Science and Education #11
Is Flood Geology Folk-Science?
Just as the assumption of a young cosmos is of no use to our systematic study of the astronomical data, the assumption of a young earth is of no use when dealing with the geological data. To explain the miles of sedimentary layers that cover every inch of the earth, YECs use an alternate geological paradigm called ‘flood geology’ that actually pre-dates Darwinism by a century, although it had a different name back then.
By the early 1800s, as roads and canals were being carved through mountains and peninsulas, it became clear that the great catastrophic flood of Noah’s time could not account for the uniform disposition of so many carefully placed layers of geological strata. And each layer appeared to contain specific fossilized remains of different prehistoric organisms. And no matter where in the world people looked, the same layers, with the same fossils, were always found in the same sequence.
A group of Christian geologists, who called themselves “scriptural geologists,” spent several years in the field attempting to reconcile the assumptions of a young earth and global flood with the new data. But by the 1830s this quest was abandoned for lack of evidence. These discredited ideas were dropped in the dustbin of history not by biblical critics, but by Christians committed to biblical authority. Eventually, these same ideas were resurrected in the 1960s by a hydraulics engineer named Henry Morris and a professor of Old Testament history named John Whitcomb with a new title. Unlike the “scriptural geologists” of the 19th century, neither Morris nor Whitcomb had any formal training in geology, and neither spent any time in the field examining the data up close. So once again, we have Christians with no formal training in science publishing books that completely up-end the modern scientific consensus on earth history without ever having conducted any original research in the field, written any peer-reviewed articles for scientific journals, or presented their ideas at professional conferences where other world-renowned experts can evaluate them. This fact alone should cause your folk-science-o-meters to start registering.
I could write several posts demonstrating just how absolutely off-base flood geology really is, but consider this simple test: if there was ever an industry that depended on sound geological principles for its survival, it would definitely be the oil industry. And if there was ever an industry that put profits over principle, the case might be made that this would also be the oil industry. So we can be fairly confident that the oil industry is more concerned with results in the field (ie: the bottom line) than taking a principled stand in the creation/evolution debate. So many Christians are surprised to learn that oil and gas exploration companies have large staffs of paleontologists, geologists and geophysicists that spend their entire day sifting through mountains of geological data to help locate fossil fuel deposits. These companies don’t care about the age of the earth or the Noahic flood; they are only interested in useful paradigms that can pinpoint the location of oil reserves with a high degree of certainty. After all, drilling for oil in the wrong location is a big fat waste of money.
Here is my point: of all the billions of dollars that the oil industry invests in novel ideas, and in building secret bunkers to hide the free-energy machines and electric cars that run on watch batteries, how much of that do you think goes to conduct research in flood geology? How many Old Testament scholars, like John Whitcomb, do you think they have on staff combing through Genesis for secrets about Earth’s short history that can be used to one-up the competition? And trust me, this has nothing to do with politics or religion. They would invest in black magic, voo-doo, and hire teams of psychics if any of these showed even the slightest bit of promise. But as it turns out, the only geological paradigm that actually works is called biostratigraphy, and it is based on two fundamental assumptions: a very old earth and the gradual evolution of marine invertebrates.
The ancient seabeds accumulated layers of sediment over hundreds of millions of years, and these layers contain a very high concentration of marine invertebrates fossils, making the gradual step-by-step evolution of these ancient organisms a very well documented scientific fact. In most cases, the first and last appearance of each separate species can be fully documented without gaps or missing links. This detailed biological record enables micro-paleontologists to make very accurate estimates on the age of specific sedimentary layers simply by examining core samples. According to micropaleontologist, Anne Hill, who works for Shell Offshore,
“The fundamental principal in stratigraphy is that the sedimentary rocks in the Earth’s surface accumulated in layers, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top . The history of life on Earth has been one of creatures appearing, evolving, and becoming extinct. Putting these two concepts together, we observe that different layers of sedimentary rocks contain different fossils. When drilling a well into the Earth’s crust in search of hydrocarbons, we encounter different fossils in a predictable sequence below the point in time where the organism became extinct…It is palaeontology that uniquely explains the element of geologic time and depositional environment to petroleum geology.”
