Do We Interprete genesis 1/2 as being Literal, Myth, or metaphorical then?

[Crabtownboy]

All of the above in the OP.

 

[humblethinker]

All of the above in the OP.

What does that mean?.... nevermind, I get it.

 

[InTheLight]

I agree, as I've said in prior postings in this thread. I would be interested in what InTheLight thinks about this idea

The speed of light slowing down dramatically would be a neat explanation for the appearance of age problem but there is no scientific evidence that the speed of light has slowed down.

I do find it kind of interesting that YECers introduce variable speed of light, variable speed of radioactive decay in an attempt to make scientific observation fit their interpretation of scripture.

 

[HankD]

The speed of light slowing down dramatically would be a neat explanation for the appearance of age problem but there is no scientific evidence that the speed of light has slowed down.

I do find it kind of interesting that YECers introduce variable speed of light, variable speed of radioactive decay in an attempt to make scientific observation fit their interpretation of scripture.

An issue of Scientific American (in 1996 I believe) Magazine Front Page had the headline Heresy: C (the Speed of Light) is not a constant.

Much of the scientific community had come to the same conclusion - The speed of light is and has been a variable all along, the closer to the Big Bang, the greater the potential variation(s), presumably it answered a few questions for them as well.

HankD

 

[Winman]

An issue of Scientific American (in 1996 I believe) Magazine Front Page had the headline Heresy: C (the Speed of Light) is not a constant.

Much of the scientific community had come to the same conclusion - The speed of light is and has been a variable all along, the closer to the Big Bang, the greater the potential variation(s), presumably it answered a few questions for them as well.

HankD

Yes, there is REAL evidence that the speed of light may have been billions (Yes, BILLIONS) of times faster in the very recent past. Barry Setterfield first put this theory forth around 1979, since that time many secular cosmologists and physicists have confirmed much of his findings. It is still very controversial, but more are in agreement with this theory every day.

This theory solves many problems the Big Bang cannot.

You can go to Barry Setterfields website to find many interesting atricles on this subject.

 

[preachinjesus]

One might posit that in creating with age, God designed a universe that allowed for the optimal placement of Earth while utilizing the laws of nature necessary to regulate existence. Thus the speed of light is built in, and visible images from light years away put into visible alignment with humanity on earth.

There are any number of replies and some difficulties...but those come with every view of cosmology.

 

[humblethinker]

The speed of light slowing down dramatically would be a neat explanation for the appearance of age problem but there is no scientific evidence that the speed of light has slowed down.

I do find it kind of interesting that YECers introduce variable speed of light, variable speed of radioactive decay in an attempt to make scientific observation fit their interpretation of scripture.

Maybe so, but don't you think it's a better arguement than the "Last Wednesday" arguement? (especially if the ideas of the speed of light being different as referred to in the above posts?

 

[quantumfaith]

Yes, there is REAL evidence that the speed of light may have been billions (Yes, BILLIONS) of times faster in the very recent past. Barry Setterfield first put this theory forth around 1979, since that time many secular cosmologists and physicists have confirmed much of his findings. It is still very controversial, but more are in agreement with this theory every day.

This theory solves many problems the Big Bang cannot.

You can go to Barry Setterfields website to find many interesting atricles on this subject.

I have "heard" of this proposal that light was "faster" in the past, but cannot grasp how that supports a "younger universe", in fact, as I ponder light being "slower" from our current vantage, it would seem to me to argue for even and older universe.

 

[InTheLight]

Yes, there is REAL evidence that the speed of light may have been billions (Yes, BILLIONS) of times faster in the very recent past. Barry Setterfield first put this theory forth around 1979, since that time many secular cosmologists and physicists have confirmed much of his findings.

Name two of them.

 

[InTheLight]

Maybe so, but don't you think it's a better arguement than the "Last Wednesday" arguement? (especially if the ideas of the speed of light being different as referred to in the above posts?

Not really a better argument. The speed of light was first measured in the 1600's. Therefore up until then, the speed of light could have been varying up and down, up and down and we'd never know it. It's kind of similar to the "Last Wednesday" argument in that we only know the speed of light since 1676 and anything related to the speed of light before that never happened.

 

[Winman]

Name two of them.

OK.

Evidence suggesting that the velocity of light, c, has been slowing down throughout history was first reported by Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman for some years.2 Now two physicists-Dr. Joao Magueijo, a Royal Society research fellow at Imperial College, London, and Dr. Andreas Albrecht, of the University of California at Davis-are proposing that, immediately after the universe was born, the speed of light may have been far faster than its present-day value of 186,000 miles per second.3 They now believe that it has been slowing down ever since. The effects predicted by their theory are to be published in the prestigious scientific journal, Physical Review. "If it's true, it would be a very big leap forward that will affect our perception of the universe and much of theoretical physics," said Dr. Magueijo.

