. I don't know whether the earth physically stopped rotating or if time was suspended in the universe or whatever. It doesn't really matter how the miracle occurred, God could have done it any way physically that He wanted. The point is, from the PERSPECTIVE of the WITNESSES, the sun literally stopped in the sky. But again, this was a MIRACLE, a one-time, GOD-ordained, event; not a statement with which to build a universal scientific truth!

 

"This example is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand."

Really?

If God was concerned with such things and wanted to be clear, would it really have been that hard for the passage in Joshua to say that the earth stopped moving instead of saying the sun stopped moving.

I mean, Gup keeps trying to tell us how all these things that we say people believed from taking the wrong parts of the Bible too literally (or that were written in that manner because that is what the people understood) are not really the case. So if they did not believe in geocentrism, then by being factually correct and saying that the earth stopped spinning, they would have understood perfectly the effect, correct?

Except that they would not have understood.

Concerning your comment on the last page... I do not think that the Bible teaches geocentrism any more than I think it teaches a flat earth or a fixed firmament or a young earth. But, if read literally, people do understand it to mean all of these things.

 

This example is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. This was clearly a MIRACULOUS event and therefore trying to use it as a prooftext to say the Bible does or does not teach geocentrism is absurd. I don't know whether the earth physically stopped rotating or if time was suspended in the universe or whatever. It doesn't really matter how the miracle occurred, God could have done it any way physically that He wanted. The point is, from the PERSPECTIVE of the WITNESSES, the sun literally stopped in the sky. But again, this was a MIRACLE, a one-time, GOD-ordained, event; not a statement with which to build a universal scientific truth! </font>[/QUOTE]Every discussion I have read concerning the topic at hand, Paul of Eugene uses Joshua as his evidence, then he plops his butt in front of a TV in the evenings and listens to his local weatherman’s “sunrise” and “sunset” times and it never registers.

 

Why do YOU suppose the weather channel doesn't do the same?

 

Because historically man has always considered that the rising of the sun was due to its movement and not due to the movement of the earth. That is the phrasing the humans use. Even once we figured out that the rotation of the earth causes the apparent rising of the sun, we continued to use the figurative language because that is the way it had always been done and that is what we are accustomed to.

You actually bring up supporting evidence for my position.

Surely you realize that there are many figurative expressions in laguage that have their origins in a time when it was not thought to be so figurative.

But, if these things were understood correctly in the past, then God could have easily said in Joshua that the earth stopped spinning and all would have understood.

And again, we still do not have a good answer as to how we know when figurative language is being used and when it is not. Often figurative language is phrased in a way that makes it sound literal. Does Joshua not sound like the sun literally quit moving?

 

Man's perspective and understanding is often in error. That is what makes the Bible so fascinating.
It move beyond the scope of what the ancient's thought they knew and remains entirely relavent and reliable to this very day. The Bible is entirely correct and without error.

 

So when your meterologist tells you tomorrow morning that the sun will rise at whatever time... make sure you mark him as a geocentrist. If someone says 'the sun is high in the sky' make sure you mark them also as geocentrists.

 

So, Gup, do you think that if Joshua had recorded that the earth stopped spinning, what happened would have been readily understood by the ancient Jewish audience? Why? If that is the case, why was that not what was recorded for us? It would have been more accurate.

"So when your meterologist tells you tomorrow morning that the sun will rise at whatever time... make sure you mark him as a geocentrist. If someone says 'the sun is high in the sky' make sure you mark them also as geocentrists. "

Historically man has always considered that the rising of the sun was due to its movement and not due to the movement of the earth. That is the phrasing the humans use. Even once we figured out that the rotation of the earth causes the apparent rising of the sun, we continued to use the figurative language because that is the way it had always been done and that is what we are accustomed to.

You actually bring up supporting evidence for my position.

Surely you realize that there are many figurative expressions in laguage that have their origins in a time when it was not thought to be so figurative.

But, if these things were understood correctly in the past, then God could have easily said in Joshua that the earth stopped spinning and all would have understood.

And again, we still do not have a good answer as to how we know when figurative language is being used and when it is not. Often figurative language is phrased in a way that makes it sound literal. Does Joshua not sound like the sun literally quit moving?