So how do the flood geologists/YECs treat the geologic column? John D. Morris had this to say,
“Creationists, on the other hand, consider that the bulk of earth’s sedimentary rock accumulated rapidly beneath the waters of the great Flood of Noah’s day. One layer followed another in swift succession, sometimes interrupted by brief periods of quiescence, uplift, and erosion. Some time may have passed between depositional events, but these periods were not long, and the bulk of the sedimentary rock record may represent hardly more than one year.”
Flood geology claims that sedimentary fossils are the remains organisms killed in the flood, and that the entire geological column was deposited in about a year. And even though the flood was violent enough to carve out canyons a mile deep and cover the tops of mountains, it somehow perfectly sorted the biological carnage in a pattern that is so consistent that it is often mistaken as evolution by secular scientists. Hmm…
The truth is, Henry Morris, John Morris and John Whitcomb can say whatever they want because their ideas don’t have to work in the field where it counts. Their bills are paid, not by those who demand results, but by other Christians who just want a scientific-sounding alternative to mainstream science. The obvious motivation here is giving scientific credibility to the biblical flood story by turning it into a scientific paradigm that competes with secular geology. But there is no competition. The scriptural geologists were right to abandon flood geology in the 1800s, and we would do well to abandon it today. For a detailed history of flood-related folk-science click here.
Unfortunately, websites like AiG and ICR still have scores of scientific-sounding articles that attempt to explain how the geological data can be explained by Noah’s flood, even though these ideas have been universally rejected by the scientific community for almost 200 years. But the proof is in the pudding! Anti-Christian bias in secular academic institutions is understandable, but if the flood geology paradigm could do something useful in industry, like find petroleum or other mineral deposits, ICR and AiG wouldn’t have to beg hard-working Christians for donations because private companies would be paying them millions. Exxon’s annual budget is around $20 billion for exploration.
I would invite my readers to also read the testimony by a fellow named Glenn Morton. Glen is a geo-physicists who wrote over 20 articles for ICR and fully supported the young-earth paradigm, along with flood geology. In the 1980s he went to work for an oil and gas exploration company because he wanted to spend his days sorting through real geological data and writing articles for ICR based on actual field-work. In other words, he was one of the few creationists who had the scientific integrity to at least go into the field and tackle the challenging problems. Of course, like most YECs who come face to face with a world that doesn’t look like it should, Glen experienced a crisis of faith and rejection by his friends at ICR because he could no longer honestly support the YEC/flood geology paradigm.
So what about the Flood? Personally, I’m not sure. I wasn’t there, and neither was Moses. But God was — and since He gave us both Genesis and the geological column (with biostratigraphy included), I guess He wasn’t that concerned about the details either. The story of Noah’s flood is an important biblical narrative, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to account for the precise patterns of invertebrate succession up through the geological column. As soon as Christians insist that this narrative can be used to solve question of geology or earth history, we’re back in folk-science territory.
In our next post, we’ll look at the idea of instantaneous miraculous creation (special creation) as folk-science — and see how much this idea can (or can’t) help us when doing biological systematics. You won’t want to miss that!
June 8th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Gordon,
Excellent article. How better to dispel the myths of Flood Geology than an appeal to the cold mercenary interests of the oil industry.
Stephen Godfrey (coauthor of Paradigms on Pilgrimage which I review here) studied paleontology in part because of his interest in Flood Geology, and his desire to find evidence in the field to support it. Instead he found that the fossil record renders Flood Geology wholly untenable, and that it strongly supports the evolutionary hypothesis.
His studies of trace fossils alone proves that Flood Geology cannot be true.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hi Gordon,
Nicely put together. This story on how the petroleum industry works is an important one - Glenn’s story is the most stark but I’ve heard other’s that enter this industry with YEC views also end up with the same conclusion - YEC is just completely unsupportable when facing the evidence.
