With me and others I know and from what I read in comments on this site to past postings, many of us who feel YEC is very wrong, mostly stop there. We just feel it’s bad science and thus wrong. (And yes a few zelots go past that and thus too far.)

But I and others have been told that not only are we wrong we are likely not saved if we don’t believe in YEC. By multiple people multiple times. In no uncertain terms.

Lots of heat like that tends to generate some heat in defense.

As my mom used to say as she seperated my brother and me when we were fighting as children, “It takes two to fight.”

Just picked up my copy of Francis Collins The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. I also looked up iMonk’s essay on this topic. As a YEC advocate I have always wondered how Gen. one is interpreted by “the other side.”

Thanks for the leads, people.

The Bible is a literary work. Rule one in interpreting literature is to recognize and respect the integrity, the wholeness, of the finished work. That means that you do not subject it to outside sources and material in discovering its meaning. You consider the internal evidence on its own.

For example, the Lord Jesus in Luke three has a genealogy that goes all the way back to Adam. Adam was created on day six of time and space, about 4000 years BC according to Genesis 1, when you add up the life-spans in the genealogies provided in Genesis.

The fourth commandment has God in person speaking to Israel at Sinai, and he explicitly says that the reason for the Sabbath is that he stopped working on day seven of the first week of the creation. It all ties in.

That is the way that Luke, Moses, and God himself at Sinai, interpret Genesis.

You are subjecting the text to external material, and in doing so you have violated its wholeness, and in doing so, violated its meaning. Literature, like science, has its method. Don’t mix them up.

Finally, I fully accept your sincerity when you say that you trust God above science. However, I would suggest that you are a little naive in your reading of the text. That is not a sin. For your part, i would hope that you do not ascribe stupidity, ignorance, or deliberate willfulness to six day people. After all, it is the historical position of the entire Christian Church.

Peace

Also, you are missing my point. This is not about a different interpretation. It is about a wrong interpretation that is in fact not interpretation at all. It is subjecting scripture to science, indeed, modifying scripture to conform to it.

As a school teacher, you should know better than anyone else that every piece of literature must be granted its own integrity, that is, its wholeness. Adding other material to it, in this case an old earth theory, destroys that integrity and thus cannot be counted as interpretation.\

We don’t do that to Mark Twain, so why do it to God’s word?

James Barr knew this, and respected it, and said that every Professor of OT and Hebrew known to him believed that the author of Genesis taught six day creation – but they all disagreed. That is the honest and informed position.

I am not ascribing dishonesty to anyone here, but I am ascribing a certain literary naivety. I have found that people with a scientific education tend to be unaware of the rules surrounding textual integrity, or wholeness.

I am saying to Mike the Geologist that his position is not interpretation as defined by the rules of interpretation. You have made your own position clear, and I say to you that you need to rethink things in the light of a proper exegetical method.

Did Christ somehow abdicate His throne and YEC grabbed the empty seat?

Oh, and Roger Du Barry?

Look up a Victorian movement called “Zetetic Astronomy” sometime. It was founded to preserve God’s Word from Godless Science, and used many of the same arguments you currently hear from Ken Ham et al regarding “Authority of God (in Scripture) vs authority of modern man”, i.e. “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It.”

They’re still around, but they’ve changed their name in the intervening century and a half.

Now they call themselves The Flat Earth Society.

For the last 2000 years this position has failed miserably. I hate to bring it up but this was exactly the same position many of the faith took when telescopes revealed the way the solar system worked. And their arguments were lost. But not without a lot of name calling and burning at the stake and driving many from the faith. Now days we skip the burning but continue with the name calling and driving from the faith.

If you drop off all the advocates of each position and just follow the people doing research in the areas you’ll find than natural selection has a lot of troubled followers. They don’t like it but outside of a “god” they can’t come up with anything else so they don’t so much champion it but more tolerate it as they have nothing (from their perspective) better. Things like eyes and reproductive systems coming about by random mutations is a hard nut to swallow but jumping to “God did it” is harder for many of them.