Ard Louis on Interpreting Genesis

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Oxford physicist Ard Louis looks at two important aspects of time to consider when reading Genesis 1: chronology and the idea of deep time.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• science
• religion
• Genesis
• time
• Bible
• Scripture
• interpretation
• evolution
• creation
• creationism
• Christianity
• God
• chronology

[hippo11222]

@talmidscott Lol, good point. Don't understnad why being a goat herder would somehow invalidate everything they say. Me thinks someone has a tempocentric bias.

[JudgeJred1]

@cbcommunity No! The structure of the Hebrew text in Genesis 1 is most certainly poetical in form, employing the device of Chiasmus to create rhythms when sung or recited. Moreover, the entirety of the Creation accounts in Genesis are meant to be theologically reconfigured "mytho-histories" or the like. Ancient Near Eastern cultural stories which have been reinterpreted from a Hebrew point of view. Also, the Bible has its own ANE worldview.

[cbcommunity]

Ard why could'nt God have created the earth which has the appeareance to humanity as an old earth, ( dating methods) but actuallly is a young earth. Consider Adam & Eve from the moment of there creation how old were they? Also the sttructure of hebrew text in Genesis is a historical narrative, certainly not poetry neither polemic. I personally think its dangerous to fit the Bible simply into ones worldview, it superceedes all worldviews whether past or present.

[ThewildRageofGordon]

To say the sun doesn't influence our lives is to be in a zone where the conceptualization of intelligence is overly blunt. In the same sense the world can be understood to have began only relatively recently in the sense that before there are ears there is no sound. So it is quite operativly cogent to assert that before there was the sense that corresponds to human ideas and experience the world had not yet been created or come into existence.

[academysounds]

Fourth Day and this is a four year. How can the moon be a lamp of light when the moon as no light of its own. Remember the wondrous woman from heaven as the moon under her feet. Rev 12.

[Atheeizm]

4 people are late for their bible reading.

[talmidscott]

@imaginenoreligion ancient goat herders could not read and write

[ivlfounder]

@imaginenoreligion

There is more to it than that.

[imaginenoreligion]

@ivlfounder, look it's a halfway step to rationalism. That's a good thing, but seriously, et's not pretend that genesis is anything but the scribblings of ancient goat herders.

[ivlfounder]

@imaginenoreligion

au contraire.

Some of the greatest modern minds who have read genesis have concluded that there may be far more to that book than the average person gets.