BTW, it should be pointed out how important the Seven Day Adventist (SDA) church was in this whole flood geology ideas. When the vast majority of Evangelicals came to accept an old earth (but not evolution!) at the end of the 19th / early 20th century, the SDA’s held staunchly to a YEC position because they couldn’t reconcile an old earth with their founding prophet (Ellen White’s) visions. Until Morris & Whitcomb came along (in the 1960s), and took up SDA geologist Price’s ideas on flood geology, the YEC movement was barely breathing. It is ironic how much YEC as resurfaced in the last 50 years when the evidence against a young earth has become even stronger.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Somewhere between my machine and the posted comment here, the second link was broken. The link should have pointed to the Wikipedia article on trace fossils for those who may be unfamiliar with the term. The URL for that article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_fossil
June 8th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Gordon,
I am a big fan of your blog and videos. I recently purchases “Beyond the Firmament,” and I hope to find the time to read through it soon.
This is a great argument to show how flood-geology (and many other pseudo-sciences) are not real science because they don’t accurately explain our observations. Real science develops predictions that can be validated or falsified with further observations… but ID and flood-geology do not provide this. They either: a) develop predictions that are falsified by simple, obvious, and well-documented observations OR b) do not develop predictions at all.
The main problem is that ID and flood-geology have a “prediction” already in mind: young earth and no evolution. So they just try to “find or fit” data to support these endpoints, instead of drawing conclusions from their observations.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Cliff, Paradigms was one of my favorites.
Steve, thanks for the note on the SDA involvement - I hadn’t considered that angle.
Wecome Adam, I hope you stick around. I’ll be putting this series to video very soon. Stay tuned!
June 9th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Another good post. Here’s my question:
When one puts forth old earth / evolution proofs of the geologic record, often a creationist rebuttal is “the geologic record is a mess. fossils are all in the wrong places, it’s the embarrassing secret of evolution that the geologic record is all mixed up and not at all as they present it to us.”
Where do YEC get this idea from, and how did it come about???
June 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am
jopinion,
I’m certainly no paleontologist, but I have to assume that if the geological column were that arbitrary, then bio-stratigraphy would be a useless paradigm for oil and gas exploration. But since micropaleontologists have been exploiting the consistency of the geologic column for decades, I can only assume that those creationists, who have probably never even laid eyes on a core sample, are ignorant or dishonest. But the proof is in the pudding. Flood geology is only used to seel book in Christian bookstores.
Creationists will also charge that “geologic layers are used to date fossils, and fossils are used to date the geologic layers” as if they have discovered some glaring inconsistency that invalidates the last 200 years of geology. The truth is, radiometric dating of the minerals found in each geologic layer is expensive and time consuming. But since since certain fossils are only found in certain layers, once you establish the connection, all you need after that is to identify the fossils of that layer - which is a lot faster and cheaper. So yes, layers of earth of first used to date fossils, and then fossils are then used to date layers. This is how the oil industry does it. And it works like a charm.
The only thing I can think of is this: there is probably some place, somewhere on earth, where some geological activity has heaved up some lower layers so that they lay higher than some more recent layers, or perhaps a large section of strata was turned on its side, etc. I’m sure, in their zeal to point out the rare exception to every rule, they have turned this molehill into a mountain. That is the typical “confuse the jury” approach. After all, if you got bust speeding, wouldn’t you try to find at least one example of a polic radar giving a false result, then argue that no police radar guns in general can’t be trusted? That is the typical YEC/ID approach.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Gordon and you other ECists,
I appreciate your digging into the science, presenting blatant evidence, and debunking YEC positions. These have their place, and Gordon, your voice does not turn people away. You need to keep on doing what you’re doing. However, to reach YECs, you also have to do it on theological grounds.
Remember when you were a YEC? Your God spoke everything into existence with one word. He made animals for man’s dominion and the earth for harvesting. Let’s assume the flood was real and cleansed, leaving 8 of God’s people to repopulate the earth. Wouldn’t God want to leave an earth for his people as he had done before in Eden? If so, perhaps God, in his wisdom, knew that layers of earth left man an opportunity to utilize the ground in a variety of ways. If it were all mixed up, perhaps nothing would grow. Perhaps rock would not materialize so that it could be carved. Sand would not be available for making glass, nor clay to make brick.