The Canadian mathematician, Alan Montgomery, has reported a computer analysis supporting the Setterfield/Norman results. His model indicates that the decay of velocity of light closely follows a cosecant-squared curve, and has been asymptotic since 1958. If he is correct, the speed of light was 10-30% faster in the time of Christ; twice as fast in the days of Solomon; four times as fast in the days of Abraham, and perhaps more than 10 million times faster prior to 3000 B.C.

Now, all this was from a creation website, but here is more from CBS News.

A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity.

The team, led by theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Sydney's Macquarie University, say it is possible that the speed of light has slowed over billions of years.

If so, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe.

"That means giving up the theory of relativity and E=mc squared and all that sort of stuff," Davies told Reuters.

"But of course it doesn't mean we just throw the books in the bin, because it's in the nature of scientific revolution that the old theories become incorporated in the new ones."

Davies, and astrophysicists Tamara Davis and Charles Lineweaver from the University of New South Wales published the proposal in the Aug. 8 edition of scientific journal Nature.

The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object, had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth.

I can find many more if you wish, but you could look for yourself if you are really interested in this.

 

[InTheLight]

I can find many more if you wish, but you could look for yourself if you are really interested in this.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

 

[Winman]

This from Wiki

The varying speed of light cosmologyThe varying speed of light cosmology has been proposed independently by Jean-Pierre Petit in 1988,[18][19][20][21] John Moffat in 1992,[22] and the two-man team of Andreas Albrecht and João Magueijo in 1998[23][24][25][26][27][28] to explain the horizon problem of cosmology and propose an alternative to cosmic inflation. An alternative VSL model has also been proposed.[29]

In Petit's VSL model, the variation of c accompanies the joint variations of all physical constants combined to space and time scale factors changes, so that all equations and measurements of these constants remain unchanged through the evolution of the universe. The Einstein field equations remain invariant through convenient joint variations of c and G in Einstein's constant. Late-model restricts the variation of constants to the higher energy density of the early universe, at the very beginning of the Radiation-Dominated Era where spacetime is identified to space-entropy with a metric conformally flat.[30][31] However it should be noted that while this was the first VSL model to be published, and the sole to date where an evolution law is given relating the joint variations of constants through time while leaving the physics unchanged, these papers received few citations in the later VSL literature.

The idea from Moffat and the team Albrecht-Magueijo is that light propagated as much as 60 orders of magnitude faster in the early universe, thus distant regions of the expanding universe have had time to interact at the beginning of the universe. There is no known way to solve the horizon problem with variation of the fine-structure constant, because its variation does not change the causal structure of spacetime. To do so would require modifying gravity by varying Newton's constant or redefining special relativity . Classically, varying speed of light cosmologies propose to circumvent this by varying the dimensionful quantity c by breaking the Lorentz invariance of Einstein's theories of general and special relativity in a particular way.[32][33] More modern formulations preserve local Lorentz invariance.[25]

 

[webdog]

I wonder if there is some connection between the lifespan of men in OT times compared to today.

 

[Tom Butler]

I wonder if there is some connection between the lifespan of men in OT times compared to today.

Ooooh, good question! Got any thoughts?

 

[webdog]

Ooooh, good question! Got any thoughts?

No :laugh: just throwing it out there

 

[Winman]

No :laugh: just throwing it out there

I think God shortened men's lifespans simply because men became too corrupt. We can observe our own life, and most of us do the most foolish, sinful, and stupid acts when we are young adults. Why? Because we think we are going to live forever, or at least a long time. As we get older we become more conscious of our mortality. When death looms, all men begin to turn their thoughts to the hereafter.

Now imagine if yourself and everybody around you were expected to live six, seven, eight, even nine hundred years. Can you imagine how depraved man would be?

Shortening a man's life in some respects is a good thing, it makes a man more conscious of his creator and mortality.

Somehow the earth was very different after the flood, we can see man's lifespan drop sharply and quickly.

 

[quantumfaith]

I wonder if there is some connection between the lifespan of men in OT times compared to today.

Its all "relative". whoops if light is changing its speed, guess that blows E=mc^2 out the window.

 

[Gold Dragon]

From my perspective, we can read the first two chapters first with the thought that they weren't written in chapter form and second with an open view of what they mean.

The first point is important. It seems obvious that the first creation account extends beyond 1:31 and ends at 2:3. When Archbishop Langton, in the 1200s, put the present chapter and verse structures in place he made numerous mistakes. This one is a doozy. By extending the first creation account to the proper framing we see it is a different kind of literature an a modern, scientifically evidenced empirical account of creation. (As someone who has done the translation work from the Hebrew) It seems obvious that the nature of the literature in 1:1-2:3 is a poetic form and polemical in nature. It is replying to pagan myths of creation contemporary of the writers of the Old Testament. The second creation account changes the language and form and talks specifically about the nature of the mankind's creation. It is different from the first. That's okay.

