Part 2 of "Does Age of Earth Matter?"

IF the "rule in the Bible" was "don't go beyond the science of your audience" then God would not have shown Moses that the Earth, Sun and Moon and all life on earth were created by "the One and Only God" in a literal 7 day week.

God would not have told Jacob that the traits for spotted vs solid colors on the sheep and goats was a matter of the males that were mating - and not the striped poles nearby.

(An understanding of genetics that mankind would not have for 1000's of year beyond Jecob).

But - the question of the thread remains - does it "matter" if we accept that life on earth was really created as God said.

Then the second question - does it matter if the earth is older than the 7 day creation week? What if all life was created in that 7 day week along with the Sun and Moon - but the earth itself is older?

Few evolutionists today would argue that the earth is older than the sun,

In Christ,

Bob

 

There are many passages that say one thing literally and we understand them in a non-literal fashion. What happens is, we read the passage, we realize it is not literally true BASED ON OUR EXTRA BIBLICAL KNOWLEDGE, and we automatically interpret it in line with that knowledge.

Everybody does this all the time. It is virtually automatic in most cases.

For example: Leviticus 11:23

"But all other winged insects which are four-footed are detestable to you. "

Mental reinterpretation: six legged insects are meant, obviously.

Note that the knowledge that all insects have six legs did not come from the Bible but from the reader's general knowledge. In spite of this, there is no problem of interpretation, we know exactly what is meant.

For example:
4 Their line has gone out through all the earth,
And their utterances to the end of the world.
In them He has placed a tent for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber;
It rejoices as a strong man to run his course.
Its rising is from one end of the heavens,
And its circuit to the other end of them;
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Here the literal is that the Sun has a chamber, a tent, from which it procedes at dawn, then moves across the firmament, then sets; this is only one of many verses that refers literally to the sun moving across the sky.

Today we view this verse and we automaticlly translate it into our knowledge that the earth rotates, causing the sun to appear to move across the sky. No scripture informs us that the earth rotates; it is modern astronomical knowledge; histroy even records all the religous figures of the days of Copornicus and Gallileo opposed the new science on the very grounds that it was not consistent with literal interpretation of scripture! Such a limited vision from the literalists - how could they have been so dumb as to think God's word would oppose the facts?

Then we have the famous passage about the basin in Solomon's Temple:

I Kings 7:24 And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.

We all know, from our modern perspective, the actual circumference would have to be 31.415926535898 . . . cubits. A line of exactly thirty cubits would, literally, be insufficient for measuring its circumference. But for the state of mathematics at the time, a rounding off from 31.5 to 30 was acceptable practice. We simply accomodate this automatically as we read.

The point of all this is - we truly do not depend on God's word along for understanding the truth of what we read. We bring to it our outside knowledge and it influences what we read and how we understand it.

So it is with the age of the universe and the fact of common descent of all life. We accept the reading from Genesis 1 in the light of that current knowledge and it still speaks to our hearts, it still teaches us that God is the creator and we are His creatures.

People who object to treating the scriptures in this way simply fail to acknowledge how they do exactly the same thing as per the above scriptures anyway; also they fail to acknowledge the depth of certainty science has acquited on these subjects.