One of the purposes of the flood, from this old YECer, was to cleanse the world and start again. When the waters receded, it had to have been left in a place that was hospitable. Certainly God, the force of all nature, could carve a world with water in such a way for man to be able to exploit it. That oil companies have found a way to exploit what God designed is no surprise. Man has always been able to capitalize on God’s gifts in ways to make the world a better and worse place.
From an old-earth point of view, what is the purpose of the flood story? Did it happen, and to what extent? Were 8 people left to repopulate the earth? What about that log on Mount Ararat?
June 9th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
So, Tom, I presume you are suggesting that the same God who creates by speaking all we see, in six 24-hour days, six to ten thousand years ago could also, by the exercise of that same M.O., assemble layers of sediment ala YEC Steven Austin’s models. (I know you don’t believe this stuff, but I think you point is that if YECers buy into recent creation in the first place, a little supernatural nudge on geology during the flood recession is an easy leap). Good point.
That is where the other problems of Flood Geology must be noted, such as the sheer volume of fossils (estimated to be such that, had all fossilized organisms been alive at the same time, they would have been several layers deep on the face of the earth!) and the problem of trace fossils. The formation of trace fossils requires that sedimentary layer A dry and harden before sedimentary layer B is laid down, an impossible scenario in Flood Geology. And yet these fossilized trails are observable in many locations. It would be difficult to argue that God arranged these phenomena with any purpose other than pure deceit.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
tom:
The flood story has so so many purposes that YEC doesn’t have anything to do with:
God is grieved by evil.
God is just and yet cares about humans enough that he doesn’t totally abandon his creation.
God will do whatever it takes in the long run to bring his universe back into order.
God acts with purpose and sovereignty, unlike gods in other flood stories who act in fights and chaos and incompetence.
God receded the water because he loved Noah’s family, not because he was “hungry” and needed a sacrifice (see: other flood stories).
Noah builds an alter to God out of gratitude, not out of compulsion (see: other flood stories).
Twisting Genesis to have the purposes and realities that you suggest misses out on these important points because it’s obsessed with our modern scientific understanding.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
God is grieved by evil.
Isn’t this already covered in several other Genesis stories? This story doesn’t add anything there.
God is just and yet cares about humans.
How just is it to drown all non-human creatures save two lucky specimens? What about unborn children?
God will do whatever it takes in the long run to bring his universe back into order.
Why does it have to be in the long run? What was “back into order?” Couldn’t God isolate his children in some way and then give the others a sexually transmitted disease? Why did all the other animals and the complete earth have to be consumed when this was just about sin — us humans and our faltered relationship with God?
God acts with purpose and sovereignty.
Again. What purpose was met such that a flood was the best option?
God receded the water not because he needed a sacrifice.
What did he need? Was his evolution experiment going too awry that he needed to back up, re-seed, and resume? Genesis is filled with stories of such “cleansing”. Is this how God modifies evolution — by pushing the do-over button?
Noah builds an alter to God out of gratitude for not drowning him like He did everyone else. That’s like thanking a terrorist for killing the other hostages and not you.
Twisting Genesis to have the purposes and realities that you suggest misses out on these important points because it’s obsessed with our modern scientific understanding.
Well, was there a flood or was there not a flood? If there was, what was its extent? Did it completely cover the earth? It could not have been too far back in human history and there should be physical evidence for it, even if it just consumed a continent. I don’t think you can divorce the story from modern scientific understanding entirely.
However, I’m asking more for a theological understanding. If the Bible is the inspired word of God, what is this story doing in there? Put it in ANE and/or a modern context, but your points above don’t float my boat.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Tom,
There was no “global” flood. Heck, there was no “globe” until the 5th century B.C. - and this idea didn’t really catch on in Christian circles until after the Roman Empire fell.
The literal details of the story make it physically impossible to reconcile with even a cusory review of the current state of geological, paleontological, and biogeographical affairs. So obviously, giving the Hebrews an accurrate historical record of an actual meteorological events was not its purpose.