We don't need to formalize the first two chapters of Genesis beyond what they, themselves already do. When we try to force them into a Cartesian scientific modernism we deny that they are written in a completely different time and with a completely different aim.

The second point is that, just like other parts of the Bible, we need to look at reading difficult passages with grace and humility. It seems to me that the Young Eather quest is, while certainly a noble and pure one, rooted in an epistemological context mightily different from that of the original framers. We need to be careful at holding tightly an interpretation that hasn't been uniformly believed, even by the church fathers, and thus damage our faith on a point that could reinforce it.

This goes for other passages...I'm looking at you Revelation.

I believe that the earth, and creation, appears to be very old. I believe the creation accounts in Genesis are authentic, honest recountings of God's mysterious work. I believe that they are accurate, but that my understanding might not be. Finally, I believe God creates with age and there is too much empirical evidence one has to overcome to convince me that the earth, and creation, doesn't appear to be very, very old.

Excellent response.

If we want to interpret a passage "literally" we need to look at the literary style and context of the passage. The lay understanding of the term "literal" usually means "the first understanding that comes to my mind". But in literary analysis, interpreting a passage "literally" is a much more complex process.

I agree with preachinjesus about how the first two chapters of Genesis are written in terms of literary style. And no matter how you interpret these two chapters, it is pretty obvious that the natural break is at Gen 2:3. I believe the rhythm and structure of Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:3 lends itself to a clearly poetic form.

In our prose and scientific dominated culture, poetic writing has come to mean something is less true or untrue but I completely disagree with that. The same for myth in our society. But both poetry and mythology are styles of writing and story telling that I believe can convey ideas that are absolute truth.

All of the above in the OP.

Agreed.

Calling the genesis story mythology is entirely appropriate with most academic understandings of the term myth which refers to the story's function of being a narrative origins story. Of course the lay understanding of the term "myth" suggests a story that is not true and I would disagree with that understanding of Genesis 1 and 2.

I think metaphor also plays a role in understanding Genesis 1 and 2. And that also does not detract from the truthfulness of scripture. Metaphor is used extensively throughout the bible in references to God's "hand" or the "Day of the Lord" and many other examples. Just because one element of a verse is metaphorical does not make the entire verse or chapter a metaphor or allegory.

I must say, I am very much appreciative that there appears to be no "hateful" vitriol thrown about toward one another even amidst the disagreement on these issues. I am indeed grateful.

Amen to this.

For those here unfamiliar with my views, I am very open to theistic evolution but have no problems with my brothers and sisters holding young earth creationist interpretations as well as any of the other many interpretations of these chapters in Genesis. All of us hold to the authority and inspiration of scripture and hopefully recognize that our interpretations will never be perfect. One day we will find out exactly how God did it and whether it is 6 24hr periods or billions of years, creation is an amazing and glorious testament to God's intimate involvement in our existence.

 

[JesusFan]

Excellent response.

If we want to interpret a passage "literally" we need to look at the literary style and context of the passage. The lay understanding of the term "literal" usually means "the first understanding that comes to my mind". But in literary analysis, interpreting a passage "literally" is a much more complex process.

I agree with preachinjesus about how the first two chapters of Genesis are written in terms of literary style. And no matter how you interpret these two chapters, it is pretty obvious that the natural break is at Gen 2:3. I believe the rhythm and structure of Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:3 lends itself to a clearly poetic form.

In our prose and scientific dominated culture, poetic writing has come to mean something is less true or untrue but I completely disagree with that. The same for myth in our society. But both poetry and mythology are styles of writing and story telling that I believe can convey ideas that are absolute truth.


Agreed.

Calling the genesis story mythology is entirely appropriate with most academic understandings of the term myth which refers to the story's function of being a narrative origins story. Of course the lay understanding of the term "myth" suggests a story that is not true and I would disagree with that understanding of Genesis 1 and 2.

I think metaphor also plays a role in understanding Genesis 1 and 2. And that also does not detract from the truthfulness of scripture. Metaphor is used extensively throughout the bible in references to God's "hand" or the "Day of the Lord" and many other examples. Just because one element of a verse is metaphorical does not make the entire verse or chapter a metaphor or allegory.


Amen to this.

For those here unfamiliar with my views, I am very open to theistic evolution but have no problems with my brothers and sisters holding young earth creationist interpretations as well as any of the other many interpretations of these chapters in Genesis. All of us hold to the authority and inspiration of scripture and hopefully recognize that our interpretations will never be perfect. One day we will find out exactly how God did it and whether it is 6 24hr periods or billions of years, creation is an amazing and glorious testament to God's intimate involvement in our existence.

genesis though HAS to be interpreted as a literally account, in order to have the messiah and His Cross actually make biblical sense!

Apostle paul relates jesus as being second Adam that we all died Spiritually in Adam by the Fall, so Adam and the fall account was aliteral recording of actual event!

Since that was real, not metaphor/myth, why wouldn't we interprete rest of that account as literall/actually also?