So what was its purpose? When you examine the pagan flood stories that were universally believed by all ANE cultures, including the Egyptians whose flood legend was actually part of an ongoing cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation — patterned after the annual flooding the Nile that initiated the following growing season, it becomes clear that these pagan stories played a significant role in the ANE cultural landscape.
In those days, history, theology, and science were not separate categories of thought as they are to us. For instance, the purpose of history was not really to chronicle actual events, but to INTERPRET events that may or may not have happened in such a way that gave meaning and identity to the culture. Just look at Judges vs. Chronicles (how the two kingdome interpreted the same historical events) and this becomes obvious.
Likewise, the purpose of science (or cosmogony) was not to figure out how the cosmos was organized and how it worked, but to identify the role of diety and the relationship between man, nature and deity.
In monotheistic cultures, deity and nature were almost the same thing. The Hebrew stories are almost exact copies of the popular pagan stories, but the narratives are altered to paint more theologically-correct state of affairs. For instance, the Hebrew creation narrative separates deity from nature, and rolls up all the essential functions of the cosmos under one God.
The Hebrew flood story retains most of the details of the various pagan versions, except the motivations of God and Noah are changed to paint a more theologically-correct state of affairs.
Of course, judged against modern standards of what is morally and socially acceptible, these stories — as you have pointed out — seem like horrible nightmares of death and destruction. But that is not how the Hebrews would have understood them.
These stories were simply part the earliest stages of the overall trajectory of Yahewism from polytheistic superstitions, to monotheistic superstitions, to the Law (which gave man a standard by which to worship God and directed his superstitions towards something that pointed to the end of the system — ie: Christ), to the promise of Christ (who would eventually come to end the Law — ie: the system of sacrifice that God institued to distract his people from sacrificing to pagan gods), to the incarnation of Christ who offered himself as the sacrifice to end the entire practice of sacrifice, and the overall abolishment of religion (as defined by man’s attempt to commune with God through rules and ritual), and the summary of an impossibly detailed and convoluted moral code (orginally accommodate to ANE moral code) with a single elegant rule that we can all agree is pretty good, and actually requires you to think situationally (which is something atheists are better at than Christians who still want everything to be black and white like the good ol’ days) — do unto others…
So to not have the flood story would have left the Hebrews with only the pagan versions, which were incompatible with Hebrew monotheism. That’s pretty much what it’s doing there. To turn it into a scientific model is absurd — as you would agree.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Thanks for a much more substantial response, Gordon!
I’m quite confused at the establishment of the Law and a system of sacrifice which mandates God to also sacrifice himself to abolish the law, but that’s probably the topic of several threads. If you can point me to other sources to describe this, I’d appreciate it.
I’m still perplexed about this story (and do not know of the other ANE flood stories of which you speak to give a contextual comparison). Is it another case of “My God’s bigger than your gods?”, a threat to follow the Law — and that it takes patience and diligence to follow the Law, but if you do all is good?
Given that the story had a place in Hebrew tradition, what are we to do with the story today?
June 10th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
John Walton’s recent book: Ancient Near-Eastern Thought, is one good resource. I’m about half-way through it.
Imagine how primitive man lived in constant fear of nature. Whether they survived to live another day was often determined by a storm, wild animals, an earthquake, etc.. Whether they had food next year was determined by rain or drought, or if a flood washed away everything they have, or insects ate it all, etc…
Primitive superstitions equated nature with diety. If it rained, then the gods were pleased. If it rained too much, they were pissed. If it didn’t rain enough, they were pissed about something else. Ancient man assumed that his survival depended on whether or not the gods were pleased, but they had no objective way to know if they were pleasing the gods, or why they weren’t pleased. So they were a sacrificing bunch of fools — hoping to please the gods, but since the gods gave them no requirements, there was no objective way to determine if their worship was pleasing to them. They were out of control.
No imagine an out-of-control train full of passengers. You can’t stop it suddenly without hurting everybody on board or losing control of it. So you jump onto it while it is moving, ride it until you can establish control of it, then slowly and safely bring the speed down to a stop so people can get off.
One way to look at the evolution of religion from the ANE to the post-christian world is to see where the trajectory is taking us. The sacrificial system given by God was an improvement from aimless sacrifice becasue there was an objective standard. The priest could sit down, or rest, after the deed was done — which is something that pagan priest could never do since they never knew if they did it right. This would be like God jumping on the train. He didn’t slam on the breaks ritght away, but merely started to regain control by slow incremental steps, so that every would be on board for the next phase, which was to have this bloody and brutal system of sacrifice eventually slow down to a halt.
Of course, God accomplishes this by submitting himself to the system as a once-and-for-all sacrifice so man is free from having to please God through ritual, even though ritual was at first better than never knowing what you were doing. Same with the rediculously detailed moral and civil OT law that was patterned after ANE legal codes, but with greater protection for the helpless (widows, orphins, the wonderer, etc…) Even the Hebrew laws of slavery, concubines, and midwives — while grossly uncivilized according to modern standards — were lightyears ahead of Isereal’s neighbors in terms of compassion and protection of the weaker and more vulnerable members of society.
Yet, all of the things were merely shadows pointing to Christ — the fullfillment of these stop-gap measures. The problem with the 1st century jews is that they didn’t want to let go of their religion, their ritual. “Love you neighbor” leaves too much to indiviual concience. They wanted to bind the concious of man with a detailed law and appoint themselves as the moral police. The spirit of Christ was completely contrary to this. True morality requires good judgment, thinking through each situation separately, not merely applying inflexible rules. It’s the Occam’s razor of morality — solve every situation with the rational application of few simple principles, get rid of the dumb and detailed list of rules.
So we should think of the flood story as a Hebrew polemic against the popular pagan flood stories. Understand where there are similarities and where there are differences. These help us to see the point God was trying to make. If a material detail is repeated verbatim, like sending out a bird to find a branch, then that obviously was an non-essential detail. But where the stories differ, like the motivation for the gods sending the devastiation, we need to focus on that — becasue therin lies the point the writers were trying to make by changing the story.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Hi Gordon,
Never heard the speeding train analogy before. But I think I like it .. thanks.
Some more theological comparisons between the Hebrew version of the story compared to the several other (older!) ANE versions.
1. in other ANE flood stories, the purpose of the flood was to completely destroy humanity. The multitude of gods were sick of mankind’s “noisiness” and wanted to get rid of them. It was a minor god who intervened to save his “favourite”. The head god was very surprised at the end of it all that the “complete wipeout” didn’t work. The Hebrew story is one of God caring for Noah & his family, and carefully planning their salvation throughout. Much different that the whim & fate of the ANE version.
2. In the ANE version, the flood was so large it almost wiped out the gods themselves and they were themselves terrified. Not so with Yahweh; he was always in control.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Thanks Steve, I just made it up yesterday while sitting through a boring teleconference.
Great points on the flood story. It’s truly fascinating to know the context of these OT stories.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:34 am
You are always full of good analogies, Gordon!
But what about Matthew 5 which says that Jesus came not to change any of the Law?
The ethic of reciprocity was not original to Jesus. (Stephen Douglas and I discussed this a bit at this thread on Cliff Martin’s blog.)
You make the assumption that sacrifices were constructed out of superstition, rather higglety pigglety, with no direction as to which god to target, etc. Obviously their sacrifices were inconsequential to the plans of Mother Nature, but ANEs certainly had a rich culture and set of rituals surrounding their deities and sacrifices to their deities.
BTW, since cattle, food, and clothing was the common sacrifice/offering of ancient Egypt, is Cain and Abel really about Hebrew sheepherders wanting to legitimize their sacrifice of sheep to their God?
What does it mean for God to be pleased or not by various sacrifices when the goal was to rid sacrifice altogether?
June 11th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Tom, Jesus came “not to abolish, but to fulfill…”
The requirements of the law haven’t been changed or abolished, sin still requires a sacrifice. However, as the author of Hebrews tells us, “the blood of bulls and goats” never accomplished this. The system was always a shadow of Christ, and he is was the only sacrifice that could satisfy “God’s wrath” against sin.
I know you no longer buy into any Christian theology, so I expect that my answer will not satisfy you. But that is way I would answer your question.
I’m not an ANE scholar, but those that have studied ANE cultures come to the conclusion that the idea of “revelation” — god telling man what the requirements are for worship — was unique to Hebrew monotheism. I assume this is true only because I accept the consensus of the ANE scholars, not becasue I have done any original research on the matter.
God was pleased by heart-felt obedience. Obedience was how he “asserted control” over the “out-of-control” train so speak. In order to bring the sacrifical system down, the system had to focus on Christ — who was the light at the end of the tunnel, and this was the intent of the ritual.
The ritual had no power in and of itself to please God — which is the point of the passage I cited eariler in Hebrews — otherwise we would still have to do it. But if somebody ignored God’s requirements and offered “strange fire” instead, they were basically saying that they know better than God, which of course, doesn’t please God.
Sine you like my analogies, here is another one: When I was going through officer training (in the U.S. Navy), everything in my locker had to line up a certain way. It took hours to arrange everything in accordance with the rediculously detailed requirements that were imposed upon me by the drill instructors — and believe me, not doing it was NO option! But these silly rules had no power in and of themselves. They accomplished nothing, except that they kept me focused and instilled in me a sense of discipline that might “save my life” someday in an unfortunate situation.
Bottom line: the security of our nation doesn’t depend on whether my pants hang 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch apart in my closet. But it does depend on the ability of our men and women in uniform to follow orders. That was the point of the “law”.
Again, I’m expecting that you will buy any of this, I’m just trying to give the best answer I can from the Christian perspective.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Several years ago I read a book called Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. In it, there was an article on the flood in which the author argued that the story that is handed down to us in Genesis 6-8 is a truncated version of the original. The original was thought to have reflected God’s true purpose, which was to destroy the Nephilim because they upset the balance of creation. Once destroyed, then He could start fresh. By the way, there are two niggling little things that have always bothered me about the flood story. 1. If everything and everyone was destroyed in the flood, then what are we to make of Numbers 13: 33, which reads: “We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them?” 2. If the flood wiped out everything and changed the landscape dramatically (as the YEC model would have us believe), then how is that the Tigris River, which flowed out of Eden is still with us today? Thoughts?
June 12th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Thanks Gordon. I’m genuinely curious about your perspectives.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Jimpithecus,
I think the standard Nephilim (and related Rephalim) story is that, following the flood, the same fallen angel-human interbreeding which had occurred prior to the flood, happened again, resulting in those 9′ tall giants in the land. This would then also serve as the justification for the complete annihilation of the descendants of Anak, and other Canaanite tribes which are supposed to have been tainted by this unholy union.
I have also puzzled about how an antediluvian Tigris and Euphrates rivers could have had any identity in a post-flood world which, according to Flood Geology, underwent such major upheaval during the flood and it recession. I do not know how Flood Geologist address this question. Anyone?
June 13th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I’ve always found it helpful to split our questions about the OT into two:
1. What point is the author attempting to make?
2. Can I find a way to reconcile my perspective with what they’re trying to say?
My points above relate to the first question. Am I confused by God destroying 99% of humanity with some good purpose in mind? Yes, I wrestle with it often. That’s question two However, in comparing Genesis 1-11 with other ANE stories, looking through Biblical scholarship, reading the stories more and more, etc., the (question 1) consensus is that Genesis’ authors/editors DEFINITELY think that God is just, loving, forgiving, purposeful, in total control, etc.
Now, of course, personally, I have all kinds of questions as to why we would stone a guy for picking up sticks on the Sabbath. That I still wrestle with, and it relates to question two. Finding the answer I’m sure will include understanding cultural differences, questioning the inerrancy of the Bible, having conversations on blogs like this, etc.
But I do think it’s important to tell the difference between those two questions. The second question I’m on the same page with you on. The first question is much easier to answer: Genesis authors/editors do indeed see a ton of purpose in the flood story, even though it’s not historical.